Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 9781317176282, 9781472457066, 9781315568683, 9287088286, 2014045787

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Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Titles in the series include: Representing Judith in Early Modern French Literature Kathleen M. Llewellyn The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800 Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ Nicky Hallett Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England Michele Osherow English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 Edited by Micheline White Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 Catie Gill

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680

Rachel Adcock Keele University, UK

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Rachel Adcock 2015 Rachel Adcock has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised n any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Adcock, Rachel. Baptist women’s writings in revolutionary culture, 1640–1680 / by Rachel Adcock. pages cm. — (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-5706-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Baptist women—England—History—17th century. 2. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 3. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Baptists—England—History—17th century. 5. Christian literature, English-—Women authors—History and criticism. 6. Religion and literature—England—History—17th century. I. Title. BX6276.A33 2015 820.9’9287088286—dc23 2014045787 ISBN: 9781472457066 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315568683 (ebk)

In memory of Tony Roberts (1929–2009) Gordon Adcock (1923–2015)

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Contents List of Figures   Acknowledgements   List of Abbreviations   Note on the Text  

ix xi xiii xiv

Introduction: ‘Virgins of Sion’: Female Baptists and Revolutionary Culture  1 1 ‘Frantique Handmaids’: Female Baptists in the Popular Imagination   29 2 ‘Valiant Deborahs’: Women’s Voices in Baptist Congregations  

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3 ‘Mothers in Israel’: Women’s Contributions to the Baptist Movement  117 4 The Woman’s Seed: Baptist Women and Fifth Monarchist Prophecy   147 Conclusion  

191

Bibliography   Index  

195 215

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List of Figures I.1

‘The Anabaptists Anotamized [sic] and Silenced in a Publique Dispute’, Frontispiece, John Cragge, The Arraignment, and Conviction of Anabaptism; or A Reply to Master Tombes (London: Printed by T. W. for H. Twyford, N. Brooks, Tho. Dring, J. Place, 1656), The Huntington Library, RB 434895. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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1.1 Title page, Bloody Newes from Dover. Being a True Relation of the Great and Bloudy Murder, Committed by Mary Champion (an Anabaptist) (London: [n. pub.], 1647), The British Library, E.375(20.). © The British Library Board.

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1.2 Frontispiece, Daniel Featley, Katabaptistai Kataptystoi: The Dippers Dipt. or, The Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d Over Head and Eares (London: For Nicholas Bourne and Richard Royston, 1645), The Huntington Library, RB 124816. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

45

1.3

Title page, A Discovery of Six Women-Preachers ([London: n. pub.], 1641), The Huntington Library, RB 241794. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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1.4

Frontispiece (original cropped), John Taylor, Stripping, Whipping, and Pumping; Or the Five Mad Shavers of Drury-Lane (London: Printed by J[ohn] O[kes] for T. Lambert, 1638), The Huntington Library, RB 88895. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to record a debt of thanks to those people and institutions who have supported me during the seven years when I was researching and writing this book. The first three years of the project were kindly supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Funding. The trustees of the British Federation of Women Graduates awarded me a Theodora Bosanquet Bursary in 2008 for a month’s accommodation in London to allow me to study at the libraries there. During the last seven years I studied and worked in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University where I benefited from conference funding, as well as the support of several tutors, colleagues, and friends. Catie Gill, Nick Freeman, Nigel Wood, and the late Bill Overton engaged critically with my work as it progressed and kept me on a safe course. I also benefited enormously from the wit, wisdom, and friendship of Jo Fowler, Laura Kennedy, Sara Read, and Anna Ziomek, particularly Sara for her expertise on the early modern body. Lately I have also learnt much from discussions with Jenna Townend on Anna Trapnel’s untitled folio, and I look forward to many more such discussions to come. My thanks go, also, to my new colleagues at Keele University, who have supported me in the final stages of the book’s completion. Above all, however, I want to thank my research supervisor Elaine Hobby, without whose example and guidance this project would not have been possible. Different versions of some of the arguments in these pages have previously appeared in ‘“Like to an anatomy before us”: Deborah Huish’s Spiritual Experiences and the Attempt to Establish the Fifth Monarchy’, The Seventeenth Century, 26.1 (2011), 44–68, and in ‘“As shee preachers hold forth Christ”: Writing and Speaking in Sara Jones’s Challenge to Episcopacy, The Relation of a Gentlewoman (1642)’, Prose Studies, 33.1 (2011), 1–18. My thanks to both journals for permissions. The knowledgeable comments of the anonymous readers of these articles have inevitably shaped this book. Conversations and correspondence with many generous people have helped me along the way, including Erin Bell, Elizabeth Clarke, Ruth Connelly, Anne Dunan-Page, Susan Haines, and David Parry. Thanks to Natasha Simonova for directing me to a manuscript mentioning both Anna Trapnel and Anne Wentworth in Edinburgh University Library. Particular thanks, however, is owed to Neil Keeble and Alison Searle who both read and commented on earlier versions of the manuscript, as well as the anonymous reader whose rigorous but encouraging comments made this a much better book. The errors, of course, remain my own. The research contained in this book was made considerably easier by the librarians and archivists who assisted me at the following institutions: the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Dr Williams’s Library, Edinburgh University Library, Exeter Cathedral Library (particularly Michael

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Howarth), Friends House Library, the Guildhall Library, Loughborough University Library, University of Nottingham Library, Regent’s Park College Library, and the Wellcome Library, and also Early English Books Online which makes so much possible in our discipline. Thanks also to the staff of the Devon Heritage Centre (particularly Brian Carpenter who showed a particular interest in my research on Deborah Huish), and the staff of East Sussex Record Office, Lewes. Stella HuysheShires of Sand, South Devon, also kindly took the time to show me around her house and gardens in which her Baptist ancestor, Deborah Huish, lived between 1640 and 1662. My particular thanks go to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California (especially Stephen Tabor), and the British Library, for permission to reproduce the five seventeenth-century images of female Baptists. Thanks also to Erika Gaffney and the team at Ashgate for being a pleasure to work with. Last, but by no means least, are the thanks due to my family for their unwavering support. To my parents, Alan and Jane Adcock, my grandmothers Estelle Roberts and Eunice Mary Adcock, and to Oliver Tearle.

List of Abbreviations AR

Association Records of the Particular Baptists of England, Wales, and Ireland to 1660, ed. by B. R. White, 3 vols (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1971–74)

BL

British Library, London

Bod.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

CCL

Canterbury Cathedral Library

CSPD

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic

DRO

Devon Record Office (now Devon Heritage Centre), Exeter

DWL

Dr Williams’s Library, London

Edin.

University of Edinburgh Library

ELH

English Literary History

ESRO

East Sussex Record Office, Lewes

Friends

Friends House Library, London

JHoC

Journal of the House of Commons

LRO

Lichfield Record Office

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online edn. 2004)

PRO

Public Record Office, London

MS Rawl.

Rawlinson Manuscripts

MS Swarth. Swarthmore Manuscripts TBHS

Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society

Toronto

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

TSP

A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. by J. T. Birch, 7 vols (London, 1742)

Yale Med.

Cushing/Whitney Medical Historical Library, Yale University

Note on the Text All quotations from primary sources conform to original spelling and syntax (except v/u and i/j). Original italics and capitals have also been retained. All biblical quotations are from the King James Bible unless otherwise indicated. Annotations from the Geneva Bible are taken from The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva: Printed by Rouland Hall, 1560).

Introduction

‘Virgins of Sion’: Female Baptists and Revolutionary Culture In 1647, the heresiographer Robert Baillie recorded that among Baptists, ‘many more of their women do venture to preach’ than in any previous seventeenthcentury religious sect that had separated from the Church of England.1 He suggested that the Baptists (or Anabaptists as their opponents termed them) allowed their female members more liberty to preach in their congregations than had ever been encouraged by an English sect, and included this observation in his list of what he believed to be the heretical and misguided tenets of the modern Anabaptists. Allowing women to preach in front of their congregations was met with much criticism in the period because it went against scripture: St Paul had advised, in 1 Corinthians 14:34, ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches’, and the established church enforced this. However, Baptists and other radical sects, believing that the tumults of the English Civil Wars had indicated the last days before the second coming of Christ, were more accepting of women speaking aloud to the church, provided their words were gifts from God. Acts 2:17 indicated that God would ‘pour out’ his spirit upon his sons and daughters, and that they would both prophesy. Although there were frequent disagreements in individual congregations over when (and even if) female Baptists could speak in their gathered churches, as will be outlined in Chapter 2, this did not prevent many women from finding their way into print to contribute to doctrinal debate, to defend themselves and their congregations, to evangelise others by example and by teaching, and to prophesy. The central aim of this book is to demonstrate that in many ways these texts, and their authors, enjoyed an authority and independence that were not available to women in other cultural contexts of that time. It will also challenge and develop existing knowledge by demonstrating a hitherto unappreciated level of achievement in these women’s works by considering their rhetorical strategies in response to the constraints of their society and of their congregations. Critical contemporaries of the sects often observed that women flocked to join congregations that had separated on principle from the established church. Although several Baptist church record books survive with comprehensive member lists, it is difficult to establish with any certainty whether women were in the majority in joining Baptist congregations. Whilst a list of members was often completed upon the formation of any gathered church, records were frequently neglected because of persecution, and inevitably the records of many churches have perished over time. Church historians, therefore, are faced with a difficult  Robert Baillie, Anabaptism (London: Printed by M. F., 1647), p. 53.

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task. Certainly, although heresiographers like Baillie and reports from around the country often recorded that many more ‘silly women’ were drawn to schism and rebellion, all this indicates is the presence of widespread cultural anxiety over the possibility of women exercising their own autonomy, disregarding their husbands and families. J. F. McGregor, in his comprehensive chapter on the Baptists and their faith, denies the ‘conventional assumption that women tended to be attracted in greater numbers than men to sectarian movements’ because it ‘is not supported by Baptist evidence’.2 Clive D. Field’s more recent analysis of Baptist and congregational church books, by contrast, suggests that the average percentage of female members in Baptist congregations for 1651–1700 was 62.3 per cent (and higher in London), but his methodology is problematic.3 Field makes no mention of other factors that could affect the balance of male and female members, particularly the effects of the Civil Wars and local situations: for instance, the Broadmead Church in Bristol attracted a predominantly female membership, but this can be attributed to the large number of absent sailors’ wives and widows, as Bristol port had become a mercantile centre for trade with Europe and the New World.4 Bernard Capp, however, using contemporary observations and Fifth Monarchist church record books (whose members often practised believers’ baptism), also asserts that ‘women easily outnumbered men’ on the lists, which indicates that women found their idea of liberation and freedom attractive.5 Given 2  J. F. McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, in Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 23–63 (p. 47). The argument that more women than men joined sectarian churches is a point originally made by Keith Thomas in ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958), 42–62. The member lists kept by the Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham Churches indicate that, for the period 1640–1680, about equal numbers of men and women joined their congregations. In the Fenstanton Church there were just under a hundred members of each sex (Records of the Churches of Christ, Gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 1644–1720, ed. by Edward Bean Underhill (London: Printed for the Hanserd Knollys Society by Haddon Brothers, 1854), pp. 251–54). 3  Clive D. Field, ‘Adam and Eve: Gender in the English Free Church Consituency’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 63–79 (p. 66). Field’s differentiation between Baptist and congregational churches simplifies the differences between such congregations which were more fluid than his classifications suggest. 4  The records of the Broadmead Church indicate that in 1679 there were 42 ‘brethren’ compared with 108 ‘sisters’ (The Records of a Church of Christ Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–1687, ed. by Edward Bean Underhill (London: J. Haddon for the Hanserd Knollys Society, 1847), pp. 417–19). My thanks go to Susan Haines for alerting me to this possibility. 5  Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Millennarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 82. The church books consulted were ‘Churchbook of Lothbury Square’, Bod. MS. Rawl. D828, f. 17; ‘Mill Yard Minutes, being the Church Book of the Seventh Day General Baptist Congregation, […] 1673–1840’, DWL MSS. 533 B.1, index of members; ‘Copy of the Records of the Congregational Church […] Woodbridge, 1651–1851’, DWL, fols. 2–3.

Introduction

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the fluid nature of mid-seventeenth-century congregations, therefore, it is not a straightforward matter to assert that women were more attracted to Baptist church membership than men until further research has been undertaken on this topic, apart from to observe that women risked considerable opposition from their families, friends, and their wider societies, in joining such groups: the principles and beliefs of Baptist churches, and the opportunities they offered for women must have outweighed the considerable stigma that being a member attracted. One opportunity that many Baptist churches offered was the chance to participate in the day-to-day running of the congregation. Whereas the established church did not allow women any office, authority, or voice in church services, gathered congregations usually allowed women to vote to admit members, express their faith, become female deacons, act as messengers between churches and to disparate members, and prophesy. As Joel Halcomb writes, ‘the mere appearance of deaconesses and widows in the church records sets congregationalism apart from most other Reformed churches in Europe that refused to allow women to hold any church office at all’.6 These offices, when added to the importance that the churches placed on every believer giving a testimony to their behaviour and grace received, are evidence that women were thought to be spiritually equal by their Baptist contemporaries. John Rogers, in his published 1653 collection of male and female testimonies gathered out of his Independent congregation in Dublin, included a similar number of both, calling them all beautiful and miraculous ‘flowers of the spring’ to be equally celebrated.7 A very similar collection of testimonies from a separatist church, published by Vavasor Powell and Henry Walker in the same year, also indicates the equal space given to male and female experience: establishing authorship of the testimonies on the basis of pronouns the compiler uses and particular circumstances mentioned in the testimonies, twentynine are identifiably female and twenty-five male, leaving seven of uncertain sex.8  Joel Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan Revolution’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009), p. 82. 7  John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh. A Tabernacle for the Sun (London: Printed for R. I. and G. and H. Eversden, 1653), p. 355. Although Rogers writes in his small introduction to the testimonies that ‘most of these are mens, and some womens’ (p. 392), out of the 39 experiences 22 are male-authored, compared with 17 by women. This difference could well have been caused by Rogers’s preference for well-known members of his church: he includes the experiences of Thomas Huggins and John Bywater, ministers in Dublin; Colonel John Hewson, governor of Dublin; as well as army men, Captain John Jecock, Captain John Spilman, and Major Andrew Manwaring. 8  Vavasor Powell and Henry Walker, Spirituall Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers. Held forth by them at Severall Solemne Meetings (London: Printed by Robert Ibbitson, 1653). Although Powell later adopted Baptist belief and practice, this particular congregation appears to be gathered in the Congregationalist way: adults were baptised when they entered the congregation, rejecting their previous infant baptism in the established church, and their children were then baptised into the church as infants as Acts 2:38–39 (‘Repent, and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, […] For the promise is unto you, and to your children’). 6

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Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680

This evidence indicates that women, through the giving and publishing of their experiences, could play a significant part in evangelising, teaching, and edifying their congregations. Surviving female separatist conversion narratives or deathbed testimonies (which include those of Baptist women) also outnumber those of their male contemporaries, which could indicate that female-authored prophecy and spiritual autobiography were more popular. Although women were widely considered to be the inferior sex, reflected in conduct literature’s preoccupation with the words of St Paul that husbands should treat their wives as ‘the weaker vessel’ (1 Peter 3:7), this also meant that women could be viewed as effective conduits for the word of God: their passivity could allow God to speak through them. While women might go along with this assertion in accordance with conventions of modesty, they also recognised that Paul had asserted that it was by ‘weak things’ that the ‘mighty’ might be ‘confounded’ (1 Corinthians 1:27). Anna Trapnel, the most widely studied Baptist woman writer, justified her prophetic outbursts in this way, prophesying in 1657: O Lord, wilt thou send thy Spirit down? And wilt thou England teach, That thou dost send thy Spirit unto Weak ones, and by them doth preach? […] O inspiration it doth come To the poor feeble one; To such as are willing to be taught By the most blessed One.9

Women’s meek and humble nature made them ‘willing to be taught’ and God could fill them as vessels for his word without the danger of their emphasising their own ideas above his own. This conflict between women’s perceived weakness, and their almost paradoxical ability to act as mouthpieces for the word of God, is the fundamental tension that is present in all Baptist women’s writings, as women battled for the right to be heard in their own communities and beyond. There is also evidence to suggest that women were considered spiritually independent of their husbands when they joined the gathered churches, something which the established church had not encouraged. The records of the Broadmead Baptist Church, Bristol, recount the propounding of a husband and wife for membership where the wife was accepted but the husband refused because of ‘some evils in his conversation, that they found by enquiry’.10 Despite his later becoming a Quaker and drawing off his ‘meek-natured’ wife from attending, the episode is evidence of the congregation’s consideration of women as separate from their husbands, which was unusual because after marriage in this period a woman was ultimately subject to her husband who controlled all her monetary 9  Anna Trapnel, [Poetical addresses or discourses delivered to a gathering of ‘Companions’ in 1657 and 1658 (London: n. pub., c. 1659)], Bod. S 1.42 Theology, p. 136. 10  The Records of a Church of Christ, Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, p. 53.

Introduction

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wealth.11 The West Country Baptist Association were keen to establish whether it was spiritually ‘lawfull’ for a ‘sister’ (a female member), whose husband was not part of the gathered church, to give money for the upkeep of the congregation’s poor ‘without his knowledge or consent therein’. The Association, made up of representatives of several Baptist churches, decided that it was a woman’s ‘duty to dispose of outward substance’ because of the precedents of holy women in scripture, and because ‘God hath given the wife an interest in her husband’s estate, being made one flesh with him’ (Genesis 2:24).12 This citation would suggest that both men and women had a share in God’s creation, whereas society at large was organised on the premise that women were inferior and owned no property of their own (unless they were widowed). Legally, a woman’s money was her husband’s, and the Baptist church sanctioning her to dispose of it without his consent is an indication that women members were told to obey the rules of their congregations (acting on the instruction of scripture, and God) over their husbands. This certainly caused many observers to register their disapproval at the perceived threats to their families. Thomas Edwards recounted with horror the exploits of ‘Mrs Attaway’, a London lace-woman who preached to Thomas Lamb’s General Baptist congregation; after addressing the room where Edwards’s spies were, she apparently began to speak with two men about John Milton’s Doctrine of Divorce, asking them their opinion of it. She was considering the treatise, according to Edwards’s account, because she wanted to be rid of ‘an unsanctified husband, that did not walk in the way of Sion’. Later in Gangraena, his catalogue of sectarian heresies, Edwards included two letters as evidence that Attaway had taken the treatise’s advice and run away with a male preacher named William Jenney, who had also left his own wife.13 Drawing on the contemporary idea that women were generally more lascivious and deceitful than men, Edwards demonstrated how the spiritual independence allowed by the Baptists could have harmful effects on society as a whole. Just as critical contemporaries worried that women could be easily drawn away to heresy because of their lust for novelties, damaging familial relations, the Baptists were also worried that when women joined without their husbands, they could easily be swayed back into conformity. Spiritual independency could lead women to join Baptist churches, but it could also cause them to reject these communities, return to the established church, or go one step further towards Quakerism. Many Baptist churches did not allow existing male or female members to marry those outside the congregation because of the ‘great difficultie there must  See, for example, Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993). 12  ‘Association Records of the Particular Baptists of the West Country to 1659’, AR, II: p. 67. 13  Thomas Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena (London: Printed by T. R. and E. M. for Ralph Smith, 1646), p. 9. She is also mentioned in Baillie, Anabaptism, p. 53. 11

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needes be found in ruling or being ruled by a yokefellow in whom Satan rules’ and such disavowal of scripture could mean excommunication from the group.14 This was what Anne Pharepoint faced in the Fenstanton church when she took ‘a husband contrary to the mind of the congregation’. During questioning by the visiting members of the church, she admitted that she remembered what ‘was said in the law to the children of Israel, that they should not marry their daughters to strangers, for they will turn away their hearts from the Lord [Deuteronomy 7:3–4]; but’, she said, ‘I have an husband that doth not hinder me’.15 Edmund Maile, one of the congregation’s members, replied that an unbeliever was part of the world, and therefore a stranger who would eventually turn her from God, but Pharepoint assured him that she would continue to walk with the church, despite her husband’s beliefs. The congregation did not recommend a separation of husband and wife in this instance, a ruling typical of surviving record books, though the case of Mrs Attaway was a possible exception. However, what this evidence indicates is that the domestic hierarchy of the husband or father must regularly have been subverted, as female believers followed the often contradictory demands of their congregations. Seventeenth-century Baptist congregations can be described as both constraining and liberating for women, and it is undoubtedly this tension that provoked them to speak and write in order to carve out what they believed women should be allowed to accomplish. From the example above it is clear that women could find spiritual independence from their earthly fathers and husbands, but this independence was closely controlled by the demands of the congregation and its adherence to scripture (interpreted in different ways by different groups). An example of these contradictory messages is demonstrated in John Bunyan’s attitude towards women’s participation in his congregation. As minister of a gathered church at Bedford during much of the period of this study, John Bunyan acknowledged that ‘the Lord doth put no difference betwixt Male and Female, as to the communications of his Saving Graces’.16 It was famously a group of ‘three or four poor women sitting at a door in the Sun, and talking about the things of God’ that began Bunyan’s own journey towards the realisation that he was one of God’s elect in his own spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding.17 It was a requirement of these churches that all potential members declare their experiences in front of the congregation to show the working of God on their hearts, and some of these 14  ‘The Abingdon Association’, AR, III: p. 141, quoted in McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, p. 46. 15  6 November 1652, Records of the Churches of Christ Gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, p. 24. 16  John Bunyan, A Case of Conscience Resolved (London: Printed for Benjamin Alsop, 1683), A2. 17  John Bunyan, ‘Grace Abounding’, in Grace Abounding with other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. by John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 3–94 (p. 14).

Introduction

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oral testimonies made it into print, often lengthened. It seems likely that believers joining the gathered churches were very familiar with giving an account of God’s revealing his grace to them, whether discussing this publicly, in front of the church, or at home with family and friends. In Grace Abounding, Bunyan describes how he drew near the women, ‘being now willing to hear them discourse, [...] for I was now a brisk talker also my self in the matters of Religion’, but decided the women ‘were far above out of my reach’. Although Bunyan had been confident of his own spiritual state, the sight of these poor women talking (women who may well have been illiterate) opened out to him ‘a new world’. He wrote: their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts, also how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature: they talked how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported against the temptations of the Devil; moreover, they reasoned of the suggestions and temptations of Satan in particular, and told to each other by which they had been afflicted, and how they were borne up under his assaults: they also discoursed of their own wretchedness of heart, of their unbelief, and did contemn, slight and abhor their own righteousness, as filthy, and insufficient to do them any good. (p. 14)

These words are evidence of a thriving oral transmission of experiences. The women tell each other how they came to be convinced of God’s grace, including which promises or scriptures had enabled this change or ‘new birth’, and also how they had been supported against the Devil’s temptations. They also explained to each other the ways by which they had conquered the continuing assaults of Satan, and how they continued to struggle with their own wretchedness, finding strength by sharing their common failings. The influence of these women’s experiences on Bunyan and the rest of his spiritual autobiography was profound, and he longed to be one of God’s chosen people basking in the warmth and light of divine love. Vavasor Powell, whose spiritual diaries were published after his death, also recorded that he had spent an evening ‘discourseing with a poor Christian antient woman’ whom he found to be ‘in a far better temper of Spirit, then I was in which helped on my Humilty somewhat’.18 Admissions of this kind by such prominent figures indicate that a great number of Baptists were likely to have been influenced by the spiritual experiences of women, whether these were passed on orally, or in print. Significantly, however, this sharing of experience by the women sitting in the sun did not take place inside the congregational space, and so women’s behaviour was not bound so tightly by scriptures that told them that they must ‘keep silence in the churches’ (1 Corinthians 14:34). Women were allowed to give their experience upon admission to the church, but they were not usually permitted to speak in 18  Vavasor Powell, The Life and Death of Mr. Vavasor Powell ([London: n. pub.] 1671), p. 60.

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680

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any way that usurped the authority of their brethren. So although Bunyan praised women for their exemplary piety, later, in A Case of Conscience Resolved (1683), the occasion for publishing the work was to present scriptural evidence against women-only prayer meetings. One of his arguments was the superiority of male members in controlling worship, which was laid down in scripture: The Lord God took the Man, said unto the Man, commanded the Man, and made him keeper of the Garden, Gen. 2. 15, 16, 17. Wherefore the management of Worship belonged to him. This, the Serpent, as I said, was a ware of. And therefore he comes to the Woman, sayes to the Woman, and deals with the Woman about it, and so overcomes the World. Wherefore it is from this consideration that Paul tells Timothy that he permitted not a Woman to teach, nor to usurp Authority over the Man, but to be in silence [1 Timothy 2:12].19

Women joining Baptist congregations were thought to be spiritually equal with male members, but it is clear that this thinking did not stretch to equality for women to debate the ‘management of Worship’ and preach. For Bunyan, Eve’s precedent proved that women could not be trusted with either tending the garden (and by extension the spiritual needs of members), or managing worship. As Neil Keeble’s thorough study of Bunyan’s representations of the ‘feminine’ has shown, Bunyan ‘welcomes women on pilgrimage, but he welcomes them not as fellow wayfarers, […] but as persons in need of especially solicitous ministerial care and guidance’.20 This passage from Cases of Conscience also highlights that there were significant variations in doctrine and practice across different contemporary Baptist congregations and that these practices changed over time. Women-only prayer meetings that were permitted are also recorded in Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654) and Deborah Huish’s The Captive Taken from the Strong (1658), where members prayed for the health and direction of the two women, and by the Broadmead Church where their elder Robert Purnell recorded that ‘Satan hath much raged’ that the women should ‘seek the Lord by supplication and prayer by themselves’.21 Each church, or group of churches, decided on their own management, and these decisions provoked arguments by both men and women.  Bunyan, A Case of Conscience Resolved, p. 15.  N. H. Keeble, ‘“Here is her Glory, even to be under Him”: The Feminine in the

19 20

Thought and Work of John Bunyan’, in John Bunyan and His England, 1628–1688, ed. by Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1990), pp. 131–47 (p. 147). 21  Anna Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (London: For Thomas Brewster, 1654), p. 6; Deborah Huish, The Captive Taken from the Strong: or, A True Relation of the Gratious Release of Mistrisse Deborah Huish (London: For Livewell Chapman, 1658), p. 12; Robert Purnell, The Church of Christ in Bristol Recovering her Vail (London: Printed for Thomas Brewster, 1657), p. 22. The latter work was directed at Dennis Hollister, a previous member of the church who had become a Quaker, and who had accused the church of encouraging women to worship as a separate group in The Skirts of the Whore Discovered, and the Mingled People in the Midst of Her (London: Printed for Giles Calvert, 1656).

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In congregations that denied women the chance to speak and fulfil a role in the community, those who joined would have found the situation disappointing, contradictory, and frustrating, and much of the writing they published argues convincingly that they, as equally beloved of God, should have more power and influence over their church’s affairs. This is one of the reasons why these women’s writings are so fascinating: they show women actively persuading those around them that they were worth listening to, that they could produce complicated doctrinal arguments and scriptural readings, and that they could evangelise and rouse up a body of believers to face the changing times as a cohesive group. Many congregations also allowed women who could prophesy the opportunity to speak aloud to their fellow members, and because the utterance was believed to be Godgiven, there were less constraints placed upon their speech. Although most Baptist congregations appear not to have allowed female members to speak except on specific occasions, however, this constraint paradoxically led to these women publishing an extraordinary body of work that both interrogates and celebrates female agency, as this book will go on to show. Concern for speaking and propriety in Baptist churches was also visible in their requirements for women deacons (‘deaconesses’ or ‘widows’), the only position of office a woman could hold in a congregation. As early as 1611, Thomas Helwys, although a minister of a General Baptist church, recorded that the officers of his congregation were ‘either Elders, who by their office do especially feed the flock concerning their soules, [...] or Deacons Men, and Women who by their office releave the necessities off the poore and impotent brethren concerning their bodies’.22 The implication is that while the elders would be made up of brethren who were gifted in their ability to preach and look after the spirits of the congregation, the deacons would look after the members’ bodily needs, tending the sick and needy. The gathered church at Great Yarmouth led by William Bridge also ‘felt also the desirableness of having “Deaconesses” or “Widows”’, and on 11 June 1650 chose two sisters to fulfil the office, having proved ‘their helpfulness and needfulness from 1 Tim 5 and Rom 16’.23 Romans 16 recorded a sister, ‘Phebe’, as a ‘servant of the church’ (16:1) and ‘succourer of many’ (16:2), as well as the helpfulness of Priscilla and Mary ‘who bestowed much labour on us’ (16:6); and 1 Timothy 5, that ‘widow[s]’ were not given office until they were over ‘threescore years old’ (5:9), if they ‘washed the saints’ feet’, and ‘received the afflicted’ (5:10). Sara Jones also encouraged the women of her congregation to follow this advice, indicating that her church employed female deacons. Male deacons were to ‘tend on the Table’ and ‘provide things usefull for the well-being of the Ordinances’, but  Thomas Helwys, A Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland (1611), in William L. Lumpkin, ed., Baptist Confessions of Faith, rev. edn (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1969), pp. 120–21. 23  John Browne, A History of Congregationalism, and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk (London: Jarrold, 1877), p. 227. The women were Alice Burgesses and Jhoanne Ames. 22

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‘mourning women [widows] or Deaconesses’ were urged to ‘be as handmaids to wash the Disciples feet [1 Timothy 5:10], be not wanton [5:11], nor refuse to doe any servile offices [5:11], but carefully tend upon the sicke [5:10]’.24 The Association Records of the churches of South Wales also record among their officers on 30–31 August 1654, ‘widows, [...] to serve the church, [...] most probably in looking to the poor and sick’; but a later 1671 publication by Hanserd Knollys suggested that the positions of Elders, Deacons, and Deaconesses were more similar: ‘for the feeding, teaching, ruling and ministring to the poor and sick of the Church, the Lord hath appointed Elders […] and Deacons (and Deaconesses) or Widows’.25 It appears to have depended on the congregation as to whether the position of deaconess involved teaching, as well as nursing. The women deacons appointed by the Broadmead church, however, were left in no doubt that it was this material and practical contribution that the church desired, but it was this physical aspect that the church paradoxically found problematic. On 18 March 1679, three women were chosen ‘that were widows, each of above sixty years of age, to be deaconesses for the congregations to look after the sick sisters’.26 The women were told that they could only be chosen if they ‘were willing to bring themselves under an obligation, in themselves, not to marry’ (p. 397), unlike the ‘younger widows’ of 1 Timothy 5:11 who ‘wax wanton against Christ’ and then remarry; the subsequent silence of those so selected appears to demonstrate their acceptance of these terms. The list of duties compiled by the church reveals why the women were required to be over sixty years of age. As well as tending to the congregation’s ‘sick sisters’ which would ‘not be so proper for men’, the women would also have to visit ‘sick brethren’ which ‘some conceive may be the reason why they must be sixty years of age, that none occasion may be given; and as 1 Tim. v. 14 [‘give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully’]’ (p. 398). The congregation, taking their example from scripture, believed that appointing celibate widows over the age of sixty to tend on sick brethren would limit the accusations of scandal from enemies of the church. As well as limiting their enemies’ ability to produce evidence of sexual liaisons if the women were above child-bearing age, however, post-menopausal women were also considered to be dryer, and therefore their bodies were seen as more akin to men’s.27 In 1 Timothy 5:11, young women are portrayed as unable to resist the temptations of love  Sara Jones, The Relation of a Gentlewoman long under the Persecution of the Bishops ([London]: Printed at the cost of S. J. for her owne use and her private friends, 1642), B4r–v. 25  ‘Association Records of South Wales to 1656’, AR, I: p. 11; Powell, The Life and Death, p. 24. 26  The Records of a Church of Christ, Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, p. 397. 27  In the early modern period, 63 was considered the ‘grand climacteric’ age for men and women and gateway to old age, but was often rounded down to 60 years. See Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 171–74; Devoney Looser, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 9. 24

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and marriage, but the constitution of older women supported chastity and piety. Although the emphasis was on the requirement to tend to the sick, the women were also told it was ‘their duty [...] to speak a word to their souls, as occasion requires, for support or consolation, to build them up in a spiritual lively faith in Jesus Christ’ (p. 398). While not able to teach or preach to members, the women were required to comfort and strengthen the sick which was an important role if the sick person was near death and so also in need of spiritual support. Despite obvious restrictions placed upon women, therefore, older women could be given important roles. Although several of the women’s works explored during the course of this book have been discussed in isolation or in studies of women’s writing from the seventeenth century (the earlier prophecies of Anna Trapnel, the narrative of Agnes Beaumont and her relationship with John Bunyan, and the works of Anne Wentworth, in particular), there has been no extended exploration of the writings and activities of early Baptist women. Studies that do exist have usually been histories of the growth of congregational and Baptist groups, and, useful as those may be, they have not often considered the role of women in building and strengthening these congregations, and, in particular, how their writings helped to achieve this.28 One area of academic work where we do find women’s writing considered is in the excellent collections of Bunyan scholarship, but this often post-dates the writings discussed in this study, or concentrates on the experiences of Agnes Beaumont, a member of his congregation suspected of murdering her father.29 Kathleen Lynch’s excellent study, Protestant Autobiography in the  See, for example, Mark Bell, ‘Freedom to Form: The Development of Baptist Movements during the English Revolution’, in Religion in Revolutionary England, ed. by Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 181–201; Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006); Mark Bell, Apocalypse How?: Baptist Movements during the English Revolution (Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press, 2000); McGregor and Reay, eds., Radical Religion in the English Revolution; B. R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1983); W. T. Whitley, A History of the British Baptists (London: Kingsgate Press, 1932); L. F. Brown, The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men in England during the Interregnum (New York: Franklin, 1911). Women’s position in seventeenth-century Baptist congregations has been briefly considered from a historical perspective in Ruth Gouldbourne, Reinventing the Wheel: Women and Ministry in English Baptist Life, The Whitley Lecture 1997–1998 (Oxford: Whitley, 1997); Karen E. Smith, ‘Beyond Public and Private Spheres: Another Look at Women in Baptist History and Historiography’, Baptist Quarterly, 34 (1991), 79– 87; J. Briggs, ‘She-preachers, Widows, Other Women: The Feminine Dimension in Baptist Life since 1600’, Baptist Quarterly, 31 (1986), 337–52; Charles W. Deweese, ‘Deaconesses in Baptist History: A Preliminary Study’, Baptist History and Heritage, 12 (1977), 52–57. 29  See, for example, N. H. Keeble’s essay, ‘“Here is her Glory, even to be under Him”’; Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Bunyan’s Women: Women’s Bunyan’, in Trauma and the Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, ed. by Vera Camden (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 63–80. 28

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Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World, pays due attention to the function of spiritual testimony and how men and women in the gathered churches recorded their conversion narratives, but the focus of the book is on the variety and fluidity of practices in the seventeenth century, rather than on the works of one particular group.30 The neglect that Baptist women have faced in scholarly accounts of women’s writing is due to the nature of Baptist church organisation. Unlike the Quakers, whose organisation was extremely successful, the Baptists struggled to unify themselves and work together as a group after the New Model Army, which had provided a vehicle for their ideas, was disbanded at the Restoration. Leading members also failed to agree on major doctrinal issues such as the practice and legitimacy of believers’ baptism, on the extent to which they should follow those in authority, and over whether to join with the Fifth Monarchists: the Baptists were a heterogeneous group during this period, and their identity is frequently subsumed by the beliefs they shared with the Congregationalists and with the Fifth Monarchists. It is often not a straightforward matter to identify a woman writer as either a Congregationalist or a Baptist. Scholars of seventeenth-century sectarian women’s writing have also often been attracted to the work of female Quakers because of the greater volume of published women’s writings, but also the greater visibility of women within Quakerism (particularly the position of Margaret Fell as a spiritual leader). As Catie Gill has written, at this time ‘it was relatively unusual to find a movement giving range to the controversial roles Quaker women could adopt, or professing so publicly values that would now be seen as egalitarian. […] these women’s very audacity shows that within Quakerism, something of the spiritual authority of women was being realised’.31 Despite these aims, Gill also highlights that women did not become leaders of the movement, indicating a similar gap between belief  Lynch’s fascinating book includes a chapter on the collected testimonies published by John Rogers in 1653, as well as those that appeared the same year with a preface by Vavasor Powell, and the response of a Baptist woman, Jane Turner, whose work is also considered in Chapter 3 of this book. See Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 121–78. 31  Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 12. For women and sectarianism see Maria Magro, ‘Spiritual Autobiography and Radical Sectarian Women’s Discourse: Anna Trapnel and the Bad Girls of the English Revolution’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34 (2004), 405–37; Elaine Hobby, ‘“Come to Live a Preaching Life”: Female Community in Seventeenth-Century Radical Sects’, in Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities, ed. by Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 76–92; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’. 30

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and practice that had appeared in the position of women in Baptist congregations. According to Elaine Hobby, Fell’s oft-quoted Women’s Speaking Justified (1666), defending female preaching, was a response to contracting roles for women as the Quaker Movement became more organised, rather than finding its basis in existing Quaker practices.32 In general, Baptist women’s writings do not defend women’s preaching because of their congregations’ hostility towards women’s speech (following the example of 1 Corinthians 14:34), but individual women do defend their ability to prophesy, present their spiritual testimonies, and vindicate themselves from censure: they do not, on the whole, write to vindicate all women’s speech (something that can be observed in the work of Quaker women). As Elizabeth Clarke has observed, Anna Trapnel, the most published and the most notorious Baptist woman writer and prophetess, was not making a ‘point about the validity of women’s discourse in general’ in her longest and latest work, her 990-page folio from 1658, instead presenting herself as ‘an exception to the majority of women, [and so as one] who can ventriloquise the speaking voice of the Holy Spirit’.33 Trapnel advises women not to ‘prattle’ on at least one occasion, recommending that they speak with a divine discourse, writing that Eve’s precedent should ‘learn Females to be slow of speech, / To have very few words from self’.34 At least one of the prophecies by Trapnel recorded in this folio was given in the presence of Quakers, and James Holstun observes that ‘her very reversion to ecstatic prophecy may have been an effort to distinguish herself from the upright, scandalous, and non-ecstatic public speech of Quaker women’.35 This apparent denial of feminine agency is problematic to modern scholars of early female activism, and this has contributed to the neglect of Baptist women’s writings in comparison with their Quaker contemporaries. Therefore, this study will address, in particular, women’s contribution to Baptist theology and politics, exploring in the course of its arguments many writers who have thus far received only limited consideration by these literary critics and historians. It will situate these women’s writings (or dictations, in the case of prophecies or deathbed testimonies) in their national context, showing how their engagement with doctrinal questions, congregational practices, and outlining of theological tenets demonstrates a wider concern with the dilemmas and possibilities of the revolutionary moment. The texts are shown to grow out of congregational church culture, where it was expected that authors would seek to answer church and 32  Elaine Hobby, ‘Handmaids of the Lord and Mothers in Israel: Early Vindications of Quaker Women’s Prophecy’, in The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. by Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (London: Frank Cass, 1995), pp. 88–98 (p. 89). 33  Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 144–45. 34  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 211. 35  James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 300.

14

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680

community imperatives as much as to address individual (author’s) needs. The monograph examines the purpose and reception of these texts, especially their reception within the gathered churches, and the part the texts played in defining and confirming doctrinal and ecclesiological views and practices. It also examines how women’s works strengthened the resolve of church members in the face both of the evangelising efforts of the Quakers and the persecution of separatists and nonconformists by authorities Presbyterian, episcopal, and royalist. The subjectmatter and publishing practices of these writers, therefore, are not dry instances of concerns of little interest beyond the membership of Baptist congregations of the period; on the contrary, they demonstrate how these Baptist women’s writings connect to the central concerns of seventeenth-century radical and revolutionary culture. The Baptists in Revolutionary Culture Upon joining a congregational church in Exeter in the early 1650s, Susanna Parr recorded that she had never before felt ‘a greater effusion of the Spirit, more purity and holinesse, more union and communion, more liberty of Conscience, and freedome from that yoke of being servants unto men’.36 These characteristics of congregational churches, gathered in a meeting house where membership was controlled, would clearly have been attractive for women seeking greater liberty and purity of worship. Despite Parr’s words proving to be overly optimistic (she was later excommunicated from the congregation as the result of a disagreement over women’s participation in the day-to-day running of the church, discussed in Chapter 2), it is clear that she believed such a congregation to be capable of promoting the pure and ‘truthful’ spirituality of the weak and downtrodden, rather than that of the rich and powerful. Meanwhile, in her conversion narrative, A Legacy for Saints, Anna Trapnel, a shipwright’s daughter, proclaimed that God could bestow his grace upon any soul, whether the person was rich or poor, learned or unlearned. In ‘the School of free grace, that is, the free School where the best learning is to be had’, Trapnel wrote, ‘the poor and fatherless here find mercy; and here the Governor of this Free-school receiveth every poor Orphane, he refuseth none that comes, though they have not one friend to make suit for them’.37 This desire for purity, against the perceived wealth and corruption of the established church, drove the earliest Puritans to break with traditional rites and forms, and gather themselves according to the example of the Gospels. In the decade before Parr and Trapnel’s works were published, England had seen a marked increase and fragmentation of radical religious opinions, undoubtedly encouraged by the dissolution of Charles I’s episcopally controlled Star Chamber 36  Susanna Parr, Susanna’s Apologie against the Elders ([Oxford]: Printed [by Henry Hall for T. Robinson], [12 May] 1659), p. 1. 37  Anna Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints; Being Several Experiences of the Dealings of God with Anna Trapnel (London: Printed for T. Brewster, 1654), p. 15.

Introduction

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and Court of High Commission, and the subsequent collapse of censorship. New and existing separatist congregations began to flourish, as members sought to establish a way of worshipping according to the practices of the New Testament churches. Separatist or Congregationalist groups (of which Baptists were a part) wanted to sever all ties with the established church, which for them had become synonymous with the Church of Rome because of ‘popish’ innovations made by Archbishop Laud during the 1630s. These included the removal of the communion table from the middle to the east end of the church, the introduction of altar rails around it (separating the consecration of the host from the people), the introduction of icons, and the increasing ornamentation of church buildings. For separatists, the established church was based upon corrupt and unscriptural principles: where, for example, were the scriptural precedents for altar rails, and icons? Instead, separatist groups gathered together by mutual consent, controlling their membership by asking for a profession of faith when entering (unlike the established church that allowed the ungodly and godly alike to take communion), and by electing their own members to preach the word. These preachers were often not ordained men and made their living from their trades, and were elected as the congregation’s elders aided by male (and sometimes female) deacons. Some ‘ultra-separatist’ groups then went on to introduce adult baptism (rebaptism) because they saw their members’ first baptism in the established church as invalid, although any newborn children of ‘the separated faithful’ were then baptised into the congregation as infants.38 Many congregations went further in their interpretation of scripture, and baptised every believer on entrance to their group as a sign of their entering into a covenant with God after a profession of faith and evidence of grace received. The first minister thought to practise believers’ baptism in 1630s London was John Spilsbury who ‘sprinkled’ members to baptise them; but he, influenced by other practising congregations, eventually concluded that the manner of baptism should be accomplished by immersing, or ‘dipping’, the believer under the water (usually in a river or stream). This was meant to resemble the pattern of Christ’s own burial and resurrection from the dead, as the believer rose from under the water. As new congregations formed and fragmented in the late 1630s and 1640s, the validity and practice of baptism became an important subject for debate, especially in opencommunion congregations that allowed the worshipping together of members who adhered to believers’ baptism (anti-paedobaptists) and those who did not (paedobaptists). Arguments made for the legitimacy of both views were published by members of these congregations, including women: as Tolmie writes, the controversy over infant baptism ‘developed into one of the most substantial of the revolutionary period, commanding an audience far beyond the separate churches’.39 One of the main objections that strict separatists and Baptists had to the national church was that it let anyone, no matter how ungodly, take the sacrament 38  See Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 23. 39  Ibid., p. 50.

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of communion. Controlling their membership by asking all members for evidence that they had felt the grace of God, the congregations sought to ensure that only the purest and most spiritually regenerate joined their fellowship. Any member who behaved against the rules and precepts of the congregation was soon excommunicated. Accounts given at admission focused on evidence that the believer was one of the elect, if the congregation was Particular Baptist. Particular (or Calvinistic) Baptists believed that Christ had died to save only the predestined elect following the orthodox Calvinism of the established church and other radical Puritans. Most publications by Baptist women resembled narratives of conversion that could have been given on entry to the church with their emphasis on the experiential. General (or Arminian) Baptists, whose beliefs had developed from European Anabaptism, believed in general redemption which was even more radical.40 While there are a number of surviving publications written by Particular Baptist women, General Baptist publications by women have not survived, if they ever existed. McGregor suggests that the General Baptists appeared ‘to have found their support in a lower stratum of the London population’ than the Particular Baptists, increasing the likelihood that their members (and women in particular) were not literate.41 Another, more likely, reason for this difference between the amounts of publications the groups produced could be the experiential nature of the Particular Baptists’ Calvinist beliefs which encouraged both men and women to share their evidences of God’s grace. Women could participate in this exchange of ideas, even though they were often prevented from preaching. General Baptists did not place the same importance on experiential writing, the main publishing opportunity for women, and this might explain their lack of published works. It is for this reason that this book focuses to a much greater extent on Particular Baptist women. The growth of the Baptist churches occurred against a backdrop of civil war and unrest, which encouraged their sense of the time as being one of possibility and experimentation. Sectarian views proliferated in the New Model Army, further substantiated when the parliamentary side was victorious, and were also spread throughout the country by various regiments, as Chapter 4 will discuss. Those espousing Baptist ideas later became leading members in Cromwell’s military government that was sent to conquer Ireland in the early 1650s, led by Lord Deputy Fleetwood.42 Indeed, Thomas Harrison, writing in 1655, reported  For the growth of both branches of the Baptists see McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, pp. 26–31. 41  Ibid., p. 29. 42  Fleetwood was accused of being a Baptist sympathiser, but Barnard writes that he was more likely to have ‘set great store by liberty of conscience’, like his superior, Oliver Cromwell (T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649–1660 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 100). See also Crawford Gribben, ‘Defining the Puritans? The Baptism Debate in Cromwellian Ireland, 1654–56’, Church History, 73 (2004), 63–89. Sarah Wight’s A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter (London: Printed by James Cottrel for Richard Moone, 1656) has a preface dedicated 40

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that at least twelve governors of Irish towns and cities were Baptists: ten colonels, three or four lieutenant colonels, ten majors, nineteen or twenty captains, and two preachers. T. C. Barnard suggests that the reason for the unprecedented increase in instances of believers’ baptism was that the ‘exclusive doctrine attracted soldiers anxious to retain their distinctive identity as the elect in a country of unregenerate papists’.43 At the forefront of revolutionary actions, Baptists sought to prepare their world for the second coming of Christ by establishing a godly regime, which they predicted would follow the bloody Civil War and the execution of Charles I. The Fifth Monarchists, whose membership was made up of individuals from both Independent and Baptist groups, believed that even Cromwell’s reformation had not adequately prepared the nation to receive Christ himself. If the nation was to be ready for the Second Coming, a theocratic regime would need to be established: some thought this would take force of arms to overthrow corrupt regimes and return rule to the lowly and godly. As such, the Fifth Monarchists were ‘a political and religious sect’.44 Their ideas, as Nigel Smith explains, ‘were communicated in a protest literature which made full use of the experiential and prophetic forms developed in the “gathered churches”’.45 As Tereas Feroli argues, too, ‘although the sects were not official government organs, their members came to play a prominent role in the period’s politics’: women prophets speaking to their congregations, therefore, did have some influence over ‘the course of political events’.46 While in the 1640s and early 1650s Baptist publications often consisted of doctrinal argument and treatises on congregational organisation and discipline, the mid- to late 1650s were characterised by an increase in experiential and prophetic works, and most of these were written or dictated by women. Most of the works explored in this book date from this period where Baptist congregations experienced greater freedom to form and develop. Thomas Venner’s Fifth Monarchist plot against the Protector, and later a desperate uprising in 1661, ensured that adherents of Fifth Monarchist and Baptist beliefs were punished and monitored by the newly restored monarchy. The oppressive Clarendon code, which included the Act against Conventicles, was to Fleetwood’s wife Bridget, daughter of Cromwell and former wife of Henry Ireton, by one ‘R. B.’. Wight was a member of Henry Jessey’s open-communion congregation, which had both a paedobaptist and anti-paedobaptist membership. Thomas Patient, Ireton’s Baptist chaplain and a visitor to the Devonshire Baptist Deborah Huish, wrote of Bridget that ‘I doe by good experience find, so far as I can discerne, the power of God’s grace in her soul, a woman acquainted with temtations and breathing after Christ’ (J. Nicolls, Original Letters and Papers of State Addressed to Oliver Cromwell (London: Printed by William Bowyer, 1743), pp. 6–7). 43  Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 104. 44  Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 14. 45  Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 10. 46  Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006), p. 20.

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enforced throughout the 1660s and 1670s and the increase in both persecution and censorship radically reduced the number of publications by Baptists that were printed legally in London.47 Fears of another Fifth Monarchist uprising to overthrow the monarchy led authorities to clamp down on religious gatherings of men and women from more than one household. One of the most startling instances for contemporaries must have been the 1664 case of twelve Baptist men and women from Aylesbury who were sentenced to death under the Elizabethan Act against Conventicles for their refusal to take the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance.48 The sentence was to be enforced only if the accused would not sign an oath declaring that they would conform, but all twelve refused.49 The influence of William Kiffin, a conservative London Baptist minister who was influential in the court of Charles II, and the efforts of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, who wrote to the Earl of Clarendon after speaking with Kiffin, secured their reprieve.50 John Bunyan was another victim of the Elizabethan Conventicle Act, imprisoned for preaching in 1661, and threatened with banishment or hanging unless he conformed. He refused and was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol throughout the 1660s, despite his wife’s efforts to free him. Elizabeth Bunyan decided not to ‘leave any possible means unattempted that might be lawful’ to achieve his  Any works openly discussing baptism in the 1660s were published abroad (like Katherine Sutton’s conversion narrative, A Christian Womans Experiences (Rotterdam: Henry Goddæus, 1663)) or the printer’s name was withheld, like John Vernon’s The Compleat Scholler ([London]: Printed for the author, 1666). 48  Thomas Crosby records seven men and two women: Stephen Daynal, a minister; Ellit, a teacher; William Whitchurch, a glover and deacon; Thomas Hill, a linen-draper; William Welch, a tallow-chandler; Thomas Monk, a farmer; Brandon, a shoemaker; Mary Jackman, a widow with six children; and Ann Turner, a spinster (Crosby, The History of the English Baptists, from the Reformation to the Beginning of the Reign of George I, 4 vols. (London: [n. pub.], 1738–1740), II: pp. 182–83). 49  Crosby records that ‘Brandon, one of the condemned persons, was prevailed upon, by the tears and earnest entreaties of his wife to make a recantation, and take the oaths; but he presently found such horror and distress in his mind, for what he had done, as exceeded all his former fears of death, or grief for his family. He voluntarily returned to the Prison again’ where he resolved to die with his companions (Crosby, The History of the English Baptists, II: p. 183). 50  Yale Med. MS 1236, John Farquhar Fulton Papers, ‘Autograph Letter from Lady Ranelagh to the Earl of Clarendon’ (n.d. [1670]). Ranelagh recounted that ‘Mr Kiffin has binn with me & told me a sad story of a sentence of death & confiscation passed upon a dowsen persons of both sexes, for but the suspition of haveing mett at a Conventicle’. The husband of Sara Jones, a member of the Jessey open-communion church discussed in Chapter 2, Thomas, was a cousin of Sir Roger Jones, First Viscount Ranelagh, the father-in-law of Viscountess Ranelagh. My thanks go to Ruth Connolly for sending me a transcript of this letter which suggests further ways in which women were instrumental in dissenting groups. For Lady Ranelagh, see Ruth Connolly, ‘A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1614–1691)’, The Seventeenth Century, 23 (2008), 244–64. 47

Introduction

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release, and through her Bunyan desired to present a petition to the magistrates.51 On the third attempt, Elizabeth appeared before them as ‘the poor widow did to the unjust Judge’, and Bunyan compared the situation to Christ’s parable in Luke 18:1–8 where a ‘poor widow’ petitioned ‘the judge, which feared not God’ until he relented. Through the course of her address to the judges, recorded by Bunyan, it is made plain that Elizabeth was looking after ‘four small children, that cannot help themselves, of which one is blind, and I have nothing to live upon, but the charity of good people’, and that she had suffered a miscarriage after eight days’ labour, caused by the fright she experienced when her husband was arrested (p. 119). Despite these hardships, Elizabeth recorded that although she was ‘somewhat timorous at my first entrance into the chamber’, when she left she felt only pity for the judges who on their deaths would ‘answer for all things whatsoever they have done in the body, whether it be good, or whether it be bad’.52 John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco, in their modern edition of ‘The Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan’, assert that ‘Elizabeth Bunyan’s lofty response is remarkable testimony, in view of the social intimidation to which she had been subjected, to the liberating effects, perhaps especially for women, of Puritan convictions’.53 The authority of speaking as part of the godly certainly allowed women a more powerful voice, though it inevitably brought with it persecution and suffering. Women and Baptism Joining a congregation that had separated from the established church certainly encouraged women’s religious autonomy, but undergoing believers’ baptism was a further indication of a member’s elect status, and inspired them with confidence in their own beliefs. Baptism was an outward, visible sign, as well as representative of inward change, and its practice visibly separated believers as they were dipped under the water to represent Christ’s death and resurrection. Undergoing such a process, which was not without its risks of damage to health and reputation, allowed believers to feel that they had been raised up and reborn into a life of Christ and that they were a specially chosen people. Anna Trapnel, who was baptised between late 1654 and early 1655, after she had become a ‘celebrity’ prophetess, recorded in 1657 that the experience led to her having a heightened ability to prophesy, as it was a further seal of God’s grace: When I arose out of the water I beheld Christs sweet face; And he did smile upon me, as A token of his grace. 51  John Bunyan, ‘A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan’, in Grace Abounding with other Spiritual Autobiographies, pp. 95–122 (p. 117). 52  Ibid., p. 120. 53  Ibid., p. 255, n. 120.

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So that I was encouraged Against the opposing foe, And enabled by my dear Lord Against them for to go. So that I could declare, and I could speak, And for the King up stand; He gave me such instruction, And brought words to my hand.54

By being baptised in ‘water deep’, Trapnel explained, she was led, as the Israelites were, by a ‘pillar of fire’ (Exodus 13:21), ‘against mine enemy and foe’ (p. 129). Baptism, then, was a useful rhetorical symbol, for it reflected a rising up out of despondence and inactivity, and the rousing of the weak by the power of Christ’s resurrection. Because she was a Fifth Monarchist, who believed in the imminent establishment of the kingdom of God on earth, this image was a particularly pregnant one for Trapnel and her co-religionists, symbolising their need to rise up against their foes and persecutors. As Bernard Capp has written, the Fifth Monarchists attracted members from ‘the very bottom strata of society (excluding paupers), the labourers and servants, that is, apprentices and journeymen’, and that the group was made up of illiterate men and silly women.55 Men from the lower levels of society, as well as women from all social levels, were united by their lack of freedom and their inability to change their circumstances. A symbol of triumph over adversity and outward and inward transformation, baptism endowed believers with the spirit and with power. Trapnel’s folio songs acknowledge (with conventional modesty) that she was a ‘poor feeble one’, as a woman, but that this allowed her to receive ‘inspiration’ as she was ‘willing to be taught’.56 Although Trapnel had prophesied before her baptism, the ordinance was a further seal of her election, a sign of her obedience, and an experience which she drew upon as an example to her followers that they would undergo periods of suffering, persecution, and uncertainty, but that they would be raised from the waters to everlasting life in God’s kingdom. By the mid-seventeenth century, the practice and meaning of baptism had become a site of extreme controversy, and not just for the Baptists. As early as 1603, the Millenary Petition presented to James I by Puritan reformers requested that the sign of the cross and the presence of godparents should be removed from the baptismal service, and that women and other lay people (including midwives) should no longer be able to baptise infants, even in case of extremity. Such changes, acknowledged in the 1604 edition of The Book of Common Prayer, appeared, as Arnold Hunt observes, to ‘effectively den[y] the absolute necessity of baptism

 Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 129.  Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 85. 56  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 136. 54 55

Introduction

21

as a precondition of salvation’.57 By the late 1630s, Baptist groups had adopted believers’ baptism, which, for the most part, they did not hold as a precondition of salvation. Rather, baptism was a symbol of obedience to the word of God, and a seal of the covenant that God had made with his people reflected in its resemblance to the suffering and resurrection of Christ. Unlike the baptism practised in the established church, Baptists did not believe that receipt of the covenant of grace was automatically transferred between believers and their children, so all those who sought to be baptised were required to make a confession of faith beforehand providing evidence of their conversion. Because children were not thought capable of making such a confession, only adults were able to undertake the ordinance. Proof for these beliefs was found in Matthew 28:19 (‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’), Mark 16:16 (‘He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved’), and Acts 2:41 (‘Then they that gladly received his word were baptised: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls’). The Baptists’ opponents sought to justify their doctrine of infant baptism, but those members convinced that it was an unscriptural practice were unsatisfied by their claims. As Murray Tolmie writes, ‘their contention that believers’ baptism alone was justified by “God’s naked truth” won adherents even outside organized Baptist churches’.58 One consistent argument made for infant baptism throughout the period of this study was that it was a substitution for circumcision given by God to the house of Abraham in the Old Testament, described in Colossians 2:10–12 (‘In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him’). Arguments made by the Baptists to refute this reading of Colossians were that Paul discouraged the New Testament apostles from adopting Jewish ceremonies, and that the circumcision spoken of was a spiritual rather than a corporeal one. Another important limitation of circumcision which, for Baptists, disproved its links with baptism, was its application: the practice could only be undergone by men, whereas baptism could be administered to both men and women. As the 1677 Baptist Confession of Faith declared, following an increase in publications about the practice, ‘neither do they or we suppose that baptism is in any such manner substituted in the place of circumcision, as to have the same (and no other) latitude, extent, or terms, then circumcision had; for that was suited only for the Male children, baptism is an ordinance suited for every beleiver, whether male, or femal’.59 An earlier catechism by Tombes sought to  Arnold Hunt, ‘Laurence Chaderton and the Hampton Court Conference’, in Belief and Practice in Reformation England, ed. by Susan Wabauda and Caroline Litzenberger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 207–28, cited in Bryan D. Spinks, Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 73. 58  Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, p. 51. 59  The Confession of Faith (London: Printed for Benjamin Harris, 1677), p. 117. 57

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prove that the command to circumcise was made to those in Abraham’s house, even though they were not of his seed, but that the ordinance admitted ‘no Females, nor Males under eight dayes old’.60 If the link between circumcision of male infants and paedobaptism could not be made, the New Testament lacked other examples. In a public dispute taking place at Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, on 5 September 1653, Henry Vaughan openly argued with Tombes that ‘the males only were mentioned in the covenant of Circumcision, for in the eyes of all laws whatsoever, the women are but as ignoble creatures, and therefore the usuall stile of laws, and covenants is, Si Quis and Qui in the masculine’, and that women were included in the promised covenant in the word ‘seed’.61 Arguments for believers’ baptism, therefore, reflected the importance that the practice was administered to both sexes in the same way, and highlighted the importance of women’s participation in the ordinance. The practicalities of the baptismal process are mostly absent from believers’ accounts of their experiences in the period; however, the published dispute between Tombes and his opponents John Cragge and Henry Vaughan was prefaced by a particularly detailed woodcut depicting ‘the manner of the Anabaptists Dipping’ (see Figure I.1). The image shows the ‘dipping’ of two believers by others lowering them backwards into the water, an image that did not match Tombes’s belief in the practice of sprinkling a believer with water in order to baptise them, rather than undergoing full immersion. The inclusion of the woodcut bypasses Tombes’s more conservative belief in ‘sprinkling’, provoking the reader to draw parallels with the activities of the European Anabaptists: it is titled, ‘The Anabaptists Anotamized [sic] and Silenced in a Publick Dispute’. The image resists sensationalism in the attire of the partakers who are fully clothed but it is unusual because it appears to show two men being dipped under the water by two women, who look to be in their shifts, but the book itself, though it mentions that ‘women and inferior tradesmen’ are drawn to the Baptists, never suggests that women are able to baptise new members.62 Assigning women the important office of ‘dipper’, however, deliberately undermines the practice of adult baptism, in accordance with the book’s argument. The baptiser, holding the believer under the water for several seconds, was in a powerful position, and to give this power to women was subversive. For reasons of expense and fear of persecution, the Baptists 60  John Tombes, A Short Catechism about Baptism (London: Printed by Henry Hills, 1659), pp. 7–8. 61  John Cragge, A Publick Dispute […] Touching Infant Baptism (London: Printed for H. Twyford, N. Brook, and J. Place, 1654), p. 9. 62  Ibid., p. 71. Baptism is never listed among the offices that women can fill in surviving congregational records, but Thomas Edwards reported that a woman in the Holland area of Lincolnshire ‘who preaches, (its certain) and ’tis reported also she baptizeth but thats not so certain’ (Thomas Edwards, Gangraena: or, A Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours (London: Printed for Ralph Smith, 1646), p. 84).

Introduction

Fig. I.1

23

‘The Anabaptists Anotamized [sic] and Silenced in a Publique Dispute’, Frontispiece, John Cragge, The Arraignment, and Conviction of Anabaptism; or A Reply to Master Tombes (London: Printed by T. W. for H. Twyford, N. Brooks, Tho. Dring, J. Place, 1656), The Huntington Library, RB 434895. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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themselves did not publish their own images, meaning those that do survive are intended to provoke the scorn of their viewers: the women are either exploited and ogled while naked, or given the office of baptism, controlling men as they are dipped under the water. The varying positions on baptism, and how and when it should be practised, led many believers to seek God for an answer and to read numerous books and pamphlets published on the subject in the 1640s and 1650s. Many believers struggled to decide whether they themselves should undergo the process. Trapnel recorded the machinations of Satan who ‘brought some curious Speculations’ to her about ‘what Baptism was not’ (p. 129), which she was able to ignore, and Katherine Sutton, whose conversion narrative was published in 1663, recorded that she feared a ‘death (in all likelyhood and in an eye of reason) would fall upon my livelyhood’ if she went ahead with her baptism, but read Matthew 28:19, and Acts 2:38 and 10:48 to counteract these fears.63 As the first chapter of this book will address, Baptist women were in danger of losing their reputations by undergoing believers’ baptism, as well as being subjected to accusations of heresy and disorderliness. In a similar way, Deborah Huish’s conversion narrative described how she pondered the ‘duty of Baptisme aforesaid, […] yet doubts and questions have been cast into my mind about it, and thus I remained, debating it in my own thoughts, and consulting the Scriptures about it, until [...] I was set upon with terrible suggestions about the lownesse and meanesse of it, being much tempted to despise and slight it’.64 However difficult these decisions were for women, the uncertainty over whether to baptise a child was fraught with even more anxiety, as parents were considered responsible for their children’s spiritual states. Lucy Hutchinson, though not a known member of a Baptist congregation, wrote that she had doubts about the practice of baptising infants, which led her and her husband to decide they would not baptise the child she was carrying in the mid-1640s. Hutchinson had obtained some ‘notes [...] concerning paedobaptism’, namely its ‘misapplication’, after her husband had been ordered by Presbyterian ministers to break up a private meeting in his soldiers’ lodgings, while he was Governor of Nottingham Castle.65 She then proceeded, ‘having then more leisure to read than he’ to peruse and ‘[compare] them with the Scriptures’ (p. 210) and found that she agreed with their assertions that there was no support for infant baptism in the scriptures. She held off from disagreeing openly with the church: being then young and modest, [she] thought it a kind of virtue to submit to the judgment and practice of most churches rather than to defend a singular opinion of her own, she not being then enlightened concerning that great mistake of the national churches. But in this year she, happening to be with 63  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.47, p. 129; Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, p. 12. 64  Huish, The Captive Taken from the Strong, pp. 66–67. 65  Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. by N. H. Keeble (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 210.

Introduction

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child, communicated her doubts to her husband and desired him to endeavour her satisfaction; which while he did, he himself became as unsatisfied, or rather satisfied against it. (p. 210)

Presenting herself as the epitome of womanly virtue, not proud enough to defend her ‘singular opinion’, Hutchinson insists with hindsight that she was the first to communicate the error of the ‘national churches’ to her husband. She was doing what Baptist women often described in their spiritual experiences, examining the scriptures for evidence and resolving to be bound by what they found. Such private meditation is presented as a lonely, but eventually rewarding, experience. Colonel John Hutchinson, Lucy’s husband, was then faced with a struggle of his own. She tells us that he ‘dilligently searched the Scriptures alone, and could find in them no ground at all for that practice; then he bought and read all the eminent treatises on both sides which came thick from the presses at that time’ (p. 210). Seeking an answer when his wife had been ‘brought to bed’ (p. 210), no doubt urged on by her, John Hutchinson invited all the ministers to dinner so that they could discuss his doubts that he might satisfy his wife. Lucy’s version of these events was that none of them could defend their practice with any satisfactory reason but the tradition of the church from the primitive times, and their main buckler of federal holiness, which Tombes and Denne had excellently overthrown. [John and Lucy Hutchinson] then professing themselves unsatisfied in the practice, desired their opinions, what they ought to do. Most answered, to conform to the general practice of other Christians, how dark soever it were to themselves; but Mr Foxcraft, one of the [Westminster] Assembly, said that except they were convinced of the warrant of that practice from the Word, they sinned in doing it: whereupon that infant was not baptised. (p. 211)

The only defences of infant baptism that the ministers came up with were the following of the traditions of the primitive church and their belief in ‘federal holiness’ or the covenant of grace. John Tombes was to ‘excellently overthrow’ this latter doctrine in his ‘Exercitation’ later published in English in Two Treatises (1645). The argument made by paedobaptists, based in 1 Corinthians 7:14 (‘For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now they are holy’), was that ‘the Infants of a Believer are holy, with a Covenant-holinesse; [...] therefore they may be baptized’.66 Tombes once used this scripture to justify his baptising of infants, but had come to believe it was not a ‘sufficient warrant’ for paedobaptism:67 he subsequently wrote that it did not follow ‘that they are to be baptized, who have not yet yeelded any shewes of divine grace’, and that 66  John Tombes, Two Treatises and an Appendix to them concerning Infant-Baptisme (London: Printed for George Whittington, 1645), p. 10. 67  Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, p. 53.

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this particular scripture did ‘not speak of federall holinesse, but of holinesse, [...] Matrimoniall, so that the sense is, your children are holy, that is [meaning] legitimate [i.e. they have the potential to be one of the elect]’.68 The difference in interpretation was whether the children of believers were yet worthy of the ordinance, before they had a chance to interpret God’s grace and grow in faith. It is likely that the eminent treatises that John and Lucy read would have included some of Tombes’s pamphlets, which, Tolmie asserts, provoked a number of the ‘conservative clergy’ to reply and join the debate on both sides.69 The Hutchinsons’ experiences attest to the anxiety men and women faced when they welcomed a child into the world, as well as the consequences of such actions. During the period of this book, therefore, women who chose not to baptise their children, or undertook believers’ baptism themselves, faced challenges from the established church, their societal networks and friends, as well as their families (particularly their husbands and fathers). Chapter 1 explores popular beliefs about female Baptists that appeared in press, as the established church and the society it controlled sought to present the women as lascivious, ignorant, and therefore led by the nose by charismatic lay preachers. These carnal, weak-minded women were also thought to be easily influenced by Satan’s machinations, which resulted in their frenzied behaviour, leading them to commit monstrous and unfeminine acts of barbarous cruelty, subverting order and patriarchal control. The chapter, therefore, will explore the representations of female Baptists in popular ‘wonderstory’ pamphlets, including the case of Mary Champion who was reported to have cut her child’s head off rather than have it baptised, as well as discussing the relationship between heresiographers’ accounts of the Baptists’ activities with vindications compiled by Baptist women themselves. The manuscript experiences of Agnes Beaumont (c. 1675) who was accused of her father’s murder provide a means of examining how popular beliefs about Baptists could affect family relationships, and provide members of the community with ammunition with which to accuse the innocent. Popular rumour accused Beaumont of being distracted  Tombes, Two Treatises, p. 10.  Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, p. 62. An 1815 catalogue of publications and

68 69

manuscripts from the Hutchinson family home at Owthorpe Hall, Nottingham, to be sold by a Loughborough bookseller, includes several publications discussing baptism, including Immanuel Knutton’s Seven questions about the controversie betweene the Church of England, and the Separatists and Anabaptists (London: Printed by Thomas Paine, 1645), which aligns Old Testament circumcision and New Testament infant baptism, and Jeremy Taylor’s A Discourse of Baptisme, its Institution, and Efficacy upon all Believers (London: Printed by J. Flesher for Richard Royston, 1652). Unfortunately the catalogue mixes the Hutchinsons’ library with two eighteenth-century divines and others, but it seems likely that these seventeenth-century books were owned by them (Toronto, Bird 00088, A Catalogue of a large collection […] belonging to the ancient family of the Hutchinson’s, of Owthorpe Hall, in the county of Nottingham; the Rev. Mr. Greenaway, of Old Dalby, in the county of Leicester; the Rev. Mr. Alleyne, of North Cerney, in the county of Gloucester, and others (Loughborough: [n. pub.], 1815)).

Introduction

27

and frantic, even several years after she was found innocent. The controversial behaviour of prophetesses, who were often encouraged by their congregations to share their prophecies with influential people, invited discussions both inside and outside congregations as to whether such actions and words were indeed divinely sanctioned. The latter part of this chapter examines arguments made by Baptist prophetesses, including Elizabeth Poole and Anna Trapnel, to show that they were divine instruments rather than mad, whorish, rebellious, or heretical. As this brief introduction has also shown, Baptist women often faced obstacles from their own congregations, as well as from their families and friends. Chapter 2 explores evidence for strictures placed upon women’s participation in Baptist congregations in church record books, records of inter-congregational meetings, and in Baptist women’s works, highlighting different interpretations of New Testament teachings. All congregations agreed that women’s speaking aloud in the congregation should be limited or delineated by practices that reminded them of their submission to the male members in their congregation, but the exact practices depended on the congregation’s minister, as well as pressures from outside the group. Despite these restrictions, however, many women argued that God had given them the right to speak, using the example of Deborah’s prophetic activity to chastise male immobility and support a reading of 1 Corinthians 11 that was favourable to female prophecy. Women were not blind to the inconsistencies present in 1 Corinthians, as well as in the teachings of their congregations, and many argued for women’s liberty to speak, citing Old Testament women like Deborah and Hannah, through whom God spoke. The latter part of this chapter will consider women’s excommunication vindications, where unruly speech and its association with unruly sexuality is explored. Chapters 3 and 4 will continue to discuss how Baptist women contributed to their congregations, by writing, speaking, and publishing works that sought to strengthen, raise up, and evangelise their followers, as well as those outside the congregation. Women writing were often referred to by themselves and others as ‘mothers’ to their congregations, indicating that motherly duties involved teaching. Indeed, if children were not baptised then mothers had a particular duty to impress godliness and obedience onto the child so that they would desire to undertake baptism when they became of age. Chapter 3 will investigate how Baptist women could utilise printed works in order to support and recommend improvements to the organisation and practices of the Baptist churches, including their contributions to arguments over baptismal practice and, in the latter part of the chapter, discussions that took place concerning the association of Baptists and paedobaptists in the conversion narrative of Jane Turner. It will also explore evidence that Baptist women’s works were circulated through Baptist networks, between different local associations of Baptist churches. For instance, Turner’s work was addressed to churches in Newcastle, Berwick, and Scotland, and the work of the Devon Baptist, Deborah Huish, was addressed by her prefatory writers to churches in Ireland. Chapter 4 focuses on Baptist women’s contribution to the Fifth Monarchist movement, as mothers of churches. The first half of

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the chapter discusses the use of baptismal waters as a literary trope in Baptist women’s prophecies, and how these waters were interpreted as both destructive and life-giving, before moving on to discussing how experience of these waters gave women liberty to speak. The latter half of the chapter considers the written spiritual experiences of Deborah Huish and Anne Wentworth, whose works focus on suffering before deliverance, and are interpreted by their followers as allegories for the struggles of the saints in the late 1650s and late 1670s. While Huish’s work was claimed by the Baptists and Fifth Monarchists as a sign of hope and their imminent rising up, Wentworth’s was disowned by her former Baptist church who has excommunicated her because she disagreed with their practices and their support for her husband’s abusive behaviour. She claimed that her conversion, which took her away from the Baptist church and her husband, was an allegory for the conflict between Zion and Babylon. Throughout this study of Baptist women writers, women draw on the gendered presentations of the Church in the Bible, particularly the woman in travel from Revelation, and the spouse of the Song of Songs, which made them apt symbols for the Church in peril and deliverance. Through these images, women could present themselves as leaders and nurturers of religious communities, negotiating their congregations’ strictures placed upon their behaviour, writing, and speech.

Chapter 1

‘Frantique Handmaids’: Female Baptists in the Popular Imagination Joining a society of Baptists was an independent choice made by many women, often, as we have seen, without the permission of their fathers, husbands, or brothers. Sectarian worship, rejecting the rituals and traditions of the established church, was a sign of disagreement and of rebellion because the Anglican Church was controlled by the state. A woman choosing to worship in this way, separating herself from both the state-controlled church and potentially her family, was then doubly rebellious, leading sensational pamphleteers to focus on sectarian women’s exploits as symptomatic of the breakdown of established religion and authority. This was a period of revolution and change in the nature and breadth of ecclesiastical control: the Civil Wars of the 1640s, the move towards Restoration and subsequent persecution of 1658–62, and after Charles II’s second Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. It is no coincidence that at this time, sensational pamphlets focusing on the rebelliousness of the sects proliferated. Such pamphlets played on contemporary anxieties: the villainous ‘Anabaptists’, as they were called, were supposedly behind insurrections and murders, and could use their devilish charm to seduce young women to their cause, baptising them naked in freezing rivers during the night. Women who easily submitted to such seductions were labelled ignorant or ‘silly’, lascivious, and disorderly, and their heretical behaviour was thought to provoke harsh judgement from God who punished them with hardships including death, illness, and madness. Many Baptist women, therefore, experienced the judgement of their friends and neighbours. Tobie Allein recorded in 1657 that he was ‘perplext to hear daily the Scoffs and Taunts wherewith some of our brethren have every where at their doors; and shops, and tables vilified’ his wife Mary, who had become a separatist and then repented, which damaged their cloth business.1 An anonymous female convert of another gathered church also addressed her Anglican relatives from her deathbed, urging them to leave off their ‘wild discourses’, where they called her conversion ‘Phrenzy’ (or mental derangement), her holy conversation ‘Phanat[ic]ism, or (which is worse) Sedition and Rebellion; and the words wherein it is held out, Canting’.2 The texts from which these accusations are taken were intended as vindications from the aspersions of the writers’ geographical and familial communities, and so this chapter will not 1  Tobie Allein, Truths Manifest: or A Full and Faithful Narrative (London: Printed for F. E., 1658), p. 14. 2  Anon., Conversion Exemplified; In the Instance of a Gracious Gentlewoman Now in Glory (London: [n. pub.], 1663), CCL H/A–4–2(15), pp. 59–60.

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only explore popular beliefs about the disorderly behaviour of female Baptists, but it will also show how the women themselves responded to these ideas in their writings. An example of the cultural stereotypes that confronted Baptists, and particularly their female members, can be seen recorded in the narrative composed by twentytwo-year-old Agnes Beaumont of Edworth, Bedfordshire, who was best known for riding to a meeting on the back of John Bunyan’s horse to the horror of her father John who accordingly fell into a passion and ran after her, hoping to pull her off.3 The conflict between Agnes, as a member of John Bunyan’s congregation (made up of both baptised and non-baptised members), and her father, seems not to have been caused not by a difference of religious beliefs, but because of outside pressure from prominent members of John Beaumont’s community. Agnes wrote in her manuscript defending her behaviour, now known as The Narrative of the Persecution of Agnes Beaumont, that her father had previously heard Bunyan ‘preach gods word, & heard him with a broaken heart as he had done several others’, going to ‘meetings for a great while together’.4 However, when Agnes was first ‘awakened’, and began to examine her conscience as to whether she was indeed one of God’s elect, she experienced ‘such distress about my soul’ that caused her father to observe: ‘I thinck my daughter will be distracted, She scarce Eats, drincks, or sleeps’ (p. 209). Such behaviour, as Chapter 3 will go on to show,  As Vera Camden’s edition of The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont evidences, a horseback ride was an opportunity for ‘folks to engage in all manner of sexual activity’ ((East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992), p. 17). 4  Agnes Beaumont, ‘The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont’, in Grace Abounding, with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. by John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 193–224 (p. 209). Subsequent references are to this edition and are placed in parentheses following the quotation. Beaumont’s narrative exists in two British Library manuscripts: MS Egerton 2414 and MS 2128. It is not known whether the first of these manuscripts is written in Beaumont’s hand, although Patricia L. Bell has speculated on the matter, but the existence of two preserved manuscript copies suggests, at least, that it was circulated (Bell, ‘Agnes Beaumont of Edworth’, Baptist Quarterly, 35 (1993), 3–17). Kathleen Lynch also comments that the manuscript is ‘clearly written’ with pencilled margins, which gives us ‘no particular reason to think that these are Beaumont’s foul papers’ (Lynch, ‘“Her Name Agnes”: The Verifications of Agnes Beaumont’s Narrative Ventures’, ELH, 67 (2000), 71–98 (88)). If it was possible to prove that the first manuscript was penned by Agnes, it would be the only known surviving handwritten manuscript by a Baptist woman from this period. Agnes’s desire to join the Bedford congregation, led by Bunyan, is recorded in the congregation’s records from 31 November 1672: ‘the desire of sister Behemont to walke in fellowship with us was propounded and was received at the next Church meeting’. Her name was subsequently written on the list of members by Bunyan himself as ‘Agniss Behement’ (The Minutes of the First Independent Church (now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford, 1656–1766, ed. by H. G. Tibbutt, 55 (Bedford: Bedfordshire Historical Records Society, 1976), p. 75). No member of her family appears to have sought membership, though she records that her brother and sister attended meetings. 3

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seems to have been common for women who undertook puritan self-examination before they came to the realisation that were not damned; but to outsiders, and especially to anxious parents, the threat of mental disorder (and even death) was a real concern.5 Agnes observed that following these events an ‘evil minded man in the town would set [her father] against these meetings’ by urging him: ‘Have you lived to these years to be led away with them? These be they that lead silly women Captive into houses, and for pretence make long prayers’ (p. 209). It was these words, as Agnes’s father told her later, that caused him to be ‘censed’, to bar her from his home when she returned from the meeting, leading her to sleep in a barn, and him to threaten to disinherit her: he was persuaded that Bunyan had captivated his daughter (as the false preachers captivating ‘silly women’ recorded in 2 Timothy 3:6) by his engaging speeches, and had encouraged her to disobey her father’s authority. Tellingly, when Agnes tried to gain access to her house again, her father called her ‘hussif’ (p. 204), a name that could mean both ‘housewife’ and ‘whore’: she was to choose whether she would remain a housewife under the domestic control of her father, or reject that control and be a whore. Beaumont’s narrative depicts the repercussions of this kind of defamation, both for her reputation in her geographical community (and also her church community), and also for her relationship with her father. When she accepted a ride on the back of Bunyan’s horse to the church meeting taking place at Gamlingay on Friday 13 February 1674, she was unprepared for the rumours witnesses would circulate: as she wrote afterwards, ‘My heart was pufft up with pride, [ … ]; and I was pleasd that any body did look after me as I rode A long’ (p. 197). However, one person who witnessed their journey, a clergyman called Mr Lane who was eager to discredit John Bunyan as a dissenting minister, ‘staird his Eyes Out; and afterward did scandalise us after a base manner, and did raise a very wicked report of us, which was altogether false’ (p. 198). He circulated the rumour at Baldock Fair that ‘at the towns End’, the couple were ‘naught together’, accusing them of sexual misconduct (p. 214). Bunyan added several paragraphs to the fifth edition of his own spiritual testimony, Grace Abounding, published in 1680, which appears to be responding to accusations such as these: ‘It began therefore to be rumored up and down among the People that I was a Witch, [ … ]. But that which was reported with the boldest confidence, was, that I had my Misses, my Whores, my Bastards.’6 However, while Bunyan could say that he bound ‘these lies and slanders to me as an ornament’, as it belonged to his ‘Christian Profession to be  Camden suggests that this ‘distraction’ could also have been interpreted by her father as lovesickness for her minister (p. 19), highlighting how her behaviour could be seen in various ways. 6  Bunyan, ‘Grace Abounding’, ed. by Stachniewski and Pacheco, pp. 1–94 (p. 85). For Bunyan’s additions to the fifth edition of Grace Abounding (1680), see N. H. Keeble, ‘“Here is her Glory, even to be under Him”: The Feminine in the Thought and Work of John Bunyan’, pp. 139–40; Tamsin Spargo, ‘The Fathers’ Seductions: Improper Relations of Desire in Seventeenth-Century Nonconformist Communities’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 17 (1998), 255–68 (257). 5

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vilified’ as Christ was, Agnes’s reputation was to prove more difficult to salvage. Four days later, after father and daughter had made peace with one another, John Beaumont died of a heart condition that took him suddenly in the night. When friends and neighbours were alerted to events, a neighbouring lawyer Mr Feery accused Beaumont of poisoning her father with the help of Bunyan, despite the her father’s age: Patricia L. Bell has shown that John Beaumont was likely to have been ‘about seventy years old’ and near his time.7 As Bernard Capp acknowledges, however, ‘if a woman enjoyed a good reputation and the allegations appeared ill-founded or malicious, she might have little to fear’, but Agnes’s reputation was already fragile: she was a member of a Baptist congregation, she had been observed as ‘distracted’, and had also recently argued with her father over her relationship with Bunyan.8 Patricide was a crime against a superior and regarded as petty-treason because it re-enacted the monarch and subject relationship: the penalty was to be burnt at the stake. Fortunately Agnes was not found guilty, despite Mr Feery’s attempts to incriminate her, and she described her trials as ‘afflicting dispensations’, drawing on Psalms 119:71, showing how they made her stronger in her faith and confirmed her election. Cultural stereotypes of the Baptists appear to have been at the heart of Feery’s accusations. Bell’s research, for instance, shows that Feery’s design was to match his own son, Thomas, to Agnes, encouraging Agnes’s father to leave her more money than her sister in his will so that his son could benefit, and that this was then thwarted when she began to attend Baptist meetings, eventually joining them in fellowship.9 As Agnes wrote, ‘He put my father on to give me more then my sister because of some design that he had then, but afterwards when I came to go to meetings he was turned Against me’ (p. 222): Feery clearly did not relish the thought of a Baptist for a daughter-in-law, and in revenge, after the funeral, appears to have encouraged Agnes’s brother-in-law to sue her for the money her sister had been denied. Agnes paid them £60 as a settlement. Evidently, her acquittal from all charges did not do enough to clear her reputation. Agnes was also plagued by rumours that she heard were circulating at Bigglesworth market, that she had ‘Confest that I had poysoned my father, and that I was quite distracted’ (p. 223), suffering madness as a result of sins. ‘A lost reputation’, Capp writes, ‘brought notoriety across an area that might extend ten miles or more from the point of

 Bell, ‘Agnes Beaumont of Edworth’, 4.  Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early

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Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 204. 9  PRO 10/1058. John Beaumont made his will on 15 August 1670, proved 30 May 1674, which, as Bell writes, was most likely penned by Mr Peter Feery and witnessed and signed by Feery’s son Thomas, and Agnes herself. Agnes, as the only single child remaining, was the main beneficiary of her father’s will: her sister Joan had received provision on her marriage, John appears to have been given the main farm, and William received £200 for an apprenticeship (Bell, ‘Agnes Beaumont of Edworth’, 6)

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origin’.10 In response, then, Agnes travelled to Bigglesworth market, equidistant from Edworth, Gamlingay, and Baldock, to show that she was in her right mind, recording that ‘all the Eyes of the market was fixt upon me’ (p. 223). Later, in summer 1675, not content with meddling in Agnes’s finances, Feery also raised another rumour recorded in the later fair manuscript copy of her narrative, that she had set one of the houses in town on fire (p. 224), which indicates that Beaumont continued to face accusations of sedition because of her beliefs, even after a jury cleared her of the original charges. Scholars have suggested that damage to her reputation is why Beaumont did not marry until 1702 when she was fifty years old, and then to a fellow dissenter.11 Agnes Beaumont’s narrative was certainly written as a vindication, defending her reputation and by extension that of her congregation, from the aspersions of her enemies. What the work also shows is that contemporary fears about Baptist behaviour were deeply entrenched and could provoke extreme measures: members of Agnes’s wider community had little difficulty in believing that she was a distracted fanatic, held in the thrall of a lascivious minister, who had done away with her father to prevent him disinheriting her. Her religious beliefs caused her to quarrel with her father, to lose her marriage prospects, and nearly her life. Scholars have often noted that Beaumont’s treatment resulted from disobedience to her father, but what has been left under-discussed is how her work is evidence of popular perceptions of female Baptists, and how a woman could respond to these culturally entrenched ideas. Therefore, before looking more closely at Beaumont’s narrative strategies for dealing with these accusations, as well as those of other Baptist women writers, this chapter will explore representations of female Baptists in sensational literature from this period. ‘Nature Unnatured’: Disorderly Female Anabaptists The vehemence with which opponents of the Baptists attacked their congregations and their female members is testament to how much their new practices were seen to resemble old European heresies brought forth in a new guise, now appearing in the heart of England. Observers of flourishing Baptist congregations in the early 1640s were mindful of their similarities with the rebellious continental Anabaptists led by Jan Bockelson (John of Leiden) who had attempted to establish a theocracy in Münster in the 1530s, hence why those outside the Baptists constantly referred to them as ‘Anabaptists’ (‘re-baptisers’). This group of male and female millenarians had violently attempted to establish a ‘New Jerusalem’ and advocated adult baptism, abolished private ownership, and practised polygamy: they turned  Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 213.  Beaumont married Thomas Warren of Cheshunt, Hertfordshire on 14 October 1702

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(she was fifty) who died in 1707, leaving half his estate (PRO 11/496 will of Thomas Warren), and then married Samuel Storey, a London fishmonger, who survived her. She died on 28 November 1720 (Bell, ‘Agnes Beaumont of Edworth’, pp. 13–16).

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all established traditions upside-down. What seventeenth-century studies of the Anabaptists often failed to explore was that this violent faction was part of a wider group, who were, J. F. McGregor writes, ‘pacifist in principle’ which is why they ‘regarded civil authority, dependent on the power of the sword, as irredeemably corrupt’.12 Instead, sensational histories of the Anabaptists that circulated in the early 1640s tended to concentrate on the events of Münster, devoting much discussion to how the group had gained control of the city and murdered those who refused to be converted, hoping to provoke their readers to see parallels with the upheaval of civil war. A Warning for England [ … ] in the Famous History of the Frantick Anabaptists (1642), for instance, stressed that Anabaptist ministers pretended ‘a wonderfull and more then ordinary zeale, having with great passion preached against the Popish Errors’, and that they claimed to have ‘some divine revelations, that god by dreames & Visions did reveal unto his saints his will’.13 This was certainly intended to associate Anabaptism with the extempore preaching characteristic of sectarian congregations in the 1640s. The collapse of Archbishop Laud’s Court of High Commission in 1641 allowed the proliferation of all kinds of zealous preaching: the pamphlet also tells its readers that the people ‘dayly flocked after [an Anabaptist minister] & admired him as a man divinely inspired’, listening to his prophecies, the most disturbing of which was that ‘he had received a command from god to kill & root up all wicked Princes & Magistrates, & to chuse better in their places’ (A2v). Anabaptism was a heresy associated with rebellious behaviour: even in 1642 pamphleteers recognised that radical religious ideas were powerful enough to destroy monarchy and hierarchy, and hence the established church. This particular preacher was also reported as having commanded ‘all Churches to be defaced’ (B3), echoing Puritan iconoclasm. Elsewhere in the pamphlet is recorded a godly Prince’s speech to his soldiers before he attempts to quell their rebellious ideas, which had greatly affected the ‘base people’ who had then ‘risen in a tumult’ (A2v): ‘These Revells did but cover with the name of the Gospell their owne impious and bloudy designes: that their true ayme was, to take away all Government, to bring in confusion into the state, Atheisme, and Barbarisme into the Church’ (A4). Published in the same year that Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham, the godly Prince’s words indicate that readers were to understand parliamentary sympathisers as harbourers of seditious heretics. Defending the monarchy against heresy and its resultant disorder and sedition,  McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, p. 25; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. II: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 7–10. 13  A Warning for England especially London in the Famous History of the Frantick Anabaptists ([London: n. pub.], 1642), A2; A2v. See also A Short History of the Anabaptists of High and Low Germany (London: Printed by T. Badger, 1642). In fact, the Particular Baptists with which this book is concerned had more in common with English Puritanism than continental Anabaptism: General Baptists could, however, trace a link back to Dutch Anabaptism. See Anne Dunan-Page, ‘John Bunyan’s A Confession of my Faith and Restoration Anabaptism’, Prose Studies, 28:1 (2006), 19–40. 12

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the pamphlet presented its readers with images of what would happen if zealous ministers were allowed to prevail. It was as if London was one step away from the Anabaptists of Münster shouting in the streets: ‘All who were not rebaptized; were to be accompted Pagans and Infidells, and to be kild’ ([B]1v). The bloody events of the next six years did nothing to destroy these anxieties in those loyal to the bishops and to the monarchy. Seventeenth-century English Baptists were consistently termed ‘Anabaptists’ by their opponents because they shared with their predecessors a desire to reform traditional religious practices and separate from the established church with its bishops, service book, and ornamentation. In their eyes, one particular practice in need of reform was that of baptising believers to welcome them into the church and share in God’s covenant. Baptists, both Particular (or Calvinistic) and General (or Arminian), were united by their belief that baptism should take place only when a believer became old enough to examine their own conscience and declare what God had done for them in front of their congregation.14 Theologians and Baptist ministers also argued that there was no scriptural precedent for paedobaptism, and therefore it was an empty form and against God’s will. As Thomas Edwards, the notorious heresiographer, noted later in 1646, some critics ‘in contempt of [infant] Baptisme’ urinated in the font of a church in Huntingtonshire, and brought a horse in and baptised it.15 Error number 105 of Edwards’s list also recorded that the sectaries maintained: ‘’Tis as lawfull to break any of the ten Commandements, as to baptize an Infant: yea, ’tis as lawfull to commit adultery and murther, as to baptize a childe.’16 New members of Baptist congregations certainly rejected their baptism into the established church, and instead received believers’ baptism as the true sign that they were part of God’s chosen people. This drew criticism, even from separatists from the established church like Praisegod Barebone, who likened anti-paedobaptism to the practice of witchcraft because ‘witches after conviction say that the Devil persuaded them to deny their first Baptisme’.17 Possibly in response to the incident with Beaumont, Bunyan was suspected of using witchcraft to ‘captivate’ potential members of his church, but the charge was, of course, an accusation most often levelled against women rather than men, suggesting they were more drawn to heresies of this kind. Jane Turner, a member of  Young Baptists tended to be baptised in their late teens if they had grown up in the community. A first awareness of the moral law and sin seemed often to go hand in hand with reaching adulthood. The youngest baptism recorded appears to be that of twelveyear-old Caleb Vernon who was dying, but he and his father (an elder of the congregation) had to convince the congregation of his sufficient godliness before the ordinance was administered. See John Vernon, The Compleat Scholler. 15  Thomas Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (London: Printed for Ralph Smith, 1646), p. 17. 16  Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena, p. 24. 17  Praisegod Barebone, A Defence of the Lawfulnesse of Baptizing Infants (London: Printed by M. Bell for Benjamin Allen, 1645), A2v, cited by McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, p. 41. 14

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a Baptist congregation in Newcastle, was defamed for acting under ‘the Mistresse of Witchcraft’, the Whore of Babylon, by the Quaker Edward Burrough; and the prophetess Elizabeth Poole was named a ‘monstrous witch’ for speaking against Charles I’s execution in front of the council of parliamentary officers that included Cromwell.18 Anna Trapnel was also threatened with the witch tryer and her ‘great pin’ used for checking birthmarks while on trial in Cornwall, discussed in the last section of this chapter.19 Parents deciding not to baptise their newly born children, whether they were members of a Baptist congregation or could not satisfy themselves that there was scriptural evidence to support the practice, often invited derision from their friends and neighbours. Lucy Hutchinson, discussed in the Introduction to this book, invited theologians to her home in order to discuss whether or not to baptise the child she was carrying. Though neither she nor her husband was a member of a Baptist congregation, they were tainted with the name of ‘Anabaptist’ even though the Hutchinsons had not stopped attending church or giving money for its maintenance. As Lucy recorded, they were looked upon as shameful ‘fanatics’ and ‘Anabaptists’: the ministers and congregation tellingly ‘glanced’ at them during the ‘public sermons’.20 Deciding to make such a break with tradition and established church doctrine was evidently not an easy decision and neither were the consequences easy to bear. Sensational tales vilified parents, and mothers in particular, providing details of calamities befalling children that had not been baptised. Edwards drew attention to this neglect by printing a letter that he had received from Colchester on 18 February 1645, reporting a monstrous birth where a mother gave birth to two dead children, one of which was born without a head but ‘having upon the breast some characters of a face, nose, and eyes’.21 The father was reported to be a separatist, an ‘enemy to the baptising of his own children’, and the mother had previously resolved ‘that if ever she had any more children, they should never be baptized’. Clearly, Edwards intended his readers to interpret these tragic circumstances as a sign of the parents’ sins in denying God’s will. Monstrous births could also be attributed to the violent emotions experienced by a mother during her pregnancy, reflecting her disordered state of mind. The midwife, Jane Sharp, observed that ‘the mother’s imagination makes an impression upon the child, but it must be a strong imagination at that very time when the forming faculty is at work’.22 Edwards’s story draws on this belief that a monstrous birth  Edward Burrough, Something in Answer to a Book called Choice Experiences, given forth by one J. Turner ([N. p.: n. pub.], 1654), A2; The English-Devil: or, Cromwel and his Monstrous Witch Discover’d at White-Hall (London: Printed by Robert Wood for George Horton, 1660). 19  Anna Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea, pp. 21–22. 20  Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, p. 211. 21  Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena, p. 4 22  Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book: or The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 92–93. 18

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was the result of the monstrous heretical beliefs of the mother, referring to the precedent of the grotesque mother, the Whore of Babylon.23 Wonder stories, like Edwards’s report, became increasingly common in ballads, pamphlets, and newsbooks during the 1640s. In 1647, the newsbook Mercurius Melancholicus reflected that the times had produced ‘nature unnatured, Monsters reversed, heads where the feete, and the feete where the heads should be; Bodies divided, yea headlesse, and yet live &c. These are nothing else but certaine presages of a sad Catastrophe’.24 ‘Unnatural’ occurrences like these were often associated with heretical activity, as signs of God’s wrath, but sectarians were also accused of violent and unnatural actions, which were evidenced by the reports of distractedness and murderous intent faced by Agnes Beaumont. Anne Dunan-Page identifies five extreme charges that were levelled against groups of Baptists because of the similarity of their beliefs to those of the Anabaptists: ‘heresy, political rebellion, murder, sexual licence, and madness’.25 A sensational pamphlet published in 1647, promising Bloody Newes from Dover, charged one female Anabaptist with committing the majority of these crimes. Mary Champion, the wife of an ‘honest Tradesman’, had given birth to a child, but when her husband desired that it be baptised ‘according [to] the antient Custome of the Kingdome’, she opposed him.26 After six or seven weeks, the pamphlet records, the ‘wicked minded woman took her opportunity; [ … ], took a great knife and cut off the Childs head’, presenting it to her husband when he returned home: ‘Behold husband, thy sweet Babe without a head, now go and baptize it; if you will, you must christen the head without a body: for here they lye separated.’ This moment is captured by the woodcut on the front of the pamphlet where her husband is labelled a ‘Presbyterian’ and Mary an ‘Anabaptist’ (see Figure 1.1). One glance at this image of an Anabaptist woman brandishing the dismembered head of her child, rather than have it baptised, would have communicated her unnatural, disorderly femininity, showing a woman actively opposing her husband’s more orthodox views. The image depicts the separation of husband and wife on religious grounds, allegorising the separation of gathered churches, like the Baptists, from the Anglican Church, and the result is a dismembered infant with its head separated from its body. The Champions’ story is prefaced by a similar tale from the later 1620s of a Protestant man who wanted his son to ‘be brought up in the Protestant Profession’, but his Catholic wife disagreed, murdered the boy, and 23  For the presentation of bad mothers in relation to heresy and sin see Pamela Hammons, ‘Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-Effacement in SeventeenthCentury Child Loss Poetry’, ELH, 66 (1999), 25–49. 24  Mercurius Melancholicus: or Newes from Westminister (25 September–4 October 1647), p. 25. 25  Anne Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 81. 26  Bloody Newes from Dover. Being a True Relation of the Great and Bloudy Murder, Committed by Mary Champion (an Anabaptist) ([London: n. pub.], 1647), [A3].

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Fig. 1.1

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680

Title page, Bloody Newes from Dover. Being a True Relation of the Great and Bloudy Murder, Committed by Mary Champion (an Anabaptist) (London: [n. pub.], 1647), The British Library, E.375(20.). © The British Library Board.

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was subsequently executed. Mary’s Anabaptism, therefore, is compared to violent Catholicism: readers in 1647 would have been more than familiar with news of the Catholic rebellion in Ireland in 1641 which resulted in the massacre of many hundreds of Protestants, though contemporary reports estimated up to and beyond 100,000 deaths.27 The pamphlet makes these connections in order to draw attention to the potential of Anabaptism for slaughter and massacre, as believers sought to destroy those they perceived as heretics. Anglicans and Royalists were particularly anxious about the prevalence of Baptists serving in the New Model Army. Regular readers of sensationalist literature about the sixteenth-century Anabaptists would have remembered their cries, ‘all who were not rebaptized; were to be accompted Pagans and Infidells, and to be kild’, and drawn parallels with the Irish massacre.28 The pamphlet ends by observing that Parliament had ‘thought fit’ to order a ‘Day of Humiliation against spreading of Heresies and Schismes’ to be ‘carryed downe into the respective Counties of this Kingdome’ on the ‘Tenth Day of March next’, uniting the counties in a campaign against sectarian activity.29 As well as suggesting and encouraging wider anxieties about Baptist violence, Bloody Newes from Dover also suggests more localised marital conflict caused by a wife’s religious beliefs that were independent of her husband’s. What hope could there be for such a marriage? As James I’s Basilikon Doron (1599) had advised readers, ‘How can ye be of one flesh and keep unity betwixt you, being members of two opposite churches?’30 Mary’s adoption of separate religious beliefs, against the will of her husband, shows her to be disobeying the rule of Ephesians 5:23 where ‘the husband is the head of the wife’: William Gouge’s conduct manual, Domesticall Duties (1622), explained that, while husbands and wives should love each other, ‘as an head is more eminent and excellent than the body, and placed above it, so is an husband to his wife’.31 Membership of a sectarian congregation, however, certainly encouraged women independently to examine scripture for themselves and come to their own understanding of God’s will: the pamphlet simultaneously dramatises and condemns these opportunities. Gouge, like other 27  John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 136–37. 28  A Warning for England, [B]1v. The woodcut depicting Mary Champion and her husband was reused, tellingly, in The Phanaticks Plot Discovered (London: Printed for Samuel Burdet, 1660), a ballad reporting the plots of Anabaptists in Gloucestershire. In 1660 Charles II was declaring toleration, prompting fears that the sects would continue to proliferate, and the Champion image reminded readers of their subversive and violent nature. 29  Bloody Newes from Dover, [A4v]. Baptist women’s experiential writings were circulated around the country, perhaps to counter sensational reports like these. Likewise, the Baptist churches also appointed shared fast days to pray as a community for some deliverance or event. 30  James I, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh: Printed by Robert Walde-Grave, 1599), p. 94. 31  William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, Eight Treatises (London: Printed by John Haviland, 1622), p. 30.

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writers of conduct literature, acknowledged that in certain cases a wife could ‘Forbear what her Husband Requireth’ when ‘God hath forbidden she ought not to do it’, and Mary Champion is seen to follow what she believed to be God’s will, whatever the consequences.32 She evidently believed that God would prefer the child to be sent directly to heaven, safe from the taint of a mortal life, than to undergo what she believed to be the sinful practice of infant baptism. Rather than explain these motivations, the pamphlet reports Mary’s imprisonment and descent into madness, thought in the period to be a punishment from God. Visitors reported that ‘her eyes were sad and distracted, by beholding strange Visions. For, shee can no wayes fixe her eyes upon any thing, but presently (she conceives) the poore Babe to appear before her without a head.’33 Tellingly, the poor woman is haunted by the child’s headless body, simultaneously a reminder of its death and a symbol of her own rebellion against her husband’s orders where she should have submitted to her husband, her ‘head’.34 As the pamphlet summarises, following the report, ‘Thus we may see, that where division and controversie doth arise, sad effects will suddenly follow: for no sooner can there a breach appear; but presently Sathan is ready to stop it up, by infusing his deluding spirit into their hearts, for the increasing of variance, discord, and contention.’35 Readers of this particular pamphlet were encouraged to understand Baptist beliefs as destroying the family, in Mary Champion’s disobedience as a wife and as a mother, but also to extend this to recognising the inherent violence and rebelliousness of these beliefs: if a woman could disobey her husband, it followed that a servant could disobey a master, and a subject a king. The published report of the murderous Mary Champion, who had been led to sinful behaviour by Satan’s ‘deluding spirit’, could easily have been known by Agnes Beaumont’s community, despite the pamphlet’s publication occurring before Beaumont was even born. A paragraph that was added to her narrative in the later fair copy indicated that rumours had circulated that Bunyan gave her  Ibid., p. 328.  Bloody Newes from Dover, [A3v]. 34  The death of a child caused many women to question whether they were following 32 33

God in the right way, and therefore whether he had taken their children as a sign that they should convert. Phyllis Mack notes that converts to John Rogers’s Independent church in Dublin had often just experienced the loss of a child (Visionary Women, p. 93). Katherine Sutton, a later member of Hanserd Knollys’s Baptist congregation, similarly joined a Baptist group because the death of her child convinced her that God was punishing her for not separating from the corrupt Anglican Church (See Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, A3v). On the other hand, Susanna Parr, a previous member of Lewis Stucley’s Independent church worshipping in Exeter Cathedral, left this group because she understood her child’s death as God making ‘a breach in her family’ just as she had made a breach in his established church. ‘When I considered the breach that the Lord had made in my family’, she wrote, ‘I beheld how terrible it was to make a breach in his family’ (Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, pp. 13–14). 35  Bloody Newes from Dover, [A3v].

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‘Councel to poison my Father’ (p. 224), which can be aligned with the temptations of Satan by the ‘increasing of variance, discord, and contention’. Beaumont’s written narrative, however, presents prominent members of her community, a lawyer and a clergyman, as the sole authors of the conflict between herself and her father. She also emphasises that she was not mentally unbalanced at the time of her father’s death, writing, ‘often times I have been sincking in a sea of sorrow; but not in that Quarter of the year before my father dyed’ (p. 194). Her tears then were for ‘Joy and not for greef’, but those around her, she writes, had misinterpreted her emotions, asking her, ‘Are you minded to kill yor self with sorrow?’ These powerful feelings, when a believer received knowledge of the moral law, provoked by the ministry of the gathered churches, were often criticised by those outside the congregation, as Chapter 3 will go on to explore. In response to these ideas, though, Beaumont constructed herself, as many who were undergoing the process of ‘awakening’ to their sins and God’s saving graces, as long-suffering Job, who declares: ‘My friends scorn me: but mine eye poureth out tears unto God’ (Job 16:20). Her detailed account of her father’s death also explains why she had fled the house ‘without my stockings and scarse any thing on me’ (p. 214) which could have been interpreted as proof of her distraction and was observed by Feery when he came to investigate. It is precisely because of cultural stereotypes of the Baptists and their female adherents that Beaumont needed to record and circulate her side of the story. ‘The Naked Truth’: Sexual Defamation of the Baptists As seventeenth-century commentators often concluded, with reference to experiences like those of Mary Champion and Agnes Beaumont, one of the main threats the Baptists were thought to pose was their undermining of the ‘sanctity of the family’.36 Other accusations, however, highlighted the lasciviousness of the sects, especially the women who were said to flock to join them. Thomas Edwards drew his concerned readers’ attentions to ‘anabaptists’ baptising ‘young maids, Citizens daughters, about one and two a clock in the morning, tempting them out of their fathers houses at midnight to be baptized[,] the parents being asleep and knowing nothing’; ‘their Husbands and Masters could not keep them in their houses’.37 His fear, typical of many less radical Puritans, was that the Baptists who lured the women to the rivers and enthralled them were trying to populate the world with their (ill-formed) heretical offspring, ignoring the rights of their husbands and fathers. Edwards was drawing on popular perceptions that Anabaptists, like their sixteenth-century counterparts, held both possessions and women in common, and, following 2 Timothy 3:6, led ‘captive silly women laden with sins,  McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, p. 26.

36

 Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena, pp. 58; 121. See also The Tubpreachers Overturn’d or Independency to be Abandon’d and Abhor’d (London: Printed for George Lindsey, 1647), pp. 5–6. 37

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[ … ] away with divers lusts’. Sarah Davy, a separatist, records being accused of having ‘itching ears [2 Timothy 4:3], ever learning [2 Timothy 3:7]’ because her ‘heart desired much to hear good men’ which she did ‘with convenience’ while at boarding school.38 Women who listened to ministers and were subsequently baptised were characterised by their lustfulness for new doctrines and effective ministry (lust for the minister was implied by extension), and were thought to be ignorant in doctrinal matters allowing ministers to take advantage. As early as 1610, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist staged an officious Anabaptist lay-elder of the ‘exiled brethren’ of Amsterdam called Ananias who exploits widows and orphans for their valuable metal goods to be used for seditious ends.39 Subtle, dressed as an alchemist in order to cozen Ananias and his minister, Tribulation Wholesome, and expose them as hypocrites, observes that such as are not graced in a state May, for their ends, be adverse in religion, And get a tune to call the flock together; For, to say sooth, a tune does much with women And other phlegmatic people. (3.2.56–60)

Women, in humoral terms, had a predominance of cold and wet humours (a temperament called ‘phlegmatic’) which was thought to make them passive and receptive (rather than hot and active which men were considered to be). Men like Ananias were shown as taking advantage of women’s supposed inherent weakness in order to cheat them of their own wealth (phallic bodkins and vessel-like thimbles were said to be particularly popular ‘donations’ to the cause), but, perhaps of most concern for men, they could ‘make zealous wives / To rob their husbands for the common cause’ (3.2.70–1).40 A later pamphlet of 1655 asserted that ‘these English Crocodiles leave no politick ways untried to work upon Weak Proselites, they

 Sarah Davy, Heaven Realiz’d or The Holy Pleasure of Daily Intimate Communion with God (London: Published by A. P., 1670), C2v. Davy attended a school run by a ‘Mrs W.’ c. 1650 and 1657. 39  Ben Jonson, ‘The Alchemist’, in The Alchemist and Other Plays, ed. by Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2.5.47. Ananias is named for the deceitful follower of Paul and the apostles in Acts 4–5 who was asked to give up his wealth so that it could be shared equally amongst all the people, but held some back for his own benefit. He was struck dead where he stood. 40  Hugh Peters, an influential minister in Cromwell’s Protectorate, was caricatured after the Restoration for confiscating ‘bodkins and thimbles’ from ‘widows and orphans’ for the furthering of the ‘good old cause’. See Portrait of Hugh Peter, BM Satires 968, in Frederic Stephens and Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols (London: British Museum Press, 1870): vol. 1. 38

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prevaile most upon the femall Sex, as knowing the Woman was first seduced, and then seduced the man’.41 A case where accusations of this kind were made was that of Elizabeth Poole, who joined the congregation of William Kiffin in the mid-1640s. Her father, Robert Poole, had suggested that Kiffin had drawn away both his daughter and his servants to join with his congregation of Baptists, and he and Kiffin met to discuss the lawfulness of the congregation’s doctrine and practices. Kiffin recorded the incident later, in his A Briefe Remonstrance of the Reasons and Grounds of those People commonly called Anabaptists (1645), writing that Poole had brought with him men that railed at Kiffin as ‘a Seducer, a Blasphemer’.42 Poole’s main grievance was that Kiffin had done him ‘the Injurie, in seducing my Children and servants into your errours’ (B2), undermining his authority as head of the household: he demanded Kiffin ‘discharge them, and leave them to the Power of me, who have the charge of them’ (B2). As Katharine Gillespie writes, opponents of the Baptists often ‘represented the act of baptism as one of the most pernicious means of invading the sacrosanct space of the home and usurping the father’s authority’.43 If Baptists could undermine fathers in their own homes, then they might also undermine the state. In the pamphlet discussing this episode, Poole refuses to answer Kiffin’s questions and proceeds to question Kiffin on the validity of his practices. Kiffin’s reply, included in the pamphlet, provides lengthy arguments based on scriptural precedents. In response to why the Baptists have separated from congregations where, Poole declares, ‘the Word and Sacraments are purely dispensed’, Kiffin explains that the Anglican Church allows everyone, whether ‘Drunkards, Fornicators, Covetous, Swearers, Lyars, and all abominable and filthy persons’, to be members with the ‘pure’ people, and that their practices (including infant baptism) were taken from ‘the durty puddle of mens Inventions’, rather than scripture (B3). As to the accusation that he had admitted ‘silly seduced servants, children or people’ to his congregation, Kiffin explained that new members had to be above sixteen years old and if they were ‘silly’ it was because they had received ‘little Edification in their so long membership’ with Poole’s own congregation (C2v). Poole’s response is not included, but his daughter Elizabeth continued a member of Kiffin’s congregation for at least another year before she was expelled from the group. Kiffin’s congregation followed the new practice of dipping a believer in a river, in public and supposedly completely naked, which no doubt further inflamed Poole’s and other fathers’ opinions against the Baptists. Such a practice was especially fraught when these believers were women. Daniel Featley’s anti Donald Lupton, The Quacking Mountebanck or The Jesuite turn’d Quaker (London: Printed for E. B., 1655), p. 20, cited by Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 119. 42  William Kiffin, A Briefe Remonstrance of the Reasons and Grounds of those People commonly called Anabaptists (London: [n. pub.], 1645), B1. 43  Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 136. 41

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Baptist tract, The Dippers Dipt, published in 1645 and a sixth time in 1660, was one of the more popular ‘heresiographies’ which sought to disprove the validity of ‘dipping’. He writes: ‘The resort of great multitudes of men and women together in the evening, [ … ] going naked into rivers, there to be plunged and Dipt, cannot be done without scandall, especially where the State giveth no allowance to any such practise.’44 The tract’s frontal woodcut, by William Marshall, shows naked men and women immersed in the river, but most prominent are the bare-breasted female Baptists labelled ‘Virgins of Sion’ (see Figure 1.2). The male baptisers are shown removing the shawls from the women’s shoulders in order to push their naked bodies under the water. Featley wrote later that the believers’ practice was to strip themselves stark naked [ … ]: and when they are questioned for it, they shelter this their shamelesse act, with the proverb Veritas nuda est, the truth is naked, and desires no vail, masque, or guise; which reason if it were good, would hinder them from holding private Conventicles as they do.45

Featley criticises the Baptists’ secret meetings, which were thought seditious due to their cloak of secrecy, and indicates that his work was undertaken to ‘lay open’ the workings and heresies of the secret meetings. Other sensational pamphlets depicted all sectarian meetings as rampantly orgiastic. A woodcut displayed on the title page of the pamphlet, The Brownists Conventicle (1641), depicted a group of men conferring while a tryst between a man and a woman occurred in another room. The Ranters Declaration (1650) also pictured a couple being told to ‘increase and multiply’, and two other pamphlets, The Ranters Religion (1650) and The Ranters Ranting (1650) held in common the theme of men and women dancing together naked at their gatherings. In a similar vein, Edwards’s Gangraena included a letter which aligned the Baptist practice of immersion with further scandal, suggesting that ministers used it as an excuse to see their female adherents naked: Another woman having a desire to be Re-baptized, and having pulled off all her cloaths to the naked skin, ready to go into the Water, but forbearing during the time the Dipper prayed, she covered her secret parts with both her hands, the which the Dipper espying, told the woman that it was an unseemly sight to see her hold her hands downward, it being an Ordinance of Jesus Christ, her hands with her heart should be lifted upward towards heaven (as he shew’d her how he did) but she refusing for modesties sake could not be Re-baptized.46

This account emphasises not only the potential for lustful actions in the practice of immersion (earlier in the letter it is recorded that the same man baptised five 44  Daniel Featley, Katabaptistai Kataptystoi: The Dippers Dipt. or, The Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d Over Head and Eares (London: For Nicholas Bourne and Richard Royston, 1645), p. 36. 45  Featley, The Dippers Dipt, p. 203. 46  Edwards, Gangraena, p. 87.

‘Frantique Handmaids’

Fig. 1.2

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Frontispiece, Daniel Featley, Katabaptistai Kataptystoi: The Dippers Dipt. or, The Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d Over Head and Eares (London: For Nicholas Bourne and Richard Royston, 1645), The Huntington Library, RB 124816. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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daughters and chose the one he liked best for his wife), but also criticises the Baptists’ strict adherence to formal practices. A refusal to undertake the practice wholeheartedly was not permitted, and the woman was faced with choosing between being baptised and ignoring her modesty, or being excluded from the ordinance. The letter writer suggests that the Baptist ministers were using salvation in order to entrap and ogle the female members they attracted. Opponents of the Baptists, therefore, thought that, in order to be ‘Virgins of Sion’, women were encouraged to risk their reputations and modesty. As if in reply to allegations of this kind, the Baptist churches in London issued The Confession of Faith, of those Churches which are Commonly (though Falsly) Called Anabaptists, published a year earlier than Featley’s tract, in 1644. Signed by William Kiffin, Thomas Patient, John Spilsbury, and Paul Hobson, among others of the seven Particular Baptist churches of London, the Confession vindicates the practices of their Baptist congregations by taking ‘off those aspersions which are frequently both in Pulpit and Print, (although unjustly) cast upon them’.47 The writers sought to justify their practices with scripture in order to confirm the faith of God’s chosen people, but also to defend themselves against accusations of scandal. Article XL outlines the ‘way and manner’ of dispensing baptism, proven by scripture to be by ‘dipping or plunging the whole body under water: it being a signe’. Aware of opinions like Featley’s, the congregations appear to have debated how to make this ordinance appear less scandalous, and in the margin above the scriptural references is written: ‘the word Baptize, signifying to dip under the water, yet so as with convenient garments both upon the administrator and subject, with all modestie’.48 Partly because of these claims of their carnal exploits, Baptist congregations tightly controlled their membership, requiring a testimony of godliness upon entering the congregation and a member to answer any defamatory comments in front of the whole group of believers. Like many aspects of being a member of a gathered church, behaviour was not just an individual concern. It reflected on the congregation of the accused and the doctrine they followed, but, most importantly to the believer, it concerned the name of God. As Agnes Beaumont recorded on being accused of murdering her father and copulating with John Bunyan, in danger of suffering death by burning: ‘I see my life lye at stake, and the name of god lye their too’ (p. 216). In the 1670s, Beaumont’s congregation seems to have been particularly concerned with examining women who were charged with sexually deviant behaviour. Disciplinary issues included withdrawing from meetings, gambling, and one woman, Elizabeth Bisbie, was accused of ‘immodest lieing in a chamber several nights wherein also lay a young man, no body being in the  William Kiffin, The Confession of Faith, of those Churches which are Commonly (though Falsly) Called Anabaptists (London: Printed by Matthew Simmons, 1644), A1. Featley originally presented his arguments from the pulpit so his accusations would have been in circulation. 48  Ibid., C2. 47

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house but them two’.49 Nehemiah Coxe, the only man asked to defend himself from charges that could lead to excommunication at this time, was asked to ‘publickly make an acknowledgment of several miscaridges by him committed’ and repent, but because he ‘had bin faulty in such things’ before, and because he could write, unlike some other members of the congregation, he was requested to record his submission to them in writing.50 Beaumont’s manuscript could have been intended for a similar purpose, as her work both provides an example of fortitude under persecution written in a religious framework, and a vindication from accusations of misconduct.51 Kathleen Lynch speculates that the readership for Beaumont’s work would have been ‘the expected community of her church’, because of the minor differences between the two surviving manuscripts: the later, decorated fair copy of the manuscript is re-titled as ‘Divine Appearances, or a very wonderfull account of the dealings of God with Mrs. Agnes Beaumont’, suggesting an expectation of a sympathetic, godly audience.52 Sheila Ottway also observes that Beaumont ‘set herself up as an example to other Christians, who may be in need of spiritual reassurance under similar circumstances of affliction’.53 Although Beaumont’s experiences would have been valuable to others, her use of narrative suggests that this was a vindication addressed to her congregation, as well as the wider world. As Chapter 2 will suggest, members of Baptist congregations reflected reactions to cultural stereotypes of women in various ways, and Baptist women accused of misconduct needed to appeal to both their gathered church and their wider community in order to attempt to restore their reputations. ‘Frantique handmaids’? The Written Responses of Female Baptists Charges of disobedience, sedition, lasciviousness, and, the root of all these sins, madness, were cultural stereotypes that Baptist women needed to respond to in their writings, in order for their message to be understood (or, indeed, for it be published at all). Following the precedent of the biblical prophetesses, including Hannah, Deborah, and Miriam, one controversial way in which Baptist women  The Minutes of the First Independent Church, p. 76.  Ibid., pp. 76–77. Two sentences, declaring that he was ‘unfeignedly repentant and

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sorry for the same’, are recorded in the church record book. 51  The circumstances of the manuscript’s production can be compared to the handwritten letters of John Bunyan to his congregation when he was imprisoned 1661, eventually published by his descendants in 1765 as A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan. Both texts would have served as encouragements for a persecuted congregation. For A Relation, see Roger Sharrock, ‘The Origin of A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan’, RES, 39 (1959), 250–56. 52  Lynch, ‘“Her Name Agnes”’, 90. 53  Sheila Ottway, ‘Autobiography’, in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 231–47 (p. 242).

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entered the public sphere was to prophesy, either by reporting their divinely inspired visions, or by prophesying extempore in their chambers. The ability to prophesy established visionary women as God’s vessels or instruments: the fair copy of Beaumont’s narrative, for instance, was renamed ‘Divine Appearances’ or ‘the dealings of God with Mrs Agnes Beaumont’ in order to reflect the divine quality of her dreams and her sufferings. Given that women were prevented from speaking in church by Pauline precedents, prophesying allowed women to speak to sway political events: Anna Trapnel and Elizabeth Poole, both active members of Baptist congregations, prophesied in and around Whitehall, though their words met with mixed responses as this chapter will go on to show. As Anne Dunan-Page has observed, heresiographers had long associated Anabaptism with ‘enthusiasm’, connoting prophetic frenzy or ‘frantic’ behaviour. Leaders of the sixteenth-century movement had accounted themselves divinely inspired and ‘convinced themselves that God could speak to them in fits, in ecstasies, in dreams, as He had done in Apostolic times for the preservation of the Church, then in its infancy’.54 For heresiographers, however, their dreams encouraged only violence and political unrest. Daniel Featley named the Anabaptists ‘a lying and blasphemous sect, falsly pretending to divine Visions and Revelations’, and recorded a report of a woman prophet during the siege of Münster that had ‘made the people beleeve, that God had put into her the spirit of Judith, and that shee would goe out of the City, and never return, till she had brought back the Bishops head; having cut it off, as Judith did the head of Holofernes’.55 The woman apparently ‘premeditated a speech like to’ Judith’s, and the ‘foolish’ citizens ‘drest her like Judith’, but when she came before the bishop, in a symbolic reversal of the events recorded in the apocryphal story where she is victorious, he was already aware of her intentions and beheaded her instead. In the book of Judith, the Israelites are under siege from King Nebuchadnezzar, whose general Holofernes had cut off their water supply, but instead of surrendering, Judith persuades the city governor to stand firm and visits the general herself. For the Anabaptists of Münster holding their newly established city against the bishop whom they had previously expelled, the example of the besieged Israelites would have been an important one, and a woman seeking to save her co-religionists would have identified with Judith who talks her way into Holofernes’s tent and beheads him. However, Featley’s report presents this Anabaptist prophetess as a fake: her speech and appearance could be made to resemble Judith’s, but she fails when her words are tested in the audience with the bishop. As Michelle Osherow has written, Judith announces that Holofernes’s ‘destruction will rely specifically upon competent discourse’: she says he will be destroyed by the ‘deceit of my lips’ and that his ‘stateliness’ would be broken down ‘by the hand of a woman’ (Judith 9:10).56 Because the  Dunan-Page, ‘John Bunyan’s A Confession of my Faith’, 31–32.  Featley, The Dippers Dipt, p. 124; pp. 126–27. 56  Michelle Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England (Aldershot: 54 55

Ashgate, 2009), p. 151.

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Anabaptist woman’s words are not supported by God, as Judith’s were, she is unable to deceive the bishop; however, Featley still acknowledges the potential for such false prophecies to draw together the ‘foolish’ multitude, in order to promote rebellion against authority. Baptists in the 1640s, who were the true subjects of Featley’s heresiography, were part of a force rebelling against the king and his bishops, and there were several visible prophetesses among them who claimed divine inspiration, as the rest of this chapter will show. The validity of women’s prophecies, then, was often called into question: were the women suitable vessels for God’s word; were they merely mad or distracted; or were they acting on behalf of sponsors in order to influence political discussion? As Julie Crawford notes, Mary Champion’s post-murder vision of her child’s headless body ‘invokes the language and visionary experiences of sectarian women prophets’, drawing attention to what the pamphlet’s author believed to be their distractedness and sinfulness, but also their desire to disrupt and reverse the social order, as in the example of Anabaptist woman who imitated Judith.57 Champion had disobeyed her husband, her head, and had separated head from body by decapitating their child. The literary trope of the head governing the body was a popular signifier of hierarchy, rooted in scripture, and explains the use of this image in women’s prophetic works to illustrate division and schism. Crawford cites the prophecies of both Grace Cary, who was driven to present her vision of Charles I’s bodiless head to the king himself in 1639, and Lady Eleanor Davies, who had a vision of a child beheaded for treason, to support this.58 Eighteen months after the publication of Bloody Newes from Dover, the Baptist prophetess Elizabeth Poole, now belonging to a Particular Baptist congregation in Abingdon, used the image of a wife separating herself from her husband in order to illustrate why the nation, and the army, should not harm the king’s body. She was chosen to appear before the General Council of the Army on 29 December 1648 in order to deliver a vision ‘wherein is manifested the disease and cure of the Kingdome’.59 Poole’s case is well documented by recent studies, though her motives for appearing in front of the council remain unclear. Gillespie explains  Julie Crawford, Marvellous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 132. 58  Ibid., p. 133. Lady Eleanor Davies’s vision was probably provoked, in part, by her grandson’s death. Her vision of this bodiless head that would not stop crying is quoted in Esther Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, ‘Never Soe Mad a Ladie’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 41. Grace Cary, a widow from Bristol, had a dream which flourished into a series of visions where ‘a king’s head and face without a body, which looked very pale and wan: it had a crown upon it and the crown was all bloody in a circle about’, which was, according to Crawford, ‘translated to a public plea for a reconciliation between king and parliament’ (Theophilus Philalethes Toxander, Vox Coeli to England, or, England’s Fore-warning from Heaven (London: Printed for E. W., 1646), pp. 3–11 (p. 5)). 59  Elizabeth Poole, A Vision: Wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure of the Kingdome (London: [n. pub.], 1648/9), title page. For a report of speech, see also The 57

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that the council were at odds over how to proceed with redefining the nature of government at this time: ‘The Levellers leaned towards a more inclusive republican commonwealth, while Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton tended towards a limited monarchy.’60 A contemporary pamphlet recorded that ‘this Witch [Poole] had her lesson taught her beforehand by Cromwell and Ireton, by whose order she was entertained at Whitehall’, indicating their possible support.61 However, as Gillespie notes, ‘a number of Baptists’, including the army ‘agitator’ William Allen, supported the case for settlement, by ‘the army generals retaining power and not handing it fully over to either the King or “the people”, as the Levellers wished’.62 Marcus Nevitt also observes that ‘Particular Baptist groups had been instrumental in supporting the Heads of the Proposals, the peace proposals of the army grandees, which advocated dialogue with the King’, and these groups included the Baptist congregation led by William Kiffin of which Poole was previously a member.63 Poole, therefore, would seem to have been supporting the views of her co-religionists. She argues, in Baptist terms, that the army (as a wife) should be able to refuse a king natural obedience (as her head and husband) if his rule was ‘absolute’ rather than ‘subordinate’, but his body should not be harmed: ‘in Subordination you owe him all that you have and are, and although he would not be your Father and husband, Subordinate, but absolute, yet know that you are for the Lords sake to honour his person. For he is the Father and husband of your bodyes, as us [women] to men.’64 As a Baptist, Poole would have been aware of defamatory pamphlets declaring that she and her community were crazed mutilators and murderers, and her words presented in Whitehall argue strongly for the preservation of the king’s life, with his ‘person’ secured but with his power diminished. This proposal, figuring the army/nation as the wife and the king as the head, closely follows the ruling of several Baptist congregations on marriage. While Gillespie asserts that the Baptists sought the ‘ability to divorce an “unregenerate” spouse’, so Poole would be advocating that the army divorce themselves from the king’s power, record books depict an altogether more conservative position.65 Contemporary ‘cataloguers’ of heresies did record, for instance, that ‘anabaptists’ could ‘put away’ spouses of a Manner of the Deposition of Charles Stewart, King of England, by the Parliament, and Generall Councell of the Armie ([London: n. pub.], 1649). 60  Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 140. 61  To Xeiphos tōn Martyōn. or, A Brief Narration of the Mysteries of State Carried on by the Spanish Faction in England (The Hague: Printed by Samuel Brown, 1651), pp. 68–70; The English-Devil: or Cromwel and his Monstrous Witch Discover’d at White-Hall, p. 6. 62  Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 140. 63  Marcus Nevitt, ‘Elizabeth Poole Writes the Regicide’, Women’s Writing, 9 (2002), 233–48 (240). 64  Poole, A Vision, p. 4. 65  Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 139; Keith Thomas also asserts this in his ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, p. 49, but relies on the work of heresiographers.

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‘contrary Religion [ … ] and that it is lawfull for them to take others’, but Baptist congregations merely discouraged the marriage of members (the sanctified) to non-members (the unsanctified): they did not advocate divorce for those who converted separately from their spouse.66 This could cause conflict when a wife chose to convert without her husband, but the Baptist ruling was that she should obey her husband in everything, as he was her head, except where she believed his ruling ‘conflicted with the obligations of sainthood’.67 A similar argument was put forward by the Independent Katherine Chidley in her animadversion on the work of Thomas Edwards where she opined (referring to 1 Corinthians 7:13) that an unbelieving husband or father could not be ‘Lord over’ his wife or daughter’s conscience, though ‘he hath authority over her in bodily and civill respects [ … ], and it is the very same authority which the Soveraigne hath over all his subjects’.68 This ruling of the gathered churches is what Poole employs in her argument for reducing the king’s power, figuring him as a violent husband, keeping his wife from following God: You never heard that a wife might put away her husband, as he is the head of her body, but, for the Lords sake suffereth his terror to her flesh, though she be free in the spirit to the Lord; and he being uncapable to act as her husband, she acteth in his stead; and having the spirit of Union [marriage] abiding in her, she considereth him in his temptations, as tempted with him: And if he will usurpe over her, she appealeth to the Father-hood for her offence, which is the spirit of justice, and it in you [the General Council of the Army]; For I know no power in England to whom it is committed, save yourselves (and the present Parliament) which are to act in the Church of Christ, as she by the gift of faith upon her, shall be your guide for the cure of her body, that you might therefore commit an unsound member to Satan (though the head) as it is flesh; that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord.69

Poole argues that though a wife may not ‘put away’ or divorce her husband, if he proves ‘uncapable’, or ungodly, she could act as her own head in order to try to save the two of them that are now ‘one flesh’ and tempted equally. However, if the husband attempted to ‘usurp’ his wife’s conscience, then she could appeal to the Church of Christ to ‘commit [the] unsound member to Satan’, according  Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: or A Description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these Latter Times (London: Printed by M. Okes, 1645), p. 13. See also Featley, The Dippers Dipt, p. 29. The West Country Association advised ‘that church members marry with such as are in the same order with them, or at least with such as may be judged godly’, following 1 Corinthians 7:39 (‘Association Records of the Particular Baptists of the West Country to 1659’, AR, II: p. 55). See also McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, p. 46. 67  McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, p. 46. 68  Katherine Chidley, The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ (London, 1641), p. 26. 69  Poole, A Vision, pp. 5–6. 66

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to the scriptural precedent of 1 Corinthians 5:5 that the gathered churches used to excommunicate sinful members: not even the ‘head’ was exempt from this treatment, as a gathered congregation was made up of a ‘body’ of members equally beloved of God. The king, as the ‘husband’, therefore, could be excommunicated by Parliament for the sins recorded in 1 Corinthians 5:11, that of being a fornicator, an idolater, or an extortioner, and his office (and hence his power) removed.70 Because he had broken his covenant with God, he could no longer control the godly actions of his ‘wife’, the army: as an excommunicant, the king would be turned out ‘of the house of God, and from the company of the Lords people’, and committed to Satan ‘as of a prisoner to a Jailor [ … ] to humble him’.71 As well as imagining the relationship between the king and his people as a spousal contract, Poole also describes it in the covenant between a church of Christ (and therefore God) and its members: as Matthew 5:30 held, ‘It is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ Marriage to an excommunicant could release a member of the gathered church from their spiritual obligation to their spouse, though the two were still married in civil law, and, likewise, the army could now, Poole thought, rule in place of the king though he should not be killed. Nevitt has observed of this episode that ‘Poole thus subtly conflates the general masculinist fear of anarchy inherent in domestic rebellion with a broadly consensual political point that the King’s life ought to be spared’.72 While supporting Baptist ruling on the spiritual autonomy of wives with ‘unsanctified’ husbands, Poole also uses this image to suggest that executing the king would be unnatural and unthinkable because vengeance is God’s work. Poole appeared before the Council a second time on 5 January 1649, but lost the argument and Charles I was executed later that month. By May, Poole was being accused of holding heretical opinions by three leaders of Baptist churches in London, William Kiffin, Thomas Patient, and John Fountain, who said that they had expelled her from their fellowship sometime before 1648. Fountain, it was said, ‘endeavoured to weaken the Message [given to the Council] by scandalizing and reproaching the Messenger, charging her with some follies committed many yeares agoe’.73 These defamatory comments calling her piety into question caused 70  Poole accuses Charles of forgetting ‘his Subordination to divine Faith hood and headship, thinking he had begotten you a generation to his own pleasure, and taking you a wife for his own lusts’ (A Vision, p. 6), of violence towards his spouse (‘you may hold the hands of your husband, that he pierce not your bowels with a knife or sword’, p. 6), and of behaving selfishly like the biblical Nabal ‘by Appropriating his goods to himselfe’ (p. 5). 71  Thomas Mall, True Account of what was done by a Church of Christ in Exon (London: Printed by R. W. for Matthew Keinton, 1658), p. 5. Mall’s congregation were justifying the excommunication of two of its female members: Susanna Parr and Mary Allein (see Chapter 2). 72  Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 342. 73  Elizabeth Poole, An Alarum of War, Given to the Army, and to their High Court of Justice (so called) revealed by the will of God in a Vision to E. Poole (London: [n.

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Poole to lose her living as a seamstress: a woman in Poole’s new congregation at Abingdon, Thomasine Pendarves, published a vindication of her friend where she foretold that Poole’s blood would be on the hands of her accusers if they persisted in their claims.74 Poole’s An[other] Alarum of War, Given to the Army, published later in 1649, recalls her detractors’ comments that she ‘went about seducing’, and subsequently revisits her earlier argument to prophesy against the men that killed the king, disregarding her vision:75 Here it is that you have not done justly, for you would be this but not that, you would be free in the spirit, but not suffer in the flesh, no not for the Lords sake: It is true indeed, a just woman must deliver up her Husband to the just claim of the Law, though she might not accuse him to the Law, or yet rejoyce over him to see his fall [Proverbs 24:17], for all that passe by and behold her, will say this was a Strumpet, and not a faithfull Wife, that rejoyceth at the fall of her Husband.76

Revisiting the husband and wife image, Poole declares that the army has, in accusing the king or rejoicing in his fall, become an unfaithful strumpet whereas she, herself, has remained faithful and has not changed her message to suit her own ends. Quite unlike the ‘seducing’ excommunicant that the London Baptist ministers presented, Poole showed that she recognised the scriptural precedents for spousal separation and that these were not undertaken to free the wife in a bodily sense or more selfish reasons: a wife was only to be made free in her conscience. Poole’s arguments, therefore, are very different than those depicted by sensationalist tales of Anabaptist slaughter: unlike the outcome of the conflict between Mary Champion and her husband where she executed her child, Elizabeth Poole’s argument saw the husband losing his power to dictate, and a subsequent avoidance of bloodshed, implying that God would supply his own judgement. When the Council did not listen, though, Poole was vilified as a strumpet in order to dismiss her prophetical activities now that the king was dead and her message conflicted with the new regime. Another Baptist prophetess who spoke in the Whitehall vicinity also faced similar charges for declaring against the established regime. Anna Trapnel had fallen to prophesying in an adjacent inn while attending the trial of her coreligionist and Independent minister Vavasor Powell at Whitehall, for treason. pub.], 1649), p. 7. Manfred Brod conjectures that her expulsion could have been caused by doctrinal debates surrounding the split of various members from the church of Henry Jessey who then joined Kiffin’s congregation because it practised believer’s baptism (Brod, ‘Politics and Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Poole’, Albion, 31 (1999), 395–412 (397)). 74  Poole, An Alarum, pp. 8–9. 75  Elizabeth Poole, An[other] Alarum of War, Given to the Army, and to their High Court of Justice (so called) by the will of God; revealed in Elizabeth Pooll ([London: n. pub.], 1649), A3v. 76  Poole, An[other] Alarum, p. 7.

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Confined to her bed for eleven days and twelve nights between 6 and 17 January 1654, she seldom moved except to prophesy in ‘Prayers and Spiritual Songs, by an Inspiration extraordinary, and full of wonder’.77 Her verses foresaw divine retribution for Cromwell’s recent acceptance of the title Lord Protector, depicting him as the fourth horn foretold in Revelation ‘which shall be more Terror to the Saints then the others that went before’: in a dream she encountered Cromwell as a horned bull who ran ‘at many precious Saints that stood in the way of him, that looked boldly at his face; he gave them many pushes, scratching them with his horn [Daniel 7:21]’.78 Trapnel’s prophecies targeting the new Protector and his counsellors, soldiers, and corrupt ministers drew attention to Powell’s cause as one of the persecuted ‘saints’, but also encouraged the reform of what she believed to be a corrupt government: perhaps Trapnel’s prophecies could persuade the Protector to revive the Good Old Cause. As Gillespie writes, female prophets and preachers were publicising their ‘nascent but growing sense of what sort of political order was necessary for them to continue practicing these markers of religious and (increasingly) political freedom’.79 People obviously listened to Trapnel: she attracted a number of prominent sectaries to her bedside and was so well known that Thomas Hobbes recorded as late as 1679 (four years after Beaumont’s trial) that in the year 1654 ‘there appear’d in Cromwel’s time a Prophetess, much fam’d for her Dreams and Visions, and hearkened to by many, whereof some were Eminent Officers’.80 Even after her Whitehall trance, the authorities followed Trapnel’s movements, along with those of her congregation at Allhallows, the pulpit of which was often home to the radical preachers John Simpson, Henry Jessey, and Christopher Feake. Marchamont Needham’s report to the Protector included a warning of Trapnel’s power to do mischief:  Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone. or A Relation of Something Spoken in Whitehall (London: [n. pub.], 1654), title page; the duration of Trapnel’s prophecies is deduced by Hilary Hinds in her modern edition of The Cry of a Stone (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), p. 82, n. 6. 78  Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, pp. 13–14. Trapnel’s community was made up of Fifth Monarchists who followed the prophecies given in Daniel and Revelation, where the fifth monarchy (following four successive corrupt empires) would see the rule of King Jesus. The ‘little horn’, signifying Cromwell in Trapnel’s prophecy, is part of the fourth corrupt empire. 79  Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 11. 80  Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth; or An Epitome of the Civil Wars of England (London: [n. pub.], 1679), p. 197. The printed text of The Cry of a Stone gives the names of several members of the recently dissolved Barebones Parliament, some of whom were Fifth Monarchists. Beyond the Restoration, Abraham Cowley’s play, Cutter of Coleman Street, set in 1658, included a randy female Fifth Monarchist, the daughter of a Baptist widow, called Tabitha who ‘was wont to go every Sunday a-foot over the Bridge to hear Mr. Feak, when he was Prisoner in Lambeth house, she has had a Vision too herself of Horns, and strange things’ (Cutter of Coleman Street. A Comedy (London: Printed for Henry Herringman, 1663), p. 33). See Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, pp. 300–01. 77

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There is a twofold design about the prophetess Hannah [Anna], who played her part lately at Whitehall at the ordinary; one to print her discourses and hymns, which are desperate against your person, family, children, friends and the government; the other to send her all over England, to proclaim them viva voce. She is much visited, and does a world of mischief in London, and would do in the country.81

Needham’s intelligence proved accurate, inasmuch as Trapnel subsequently began a journey to Cornwall, visiting her fellow Fifth Monarchist radicals Christopher Feake and John Simpson as she passed. Trapnel prophesied in the houses of Fifth Monarchist sympathisers, including that of Captain Francis Langdon, a former member of the Barebones Parliament, but the Truro authorities, anxious that she was prophesying against them, soon arrested her for vagrancy, ‘occasion[ing] unlawful meetings’, and speaking ‘against the present Government’, as well as for madness and whoredom.82 Trapnel’s own account, published as Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654), also recorded that she was threatened at her trial with the ‘great pin’ of the witch trier, used to prick birthmarks, implying that she was in some way influenced by the machinations of Satan.83 Though she was not convicted of any of these crimes, an order from parliament dictated that she be escorted back to London, where she was imprisoned in the infamous Bridewell prison above the ‘common shore’. She spent at least three months incarcerated in the stinking cell accompanied by her friend Ursula Adman, before she was released on 26 July 1654. She was never charged. Trapnel’s Report and Plea, published soon after her release, recorded her journeys and trials as well as appending a ‘Defiance to all reproachfull, scandalous, base, horrid, defaming speeches, which have been vented by Rulers, Clergy, and their Auditors, and published in scurrilous Pamphlets up and down in Cities and Countries’. There, Trapnel responds separately to the four main accusations that her prophesying had met with in Cornwall and London: witchcraft and madness, vagrancy, whoredom, and spreading sedition. Her enemies had accused her of ‘carnal boldness’ because she faced her accusers with ‘chearfulness’ and ‘courage’ in the manner of her co-religionist and ‘dear friend to Christ’ Vavasor Powell (p. 24). Like Paul the apostle, Trapnel 81  ‘Marchamont Needham to the Protector’, CSPD, 7 February 1654. Needham’s use of the name ‘Hannah’ is in common with other contemporary records. For instance, John Rogers wrote about his time in prison in 1654 when a message was brought him ‘by our S. H. T. who had a weeks close communion and conference with the Lord in heavenly Visits and Visions’ (Jegar-Sahadutha: An Oyled Pillar ([London: n. pub.], 1657), p. 28). (My thanks to Jenna Townend for this reference.) Although the names ‘Hannah’ and ‘Anna’ were interchangeable in the seventeenth century, it is also possible that Trapnel’s contemporaries associated her ability to communicate with the Lord with the biblical Hannah, a comparison she herself drew in her Report and Plea from later in 1654, in which case Needham’s use of the name would have been ironic. 82  Mercurius Politicus (13–20 April 1654), p. 3430. 83  Trapnel, Report and Plea, pp. 21–22.

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and Powell were both imprisoned without charge for spreading the good news of Christ, and like him, were accused of membership within a seditious ‘sect’ of followers which only time had redeemed in the eyes of the people. The Cornwall authorities, however, were particularly worried that she was ‘masterless’, without a husband and without employment, and that she was prophesying ‘in public’: she was therefore condemned in similar terms to Elizabeth Poole. A book of prophecies published soon after compared its subject to ‘Hana Trampenal’, implying Trapnel’s sexual misconduct: as Susanne Trill writes, the spelling provokes the meaning of ‘vagrant female’.84 A spell in Bridewell also damaged women’s reputations, earning them the title ‘Bridewell bird’ which was everyday slang for ‘whore’.85 According to surviving calendars, women were committed to the Westminster Bridewell ‘twice as frequently as men’, mainly for ‘street offences’ including ‘“lewd, idle, and disorderly” behaviour’, ‘threatening to burn houses; keeping a disorderly house and disturbing the neighbours’.86 These crimes reflect society’s preoccupation with correcting ‘disorderly’ women, and Trapnel’s travels, accompanied by her ability to prophesy against the government in front of large groups of people, could be easily dismissed when she was in Bridewell as just another ranting madwoman. In an earlier pamphlet, published in 1641, the author declared that he did not know where female preachers had their university, referring to their lack of learning, but he supposed ‘that Bedlam or Bridewell would be two convenient places for them’.87  Arise Evans and Elinor Channel, A Message from God, (by a Dumb Woman) to his Highness the Lord Protector ([London: n. pub.], 1654), p. 7; Susanne Trill, ‘Religion and the Construction of Femininity’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 30–55 (pp. 44–45). Evans was in favour of restoring Charles II to the throne, so his politics were rather different from Trapnel’s. 85  Mary Overton, wife of Leveller and General Baptist Richard Overton, was dragged through the streets with her six-month-old child to Bridewell after she was caught sewing together a radical Leveller tract. Her husband recorded that she was ‘cast into the most infamous Goale of Bride-well, that common Centre and receptacle of bauds, whores, and strumpets’ and that the fellows that dragged her called her ‘Strumpet and vild Whore [ … ] a sufficient matter to blast her reputation for ever’ (Richard/Mary Overton, The Commoners Complaint: or, A Dreadful Warning from Newgate ([London: n. pub.], 1646), p. 17; pp. 19–20). 86  Joanna Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells 1555–1800’, in Labour, Law, and Crime: An Historical Perspective, ed. by Francis Snyder and Douglas Hay (London: Tavistock, 1987), pp. 42–122 (p. 85). 87  A Discovery of Six Women-Preachers ([London: n. pub.], 1641), A4. Significantly, the pamphlet’s title page woodcut depicting four women undressing another in the centre (see Figure 1.3) has been reused from an earlier pamphlet recording the Stripping, Whipping, and Pumping of Joan Ilsley by five women suspecting her of ‘being naught’ with one of their husbands (John Taylor, Stripping, Whipping, and Pumping; or The Five Mad Shavers of Drury-Lane (London: Printed by J. O., 1638), p. 5) (see Figure 1.4). The women whippers are accused of lawless and deplorable behaviour in publicly disgracing 84

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Fig. 1.3

Title page, A Discovery of Six Women-Preachers ([London: n. pub.], 1641), The Huntington Library, RB 241794. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Fig. 1.4

Frontispiece (original cropped), John Taylor, Stripping, Whipping, and Pumping; Or the Five Mad Shavers of Drury-Lane (London: Printed by J[ohn] O[kes] for T. Lambert, 1638), The Huntington Library, RB 88895. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Trapnel, however, had other ideas, and when she was released paid for an official copy of the order that she was to be released without charge. Her subsequent Report and Plea was for ‘the satisfaction of the LORD’s friends known and unknown in all parts where the rumour hath run’ (A4): her printed text could present her own case, in her words, to counteract defamatory rumours and restore not only her reputation, but that of her co-religionists. It was important that Trapnel should present herself as an empty, but godly, vessel through which the word of God could flow and be made heard. An anonymous letter writer from the period, named an ‘Anabaptist Leveller’ in the Rawlinson catalogue, recorded his own impression of Trapnel’s ability to prophesy in Whitehall which he observed: it is (to be playne) to me a very strange dispensation, yet I am perswaded she hath communion with God in it, but under what sort to ranke it, I am at some stand. The dispensation is strange, because rare, more strange, because to me there appeares no such among the vissions and Revelations of the Lord, because in the things she utters (whether in verse or prose) it’s onely what she hath beene conversant in before.88

The writer records that witnessing Trapnel’s ‘stifned’ body, resembling a dead woman except that she drew breath, and her word that she was unable to make a verse when she was herself. These visual markers, and Trapnel’s testimony that the words were ‘throwne in by the Spirit to hir’, seem to have assuaged the man’s doubts, but his observation that her dispensation had no biblical precedent because she seemed to speak of things she already knew indicates that Trapnel’s prophetic voice, and her usual speaking voice, were closer to each other than he was comfortable with. In her Report and Plea, however, Trapnel addresses these doubts by comparing her situation and her dispensation with that of her namesake Hannah in 1 Samuel 1–2. Hannah was barren, though her husband’s other wife was fruitful, and this caused her great sorrow, making her unable to eat. In order to present her private petition for a son to the Lord, she went to their victim, especially in their use of a razor to shave her, showing the reputations of both parties to have been ruined. While the original speech of the woodcut has been removed in A Discoverie, the centre female is still shown being stripped and the boy entering with a razor is retained in the bottom left. The similarities between the two images certainly suggest that female preachers could be associated with disorderly, lawless women, whether guilty of whoredom or carrying out unnecessary violence. The event was misremembered as the ‘six woman shavers in Drury-Lane’ by Mary Carleton as late as 1663 suggesting that the former incident was widely reported (The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, Lately Stiled the German Princess (London: Printed by Sam[uel] Steed and Hen[ry] Marsh, 1663), p. 72). The fact that Carleton remembers six women, rather than five, could indicate that the two accounts were closely associated. 88  Bod. MS Rawl. A 21, p. 325. The manuscript is quoted at length in Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 149.

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the temple where she was observed by its priest Eli, who perceived her silent prayer where only her mouth moved to be a sign that she was drunk. Only after Hannah explained that she was a ‘handmaid’ speaking out of her ‘abundance of complaint and grief’ (1:16) does Eli wish her well, and she later gives birth to a son and prophet, Samuel. Not only does Hannah’s story provide Trapnel with an image of the process of conversion for Baptists, in that sorrow at fruitlessness is eventually replaced by joy at a new birth, but it shows the misapprehension of an ordained priest confronted by what Trapnel calls ‘a sober holy woman’ (A3v). Her preface indicates that she desires only to ‘imitate that approved Hannah’ (A2v) in her actions, figuring her enemies as the opposing and misconstruing Eli: In these dayes [ … ] there is such an old evil spirit of mis-construing, and judging holy actions to carry in them evil consequences. Eli the Priest of the Lord, is imitated in his worst part. England’s Rulers and Clergie do judge the Lords hand-maid to be mad, and under the administration of evil angels, and a witch, and many other evil terms they raise up to make me odious, and abhorr’d in the hearts of good and bad, that do not know me. (A3)

Contemporary newsbooks sent around the country reported that many ‘suppose[d] her to be of a troubled mind’ that was exacerbated by those that flocked to see her; another that her spirit is ‘Non-Sensical’; and Trapnel records that ‘the Clergie gave information in many places of the Country, what an imposter, and a dangerous deceiver was come into Cornwall’ (p. 18).89 Trapnel and her enemies evidently argued over what exactly her actions signified: at her trial, Justice Lobb disparagingly called her a ‘dreamer’ (p. 27), alluding to the word’s frequent appearance in Deuteronomy 13 which decrees that a ‘prophet, or that dreamer of dreams’ who advocated different religious opinions ‘shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God’ (13:5). Trapnel, on the other hand, interprets the word to signify that she is the prophet

 See also Mercurius Politicus (11 April 1654 (13–20 April)), p. 3430. There is textual evidence in Trapnel’s Report and Plea that she read this report which said that ‘Langdon and Baudon, her Compeers and Abettors, endeavored to make a learned Defence for her, but it was not suffered’. Trapnel records that ‘They had indeed such learning from the Spirit of wisdom and of a sound minde, which the Jurors and their companions were not able to contend against’ (p. 27). Trapnel was discussed in several newsbooks during the period 1654–56. See Severall Proceedings (11 January 1653[4] (12–19 January 1653[4])), pp. 3562–64; Mercurius Politicus (11 April 1654 (13–20 April)), pp. 3429–30; Certain Passages of Every Dayes Intelligence (15 April 1654 (14–21 April)), p. 111; The Weekly Intelligencer (20 April 1654 (18–25 April)), pp. 229–30; A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence (7 June 1654 (7–14 June 1654)), p. 1425; The Publick Intelligencer (24–31 December 1655), pp. 193–94); Mercurius Politicus (23 May 1656 (29 May–5 June)), pp. 6997–98. 89

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Joseph interpreting dreams for Pharaoh in Genesis 37:19, therefore sanctioning her divinely inspired gift.90 Hannah’s precedent was also significant for Trapnel, because after the birth of her son her mouth was ‘enlarged’ (1 Samuel 2:1) to sing prophecies against the Lord’s opponents. It is her position as faithful mother, made fruitful by the Lord, which Trapnel utilises in her own words that are inspired by her own recovery out of affliction: she, herself, underwent a period where she believed she was cursed, or barren, and was then convinced of her election. Imitating Hannah’s song also allows Trapnel to speak not just as a vessel for God’s words, but as a believer who can be inspired by faith, as if in response to the quandary of the Anabaptist Leveller above: as Michelle Osherow writes, Hannah’s ‘elaborate song of thanksgiving [ … ] celebrates Hannah’s own voice as much as it does her God’.91 Hannah’s song also provides Trapnel with a precedent for singing against her enemies, as she proclaimed that ‘the adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; [ … ]; and he shall give strength unto his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed’ (1 Samuel 2:10). Eli’s sons are revealed to be corrupt ‘sons of Belial’ who ‘knew not God’ (2:12) and provided early modern readers like Trapnel with examples of ‘popish’ priests of the old religious order who did not approve of her private prayers to God. Indeed, as Osherow contends, Hannah’s ‘story depicts an emerging spiritual autonomy; she redefines her relationship to God and insists upon the righteousness of her position’.92 Trapnel condemns ‘Baal’s Priests’ of the old order for ‘upholding the Popes Dominion, and dressing the Scarlet Whore in new clothes, so as to blinde and deceive Cities and Countries, telling them, That it’s the true genuine fruit of the Womb of the Church, and Spouse of CHRIST’ (A4). Rather than the Anglican Church’s Babylonian ‘Brats’ (A4), produced because it is only the Catholic Church ‘in new clothes’, Trapnel presents her own prophetic writings as the true fruit of Hannah’s womb, produced from her close relationship with her Lord. Her repeated mentions of her congregation back at Allhallows, London, leaves her reader in no doubt that this was the true church she envisaged: she was confident that no matter how many ‘Clergie-m[e]n and Jurors’ confronted her, she could ‘stand before them’ and sing ‘with much courage’ (p. 10). Trapnel’s argument in her Report and Plea utilises her gender in order to argue why her prophecies, and indeed her voice, are more powerful than those of her persecutors. Osherow posits, with reference to another sectarian, the Quaker  These threats were also recorded in Mercurius Politicus where the writer draws parallels between Trapnel and ‘Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent [ … ] in the dayes of Henry the 8’. Barton, an unlearned maid of Kent, experienced trances where she ate or drank nothing, was paralysed, and prophesied future events, all of which Trapnel also experienced. What the newsbook referred to, however, was that Barton had prophesied against her ruler, and was eventually executed (11 April 1654 (13–20 April)), p. 3430. See Diane Watt, ‘Elizabeth Barton’, ODNB. Watt writes that Barton has since been viewed as everything from a ‘puppet’ and a ‘naive and innocent victim’, to a ‘sexually immoral hypocrite’. 91  Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 45. 92  Ibid., p. 46. 90

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Margaret Fell, that ‘Hannah’s poetic voice defines success as a rhetorical triumph – the enemy’s speech is suppressed, the female victor’s mouth is opened and operative’.93 Hannah sings forth that her ‘arrogant’ oppressors should ‘talk no more so exceeding proudly’ because the ‘bows of the mighty men’ shall ‘be broken’ by God (1 Samuel 2:3–4). In Trapnel’s transcript of moments from her trial, she responds wittily, in her words causing the ‘rude multitude’ to say ‘Sure this woman is no witch, for she speaks many good words, which the witches could not’ (p. 28): the Lord had given her strength so that she could speak, causing ‘many to be of another minde’ (p. 25). This change in public opinion foreshadows what Trapnel sees as the dawn of a new political order where the saints can welcome ‘King Jesus’, and where ‘slighted’ handmaids could sing his praises as well as men: And then who shall be so deep speecht [Isaiah 33:19], as Saints now who are counted Novices, and shallow fellowes, and frantique handmaids, not fit to stand to speak to the Learned wise Rabbies of these times, which call such that speak plainly phan[a]tick, and under the administration of evill Angels and seditious whimsicall headed ones; but the time is coming which will discover the King of Beauty [Isaiah 33:17] to his, that are so slighted, and then they shall be the onely Scribes who are the Lords chosen Baruchs, he will imploy them to write his Roules [Isaiah 33:18; Jeremiah 36:4; 36:32]. (p. 54)

Inspired by the prophecies of Isaiah 33 that foretold the Lord’s vengeance against the enemies of the true church, understood as the Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Sennacherib, Trapnel continues to sing as the prophetess Hannah. Before the saints could gain their liberty under the ‘king of beauty’, King Jesus, their enemies would assail them and each believer would be called to their respective post, and Trapnel to her post as ‘scribe’ (Isaiah 33:18). When Christ the King returned he would choose those slighted by the university-educated ‘Rabbies’ (a title which in itself was used in the Matthew 28:8 to denote the chief priest’s ambition and exploitation of power) to record his works as Baruch did, who transcribed the prophecies of Jeremiah on scrolls (Jeremiah 36). These prophecies criticised the depths to which Judah had sunk, allowing all the people including their Egyptianappointed king Jehoiakim to have a chance to ‘return every man from his evil way’ (Jeremiah 36:3) before the Lord would afflict them with disasters for breaking his covenant made when the Israelites fled Egypt. For Trapnel, the rule of Jehoiakim resembled her own experience of Cromwell’s protectorate: Jehoiakim’s eyes and heart are said to exist only for ‘covetousness, and for to shed innocent blood, and for oppression, and for violence, to do it’ (Jeremiah 22:17).94 The prophecies of  Ibid., p. 64.  Milton also saw parallels between the events of his own time and those of the

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Hebrew Bible, particularly between the sins of the Judean people and those of England at the Restoration: as David Loewenstein observes in The Readie and Easie Way (1660), Milton ‘aligns the historical crisis of his own age with the historical crisis of Jeremiah’s age of apostasy’ (Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 91).

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Jeremiah, therefore, provide Trapnel’s words with another powerful precedent: the scrolls written by Baruch were controversial enough that Jehoiakim cast them into the fire, and had their compilers persecuted. Jeremiah and Baruch rewrote the prophecies, though enlarged with more declarations of vengeance from the Lord that he would punish the king and ‘his seed and his servants for their iniquity’, by heaping ‘evil’ upon them (Jeremiah 36:31). Trapnel’s readers would not have been able to ignore Judah’s punishment, when the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem and burnt it down, and the parallels between her own incarceration and that of Jeremiah for urging their people to repent. The image of Baruch the scribe also provides Trapnel with a precedent for writing her prophecies down and circulating them in order to persuade her readers to reform and recognise her as a vessel for God’s words. She, like Jeremiah and Baruch, disobeys her ruler and the authorities, but her use of such biblical allusion defends her reputation from charges of madness: unlike Mary Champion’s, Trapnel’s published words prove she was no ‘frantique handmaid’, making her able to triumph rhetorically over her enemies. Though written twenty years later than Trapnel’s prophecies, Agnes Beaumont’s narrative of her persecution also finds parallels in scripture, leaving her reader in no doubt that the events of her father’s death were part of God’s own plan and not a result of her own distractedness, of which Feery accused her: she was determined to show that she was not another Anabaptist murderess, set on overturning male authority. Beaumont turns specifically to the example of Peter betraying Christ in the Gospels by declaring himself not a member of the apostles, which his master had foretold, in her own submission to her father’s authority by agreeing (on the third time her asked) that she would no longer attend meetings without his consent, ‘as long as yow live’ (p. 207). She presented herself as a ‘peeter like [ … ] poor weak Creature’ (p. 205) for submitting to her father’s authority, but only after she has struggled for days with her conscience. Like Peter, Beaumont is subject to God’s plan, but this event also confirms her status as a future apostle living a godly life and spreading the word of the Lord. Beaumont’s exact promise to her father was also to become significant, as, read in a different way, the words could have signified her intention to rid herself of her father’s authority permanently, freeing herself to attend meetings. However, in the context of Beaumont’s narrative, which relies heavily on prolepsis and premonition in her depicting of her own and her father’s suffering, such events are shown to have only one author, and that was God. Beaumont’s narrative professes what John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco call a ‘modest claim to prophetic gifts’ (n. 195, p. 275), as she includes scriptural allusions and dreams as premonitions of her grief and suffering: for instance, she writes that ‘some times one scripture after Another would run in my mind several days together. That would signifie something I had to meet with, and that I must prepare for a tryal’ (pp. 193–4). Beaumont had ‘many dreams’ and believed ‘some of them was of God’ (p. 195), given their parallels with moments in scripture. One dream that she recounts at length is that of a great apple tree which Sister

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Prudon, her friend who had heard her talk of the dream when it occurred months before, ‘tould me of after my father was dead’ (p. 195). The two women obviously recognised its prophetic qualities: Me thoughts in my fathers yard grew an old Aple tree, and it was full of fruit. And one night, about the midle of the night, their came a very suddaine storm of wind, and blew this tree up by the roots, and I was sorely troubled to see this tree so suddenly blew down. I run to it, as it lay upon the ground, to lift it up, to have it grow in its place again. I thought I see it turnd up by the roots, and [me] thoughts I stood lifting at it as long as I had any strength, as it lay upon the ground, first at one Arm [branch], then at another, but could not stir it out of its place to have it grow in its place again; at last left it, and run to my Brothers to Call help to set this tree in its place again. & I thought when my Brother and his men did Come, they could not make this tree grow in its place again; and, oh, how troubled was I for this tree, and so greived that the wind should blow that tree down and let others stand. And many such things that I see afterwards did signifie some thing. (p. 195)

Beaumont certainly saw parallels between this old apple tree and her father. She revisits the dream later in her narrative before recounting the death of her father, who collapsed with heart trouble, his daughter, and then her brother, unable to rouse him: ‘some afterwards said, my dreaming of the Aple tree did signifie something of this’ (p. 212). Beaumont’s readers would have understood the significance of the storm’s claiming of one particular tree, leaving others around it standing, as the result of divine providence.95 In the Old Testament, too, the uprooting of great trees signifies the humbling of strength, loftiness, and authority (see Isaiah 2:13, Amos 2:9, and Zechariah 11:2), and so the image provides Beaumont with a means to show her readers why her father’s actions were punished by God, without explicitly condemning him herself. In Matthew 3:8–10, John the Baptist urges the Pharisees and Sadducees to bring forth ‘fruits meet for repentance’ before baptism, because ‘every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire’. Beaumont includes evidence of her father’s later repentance for forcing her to promise she would not attend meetings by including his direct speech: ‘I have been Against yow for seeking after Jesus Christ; the Lord forgive me, and lay 95  It could be possible to attribute the dream to previous natural occurrences in the vicinity: Bedford had recently experienced violent storms and ‘Tempestuous Winds’ that had, according to one contemporary pamphlet, ‘tor[n] up the Trees by the Roots, the Gates off the Hinges, Breaking them in pieces, Driving down Houses, To the Terror and Amazement of the Inhabitants’ (A True Relation of what Hapned at Bedford, on Munday last, Aug. 19. (London: Printed for Fra[ncis] Smith, 1672), title page). Smith, the printer, was the leader of a congregation in Croydon, and had published many of Bunyan’s works: his booklist, as Lynch writes, usually demonstrated ‘a tenacious commitment to nonconformist polemic’, though this work does not do so explicitly. It is possible that such a work was meant to be read with providence in mind (Lynch, ‘“Her Name Agnes”’, p. 83).

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not that sin to my Charge’ (p. 212). ‘Lay not that sin to my charge’ aligns her father with those that threw stones at Stephen (Acts 7:60), and therefore Beaumont with Stephen himself, whose sermon to the people of Jerusalem warned them of building an idolatrous temple, and reminded them not to break their covenant with God. She is also the apostle Paul whose friends forsook him (1 Timothy 4:16) before the Lord gave him strength to proclaim the message to ‘all the Gentiles’, causing him to be ‘delivered out of the mouth of the lion’ (1 Timothy 4:17). Beaumont, therefore, depicts her father’s support for her profession, and her speaking it aloud in order to persuade the unrepentant, Anglican church-goers, like himself, to ask for God’s forgiveness. Rather than continually disobeying her father, Beaumont receives his blessing and support in her belief, and his death allows her to continue attending meetings without breaking her oath. Her narrative shows the very real consequences of balancing the demands of her father (her head), and of God, and what happened when fathers usurped God’s position as the heads of their families. Beaumont’s tree image is important to the understanding of her narrative as it draws on the early prophetic chapters of Isaiah which set out God’s plan for the whole of creation. In particular, Isaiah urges the repentance of Judah and Jerusalem, prophesies events in the near future, as well as foretelling the coming of Christ (and even the second coming). Beaumont’s narrative establishes her in this prophetic tradition, though, unlike Trapnel, she is generally reluctant to draw radical meaning from her experiences and dreams except to say that God will support the elect against sinners. It is in Beaumont’s scriptural allusions that her position as a prophet and messenger becomes clear, particularly in the comparison of her father with the old apple tree. Isaiah 2 depicts God’s rebuke of Judah and Jerusalem, which included the humbling of ‘every one that is proud and lofty’ (12), including ‘all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, and [ … ] all the oaks of Bashan’ (13), in ‘the last days’ (2) before Christ’s coming when God would rebuke the idolatrous, unrepentant, and warmongering in order to establish the true church. As part of the prophecy, the rulers and elders were to be judged for not preserving the church, beating God’s ‘people to pieces, and grind[ing] the faces of the poor’ (Isaiah 3:15), and for the behaviour of their women who are ‘haughty, and walk with extended necks’ (Isaiah 3:16) exhibiting their pride. Beaumont, in her narrative, admits to the sin of pride as she rode off behind Bunyan on his horse, though afterwards repents for this behaviour when she returns to her father’s house and is relegated to spend the night in his barn: like the gates of the city of Zion, figured as female, who sits upon the ground ‘desolate’ and full of lamentation (Isaiah 3:26), Beaumont is left alone in the cold barn until she attends ‘the throne of grace, to spread my Complaints before the Lord’ (Isaiah 37:14). After this depiction of the Lord’s vengeance Isaiah promises ‘the branch of the LORD’ which is ‘beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel’ (Isaiah 4:2), and seven women, previously accused of pride, ask only to be called by God’s name ‘to take away our reproach’ (Isaiah 4:1). Though Beaumont foresees the fall of an apple tree (rather than an oak), she is left with ready access to the fruit of the tree, now

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promised her because she has chosen to meet with the Lord’s chosen people: when she attended the meeting earlier in the narrative, she proclaimed that God’s ‘fruit was pleasant to my tast’ (Song of Songs 2:3), transforming the apple tree into her beloved Christ, that provides Beaumont, as the spouse of Christ, with both sustenance and sweet repose. Significantly, Beaumont’s dream of the apple tree also alludes to other biblical passages, signifying her conflicted feelings as the image holds (at least) two simultaneous meanings. Her dream can also be understood as symbolic of Christ withdrawing his presence from her when she chooses to obey her father rather than God. Job 19:10 records that God ‘hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree’, the notes on the Geneva translation confirming that the tree, the beloved who provides the spouse with shelter, ‘is plucked up, and has no more hope to grow’. Later in the chapter, Job also declares that he is in danger from ‘troops’ who ‘raise up their way against me’ (Job 19:12), and that God has ‘put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed’ (Job 19:13–14), but also berates those who judge him as a sinner rather than considering his experience as an example for others in, as the Geneva translation glosses, ‘faith and patience’ (n. Job 19:28). Anna Trapnel also prophesies using the metaphor of uprooted trees, this time to foresee the fall of the Barebones Parliament in December 1653, an authority in which she was sorely disappointed, but her allusion very clearly refers to the lofty oak trees depicted by Isaiah: Another Vision I had at the same time, of many Oaks, with spreading branches full of leaves, very great limmed; I looking to the root, which lay but very little in the ground, & look’t dry, as if it were crumbling to dust, and above the ground was only a little dry bark, on which limmed and spreading Oaks were set; a few shrubs which being by, were very lovely and green, these great Oaks fell suddenly down, and cover’d the other; presently I saw a very lovely tree for stature & compleatness every way not to be paralleled by any thing that ever I saw, and before which the great Oaks crumbled to dust, and the little shrubs were raised up, growing and thriving exceedingly; then I desired Scripture to this Vision; Reply was, in the first of Isaiah it is said, They shall be confounded in the Oaks that they have desired [Isaiah 1:29]: And as to that lovely Tree, it was declared to me to be the Lord Jesus, which I had sometimes seen in the new Jerusalem, which is spoken of in the Rev[elation 22:2]. That that Tree was the very same that is there mentioned whose fruit should be very many and beautiful, held forth to the Shrubs, which they feeding upon, should immediately grow up to a lovely Stature; which said the Lord to me, thou here seest that no sooner doth this Tree appear, which represents my Son, but immediately those despised Shrubs that the great Oaks endeavored to scatter and hide in their holds, they shall come forth, and all the Oaks shall crumble into dust; this is not by Might, nor by Power, or Arms, but brought in through the pourings out of my Spirit.96

 Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, pp. 12–13.

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Trapnel’s oaks, here, very clearly fall down as a symbol of the fall of sinners and transgressors, the lofty rulers depicted in Isaiah 2. They bear no fruit, nor do they receive any nourishment from the soil.97 The tree of Revelation foretold by Trapnel, however, is unparalleled amongst the trees and bears fruit to heal nations, reducing the oaks to dust in order to allow the lovely green shrubs, the godly, to flourish. For Trapnel, the barren oaks and the fruitful tree of salvation are very clearly separated, whereas in Beaumont’s dream the tree is lofty, fallen, and fruitful. What this highlights is the difference in each woman’s situation with regard to authority: while Trapnel has no immediate connection to the members of parliament and rejoices at their fall, Beaumont remains torn throughout her narrative as to which authority she should obey, her father or her God. In the dream of the apple tree, the two authorities are conflated representing a Baptist woman’s conflicting duties to either her earthly or heavenly head: in the end, God removes her father and allows her easier access to the fruit, her salvation. It is by attributing retribution wholly to God that Beaumont absolves herself from any blame in her father’s death. In her dream, she uses all her strength to restore the tree to its place, but she cannot alter God’s plan. Reflecting on the accusations of Feery and her trial, Beaumont drew solace from the example of Peter and John in Acts 4:13, that God ‘would give me faith and Courage that I might look my Accuser [Feery] in the face with boldness, and that I might lift up my head before him’ (p. 218). She recounted that the jury marvelled at her testimony, just as the Jewish leaders and their people listening to the trial of Peter and John had done when they realised both men were ‘unlearned and ignorant’, proving that they must have received their knowledge from Christ. This chapter is glossed in the Geneva translation as the servants of God showing up those that ‘lay hidden under a mask of zeal’ who ‘betray themselves to indeed be wicked men’ (n. Acts 4:13), and this is indeed the function of Beaumont’s narrative. While she asserts her godly credentials, and those of her congregation, as did Peter and John, her actions also expose the malice and wickedness of both lawyers and clergymen: when the apostles return to their congregation, they assert that God uses the wicked people ‘contrary to their desires to set forth his glory, which gives them permission to do’ (Acts 4:21), though their actions are not without fault. The Geneva Bible gloss advises that these events merely bring the saints closer to God: We should neither be afraid of the threats of our enemies, neither yet foolishly condemn their rage and madness against us: but we have to set against their force and malice an earnest thinking upon the power and good will of God (both which we manifestly behold in Christ) and so flee to the aid and assistance of our Father. (n. Acts 4:24)

97  This image is also utilised by Anne Wentworth in her Englands Spiritual Pill ([London: n. pub., 1679]), Edin. *z.8.1/2, where she orders her readers: ‘Hew down the tree of Formality, let never fruit grow on it more, from this time forth’ (p. 10).

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This is what Beaumont’s narrative depicts: when she is informed that she will have to face a coroner and a jury, she writes that she flew ‘to God for help’ and prayed that he would ‘appeer for [her] in this fiery tryal [1 Peter 4:12]’ (p. 216). Seeing that her life lay, quite literally, ‘at stake’ (p. 216), her thoughts of being burnt, she wrote, ‘would sometimes shake me all to peeces’, asking the Lord, ‘How shall I endure burning?’ (p. 217). Beaumont says, in introduction to her narrative, ‘And oh, how great hath the kindness of god been to me in afflicting dispensations! [ … ] thank god for trouble when I have found it drive me nearer to himself’ (p. 193). It is this that she, and all the women suffering in this chapter, desire to show in their writing, that suffering only allows them to become closer to God. When Beaumont spoke in front of the coroner and jury about the death of her father, she declared that there was ‘no body with me but God’ (p. 221), before all charges against her were dropped, but causing the jury members even ‘a twelvemonth after’ to ‘speak of [her] with teirs’ (p. 222). Though the testimonies and prophecies of Poole, Trapnel, and Beaumont were written over twenty years apart, they recount similar reactions produced by community anxiety about Baptist worship and the specific ways in which a woman could be damaged in the long and short term by defamatory comments in word or print. Despite the dangers women faced in proclaiming their belief publicly, this chapter has shown that Baptist women did not keep quiet in order to avoid inviting more censure from those outside the church: they spoke out against contemporary cultural ideas and instead declared that their behaviour was being ‘read’ wrongly. Like Hannah, whose behaviour was misunderstood by Eli in 1 Samuel 1, Baptist women showed that they were divine instruments rather than mad, whorish, rebellious, or heretical. The controversial behaviour of prophetesses, in particular, invited discussions both inside and outside congregations as to whether such actions and words were indeed divinely sanctioned. Having explored some contemporary perceptions of Baptist women, this book will continue by discussing women’s position in Baptist congregations and whether this may have been affected by these beliefs. Agnes Beaumont seems only to have been able to declare her dreams to her fellow female Baptist, Sister Prudon, suggesting either that she was prevented from communicating this to her congregation, or that they were not convinced of their divine authority. Indeed, as Kathleen Lynch has written, the ‘lack of expressed support’ for Beaumont in print could well have meant that her ‘divinely derived sense of election posed a potential threat to the internal stability of her congregation, as well’.98 Perhaps as Beaumont’s actions drew attention to Bunyan’s congregation, and indeed to his own conduct, the group distanced themselves from her. In the decade after, however, Bunyan would utilise the dream form as the means to present Christian’s journey in The Pilgrim’s Progress, in what Dunan-Page calls ‘open defiance of contemporary association between nocturnal visions and the inspired leaders of the Anabaptist movement’.99  Lynch, ‘“Her Name Agnes”’, p. 77.  Dunan-Page, ‘John Bunyan’s A Confession of Faith’, p. 32.

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This chapter has shown that women were already utilising the dream or vision to return them ‘to their proper, legitimate function, as the expressions of divine, prophetical inspiration’: these women did not just want to resemble Judith, or indeed ‘frantique handmaids’; they wanted their readers and listeners to believe in their words and reform their ways before it was too late.

Chapter 2

‘Valiant Deborahs’: Women’s Voices in Baptist Congregations Writing in the late 1650s, Susanna Parr recorded that she and other members of her community ‘were told in time of the [civil] Warres, that when the Lord did turne our Captivity, there must be a thorough Reformation, every thing must be brought to the patterne in the Mount’.1 In many ways, Parr continued, the Civil War was ‘stiled a Sacramentall warre’, concerned with reforming the practices of the established church: even before the conflict there was a widespread distrust of the power of episcopacy, of scandalous ministers, of unscriptural practices based on popish tradition rather than scripture, and the power the clergy maintained over the everyday lives of men and women.2 Parr’s words show that the 1640s and 1650s were a time of reforming the church so that it was closer to the example of the primitive biblical churches: she alludes to Moses receiving God’s ‘ceremonial law’ on Mount Sinai in Exodus 25:40 which should provide future churches with their ‘pattern’ or example, so ‘nothing shuld be left to mans invention’ (Geneva n. Exodus 25:2). This scriptural example clearly encouraged Parr to think more about ‘purity as to the Ordinances’, and she began to follow the ‘Congregationall way’, where an autonomous congregation would gather separately from the established church and form its own covenant: such organisation promised ‘a greater effusion of the Spirit, more purity and holinesse, more union and communion, more liberty of Conscience, and freedome from that yoke of being servants unto men’ (p. 1). In her rejection of servitude, Parr draws a link between her own oppression by ungodly prelates whom she now thought were not God’s chosen representatives, and the oppression of her community in Exeter, a city that came under siege by Royalists in June 1643 and made it their garrison until 1646.3 Parr was born into a family with parliamentary and Puritan sympathies: she was related to Exeter’s previous mayor and subsequent justice of the peace, Alderman Ignatius Jourdaine, who was influential in making Exeter a Puritan-governed city.4 During the Royalist siege,  Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, p. 1.  See, for example, Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas

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during the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972, repr. 1991), pp. 30–32. 3  See Eugene A. Andriette, Devon and Exeter in the Civil War (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), pp. 91–92. 4  Jourdaine (1561–1640) gained his reputation as an ‘Arch-Puritan’ because of his efforts to punish fornication and drinking in the city. He actively criticised Charles I’s royal policy, particularly the Book of Sports and his war with the Scots. His biography was published in 1654, and reprinted in Samuel Clarke’s A Collection of the Lives of Ten Eminent Divines (London: Printed for William Miller, 1662), pp. 449–87. See Mark Stoyle, ‘Jurdain, Ignatius’, ODNB. Parr’s father George Jourdaine was probably his brother.

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it must have seemed to Parr and her fellow Puritans that they were facing a siege bombardment like that of Jerusalem by the Babylonians recorded in Jeremiah, where God would destroy the disobedient dwelling in the city, but would bring out the godly from their captivity as prisoners: ‘I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you’ (Jeremiah 29:14). This punishment was to encourage their reformation, and to allow them to escape their captivity under oppressive kings; by connecting this with the siege of Exeter, Parr links her newly established, reformed congregation with God’s chosen people of Israel. Parr’s words gain another meaning when considered in light of the rest of her narrative, which is a vindication from charges that she was herself disobedient in disagreeing with the degree of ‘purity’ in ordinances (p. 7) that her new congregation, led by Lewis Stucley, had achieved. She wrote that she had ‘never heard or read in Scripture, or other history, that the Lord did make use of a people of such an earthly, luke-warme, and indifferent spirit, in any publique worke of reformation’, and that the people they had separated from were ‘more Godly than our selves’ (p. 7). After putting forward this view, hoping to encourage the congregation’s reform, she wrote that Stucley refused to let her speak in the congregation as she had done previously (citing 1 Corinthians 14:34 ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches’), and, as a result of this, and what she perceived to be the providential death of her newborn child, Parr became convinced that she should return to her previous church. Stucley and his assistant Thomas Mall then excommunicated her and published two tracts justifying their proceedings, and defaming her behaviour as scandalous. Parr’s original hope, as she records, was that her congregation would give her ‘liberty of Conscience’, and ‘freedome from that yoke of being servants to men’, but when she was dissatisfied with its ministers, and the degree of the congregation’s reformation, she was silenced, excommunicated, and defamed in print. From the example of this specific congregation, then, it is reasonable to assume that similar unrecorded tensions arose in other gathered churches, whether congregational or Baptist, over the degree to which women could advise on church policy, and, indeed, whether they were allowed to speak in the church at all. In order to explore this tension further, this chapter will consider the role women played in the formation and growth of new congregations, including their written contributions to the controversial debate over believers’ baptism, and what positions of service they could undertake in the everyday workings of the congregation including their written arguments for speaking in the church. In the course of these discussions consideration will also be given to the extent to which Baptist women identified with the example of the Hebrew judge Deborah who was given by God to the people of Israel to advise them against continuing in their evil ways: as Osherow has observed, ‘Deborah’s history not only challenges requirements for female silence, but also makes female speech necessary’.5 Deborah was a figure of female authority, a judge settling disputes, a leader of men, and without her the people of  Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 78.

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Israel would not have been saved from their oppressors: it was Deborah who urged the hesitant Barak, the head of the Israelite army, to go to war with Sisera. Parr’s own experience and written vindication is composed with such an example in mind: she, too, sees herself as the voice of authority in a time of conflict, when her people were under threat from the ‘antichristian’ Royalist forces. Deborah’s story, recorded in Judges, contains examples of feminine, divinely inspired authority, but it also presents Barak as a weak leader needing such guidance, an argument which Parr utilises in her accusations against Stucley’s behaviour. Deborah’s example is a direct contrast to what is urged by 1 Corinthians, and so to become voices for their congregations, the seventeenth-century people belonging to a new Israel, Baptist women drew rather on the actions and words of Deborah, which did not always meet with male approval. This chapter will go on to consider women’s arguments for their participation in Baptist congregations, highlighting the discrepancy between their congregation’s biblical precedents for women’s behaviour and their own examples of female authority. ‘He-goats before the flocks’: Women’s Separation from the Established Church Women from all kinds of backgrounds expressed distaste for the condition of state religion before the Civil Wars, and as a result they worked hard to establish their own congregational groups. The first part of this chapter, therefore, will consider the part women played in separating and forming their own churches, before moving on to discussing the strictures placed upon women’s voices. On 16 January 1640 Anna Temple wrote to her married daughter Anne Busbridge updating her with the latest family news. As well as urging her daughter to send her grandchildren to visit so that they could attend church ‘wch they cannot do wth yu, especially in winter’, she rejoiced in observing that the church she frequented had begun to remove the ‘Popish’ influences introduced and maintained by Archbishop William Laud and his bishops: God is exceeding good to us everie way, both to bodys & soules; & hath done wonderfull things among us already; & gives us hope of more, & that wee shall see Idolatry & Superstition rooted out; and gods ordinances sett up in the parishe & power of them; Altars begin to goe downe apace & railes in many places, & yrs must follow if it bee not downe already, let us labor to be thankfull & continue our prayers; hould up our hands yt Israell may prevaile.6

Temple was hopeful that her family’s continual prayers would help the accomplishment of God’s work; the true reformation of his church on earth; and  ESRO MS DUN 51/54. Anna Temple née Tomlins (bap. c. 1575) married John Temple c. 1595 and the church alterations Temple refers to probably occurred near where they lived at Frankton, Warwickshire. Temple was not herself a Baptist worshipper, but her letter depicts a concern for the state of national religious practices. 6

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the ‘prevailing’ of ‘Israell’. She was not alone in such wishes. Godly men and women around the country rejoiced to see the rails that kept the east-end altars from out of the reach of the people removed, and the ‘sacramentalism’, favoured by the Arminian party under Laud and Charles I, labelled as false and Popish by their Calvinist opponents.7 Katherine Sutton, a Baptist and so more radically Calvinist than Temple, went a stage further in her criticism of the Arminian practices her parish church had introduced, and decided to separate completely from what she perceived as unscriptural, false, and antichristian worship. Although she was a governess, and moved from family to family, she wrote that she had always ‘endeavour[ed] to keep close to the best teaching ministery I could find’ even though she often dwelt in places where there were ‘many Papists’.8 After her marriage, and the death of one of her children, occurring in the late 1620s, Sutton was convinced of ‘the falsness’ of the worship in the parish church she frequented: ‘I could not kneell as the rest did, but sat down as if I had kneeled’ (p. 6). Her belief that kneeling for communion had no scriptural foundation made her realise that a minister could easily go further and ‘command thee to kneel at an Altar, (although at that time there was nothing known of setting up of Altars)’ (p. 6).9 Confronting the minister, she wrote that she did warn him that if Altars should be set up, that he would not (for filthy lucre sake) kneell at them himself, nor compel others so to do: But he told mee he could not believe any such thing should be: but if it should bee so he promised mee he would not conform to them. But in a short time after he found it too true, for Altars were reared up, and he poor man (contrary to his promise) did conform himself in that thing, and compelled others so to do: but the first time he did so, it pleased the Lord to smite him with a sore languishing disease, that he went out no more. (pp. 6–7)

While also establishing her role as a prophetess, warning her minister to adhere to the ways of God in the turbulent times ahead, Sutton exposes ministers like hers who would adopt unscriptural practices for their own gain. The publication of this work in 1663 from exile in Rotterdam, immediately following the Act of Uniformity and the renewal of persecution for dissenters including the Baptists, was also a warning to the restored clergymen not to reinstate episcopacy. She, like the other women discussed in this chapter, took it upon herself to try to understand what a scriptural and pure worship of God should consist of, which often meant facing persecution at familial, local, and national levels. Whether they quietly prayed for change like Temple, or actively joined congregations of saints gathered  Crawford, Women and Religion in England, p. 57.  Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, p. 2. 9  Crawford records the story of a gentlewoman who in 1630 sat quietly while others 7 8

stood to sing the Nicene creed and was made to stand by Bishop Cosin, who called her a ‘lazie sow’ and tore her sleeve in the process. See Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 57, citing The Correspondence of John Cosin, D. D. Lord Bishop of Durham, Surtees Society, 52 (1868), p. 174.

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together to worship according to the ways of the New Testament churches as Sutton went on to do, women found their voices to discuss the practices and doctrines of their new churches.10 Believers who were dissatisfied with the established church often listed unscriptural kneeling to false and idolatrous altars as one of the reasons for their non-attendance there. After Sutton had realised the inappropriateness of this practice she began to observe other faults, particularly the ‘Christening of a child (as they call it) at which time God was pleased to convince mee of the evil and falseness of that piece of Worship’, and of a ‘form of prayer made and appointed to be read in every assembly’ by ‘man’s invention’ (p. 7), referring to Laud’s enforcement of the Book of Common Prayer in the 1630s: Sutton reminded her readers that this was not the word of God (p. 7). Earlier in the narrative she had also recounted casting ‘away her prayer-book, for it did not reach my necessities’ and asked the Lord instead to ‘teach mee to pray’ (pp. 1–2). Finding no scriptural evidence for baptising a child, or for ‘invented’ prayers, drove her to resolve to seperate from, and come no more to joyn in such a way of worship, as it is written in his blessed word; and in order there unto I made use of the best books I could get, that were then published to that purpose, and also called in the help of many Godly Ministers of several judgment[s]. (p. 7)

Responding to the ‘blessed word’, Paul’s advice to the primitive churches, ‘Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate’ (2 Corinthians 6:17), Sutton fasted and prayed with some others of the same opinion and they, as a group, decided whether they should join ‘in the way of his pure worship’ with others of the same persuasion. This involved Sutton using some of her goods to pay off the lease her husband had on their house, which the ‘Lord was pleased in a short time to make him willing that I should remove’ (p. 8).11 In their new  Several previous studies have discussed the position of women in the gathered churches. See, for example, Claire Cross, ‘“He-Goats before the Flocks”: A Note on the Part Played by some Women in the Founding of some Civil War Churches’, in Popular Belief and Practice: Papers Read at the Ninth Summer Meeting and the Tenth Summer Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. by G. J. Cunning and D. Baker (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 195–202; Anne Laurence, ‘A Priesthood of SheBelievers: Women and Congregations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. by W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 345–63; Richard L. Greaves, ‘Foundation Builders: The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity’, in Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History, ed. by Richard L. Greaves (London: Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 75–91. 11  Sutton’s syntax is confused at this point, but it appears that her husband had agreed for them to move if she could gather enough goods to pay it off their current lease, which he must have thought unlikely. After she obtained such goods he was obliged to move to a place where she could receive profitable ministry. Although Sutton continually uses ‘I’ (‘I was made free’, p. 8), her husband is mentioned as being with her on her travels. 10

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habitation, the group enjoyed a ‘good man preach[ing], and had the sweet benefit of some private meetings’ (p. 8) before the increased persecution of such groups caused her to travel ‘over the Sea, where I did injoy further and fuller communion with [God] in his ordinances’ (p. 10). At the end of her spiritual autobiography Sutton advised her readers, as she had been advised: ‘who ever would not be eternally seperated from God, let them in time seperate from all sin’ (p. 38). The publication of Sutton’s work in Rotterdam is evidence that her work was exemplary and useful for the saints under persecution, given her struggle to join a congregation because of both geographical constraints (persuading her husband to move), and because the 1630s were a time of comparable oppression. As her minister Hanserd Knollys wrote in his preface to the book, This godly Woman [ … ] would not loose any opportunity she could get either in publicke or private for her precious soul, but would often break thorrow some difficulties and endure some hardships to enjoy such opportunities; and this she did at that time, when many professors sleighted and neglected (O grievous Sin!) yea contemned the Ministry of the word. (*1v)

Such fortitude of women in their aiding the formation and growth of Baptist congregations was often commented on by male Baptists in the period. Edward Terrill, the first compiler of records for what became the Broadmead Church in Bristol, writing in 1672, included as his first entry a detailed biography of the congregation’s female co-founder, Dorothy Hazzard; indeed, she was to prove an example for every additional member to the church.12 After her first husband Anthony Kelly’s death in the 1630s, Terrill writes, Hazzard became well-known in the city as ‘a virtuous woman: she was like a he-goat before the flock’ (Jeremiah 50:8).13 Significantly, Hazzard is compared to the masculine leader of ‘the children of Israel’, who sought their Lord ‘weeping’ and asking the ‘way to Zion’ (Jeremiah 50:4–5), a position that could only be taken, as the Geneva gloss has it, by the ‘most forward, and without fear’. Referring to Hazzard’s practice of opening her shop in Bristol High Street on Christmas Day where she sat and sewed ‘as a witness for God in the midst of the city, in the face of the sun’, Terrill gives an account of how, like a Deborah she arose, with strength of holy resolution in her soul from God, even a mother in Israel [Judges 5:7], and so she proved: because she was the first woman in this city of Bristol that practised that truth of the Lord, which was then hated and odious, namely, separation. (p. 11)

Terrill endows Hazzard with authority and leadership by comparing her to Deborah. According to Osherow, Deborah was ‘a remedy to a predicament reflected 12  Edward Terrill was chosen as the ruling elder of the church in 1666/7 and undertook the office until his death in 1685. Internal evidence in the records indicates that they were written in 1672 (coinciding with Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence). 13  The Records of a Church of Christ, Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, p. 10.

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in the Israelites’ disobedience punctuated by their worship of false gods’, and Hazzard’s own separation from the established church reflected this remedy.14 Her fortitude in worshipping in her gathered church despite the bishops’ endeavours to suppress them, and an assault on one of their meetings by ‘the rude multitude and seamen’ (p. 12), was celebrated. Instead of supporting the congregation’s cause when they petitioned him for redress, the city’s mayor imprisoned several members. In a similar way to Deborah, Hazzard is also said by Terrill to sit in the sun (much like the godly women of Bedford observed talking about ‘the things of God’ by John Bunyan) reflecting her own enlightened position: in Judges, Deborah is last heard, according to Osherow, ‘petitioning God to enlighten his devoted subjects’ so that they would become as ‘the sun when he goeth forth in his might’ (Judges 5:31) as she had been.15 Hazzard was the only female ‘professor’ to separate from corrupt practices in 1640, with four other men, and led ‘the way out of Babylon’ (p. 15). Hazzard’s enlightened strength also enabled her to pursue her belief independently of her second husband: in the late 1630s, she married Matthew, a preacher ‘savouring of a puritanical spirit’ (p. 10) who was subsequently granted the living of the neighbouring St Ewin’s Parish, but he continued to read the Book of Common Prayer to his congregation (though not giving the sacrament to all present). Upon sitting in his congregation, Hazzard considered ‘it would be of ill report if she should forbear’ and leave, but ‘a bad example unto others if she did refrain and not go’ (p. 16); she resolved that she must disobey her husband, whose own conscience had not yet been sufficiently enlightened. To say prayers of man’s invention, she said, was to worship the ‘beast and his image’ spoken of in Revelation 14:9, for which the punishment was eternal torment. Hazzard’s behaviour, in departing from her husband’s beliefs, is therefore explained as the responsibility of all the godly, to both separate and speak out to encourage others to do likewise. In 1640, when John Canne, an Independent minister newly returned from Amsterdam, visited Bristol, Hazzard rushed to ‘fetch him to her house, and entertained him all the time he stayed in the city’ (p. 18) despite her husband’s absence visiting his family in Lyme. Terrill’s account attests to the importance of Canne’s teachings as ‘a baptized man’ who ‘taught them the way of the Lord more perfectly’ (p. 18), debating the practice of separation with a local minister openly on the green to which the people flocked.16 When Hazzard’s husband returned, however, he was derided by others who said that ‘the next thing that followed would be that she would forsake the [marriage] bed also’ (p. 22), drawing attention  Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 81.  Ibid., p. 108. 16  Roger Hayden’s entry for John Canne in ODNB asserts that ‘a claim that in 1642 14 15

Canne, as an Anabaptist, founded the first Baptist church in Bristol on the basis of principles outlined in A Necessitie of Separation is without foundation’, but Terrill’s notes clearly show Canne debating scriptural precedents for reforming or separating from the established church on Bristol green.

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to Hazzard’s abandonment of wifely duties, as well as to established stereotypes of female Anabaptists discussed in Chapter 1. Terrill’s account counteracts such charges by highlighting her piety and virtue, and he also depicts Matthew Hazzard as wholly sympathetic to his wife’s beliefs in the face of such rumours. For instance, living over the parish boundary allowed him and his wife to give fellow separatists some protection from the church authorities in Bristol. Their house became a haven for families bound for New England to escape persecution, and for ‘several good women [ … ] to bed there at their time of lying-in [ … ], to avoid the ceremonies of their churching’ (p. 15). The ‘thanksgiving’ purification ritual of churching following the birth of every child was believed by many who chose to separate to be a popish ceremony preserved from the days of Catholicism. Canne listed the practice among ‘seventy principal errors of the Church of England’, as ‘a horrible mocking of God’, and a contemporary separatist, Katherine Chidley, also condemned it as an excuse for ministers to demand fees: They will yet have another patrimony for the birth of that childe, for before the mother dare goe abroade, shee must have their blessing, that the Sun shall not smite her by day nor the Moone by night [Psalms 121:6];17 for which blessing of theirs, they must have an offering, and the like they require for all the children that be borne into this world, though there live not one of sixe to be men or women.18

To escape the charges of a clergy that they thought did not abide by scripture, both Hazzard and Chidley refused to be churched, Hazzard by moving to a parish controlled by her husband, and Chidley by flatly refusing.19 Terrill’s account, in its concentration on Hazzard’s life over that of the male founding members of her congregation, works to vindicate her behaviour, reclaiming it as the proper way for godly women to behave by obeying God above all others. 17  The churching service included words from Psalm 121. See David Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England’, Past and Present, 141 (1993), 106–46 (119). 18  John Canne, A Necessity of Separation from the Church of England (Amsterdam: [n. pub.], 1634), pp. 99–100, 244, quoted in Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England’, 125; Chidley, Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ, p. 57. See also William Coster, ‘Purity, Profanity, and Puritanism: The Churching of Women, 1500–1700’, in Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. by W. J. Shields and Diana Wood (London: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 377–87. 19  Katherine and her husband Daniel Chidley were active in a Shrewsbury conventicle in the 1620s and quarrelled with the rector of St Chad’s, Shrewsbury, Peter Studley. By 1626 the couple were among twenty people presented to the consistory court for nonattendance at church. Katherine was reported for refusing ‘to come to be churched after childbirth’ (LRO, B/C/1, B/C/5, B/C/2, Lichfield Diocesan Records). See Ian Gentles, ‘London Levellers in the English Revolution: The Chidleys and their Circle’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 29 (1978), 281–309; Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, pp. 75–85.

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Terrill attributed the reformation of the Broadmead Church’s practice to the influence of both Canne and Hazzard, comparing them to Aquila and Priscilla, the husband and wife who ‘expounded unto [Apollos] the way of God more perfectly’ (Acts 18:26), and listed twelve ways in which the congregation began to worship in the manner of the New Testament churches. ‘Showing them how they should join together, and take in members’ (p. 19), Canne taught the newly gathered congregation to cast off the ‘body of false doctrines of the church of Rome’, including the doctrines of transubstantiation and Arminianism (‘that man’s works merit salvation’ [p. 23]), and rejecting ‘the nest of idolaters’ (the clergy), but also the advocacy of saints’ days and praying for the deceased. Following Hazzard’s earlier example, they would no longer bow at the altars, pray with pictures or images, hear the Book of Common Prayer, nor ‘kneel at the sacrament, because the example in holy scriptures was sitting at the Lord’s Supper’ (p. 25). The practice of baptism, however, was to become a hotly debated point for the church during the 1640s and 1650s. Canne’s influence led the church to adopt the practice of believers’ baptism (first in the river, then in a font), but they also allowed the baptism of all newborn infants of believing parents like other separatist churches (p. 25).20 However, it was the church’s escape from Bristol to London during the Civil War, after the city fell to Royalist forces, which convinced them of believers’ baptism by immersion. In July 1643, Bristol was under siege by the Royalist forces led by Prince Rupert and surrendered by the parliamentary commander Nathaniel Fiennes. Fiennes was tried for his ‘Cowardly and Traytorly Surrendering of this City and Castle [ … ] in lesse then Three whole dayes Siege’, and among the witnesses at his trial appeared several members of the Broadmead congregation who were eager to continue to defend their godly city with their lives. One of these was Dorothy Hazzard, who showed herself to be a valiant Deborah as one of a group of women who ‘with the helpe of some men, did with Wool-sackes and earth, stop up Froome gate, to keepe out the Enemy from entring’.21 She then told the gunners that ‘if they would stand out and fight, they would stand with them’, her testimony highlighting that the women’s bravery far surpassed that of their commander. As part of the terms of surrender, the citizens of Bristol were allowed to walk free, though later ‘stripped and robbed in the country’ (p. 30) by Royalist soldiers. Many members of the Broadmead church, which likely included Hazzard and her family, headed for London to worship with the open-communion congregation at Allhallows, of which Anna Trapnel was a member, and William 20  The congregation experimented with ‘sprinkling’ the believer rather than ‘dipping’, and with allowing ‘women to do it [baptism], in case of necessity, as they called it, to seal their wills’ (p. 25). 21  A True and Full Relation of the Prosecution, Arraignment, Tryall, and Condemnation of Nathaniel Fiennes (London: Printed for Michael Sparke, senior, 1644), title page; second part, pp. 32–33. The work recounted that she had come to defend Bristol Castle bringing with her ‘above three moneths provision for our family there, and a great part of our Estate’ which were then seized by the Royalists.

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Kiffin’s Baptist church, then the congregation of Elizabeth Poole, where the new members underwent believers’ baptism according to the newly issued Baptist Confession of Faith (1644).22 On return to Bristol when the Royalists surrendered the city in September 1645 the congregation met together again to discuss their practices, concluding that ‘there was no ground for baptizing children, much less for sprinkling them; and, therefore, [that] they had not been rightly baptized, according to the scripture’ (p. 41). Such a conclusion was scripturally based, but would also have been attractive to a church seeking to reform their practices and recognise themselves apart from the unregenerate Royalists and Quakers that threatened their membership. The Broadmead Church’s exile from their city, sacked by their Royalist enemies, could easily be compared to an escape from the Babylonian hordes descending on Jerusalem because the people would not reform themselves (recorded in Jeremiah). Terrill’s comparison of the church’s flight to ‘passing through a Red Sea of blood by the wars’ (p. 8), where Moses led the people out of Egypt, indicates that members saw themselves as the godly children of Israel. Just as Pharaoh reneged on his promise to allow the Israelites to leave peacefully, so the people of Bristol were hounded by Royalist troops on their way to London. Dorothy Hazzard is also shown to play a leading military role in the defence of Bristol, a seventeenth-century Jerusalem, chastising her own Barak, Nathaniel Fiennes, for his inaction and cowardliness. This example, then, indicates that women were valued and celebrated members of such congregations, held up as leaders and saviours like Deborah, and were willing to put themselves in danger of severe persecution in order to uphold their beliefs and reform their practices. ‘How far women may speake in the church and how far not’: Female Speech in Baptist Meetings So far this chapter has shown that women were instrumental in founding and reforming their congregations, and were therefore compared with Deborah because of their bravery and leadership in spiritual matters. However, once these congregations became established, these male-authored comparisons with Deborah did not usually extend to a celebration of women’s judgement in doctrinal disputation; indeed, women’s speech inside the congregation was tightly controlled. Female congregational members, therefore, were in many ways remarkable, for not only were they transgressing by joining Baptist communities, as has been shown in Chapter 1, but they also had to fight to be able to speak and participate in their newly formed congregational groups. Baptists took their precedents for believers’ baptism from the New Testament, and this is also where  On the eve of the first Civil War, many members of the Welsh Independent Church of Llanvaches had fled to Bristol, because it was controlled by parliament, and subsequently joined the Broadmead Church; they also joined them on the journey to London. See Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, pp. 29–30; 94. 22

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they found examples of setting up gathered congregations, particularly in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul’s instructions to the church at Corinth. Paul mentions the positions of several women in the early church, including the respect he gave to Priscilla in her help founding the church (Acts 18:1–4, 18–28), but also the prominence he gave to women in the Roman Church, particularly Phoebe whose office was that of ‘a deacon’ (Romans 16:1–16). However, the seventeenthcentury gathered churches struggled to unite these examples with the message of Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 where he advocates absolute silence for women in the church, instructing any woman who wanted to learn to go home and ask their husband. In order to reconcile Paul’s seemingly contradictory teachings, congregations came to several different conclusions. Some believed women could speak outside the church (Anna Trapnel, for instance, is never recorded speaking in Allhallows but prophesied in bedchambers, an ordinary, and in prison). Others suggested Paul was asking only married women to keep silent, but unmarried women could participate. But, most commonly, congregations concluded that Paul’s recommendation of silence only applied to women’s speech that was not divinely inspired, because he permitted praying and prophesying with a veil in 1 Corinthians 11. 1 Timothy 2:11–12 also reinforced the instruction for women to be silent, and also includes theological argument to support women’s subordination: in the beginning, according to 1 Timothy, ‘Adam was not deceived’ by Satan, but ‘woman being deceived was in the transgression’ (2:14), to which John Bunyan made detailed reference in his A Case of Conscience Resolved (see Introduction). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Baptist churches often disagreed about what position women should occupy in their groups. For instance, the Broadmead church celebrated Dorothy Hazzard as a leader and adviser (comparing her to Deborah and Priscilla), and criticised women whose consciences were led by their husbands for their ‘meek nature’, which implies that strength of conscience was praised, and female deacons were appointed to care for members of the church. But despite this, as early as 1645, if a woman of the church had a ‘desire of understanding, any portion of scripture’ she had to ask a brother to relay her desire to the whole church for the ‘rest of the brethren’ to discuss it.23 The rest of this chapter, therefore, will outline some of the main controversies concerning Baptist women speaking in their congregations, but it will also highlight the comparisons women made with female Old Testament speakers, in order to explore the discrepancy between this practice and that of the New Testament churches. Given the contradictory views presented for women’s speaking in church in scripture, Baptist congregations clearly thought that they needed to pray for guidance for how their churches should proceed. On 4–6 June 1656 the Baptist Records of the Midlands Association, for instance, record the discussions of the representatives of various congregations meeting at Morton Hinmarsh, and set 23  The Records of a Church of Christ, Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, p. 53; p. 33. A brother could ‘propose his doubt of’ a portion of scripture or an interpretation of it, but women could only ‘desire of understanding’ it.

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down their approved rules on ‘how far women may speake in the church and how far not?’ taking their precedent from 1 Timothy 2:12: ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’24 Their rules stipulated four occasions where women’s ‘speaking shall shew a not acknowledging of the inferiourity of their sex and so bee a usurping of authority over the man’: a woman could not ‘publickely teach in the church’; she could not decide on ‘doctrines of cases in the church’; she ‘may not stand up as a ruler in the church’; and she could not ‘speak in prayer as the mouth of the church’. The occasions where women could speak in church ‘and not be found to offend against the rule of the apostle’ were listed below: [1.] if she desire to make a profession of her faith to the church [and] to expresse her desire to baptisme and communion with the church. 2. If shee bee a witnesse conserning the church admonition of one that the church is to deal with or must herselfe tell the matter to the churche according to the rule in Mt. 18.17. 3. If shee be sente from another church as a messenger she may deliver a message. 4. If shee have need of the church’s assistance in any things shee may impart her just desire and lay open her case to them. 5. If a woman have sinned and [been] cast out of the church and God hath given her repentance, undoubtedly shee may manifest it in the church.25

These five reasons were concerned with a woman testifying to her own virtue and election, or that of others (the precedent for which could be found in Matthew 3:6 where believers were baptised in the River Jordan, ‘confessing their sins’), but they were not permitted to debate doctrinal matters with the brothers of the church because this would not be in obedience to 1 Timothy’s strictures on the subordination of women to men. Regarding election, the congregations followed Galatians 3:28, ‘There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’, but in the day-to-day running of the church, women were to stay silent. What appears to have triggered these stipulations is the question of who could undertake ‘gospell prophesying in the church’, and, taking their precedent from  ‘Association Records of the Midlands to 1658’, AR, II: p. 28; These rulings were later taken up by the Abingdon Association on 30 March 1658 (‘Records of the Abingdon Association’, AR, III: p. 185. 25  ‘Association Records of the Midlands to 1658’, AR, II: p. 28. The Abingdon records added that women could also comment on a potential member’s request to enter the ‘church for communion’, if they knew something ‘which she judgeth doth render this person unfit for the same and which she conceives the church is ignorant of’ (‘Records of the Abingdon Association’, AR, III: p. 185). Crawford outlines the practice of women speaking in one of the earliest Baptist churches in Amsterdam led by Henry Robinson where they could ‘profess their faith, confess their sins, say Amen to prayers and sing Psalms. They could share also in church discipline by accusing or defending a brother who was accused of sin’. Women were also allowed to speak as prophetesses. See Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 122, citing Henry Robinson, A Just and Necessary Apology of Certain Christians ([Amsterdam: Successors of G. Thorp], 1625), p. 39; p. 52. 24

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1 Corinthians 14:3 (‘But he that prophesieth speaketh [ … ]’) and 1 Peter 4:10 (‘As every man hath received the gift [ … ]’), the congregation decided that only men had been given the gift of prophecy. The Baptist records of the West Country Association, however, did recognise that women had the capacity to prophesy though they should not be allowed to do so in the congregation, recorded in their discussion from March 1654: ‘A woman is not permitted at all to speak in the church, neither by way of praying, prophecying nor enquiring, [ … ], but if any have a gift, we judge they may exercise it in private, observing the rule mentioned, 1 Cor. 11.5.’26 This ruling of Paul’s stipulated that ‘every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head’, indicating that women show proper subjection to their ‘head’ (husbands and ministers) by wearing a veil. The West Country Association, ignoring Paul’s address to women prophesying publicly in the congregation at this point, rather than privately, appear to have preferred to be doubly sure that women’s utterances would not shame themselves or their gathered churches. The ferocity with which Baptist congregations defined the nature of women’s speech and activity within their congregations is a likely indication that before this women were participating in debates and discussion with more frequency.27 Joanna Dewey, in her commentary on 1 Timothy, suggests that it was composed for a similar reason: ‘The fact that the author spends so much time and effort to enjoin silence on Christian women suggests that the actual and accepted practice of women was active and vocal and that the author was attempting to change this behaviour.’28 In a similar way, the enforcement of wearing a veil in 1 Corinthians 11 suggests that women in the early churches were speaking under divine inspiration but disobeying the instruction to wear a veil to represent their difference and subordination to men as their ‘head’ (1 Corinthians 11:3). In the seventeenth-century churches, the idea of the veil would have also worked to reinforce gender hierarchy by both limiting female speech and by encouraging women to feel subordinate and shameful: indeed, the practice of wearing a veil in the Anglican churching ceremony was said to signify ‘subjection to superior power’, worn for decency’s sake, although it was considered by Puritans to be 26  ‘Association Records of the Particular Baptists of the West Country to 1659’, AR, II: p. 55. The differences between the West Country and Abingdon Associations, who were linked to the central London Baptists by messengers, ministers, and missionary activities, highlight that even in one church body (as the Baptists were moving towards by the late 1650s), the position of women provoked varying responses. 27  These attitudes have often been observed in the history of the Quaker movement. As Elaine Hobby writes, for instance, ‘When the Society of Friends metamorphosed from a fluid movement into an organized body, specific constraints with associated rights and duties were imposed on women members’ (‘Handmaids of the Lord and Mothers in Israel’, p. 89). 28  Joanna Dewey, ’1 Timothy’, in Women’s Bible Commentary: Expanded Edition with Apocrypha, ed. by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1998), pp. 444–49 (p. 446).

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a remnant of popery.29 A contemporary misogynistic pamphlet criticising the proliferation of women preachers in such congregations explained that in a woman’s ‘subjected estate, she was no more to weare her haire down along, as in the Creation, but to weare it tyed up for a covering’, seeing women’s subjection as a consequence of the Fall.30 For separatist and Baptist women alike, therefore, wearing a veil would have felt uncomfortable and humiliating, especially if the practice was being newly enforced. The records of an unnamed mid-1650s congregation are evidence to suggest that women actively contested strictures on their speaking, and that putting on a veil was enforced. One of its members, Anne Harriman, strongly objected to the newly established practice of restricting women’s speech in meetings.31 As a result, on January 1653/4 the congregation had gathered to discuss 1 Corinthians 14:34 in order to reach a decision regarding the behaviour of their female members, asking: ‘1. Whether Woemen may speak in ye Church? 2. What Woemen may speak? 3. What they may speak?’.32 Harriman had sent word that she would not be present at the debate because she knew she would be prevented from participating, indicating that restrictions on women had already been implemented: [Harriman] was not free to come to the meeting because that Bro: [Theodore] Naudin He would not well wth such as gave libertie to woemen to speak in ye Church ffor she would not walk where she had not libertie to speak. And therefore rather than Brother Naudin should withdraw, shee would withdraw. And this was but one of her Reasons for her Absence.33

It might be deduced from these events that women, like Harriman, had not always been denied their liberty to speak in the congregation, but the change in practice had been caused by Brother Naudin’s opinion that some women had been usurping their fellow members’ authority. The next three manuscript pages record a discussion concerning which women the apostle was referring to in 1 Corinthians 14:35 (‘And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church’). The brothers concluded that 14:34 excluded wives in particular from speaking, requiring them to ask  Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women in PostReformation England’, 133, citing Jacobean bishop Thomas Morton in William Ames, A Fresh Suit against Human Ceremonies in Gods Worship ([Amsterdam: Successors of G. Thorp], 1633), pp. 345–49. 30  A Spirit Moving in the Women-Preachers (London: Printed for Henry Shepheard and William Ley, 1646), p. 4. The pamphleteer writes that the only reason a woman’s hair should come down is if she is defending herself from censure. 31  The church is unnamed in the manuscript (Bod. MS Rawl. D828) but records disagreements between the leaders and Peter Chamberlen, a later leader of a London Baptist church. 32  Bod. MS Rawl. D828 fol. 28. The debate is recorded on fols. 28–32. 33  Ibid. 29

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their husbands privately (in case they showed ‘before all their infirmitie of the Tongue’). However, on consideration of who was being addressed in 1 Timothy 2, they concluded that ‘All Widdowes & Maydes that are not Prophetesses’ should also be restricted ‘becaus the Male hath naturally Dominion over the Female. & ye Femal hath naturally Weaknes & Subjection to ye Male’.34 The only occasion where women did have liberty to speak, therefore, was when prophesying, but they concluded that a prophetess, whether ‘a Woeman (Mayd, Wife, or Widdow) [ … ] may speake, Prophesie, Pray, wth a Vayl. Others may not’.35 Referring to 1 Corinthians 11:5, the congregation decided to limit women’s speech to prophesying with a veil inside the church, though they did not specify that this had to be done privately as had the West Country churches. Even limiting female utterance to prophesying was significant, however, because, as Erica Longfellow writes in her own work on the manuscript, ‘the “Weaknes & Subjection” of a woman’s speech were subsumed in the (male) authority of the spirit speaking through her’.36 The biblical Deborah’s function of judge and mediator were sidelined in favour of New Testament teaching. Whether Anne Harriman left her London congregation altogether is not recorded, but another woman who faced new restrictions on her position in her congregation, Susanna Parr, chose to leave her group, an Independent Church meeting in Exeter Cathedral, in order to return to the Anglican Church. Her narrative charts how women’s participation and autonomy within the congregation changed after she and eight or nine men had founded it at the advice of a Cornwall minister, Lewis Stucley, who later took over its ministry. She recorded that this new congregation first allowed women to speak on all occasions: As for women speaking, it was usually practiced among us by the rest of my sex. And it is well known that the power was pretended at first to be in the body of the people, in the multitude, so that everyone had the liberty of assenting or dissenting, of arguing and debating any matter proposed, whether men or women.37

As time went on, Parr began to notice practices in the congregation that she disagreed with, and initially Stucley encouraged her to ‘be faithfull unto them in minding them of what was amisse’ because ‘the time was now not to be ClosetProfessors’, speaking privately, but as one of the children of Israel, ‘to seek the Lord together, with our faces Zion-ward [Jeremiah 50:4–5]’ (p. 9). However, when Parr began to exercise her right to vote for the admission or dismissal of potential members, she was criticised by Stucley for opposing ‘severall persons in their Admission, who have beene knowne to be of approved godlinesse and integrity; and those who have beene most lyable to Exception, she hath most  Ibid., fol. 31.  Ibid., fol. 32. 36  Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, p. 161. 37  Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, p. 76. 34 35

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contended for’ (p. 71). Parr wrote that she had voted for the admission of one Agnes Pullen, despite the fact that the maid had been refused entry to the church for her ‘unwillingnesse to declare her Experiences in a publique meeting’ (p. 72).38 When the ‘Admission of members began to be in private’ Pullen applied again but was refused a second time because ‘some had a prejudice against her’ (p. 72). This prejudice, Parr wrote, combined with her sickly disposition and Stucley’s neglect of her in her illness, contributed to Pullen’s premature death. When Parr was told by Stucley that her speaking was ‘disrelisht; unless a question was proposed and I was desired to give my answer unto it’ (p. 13), and that any independent speech had to be relayed to the congregation ‘by a Brother; [ … ], promising likewise if I did speak by him, to deliver my words in the same manner as I spake them’ (p. 13), she began to reconsider her membership, also interpreting the death of one of her children as a sign that she should return to her previous church. Stucley’s own account of Parr’s behaviour recorded, contrary to her presentation of her modest behaviour because of her ‘Sex’ and her ‘naturall and sinfull infirmities, which made me unfit to speak unto others’ (pp. 9–10): [she] for a long time contend[ed] for women’s speaking in the Church, and being admonished for practising accordingly, she did openly professe, that she would not be present at Church meetings, when matters were debated, unless she might have that liberty, and being denyed, she ever since contemptuously neglected Church meetings, and slighted the officers of the Church.39

Parr’s response to Stucley’s defamatory text, and his later excommunication of her from the group, was to remind him of the way his congregation had treated Agnes Pullen, asserting that ‘if women were denied the liberty of speaking, how could they declare their Experiences: yea A. P. was kept off for refusing this’ (p. 77). Major changes in the congregation’s practice, as they sought to follow the example of the primitive churches more closely, appears to have alienated women who wanted the chance to speak in their groups and not feel ashamed that they were doing so. Susanna Parr was not alone in her criticism of Stucley’s treatment of women in his congregation. She found an ally in the form of an anonymous author known only by the initials ‘E. T’ who published Diotrephes Detected, Corrected, and  John Rogers advocated leniency in his Independent Dublin congregation: he allowed those who were ‘very unable to speake in publicke [ … ], as some Maids and others that are bashful’ to give ‘in private the account of faith’ to someone the church had appointed. Even if the congregation received ‘such broken and imperfect answers as they give’, Rogers maintained (in marked contrast to Stucley’s treatment of Agnes Pullen’s experiences) that ‘they be but words dropping sweetness, and savoring of grace, yet put together, may make weight, and will signifie something well-spelled’ (Ohel or BethShemesh, p. 291). 39  Lewis Stucley, Manifest Truth: or An Inversion of Truth’s Manifest (London, 1658), p. 43. 38

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Rejected in 1658. Although this pamphlet does not explicitly reveal whether the writer is male or female, Parr refers to the work as ‘a Bratherly admonition’ given to Stucley by an ‘unknowne author’ (p. 113), echoing the last page of E. T.’s work where it is signed ‘your Brother and Companion in the Kingdome’, and this is persuasive evidence that the pamphlet was male authored.40 The work is concerned with protecting women’s position in gathered congregations by setting out more clearly when they could speak themselves and when they should speak through a brother of the church. His rules correspond closely with the procedures set out by the Abingdon Association of Baptist churches, but he also is keen to communicate that a woman could speak to clear herself from censure, especially if it was undeserved, and could pray and prophesy on occasion. ‘When those Members’, E. T. wrote addressing Stucley, ‘did their Duty to Declare their Dissatisfaction with your Irregular Proceedings, you reproved them for speaking in Church, because Women must not speake in the Church’ (p. 4), but then goes on to outline ways in which the women should have been allowed to show their dissatisfaction. Women could ‘take you out of the Church, and shew you your Errour and set you right as Priscilla did [Acts 18:26]’; pray and teach others ‘of their own Sex, amongst themselves in their meetings together [Titus 2:4]’; if they had no husband at home, ‘or none capable to resolve them’, they could ‘ask any of the Brethren PRIVATELY (which is all one as to ask at Home,) who may after (when it is convenient) Speake for them in the Church that they may be satisfyed’ (although they still could not ‘Teach, or Prophecy, or Conferre, or Dispute PUBLIKELY’); speak at their own admission, and those of others; sing; be sent as messengers or recommended to other churches; speak if they have ‘an Extraordinary Gift of Prayer and Prophecy [1 Corinthians 11:5]’; and speak to clear themselves from any ‘Rash, Sudden, undeserved, unadvised, uncharitable and unjust Censure, Admonition or Reproofe Irregularly given them by the Church-Officer’ (pp. 5–7). E. T. makes a clear demarcation between public speaking in front of the gathered church, and private speaking outside to a male member, in a similar way to the advice of the West Country Association, but here a woman who has an ‘Extraordinary’ gift for prophesying and praying was able to do so in front of the church. Evidently the extent to which women were allowed to speak in their congregations depended on the attitudes of their ministers. E. T. also implied that Stucley, when he had taught previously in Cornwall, had become ‘very much ashamed to think how short [he] came of them [the women of Cornwall] in the Gift or Spirit of prayer’ (p. 5) and had experimented with allowing women to speak in his Cathedral congregation until he thought better of it. ‘Will you learn’, E. T. asked Stucley, ‘in what cases they may and ought to Speak, and wherein they should Sinne, if they speake not?’ (p. 6), urging him to examine scriptural precedents and take these as his example.

40  E. T., Diotrephes Detected, Corrected, and Rejected, and Archippus Admonished (London: Printed by M. S. for Henry Cripps, 1658), p. 18. Crawford suggests that E. T. was a female writer (Women and Religion in England, p. 249, n. 76).

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Parr’s congregation was certainly not the only gathered church that changed its views over the extent to which women could participate several years after its formation. By the mid-1640s, about five years after its formation, Hazzard’s Broadmead Church in Bristol had also introduced the practice of having a sister of the church speaking by way of a brother if they had any doctrinal doubts, and, of course, Anne Harriman’s congregation established a similar practice.41 Like Parr, Hazzard was the only founding female member of the church, and both had played an active role in attracting a suitable minister, but as soon as the churches began to grow in membership, the roles of women became more proscribed. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, as the purpose of founding a gathered church was to follow faithfully the example of the New Testament churches, but this does not wholly explain why women’s voices were gradually prohibited, given the examples of female biblical agency expressed by the Baptist women writers discussed in this book. Another explanation is hinted at by Edward Terrill in the Broadmead Church records, where the early congregation (including Hazzard as a leading member) was criticised for the behaviour of its women: the world and wicked men vilified them, [ … ], as that they had women preachers among them, because there were many good women, that frequented their assembling, who, when they should upon occasion be speaking with the world about the things thereof, in their buying and selling, they would speak very heavenly.42

It was several years after this that the practice of women speaking via male members was introduced, but this account shows earlier contemporary anxieties concerning the speech of Baptist women in the marketplace, in public. Speaking of the Lord in public rather than at home in private indicated that the women were straying into dangerous territory. Observers of sects like the Baptists, as shown in Chapter 1, noted that female members had a propensity to lasciviousness and rebelliousness, disobeying their husbands and fathers, but they also spoke about the dangers of allowing women to preach (or to discuss and debate the interpretation of scripture). Katharine Gillespie draws attention to the emerging ‘equation of religious toleration with the awful spectacle of women preachers’ because of ‘deeply entrenched prohibitions against the exercise of female religious authority’.43 The 1640s saw the publication of a number of misogynistic pamphlets attacking women preachers, making them symbols of the world turned upside-down. On 15 January 1646, for instance, there were petitions presented to the House of Commons against groups of women preachers who were said to cause ‘great Rents and Divisions in divers and sundry Families in and about the City’ (because of religious differences, but also because sectarian women were considered particularly lascivious, as discussed in Chapter 1), and some women  The Records of a Church of Christ, Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, p. 33.  Ibid., p. 11. 43  Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 11.

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were questioned ‘in relation to the women Preachers who stand committed to custody’.44 A Spirit Moving in the Women-Preachers, published a month later, was particularly anxious that female preachers (this ‘strange, new Feminine Brood’) were transgressing the rules of nature and usurping authority: Perhaps it had been much better and safer for me to have scorned to meddle with these silly frantick creatures [the women preachers], hereafter named, saying unto them with abominated indignation, as the Prophet Isa[iah] 30.22. speaks of the covering of superstitious Images, as unto a menstruous cloth, get thee hence. [ … ] no man would, or could rationally encounter their foolish, proud, vain-glorious insolencies, in presuming to advance themselves before, and over men, transgressing the rules of Nature, Modestie, Divinitie, Discretion, Civilitie, &c. in triumphing against Authoritie, contemning Lawes, and all things opposite unto their weak proceedings; [ … ] so by them [male preachers] they may attaine unto all their unlawful secret desires; most of them (for the most part) wearing breeches, and so draw and lead their husbands by the nose, which way they please, by degrees wasting their estates.45

The writer speaks of women in particularly insulting terms, linking women’s preaching with unscriptural practices (in Isaiah’s ruling against the use of icons) but also with the pollution and corruption of a rag used to catch menstrual blood. Mostly, however, the pamphlet is keen to highlight women’s usurping of authority, and their rebellious behaviour is shown to be symptomatic of societal breakdown caused by the separatist churches. From accounts like this it might be assumed that the accusations that women preached to congregations were used to tarnish the reputation of the newly formed separatist churches, but, for these accusations to have any weight, some women preachers must have gained a certain notoriety. John Collinges, a congregational minister who published Mary Simpson’s death-bed testimony in 1649, was anxious that she not be accused of being a female preacher because she advised visitors to her bedside. He wrote: ‘I meane not that she was a Pulpit-preacher, No, God had taught her to be wise to sobriety, [ … ], as Priscilla & Aquila, by privately instructing others in the wayes of God [Acts 18:26].’46 Anna Trapnel also spoke from the confines of a bedchamber in 1654, though prophesying rather than instructing, and was accused by the Cornish clergy of setting ‘open my chamberdoors and my windows for people to hear’. Her defence was that she was entitled to ‘pray with many people in the room’, especially because ‘I know not that there  ‘House of Commons Journal, 15 January 1646’, JHoC, 4: pp. 407–08; Friday 23 January 1645/6 (22–29 January), A Diary, or an Exact Journall (London: Printed for Matthew Walbancke, 1646), A2v. 45  A Spirit Moving in the Women-Preachers, pp. 2–3. 46  Mary Simpson and John Collinges, Faith & Experience: or, A Short Narration of the Holy Life and Death of Mary Simpson (London: Printed for Richard Tomlins, 1649), p. 67. 44

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is any body in the room when I pray’, and denied that she had spoken publicly.47 Both Collinges and Trapnel were certainly aware of the contemporary distrust of women preachers, and of the need for women to speak privately, although Trapnel’s prophecies at other times were given in more public places. Reports of this type, however, suggest that a growing anxiety over women speaking publicly could have led to congregations tightening up their rules in order to protect themselves from further censure. The proliferation of pamphlets denouncing female preachers would certainly have influenced the evolution of Baptist church policy. Under the commonwealth, the groups were debating and refining their practices in a period of relative freedom, and some churches appear to have gradually realised that in order to preserve the churches they needed to distance themselves from women’s radicalism, practised by the emerging Quaker movement, and the Fifth Monarchists (who held the millenarian belief that in the last days, ‘your sons and your daughters will prophesy’ (Joel 2:28)). Indeed, although Baptist churches all required women to profess their faith (and hence the evidence of their election), it tended to be those with ministers sympathetic to millenarian beliefs characteristic of the Fifth Monarchists that allowed and even encouraged women to prophesy, although this seems to have rarely occurred inside the congregational space. For the millenarian John Rogers, a minister of an Independent congregation in Dublin who later became a leading Fifth Monarchist, women were to be ‘equal members’ of the group so that the sexes would not ‘contend and differ’ and distract themselves from their purpose, which was to establish a godly community, but he advised women to be careful not to invoke the ire of the ‘Furies and Harpies’ outside the congregation.48 Writing in 1653, a year before Trapnel’s prophetic activity outside Whitehall, Rogers cited Galatians 3:28 (‘[ … ]there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’), scriptural evidence that some women ‘surpass[ed] men for piety and judgement’ (including Abigail, the Queen of Sheba, Priscilla, the Canaanite woman, Mary Magdalene, Jael, Deborah, Lois and Eunice, Lydia, the Shunamite woman, the Samaritan woman, Manoah’s wife, and Mary the mother of Jesus), and that ‘the Kingdome of heaven is compared to a woman, and Christs Church is called his wife and spouse. Rev. 19. Cant. 2’, to prove women’s ‘just liberty in the Church of Christ’ (p. 474). Rogers still forbade women ‘to speak by way of Teaching, or Ruling in the Church’ (p. 294), but allowed them ‘common ordinary liberty due to them as members of the Church, viz. to speak, object, offer, or vote with the rest’ (p. 475), beliefs that Erica Longfellow cites as ‘unusually liberal’.49 With regard to prophecy, Rogers believed that in the near future,  Trapnel, Report and Plea, p. 28.  Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh, p. 463. Rogers devoted the eighth chapter of his

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work, ‘Pupilla: That in the Church all the Members, even the Sisters as well as Brothers, have a right to Church-affairs’, to arguing that women should have equal fellowship with men. 49  Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, p. 159.

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‘handmaids shall prophecy, and have more publick liberty then now they have’, arguing that 1 Corinthians 7:6 indicated Paul’s advice was for ‘prudence, not any positive command of Gods’, only to prevent confusion in those times (p. 476).50 To keep order, therefore, Rogers advised women not to fully exercise their liberty before they had got used to having it: ‘Your silence may sometimes be the best advocate of your orderly liberty [ … ] spirits that run too high at first, may soon fall into disorder, and irregularity’ (p. 476). Such utterances from women would also provoke the scorn of detractors outside of the congregation (and may have provoked remarks from existing members), so Rogers recommended a gradual increase in their activity: [Some liberty] may be lawfull to you, that is not (as yet) expedient for you; and rather then run into disorder and confusion, hold your liberty a little in suspense, and wave it on some occasions wherein you lawfully may, but lose it not for all the world which Christ payed so great a price for, and prepare for fairer gales. As the Miller does, for though he cannot command the winde, yet he will spread his [windmill] sailes out, and open them in a readinesse, when he is in hopes of its coming; and so do you, and when the winde blows (which begins) your liberty with full sailes shall bring forth abundantly to serve all the countrey round. (p. 477)

Rogers clearly recognised that the time had not come when women could make full use of the liberty allowed them by scripture, but he recommended that in the meantime they prepare for ‘fairer’ times, by contributing to congregational meetings. The ‘wind’, an attribute of the Holy Spirit given to the apostles in Acts 2:2, ‘begins’ to blow women’s liberty, and if they continued to exploit their liberty then they would serve ‘all the countrey round’ with the fruits of the Spirit in their prophecies. Instead of women’s liberty leading to wantonness and shame (as was insinuated by critical contemporaries), Rogers appears to be advocating such freedom so that divisions are avoided in marriages and the congregation itself which would lead to scandal. Rogers’s advice to his congregation is an example of how a minister responded to the needs of his group, but also those outside his congregation, in settling the question of women’s liberty to speak. Women were not given positions of leadership in Rogers’s congregation, but their abilities and entitlement to speak and discuss were recognised, rather than restricted to utterances that were divinely inspired. However, as this chapter has so far shown, Rogers did not hold views typical of Baptist groups more generally, which produced female-authored texts arguing for their own judgement to be accepted, valued, and encouraged.

50  James Holstun highlights that ‘Rogers also contradicts himself – but rapturously, not anxiously’ by making ‘patriarchal concession[s]’ and then qualifying them with restrictions: Ehud’s Dagger, pp. 260–61.

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‘For Sion’s sake be not silent’: Women’s Responses So far, this chapter has explored women’s part in the formation and growth of the gathered churches alongside the introduction of tighter controls on women’s speech and behaviour. How, then, did ‘valiant Deborahs’ find a voice in congregations needing guidance that did not permit their speech? The next part of this chapter, therefore, will consider two particular women’s works that attempt to justify women’s ability to prophesy: the prophetic songs and conversion narrative of Katherine Sutton and the published advice of Sara Jones. Both women were aware that they were denied liberty to speak by certain biblical precedents: Jones acknowledged that women were not allowed to speak in church, but claimed the role of Deborah stepping in to rouse her male co-religionists in a speech before her congregation, and Sutton recounted how God had punished her when she had not revealed the prophecies he had given her to her gathered church. Both works defended women’s speech, judgement, and their ability to write, despite the restrictions placed upon both these activities, showing that to receive the spirit but not communicate it was a sin. As Erica Longfellow writes, ‘the Calvinist emphasis on the examination of experience meant that all Christians, men and women, were meant to test their faith in action, to question and to debate’.51 It may not be a coincidence that these two works defending women’s utterances were published in times of particular adversity, Jones’s following the persecution of separatists by Archbishop William Laud in the 1630s, and Sutton’s soon after the Act of Uniformity, and, more importantly for Baptists aligned with the Fifth Monarchists, soon after Thomas Venner’s unsuccessful rising against Charles II in 1661. Conditions in England led Sutton to escape to Rotterdam, likely following the example of her Baptist and Fifth Monarchist minister Hanserd Knollys who had been imprisoned after the rising. In such uncertain times, women fount apt parallels with Deborah, the prophetess who led her people to victory. Persecution from outside the gathered churches highlighted both the group’s shortcomings and the nation’s disobedience to Sutton and Jones, their speech becoming necessary to alert their co-religionists to God’s will: to stay silent, they wrote, would be a sin. Katherine Sutton’s conversion narrative, titled A Christian Womans Experiences (1663), clearly aligns sin and its manifestation in bodily suffering with silence and reluctance to share what God had made known to her through the Holy Spirit, proving the necessity of prophesying from what was visited on her own body. After her separation from the established church, Sutton had travelled ‘over the Sea’ to ‘injoy further and fuller communion with [God] himself in his ordinances’ (p. 10) free of Laudian persecution in England. While there she lost a child, and experienced ‘such a distemper that my joints and sinnews were by fits bound up’ causing many to think she was beyond medical help, before her faith and the prayers of her congregation were believed to have saved her. Sutton’s identification with the bleeding woman who touches the hem of Jesus’s garment believing it  Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, p. 159.

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will cure her, in Mark 5:25–34 and Matthew 9:20–22, suggests that she may have been suffering from post-partum bleeding and other complications following her child’s birth.52 The woman’s impurity in her illness, as well as her gender, made her doubly marginalised, but Jesus knew that she, unlike other members of the crowd, had touched him with unwavering faith, and it was Sutton’s faith that assured her she was one of the elect and that was why she was healed. After another of her children died, she struggled to reconcile her belief that God was punishing her with her own election, but came to wish that ‘all afflictions might be sanctified rather then removed, and that by all I might be made more conformable unto Jesus Christ’ (p. 11). Her pastor compared God to a wood carver, choosing a ‘pleasant and convenient’ tree that he ‘chops, & hacks and makes an Arbour to sit in for his delight’ (p. 11), an image that Sutton continued to draw on as she felt God ridding her of sin and temptation, so that she became a fit vessel for his Spirit. Because the nature of prophesying meant having one’s own agency taken over by God’s, weakness and humility were required in order to receive the Holy Spirit. Women were therefore more likely to prophesy: as Elizabeth Clarke writes, ‘humility and weakness called forth the Holy Spirit to produce a divine strength in the believer’.53 She received prophecies from God that chastised her disobedient nation, promising that his chosen people would not be troubled by ‘those great and publique calamities, which were coming’ (p. 18), but she neglected to tell her congregation of these promises because she was not sure if it would ‘be born[e]’ (p. 21), for which God punished her with more afflictions. Proof that she should ignore her congregation’s strictures on her prophesying came in the form of a song, alluding to Psalms 30 where David advocates praising the Lord for his goodness: the Geneva gloss on Psalmes 30:1 reads, ‘he condemneth them of great ingratitude, which do not praise God for his benefites’. It declares: Cease thou thy mourning, and see thou dost praise, For thou shalt do my will in all my wayes: Thy work shall be praises now for to sing, Because thou hast chosen Christ to be thy King. Lift up your heads, redemption draweth near, Do not at all possess thy heart with fear: Lift up your heads, and look to heaven high; For God will make his people glorify. Draw water from the wells that are so deep: You shall drink flaggons of my love, when others are asleep. (p. 21)

In this prophecy, God is clearly and forcefully telling Sutton to do his will in everything, even if it meant singing in front of her congregation who disapproved of such a practice: her work is to sing the Lord’s praises, echoing Psalm 30:4 (‘Sing unto the LORD, O ye saints of his’), and witness to others how she has been healed  I am grateful to Sara Read for this observation.  Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs, p. 4.

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of her afflictions, just as David claimed that ‘I cried unto thee, and thou has healed me’ (Psalm 30:2). Sutton placed herself within the prophetic tradition, drawing links between herself and David, and persuading her congregation that she had received an irresistible gift of the spirit which she was compelled to proclaim to others: to ignore this would be great ingratitude indeed. Sutton’s extempore songs also draw on the prophetic tradition of Deborah for the manner in which they are given and recorded, in ‘song’ (Judges 5:12), and for their content, which urges the people of God to resist their enemies. Her penultimate song begins ‘Awake, awake, put on my strength’, drawing on Isaiah 52:1 where Jerusalem is urged to ‘put on thy strength’ and ‘put on beautiful garments’ by the Lord, for it would no longer be threatened by a ‘wicked tyrant, who will subvert Gods true religion, & oppresse the consciences’ as the Geneva gloss has it. Jerusalem, a ‘captive daughter of Zion’ (Isaiah 52:2), is told to put off her sorrow and ‘arise’ and make herself glad, in a similar fashion to Deborah’s own song: ‘Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song’ (Judges 5:12). Sutton’s song is directed, of course, to the persecuted saints during the Restoration, but could also be addressed to anyone preventing her from proclaiming the word of God. Indeed, the last allusion in her account is to Micah 6:8 (‘What doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’), which urges her readers to examine whether they were obeying God’s commandments correctly. In Judges, if Deborah’s voice had not been heard then the Israelites would not have won their war. Though Sutton never mentions Deborah by name, as Michelle Osherow has written, ‘references to her behaviors and rhetorical practices are evident’ in women’s prophetic writing.54 Unlike Anna Trapnel’s 1657/8 prophecies that frequently draw on Deborah’s song to justify prophetic activity, Sutton preferred to justify her singing and prophesying using precedents from the New Testament, because it was where closed-communion Baptists justified the organisation of their churches, especially adult baptism. The prophecies that Sutton produced, however, draw on rhetorical strategies of the Old Testament prophecies and Revelation. The last couplet of ‘Cease thou thy mourning’ is also significant for Sutton as a woman witnessing to the power and love of the Lord, alluding to the Samaritan woman to whom Christ promises ‘living water’ before she leaves to bear witness to him as the Messiah (John 4:1–42). Like the bleeding woman, the Samaritan woman was ostracised from Jewish society because the Samaritans were enemies of the Jews, and because she is often interpreted as a sinner because Jesus tells her the man she ‘now hast is not thy husband’ (John 4:18). Both women were cultural outsiders, which indicates that Sutton might have identified with them because she was a member of a congregation forced to flee to the continent in 1663, but also because this group may not have permitted her to speak or sing freely. Both biblical women are seen, above all, to express their unwavering faith in Jesus as the Messiah, and his ability to cure and forgive, but the Samaritan woman hears  Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 95.

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Jesus say that ‘God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth’ (John 4:24) before she goes away and bears witness to others. Sutton explains this passage, writing that Christ here ‘promised us the pouring out of the Spirit, to teach us all things: and to bring all things to our remembrance’ (p. 24), intending that she would witness to Christ as the Samaritan woman had done before her: Jesus chose to speak to her, despite his disciples’ apparent amazement, recorded in John 4:27. Similar attitudes to women communicating with the Lord were obviously still in place in Sutton’s congregation throughout the 1650s or else she would not have needed to defend her gift of singing. Her inability to express herself in front of the group led to the Lord afflicting her because she was not brave enough to speak: after a ‘great fit of sickness’ she asked God’s mind and he showed her ‘it was because I did not declare to the Church with whom I walked; those things he had made known unto mee’ (p. 20). When she ‘could not tell how to keep in these things any longer’, she went to her congregation to declare it to them but ‘could not find him that I would have spoken of it unto, for him to declare unto the rest, so I returned, and did it not’ (p. 20). The practice of a woman speaking to a particular male member for him to declare it to the church is presented as flawed because it does not allow God’s word to be heard: at another time Sutton could only declare part of her prophecy because she was afraid ‘it would not be suffered’ by some of the group (p. 21). In the accounts of the biblical women, the male disciples are shown to be amazed at the relationship between Christ and the ostracised women, and Sutton parallels these men with those in her own congregation who refused to recognise her relationship with God because she was female. At the end of her work, Sutton includes an address to the reader which defends both the publishing of her prophecies and her ability to prophesy, and her femininity in particular. She directs her reader to ‘pass by what is of the flesh’ (her female appearance) and ‘Own what is of the spirit, and judg not’, assuring them that ‘if it was not out of obedience to God, it should not have com’d to your view’ (p. 40). Christ, she says, ‘did not reject the woman though weak, ignorant, and sinful; and where he hath forgiven much, he maketh them love much, and follow him to the last’ (p. 40). Sutton claims feminine ‘weakness’ and ‘sinfulness’ are the very qualities that God looks for in a vessel for his Spirit, drawing attention to the example of Mary Magdalene’s witnessing the risen Christ, because she had followed him ‘to the last’. As Sutton observes, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see Christ after his resurrection, as recorded in Matthew, Mark, and John, and was therefore charged with bringing ‘the first glad tidings of the Gospel of the resurrection unto the Disciples’ (p. 40), who, significantly, dismissed her words at first: women, Sutton argued, were required to ‘honour him as well as men’ as the ‘free grace of God’ was granted both ‘to the one as the other’ (p. 41), and their words should not be dismissed. Sinfulness, she wrote, was not a bar to the ability of women to witness to Christ:

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Poorness and ignorance are shown to be beneficial qualities for receiving the gift of eternal life, but these two biblical examples show, in particular, that both women were unafraid of speaking with Christ – indeed the Samaritan woman questions him on theological matters – and that gender and social boundaries are rejected by Christ. Both women are granted ‘free grace’ in the ‘guift of the well of water’, extremely symbolic for Baptists. Whereas Baptist congregations taught that women should be treated differently from men in a congregational environment, Sutton highlights examples that show women displaying the marks of discipleship in witnessing to God and sharing the good news, often surprising Jesus’s chosen disciples. For Sutton, discipleship involved receiving the Holy Spirit and communicating this to others, but, as the previous part of this chapter has shown, many congregation members were sceptical of prophecy, especially when it was practised by women. Even Sutton’s prefatory writer, the Baptist minister Hanserd Knollys, included a section justifying prophesying in song using scripture which echoed her arguments contained in the body of the work.55 Evidently, even though some ministers were in favour of women prophesying, they still had to defend their utterance to a wider Baptist readership and to a less radical reading public. Knollys intended the publication of the work for his readers’ ‘edification’ (*2), setting out several scriptural precedents for singing with the spirit, including 1 Corinthians 14:12– 15, which specified that spiritual gifts should be for ‘edifying of the church’, and Colossians 3:16, which advised the church to ‘teach and admonish one another 55  Whilst Sutton’s work does not make clear whether Knollys had always been her minister, his support of visionary women (he was a friend of the prophetess Anne Wentworth before she disagreed with his church), and his expression of radical ideas leading him to be identified with the Fifth Monarchists at the Restoration, would have encouraged Sutton to follow him to Holland. Following his imprisonment in the aftermath of Venner’s failed rebellion (encouraged by his inflammatory sermons at Allhallows, the London centre of radical sectarian activity), Knollys was briefly imprisoned and fled to Holland, moving on to Germany, before travelling back to London via Rotterdam in 1663/4 (where Sutton’s work was published). See Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 61.

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in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs’. Readers that were members of other Baptist churches might have found the association of prophesying and teaching uncomfortable if women were involved, but Knollys appears to have followed Romans 12:6–7 (‘Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith’) that ‘Prophecying and Preaching’ were different ordinances: prophesying would naturally involve teaching because it was communicating God’s word, but it was God’s agency that moved the female prophet, not her own.56 Given the prominence of hymns during the Civil War and interregnum ‘to tell the divine and glorious story of Parliament and the nation’s deeds as driven and rewarded by providence’, especially reverting to the ‘model’ of Deborah in producing a ‘victory song’, it is perhaps unsurprising that Sutton and Knollys, both defeated and disenfranchised abroad, should defend the practice.57 ‘With their attachment to spontaneity, sincerity, and freedom of action’, Sharon Achinstein writes, ‘hymn writers and singers also made a political gesture’ by announcing ‘their resistance to the mandated forms of the state church’.58 Sutton was particularly keen to show that her songs were ‘not studied things, but are given in immediately’ (p. 44) proving both that they came from divine inspiration, and a resistance to the empty formalism of the re-introduction of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662. Indeed, as a Fifth Monarchist sympathiser, Knollys prayed that a ‘Spirit of praise’ would ‘ere long be powred forth upon the sons and daughters of Zion’ (*2v) according to the promise made in Joel 2:28 (‘your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’), which confirmed both his approval of female prophetic activity, and his belief that Sutton’s prophecies foresaw terrible calamities, as had Joel’s, that would descend on an unrepentant nation. Sutton’s prophecies are written in the manner of Joel, urging, ‘Oh! England, England, take heed thou dost not smart’ (p. 14) as early as 1655, and later prophecies declared that disasters would be visited upon the land, while God’s people (including his prophetesses) would be saved. Her outpourings, therefore, were political songs of resistance to the Restoration as well as published reassurances to the exiled saints. In her own work, Sutton identified herself with the apostles receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, an event which fulfilled the promises of Joel that men and women would prophesy in the latter days. It was after reading this chapter, where the apostles are given the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and begin to form their church, that she prayed to the Lord to ‘pour out of his blessed Spirit upon mee’ (p. 12), making her into a disciple of the Lord. Despite the apostles all being male, in Acts 2:17–18 Peter recalled Joel’s words that God would pour out his spirit on his ‘servants’ and ‘handmaidens’ who would prophesy, recorded by 56  Hanserd Knollys, The Life and Death of that Old Disciple of Jesus Christ (London: Printed for John Harris, 1692), p. 51. 57  Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 215. 58  Ibid., p. 212.

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Sutton as proof of women’s ability to receive the Spirit. In these latter days, before the Day of Judgement, Joel prophesied the breakdown of traditional hierarchies so that women and servants could communicate the word of God, but he also indicated that there would be natural signs in the heavens. Sutton saw and recorded these signs, or ‘light appearances’, in order to support her own prophetic activity: And it was so when the spring came on, then began that sickness of agues and feavours, that have continued ever since, little or much, and there followed two dry summers one after another, and also we had many light appearances; but they set in dark shadows, till Christ our light shall appear, and in great mercy take away and remove our dark and sad afflictions and sorrows; well now, I was at last so moved in my spirit, that I could not tell how to keep in these things any longer, and therefore went to the Church to that end, but I then could not find him that I would have spoken of it unto, for him to declare unto the rest, so I returned, and did it not. (p. 20)

Sutton’s observations of ‘wonders in heaven above’ and ‘signs in the earth beneath’ (Joel 2:19), where the sun is ‘turned into darkness’ (Joel 2:20) are signs of preparation for Christ’s return, and support her ability to prophesy. Her congregation, by impeding her words, were preventing God’s preparations and ignoring the practices of the apostles undertaken at the first foundations of the primitive Christian churches. Sutton closes her work by advising those with too much ‘spiritual pride’, who are ‘puffed up with self conceite’, and ‘judg all others to be in errors, who are not just of their perswasion; and so to judge censure, and condemne them for Heretikes: and to persecute them at least with the tonge’, to practise charity and ‘wait for the teachings of the Spirit, and for the accomplishment of that promise made to the last dayes’ (pp. 38–39). Baptist congregations, she wrote, should be open to the teachings of the Spirit, whatever vessel, male or female, rich or poor, it filled. Being ‘unacquainted with such things’ (p. 20) was not an excuse as it was clearly written in scripture. Unlike Sutton’s prophetic activity, which emphasised her passive receipt of divine inspiration over her own independent judgement, Sara Jones’s published work is very different (and, in the context of surviving women’s publications, much less typical). Jones’s earlier prophetic writings (which are presumably a record of words spoken to her congregation) draw more explicitly on the strength and validity of Deborah’s speech as well as her independent ability to judge and advice. Perhaps attributable to an earlier climate where congregational rules were not as strict, Jones appears to preach without the modest apologies characteristic of Sutton’s work, and with only brief reference to the Lord’s speaking through her. Like Deborah’s song, Jones’s latest extant work was composed at a time when God’s people were undergoing persecution for their faith. The Relation of a Gentlewoman long under the persecution of the Bishops, was ‘printed at the cost of S. J. for her owne use and her private friends’ in 1642, but internal evidence indicates that the first half of the work was written between 29 November and 3 December 1632 after she and forty-two members of her separatist congregation

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were arrested by the Court of High Commission on Sunday 29 April for unlawfully meeting at the house of Humphrey Barnet, a brewer.59 Later, her pastor, John Lathrop, and her husband, named in the congregational records as ‘Mr Jones’, were added to those incarcerated.60 Many of the members were called to answer to the court convened by Archbishop Laud and swear the oath ex officio: according to the court proceedings, Sara Jones appeared twice, spiritedly refusing to take the oath, claiming she was ‘afraid to take Gods name in vaine’.61 In this time of persecution, the congregation’s records also indicate that female members were active in defending themselves against the prelates’ slanderous accusations: ‘in that time ye Lord opened their mouths so to speak at ye High Commission & [St] Pauls & in private even ye weake Women as their Subtill & malicious Adversarys ware not able to resist but ware asshamed.’62 Such dire straits seemingly provoked unconventional measures, leading Jones to produce the first half of her work which she ‘spake and writ [ … ], being a sufferer with the fortie; we being blamed, and counted not able (through ignorance) to defend the way we walked in, I strained my self to declare my judgement thus farre, as time would permit me’ (p. 2). The exact circumstances of the work’s delivery to the congregation are unclear, but its succinct, forceful, and repetitive phrasing indicates that Jones’s writings either had their origins in speech, were meant to be read aloud, or both. Certainly the frequent interjections of ‘I say to you’, accompanied by numerous allusions to breaking her silence, and defence of prophetic activity, suggest that this was spoken in front of her congregation in order to advise them on uniting and supporting each 59  The congregation’s own account of the persecution of their members in 1632, written originally by their minister Henry Jessey and transcribed by Benjamin Stinton, is printed in Whitley, ed., ‘Records of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church, 1616–1641’, in TBHS (1908–09), pp. 203–25. The records include a reference to writings produced by the congregation during this time, including ‘the Answers of Mrs Jones & Some others in yt time of their Sufferings are not yet Extent for ye Comfort and Encouragement of others’, ‘Sarah Jones her Grievances given in & read openly at ye Commission Court’, and ‘Her Cronicle of Gods remarkable Judgments & dealings that Year’ (pp. 217–18). Jones was later fined £3,000 ‘for publishing certain fanatical pamphlets’ (CSPD, 1634–1635, p. 112), but none are extant from this period. Jones’s writings were confiscated again in 1640 (The Relation, p. 55). 60  Whitley, ed., ‘Records of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church’, p. 215. The first half of Jones’s work, ‘To all the Builders of Sion’ (pp. 3–49), dates from December 1632, and the second, ‘To all the Scattered Saints’ (pp. 50–71) from between late 1640 and 1642. 61  Bod. MS Rawl. A.128, reprinted in Stephen R. Gardiner, ed., Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission (Westminister: Camden Society, 1886), 11: pp. 278–80, 281–86, 292–95 (p. 292). Jones also appeared in front of the High Commission on 12 June and 16 October 1634 (CSPD, 1634–1635, p. 176, p. 267), and on 21 April 1640 (Whitley, ed., ‘Records of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church’, p. 224). See Rachel Adcock, ‘“As shee preachers hold forth Christ”: Writing and Speaking in Sara Jones’s Challenge to Episcopacy, The Relation of a Gentlewoman (1642)’, 33:1 (2011), 1–18. 62  Whitley, ed., ‘Records of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church’, pp. 215–16.

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other in times of hardship. Despite Jones’s congregation’s seeming tolerance of women speaking in front of the group, she continued to argue for the participation of women in gathered congregations, especially in the second half of the work, written in 1642. By 1642, Jones’s congregation was under the care of Henry Jessey because its previous minister, John Lathrop, had left to be a pastor in New England, and she used Jessey’s inadequacies in order to support the urgent publication of her work. The title page of a later treatise of hers, To Sions Virgins (1644), indicated that Jones had not accepted her new minister, as she neglected to mention his name alongside previous leaders Henry Jacob and Lathrop, and prayed that in the future God would ‘give more liberty and Pastours according to his own heart’:63 the congregation under Jessey was mixed communion which Jones, as a paedobaptist, strongly disagreed with. Jones’s treatise cited Jessey’s laxity as the reason for breaking her previously held silence, comparing herself to the prophetess Deborah who encouraged Barak to go to war against King Jabin of Canaan and his captain Sisera. Jones reminds Jessey, and other ministers, of their duty to their persecuted congregations: I would some more honored uncovered head and stronger hand, would digest, chew the cud, and breake these things in a more ample manner; O that some worthy Baruch would goe forth with valiant Deborah, and set the Armies of Jehovah in order, even the fellowships of the Saints, [ … ], such well ordered Armies the friends of Christ, I beleeve will doe more service, than the scattered Armies out of order, knowing not who are friends, nor who are enemies. (p. 64)

The purpose of Jones’s Relation was to set her congregation in ‘order’, outlining the offices of each member, including elders, male and female deacons, writers, prophets, and male and female lay members in order to combat persecution from without. Though her minister’s hand is ‘stronger’, and he is ‘honoured’ by 1 Corinthians 11:5 to pray or prophesy with his head ‘uncovered’, he, and other male members in authority, were neglecting their office: how could the congregation do the Lord service, the type specified by 1 Corinthians 12:14 (‘For the body is not one member, but many’), if their offices were not explained to them? Male inactivity therefore enabled female speech, as in the example of Barak’s reluctance to pursue Sisera in Judges 4:8, as God sent his spirit to prophetesses to rouse their male coreligionists into action. Deborah’s disapproval, and mockery, of brethren ‘who did not come to God’s aid in the battle against Sisera’ were noted in several earlymodern works, as Osherow has shown, though such disapproval was satirised by contemporary pamphleteers.64 A Discovery of Six Women-Preachers, published a year earlier than Jones’s Relation, complained that women’s 63  Sara Jones, To Sions Virgins: or A Short Forme of Catechisme of the Doctrine of Baptisme ([London: n. pub.], 1644), A1. 64  Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 92.

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onely reason or cause of preaching was, that there was a deficiency of good men, wherefore it was but fit, that vertuous women should supply their places, they were (men they did mean) good for nothing, but to make their texts good by expounding the language of the Beast, but they themselves would preach nothing, but such things as the spirit should move them.65

Jones clearly took her office seriously, believing that God had moved her with his spirit to save her congregation from its oppressors, Laud and Charles (Sisera and King Jabin). She urged her fellow believers to band ‘themselves together with spirituall weapons, and drive that Antichristian beast into some Jaels Tent’ (p. 65), referring to Sisera’s fate at the hands of Jael where she drove a tent peg through his temple.66 By 1642, Laud had been imprisoned in the Tower accused of High Treason (to be executed in 1645), and Jones envisages the ability of female speech to make those he persecuted victorious. While also justifying her speech by referencing Deborah’s precedent, Jones was well aware of New Testament strictures, particularly 1 Corinthians 14:34, arguing (with several congregations mentioned earlier in this chapter) that such restrictions did not apply if a woman was prophesying (as God was speaking through her). The Geneva gloss on Judges 4:4 confirmed the early modern belief that Deborah was a prophetess, ‘by ye Spirit of prophecie, resolving of controversies, & declaring ye wil of God’, and so did 1 Corinthians 11:4–5, where both men and women are said to prophesy, women with their heads covered. Believing herself a prophet, Jones writes that she thought to be silent, but beleeving the Lord will do well to Sion, I therefore speak, and for Sions sake I dare not hold my peace [Isaiah 62:1]. Now though women may not speak in Church, I beleeve they may speak for edification to the Church [1 Corinthians 14:3]. (p. 54)

Jones’s allusion to Isaiah 62:1 (‘For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace [ … ]’) adds to her identification with Deborah, the Geneva gloss on this place explaining that ‘the Prophet speaketh to incourage all other ministers to the setting forth of Gods mercies toward his Church’. In Isaiah 62:6, God proclaims through his prophet that he has ‘set watchmen [glossed as prophets, pastors, and ministers] upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the LORD, keep not silence’. In light of this command, Jones claims the right to prophesy in order to teach her fellow congregation members. Although 1 Corinthians 14:3 (‘But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men for edification, and exhortation, and comfort’) uses only the personal pronoun ‘he’ consistently throughout the passage, and precedes the command for women  A Discovery of Six Women-Preachers, A2.  Katharine Gillespie points out that Katherine Chidley’s Justification, written a

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year earlier in 1641, uses this violent biblical story on its title page to provoke similar comparisons in the minds of its readers (Domesticity and Dissent, pp. 82–83).

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‘to keep silence in the churches’ (1 Corinthians 14:34), Jones uses it to justify her speaking.67 She repeatedly refers to her work ‘edifying the body’, utilising the church/body metaphor prevalent in 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4:12 (‘for the edifying of the body of Christ’). In the earlier half of the Relation she asserts that ‘all shall be for the edifying of the body, and the least joint shall do service, if it be not to be cut off; for the spirit runs through all the bodie’ (p. 19): women, she argued, could edify the congregation as well as men, and later in the work she compared herself to Ezekiel breathing on ‘the Armie of the drie bones [ … ] as the Spirit giveth for the edifying of the body’ (p. 26). The Geneva gloss on Ezekiel 37:2 explains that the bones are a metaphor for the ‘scattered’ Israelites throughout the world who could be united through the spirit, and the second half of Jones’s work is addressed ‘to all the scattered Saints’ (p. 50) who had fled because of persecution. Jones envisaged herself bestowing the Holy Spirit on her congregation to knit them more closely together. Whilst Jones’s speech recorded in The Relation appears to be the outpouring of the spirit in accordance with what women were permitted to contribute to their congregations, it is also unusual because of the extent to which Jones claims the speech as her own. As a prophetess, Deborah’s own agency was subsumed by the spirit speaking through her: as a contemporary divine, Stephen Marshall observed, the prophetess’s song ‘came not from the private Spirit of Deborah [ … ] but was pronounced by the direction of God’.68 Indeed, in the earlier half of Jones’s work, she acknowledged her written address was a gift of the spirit: she wrote that ‘I spake and writ this writing’ because ‘my spirit’ was ‘stirred to some of them’ (p. 2), writing later that the preacher-like interjection, ‘I say to you’ (often utilised by Christ in his speeches), came from God and was not her own formulation: ‘Though I said unadvisedly sometime before, I say to you, which I desire may be passed by, yet I thinke I have the minde of the Lord, and that this cometh of him’ (p. 33). By the 1640s, however, Jones recognised that in order to prophesy the speaker also needed to use her own understanding so that the words could be understood. 1 Corinthians 14, Jones’s source for the function of prophesising to be for ‘edification’, explained that prophets would ‘pray with the spirit’, but would ‘pray with the understanding also’ (1 Corinthians 14:15) so that the church was ‘edified thereby’ (Geneva gloss on 1 Corinthians 14:14). In the second half of her work, Jones asked her audience to give equal attention to what the spirit produced through her and what was of her own mind: ‘What you doe conceive the Spirit speaketh, have an eare to heare; and what is of my selfe I pray const[rue] to the best, for I wish well to Sion’ (p. 34). We might construe this as a plea from Jones  In To Sions Lovers, Being a Golden Egge, to Avoid Infection ([London: n. pub.], 1644), Jones organises her prophecies under ‘exhortations’, ‘observations’, and ‘comforts’, echoing 1 Corinthians 14:3. 68  Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed, or, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons (London: Printed by R. Badger for Samuel Gellibrand, 1641), p. 5, cited in Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 94. 67

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to her audience to listen to her own beliefs, supported rather than condemned by 1 Corinthians 14. Jones’s later works, published two years later in 1644, also address the importance of women’s participation in their congregations by writing and speaking, arguing that conventionally male roles could be filled by women. In To Sions Lovers, a treatise urging leading ministers to make ‘clear’ to all the saints the doctrine of laying on of hands and paedobaptism in order to show that members were part of a congregation, she addresses Dr William Gouge, one of the ‘Maisters of the Assemblie’ at Westminster and a friend of her late father’s, pleading with him to take action. Jones berates him for his acquiescence in Laud’s policies, telling him ‘there was much jelosie of you in the time of the Prelates, that you were too full of feares, And now the Lord hath shortned those dayes of persecution’ (A2). Jones considered that the Westminster Assembly, appointed to reform the church, were caught up in disputations between Presbyterians and Independents rather than coming to speedy conclusions: ‘Is there not great labour lost in wrong reasoning, strife about words, Presbitery and Independency which the Saints in fellowship owne not?’ (B1). When she asks the ‘honored that labour in the word and doctrine’ to fulfil her ‘patient desire to be healed wherein I erre’ (B1v), it is to highlight the inaction of the ‘honored’ men and therefore the need for her to publish her treatise. Within its first sentence, Jones claimed that she ‘presume[d] to father this naked child’, her work, ‘without Scholasticke phraises, or Schoole learning to dresse it and garnish it’, indicating her own occupation of the vacant fatherly role (A2). Thomason’s annotation, ‘Sarah. Jones. Diars wife’, reveals her sex (A2), and could indicate that, in signing her treatise ‘S. J.’, her work was recognisable, so adopting the role of ‘father’ was not an attempt at writing as a man but at writing with male authority.69 This continues later in the treatise where Jones references the Geneva translation of Psalms 68:11 (‘The Lord gave matter to the women to tell of the great armie’), which highlights women’s role in publishing the saints’ victories: the marginal note explains that the ‘fashion then was that women sang songs after the victory, as did Deborah, Miriam, Judith and others’. The King James Bible translators had replaced ‘women’ in Psalms 68:11 with ‘company’, reflecting that it was the duty of both male and female saints to publish the Gospel: the first of Jones’s references to this verse instructs her congregation to act as the ‘shee preachers’ described by the Geneva version had done: ‘great are the Armies, many were the publishers all the Congregations of the Saints; as shee preachers hold forth Christ, publish the Gospel’ (A4). Male and female members are all encouraged to spread the truth of their congregational practices. In the second reference, Jones tells the congregation to be like the ‘shee preachers to whom the command is given, to whom the promise is made, goe  Stephen Wright’s article, ‘Sarah Jones and the Jacob-Jessey Church: The Relation of a Gentlewoman’, The Electronic British Library Journal, 2 (2004), 1–9, establishes the authorship of Jones’s three extant works, and is the only scholarly work to discuss The Relation (which is signed only ‘S. J.’) to date. 69

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Preach and Baptize, observe and doe all I command you, and I will be with you to the end of the world [Matthew 28:19–20]’ (B2v). Men who had fallen short of witnessing and spreading the Gospel are told to act like ‘shee preachers’, who were joyful, obedient, and had received God’s favour. Jones’s works are in many ways exceptional for women writers of the gathered churches. The works discussed in this chapter often defend their own utterances, claiming that they own exceptional prophetic gifts, but they rarely defend women’s day-to-day participation in their congregations. As Elizabeth Clarke has written, in the numerous prophecies spoken by Anna Trapnel, ‘no point about the validity of women’s discourse in general is being made’.70 On 15 December 1657, for instance, Trapnel instructed ‘Females’ that a ‘prattling tongue / Cannot the Lord praises show’, an unbridled tongue causing Eve’s downfall: ‘O this talk did give a blow / To the Creations choice smile’.71 Where a female tongue is ‘set on fire’, to gossiping, scolding, and other transgressive activities that did not conform to the weakness and sobriety required of female prophets, Trapnel declared: ‘Oh no singing can there take hold, / O it cannot there come’ (p. 212). Though the Lord could ‘bring’ women his own ‘very joyful voice’, if they were meek and humble, Trapnel wrote that Eve’s precedent should ‘learn Females to be slow of speech, / To have very few words from self’ (p. 211). This contrasts with the way Jones envisaged the Lord working through her: unlike the other prophetesses discussed in this chapter, she vocalised the importance of all women speaking and participating in congregational worship. Addressing her congregation, in her Relation, Jones writes: ‘ye deare friends of Christ, as the weaker vessel bear with my foolishnesse a little; though we were first in the transgression, let us not be the last to race [raze] out the name of Antichrist: Jehovah will give women cause of joy’ (pp. 46–47). Although Jones draws on 1 Timothy 2:14 (‘women being deceived was in the transgression’), echoing Genesis, she believed that this should not prevent women from strengthening their congregations by publishing the Gospel, effectively ‘razing’ out all opposition. She advised ministers to ‘helpe those women that labour with you in the Gospell, which receive the truthes you teach, and build up with you by an holy conversation, and so winne others’ (p. 21), recognising that unless women could speak they could not be corrected. Referencing the spiritual gifts outlined by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12, she wrote: ‘If you never exercise your gifts, how shall the Church know whether you received those truths which are taught, [ … ]. I think the neglect of speaking one to another in publique, is the cause of most of the ignorance and errors’ (pp. 37–38). If women were considered weaker and more susceptible to temptation and sin, then Jones argued they needed more help to overcome this so that they would not hold back the whole congregation: ‘Let not the weaknesse of the female sect weaken any hand from helping the Lord against the mightie, but let the strong helpe the weake, and let that which is halting be healed’ (pp. 63–64). Jones’s speaking as well as her arguments that women could prophesy,  Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs, p. 144.  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 211.

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and use their understanding to use this message to teach their congregations, was part of her larger message that the early separatist congregations should gather together in visible order with every member knowing their office and function. All voices were needed to proclaim God’s message. ‘She would not walk where she had not libertie to speak’: Excommunicated Voices Having considered the various ways in which Baptist women identified with Deborah to defend their activism, it is appropriate to return to the case of the woman who opened this chapter, Susanna Parr, to explore her experiences in the light of that wider context. So far this chapter has shown that whilst some women joining the Baptist churches could negotiate their liberty to participate or speak in the congregation, either as prophetesses or as ordinary members, the congregations of other women denied them the opportunity to obtain ‘a greater effusion of the Spirit, more purity and holinesse, more union and communion, more liberty of Conscience, and freedome from that yoke of being servants unto men’ (Parr’s expectations that opened this chapter). For women who were active in founding congregations, like Parr, restrictions on their liberty to disagree with certain practices adopted by the church led them to question the validity of their congregations and the actions of their ministers, much like Sara Jones had done. However, in some documented instances tensions rose irrevocably and when women tried to voice concerns outside of their congregation, or went to meetings in other churches, they ran the risk of admonishment. If they continued in their sin, their congregation could choose to excommunicate them by ‘delivering such an one unto Satan’ (1 Corinthians 5:5). The Baptists (and other strict separatist churches), as J. F. McGregor has observed, drew their strength ‘from the moral superiority of [their] members while lax conduct exposed the saints to scandal in the eyes of the world’.72 Disorderly female members who conducted themselves like scandalous ‘women preachers’, who visited different meetings resembling 2 Timothy’s ‘captive silly women laden with sins, led away with diverse lusts’ (3:6), or who disobeyed the ruling of their husbands, encouraged the censures of the world discussed in Chapter 1: any female member who fanned the flames of scandal without repentance, therefore, was expelled from the group to preserve the moral ‘health’ of the rest.73 It is significant that a woman exercising her liberty 72  McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, p. 45. ‘The Records of the Abingdon Association’ recorded the result of their considering ‘whether it be lawfull for a saint to marie her that had bene his brother’s wife’, which was it was ‘not expedient nor of good report seeing the saints are to abstaine from the very appearance of evill’ (AR, III: p. 157). 73  T. Dowley’s useful study of ‘Baptists and Discipline in the Seventeenth Century’, Baptist Quarterly, 24 (1971–72), 157–66, observed that cases of admonition involving ‘sexual laxity’ affected more women than men, either because ‘the women were more

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to attend other church meetings, for example, could be accused as if she had committed a disorderly sexual sin, rather than being accused of heretical beliefs at odds with those of the congregation: Parr was accused, for instance, of adultery when she enquired whether she had the ‘liberty of hearing other ministers’, her pastors ‘alleadging that I might aswell delight in another man that was not my husband, because the Image of God shined more in him then in my husband’.74 For disagreeing with the practices of her ‘Anabaptist’ church, Anne Wentworth was also accused of being ‘an impudent Hussy, a disobedient Wife to him, one that run away from her Husband’, who kept ‘Men company’, had ‘Rogues come’ to her, and lived ‘a scandalous life in an Alms house’.75 The remainder of this chapter, therefore, will consider the cases of Parr, her fellow member Mary Allein, and Anne Wentworth, exploring both the accusations levelled at women who disagreed with their congregation’s practices, and how they countered these in print.76 These women considered it their duty to vindicate themselves but also to point out their opponents’ shortcomings in theological matters. Susanna Parr and Mary Allein were excommunicated from Lewis Stucley’s Independent congregation that met in the nave of St Peter’s Cathedral, Exeter (named ‘West Peter’s), on 8 March 1658: an explanation, vindicating the church of any wrongdoing by accusing the women publicly, appeared in early 1658 titled [A] True Account of what was done by a Church of Christ in Exon [ … ] the eighth day of March, 1657[8]. when two members thereof were Excommunicated, authored by Thomas Mall, Stucley’s assistant minister. Mall’s account was so inflammatory that it provoked a flurry of five other pamphlets over the course of the next year, including two replies from Mary Allein’s husband Tobie, a response from Lewis Stucley, a reproof from an unknown writer (though probable minister) ‘E. T.’, and the final (extant) word from Susanna Parr herself.77 Parr, as has been discussed frequently guilty of sexual misdemeanours, or because looseness among male members was condoned or more easily overlooked’ (161). However, these comments are not combined with an analysis of each church’s membership: some churches had many more female members, for instance. 74  Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, p. 21. 75  Anne Wentworth, The Revelation of Jesus Christ ([London: n. pub.], 1679), p. 20. 76  Excommunication provoked men as well as women to publish vindications. Dennis Hollister was a founding member of the Broadmead Church, Bristol, alongside Dorothy Hazzard, and was admonished by the congregation for espousing Quaker principles. He later published The Skirts of the Whore Discovered (1656) in ‘Answer to a Charge brought to him from them by some of their Members’, his title suggesting the falseness of their church by comparing it to the Whore of Babylon. 77  The texts in the order they appeared were Mall, True Account; Allein, Truths Manifest (1658); Stucley, Manifest Truth; E. T., Diotrephes Detected, Corrected, and Rejected (1658); Tobie Allein, Truths Manifest Revived (London: Printed by R. D. for Francis Eglesfield, 1659); Parr, Susanna’s Apologie (1659). The dispute is also discussed from Parr’s perspective in Karen L. Edwards, ‘Susannas Apologie and the Politics of Privity’, Literature and History, 6 (1997), 1–16; Crawford, Women and Religion, pp. 152–59.

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in the earlier part of this chapter, was a founding member of the congregation, where at first ‘everyone had the liberty of assenting or dissenting, of arguing and debating any matter proposed, whether men or women’.78 As seems common in gathered churches, however, power began to centre in the hands of the male minister and his elders. After the news that God had prevented a Fifth Monarchist insurrection (led by Venner in April 1657), the elders of the church wanted seven male members to subscribe to a petition to urge Cromwell not to ‘accept Kingly Office’ (he refused the crown in May 1657), and another ‘clause in it, to pray the Lord Protector to dissolve the Parliament’.79 In the next meeting, Mary Allein observed to her husband that the church’s petition ‘carried on some mans interest’ (p. 3), who had ‘a selfish carnal designe’ (p. 4), and she urged her husband to be ‘exceeding warie’ what he did, ‘and have respect’ to himself, her, and their children (p. 3). She observed that one of the elders prayed for the Protector asking if he was ‘not high enough already’, just ‘like Mr. Feaks praying’ (p. 4). The period following Venner’s insurrection was not a good time to be supporting such talk, and the testimony of the Alleins’ neighbours at the beginning of Truths Manifest depicted Tobie as ‘alwayes wel-affected to the Common-Wealth and very active in, and as Captain raised a Company for His Highnesse service’ (A2). Mary then ‘began to flagg in her affection towards their way’, especially when members were encouraged to speak ‘of such sins as are not to be named’ at their admissions, and a covenant was introduced to restrict members from hearing other ministers, confirming their separation from Babylonish churches (p. 4). Mary’s liberty to vote on and debate these matters, she saw, was gradually being eroded. It was the usual policy of the gathered churches to wait before action for the assent of all members (not just the majority) to a proposal, based on Acts 15:25 (‘being assembled with one accord’), therefore Stucley and Mall’s conduct was unusual. The Baptist Abingdon Association, for instance, decided that ‘we doe not discerne that a proposall can rightly be subscribed in the name of any church unlesse the whole church may duly be judged to agree thereunto’.80 This was also the focus of E. T.’s reply to Mall and Stucley, where the author asked why they ‘came to take away these Keyes [of the church] from the Minor part of the Brethren, and from the Sisters? Are they not all Believers? Have Women no Soules? or no Faith?’.81 E. T. made it clear that the church could only proceed if ‘there be in the Dissatisfyed, (if not a concurrence, yet at least) a Submission and yeelding, (manifested and Declared,) that the Church may proceed’.82 Allein and Parr did not submit, and asked for advice elsewhere: Parr sought the Presbyterian ministry of Thomas Ford who preached in the Choir of St Peter’s Cathedral (East Peter’s), and Allein the advice of her brother-in-law, the famous nonconformist  Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, p. 76.  Allein, Truths Manifest, p. 2. 80  ‘The Records of the Abingdon Association’, AR, III: p. 164. 81  E. T., Diotrephes Detected, p. 12. 82  Ibid., p. 8. 78 79

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Joseph Alleine of Taunton, despite Stucley forbidding others ‘to have to do with the busines of their Church’ (p. 7). Both women were also anxious that God had punished their separation from the established church by the deaths of their children, and, even more urgently, Mary was heavily pregnant and did not know in which church to baptise her child.83 When the meeting was delayed, Mary took the journey alone without her husband’s knowledge, which he chastised her for later, but it was likely that she was anxious that her impending lying-in would prevent her from gaining an answer in time for the baptism of her next child. Despite her husband’s desire that she come back to the church before this time, Mary had her way, as the aptly named ‘Susanna Allein’ was born on 15 November 1657 and baptised at the Anglican Church of St Petrock’s, Exeter.84 Both women subsequently withdrew from Stucley’s congregation, after consulting with other churches, and had behaved impeccably according to E. T.: ‘the MINOR PART’ of the congregation who were dissatisfied, the author wrote, ‘OUGHT (according to Rule) TO WITHDRAW THEMSELVES (either for a Time, if the Advice of other Churches may after be a means to Reconcile them or if not, for altogether)’.85 As Patricia Crawford has asserted in her excellent account of the Exeter controversy, the reason Stucley and Mall ‘alleged that both women were disorderly [was] because they went to hear other ministers’.86 However, Stucley repeatedly argued that he attacked the women’s conduct ‘to satisife and silence them who pretended we had censured [Mary] for joining with a congregation of different  Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, pp. 13–14; Allein, Truths Manifest, p. 5. Stucley’s reply to Tobie Allein advised that interpreting providence was ‘a task that oft-times exceeds the line of humane wisdome’ (Manifest Truth, p. 11), and did not support their interpretations of the reason for their children’s deaths. Mary Allein had six recorded children with her husband Tobie whom she married on 20 March 1642 at Saint Sidwell’s, Exeter (see DRO 3429 A-99, Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1569–1733). Hannah (1646), Tobie (1647), Susanna (1657), Hester (1658), and Mark (1660), were all baptised at the Anglican Church of St Petrock’s, Exeter (see DRO 2946 A-99/PR1, Baptisms 1539–1812), and Dorcas (1654) at St Peter’s Cathedral by Stucley’s church (see W. Reynell-Upham and H. Tapley-Soper, eds, The Registers of Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials of the City of Exeter, 1594–1813 (Exeter: Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1910)). Susanna Parr had seven recorded children with her husband Christopher Parr whom she married on 19 October 1634 at St Kerrian’s, Exeter (see DRO 4780 A–99/PR1, Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1559–1812). Susanna (1640), Christopher (1643), Samuel (1645), Sara (1647), and Lydia (1649), were all baptised at Saint Olave’s, Exeter (see DRO 2738A–99/PR1, St Olave’s Parish, Exeter, Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials 1601–1700), and Hannah (1654) and Ruth (1659) at St Peter’s Cathedral (see Reynell-Upham and Tapley-Soper, eds, The Registers of Baptisms). Ruth was baptised by Thomas Ford rather than Lewis Stucley. 84  Parr and Allein appear to have been close: they co-authored their response to Stucley’s summons for them to appear in front of the congregation to be excommunicated (Truths Manifest Revived, pp. 25–26). Both women refused to appear. 85  E. T., Diotrephes Detected, pp. 8–9. 86  Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 154. 83

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principles from us’.87 Tobie Allein was rather convinced that Stucley ‘(being madded at her leaving them) in point of policy or rather revenge [did] conspire to spread and foment this false report, and then call it publick scandal, past her husbands pardon’.88 In the course of Stucley’s reply to Allein’s Truth Manifest, Mary is accused of withdrawing from the congregation to further her husband’s cloth business which she often managed (St Peter’s cloisters housing a cloth exchange), and that her journey to Taunton while ‘great bellyed’ had scandalous ends: he wrote that she had been accompanied by her midwife ‘Dame’ who had since eloped to Ireland with another woman’s husband (as Mary’s brother later confessed), and that the landlady in the Honiton tavern where her husband found her confessed that ‘Mr. T. A. could not be admitted for a while into his wifes Chamber, and that Mris. A. did confesse to her, that she left her husband because of a different way from her’.89 Whether Allein had ‘left’ her husband permanently is up to his readers to judge, but because ‘the offence became publick’, Stucley wrote, ‘Hon[iton] and Exeter Rang with this scandal, and the Church account themselves obliged to take notice of it’.90 Thomas Mall also attempted to discredit Mary’s speech by criticising her testimony given at her admission to the congregation: Mistress A. proposed herself to this society and spake very confidently of her condition. On a sudden she was (as some observed) stopt in her speech; having a little before spoken much of her assurance, yet discovered so much ignorance, that I cannot believe not one person was satisfied with that, which she spake as her experience, therefore she was denied. But a considerable time after the Church was constituted, she desired Church-fellowship; And then came in with so much difficulty, that (as I am credibly informed, for I was them absent) Mr. Stoneham, the then Teacher of this Church, hinted to her to this purpose, that the Church had stretched to the utmost line of Charity in order to her Reception; and therefore advised her that her future demeanour might be such, as might give better satisfaction concerning her for the future, then they had for the present.91

Mary Allein later expressed her disapproval of the admissions of members in front of the church ‘who in making out their experiences at their admissions, spake of such sins as are not to be named, which thing shee bordred too nigh on Auriculer [Catholic] confession’ (p. 4). It is likely, therefore, that Allein was not prepared for the depth in which she had to explore her private sins in order to gain entrance to the congregation, which was no small concern to women, especially if their ministers were poised to remember their failings for use against them later. Such accusations, added to her excommunication, had the potential to severely damage Mary’s reputation and the Alleins’ cloth business that employed  Stucley, Manifest Truth, p. 4.  Allein, Truths Manifest Revived, pp. 83–84. 89  Stucley, Manifest Truth, pp. 14–15. 90  Ibid., p. 15. 91  Mall, True Account, p. 22. 87 88

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500 workers: Tobie lamented that ‘some of our brethren have every where at their doors; and shops, and tables vilified her’ (p. 14). Publishing a reply to Mall and Stucley’s writings, accompanied by the signatures of James Pearse, Exeter’s mayor, and eight other former and future majors of the city (including Thomas Ford), all prominent aldermen, would have gone some way towards stifling Stucley’s malicious rumours.92 The experiences of Anne Wentworth, written twenty years later, also depict the events leading up to and following her admonition and excommunication from her church for disagreeing with her husband and the prominent Baptists who supported him. Given the growth of popular uncertainty surrounding nonconformists and papists as the 1670s progressed, which culminated in the accusations of Titus Oates that a popish plot threatened the life of Charles II and his people, the Baptists could not afford the negative publicity that Wentworth provided. Baptists were at the heart of Whig resistance to the Catholic succession during the later Exclusion Crisis, and, as Clarke writes, after the Restoration Baptists were ‘consciously engaged in political resistance to the ruling regime’.93 Wentworth’s last book, Englands Spiritual Pill (1679), included one ‘Revelation’ from 30 September 1679 where she made six comparisons between the Papists and the Baptists, that they were ‘cruel, hard hearted’, ‘scorners and persecutors of the true seed of God’, and ‘fighters against the Lord’: a particularly damaging comparison was that [The Anabaptists] act by the same principle, and from the same oppressing spirit that the Pope of Rome doth, for if any one obey the revealed will of God, [ … ], they will persecute such a Soul unto death, if they will not deny the Lord and all truth, and fall down to their Idol worship and false Religion, and obey man before God.94

Wentworth exploited popular fears of papist massacres in order to discredit her adversaries, comparing her own experience at the hands of her Baptist husband, and leading Baptist ministers that included Hanserd Knollys and Nehemiah Cox, to rumoured papist activities.95 In A Vindication of Anne Wentworth, published in 1677, two years after her excommunication, she spoke of the ‘unspeakable Tyrannies of an Hard-hearted Yoak-Fellow’, who had abused her for eighteen years of her marriage: ‘He has in his barbarous actions towards me, a many times 92  The mayors during the interregnum were all prominent aldermen and Puritans: James Gould (1648), Richard Crossing (1649 but stood down, 1654), Richard Evans (1650), Ralph Herman (1652), Simon Snow (1653), Thomas Ford (1656), James Pearse (1657), James Marshall (1658), and Christopher Clark (1659) all signed Truths Manifest, A2. 93  Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs, p. 2. 94  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 14. 95  Wentworth appears to have been a member of Knollys’s congregation, as she speaks of her friendship with him, and because her charges were read in that church. William Wentworth, after he left his marital home, became a member of Nehemiah Cox’s congregation gathered at Petty France.

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over-done such things, as not only in the Spirit of them will be one day judged a murdering of, but had long since really proved so, if God had not wonderfully supported, and preserved me.’96 The abuse took place in ‘secret’, where her husband was ‘so great a scourge and lash to me’ while she ‘in obedience to satisfy the unreasonable will of my earthly Husband, [ … ] laid my body as the ground, and as the street for him to go over [Isaiah 51:23] for 18 years together, and keep silent [ … ], for my days had been spent with sighing, and my years with crying’.97 When she was instructed by God to declare her experience publicly, ‘speaking the way as the Lord led me’ and recovering her ‘liberty’, her husband stole the writings, causing the Baptists to ‘fall upon me’ because they ‘could not bear the truth to be spoke of their Brother’.98 Indeed, if William Wentworth was guilty of abusing his wife, by beating or bullying, he would have been going against the advice of the Baptist churches. Bunyan’s Bedford church excommunicated one of their members for ‘abusing his wife, and beating her often for very light matters’, and the West Country Association answered a query from the Stoke church whether a husband could ‘lawfully’ (i.e. scripturally) strike his wife, to which they replied that ruling over a wife ‘in wisdom’ was preferable, given there was no scriptural precedent for striking.99 When Wentworth’s Baptist church took her abusive husband’s side, however, she realised their defects: believing him unregenerate, she wrote that ‘they must needs be no Saints or Christians in deed and in truth, nor know the new birth themselves, if they take him to be one that is born again’.100 For her, their practice of baptism only washed the outward body, ‘which stood in the least need, when his soul was never yet washed from the filth of his inbred natural corruption’. In a prophecy of 10 November 1679, she acknowledged that the Baptist church appeared ‘in a purer form, then any other’ (including the Independents and Quakers), but that it was still a ‘false Church, a harlot’.101 The Baptists, she concluded, were empty formalists, abiding by outward forms that did not reflect an inward change. The leading Baptists, Hanserd Knollys, Nehemiah Cox, William Dix, and Thomas Hicks, reflected, as Lewis Stucley had done in the case of Allein and

96  Anne Wentworth, A Vindication of Anne Wentworth ([London: n. pub.], 1677), p. 1; p. 4. 97  Anne Wentworth, A True Account of Anne Wentworths being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt with by some of those People Called Anabaptists ([London: n. pub.], 1676), p. 7; pp. 8–9. 98  Wentworth, A True Account, p. 6; p. 7; Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 6. 99  The Minutes of the First Independent Church, p. 84; 15–16 September 1657, ‘Association Records of the Particular Baptists of the West Country to 1659’, AR, II: p. 69. See Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England’, Journal of Women’s History, 6:2 (1994), 70–89. 100  Wentworth, A True Account, p. 7. 101  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 44.

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Parr, that Wentworth had ‘open[ed] the mouths of wicked men against religion’.102 They represented her ‘as a Proud, Passionate, Revengful, Discontented, and Mad Woman, and as one that has unduly published things to the prejudice and scandal of my Husband; and that have wickedly left him’.103 As a response to Wentworth’s experience, the Baptist leaders accompanied her husband to her house on 13 February 1674 where they presented her with charges against her. When she did not repent, the charges were repeated in Hanserd Knollys’s church a year later, where she appeared in ‘a weak condition’, and she was then declared her ‘an Heathen, and a Publican’ following the process for excommunicating brethren in Matthew 18:15–20.104 According to Wentworth, her husband also accused her of ‘ly[ing] out one night without his leave’, adding to his case that she had ‘wickedly left him’ and caused their separation, but she explained that she was frightened of her husband’s behaviour if she disobeyed him and went to stay with a friend.105 Unlike Mary Allein’s husband, William Wentworth was not supportive of his wife’s qualms with the church, and began to question if he should even eat with his unrepentant wife.106 The men’s cruelty apparently led Wentworth to miscarry, and her husband subsequently let out their house in Kingshead Court, employing his cousins to force her to leave. Her version of events supports her claim that ‘I have not left my husband, but he me’, accusing him of separation and disobedience in a reversal of her church’s charges.107 Baptist Association meetings generally advised the separation of members from those outside the church, although they found difficulty in ruling with regard to husbands and wives: the Abingdon Association did not advocate relinquishing a marriage contract, lest the church be accused of  Allein, Truths Manifest, p. 15. Thomas Hicks and William Dix were ministers of other Baptist congregations, but joined with Knollys and Cox to discuss and control discipline in the London churches. Manuscript and printed records gathered by Joseph Ivimey are often signed by some or all of these four men, accompanied by other ministers. In the months following Wentworth’s admonishment, Hicks was involved in a pamphlet controversy with the Quakers who declared that they would ‘pursue him, [ … ] as the Baptists’ great champion, peculiar agent, or representative’, which prompted his own trial on 28 August 1674 where he defended his actions to leading Baptists and Quakers. His actions were judged lawful and were attested to by Knollys, Dix, and John Vernon, among others: Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists, 4 vols. (London: Printed for the author, 1811–1830), I: pp. 388–95. 103  Wentworth, A Vindication, p. 2. 104  Ibid., p. 1; Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 6. The same process appears to have been adopted by most gathered churches. 105  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, pp. 5–6 106  Ibid., p. 16. The West Country Association advised, citing 2 Thessalonians 3:14, that ‘the saints should, as much as they may, so far as may tend to work shame and repentance, abstain from civil society with them during the time of withdrawing and after rejection too’, ‘Association Records of the Particular Baptists of the West Country to 1659’, AR, II: p. 66. 107  Wentworth, A Vindication, p. 5. 102

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covenant breaking, but they observed that a husband and wife unequally yoked could be compared to ‘the perpetuall enmitie between the two seeds’ of Eve and the serpent in Genesis 3:15.108 Wentworth was convinced that her experience was in fact a ‘Riddle of Gods prophetical stile’, where the Lord had ‘placed the two spirits in a Man and his Wife, to figure out Zion and Babylon’.109 She, as Zion, had been persecuted by Babylon, but God had caused her separation: her husband becomes the ungodly excommunicant. She also lays claim to a more ‘authentic’ baptism than that of her husband and his church’s, by drawing on Luke 12:50 (‘But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished’), because she has undergone pain and persecution: their own baptism was nothing more than an outward show. The same chapter indicates that Christ would cause divisions between family members because of religious differences, prophesying that those who were not faithful servants would receive ‘many stripes’ (Luke 12:47) and would feel ‘fire on the earth’ (Luke 12:49), later chastising the people for not reading spiritual signs (a topic to which Wentworth’s own prophecies refer). God’s prophecy to Wentworth observed that the Baptists were ‘so dead asleep, that nothing will awake them’, commanding her to ‘write and speak, what thou wilt in my name never so fully and plainly’, despite her audience’s wilful ignorance.110 As Chapter 1 has already discussed, female separatists were often vilified and scandalised in the popular imagination for causing disorder and division, which made them particularly vulnerable in disputes such as those experienced by Allein, Parr, and Wentworth. Women’s conduct was already under particular scrutiny, and it appears that their detractors utilised familiar criticisms of women’s supposed promiscuity, deceit, disorderliness, easy submission to heretical ideas, and instability of mind. The Baptists reproached Wentworth, for instance, for being a ‘wicked, deceived, deluded, lying Woman; a mad, melancholy, crack-brained, self willed, conceited Fool, and black Sinner, led by whimsies, notions, and knis-knass of my own head’.111 Congregations that were looking to become members of wider associations of separatist or Baptist churches, or, indeed, become more accepted by the society in which they lived, needed to be seen to be disciplining members if they were damaging the reputation of the association. As Patricia Crawford notes, for instance, the Exeter Assembly, made up of the ministers of various Puritan churches, ‘were not prepared to admit to their assembly any congregation which lacked the power to discipline’, and so the ministers were obliged to make sure that they kept their church free from all reproach.112 Indeed, the Assembly warned their members ‘that Obstinacy in lesser sins generally knowne to be sins, after  ‘Records of the Abingdon Association’, AR, III: p. 141.  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 2. 110  Ibid., p. 26. 111  Wentworth, The Revelation, p. 19. 112  Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 155, n. 68. Allan Brockett, Nonconformity in 108 109

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due admonition from the Church is a scandall’.113 Susanna Parr, because Stucley and Mall would not publicly admit that her excommunication was because she had joined another group, was accused of ‘lying more then three times’.114 In an attempt to justify the excommunication, Mall wrote that it was ‘safer in some sence to tolerate an incestuous person, then a liar in a Church: especially such an one as soweth discord, a discontented liar, as this woman was’.115 Stucley and Mall took their precedent for excommunication from 1 Corinthians 5, which explains Mall’s allusion to incest: the chapter illustrates that the incestuous behaviour of the Gentiles who took their ‘father’s wives’ (1 Corinthians 5:1) caused them to be delivered ‘unto Satan’ (5:5) so they would not pollute the rest of God’s people by their sin.116 The gloss on 1 Corinthians 5:5 in the Geneva translation indicates that the person delivered to Satan would become a ‘heathen and a publican’ (linking the passage with Matthew 18:17), disenfranchised from God’s people. Throughout Mall’s treatise, which also defends the practice of excommunication quoting a number of learned sources, he aligns Parr’s sin of lying, and Allein’s running away from her husband with the sin of incest, or sexual immorality more generally, and its public nature: 1 Corinthians 5:1 speaks of the sins being ‘reported commonly’ and therefore bringing the name of God into disrepute. While accusing Allein, Mall emphasises not her ‘neglecting fellowship’ with the church, but her supposed sexual crimes: She hath bin accused for neglecting fellowship with the people of God, and in that for Covenant-breaking; but chiefly hath been dealt with, for that scandalous carriage of hers in running away from her husband. [ … ] How much the Name of God suffered (you know in part) by her leaving her husband: I am sure I have been hit in the teeth with the scandalousness of the fact.117

In employing this chapter as a scriptural precedent, Mall was able to persuade his readers, familiar with popular stereotypes of sectarian women, that ‘the offences of both these [women], are in this like the incestuous persons sin, they are such, as are not named among the Gentiles, and are indeed abominable’.118

113  DRO, MS 35420/M1/1, Minutes of the Exeter Assembly, 1655–59, in Appendix III, ‘Puritanism in Devon and the Exeter Assembly’, Records and Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 9 (1877), pp. 250–91 (p. 284). 114  Mall, True Account, p. 18. 115  Ibid., p. 19. 116  The prayer uttered at their excommunication seemed to have lost none of its horror for the congregation: Mary’s husband Tobie Allein recounted that after the excommunication had been declared against the women (neither of whom was present) ‘the Church made a hideous howling cry, that did even astonish divers then present’ (Allein, Truths Manifest, p. 20). 117  Mall, True Account, p. 19. 118  Ibid., p. 20.

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Susanna Parr’s reply to the five other treatises, Susanna’s Apologie against the Elders, showed its awareness of the difficulties godly women faced when accused of sexual crimes, by drawing on the example of the apocryphal book, the History of Susanna. Mall and Stucley had told Parr, when she sought the ministry of another church, that there ‘was as much reason for a woman to goe after another man because of fruitfulnesse, as to make use of another Ministry because of more benefit’: women following their religious beliefs independently are shown to be fickle, lusty, and self-serving.119 Parr certainly realised that she was effectively being accused of adultery, and aligned herself with Susanna, her namesake, who was also accused of adultery by two of her town’s appointed judges or elders. The biblical Susanna was already married, but the two men watched her bathing in her private garden, inflamed with lust, revealed themselves while threatening that if she would not lie with them, they would falsely call her an adulterer: ‘If thou wilt not, we will bear witness against thee, that a young man was with thee’ (History of Susanna 1:21). Susanna saw her death in both choices (at that time adultery was punishable by death) but chose not to sin against God and her natural husband, letting the elders ‘bear witness against’ her (History of Susanna 1:21–23) to all the people. In a public meeting, the elders sentenced her to death, but her faith in the Lord caused him to send his Holy Spirit to Daniel to uncover the elders’ ‘false judgment’ (1:53). The men were then put to death having tried to pervert a ‘daughter of Juda’ with their ‘wickedness’ (1:57). Parr’s readers would have seen immediately that Susanna was an example of a godly woman’s ability to surmount what Toni Craven calls ‘the powerlessness her female status accorded her in an otherwise male-dominated world’.120 Susanna was prevented by the law from defending herself at the meeting, though the elders are permitted to testify, reminiscent of the restrictions on female speech in Parr’s congregation. Susanna speaks only when she cries out against rape (History of Susanna 1:24), and when she implores the Lord to save her from death (History of Susanna 1:42–43). Significantly, her first cry is drowned out by the elders’ own cries of adultery, leading her servants to be ‘greatly ashamed’ of her (1:27), and her second is ignored by her community (presumably including her husband and family), who appear to accept her death sentence without question. Such is the power of male authority to influence the people. In allowing stereotypes of lusty and deceitful women to prevail, and ignoring women’s accounts, Parr suggests, congregations were in danger of persecuting God’s chosen people. Instead, the History of Susanna depicts lusty and deceitful men, found guilty of what Mall had accused

 Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, p. 25. It is possible that Mall and Stucley intended these accusations to chime with the biblical story of the adulterous David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11), whose first child was taken by the Lord as punishment, given Parr and Allein’s interpretations of their own children’s deaths. 120  Toni Craven, ‘The Greek Book of Daniel’, in Women’s Bible Commentary, pp. 311–15 (p. 314). 119

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Parr of: ‘tripping very much in reference to her tongue, and lying [e]gregiously: so that the whole Church could bear witness against her’.121 Parr’s vindication argues effectively that women’s speech should be acknowledged and valued in disputations, rather than dismissed when in conflict with men of authority. The biblical Susanna cries out her innocence to God, who is only able to save her by speaking through Daniel: her own words appear to have no effect on the people. Although Parr effectively condemns Stucley and Mall to death (or at least to lose their reputations), sharing the fate of the elders, she also condemns an ignorant community who refused to listen to a woman’s report, and prevented women from defending themselves while on trial. As Craven writes, ‘Susanna’s story tells how a woman within the covenant community faced death and triumphed over adversity when threatened’, but, instead of the threats originating in the world outside the separatist congregations, as has been discussed earlier in this chapter, the apocryphal Susanna was threatened by ‘supposedly trustworthy Jewish leaders’.122 Anne Wentworth also speaks of her congregation’s ‘angry men and women that speak so much for my Husband, and so much against me’, believing male Baptists in authority before even reading her testimony.123 In the manner of Susanna’s community, Wentworth’s husband and ‘Brethren’ did ‘not suffer [her] to speak of the things of God’, after they had accused her, and because in any other discourse she was ‘very slow of speech’ she was rendered ‘a silent woman’.124 It is the Lord who permits Wentworth to write, allowing her to speak, but also gives her the power to effectively dismiss her husband, excommunicating him by labelling him ‘Babylon’ to her ‘Zion’. In fact, Wentworth also commits what Frances Dolan calls ‘metaphorical murder’ by presenting her marriage as ‘a life or death, salvation or damnation struggle in which there can be only one winner’, though, as in the History of Susanna, it is God who ultimately brings about death and damnation.125 It is not surprising that Parr or Wentworth would choose to align themselves with such a courageous woman who protested her innocence, in the face of loneliness and desertion, and was saved: what their experiences highlight is that women in gathered congregations often had two adversaries in their fight to reform their churches: their hostile wider communities, but also their own congregations of saints. Women in Baptist congregations, this chapter has shown, were ‘Valiant Deborahs’ because not only did they have to contend with persecution from outside their congregations, including the kind of accusations levelled against them in popular pamphlets discussed in Chapter 1, but in many cases they had to fight to be heard against their own congregation members. Women played major  Mall, True Account, p. 20.  Craven, ‘The Greek Book of Daniel’, in Women’s Bible Commentary, p. 314. 123  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 7. 124  Wentworth, A True Account, p. 10. 125  Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia, 121 122

PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 59–60.

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roles in separating from the established church, were founding members of the gathered churches, and were instrumental in discussing church practices soon after formation. Indeed, women like Sara Jones and Anna Trapnel were able to discuss the theological implications of undertaking adult baptism and disagree with ministers that they had come into contact with. However, while Baptist women like Dorothy Hazzard and Susanna Parr were highly regarded members of their congregations, as time went on their participation was restricted. Attitudes to sectarian women outside of the congregations cannot have helped matters: when laws penalising sectarians relaxed during the interregnum, Baptist churches chose this moment to tighten their rules controlling women’s speech, attempting to become more ‘acceptable’ when it seemed that their churches could become permanent. The variable interpretations of Pauline strictures across different congregations are testament to the extent to which women’s liberty depended on the individual congregation or minister, as well as the ferocity of local pressure. All congregations agreed, however, that women’s speaking should be limited or delineated by practices that reminded them of their submission to the male members in their congregation: wearing a veil, or speaking through a male member, could have put some women off speaking altogether. Despite these restrictions, many women argued that God had given them the right to speak, using the example of Deborah’s prophetic activity to chastise male immobility and support a reading of 1 Corinthians 11 that was favourable to female prophecy. For Katherine Sutton and Sara Jones, to neglect speaking in front of the congregation, to enlighten them on their proper function and offices, was a heinous sin in what Jones called a ‘time of warre’.126 To obey 1 Corinthians 14:34 was to ignore the spirit talking through them, which was not addressed in this verse. Parr also acknowledged that limited speech for women did not fulfil the role of a church that was to give ‘freedom from that yoke of being servants to men’.127 A study of these strictures is important because it explains why Baptist women drew predominantly on two main interlocking genres in their writings, prophecy and the conversion narrative, occasions where their speech was permitted in their congregations. The final two chapters will discuss these two intersecting genres.

 Jones, To Sions Lovers, A3.  Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, p. 1.

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Chapter 3

‘Mothers in Israel’: Women’s Contributions to the Baptist Movement In 1653, the Choice Experiences of Jane Turner appeared in print as the first singly published, Baptist conversion narrative.1 She acknowledged that she walked ‘in an untrodden path, I having never seen any thing written before in this manner and method’, but was ‘well satisfied’ that her footsteps would ‘be found as for matter, so for method and manner, among the foot-steps of the flock of Christ, where I desire to feed besides the Shepheards Tents’.2 Here, Turner recalls Christ’s answer to his spouse, the Church and ‘fairest among women’ in Song of Songs 1:8, that she should adhere to the true pastors of his flock, feeding on his word. The spouse’s initial complaint, according to the Geneva marginal notes, was that when she realised her sin and ‘negligence’, she had come across some pastors that ‘set forthe their owne dreames instead of thy [Christ’s] doctrine’. Indeed, this is the message of Turner’s conversion narrative: she is the recipient of God’s free grace, evidenced by her saving faith as well as her preservation from temptation and error, despite being endangered by many pastors and sects that she believed ‘set forthe their owne dreames’. She concludes, in a section expounding on ‘true Ministery’ (p. 97) reflecting on her own baptism, that ‘publick hearing out of the Church of God’ (p. 96), outside the communion of strict Particular Baptists, was unprofitable and dangerous: her own experiences attest to the confusion caused by open-communion churches (those composed of both paedo- and antipaedobaptists) and the evangelising efforts of the Quakers. Despite these several hindrances, Turner came to acknowledge her sins and corruptions, before arriving at a belief in the saving graces of God, undergoing the ‘labors and travels of my soul’ before her conversion which she described ‘as life from the dead’ (p. 129). Having received this grace, Turner believed that it was her duty to share this with  Kathleen Lynch, in her Protestant Autobiography, pp. 166–73, explores Turner’s departure from earlier group-published spiritual experiences, particularly Spiritual Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers (1653), which appeared with a recommendation by Vavasor Powell, and Ohel or Beth-shemesh (1653) by John Rogers. Neither of these groups can be described as ‘strict’ Baptists, although the former group may have employed rebaptism. Sarah Wight’s prophetic outbursts are recorded by Henry Jessey (a Baptist) but, like the works of Sara Jones who was also a member of Jessey’s church, they give no evidence of her undergoing believers’ baptism. 2  Jane Turner, Choice Experiences of the Kind Dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion (London: Printed by H. Hils, 1653), B8. 1

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other Baptists in her own Newcastle Church, but also to others further afield: the title page of her work indicates that it was sent to the small Baptist churches in Berwick-upon-Tweed and in Scotland. In her observations following the fourth section of her work, which included the circumstances of her baptism, she wrote that she believed it was ‘the duty of all that have received the Grace of God to be active for his Glory, so it is the nature of Grace to teach and engage Saints to do the same’ (p. 90). Despite the hostility faced by some women in the previous chapter, Turner’s exemplary experiences of grace, and her learned arguments against anti-Baptist beliefs, earned her the title of ‘Mother in the true Israel’ from John Gardiner, a London Baptist. He was, of course, aligning Turner with Deborah who ‘arose a mother in Israel’ (Judges 5:7), and who, according to the Geneva translation’s marginal notes, was ‘miraculously stirred up by God to pitie them & deliver them’. It was Turner’s grace made manifest by her conversion (or her ‘new birth’ as other Baptists called it) that had allowed her such ‘social and cultural authority’ in the ‘true’ Baptist churches.3 This chapter, therefore, will focus on women’s contributions to the Baptist movement as mothers, mediators, and advisors, committed to nurturing their congregations and seeking after Christ by contributing to doctrinal controversies, particularly arguments over baptism’s correct practice, as well as evangelising their followers. In the seventeenth century, mothers had an authority and responsibility to teach and comfort their children in their own families. As Richard Greaves has observed, the marginal note to the Geneva translation of Deuteronomy 21:18 instructed that it was ‘the mothers dutie also to instruct her children’.4 Hanserd Knollys praised the abilities of Katherine Sutton to teach in her own family and the families of others as a governess, desiring that ‘Parents and Governours of families would follow her Example therein: Endeavouring (as she did) the Conversion and sanctification of them, whom God committed to their charge, by Instructions, councel, and reproof, which she adminstred’.5 Given the restrictions on women speaking in their congregations, Knollys specified that her teaching took place as part of ‘her family duties’, but, nevertheless, teaching in the home was extremely influential on the early spiritual lives of the separatists, as well as servants, especially those who lived far away from meeting houses. For instance, the frequently despairing Deborah Huish was assured of her election after participating in family duties. Melinda Zook has noted that the term ‘nursing mother’, used to describe women in the 1680s that sheltered Whig activists, was used earlier in the century to describe women that ‘nourished the hungry congregation of the new enlarged family’.6  Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 97.  Richard L. Greaves, ‘Women in Early English Nonconformity’, Church History, 52

3 4

(1983), 299–311 (301). 5  Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, [a]2. 6  Melinda Zook, ‘Nursing Sedition: Women, Dissent, and the Whig Struggle’, in Fear, Exclusion, and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. by Jason McElligott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 189–203 (p. 192).

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Although her examples are taken from Quaker works, Baptists also referred to women as mothers who nursed, comforted, and protected the members of their groups, most notably in the office of deaconess (or ‘widow’) and in their published conversion narratives and prophecies. Indeed, women could defend their writing and publishing if it was done for strengthening the ‘health’ of the congregation, framing themselves, as ‘active, public women’, ‘within acceptable, non-threatening familial roles’.7 Far from the riotous, lascivious women that contemporaries envisaged, Baptist women were often presented in their works as fruitful, pious councillors. As both Zook and Osherow note, however, women writers’ maternity could also be political, emphasised by the role of Deborah ‘whose efforts on her nation’s behalf consist of a use of language’.8 Turner’s work draws on Deborah’s ability to judge, and to cure her people: some Baptist churches, she argued, needed to reject all those who communed with paedobaptists or Quakers from among them, just as Deborah had highlighted the ‘Israelites’ disobedience punctuated by their worship of false gods’ (Judges 2:12).9 As a mother, it was her duty to ‘speak for others’ (p. 103) who were not fulfilling their proper offices to ‘forewarn others’ (p. 111) of the dangers posed by listening to those of different beliefs. In his prefatory epistle, the leading Baptist John Spilsbury called her work ‘seasonable for the time we live in’ (B4) because it would ‘provoke self-examination and spiritual quickening’ (B6v) amongst the Baptists. This chapter, therefore, will explore the written contributions of women to the Baptist movement as anxious mothers to their congregations, provoking new births in their followers, and strengthening their groups. Attention will be given to the participation of women in baptismal debates, focusing on the nature and practice of baptism in the first part, before exploring Jane Turner’s conversion narrative as an argument against open-communion and Quaker churches. ‘A little sprinkling will not do’: Women Debating Believers’ Baptism From the first formation of Baptist congregations, several interlocking issues, all to do with how the group defined itself as ‘orderly’, distinctive, or separate from the world, caused internal and external disagreements and provoked women into print. First there was the issue of baptism: should it be issued to all entrants to the church, infant or adult, or restricted to believing adults, and should it take the form of ‘dipping’ or immersing the believer in a river or stream, or ‘sprinkling’ the believer from a font? Secondly, could a congregation allow both paedobaptist and anti-paedobaptist members to join together in worship as an open-communion church, and if so, should stricter Baptist churches disassociate themselves from open-communion groups? Thirdly, should the minister or elder lay their hands  Ibid., p. 192.  Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 98. 9  Ibid., p. 81. 7 8

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upon each member as they entered the congregation as a sign of membership? Strict Baptist congregations, such as that joined by Jane Turner, practised baptism by immersion and often strongly advised members against associating with those who communed with paedobaptists. On 1–2 March 1654, for instance, the Association of South Wales advised the erring Abergavenny Church to ‘take heed of mixed communion with unbaptized persons, or any others walking disorderly’.10 The Midlands Association, meeting on 4–6 June 1656 at Morton-in-the-Marsh, also concluded: ‘Neither may they [Baptists] soe heare or joyne with unbaptised persones, though hoped to be godly, because they are disorderly in carr[y]ing on a publick ministery and worship without baptism’ (citing Colossians 2:5 and 2 Thessalonians 3:6 where Paul insists on good order and discipline).11 To be ‘disorderly’, as Anne Dunan-Page writes, was ‘a standard Pauline expression’ for churches that ‘did not respect the proper order for admission. Baptists insisted that church fellowship and communion came after teaching and baptism; Bunyan [and other open-communion churches] that fellowship came before baptism.’12 Opencommunion churches, like those gathering in Bedford, Bristol, and Hexham, and those of Henry Jessey and John Simpson in London (supported by the principles of John Tombes), tended to allow each believer to follow their own conscience, although their own ministers were baptised.13 The diverse beliefs present in these churches, which were often charged with disorderliness by anti-paedobaptists, appears to have provoked women’s engagement with baptismal debate. This section, therefore, will highlight women’s role in the baptismal debate, in contrast to previous discussions that focus only on male-authored treatises, but will focus particularly on arguments for the practice of believers’ baptism.14 In his account of the Broadmead Church, elder Edward Terrill put forward the scriptural precedents for believers’ baptism found in the New Testament where there was ‘the plain gospel rule, that none were baptized until they professed their faith in Christ’ (p. 40) depicted by the practice of the apostles in Acts 8:37. Baptists like Terrill could see no precedent for infant baptism in the New Testament, but paedobaptists, instead, looked to the Old Testament, where God makes a covenant with Abraham and his descendants in Genesis 17. Upon making the covenant, God asked Abraham to circumcise all his ‘seed’ at eight days old thereafter (17:10), but also all his household including his servants (17:23), which became the sign that the child was one of the elect. Only after Christ’s crucifixion, taking away the suffering of man, was circumcision replaced with water baptism, and it was widely held that the two practices were equivalent: infants would instead  ‘Association Records of South Wales to 1656’, AR, I: p. 8.  ‘Association Records of the Midlands to 1658’, AR, I: p. 25. 12  Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming, p. 57. 13  B. R. White, ‘Open and Closed Membership among English and Welsh Baptists’, 10 11

Baptist Quarterly, 24 (1972), 330–34. 14  For sources on the baptismal debates see Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, pp. 51–55; Page, Grace Overwhelming, pp. 47–76; Bell, Apocalypse How?, pp. 26–29.

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be baptised at eight days old to signify they were recipients of God’s covenant. The paedobaptist Daniel Featley in The Dippers Dipt, for instance, asserted ‘that which circumcision was in the old law to the Jews, that is baptisme now to us, the sacrament of entrance into the church; for so St. Au[gu]stine and all sound divines hold’.15 Addressing her open-communion congregation that had been debating the practice of baptism for a couple of years, Sara Jones wrote in support of infant baptism because of its equivalence to circumcision cementing the covenant: ‘The two seales under the Gospel are of one nature’, baptism and holy communion, ‘but washing makes us capeable of eating. So Circumcision makes them [the Jews] capeable of eating the Passover.’16 While Baptists required profession of faith before baptism and admission to the Lord’s supper, Jones’s congregation, up until that point, had only required a profession before the Lord’s supper, ‘not before they can examine themselves’ (B2): baptism was automatically administered to the seed of the faithful. Jones saw her congregation as part of the visible church descended from Abraham and his wife Sarah, separate from the line he established with his bondwoman Hagar described in Genesis. Although he already had a natural son, Ishmael, by Hagar, the Lord saw fit to grant him a son, Isaac, by Sarah who had long been barren. Because Isaac was a gift from God, a child ‘of the promise’ (Romans 9:8), he was considered an example of God’s elect, predestined before birth, as opposed to Ishmael who was a child ‘of the flesh’. In an earlier work, Jones depicted her congregation as descended of Sarah, the ‘free woman, and not of the bond woman’, and encouraged her fellow members to build a ‘holy house for the King of Saints to rule in, as the first-born sonne [Isaac], and not as a Mosaicall servant [Ishmael]’: those who worshipped contrary to scripture, in her eyes both the established church and those in her congregation that supported believers’ baptism, worshipped in bondage and were not true inheritors of the covenant.17 She advocated a separation from such ‘Congregations in bondage, as Hagar’, but that the congregation should ‘gather our Baptisme from them’.18 As both Isaac and Ishmael were circumcised at eight days old, both lines continued the practice, which then changed to baptism, and so Jones recognised that her separatist congregation would share infant baptism with the established church. Anti-paedobaptists like Terrill disagreed with beliefs akin to Jones’s that baptism could be given to those that were not recipients of God’s covenant, and so denied that circumcision and baptism were equivalent ordinances. Terrill, in agreement with other Baptists, believed that the newest instruction on the practice of baptism was to be found in the New Testament, where profession of faith preceded the ordinance: paedobaptists, he wrote, acted as if there was ‘the same law for God’s house, or church, under the gospel, as there was under the law, for the discipline of it’ (p. 40), when it was clear that God had changed the law throughout the Old  Featley, The Dippers Dipt, p. 9, quoted by Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, p. 51.  Jones, To Sions Virgins, B1v. 17  Jones, The Relation, p. 54. 18  Ibid., p. 51; p. 52. 15 16

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Testament. Such arguments, especially when they divided a congregation, often led to splits and cessations of members as they sought to align themselves with the congregation that they thought best resembled the examples that appeared in the scripture. Both Jones’s and Terrill’s congregations recognised the importance of believers following their own consciences and worshipped as open-communion groups, embracing both paedo- and anti-paedobaptists. As Lucy Hutchinson’s biography of her husband attested, discussed in this book’s introduction, deciding whether to baptise a newborn infant was fraught with anxiety. Believers could reject the ordinance until their child was of age, fearful that baptising infants was not practised in scripture, but that meant turning their backs on tradition, leading those critical of anti-paedobaptists to claim, as Jones did, that it was ‘a sad thing that the Citizens of Sion should have their children borne forreiners not to be baptized’.19 The Broadmead Church recognised parents’ anxiety over their children’s souls if they rejected infant baptism and established the practice of praying in the house of the newly delivered mother and writing the name of the child in their church book under ‘Children of the Church’ which were the ‘seed of the faithful’, which in some ways resembled the traditional baptismal and churching ceremonies.20 The doubts of future Baptist minister Hanserd Knollys and his wife caused Sara Jones’s church, led by Henry Jessey, to hold a conference on the scriptural precedents for infant baptism so that he and the congregation could be resolved, and provoked the publication of her own catechism supporting infant baptism. In early 1643, Knollys, a member of the church from about 1641, was encouraged by the congregation to baptise his newborn child by ‘ye Elder [presumably Jessey], & by one or two more’, but he referred the matter to the church and several meetings were appointed between Knollys, Jessey as minister, and William Kiffin (‘B. Ki.’) and were written in the church’s record for the use of members who could not attend.21 Jessey admitted that there was no precedent for infant baptism in the New Testament and referred to the use of circumcision to cement Abraham’s covenant, but Knollys argued that circumcision was not given to the church, but rather to the natural family of Abraham: ‘Gen: 17 proves [circumcision] no more to be given to a Church as a Church, for their Infants to have the token of Covenant in Infancy, then for the  Jones, To Sions Virgins, A2v.  One of Broadmead’s elders, Robert Purnell, published this as part of a response

19 20

to the printed attack of a previous elder, Dennis Hollister, who had turned Quaker. Purnell recommended this practice ‘to all sober Christians, especially such as are dissatisfied in their judgments and Consciences, about Infants Baptism’, especially ‘that when any godly Woman, a Member of a Congregation, hath received such a mercy, she should at some convenient season present her self with her Child in the Church, that Praise may be rendred to the Lord on her behalf, presenting her Child also to the Lord by Prayer [...]. I the rather mention this, because there are many who since they left of Infant Baptism, that are (as I conceive) too remiss in the duty of thankfulness, and too careless of the pretious Souls of their Children’ (Purnell, The Church of Christ in Bristol Recovering her Vail, p. 64). 21  W. T. Whitley, ed., ‘Debate on Infant Baptism, 1643’, TBHS, 1 (1908–09), p. 240.

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Churches Servants all bought wth money &c without exception of Religion to be Baptized [17:12–13].’22 Kiffin appears to have won the argument by showing that the congregation should look only to New Testament teachings in which there was ‘no Institution for Infants Baptism’ and ‘being ye Seed of Abraham, of Godly Parents, would not qualify them’ for the ordinance.23 Following the conference, members of the congregation continued to discuss the problem ‘whereof some searched ye Scriptures, some prayed earnestly for light, & had such impressions on their Spirits against Pedobaptisme, as they told ye Elder [Jessey] upon his enquiry, that he could not but judg there was much of God in it’.24 Sixteen members were so convinced against paedobaptism that they would not even speak to those who upheld it. Jessey was moved against paedobaptism himself, and was eventually baptised by Hanserd Knollys on 29 June 1645, but he never made believers’ baptism a condition of entry to his congregation, causing some members to leave to join other separatist or Baptist groups: Jones appears to have stayed a member at least until 1644 though she clearly disagreed with Jessey’s ruling on paedobaptism, and its practice.25 Jones published two pamphlets soon after these debates which resulted, to her discomfort, in her congregation being ‘baptized as a true Church’ in March and April 1644.26 Jones’s two tracts, To Sions Virgins, a catechism supporting paedobaptism, and To Sions Lovers, a short tract in support of ‘the Doctrine of laying on of hands’, an ordinance given to members entering the congregation, were bought by Thomason on 4 November 1644 and 6 November 1644 respectively, barely a month after the Baptist Confession of Faith appeared in print on 16 October. The Confession was signed and published by the seven Baptist churches of London, including William Kiffin, John Spilsbury, and Thomas Patient, in response to accusations of ‘doing acts unseemly in the dispensing the Ordinance of Baptisme, not to be named amongst Christians’.27 In order to vindicate the group, the articles set out the scriptural precedents for their ordinances which followed Kiffin’s argument expressed in his earlier debate with Knollys and Jessey: the thirty-ninth article reads that ‘Baptisme is an Ordinance of the new Testament, given by Christ, to be dispensed onely upon persons professing faith, or that are Disciples, or taught, who upon a profession of faith, ought to be baptized’ (C1v–C2). Although Jessey had not signed the Confession, not undergoing believers’ baptism himself until the following June, the title page of Jones’s To Sions Virgins erased him from her gathered church’s history, only recording the names and reputations of the congregation’s two previous ministers, Henry Jacob and John Lathrop, though  Ibid., p. 241.  Ibid., p. 242. 24  Ibid., pp. 242–43. 25  See Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, pp. 55–61; Wright, The Early English 22 23

Baptists, 1603–1649, pp. 75–84. 26  ‘Debate on Infant Baptism, 1643’, p. 243. 27  The Confession of Faith, A2v.

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Jessey had become the church’s leader in 1637. The composer of the title page was waiting for ‘when God shall give more liberty and Pastours according to his own heart’, in effect, urging Jessey to return to the paedobaptist beliefs of his predecessors. Jones addresses her fellow paedobaptist readers by encouraging them to ‘marke those that made devision and avoid them’, because they have ‘a spirit of fornication that easily closeth with errour’ (A2), advocating the use of excommunication for those who were persuaded to believers’ baptism and would not speak to their paedobaptist friends. The first words of her address highlight the covenant made between God and his people and urge her readers to turn away from their transgressions, ‘Heare, and thy soule shall live’ (Isaiah 55:3), ‘looke on him whom thou hast peirced’ (Zechariah 12:10), and ‘separat[e] the pretious from the vile’ (Jeremiah 15:19), drawing a link between her congregation and the seed of Abraham (A2). She warns her ‘godly friends’ to beware of the ‘old errours’ of Anabaptism appearing ‘new furbished as new truths’, writing that ‘the Beast will plucke hard’ in order to ‘deceive the Elect’ (A2): ‘beware of the taile of the Beast’ she writes, ‘that must draw the third part after him’ (A2), alluding to the prophetic visions of Revelation 12:4 where Satan is said to pervert the ‘third part of the stars of heaven’, the elect, ‘casting them down to earth’. In this same verse, Satan as a dragon is depicted waiting for a woman, the church personified, to give birth so that it may devour the child, which Jones reads as her own congregation struggling to bring forth the new church organised according to scripture, and Satan’s new heresies waiting to devour it. Though depicting the church as the Bride of Christ was a rhetorical device frequently employed in the Bible, Jones also utilises its femininity to align these sufferings with her own as she is ‘in paine, as a travelling woman, to bring forth to the King of Saints’, struggling to form this new church according to scripture.28 In doing this she endows herself with the power of the Bride in order to vanquish the ‘old errours’ by uniting her congregation in scriptural order. The images Sara Jones uses to describe her congregation and its members are predominantly feminine: the church is the Bride of Christ, a travelling woman; Jones herself exploits the slippage between her own name ‘Sara’ and the biblical Sarah ‘mother of nations’ (Genesis 17:16); and the children of the church after baptism are ‘sion’s virgins’, compared to ‘the Virgins, without number’ of Song of Songs 6:8 who are preparing to become spouses (and later, perhaps, fruitful mothers). In the latter allusion, Jones becomes the spouse continually searching for her beloved, the true church searching for the right way to worship, witnessed by ‘sion’s virgins’, the congregation. Katharine Gillespie has written, referring in particular to popular ideas that female sectarians (but particularly Baptists) made monstrous mothers because they did not baptise their children, that female ‘sectarians themselves propagated and celebrated the idea that the gathered churches were institutional and holy products of a maternal agency expressly

 Jones, The Relation, p. 21.

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lacking in “elderships”’.29 Unlike her minister Jessey who welcomed antipaedobaptists into his congregation, Jones played the part of an anxious mother encouraging her readers to continue baptising their children, addressing her female readers in her previous tract, The Relation of a Gentlewoman, as the ‘Daughters of Sarah’, establishing the congregation’s receipt of the covenant, but also her own position as the nursing mother of her church.30 Later in the same text, Jones aligns herself with Deborah, the ‘mother in Israel’, whose judgement and advice led the Israelites to defeat their oppressors, aligning the position of ‘mother’ with giving advice or counsel to her people. The Relation is concerned with maintaining church order in the face of Laudian persecution, including defining the congregation’s proper offices of elder, deacon, and deaconess, but also sets out what Jones believed was the precedent for infant baptism: By vertue of the externall covenant the children of the visible Congregation are received into the Kingdome by Baptisme; they are not received by vertue of the parents beleeving, but by vertue of their parents visible order are they received in by Baptisme; they are not regenerated and borne again by outward washing, neither are they saved by their parents faith, but outwardly saved in the visible Congregation of the saints, as Noah in the Arke; wherefore unlesse you doe agree in the Name of Christ, consenting to visible order, you shall never gainsay such as deny the washing or baptising of Infants; wherefore get into order, and manifest faith, to the joy of the Saints in order.31

Jones emphasises the need for both parents to uphold the ‘visible order’ of the separatist congregation by each member undergoing a seal of their separation, which Jones advised later, in To Sions Lovers, should take the form of a profession of faith followed by the laying on of hands. Using the precedent of Noah’s visible separation from the sinful at the time of the flood, Jones shows how the covenant should be restricted to only fully separated members, changing her congregation from an open- to a closed-communion group, so that their seed could be assured of being in receipt of God’s grace. Jones presents herself as a mother urging her people, men and women, to strengthen themselves against the spread of believers’ baptism, in order that their children might be ‘saved’ from this antichristian ordinance: she saw the Lord ‘having powred out his Spirit upon them giving them power to be his Sonnes and Daughters [Acts 2:17]’, which emphasised the

 Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 39, citing Jones, To Sions Lovers, B2.  Jones, The Relation, p. 21. 31  Ibid., p. 63. Katherine Chidley, a member of John Duppa’s congregation and 29 30

a vehement justifier of separatism, uses the example of Noah in her Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ, written in the same year, to ‘declare by the testimony of the Scripture it selfe, that the way of Separation is the way of God’ (a3). She writes that ‘Noah and his family [...] were saved, when the world was drowned’ (Genesis 6), thus, in effect, ‘separating of his Church from the world’ (a3).

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importance of both parents submitting to the power of order, but also, according to Acts 2:17, that both sexes could prophesy for the profit of all.32 Unsurprisingly, open-communion congregations like Jones’s that tolerated both paedobaptists and anti-paedobaptists in the same group experienced more conflict among members than closed-communion churches, and in these exceptional situations, women writers and prophets appear to have flourished. Jones, Turner, and Anna Trapnel all produced writings and utterances that contributed to debates about the membership of their groups. Trapnel was a member of John Simpson’s open-communion congregation worshipping at Allhallows, Upper Thames Street, London, from 1650, before her Cornwall journey, until 1 September 1657, during which time she published four out of six of her extant works. As Murray Tolmie has noted, Trapnel’s minister, John Simpson, had become a Baptist early in the 1650s, ‘but like Henry Jessey he made believers’ baptism a personal rather than a church matter, and his congregation continued as an Independent church’.33 By 1656, however, the church had begun to disagree because Simpson began to preach in favour of the Protectorate, at odds with the group’s large Fifth Monarchist membership. In February 1656, after Simpson’s release from prison for preaching against the Protectorate, he spoke ‘against the oppinion of the fifth monarchy’ and that he was ‘utterly against’ taking arms against the government until ‘Christ comeinge personally’.34 For this he was ‘sufficiently bayted for by his own partye’ who broke up the meeting ‘in confusion’. By spring 1657, the Fifth Monarchists in his congregation had confronted their minister, who barred them from entering the congregation. They issued a complaint in 1658, signed by former elder and deacon, Caleb Ingold and John Proud, who had also signed the preface to Trapnel’s published letters and conversion narrative, A Legacy for Saints. Following the formal cessation of the Fifth Monarchists from Allhallows, Trapnel sang prophecies in verse and prose for several weeks between 11 October 1657 and 7 August 1658 in which she spoke of her own baptism, and argued for its correct practice, emphasising its ability to separate the saints ‘from that untoward generation’.35 Although choosing not to undertake baptism did not mean, as some had asserted, that believers were damned, Trapnel held that the practice was a ‘visible discovery’ of ‘universal obedience in Christ’: ‘but as the Apostle commends Water-Baptism, so he leads them to the advancing of Christ the Redeemer and Saviour’. Baptism, therefore, was an outward sign that the Fifth Monarchists were a chosen people set apart. Two particular prophecies, recorded on 28 November and 2 December 1657, are the longest female-authored defences  Jones, To Sions Virgins, B1.  Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints, p. 109. 34  Secretary Thurloe to Henry Cromwell, 19 Feburary 1655/6, TSP, p. 545. See an 32 33

account of the disagreement in The Old Leaven Purged Out. or, The Apostacy of this Day Further Opened ([London: n. pub.], 1658); Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, pp. 276–78; Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, pp. 297–99. 35  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 434.

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of believers’ baptism still extant, and were certainly provoked by Trapnel’s urge to separate herself and her fellow Fifth Monarchists, the few who continued to speak against the Protectorate, as well as an ongoing dispute between the London Baptists and Zachary Crofton, a Presbyterian and a paedobaptist. At the petition of frequenters of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, John Simpson had been appointed by Cromwell as an afternoon lecturer there on 10 February 1657, sharing the pulpit with Crofton who was very critical of what he called the ‘profane and Anabaptisical spirits’ he found under his ministry, berating them in a defence of his own behaviour which he published as Perjury the Proof of Forgery.36 On 2 December 1657 Crofton appeared in court in front of the Guildhall commissioners to answer for his preventing Simpson’s ministry, but also for the accusation that he had unjustly and salaciously whipped his maidservant, Mary Cadman. His defence, bought by Thomason on the same day as the trial, tormented the Baptists who he said ‘fret[ted] at the constant and successeful administration of baptism to the infants of believing parents’ which they ‘cry out against as a Prelatical command’.37 Trapnel’s prophecy from 2 December, although never mentioning Crofton by name, was critical of the ‘vile opposing Rabbies’ that sought to prevent the proper, scriptural administration of baptism: The Lord remembers their sin, who Hath such a despising tongue; That so do speak against those truths That from the new Covenant doth come.38

Accompanied by the defamatory accusations made against Crofton, Trapnel’s words would have aligned aggressive paedobaptism based on the ‘old’ covenant of Abraham rather than the ‘new’ Gospel covenant, with questionable private conduct. Trapnel’s folio, according to Erica Longfellow, ‘aligns itself with the divine authority of the Psalms through a formal resemblance to English Psalm translations’, but her song also aligns her with Deborah whose ‘victory song’ appears in Judges 5 in which she celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from their enemies.39 As a judge and a leader, Deborah provides Trapnel with the means to advise her co-religionists on the practice and power of believers’ baptism, while also aligning them with the Israelites, the Lord’s chosen people: the enemies of believers’ baptism, including Crofton, but also Cromwell, as a persecutor of the  Zachary Crofton (pseud. Alethes Noctroff), Perjury the Proof of Forgery: or, Mr Crofton’s Civilitie Justified by Cadman’s Falsitie (London: Printed for James Nuthal, 1657), A2. See also J. A. Dodd, ‘Troubles in a City Parish under the Protectorate’, EHR, 10 (1895), 41–54. 37  Crofton, Perjury the Proof of Forgery, A2. 38  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 125; p. 134. 39  Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, p. 172; Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 80. 36

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saints, become Sisera and Jabin. The seal of baptism could visibly unite the elect against their enemies, and Trapnel asks that both ‘search through the Scripturebook’ (p. 131) in order to find the right practice of ‘Gospel-Baptism’ (p. 74): although she recognised that ‘the promise is to Abraham and his seed’, repeating this line five times over fifty lines, grace was not given ‘according to the flesh’ of his descendants but according to their ‘spiritual account’ which could only be made manifest in a profession of faith (p. 131). It was the ‘Antichrist’, she said, ‘that doth | Apply [baptism] to children’, because they could not show evidence that they were one of the ‘election-seed’: O Baptism I can largely sing of, Though others do despise: [...] The Children of believers, they Have no more right then others, If that it be made out that they Are believing Sisters and Brothers. It’s faith that gives a right into The Ordinances sweet; And it is onely by faith, that We the Lord in them meet. (p. 126; p. 131)

Trapnel believed that the ‘Antichrist’ had ‘straightened’ or narrowed the covenant in restricting it to the children of believers, rather than any person who could demonstrate their faith and therefore proof of election. James Holstun, in his excellent account of Trapnel’s untitled folio, writes that she ‘endeavours to drive out heretical “mixtures”’ by defending and defining believers’ baptism, explaining that paedobaptism was directly against the gospel precedent.40 If baptism was carried out in the right way, she prophesied, the Lord would ‘deliver this day | Israel from their enemy [the Protectorate] | In a wondrous manner and way’ (p. 69) as he had done for Deborah, where the Lord made her ‘have dominion over the mighty’ (Judges 5:13). In her earlier prophecy on baptism from 28 November, Trapnel spoke of how the Antichrist did endeavour to ‘break down’ the practice of baptism by allowing it, ‘but not according to | The Institution sweet’ (p. 74). There were disagreements over not only who should be baptised, but also how the water should wash the candidate, whether by sprinkling, or immersing the whole body. Most, if not all, Baptist congregations were dipping their members by the time of Trapnel’s prophecy in 1657, though the established church continued to sprinkle infants from the precedent in Isaiah 52:15 (‘so shall he sprinkle many nations’), and Ezekiel 36:25 (‘Then I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean’), in both senses referring to the reforming qualities of the word or spirit. Jones, writing against the practice of ‘dipping’, by contrast, held up sprinkling as being symbolic of the issuing of water from Christ’s side at the crucifixion, symbolising  Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, p. 299.

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the redemptive power of his death for all the elect. Baptist churches, however, dipped their members following the example in the New Testament, particularly John the Baptist’s baptising of the people of Jerusalem and Judea in the river Jordan, ‘confessing their sins’ (Matthew 3:6), followed by Christ’s own baptism after which he ‘went up straightaway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove’ (3:16). The Baptist Confession of Faith from 1644 advised that ‘the way and manner of the dispensing of this Ordinance, the Scripture holds out to be dipping or plunging the whole body under water: it being a signe’ of Christ’s own burial and resurrection.41 Reading the precedent for this belief, Romans 6:4–5, convinced Deborah Huish, a member of a Baptist congregation in Loughwood, South Devon, to undergo baptism by dipping: I did expect advantage by the Lord Christ his death and Resurrection to my poor soul, so I ought by my visible obedience to this his Command, to declare my putting him on, and my being planted in the likenesse of his death, being buried with him by Baptism into death [6:4]; and also my being raised with and by him, and the Power of his Resurrection [6:5], unto newnesse of life [6:4]; and my resolving (in his strength) to walk accordingly: all which ends Baptism.42

Undergoing a practice which resembled the saving death and resurrection of Christ also represented the candidate’s own suffering through being made conscious of their own sins before they were made aware that they were among the elect. The practice of sprinkling, Baptists believed, did not resemble the emblematic New Testament model, as Trapnel contended: O those that are baptized in Christ, According to Gospel-truth, They are plunged into water, and They do his death and resurrection shew. O they are plunged in the water, A little sprinkling will not do: For what similitude hath that To this Baptism that is true? For what similitude hath sprinkling To burying in his grave? And to that resurrection which Is so choice and so brave? (p. 76)

By speaking through such prophecies, claiming the agency of the Holy Spirit, Trapnel’s words were given more authority to argue against the ‘vile Rabbies’, like Crofton, who refused and ‘greatly abuse[d] [...] true Baptism’ (p. 73). ‘Let none think’, she asserted, ‘that they can | Pluck down this Baptism wall. | Let  The Confession of Faith, C2.  Huish, The Captive Taken from the Strong, pp. 70–71.

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none think they can have power / Baptism to destroy’ (p. 75). Her audience and readers were urged to ‘be not deceived | By those that do creep in’, and not to maintain ‘dissembling [...], | Because the Rabbies say it is so’ (p. 77). She believed that she had been called by God to warn ‘poor England’ (p. 77) away from the practices of the antichrist. Her claim to be a seventeenth-century Deborah, advising on church practice and urging her congregation against blindly accepting popish, unscriptural, or corrupt practices, allowed Trapnel to sing out against her persecutors and become a leader in the fight against the antichristian forces. ‘Clear conceptions, and sound judgement’: Jane Turner’s ‘separation from all false waies of worship’ Despite strictures placed upon Baptist women contributing to doctrinal debates within their congregations, except by prophesying as discussed in Chapter 2, Jane Turner’s Choice Experiences (1653) not only presented the ‘Kind Dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion’, but interpreted and taught from these spiritual experiences. Her narrative, as well as the male-authored prefatory material, depicts her as a woman with ‘clear conceptions, and sound judgement’ (B5v), a celebrated mother of the church. The work is divided into six experiences, each one charting a period of her spiritual life (ignorance before conversion, hearing unprofitable ministry, baptised into communion, overcoming an assault by the Quakers, joys ever since), each followed by a corresponding ‘observation’ that draws out the providential message from the narrative. It is apparent that Turner is advising the Baptist churches on their conduct and practice, as well as providing an example to lay members to avoid the temptations of other ministries. She indicates that she experienced some discouragements from the saints ‘in writing, speaking, or doing any thing whereby God may be glorified’ (p. 5) and in ‘other spiritual duties also’ (p. 6), perhaps indicating that her contribution to her church, or those she visited, was not always tolerated or valued by her brethren. Citing 1 Thessalonians 5:19 (‘Quench not the Spirit’), Turner advises her church to take note of Paul’s exhortations to strive for godliness in comforting and edifying one another (5:11) and esteeming their preachers (5:12), while also urging them to warn those that were unruly and discouraging (5:14). In her observations, Turner frequently speaks as the mouth of the church, using ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, and ‘If I may speak for others’ (p. 103) when she justifies her love and delight for some of those who were not strict Baptists, even if they differed in their practices. Several pages later, however, her tone is more forceful, ‘forewarn[ing]’ (p. 111) her readers to break their association with those not of the same way: ‘we by our presence being silent do say the same, though in our Judgement we cannot so own them’ (p. 99). The rest of this chapter will explore Turner’s function as judge and advisor to the Baptist congregations in the North of England and Scotland, a position that was accepted and promoted by her husband and other church ministers. Evidently, according to Turner, the strict Baptist churches were not doing enough to separate from opencommunion churches, and prevent uncertain believers from having their spirits

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discouraged and ‘quenched’. As 1 Thessalonians 5 advised, the saints did not know when the Day of Judgement would arrive, so godly congregations should waste no time in establishing themselves according to order, which included treasuring up spiritual experiences ‘that we may be ready upon all occasions to bring it forth, [...] to the profit & comfort of our selves and others, as its our duty so to do, till the comming of our Lord’ (p. 208). While it was expected for men and women to give an account of their evidence of grace and reflect upon and draw meaning from this in private, Turner’s extended interpretations clearly and publicly voice criticisms of the Baptist ministry. Unlike the earlier publications of Sara Jones, who attributed much of her work to the Holy Spirit speaking through her using prophecy, Turner’s experiential work allows her to utilise her own voice, ‘believing that God would assist and help me’ (p. 5). The three men who added prefatory material to the work, her husband Captain John Turner, Captain John Gardiner, and John Spilsbury, all testified to God’s ability to show himself in the ‘labours of one of the weakest sex’, her husband asserting that her work would ‘occasion [the reader] the more to give glory to God, in that his strength appears in weakness’ (A6). When John Turner first saw her writings, which he assures the reader she had no desire to publish, he wrote that he was so surprized, knowing nothing of it before, that I knew not what to say of it; but upon consideration, and reviewing of it, I was very much pressed in spirit to publish it, and the more, in that the oftner I read it, the more I was ingaged to it: I can say through mercy it hath been usefull and profitable to me; I hope it will be so to many more. (A7r–v)

Leading Baptist minister, John Spilsbury, emphasised the work’s novelty, as ‘a work that is not common amongst men, being the work of a Daughter of Zion, nay I may say a Mother in Israel’ (B2), which John Gardiner echoed in comparing her to a ‘Mother in the true Israel, of which we have not many’ (B5v). All three men praised Turner’s wisdom, godliness, and virtue, all qualities of the prophetess Deborah: for instance, Gardiner testified to having experience of her ‘clear conceptions, and sound judgement; being more naturally given to the exercise of godliness with sobriety than others, [...] which hath been very advantageous to many, but especially to me’ (B5v). Turner’s experiences had been ‘very advantageous to many’ who were ‘so drowned in confused and immethodical thoughts, that all their intentions are like an untimely birth’ (B5), because she had ‘conceived and brought forth spiritual fruit, to the view of good and bad’ (B6). Metaphors concerning believers conceiving, travailing, and giving birth are common in conversion narratives, comparing the realisation that the believer is the recipient of saving grace with the moment of delivery (the ‘new birth’). The confusion caused by listening to different preachers was addressed by Turner’s first experience, where she observed afterwards that ‘ignorant persons in hearing truth may have their reason so far touched, that they may assent to it, and be much affected with it, and yet understand nothing so as to have it seated in the heart and judgement’ (p. 18). Such a receipt of truth, she writes, is like the seed of Mark

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4:5 that falls upon the stony ground, springing up suddenly but is unable to root and dies off (p. 19), an agricultural metaphor also frequently utilised by medical texts on reproduction.43 Turner recommended ‘weighing and pondering things in the heart and judgment’ (p. 21) in order to root truth deeply, instead of blindly accepting attractive doctrines causing such ‘ignorant persons’ to be ‘so uncertain and so unconstant in their thoughts’ (pp. 18–19), leading to the aformentioned ‘untimely births’. Turner compares herself to Mary, who ‘pondered those things in her heart, Luke 2:19’, whereas Gardiner compared ignorant persons to the barren ‘Jewish woman [...] deprived of bringing forth Christ in his humane nature’ because they were ‘barren in spirituals’ (B5v–B6). She observed later in her experience that ‘the reason why many persons do sit a long time in the profession of truth, and yet continue weak, ignorant, barren, and fruitless branches, it is because they are remiss in private duties’ (p. 188). It is the express direction of the Gospel, Turner argues, to practise the writing and interpreting of experience, comparing herself to the male ‘scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven’, whom Christ compared to a ‘householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old’ in Matthew 13:52 (p. 21). While Turner might own very little material wealth, relinquishing her money when she was married, she is spiritually rich, in command of her own private, spiritual household which she is ready to make public: this status allows her to become a scribe, recording God’s promises to his people (of whom she is a part), and edifying those experiencing ignorance and barrenness. Turner’s Choice Experiences, as Kathleen Lynch has discussed in her study of Protestant Autobiography, differed from the anthologies of Independent spiritual experiences published earlier in 1653 because the work ‘is not one among many’ and ‘positions the moment of conversion in a continuum of devotional practices rather than as the sustained culmination of those practices’.44 Unlike the writers of these earlier anthologies, Turner recognised that dangers threatened members of the Baptist churches even after they were converted, baptised, and added to the church, precisely because she experienced some uncertain ministry combined with the temptations of Quakerism in North-East England after she had been baptised. As Lynch observes, ‘like many of the critics of Independents, Turner stressed the 43  For instance, the mid-seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp explains the ‘twoseed model’ for conception in her Midwives Book: ‘Man in the act of procreation is the agent and tiller and sower of the Ground, Woman is the Patient or Ground to be tilled, who brings the Seed also as well as the Man to sow the ground with’ (The Midwives Book, p. 32). 44  Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, p. 167. John Turner also criticises these previous published testimonies for holding up as exemplary ‘a high degree of visible prophaness, and excess of riot, with heart, hand and tongue blaspheming the holy One of Israel, in an unconverted State’ (B1). His wife, he writes, was ‘kept from that high degree of wickedness’ and that saints should practise ‘Civility and Morality’ while they undergo spiritual struggles. This belief was not held by all Baptist church members, evidenced by the printed prefaces to Deborah Huish’s The Captive Taken from the Strong (1658), which interpret her experiences of the Devil’s temptations.

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ways in which the extension of a life could not be reduced to a single defining moment of blasting insight’.45 Turner begins her narrative as a ‘zealous’ member of the established church (p. 11), until she became acquainted with some Puritans whose language made her ‘question my own condition’ (p. 12) and she began to study the scriptures more frequently. She began to walk miles to hear a Puritan ‘Minister of the Nation’ (p. 22), who persuaded her that she was ‘convinced of sin by the Law’, which she writes, looking back, brought her ‘a great deal of labour and travel for life and happinesse’, in which state she remained for several years (p. 26). After believing in this ‘legal righteousness’, Turner came across a book espousing ‘Free Grace, the nature of the Gospel, and the New Covenant’, which she adopted after examining its scriptural basis. From free grace she embraced believers’ baptism, travelling to London to be instructed in its validity, and then settling there after her marriage. When she and her husband were convinced of the practice they gave their experiences in front of a London Baptist church, likely to have been John Spilsbury’s group gathered at Wapping. After several years with the church, Turner followed her husband, now a member of the army, into the country at the start of the Civil War, where confused Baptist ministry left them susceptible to the evangelising efforts of the Quakers, those ‘Angell[s] of Light’ (p. 113). Shortly afterwards she accompanied her husband on a voyage to Newcastle, to serve his Captain Robert Lilburne, also a Baptist, who was appointed Governor of the city in 1647, and credited with co-founding the first Baptist congregation in the city with Major Paul Hobson, who became one of the congregation’s elders.46 While in Newcastle, in communion with the newly founded garrison congregation, northern Quakers attempted to convert Turner, especially when she was left alone when her husband travelled to Scotland with his commander as part of Cromwell’s military expedition of 1650–51, and where Lilburne was subsequently made commander-in-chief of the army in Scotland. Despite the Newcastle congregation’s upheaval when its founding members travelled to Scotland, meditating on the scriptures privately led Turner to refute Quaker principles, confirming her Baptist faith and the necessity of recording such experiences for future use at the end of the narrative. Publishing Turner’s spiritual narrative was obviously beneficial to Baptist church members who were joined to newly founded congregations with uncertain ministry. Such northern groups were extremely vulnerable to members either  Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, p. 168.  Roger Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution: A Study of the

45 46

Civil War in North England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 248–49. A note in William Hylton Dyer Longstaffe’s edition of Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Ambrose Barnes ((Durham: Surtees Society, 1867), p. 150) records that the Baptists were permitted to use the chapel of St. Thomas on Tyne Bridge. A ‘Lieutenant John Turner’ signed Robert Lilburne’s A Remonstrance sent from Colonell Lilburnes Regiment to his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax (London: Printed for Giles Calvert, 1647), p. 5, with Major Paul Hobson. A ‘CaptainLieutenant Turner’ is also recorded in a list of officers in Robert Lilburne’s regiment from 1659 (28 May 1659, JHoC, 7: p. 669).

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falling back to the national church, or embracing radical Quaker or General Baptist tenets, both more popular in the northern counties. Clearly, Turner had experienced these problems at first hand, and saw the need to forewarn others (expressed via the warnings in the ‘observations’), although she and her prefatory writers all agreed that it was not her own idea to publish the work: Turner attested that she had completed the work in private ‘at several times in my Husbands absence’ (B7v), and that it was he who desired the work to be published when he saw it. It is not clear from Turner’s work where she was residing in 1653, as she does not identify herself with one particular Baptist congregation, but following her husband’s regiment to his station in Scotland in late 1652 after Lilburne’s appointment as commander-inchief seems a likely scenario: John Turner was a frequent presence at the central Scottish garrison at Dalkeith, Edinburgh, as was Jane’s other prefatory writer, John Gardiner, so it can be assumed with some confidence that she settled in Dalkieth at least until Lilburne was replaced as commander-in-chief by General George Monck in May 1654.47 As early as 1652, R. Scott Spurlock writes that ‘Baptist missionaries, particularly within the occupying army, set about propagating their message’, forming congregations across Scotland, including the port of Leith, near Dalkeith, Perth, and Cupar, and perhaps Dundee, Ayr, Aberdeen, and Inverness.48 As part of the travelling regiments, John Turner and John Gardiner were both serving captains in the occupying army, but they were also dedicated to furthering the Baptist movement in the country. According to the Hexham church records, which include several letters sent from Dalkeith, John Gardiner had previously been a chaplain with the army for at least two years, but accepted a captaincy because of ‘the inconviences of the condition of a chaplain, and that such could not speak out the mind of God so freely’ which was ‘a chief stumbling-block to many that are without [...] but especially those brethren that are assembled in this country’.49 The author of the letter reported that Gardiner had cited Acts 20:35 (‘that so labouring ye ought to support the weak’) to illustrate his meaning. As Scott Spurlock observes, ‘the suggestion that a military commission, as opposed to a chaplaincy, might provide greater freedom for missionary work is telling’, and cites reports that as an army officer Gardiner was baptising believers across Scotland.50 John Turner is also cited in a letter from Dalkeith to Hexham debating

47  Coward, ‘Robert Lilburne, ODNB. A letter from a missionary of the Hexham church recorded that Turner had previously visited Dalkeith: ‘Captain Turner hath, since his last coming hither, changed his judgment about the above-named particular’ (Edward Hickhorngill to the church at Hexham, 15 March 1652/3, ‘The Records of the Church at Hexham’, p. 318). 48  R. Scott Spurlock, ‘The Politics of Eschatology: Baptists in Interregnum Scotland’, Baptist Quarterly, 43 (2010), 324–46 (325). 49  Edward Hickhorngill to the Hexham Church, 8 January 1652/3 in ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, p. 308. 50  Scott Spurlock, ‘The Politics of Eschatology’, p. 328.

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whether a minister to a gathered church should accept a maintenance.51 Both men were clearly involved in evangelising activity across Scotland, using their freedom and authority to convert those in far-flung communities, and carrying letters and profitable books between groups, recruiting more believers and building links between new and uncertain ministries: John Turner addressed his wife’s published work to the ‘Precious and dearly beloved Brethren’ in the ‘Churches of Christ who worship God in spirit and truth [...], especially those my dear Brethren at Newcastle, B[e]rwick, and Scotland’, with whom he had ‘taken sweet counsel in the house of God for several years past’, linking them in their common trials and beliefs (A2). When Jane Turner’s Choice Experiences was published, soon after 7 September 1653 when the London Baptist John Spilsbury added his preface, the Baptist churches were forming themselves into larger associations of churches in order to support and succour young and inexperienced groups within them. Turner’s work can be understood as part of this movement because it recognised the growing need to support groups under threat, particularly in the north of England and Scotland where the Baptist presence was smaller, and a much more recent development.52 McGregor observes that ‘there were no more than a handful of churches in the six northern counties’, whereas the movement was much stronger in the south, west, midlands, and London: associations, at least for which records survive, gathered around the Midlands, around Abingdon, the West Country, Wales, and Ireland, and all associations were connected to the Particular Baptists in London by correspondence and by missionary activity.53 Because each group was thought to be part of the same body, with Christ only as the head, each congregation was required to send a representative to an association meeting in order to resolve theological and ecclesiological questions, provide financial support to other congregations and members, plan evangelical missions, and hear news about neighbouring congregations and their members.54 The groups were very successful, and, as McGregor writes, ‘were able to create a system of democratic, representative assemblies with no previous parallel, at least in English history. [...] Their associational system was not matched until the Quakers.’55 This kind of evidence suggests that the Baptists cared about the spiritual health of each individual church, but also the health of each individual member: the activities of Turner, her husband, and Gardiner, publishing a text  Edward Hickhorngill to the church at Hexham, 15 March 1652/3, ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, p. 318. 52  W. T. Whitley’s ‘Baptist Churches till 1660’ lists only congregations at Hexham, Newcastle, Carlisle (where members joined the Quakers in 1653), and Great Broughton (TBHS, 2 (1911), 232–34). John Turner also references a church at Berwick-upon-Tweed in his preface to his wife’s work. 53  McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, p. 35. 54  Ibid., pp. 34–35; Mark Bell, Apocalypse How?, p. 129; pp. 137–38. 55  McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, pp. 34–35. 51

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that resolved many questions of spirit and practice, indicate that they were in the process of establishing an association between the northern and Scottish churches, and further links with southern groups. A ‘Captaine John Turner’ appears as a messenger in the Abingdon Association records for December 1654 travelling between Warwick and Tetsworth, carrying an epistle to the latter, and a messenger from the Leith church visited the Fenstanton church at the time of an Abingdon Association meeting in April 1656.56 Turner’s work was also published with the intention to unite congregations across national boundaries. Jane Turner’s links with the Baptist congregations at Newcastle and Leith alerted her to the problems caused by churches that were open-communion, inviting both paedobaptists and anti-paedobaptists to join their churches. While the Newcastle church had quickly become closed-communion, the church at Leith was recruiting its ministers from an open-communion congregation at Hexham, twenty miles from Newcastle, led by Thomas Tillam. The Hexham church record book indicates that the closed-communion Newcastle church, led by Thomas Gower and Paul Hobson, was in disagreement with Tillam over his practices.57 Tillam practised the laying on of hands after each individual member was added to his church by baptism (the precedent for which he found in Hebrews 6:2), and associated with a network of open-communion churches, including that of John Tombes, a well-known advocate of the latter practice.58 Tillam complained later in April 1654 that a ‘spirit of rigidness doth so far sway among them [the Newcastle church], that they cannot own us, because we can own unbaptized churches and ministers for churches of Christ and ministers of Christ’.59 He found sympathy for this from the open-communion congregation led by Henry Jessey, but the same church advised against the practice of laying on of hands; Hanserd Knollys’s closed-communion congregation, urged by the ‘great storms and commotions, raised by Mr. Gower’, disowned Tillam’s church in June 1655 ‘and all that are in the practice of laying on of hands’.60 As well as these doctrinal disagreements, however, Tillam also mistakenly baptised ‘Joseph Ben Israel’ in June 1653, a man he suspected to be a Jewish immigrant, who was revealed by a conference with the Newcastle church to be a secret Jesuit, seeking to exploit

56  ‘Records of the Abington Association’, p. 135; p. 209, n. 36; ‘The Records of the Fenstanton Church’, pp. 180–81; Scott Spurlock, ‘The Politics of Eschatology’, 329. 57  White, ‘The Organisation of the Particular Baptists’, p. 215. 58  To the church at Hexham from various [open-communion] churches, ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, pp. 341–46. Periods of toleration led to more arguments between Baptists: Anne Dunan-Page observes ‘a revival in Baptist controversy’ after the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 (‘John Bunyan’s A Confession of my Faith and Restoration Anabaptism’, 23). 59  The church at Hexham to the church in Swan Alley, Coleman Street, London, ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, p. 349. 60  11 June 1655, ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, p. 295.

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national Baptist networks.61 It also became obvious during these exchanges that Tillam had converted from Roman Catholicism, himself. At the same time, the Hexham church was in correspondence with the second of their messengers they had sent to Leith to be employed as a chaplain by Lilburne, Thomas Stackhouse. After spending a year in Scotland, the Hexham church’s previous messenger, Edmund Hickeringill, had disappeared from the Leith church which he had joined, but returned to Dalkeith in July 1653 dressed ‘in a swaggering garb, full of vain and idle discourse, and in my [Stackhouse’s] judgment a desperate atheist’; he had left a Quaker, but returned believing in nothing but his own reason.62 A letter from Hickeringill, written in the same September as the publication of Turner’s experiences, admitted to strong temptations, ‘and my strength weak, having heart hankering after novelties which hath (I find) hitherto been my distemper, and partly the fuel of my extravagances’.63 Stackhouse’s own letter proclaimed the difficulty of his own role: My work is great; my strength is small. My life in every respect is a warfare. Corruptions within, enemies without. [...] My life hath been sweet to me, ever since I came from you, until Mr Hick[eringill] came, who troubles all that love the welfare of Sion, and causes them to vex their souls from day to day with his unlawful deeds. My brother Bond and I have had a sore trial. We have not wrestled with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, with spiritual wickednesses in high places, having had many secret temptations stealing in upon us unawares, even the fiery darts of Satan, our wicked hearts being full of atheism.64

Whether the Hexham church was unlucky, or whether Tillam was not up to the task of minister, the cases of Ben Israel and Hickeringill did untold damage to the northern Baptist movement, inviting slurs upon the Baptists that they harboured Papists and atheists, and that they would baptise anyone who offered themselves to the church. Turner’s experiences can be understood as directly responding to these events, distancing her own church from the disorderly and scandalous practices of the Hexham church. Choice Experiences was printed for the well-known Baptist Henry Hills, who also published Thomas Tillam’s vindication of his church and practice later in 61  Thomas Tillam, Banners of Love Displaied Over the Church of Christ, [...] at Hexham (London: Published by Henry Hils, 1653); David S. Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 21–47; Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution, pp. 249–54. 62  Mr Thomas Stackhouse to the church at Hexham, ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, pp. 330–31. 63  Edward Hickhorngill to the church at Hexham, ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, p. 333. 64  Mr Thomas Stackhouse to the church at Hexham, ‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, p. 331.

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January 1654, which indicates that the bookseller was eager to restore his group’s reputation.65 Turner records the setbacks she herself had when joining a London Baptist church, illustrating how these could have been avoided if the existing Baptist ministry had been more respectable, and if she had not have heard other, conflicting, ministers preach. She was convinced from Matthew 28:19 that ‘Baptism of Believers was an Ordinance of Christ, and that there could be no true Church without it, and that Baptizing of Infants is that for which I could find no ground in Scripture’ (p. 82). Indeed, she wrote, ‘the Scriptures were so plain and clear for it, that I did much wonder at my own ignorance’ (p. 83), urging believers to study the scriptures if in doubt about a principle. After visiting London for the sole purpose of hearing more about the practice, she became discouraged for four reasons: she was reluctant to be ‘tyed to a particular people’ as she believed that she profited from hearing other preachers; she had heard of ‘the failings and miscarriages of some particular persons then in the [Baptist] Churches’; she believed that it was her ‘liberty’ to undertake baptism or not; and because of these scruples she could willingly undergo persecution as a member of a church. A ‘notional’ preacher she heard then ‘bred such a confusion in my heart that I knew not what to do’ (p. 86). Despite having convincing scriptural proof, Turner was drawn away from the Baptists because of their conduct and the confusion of opinions she was exposed to: two of the larger problems which Tillam and his Hexham church were exacerbating in 1653. In her observations on her experience, she acknowledged that many people had received grace, but were ‘ignorant of their duty’ (p. 91), and through ignorance ‘of the nature of Christian Liberty, we are too subject to think that Bondage which is not only Liberty but a great Privilege’ (p. 93). Opencommunion churches were free to hear other preachers, to keep their liberty, but Turner’s experiences demonstrated that such freedom resulted in confusion and backsliding from duties. She advises such churches ‘that the Consideration of our stumbling at the failings of others, should make us carefull lest we occasion others to stumble at us’ (p. 94). The verse that convinced Turner to undertake the ordinance of baptism was given her by God, in the same way as it had been given to Paul in Acts 22:16 (‘And now why tarriest thou? Arise, and be baptized [...]’), which associated the practice with forgiveness and subsequent discipleship. Directly after recounting her baptism and entrance to the church, she testified to her satisfaction with its ministry: As to hearing out of the Church, I never desired it since, but God was pleased, and still is, to satisfy me with the fatness of his house [Psalms 36:8], feeding me with green pastures there [Psalms 23:2]; and sitting under the shadow of Christ, his Fruit is sweet to my tast [Song of Songs 2:3]; which the LORD grant I may be found so doing, as he hath commanded, until his second coming. (p. 88)

In order to attest to her confidence in God’s grace, and her and Christ’s mutual love manifested in her experience of conversion, Turner alludes to three biblical  Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, p. 167.

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songs presenting paradisiacal fruitful landscapes where she dwells as one of God’s flock. Saints dwelling with the Lord, glorifying him in all his duties, would be satisfied by the Lord and would need no other sustenance: David’s Psalm 36:8 foretold that the Lord ‘shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures’, simultaneously a symbol of sustenance and baptism, and the Geneva gloss specified that ‘onely Gods children have ynough of all things both concerning this life & the life to come’. Turner’s message was that those who did not encourage their flocks to undergo baptism would leave them lacking in spiritual sustenance, therefore causing them to become confused in their ways and to look elsewhere as she had come so close to doing. Turner’s experience of mixed and uncertain ministry, causing her to falter in her faith, authorised the harsh comparisons she made between the Baptist churches’ leading members who associated with open-communion congregations and the biblical enemies of Israel. Near the end of her ‘Observation on the fourth experience’, she urges the saints to ‘earnestly contend’ for the faith, citing Jude 1:3, because ‘certain men [have] crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God’ (1:4). Jude prophesies that these men ‘that believed not’ (1:5) would be destroyed as Cain, Balaam, and Core (1:12), and that their presence as ‘mockers in the last time’ (1:18) was foretold by the apostles. He then exhorts his readers to build each other up in spiritual faith, by urging each other to remain spotless. Turner’s observation carries out the instruction added to 1:22– 23 in the Geneva version, recognising that ‘some may be wonne with gentlenes, others by sharpe reprofes to drawe them out of danger’. Indeed, although she professes she did ‘much respect, love, and delight in some who are not yet come up to the true worship of Christ in his Church’ (p. 98) and hoped that one day they would ‘serve him with one consent [Zephaniah 3:9]’ (p. 104), she warned those that were undecided in doctrine to ‘take heed of pleasing men, or halting between two opinions’, citing Elijah’s reproofs to Ahab for worshipping God and Baal in 1 Kings 18:21: ‘but if God be God follow him, if Baal follow him’. Strict Baptists regarded infant baptism as an idol set up by Rome, so those who practised it were comparable to Baal’s prophets who are slain by Elijah by the end of the chapter, while he urges all those of indifferent principles to be consistent if they love God (Geneva n. 18:21). Turner certainly recognised this comparison as ‘harsh language’ (p. 102), but deemed it a loving act necessary to bring her co-religionists out of danger: she did not doubt their receipt of grace, nor did judge this herself, but was following the example of Jude and Elijah in exhorting and reproving her brethren. Let none, she wrote, ‘grow cold, and indifferent in the great things of God: For none can truly wait for the accomplishment of Promises, but such as do wait in a close walking with God’ (p. 104). The Baptists’ silence on this matter was sinful and would lead the ignorant astray by their seeming confusion, driving some, like Edmund Hickeringill, to adopt Quaker principles:

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Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680 I cannot see how we that are, according to the Gospel, joyned to the Lord, and his Church, by which we hold out to the world a visible profession of his name, and a separation from all false waies of worship, which in our principles we judge them who are not rightly constituted with us according to the appointment and practice of Christ and his Apostles to be no other, I say I cannot see how we can meet with them in their publique worship, to hear their Ministers, or in any other spiritual duty,66 but it is a crossing our own principles. As thus, they own themselves true Churches, and Ministers of Christ, the ignorant world knoweth not but they are so, we by our presence being silent do say the same, though in our Judgement we cannot so own them, which is a plain contradiction in our principles; we say they are not Churches and Ministers of Christ, by our practice we say they are, as hath been minded. (pp. 98–100, my italics)

It was not enough, Turner writes, to judge churches that have not rejected and separated from all false ways of worship as wanting: strict Baptists should decry the false ways of churches like Tillam’s Hexham church to the world. It was important to Turner, as she had experience of ministry of this kind, that potential members would not receive confused and incoherent principles from Baptist meetings: drawing on Paul’s example in 1 Corinthians 14:19, brethren appointed to expound and prophesy to the gathered people should not speak ‘in an unknown tongue’ (p. 97), but speak with understanding, because if ‘all speak with [unknown] tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?’ (14:23). Upholding separatist principles as a united church, Turner judged, was the only way to attract members without endangering their faith: she envisaged her writings as the product of sound judgement and reason, compared to the confusion all around her. By August 1654, however, the Newcastle church had sent their charges against the Hexham church to Knollys’s church in London, explaining in a letter to ‘the church at Hexham’ that ‘we could not own you according to a gospel rule’, and on 11 June 1655, Tillam and his church were ‘disown[ed]’.67 The predominant aim of Turner’s work, therefore, is to convince her readers that they needed to judge doctrine and practice for themselves by looking to scriptural precedents, and not blindly trust the preachers they had heard. She promotes the autonomy of individual believers to distinguish between true and false doctrine. As Thomas Weld, an Independent minister in Newcastle who had examined Joseph Ben Israel, wrote in relation to the problem of the papists in June 1653, a ‘method of Satan is, either to introduce persons unsound in the faith, or to 66  The Harvard University Library copy (shelfmark *EC65 T8542 653c, available on Early English Books Online) has a manicule drawn onto the page highlighting the last part of Turner’s quotation (p. 99). This does not happen on any other page and might conceivably be the mark of a reader who thought this argument particularly worthy of note. 67  The church at Newcastle to the church at Hexham, 27 August 1654, ‘The Records of the Church at Hexham’, p. 362; 11 June 1655, ‘The Records of the Church at Hexham’, p. 295.

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corrupt their judgements when they are in, for Satan hath no better a way to turn Churches into aire and dispirit them of the power of godlinesse, then by filling their heads with errour and fancy’.68 Ben Israel had apparently told his examiners that the papists’ plans were to ‘to undermine the Churches by closing with errours, and crying up notions’, and Turner’s work advocates frequent study of the scriptures in order to combat error but also to recognise true, scriptural doctrine. She was all too aware of the dangers of dismissing doctrines and practices that brought believers closer to the practice of the primitive saints: ‘it is a dangerous thing to esteem of persons above what is meet, and to be implicitly led by them in spiritual things’ (p. 65). Early in her spiritual life, Turner had heard a preacher who was opposed for ‘holding grosse errors in his Judgement’ (p. 50), of believing in the ‘Free Grace’ of God, but she earnestly weighed this new doctrine against scriptural passages (taking Romans 10:3 as her main precedent) before adopting it. Free Grace was a doctrine that made election and salvation independent of any action taken by the believer, placing less emphasis on legalism, formalism, and the moral law. Faith and belief were all that was required as evidence of election: as Turner put it, ‘the abounding love of Christ did compel and constrain me to cast my self upon him for life and salvation, in a way of believing, and not in a way of working’ (p. 58). A belief in free grace inevitably laid adherents and congregations open to charges of Antinomianism, of being ‘against the Law’ and giving believers liberty to sin. Sects like the Ranters took these beliefs to their extremes between the late 1640s and early 1650s, leading all believers in free grace to be tarred with a similar brush: Turner recalled that she was in ‘fear of those evill consequences that a carnal heart might draw from them’ (p. 50), and ‘so surprised with fear of carnal liberty, merely by their words’ (p. 52) that at first she dared not read anything or listen to any that preached on the topic. Anna Trapnel also recalled being ‘passed under the name of Antinomian’, observing that ‘as the Divel nick names Saints, so he nick names the doctrine of grace too’, and recorded that she ‘found no doctrine leading to holiness so much as it, no salve drawing out corruptions and ill humors like this, no plaister healing the most desperate wound, like the plaister of free grace’.69 ‘Legall threatnings, and legall promises’ left her ‘wallowing in blood, and pained with wounds’, believing she was not one of the elect, until Christ healed her with his own blood. This great love was the reason that Trapnel and Turner cited for having discouraged them from sinning: ‘there is no engagement so strong to keep the soul from sinning against God’, Turner wrote, ‘as the Free Grace of God, nor nothing more endeers the heart to God; Yet doubtless where there is nothing but only the notion of it, there is the greatest advantage to Satan that can be, and usually such persons are the worst of all others’ (p. 68). Rather than  Thomas Weld, A False Jew: or, A Wonderfull Discovery of a Scot (London: For Richard Tomlins, 1653), A3v. In the same year Weld also published The Perfect Pharisee under Monkish Holinesse (Gateside: Printed by S. B., 1653) against the Quakers. He later published the work of his stepdaughter, Anne Venn, in 1658 (see Chapter 4). 69  Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints, p. 15; p. 13. 68

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embracing an empty ‘notion’ because of its outward attractiveness, Turner argued that privately studying and meditating on the scriptures was necessary in order to bring about a true and lasting belief in grace. If the heart was not truly endeared to God, then those believers were on their way to becoming Ranters, Seekers, and Quakers; indeed, as Michael Watts notes, it was to some extent the failure of pastors in ‘treading the exceedingly narrow path between legalism on the one hand and Antinomianism on the other’ that caused many believers to seek religious ‘liberty’ in other guises.70 Turner acknowledged this problem while reflecting on the temptations of Quakerism: ‘Some do mind truth so much in an outward way as it relates to Order and Ordinances, as Baptism, Church-fellowship and the like, that they mind little else as to the end of these; and some are in the extreme on the other hand, [...] eagerly pursuing after the mystery of truth as to their intentions’ (p. 152). Problems in the northern Baptist churches in 1653 had at their root the conflict between legalism and antinomianism, and a proliferating experimentation with religious doctrines. At this time, Turner wrote, the people ‘being but newly brought from under the Bishops and Presbyterian yokes, they were generally weak in Judgement, though (it may be) strong in affection, and so more easily deceived’ by various radical opinions (p. 150). The first way to amend this, Turner wrote, was to hear only Baptist ministers preach and to separate completely from paedobaptists. The second way was to encourage believers to find scriptural proof for free grace and pray for guidance, not blindly accepting the doctrine as an empty notion and consequently embracing further radical tenets, such as Quakerism, more easily. Quakerism was spreading rapidly in the north and Scotland, and both the Hexham and Newcastle Baptist churches experienced a loss of members: Richard L. Greaves writes that Paul Hobson ‘battled with the Quakers, who converted six of his followers’.71 Turner recognised that in the previous six years ‘it was hard to find one person, much less a whole Church, that was not corrupted with them’ (p. 147), and devoted the fifth note of her experience to the ‘Notions, Pretended Spiritualities’ (p. 109) of the Quakers. Turner first encountered Quaker ‘Angels of light’ after she was baptised, when she and her husband had moved into the countryside with the army where they ‘had not that privilege’ of ‘the practice of the Gospel’ as they had previously (p. 111). There they found whole churches  Watts, The Dissenters, p. 179.  Richard L. Greaves, ‘Paul Hobson’, ODNB. Howell records that ‘more books were

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published in Newcastle in 1653 than in any other year during the Interregnum, and all five of the known titles for that year are concerned with the Quakers or the Baptists’ and that the Quakers were very active in 1653 and 1654 (Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution, p. 247, p. 255). Turner’s work is not the only evidence of Baptist women speaking out against the Quakers. Anna Trapnel prophesied against the Quakers, drowning out those of them that came to listen to her on 12 November 1657 and calling their ‘inward light’ the work of Satan ([Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 47). One letter gathered in the Quaker Swarthmore Manuscripts records that ‘one woman of Bunian his society’ opposed them in Bedfordshire in 1659 (Friends, MS Swarth. III, fol. 45).

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‘very much corrupted, owning & practising strange things’, though doing so under the guise of godly churches, and she recorded that it was difficult to find a person with ‘sound principles, much less a whole Church where there was a powerful Ministery, and a wise government’ (p. 112). This confusion led her to consider the tenets of the Quakers, including waiting for the spirit to move them to speak, ‘not owning any Ministery by way of gifts or office, but to come together, and there sit and wait till they had a power, and then to speak, whether men or women’ (pp. 114–15). Turner confessed that she was much taken with this practice, although she never ‘fully own[ed] them in Judgement’ (p. 115), but her experimentations with Quakerism left her ‘troubled’ because she had ‘little or no communion with God’ and she was never ‘so troubled with temptations as I was at that time’ (p. 117).72 Such experiences and practices, she wrote, ‘naturally lead to such temptations’ that included atheism with which she was violently afflicted (p. 118). Hexham’s missionary in Scotland, Edmund Hickeringill, was tempted by the Quakers and became a ‘desperate atheist’, having ‘a heart hankering after novelties which hath (I find) hitherto been my distemper, and partly the fuel of my extravagances’.73 Turner was alluding to situations like this when she wrote that believers had been led by Quakers ‘to the highest degree of wickedness, wax[ing] worse and worse till they have been as vile as hell it self, and particularly denying the resurrection of the body, and the Lord Jesus Christ’ (p. 146). Surely Turner was making the point that believers as well as ministers had to spend time comparing their own spiritual states with the scriptures: Tillam’s ministry had not accurately examined Ben Israel’s state of grace before he was baptised, and he had perhaps not done all he could in preaching effectively about free grace to Hickeringill (or indeed impressing the importance of not listening to non-Baptist preachers). The result of uncertain ministry, she wrote, ‘had some effects, which are too visible, and remain unto this day’ (p. 100). Turner’s whole treatise advocates the use of scripture for validating new doctrines; indeed, she believed that the reason so many saints were ‘deceived’ by the machinations of the Ranters and Quakers was because of ‘an extreme in minding truth as it relates to the inward man in point of experience, and inward workings’ (p. 151). While analysing experience was valuable, Turner believed that privileging it over scripture had encouraged believers to place more emphasis on 72  John Bunyan’s address to his readers in Some Gospel-Truths Opened, published in 1656, is an example of a warning to his fellow congregation members to consider ‘the Stratagems, or subtile temptations of the Devil, whereby he lyeth in wait, if by any meanes he may, to make [the believer] fall short of eternal life’ (Some Gospel-Truths Opened (London: Printed for J. Wright, 1656) B1v). One of the main methods Satan used, according to Bunyan, was that of the temptation to Quaker tenets. He writes that if a believer had not come to a firm belief in God’s grace they were particularly ‘lyable to the next damnable heresy that the Divel sendeth into the world. See and consider, Luke 8.13 2 Tim. 2.[26]. I say thou doest lie lyable to be carried away with it, and to be captivated by it’ (B5v). 73  Edward Hickhorngill to the church at Hexham, October 1653, ‘The Records of the Church at Hexham’, p. 333.

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their own inner spirit (that Turner suggested was being utilised by Satan). Quakers argued that because the Bible had been inspired by the Spirit, ‘the Spirit, not the Bible, ought to be the rule of Christians’.74 While Turner uses her own experience as an example to others, she weighs her spiritual state against scriptural examples, using these to argue against Quaker tenets. It was by ‘reading and examining my Scripture-grounds’ where she found ‘very full and plain’ evidence for election, free grace, and baptism, but ‘nothing’ for Quakerism (p. 124). Turner’s experience provoked a strongly worded reply the next year from the Quaker Edward Burrough, in Something in Answer to a Book called Choice Experiences. Burrough was ‘moved of the Lord’ to come into the ‘Assembly’ of her Newcastle congregation ‘to declare the truth from him, concerning you’, addressing Turner and ‘the Speaker when I was present among you’, probably Thomas Gower.75 In the subsequent reply, Burrough tries to convince the congregation that they are the ones that are ‘deceived’ by following the scripture so closely, and shows that they are ‘bewitched from the obedience of the truth within, to obey the letter without; as they were that the Scripture speaks of’ (p. 14). Referring to Galatians 3 in which Paul explores the importance of faith rather than the law, saying ‘after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster [the Law]’ (3.25), Burrough advocates an emphasis on the Quaker belief in the inward spirit rather than the comparative legalism and formalism he observed in Turner’s, and her congregation’s, adherence to scripture and the ordinances. Although Burrough threatens Turner, declaring ‘let her mouth be stopped, and let shame strike her in the Face, who professes her selfe to know the Lord’ (p. 7), he recognises her as the mouthpiece for her congregation, as she had portrayed herself in her narrative. As the first extant single-authored Baptist conversion narrative, Turner’s Choice Experiences has been acknowledged as an important work in the history of spiritual autobiography. However, scholars have often overlooked the function of Turner’s work as an attempt to unite and strengthen Baptist congregations over national boundaries. Unlike the contemporary works of Newcastle Independent Thomas Weld, and Newcastle Baptist Paul Hobson, which were published to be sold in Durham and Newcastle, Choice Experiences bore the prefatory epistle of leading London Baptist John Spilsbury, who most likely arranged its publication with Baptist printer and bookseller Henry Hills. The nature of the prefatory writings by Captain John Turner and John Gardiner attest to the work’s importance in their missionary activities as part of Cromwell’s occupying forces in Scotland, establishing links between the Newcastle and Berwick churches, and the Scottish churches (most especially, it can be supposed, with the congregation gathered near Dalkeith). Such a text would have been extremely useful to readers who  T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The BaptistQuaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 22. 75  Burrough, Something in Answer to a Book called Choice Experiences, p. 14; title page. 74

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had recently embraced Baptist faith as they sought to find the right practices in a multitude of errors: Turner advises how to avoid these errors, advocating a close reliance on comparing scripture and doctrine, but she also recommends changes to the organisation of the Baptist churches, to further discourage cessations to the Quakers. Open-communion congregations presented the most danger for Turner because their doctrines could more easily provoke confusion, and in listening to other preachers, believers were in danger of being led astray. Because the northern churches were less prevalent, they were inevitably less equipped to deal with the evangelising efforts of the Quakers: the letters written to the Hexham church attest to the lack of suitable ministers to act as missionaries in Scotland. Turner’s published book fulfilled some of the offices of a minister because it encouraged strength, but also recommended change, and similarities in approach can be found between it and Bunyan’s Some Gospel-Truths (published later in 1656), the preface to which includes the author’s own experience of Quaker temptations. What this chapter has shown, therefore, is that despite the restrictions placed upon Baptist women’s speech, they could utilise printed works in order to support and recommend improvements to the organisation and practices of the Baptist churches, fulfilling their function as descendants of Deborah, the biblical judge and leader of the oppressed church. These women contributed to baptismal debates, arguing for and against believers’ baptism, and to disagreements surrounding the existence of open-communion churches, requiring them to teach and advise their congregations in print: Jones, Trapnel, and Turner could all see dire consequences (like to those that threatened the Israelites in Judges) if they did not attempt to steer their congregation towards rightful doctrines and practices, and utilised this in order to excuse their authoritative writings.

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Chapter 4

The Woman’s Seed: Baptist Women and Fifth Monarchist Prophecy The time is coming, Are you fit? Companions, what do you say? Can you sing praises unto him For this approaching day? Companions are you strengthened For the King to appear? That you may engage for the King, And own his latter year. Companions dear, no matter though Others it delusion call: Yet O do you esteem of that Which brings the all of all.1

On 5 November 1657, Anna Trapnel lay prophesying, singing these verses to those that had gathered eagerly around her. Although there are no other contemporary references made to these prophecies, apart from the untitled 990-page folio in which they appear, it is very likely that they were addressed predominantly to a radical Fifth Monarchist group that had seceded from John Simpson’s open-communion congregation at Allhallows in the Spring of 1657. Bernard Capp writes that, by the first half of 1657, ‘a scheme to make Cromwell king was being canvassed’, which further incensed increasingly disillusioned Fifth Monarchists who held that Christ alone should wear the crown.2 Following repeated imprisonments by the Protectorate, Simpson had begun to preach in its favour, causing disagreement and, eventually, a cessation, and given Trapnel’s extended criticism of Cromwell in her prophecies, calling him ‘a Traytor [ … ] Against the mighty King [Jesus]’, it seems very likely that she would have participated in this split.3 Trapnel’s prophecies, which she described as combining the ‘Spirit’ and her ‘Voice’ to make ‘a league | Against Cromwel and his Crown’, ran in clusters from 11 October 1657 to 7 August 1658, ending a month before the Protector’s death, and suggest that her companions  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42 Theology, p. 45. The first prophecies from Trapnel’s folio are also recorded in A Lively Voice for the King of Saints and Nations ([London: n. pub., 1657/8]). 2  Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 119, referring to Charles Harding Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656–58, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1909), I: pp. 128–200. 3  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42, p. 273. 1

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were in need of reforming their practices and separating from all those who fell short of establishing the rule of the saints on earth. Two of her earlier prophecies from 28 November and 2 December 1657, discussed in Chapter 3, advocate that all her followers should unite in belief, undergo believer’s baptism, and strengthen their faith in order to welcome the millennium, questioning them as to whether they were spiritually ‘fit’ enough to receive King Jesus into their midst. Another prophecy on 12 November 1657 records the presence of Quakers in the room as she lay prophesying against them, and others directed verses specifically to other groups of people including ministers or female followers, urging them to listen to the spirit and ‘sing praises’, adding to Trapnel’s existing prophecies, in order to evangelise, strengthen, and edify. Another focus of Trapnel’s prophecies, however, is her justification for speaking as a prophetess. Although she does not champion a woman’s right to speak from her ‘self’, discussed in Chapter 2, Trapnel does defend her function as a vessel for God’s word by establishing herself in the tradition of Deborah, and was keen to highlight that, although women’s initial disobedience in their speech and behaviour was punished in Genesis, God had foretold that it would be the ‘woman’s seed’ that would battle the seed of the serpent in Genesis 3:15 (‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; [ … ]’), and later in Revelation 12:17 (‘And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ’). Chapter 3 discussed Baptist women’s connection of themselves with Deborah’s function as judge, mother, and leader, and these qualities are also present in writings by the Fifth Monarchist women discussed in this chapter, but Fifth Monarchist works are also characterised by the use of pattern and allegory which encouraged readers to draw parallels between individual spiritual struggles and larger crises of the saints. As Neil Keeble writes, this kind of nonconformist style ‘discerns patterns in whatever it touches, and hence by its very manner asserts the never-ending conflict between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed [in Genesis 3:15]’. This chapter, therefore, discusses the centrality of women’s experiences and prophecies to the Fifth Monarchist cause against the ‘serpent’s seed’ but also the use made of images of painful labour, suffering, and recovery that are utilised. As Gillespie writes, by gathering captivated followers female prophets were able ‘to produce a church and hence [ … ] conjure a counterculture into existence’,4 but this chapter focuses rather on the prophetic framing of their spiritual experiences, especially baptism, in Trapnel’s case, as signs for the rest of the saints. By mid-1657 the Fifth Monarchists were struggling to unite under a shared belief as to when the millennium would arrive. Venner’s unsuccessful rising in the April of that year had not been supported by the movement’s leading thinkers, especially John Rogers, who thought that the rising was taking place too early. As early as November 1656, a prophecy by Katherine Sutton foresaw that God ‘will come forth in Judgment’ (confirmed in Isaiah 14:13 and Psalms 89:19) but also  Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, p. 43.

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that his people should ‘quiet sit, | And wait on him with joy’, and later recorded that in 1657 she was asked to pray for the rising, but the Lord showed her, ‘They must sit still, behold my power, | Which worketh for them hour by hour’.5 Rogers had predicted the coming of the millennium three and a half years after the beginning of the Protectorate, in June 1657, but when this came and went without incident, he attempted to combat the saints’ fading hopes by publishing A Reviving Word from the Quick and the Dead (1657) which attracted the signatures of 120 (male) members of the radical London congregations, including members ‘identified from the churches of Rogers, Venner, Chamberlen, Simpson, and Barbone’.6 At this point, the congregations of Venner, Chamberlen, and Simpson all had a significant Baptist membership. The work’s aim was to explain the relationship of one church to another, as ‘a Few Dry Bones, that begin to Rise and Rattle’ to be followed by the ‘IMMEDIATE UNITING of ALL SAINTS into ONE BODY, [ … ] to put us ALL (as one man) into a Posture meet to Meet our Lord Jesus at his second coming, in All the DEGREES and SERVICES thereof’.7 Trapnel’s own prophecies serve this same general purpose and were roughly contemporary with Rogers’s own work: her published prophecies began in October 1657, but, as Erica Longfellow has observed, ‘the sense of interrupting an already established personal vocabulary implies that there had been unrecorded prophecies before this date’.8 As well as berating the saints’ sleepiness and inactivity, Trapnel also criticised the activities of Venner and his followers: The Voice of Spirit goes against them, Against drowsie Churches throughout, That do maintain those things that are Witnessed against by the Lords mouth. The Voice and Spirit hath made a league Against those rash brains too, That have not the standard set up That is the Ensigne new. The Voice and Spirit hath made a league Against the rash throughout, Which causeth the name of God to be blasphemed Amongst the hellish rout.9

As James Holstun has noted, Trapnel is alluding to Venner’s A Standard Set Up (1657), and criticises his rashness in preparing the way for King Jesus with

 Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, p. 43; p. 30.  Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 120. 7  John Rogers, A Reviving Word from the Quick and the Dead (London: Printed for 5 6

Giles Calvert, 1657), A1. 8  Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, p. 171. 9  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42, p. 273.

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violence, which had irreparably damaged the saints’ cause.10 Her prophecies were concerned with distancing herself and her companions from loose cannons like Venner, but also the ‘drowsie Churches’ that were not doing all they could to reform: this was, of course, a direct criticism of Simpson’s support for the Protector and his ‘crown’. As Bernard Capp rightly asserts, ‘the Fifth Monarchist movement emerged as a reaction to fading, not rising expectations’, and 1657–58 saw a number of Fifth Monarchist publications by women in response to these diminishing hopes, including the prophecies of Anna Trapnel and Katherine Sutton, but also the conversion narratives of Deborah Huish and Anne Venn.11 The existence of such a book as Trapnel’s, Longfellow argues, ‘suggests that someone in Trapnel’s circle had more money than the poor “handmaid” herself’.12 The printing and publishing costs of the 990-page folio would have been considerable to produce even in one edition, but the books of Huish and Sutton were also published by either the elders or minister of their churches. Matthew Prineas’s discussion of Trapnel’s folio ‘as a book – not just as the record of “something spoken”’ is useful in that it highlights the work’s imitation of a biblical collection of songs, given in the same way as in the Old Testament, perhaps reflecting the female voices in the Song of Deborah, Song of Songs, and the books of Samuel and Lamentations, but drawing, instead, on contemporary events.13 Women’s greater textual participation in the Fifth Monarchist movement, compared to what was permitted by early Baptist churches, was due, in part, to the group’s reliance on readings of the apocalyptic books of the Bible, Daniel, Joel, and Revelation. As has been discussed in Chapter 2, Joel, especially, held that in the last days before the millennium, ‘your sons and your daughters will prophesy’ (Joel 2:28). Fifth Monarchists also drew on the image of Zion as a beautiful daughter who had been disobedient, defiled, and held captive by her enemies, prevalent in Isaiah and Lamentations, which encouraged believers of both sexes to draw parallels between individual spiritual struggles and the larger crises of the saints. Rogers’s A Reviving Word called that ‘more Amiablenesse and Beuty may appear in the Saints in Zion; and in the Principles of the Kingdome [ … ] then now does among the Dispersed DUST and STONES’ (Lamentations 2:10). He also connected this image with Revelation’s woman in  Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, p. 299.  Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 58. Anne Venn’s experiences were published

10 11

posthumously by her stepfather, Thomas Weld, as A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning. Venn appears to have been a member of an Independent Church gathering in Fulham and led by Isaac Knight, but her stepfather’s choice to publish her manuscripts for what he hoped might ‘be useful in these declining times to convince some Christians of their slackness and awaken others, and shew them how to make more heart-work by the example of one of the weak Sex’ (A5) suggests a similar feeling of disaffection and disappointment. 12  Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, p. 171. 13  Matthew Prineas, ‘The Discourse of Love and the Rhetoric of Apocalypse in Anna Trapnel’s Folio Songs’, Comitatus, 28 (1997), 90–110 (106).

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labour, reading it as a prophecy that the true church would undergo travails in the wilderness, caused by Cromwell, the ‘Man of Sin’, before it was united: But now as the MAN OF SIN rose up, and the Womans flight into the wildernesse, viz. by Divisions, and Dispersions, they lost it againe, and so their BEAUTY hath lay in the Dust (cut into very shreds) to this day (wherein we doe so abound with diversities, and perversities, that by reason thereof we are not able to expresse, what a Wound hath been given to the very name of Christ, and Religion, what persecutions occasioned to the truth?14

In March 1658, a particularly inflammatory pamphlet named Some Considerations by Way of Proposal appeared addressed to ‘the Remnant of the Womans seed’, whose ‘hearts are groaning and sighing for the deliverance of Zion, and the appearance of her KING’, defending the spirit of Venner’s manifesto, and linking the struggles of the Fifth Monarchists to metaphorical labour pangs.15 Trapnel had also utilised this image in an earlier prophecy of hers where she connected the process of nurturing ‘seed’ to the production of song, aligning herself with the biblical Miriam, the first female prophet: And therefore a Miriam must come, Because his seed in woman should grow, She being over-shadowed by his Spirit That sin should overthrow. O the womans seed, the womans seed, It shall the Serpent break; It shall him utterly overcome, And it shall him defeat. The seed of the woman it is that That unto man must show Over Sin and Satan a victory, And utter overthrow.16

Trapnel’s prophetic songs, in the tradition of Miriam, are shown to be signs to all men of God’s victory over sin, despite sin’s arrival in the world through a woman’s disobedience.17 Miriam’s own celebration of the Lord after the Israelites’ escape from Egypt (Exodus 15:21) is aligned with the trials of the woman in the wilderness: both allusions support Trapnel’s authority as a prophet, promising her  Rogers, A Reviving Word, p. 13.  Some Considerations by Way of Proposall ([London: n. pub.], 1658), A1v; title

14 15

page; Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 120. 16  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42, p. 210. 17  Later in the same prophecy, Trapnel explains that Miriam’s speech was problematic because she later spoke against her brother Moses, recorded in Numbers 12:15. Trapnel uses this example of women’s unruly speech, and advises all women to draw close to the Lamb and be humble rather than speaking against God’s mediators.

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people’s recovery and victory, the importance of women’s spiritual experiences as signs for others, and also her position as a mother, labouring in her chamber to bring about the spiritual rebirth of her followers. Throughout her prophecies, Trapnel makes links between Eve’s seed and the seed of the travailing woman that is nearly eaten by the serpent, showing that it is at a woman’s weakest hour that she has most opportunity to show her strength and faith. Without pain and suffering, faith in God is left untried, and so it was, she thought, for the saints. A month after Some Considerations by Way of Proposal, Trapnel returned to the image of the woman in labour, using it as the basis of one her prophecies from 7 April 1658 where she praised the woman’s weakness: O Christ he is the smiting-stone: But before he doth appear, The woman she doth suffer much, Hath many a groan and tear. [ … ] The woman when her figure comes forth Which shews a mystery rare: A woman, and a feeble thing With such strength as none can compare. [ … ] A woman, and a sorrowful one, That oft did sit and weep: But is exalted very high, And with a Crown did meet.18

Trapnel defends woman’s position as a crucial instrument for bringing forth and mothering God’s people while evangelising and uniting them. Eve’s temptation did not prevent women from being conduits of the word, Trapnel argued: if anything, their gender made them more suited to the office. Baptist women involved with the Fifth Monarchists invariably used their personal strife to reflect the rise and fall of their community’s fortunes in their work, on which the second half of this chapter will focus. One particularly attractive rhetorical strategy for women writing and/or speaking in 1657/8 was to present themselves as metaphorical mothers, bringing about a theocratic society where Christ could reign. It seems no coincidence that Trapnel’s prophecies, Katherine Sutton’s conversion narrative including prophecies from this period, and Deborah Huish’s conversion narrative published in 1658 all recall that God had wrought their conversion, which included allowing Satan loose on their consciences, during a period of fourteen years, a ‘magic’ number signifying the amount of time between suffering and deliverance in the Bible. Trapnel’s amanuensis recorded her testimony:  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42, p. 751. This passage alludes to the biblical Hannah, who petitioned the Lord in tears for a son, and was exalted (1 Samuel 1–2). Trapnel frequently identified herself with Hannah whose prayers were misunderstood by the faulty priest, Eli (see Chapter 1). 18

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Poor Instrument hath found thee, Lord, For fourteen years together United so unto her soul, That nothing can from thee sever. Poor instrument hath found thee, Lord, Glorious for fourteen years; And O thou dost still more and more To her relief appear.19

Her earlier work, A Legacy for Saints (1654), had described that on 3 January 1643, fourteen years before the prophecy above, Trapnel’s aunt broke the news to her of her mother’s death telling her: ‘Cosen, the Lord hath taken your mother from you, now labour to be married to Christ’.20 For Trapnel, then, this fourteen-year period had come to an end in 1657/8, just in time for the millennium. This allusion to the number fourteen echoes Matthew 1:17, where ‘all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations’. Consciously or not, the period of the women’s struggles with Satan and their path towards justification is aligned with the fourteen-year period between Babylonian captivity and the birth of Christ. The very title of Huish’s work, The Captive Taken from the Strong, alludes to the saints held captive by Babylon, described by Jeremiah, and elegised in Lamentations, both important referents in her work. The first sentence of Huish’s experience, given in front of her congregation in 1657/8, begins, ‘About fourteen years ago I was cast into deep despair’, and her brother-in-law William Allen’s prefatory epistle to the work described these torments as ‘her fourteen years dangerous Voyage through such a tempestuous troubled Sea’.21 Her other prefatory writer, John Vernon, urged that her testimony would ‘help to succour also the whole of Zion of God; though she be ready to say, My God hath forgotten me [Isaiah 49:14; Jeremiah 18:15]’ and wished that the ‘travel spoken of’ in Isaiah 66:6–8, where Isaiah prophesies that a woman could not bring forth child ‘before she had travailed’ (66:7), just like a ‘nation be born at once’ (66:8), might be ‘begun by all that have their hearts heavy loaden, with their own (and others) Iniquities’.22 ‘As soon as Zion travailed’, Isaiah had said, ‘she brought forth her children’ (66:8), and Huish underwent similar struggles in her path to her own ‘new birth’, a phrase Baptists used to mean being ‘born again’. Katherine Sutton used similar birthing language to describe her own ‘new birth’, writing later in 1662/3:

19  Ibid., p. 366. Trapnel dwells for nearly two pages on the fourteen-year period during which she had felt God’s presence. See p. 354: ‘O the sealings of this birth fourteen years together can witness for it’. 20  Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints, p. 10. 21  Huish, The Captive Taken from the Strong, p. 1; A4v. 22  Ibid., b1v–b2.

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I was about 14 years in the pangs of the new birth before I received the witness of the spirit, in which time I was exceeding troubled with my unbelieving heart through entertaining false fears: and indeed some thing of Jesus Christ was in mee all that while.23

Although fourteen years in her delivery, she explained that the babe Christ was always within her waiting to be brought forth and made manifest in her conversion, and the communication of this experience to allow others to undergo their own pangs and new births. All three women’s works explain that women could receive ‘the witness of spirit’, bringing about a reformation with their prophetic writings, and all three used their feminine capacity for travail and motherhood to legitimatise these claims. Women writers and prophetesses were not the only ones who drew on feminine imagery in order to describe their experience of inward regeneration. Male preachers also utilised feminine biblical tropes in order to replicate states of weakness, obedience, and passivity that their culture associated with women (in comparison with God’s overwhelming power and strength), but also the state of motherhood in pregnancy, labour, and nursing and their relation to evangelising.24 Bunyan, for instance, presented himself as a minister impregnating his flock with the word and labouring with them in their subsequent rebirths: ‘In my preaching, I have really been in pain, and have as it were travelled to bring forth Children to God.’25 As Michael Davies summarises, ‘the language of pregnancy and childbirth is central to the entire concept of salvation for Bunyan’, reflecting, as it was, the language used by Paul, particularly Galatians 4:19 (‘my little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you’).26 Likewise, on 19–20 June 1655 the Abingdon Association meeting ruled that all elders of the Baptist churches should follow 1 Timothy 5:17 (‘Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who labour in the word and doctrine’), and agreed that ‘“They which labour” doth most properly signifye, “They which labour verie painefully”’.27 An abundance of these pains, they agreed, would give him more honour. The ability of a minister to bring forth believers, and subsequently nurse them, was also a concern of Robert Purnell writing in 1657 to vindicate the  Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, p. 32.  See Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs, pp. 4–5, for the implications

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of male writers and preachers drawing on the imagery of spouse from the Song of Songs. Thomas Tillam, pastor of the Hexham open-communion Baptist congregation, vowed at his first meeting that he was ‘I Tho. Tillam, espoused to one husband; hoping that I shall present them a chaste virgin to Christ’ (‘The Records of the Hexham Church’, in Records of the Churches of Christ Gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 1644–1720, p. 290. 25  John Bunyan, ‘Grace Abounding’, p. 81. 26  Michael Davies, ‘Bunyan’s Bawdy: Sex and Sexual Wordplay in the Writings of John Bunyan’, in Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, ed. by Vera Camden (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 100–19 (p. 101). 27  ‘Records of the Abingdon Association’, AR, III: p. 138.

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Broadmead Church in Bristol from a scurrilous pamphlet by ex-member Dennis Hollister, The Skirts of the Whore Discovered. Of Hollister, he wrote that ‘I shall not much wonder, if his Ministry prove as I have sometimes said or feared, many mens have done, as a miscarrying Womb, and dry breasts [Hosea 9:14], notwithstanding all their great learning, of which they seem to boast’, suggesting that education was not necessarily a precursor to powerful and effective preaching, just as it was no indicator of a good mother.28 Sara Jones, writing earlier, in 1632, also utilised these images, but directed them at the existing elders of her congregation, who she believed were lacking in their ministry, along with her minister Henry Jessey who had recently embraced believers’ baptism to which she did not subscribe (see Chapter 2). She advises these elders in The Relation of a Gentlewoman: They must not be broken as Ephraim, because he willingly obeyed the commandment of man [Hosea 5:11]; If any be so broken that he cannot distill the seed of the Word [Deuteronomy 32:2], for the begetting of children to the King of the Saints; also if he be not able, as in paine, as a travelling woman to bring forth to the King of the Saints, yet an hypocrite may nurse them on her knees, and be usefull for the body: but if he be either broken, as in judgement, or she uncapable to beare it, must be put away, as he that offereth a male in his flock, and offereth a female, offereth a corrupt thing: So he that can do good service, and doth the worse, offereth a corrupt thing [Malachi 1:14].29

This passage is reliant on Hosea 5:11 where the descendants of Ephraim are described as ‘broken in judgement’ because they worshipped idols, a criticism of the corrupt practices Jones believed her congregation to be taking part in. She also indicates that these elders were spiritually impotent and unable to distribute their seed upon the grass of their congregations to make it grow and flourish.30 While impotent, these elders were also barren, and unable to inspire their congregations to be fruitful. As Chapter 2 has shown, Jones’s adoption of  Purnell, The Church of Christ in Bristol Recovering her Vail, p. 62.  Jones, The Relation, p. 13. 30  In this period, producing seed for conception was believed to be either a male 28 29

function or a function that both sexes shared, depending on which medical model was prevalent. The teachings of Aristotle claimed that the man supplied the whole matter of generation in his seed (sperm) and that the woman’s role was to nurture this seed. This model is referred to extensively in an agricultural metaphor linking the female body to a field in which the male sows his seed, or as the ‘agent and patient’ model in which the man is the active agent. The second model was inherited from the teachings of Galen and held that women also needed to emit a seed on orgasm which was joined with her husband’s seed to produce a conception. In 1671 the midwife Jane Sharp explained that it was ‘by the stirring of the Clitoris [that] the imagination causeth the Vessels to cast out that Seed’. Both models held sway throughout the seventeenth century, although the latter model gained ground as the century progressed. See Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 41. This theory would not have been lost on Jones, who is interested in foregrounding the ability of women to inspire and evangelise.

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her namesake Sarah, Abraham’s barren wife that was made fruitful by God, is there to highlight the ineffectual preaching and spiritual barrenness of certain male members of her congregation. Those of them that were trying to nurse members of their congregation, without bringing them forth, are said to be hypocrites: they can be wet nurses, useful only for the body, but not mothers, who would bring about the new births of the children of God. Jones ends the passage by associating these men’s unsuccessful efforts with feminine weakness, implying that those that are refusing to devote their abilities to God’s cause will be punished. As well as their own natural ability to become mothers and existing experience of child labour and motherhood, it seems likely that Baptist women also drew on the image of the minister as travailing mother in order to legitimise their activities. Trapnel, although she did not have children of her own, exploited the symbolic power of spiritual motherhood to a greater degree than her female contemporaries, perhaps because she believed the millennium to be imminent, rather than liable to appear at some point in the future. She berated Simpson’s inactivity as one of the preachers Jones would have called ‘broken in judgement’, and criticised Venner’s rashness as if it was an abortive pregnancy that had not run full term. Trapnel’s prophecy from 1 January 1658, this time in prose, indicated that spreading the news of her own new birth could encourage others to experience the same: In Churches, O the new birth is wanting, let it break forth; come, and give to them the lovely birth, that thou mayst have a sweet sound in the midst of confusion, of confused Babel [Genesis 11:9]: divers voices are abroad, a very great confusion, but happy they that have the new birth brought forth that is very glorious. O the sealings of this birth fourteen years together can witness for it; the light and life of that sealing hath abided; it hath many times had darkness, and clouds, but it hath never been extinguished.31

This sharing of her own new birth, she wrote, could produce a moment of clarity while the saints were in disagreement and provide hope in the darkest times. With Paul she might have said: ‘For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints’ (1 Corinthians 14:33). It was also important for everyone, including women, to share their experiences of being reborn, because it was this that would reform society for Christ’s appearance: [The new birth] is full of zeal for Christ against the Foe; It hath a courage for Christ, and for his Interest; it hath a delight in Christ. O the new birth is thine own Image drawn upon the soul; it is a choice birth, a glorious birth, a high birth: The new birth is the Image of the risen Christ, the spreading forth of that glorious Image, that so the Father, the Son, the Spirit, may be known in the World.32

 Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42, p. 354.  Ibid., p. 354. Carola Scott-Luckens has highlighted aspects of the prophetess Sarah

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Wight’s experience that resemble sixteenth and seventeenth-century birthing rituals, calling her 1647 text, The Exceeding Riches of Grace, a kind of ‘birth-narrative, modelled on the

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Here, the new birth is ‘the Image of the risen Christ’, the pouring out of his blood and his rising up in resurrection, that believers testify and spread in their conversion experiences. It is this image that believers reflected when they undertook the ordinance of baptism. She continued to pray that the ‘beautiful excellency of the new nature shall be more and more made manifest’. ‘It is royal’, she wrote, ‘but it is despised among men, but the Lord of Glory will appear’: ‘there is a distinguishing time a coming, when the wrath of the Lamb shall terribly break forth, and that terrible sentence pass upon opposers’. Each person who was converted could spread the good news and the means of their release from suffering to the glory of the Lord. Trapnel shows that the new birth could rectify controversies and confusion in practice and doctrine by testifying to where God had chosen to bestow his grace. Baptist women used the image of a mother travailing in labour in order to legitimise their activities, whether in their experiences of conversion, or in being compelled to share their experiences with others. Being a mother was natural and God-given: Anne Wentworth defended her work by foregrounding that it ‘doth not come to the view of the World with eloquence of speech, not any artificial dress, but in plainness of speech, in its own Mother’s tongue, not set forth and adorned with the wisdom of men’.33 The Fifth Monarchist women included in this chapter all act as mothers to their congregations and followers, in various ways, whether it be by preaching or prophesising, or providing others with relations of their own new births. These women were all united by their desire to reform their communities, helping to bring forth believers to God, in order that Christ would return. Individual experiences of grace were believed so crucial in this fight that they were endowed with symbolic meaning by their communities, as allegories for the plight of the saints. Women were able to contribute to nurturing the ‘woman’s seed’, despite restrictions placed upon them. ‘The broad river is returning’: Anna Trapnel’s prophecies and the Fifth Monarchist Cause The mother in labour was a particularly important image that Baptist women used to legitimise their activities, but another focus of their work, and particularly Trapnel’s, was the significance of baptismal water, also a symbol of new birth and resurrection which involved an element of risk. Undergoing the process of dipping under the water in freezing rivers was meant to reflect that believers were ‘buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life’ (Romans ritual ceremonies conventionally surrounding maternity during this period’ (Scott-Luckens, ‘Propaganda or Marks of Grace? The Impact of the Reported Ordeals of Sarah Wight in Revolutionary London, 1647–52’, Women’s Writing, 9 (2002), 215–32 (222)). Trapnel is recorded as having visited Wight in The Exceeding Riches of Grace (London: Printed by Matthew Simmons for Henry Overton and Hannah Allen, 1647), a1. 33  Wentworth, A True Account, pp. 21–22.

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6:4–5). Ministers pushing down the heads and bodies of believers under the water signified the death and burial of Christ in the tomb, and their emergence emulated the ‘newness’ of life shown in Christ’s resurrection. However, many regarded the Baptist practice of ‘dipping’, or completely immersing people in water in order to baptise them, as a way of indirectly murdering their followers. Anne Dunan-Page refers to Richard Baxter’s vindication of paedobaptism which shows his concern for participants in believers’ baptism, particularly women: In Cities like London, and among Gentlewomen that have been tenderly brought up, and ancient people, and shop-keepers, especially women that take but little of the cold ayr, the dipping them in the cold weather, in cold water, in the course of nature, would kill hundreds and thousands of them, either suddenly, or by casting them into some chronicall Disease.34

Sara Read also notes that even washing the feet in cold water was believed to cause illness, let alone immersing the whole body under water. Men and women rarely washed their whole bodies, believing it to be dangerous: John Ray’s book of proverbs from 1678 advised readers to ‘wash your hands often, your feet rarely; and your head never’.35 Dunan-Page has also acknowledged that ‘any believers inclined to ponder the physical danger of baptism would not have been reassured by the constant reminder that total immersion represented the death, burial and resurrection of Christ’, and cites Henry Danvers’s A Treatise of Baptism for a ‘most striking exposition’ of this idea: ‘Abiding under the Water, how little a while soever, denotes his descent into Hell, even the very deepest of lifelessness, while lying in the sealed and guarded Sepulchre, he was accounted as one dead.’36 If the minister did indeed push believers down into the water, they would have no doubt been forced to consider the weight of sin pushing them down followed by a feeling of release attributed to the redeeming power of Christ’s death and resurrection. The 1644 Confession of Faith, put forward by William Kiffin, also explores the importance of linking baptism and Christ’s resurrection: ‘As certainly as the body is buried under water, and riseth againe, so certainly shall the bodies of the Saints be raised by the power of Christ, in the day of the resurrection, to reigne with Christ.’37 Looking back on her own deliberations of whether to undergo believers’  Richard Baxter, Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church Membership and Baptism (London: For Robert White, 1651), p. 134. See also Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena, pp. 121–22. Edwards recounts how Samuel Oates, a General Baptist minister, was imprisoned when a woman he baptised, named Ann Martin, fell sick and subsequently died. 35  Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England, p. 131; John Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs (Cambridge: Printed by John Hayes, 1678), p. 39. 36  Dunan-Page, ‘John Bunyan’s A Confession of My Faith and Restoration Anabaptism’, p. 29. Henry Danvers, A Treatise of Baptism wherein that of Believers and that of Infants is Examined by the Scriptures (London: Printed for Francis Smith, 1673), p. 241, cited by Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming, p. 87. 37  Kiffin, The Confession of Faith, C2. 34

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baptism, Katherine Sutton declared, from ‘mine own experience’, her realisation ‘that [to] lose is the way to gain, [ … ], and death is the way to life’, drawing on Christ’s words: ‘He that looseth his life for my sake, saith Jesus Christ, the same shall find it [Matthew 10:39; 16:25; Luke 9:24], through the valey of tears lieth the way to the mountain of joy’.38 God had given her faith in Christ ‘who was exalted as a Prince and a Saviour to give me repentance’, and made her willing, after some temptations, to ‘be baptised for the remission of sins’. Baptism, though undoubtedly dangerous, reminded believers that the way to a life in Christ is to undergo birthing pangs, suffering, Satan’s buffetings, and experience feeling under the heavy burden of sin: all experiences that were necessary to the process of being spiritually refined. Baptismal water, therefore, held both healing and destructive qualities, and Trapnel, in particular, utilised both qualities in her prophecies in order to unite the baptised saints against their unregenerate enemies. Believers’ baptism was a very visible sign of who had undergone a spiritual rebirth and rejected the practices and teachings of the established church, which meant that it was an extremely effective way of differentiating between the saints who would be spared at the millennium, and who would not. Most Baptists did not necessarily believe that believers had to be baptised as adults in order to enter the kingdom of God, but rather it signified obedience to his wishes. Trapnel’s folio, of course, was interested in urging all her followers to reform their practices, and this meant obedience to the New Testament. Leading Fifth Monarchists, John Rogers and Christopher Feake, recognised the importance of attracting the Baptists to their cause, so being able to win over the army and draw on their newly established church networks, and Trapnel encouraged her followers to undertake their ordinances that she had already embraced. Undergoing (and surviving) baptism justified Trapnel’s ability to prophesy, she sang, and being a witness to Christ’s resurrection during the process of her baptism gave her leave to declare the wonder of this experience and what the Lord had brought into her mind: When I arose out of the water I beheld Christs sweet face; And he did smile upon me, as A token of his grace. So that I was encouraged Against the opposing foe, And enabled by my dear Lord Against them for to go. So that I could declare, and I could speak, And for the King up stand; He gave me such instruction, And brought words to my hand.39

 Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, p. 11.  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42, p. 129.

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By being baptised in ‘water deep’, Trapnel sang that she was led, as the Israelites were, by a ‘pillar of fire’ (Exodus 13:21), ‘against mine enemy and foe’. The spirit of the Lord ‘made a league’ with her own voice ‘against them all to go, | And by its witness and testimony | Them for to overthrow’ (p. 273). Here, baptism is related to the destruction of the sinful self, as the water cleanses the inward soul: further on in the same prophecy, Trapnel declares that ‘it is not the outward washing, but | Inward cleansing’ that the Lord intends by the ordinance, ‘according to record’, and the following quatrain explores the ‘cleansing and healing of his bloud’ echoing Christ’s crucifixion that, she says, ‘revives my soul, | And quickens every part’, showing that the purging with the waters of baptism reflects/represents the washing away of sins by Christ’s blood (p. 126). ‘Through [God’s] grace’, she sings, ‘I did arise | As a cleansed washed mould’, indicating that she is a vessel that has been cleansed, shaped, and refined by the Lord to be filled with the word of the Holy Spirit (p. 127 mispag. 129). The transformative power of baptism was also drawn upon by Sutton, who described how the Holy Spirit was ‘poured out upon the soules of Believers (as floods upon the dry ground) And those spiritual showers and shinings do make a spring of Grace in the wilderness of their hearts.’40 Washing fulfilled the function of healing and transformation, while also deadening sin, but also allowed the new self-denying creature to receive and communicate the word of God to others. Trapnel had undertaken believers’ baptism when she was released from Bridewell prison in 1654 for seditious activities in Cornwall, where she declared that the Lord had visited her soul during her imprisonment (p. 130). She was further convinced that ‘Water-Baptism [ … ] Performed in Christs way’, would stand up against the ‘Antichrist in England’ and contradict or ‘gainsay’ his practices (p. 139). After her baptism she appended ‘A Defiance’ to her Report and Plea (written in the period following her incarceration), addressed to all the ‘Rulers, Clergy, and their Auditors’ who had scandalised her in their speeches and published their criticisms in ‘scurrilous Pamphlets’. As well as defending herself from the charges of being a witch, a vagabond, a whore, ‘dangerous’, and ‘seditious’, she prophesies the coming of the millennium using Isaiah 33:21 (‘But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no gally with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby’).41 Describing the ‘broad rivers’ that the Lord would be to the saints, she writes that ‘unto such will the glorious Lord be a place of broad rivers; not a narrow channel, nor a marshy ditch’ (p. 58). Referring to the prophecy of Ezekiel 47 where an angel guides the prophet along a river issuing from the Lord’s house (47:9 ‘every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live’), she describes the broad river’s healing qualities for those that dwell therein:

 Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, a2.  Trapnel, Report and Plea, p. 52. For the ‘Defiance’ see pp. 49–59.

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Its good to be dipt or plunged in this Jordan river, wch takes away all deformity, and cleanseth from all leprosie, and its a comforting refreshing River, this is Water of Life, it recovers the dying vitalls, and fainting Spirits, the which none of mens strong liquors of Arts and Sciences can do, neither can any compounded water of humane invention be so effectuall, though they still it in the Limbeck [distillation vessel] of brain-study. (p. 57)

Trapnel advocates the cleansing, healing waters given to the saints rather than the ‘strong liquor’ of ‘humane invention’ that learned men give to heal the sick and deformed in body and mind. It recovers those in spiritual anguish, and temptation to sin, resembling the pouring out of Christ’s blood on the cross, issuing water from his side, while also resembling baptism. No rhetorical water distilled by the mind of man could hope to heal and cleanse away spiritual deformities. Trapnel then combines this image, which merges ideas of Christ’s blood and baptism, with the scripture from Isaiah 33 which shows how these healing waters established at Christ’s second coming would only be available to the saints who swam in them: the soul swimes in the broad rivers that are promised Zion; which Rivers will admit no gally with oares to row therein, no troublers shall come there, none of mens gallantry [Isaiah 33:21], nor ships of Merchandise shall sail there, no Turkish, nor English gally of power and strength and device, mannaged with Souldiour oares shall appear to take the free-born captive; that river will presently sink such gallies and oares too; and if so be gallant Councel ships, and great numerous Parliament ships, which are made of wood; and pitch, and rosin, and tarre, and okum, such stuff as wil burn to ashes when the fire comes, which Scriptures speaks of [33:14]. (p. 57)

The ‘gallies with oars’ Trapnel interprets as the ships of the Parliamentary soldiers ready to ‘trouble’ the saints in their haven of God’s love. The gallies filled with ‘mens gallantry’ are related to the ships of merchandise, both Turkish and English, full of material, ‘fleshly’ goods that would do no good to the saints in eternal glory. Neither of these sorts of ships, Trapnel says, would be allowed to appear and ‘take the free-born captive’: no Cromwellian judge or gaoler would have the power to imprison her in Bridewell for speaking good to the saints and spreading his word. If such ships did make an attempt on the souls pleasantly swimming in the broad river, the waters would either sink them, or wait for them to be burnt up ‘with the devouring fire’ of Isaiah 33:14 (‘The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings’). Trapnel is clearly prophesying that those soldiers who tried to take the ‘free-born’ saints ‘captive’, along with those who sailed in ships of ‘power and strength and device’, would be destroyed by the Lord’s vengeance at the day of reckoning. Those ships made with flammable wood and tar and fastened with ineffective ‘Clergy nails’ were destined to burn at the arrival of the Fifth Monarchy (p. 57). Trapnel’s prophecies speak about both the healing and destructive nature of ‘broad rivers’ and baptism, and how this could be understood as separating the

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elect from the reprobate. One of the scriptural examples she most regularly uses to show the power of water as both purging and cleansing is in the destruction of Pharaoh and his men when they tried to cross the Red Sea in pursuit of the fleeing Israelites who were being led out of Egypt by Moses (Exodus 14–15). She uses this to chart the history of the ordinance of baptism and how its rightful practice would purge away the evil and strengthen the saints in adversity: O, no, in despite of all enemies, Ordinances shall remain, And be in vigor and in strength, When that the foes are slain. O when that Pharaoh and his host Were broken down and slain, The Pillar of fire appears, and Baptism God made to reign.42

In Exodus, Moses was sent to lead the Israelites out of captivity and slavery after the Pharaoh had been warned by plagues and famine that he should release them, and Trapnel relates this to the case of the saints under what she perceived to be the tyranny of Cromwell. As she declared later in her prophecies, ‘God would not let old Israel | Fall under that Monarchs feet’ and enemies of Israel ‘must ruined be’ (p. 174). In her prophecy from 19 March, she refers to the imprisonment of ‘the Lambs followers’, Rogers, Hugh Courtney, and John Portman in February 1658 for spreading seditious literature, and showed how, like the Egyptians, enemies of the saints would be ‘Punished in their kind, [ … ] by Locusts’ (p. 648).43 She prophesies that her enemies would be ‘broken down and slain’ by the baptismal waters and confused by ‘the Pillar of fire’ that the Lord made appear in the clouds to frighten the Egyptians. She later refers to how the Israelites, after being saved from the waters, were ‘Baptized to Moses and to those | Administrations all’, drawing on 1 Corinthians 10:2 where they ‘were all baptized to Moses in the cloud and in the sea’ (p. 75). The water separated the precious from the vile, and the elect from the reprobate. Trapnel’s ‘broad river’ could simultaneously destroy enemies and baptise God’s people to himself, and she also uses the story of God’s saving of Noah and the ark as another example of how this could be understood: ‘for the Ark was an inclosure, a preservation from the Flood; it was a Flood to the disobedient, and a pleasant stream to others’ (p. 434). The company was ‘saved in obedience by water from the abominations of others’, and this was a prefiguring of what Christ went on to show in his baptism and subsequent resurrection. Water could wash away sin, hence it could also purge away enemies on a larger scale (p. 435). The necessity of advising an unrepentant nation also provided Katherine Sutton with justification for publishing her prophetic songs and experiences. As  Trapnel, [Poetical addresses], S 1.42, p. 75.  Portman was part of the splinter group that separated from Simpson’s congregation

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with Trapnel, and signed The Old Leaven Purged Out (1658).

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discussed in Chapter 2, Sutton and her prefatory writer, the Fifth Monarchist Hanserd Knollys, believed in Joel’s prophecy that both men and women would prophesy in the last days before the millennium in order to warn their communities of what was to come. Like Anna Trapnel, Sutton also found an audience in ‘high places’ that paid her prophecies some attention. It was soon after this prophecy was given to her that she ‘looked upon it as my duty to make this known, that people might be warned to depart from sin’, and she then ‘had an opportunity to declare this to some that then were in high places’, and on the way in to speak to them she had an extension to it ‘which I so declared’: ‘Didst thou not hear a voice from on high, | Deny your selves (take up the crosse), or verily you shall die?’.44 This was ‘approved on by some, and received as a very suitable and seasonable word’, which might show that her words were not disregarded, but perhaps misinterpreted. Sutton had prophesied earlier in 1655, receiving the word of God when she had prayed and fasted apart from her congregation: Shall light appear, and darkness done away: Shall Sommers green be cloathed all in gray: Shall a bright morning set in shadowes dark, Oh! England, England, take heed thou dost not smart. (p. 14)

After these prophecies failed to persuade the rulers to turn to the proper worship of God’s ways, Sutton records that he communicated to her that he was angry and asked the people: ‘What hast thou to do to declare my statutes, [ … ] seeing thou hatest to be reformed?’ (p. 17). She then realised that her ‘duty of the present time’ was to urge her congregation of saints to ‘be watchful’ against ‘the cares of the world’, ‘be much in prayer’, ‘lay up treasures in heaven’ instead of material treasures on earth, and to be ‘much in humiliation’. The congregation of saints were to take comfort from the example of Lot, whose ‘righteous soul being grieved with the unclean conversation of the wicked; [ … ] was preserved when others were destroyed with the firy storme of Gods pleasure [2 Peter 2:7]’ (pp. 18–19). She then includes other scriptural examples of God’s upholding of his own people. Like Trapnel, she also refers to the comfort of John 7:38: He that believeth on mee, as the Scriptures hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living waters [7:38]; but this spake he of the spirit, that they, that believe on him, should receive [7:39]: and he promised to be poured out in the latter days.

The presence of cleansing and healing water also appears in her experiences when she is shipwrecked upon a sandbank escaping to Holland because of the persecution of the godly in England. Not knowing where to walk in order to reach the shore, finding ‘no way out of the sea, as it were, compassing us about round’, she and her godly friends trusted in God to be their ‘Pilot [ … ] not knowing  Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, p. 16.

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whether we went, for the sea was on both sides of us, and wee had but a small way on the sands to walk in’ (p. 23). She prayed that the Lord would ‘keep in the seas till we found out a place’ and he worked this miracle, resembling in no small way the story of the Israelites fleeing Egypt and the Lord guiding Moses as his navigator and enabling him to part the waters as a ‘wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left’ (Exodus 14:22). This was seen by Sutton as a sign of what God would do for the godly in England under its cruel rulers. She recorded that he told her, ‘As thy deliverance is, so shall Englands be, when they are brought to greatest straights, then will deliverance be from God’. What Sutton’s experience advocates is the upholding of her and her congregation’s faith which would allow them to be saved when the time of God’s judgement arrived. ‘God is pleased to set a mark upon the fore-heads of them that mourn for the abomination of the times’, she wrote, urging her fellow saints not to take part and uphold these ‘abominations’ but to pray for the release of those from under them (p. 19). Baptist women, therefore, appear to have interpreted baptismal waters as both destructive and life-giving, and their experience of both as justification for their prophetic speech. Later in Trapnel’s ‘Defiance’ she drew explicit parallels between the ships of the saints on the ‘broad river’, the furtherance of Zion, and the imminent destruction of all opposed them: But the broad river is preparing, its making its path thorough all opposition, & its ships are all making ready and preparing to swim: The great Ship-Wright, I speak this with reverence and holy aw of God, and say that the great artificial Ship-Wright, and Carpenters Son so called by the Jews, which was the glorious Messiah, this mighty God is fitting his ships for this time, these are the Zion spoken of, Micah 4:13. whose horns are Iron, and hoofs brasse, who are exhorted to arise and thresh, and beat in pieces many people.45

Trapnel’s imagery of the Lord as a great shipwright also had personal significance for her. Her father, William Trapnel, was a shipwright, as she asserts at the beginning of her prophecies included in The Cry of a Stone, and perhaps she believed that this somehow proved that she was also the daughter of the greater shipwright who would build ships of Zion with which his children could fight.46 In her folio she rejoices at the sight of ‘the light of Christs golden Oar’ when she recounts how she came to be baptised.47 Her allusions to scripture are also significant. Micah 4 does not speak of ships but of the travailing ‘Daughter of Zion’ who is sent into Babylon to be delivered (4:10), where many nations  Trapnel, Report and Plea, p. 58.  Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, p. 3. Anna Trapnel was the daughter of William Trapnel,

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a shipwright, and his wife Anne, baptised in St Dunstan’s, Stepney on 10 September 1620 (Greater London RO, X024/066, Baptismal Register of St Dunstan’s). She grew up in the hamlet of Poplar in the parish of Stepney. See Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, p. 153. 47  Trapnel, [Poetical Addresses], S 1.42, p. 129.

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gathered against her to watch her be ‘defiled’ (4:11). Her purpose, like Trapnel’s, was to draw out the enemies of the saints in their persecution of her, to ‘gather them as the sheaves into the floor’ (4:12). The Lord would then say ‘Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion’ and she would attack with an iron horn and brass hooves to ‘beat in pieces many people’ (4:13). The Cornwall clergy and justices, and Cromwell’s court by implication, were those who had risen up against her and had drawn close to watch her ‘travailing’ in pain, in captivity, while she brought forth the ‘new birth’, the good news of Christ. It was they who would be ‘beat[en] in pieces’ like sheaves of corn. ‘Travails in the Wilderness’: The Experiences of Deborah Huish and Anne Wentworth Although published conversion narratives by Baptists developed from the congregational practice of believers standing up and declaring the evidences of God’s grace they had experienced, they also tended to have a very public dimension, using the private workings of grace to signify something of greater and more universal importance to both existing and potential followers. As Patricia Crawford has noted, citing Sara Mendelson’s work, ‘the practice of piety, [ … ], could provide “a coherent and satisfying explanation of world-historical events”’.48 Both women and men interpreted their life events by God’s providence, using his blessings or chastisements as explanations for life or death in their families. They also took meaning from the shape of their own lives as they wrote and drew larger significance through connections with contemporary religio-political events. The individual struggle of each believer could be mapped onto the struggles of the people of God as a whole. One persecuted sufferer could stand for all those persecuted, and one persecutor could stand for any enemy carrying out God’s work. The writer of the preface to Anne Wentworth’s Englands Spiritual Pill (1679), A. S., observed that those who did not see a larger significance in her experience of being turned out of her home by her husband were ignorant of the way God made his purpose known: Therefore if any ignorance hinders thee from understanding this Riddle of Gods prophetical stile, and so causes thee to undervalue and slight what Ann Wentworth says, as of her self: then advise with the king Solomon in his Song or Canticle, and he will unfold that Riddle unto thee. But I would have thee also remember, that as in all Gods words and dealings with men, there is almost even a twofold sense; One that is literall, and another that is mysticall, whereof the former is like the Egg-shell to the yolk: so thou mightest not think hard of God, because he makes so much ado with Anne Wentworths personal condition, sufferings, vindication and with putting her in her former state and house; &c. 48  Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 83, citing Sara Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. by Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 181–210 (p. 186).

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For in all such divine transactions there is involved a mystical sense or meaning in reference to the true Church of Gods Elect, which is open to an unblended spiritual eye, and hid from the Scribes and Pharisees, who yet have eyes, but see not.49

Those who derided her, the members of her husband’s Baptist church, were the ‘Scribes and Pharisees’ who refused to see ‘a mystical sense or meaning’ for God’s elect in Wentworth’s narrative. A. S. cites both the example of ‘Agar and Sarah a figure of the Law and Gospel’ (Galatians 4:24–25), and ‘Solomons Song throughout’, as precedents for this method, asking the Pharisees ‘will you forbid the Lord not to now, what he did of old?’. Because Wentworth was made able to return to her house, A. S. writes that the Lord had placed ‘two spirits in a Man and his Wife, to figure out Zion and Babylon’, and that ‘God should intimate by it, that now he would bring his exiled Church (turned out by Babylon) to her primitive state again’: the publication of Englands Spiritual Pill was described as ‘the canticle of Solomon according to the time of this age’, suggesting that it was to be understood as a contemporary reworking of the Song of Songs where Wentworth is the bride, and Christ is her bridegroom (rather than her unregenerate husband). The rest of this chapter will now explore the way Baptist women’s experiences were understood as signs and allegories ‘according to the time of this age’, exploring both the recorded words of Deborah Huish, whose work was utilised by disaffected Fifth Monarchists in the late 1650s, and then return to Wentworth’s writings that date from a later, but also tumultuous, period, the late 1670s. Deborah Huish’s The Captive Taken from the Strong, published by other members of her Baptist congregation at Loughwood, East Devon, in 1658, is an example of how one woman’s individual battle with Satan could be understood as a sign for the struggles of a whole church, as it waited in expectation for the second coming of Christ. Huish’s narrative is a transcript of the testimony that was ‘heard out of her own mouth, in the midst of the Congregation’, where she expressed her ‘wonderful deliverance’ from her religious despondency, aggravated by the machinations of Satan, and her reasons for undertaking believers’ baptism.50 From the age of fourteen, a magical number for Fifth Monarchists, as has been discussed, Huish ‘was cast into deep despair’ because she experienced blasphemous thoughts while reading the scriptures, which her elder sister, Anne, blamed on the Devil (pp. 1–2). Despite the reassurances of her family and the people of God whose  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 2.  Huish, The Captive Taken from the Strong, b6v. The elders of her congregation

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recorded that ‘the earnest solicitation of a near Relation of hers [William Allen] (whom God had used in some good measure, as an Instrument of her enlargement) concurr’d to prevent her’ from elaborating too much, which means that the narrative is likely to be a fleshed out version of what the congregation heard. A previous version of this research on Deborah Huish was published as Rachel Adcock, ‘“Like to an anatomy before us”: Deborah Huish’s spiritual experiences and the attempt to establish the Fifth Monarchy’, The Seventeenth Century, 26 (2011), 44–68.

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company she frequented, Huish became convinced she was damned under the Law and that they were all ‘lyars’ (p. 3). Her two elder sisters, Mary and Anne, then married two parliamentary army radicals, Adjutant-General William Allen and Captain John Vernon, who were part of Fairfax’s regiment that won back Exeter to parliamentary control in 1646, had Cromwell’s ear, and were active Baptist proselytisers. James Huish, Esquire, the father of Mary, Anne, and Deborah, had given funds to aid the Royalists during the Civil War, so the marriage of his two eldest daughters to prominent parliamentary men was surely a statement of his acceptance of the commonwealth: William Allen’s later letters to Cromwell in the 1650s were dated from the Huish family home at Sand, East Devon.51 In June 1654, at twenty-six years of age, Deborah accompanied her sisters and brothersin-law to Ireland where they were stationed as part of Cromwell’s occupying army, and immediately contracted smallpox. Although she survived the disease, she was continually tempted to believe that her sufferings (during and after the disease, which often left its victims with horrific scars) were an indication that she was among the reprobate, and continued thereafter to believe she would be imminently cast into hell. While in Dublin she was tempted to ‘cast my self down out of a window to kill my self’, but was deterred only by the ‘dread of Hell’ (p. 9), and interpreted the death of her sister Mary in December 1655 as the Lord ‘stop[ping] many of their mouths by death, that they might not pray any more for me’ (p. 13). Soon after, the family set off back from Ireland, William Allen escorting Deborah from Minehead back to her father’s house at Sand, and the narrative then skips to the period directly before Huish’s baptism, 10–28 January 1658, where she was convinced of God’s free grace, despite her previous sins, and read scriptures on baptism in order to overcome Satan’s temptations that it was a ‘poor low thing’ (b8). The elders of her Loughwood congregation, Henry Parsons, John Owen, and James Hill, testified in their preface that her spoken account, recorded in the pages following, meant that ‘she was with universal satisfaction accepted, and accordingly Baptized, and received’ (b8v).52 51  The outward appearance of the house at Sand has changed very little since Deborah’s grandfather Rowland Huish extended the building in 1594. Deborah’s father, James Huish, ‘engaged most actively in support of the Royal cause in the Rebellion making great sacrifices of his private fortune’ (John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry; Or Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 4 (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), p. 414; Hamilton Rogers, Huyshe of Somerset and Devon: A Pedigree (Taunton: Athenaeum Press, 1897), p. 35). Deborah’s parents, James Huish (1604–1681) and Deborah Reynell (1621–1687), had eleven recorded children. These were, from eldest to youngest, Anne (bap. 9 May 1625, m. first to John Vernon, bur. date unknown), Mary (bap. 1 March 1626, m. William Allen, died in Dublin c. 19 December 1655), Deborah, James (bap. 1630), Rebecca (bap. 1632), John (bap. 1634/5), Rowland (bap. 1636, died 1638), Richard (bap. 1638), Sarah (bap. 1640), Jael (bap. 1642), and Tryphoena (bap. 1645/6). See Burke, pp. 414–15; Hamilton Rogers, pp. 35–36. 52  The Loughwood church book records Deborah Huish’s name on the list of members for Sidbury (DRO 3700D–O/M.1, Proceedings Book of Meetings in East Devon, Chiefly

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Huish’s narrative expressed a clear message to her own congregation, and to the wider body of believers: it was possible for any saint in danger to overcome and subdue their enemies, despite the afflictions they had suffered, and find peace in obedience to scriptural ordinances. William Allen declared in his preface that one end of transcribing and publishing Huish’s testimony was to prevent ‘such as might be stopped in their Carreer in wayes of sin and Ruine’, causing them to return to the fold, because she, having ‘known the terrours of the Lord, doth declare them, to that end that she may perswade men’ (A4). Those under the temptations of Satan, convinced they were guilty of unpardonable sins, were also encouraged and supported in their trials, and their communities were encouraged to pray for and help them, despite discouragements. Huish recounts that she pleaded with her family and friends not to pray for her, and they then began to neglect this ordinance: while in Waterford, Ireland, she realised that ‘no words were spoken to me, or to the Lord for me, doing me any good as I perceive; so that I still concluded God could not lie, nor repent, therefore I must be damned; and that it was vain to attempt the contrary’ (p. 17). In response, Huish’s brother-inlaw John Vernon, who also wrote a prefatory epistle to her work, recognised that congregation members should be more attentive to their fellow saints, especially those that experienced more severe affliction, berating himself that he had been more concerned to distance himself from her attempts at self-murder than he had to help her when they were in Ireland: Even we that were nearest related also, left off our hope for this poor soul[.] Yea, how have I, to my shame, that had the charge of her, failed most herein! I must say indeed, to my abasement, the weights and fear of her untimely end; the cares of keeping her from any Instrument to accomplish it; [ … ] Alas, Pained now at no more in my own mind, then to get her safe again delivered into her dear Parents hands, that my face might not be covered with shame, according to my fear of her untimely end, at such distance from them [ … ] alas, she almost fell out of my memory, and was seldom in my Prayer; the Lord grant me the mercy of her earnest supplications. (a4r–v)

Vernon’s admission of his neglect highlights the need for Baptist members not to dismiss the sufferings of others, no matter how much they appeared to be the result of sinfulness, because God’s free grace could overcome this. Clearly, some Baptists disagreed about the extent to which believers should speak openly about thoughts that considered suicide, blasphemy, or atheism: in the preface to his wife’s written conversion narrative published earlier, in 1653, John Turner criticised those who conducted themselves with ‘visible profaness, and excess of riot, with heart, at Loughwood, vol. 1 (1653–1795), pp. 2, 6). William Allen is listed as a member of the Dalwood area, on p. 5, below the names of ‘Br and Str Vernon’. The church building still survives today and has been restored by the National Trust for visitors. See W. T. Whitley, ‘Loughwood and Honiton’, TBHS, 4 (1914–15), 129–44; J. B. Whiteley, ‘Loughwood Baptists in the Seventeenth Century’, Baptist Quarterly, 31 (1985), 148–58.

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hand and tongue blaspheming the holy One of Israel, in an unconverted State’, advocating ‘Civility and Morality’ over ‘sin and profaness’.53 Huish’s narrative, however, was published as an example of how God could help her overcome Satan’s terrible assaults, and how this deliverance could be interpreted as a sign for all Baptists: the published text vindicates Huish’s behaviour, commending her piety, as well as treating her conversion and baptism as providential. Huish’s narrative was published at an uncertain time for her Loughwood congregation, who were Baptists and enthusiastic Fifth Monarchists, believing that the return of Christ was imminent and therefore that society needed to be radically reformed in preparation for his arrival. Her account of her deliverance, and her obedience to ordinances, therefore, indicated that God was on their side, and that further deliverance would follow. As early as December 1653, when Cromwell dissolved the Barebones Parliament, establishing the Protectorate later that month, ‘militant Baptists, particularly the Irish Army officers’, McGregor has written, shared the ‘belief that Cromwell had usurped the role of King Jesus in adopting rule by a single person’.54 To many of his previous supporters, Cromwell appeared to have accepted kingship. In early 1655, Allen returned from Ireland to speak privately to the Protector about the matter where, according to John Copleston’s intelligence to Cromwell’s spymaster John Thurloe, he ‘did nettle the protector extreamly’ and the two parted ‘in a huffe’.55 He returned to his father-inlaw’s house at Sand, where he was said to meet with ‘divers strangers, particularly from Somerset and about Bristol’, riding ‘comonly with a kind of vizard over his face, with glasses over his eyes’, and expressing his dissatisfaction with the present government. Hugh Courtney, an active Fifth Monarchist, met with him and, according to Copleston’s report, assured his co-religionist that he was ‘sure to meet hearts and hands enough to carry on the anabaptisticall interest; that his [Cromwell’s] government should not stand many months, and that deliverance was at hand’.56 Allen was subsequently held under house arrest at Sand, where he expressed his disappointment at his friend’s behaviour: ‘What my esteem hath been of you in some verticall forsakeing dayes I beleev you can remember; and I cann truly saye, if I have erred, it hath been, I feare, in esteeming too highly of you.’57 He was subsequently released, but then resigned his commission in Ireland in 1656, accompanied by John Vernon, and returned to the West Country which continued to attract attention for harbouring Fifth Monarchist sympathisers: Anna Trapnel returned to Cornwall in December 1655, and designs on her passing  Turner, Choice Experiences, B1.  McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, p. 53. 55  ‘Concerning Adjutant Allen, 7 February 1654[5]’, TSP, 3: p. 140. 56  Ibid. 57  ‘From Adjutant Allen, 7 February 1654[5]’, TSP, 3: p. 140. Allen also complained 53 54

in the letter that he was ill accommodated having no money nor cloaths for me, my poore wife, nor littl one’, and begged to ‘goe to hear the word, if it might be’. His wife, Mary, died within the year, and possibly his child too.

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the seas, probably to Ireland, as well as the Fifth Monarchy men’s intentions ‘of destroying Magistracy and Ministry, if they might pursue their principles’, were reported in May/June 1656.58 The Loughwood church record book is evidence that Fifth Monarchists in the West Country met together, for on 14 July 1659, Robert Doyley, one of the ‘brethren approved of in the church to exercise their gifts’ and one of Huish’s prefatory writers, married Mrs Ann Langdon of Tregasow, Truro, who was the widow of Trapnel’s supporter and patron, Captain Langdon, MP for Cornwall in the Barebones Parliament.59 How else would the two have met, living over one hundred miles apart, if they were not involved in meetings in the area? By 1658, the year Huish’s narrative was published, there had been disagreements amongst various Fifth Monarchists over how and when a godly society should be established, some more conservative brethren supporting the Protectorate, and some continuing to criticise it in the pulpit. Imprisonment by the government led Christopher Feake to preach at Allhallows upon his release in January 1657 that ‘this power and the old monarchie are one and the same; and this army doth as really support popery, and all the reliques of it, as ever king Charles and the archbishop of Canterbury’. He drew attention to the conservative brethren in his audience who had prayed ‘to the Lord to remove those differences and heal the rents that are among [the churches]’, while he endeavoured ‘to rouze, and rattle them, and give them disturbance, and waken those that are faithfull among them, that they may see whither they are fallen, and falling, and return to their first love’.60 Feake’s preaching was evidently well received, for the spy recording his words was unable to collect more because his shoulders ‘were laden with a croud of women riding over [his] head’, and when Henry Jessey, William Kiffin, and John Simpson opposed his words, advocating support for the government, many people in the audience cried out: ‘Mr. Kiffin is a courtier and Mr. Simpson an apostate, that had preached the same things in the same place.’61 The next month, MPs drafted a constitutional document that would name Cromwell king, provoking even the conservative London Baptists, notably except William Kiffin, to urge him to reject the crown.62 Following Thomas Venner’s easily suppressed uprising in London in April 1657, Cromwell declined the crown, but was re-invested as Lord Protector in similar splendour. The radical Fifth Monarchists became more desperate as the authorities arrested their influential members: John Rogers, Hugh Courtney, and John Portman were all arrested on 3 February 1658 for sedition, roughly contemporary with Huish’s account of her convincement of baptism in The Captive. William Allen criticised the London Baptists for the distance they 58  See The Publick Intelligencer (24–31 December 1655), pp. 193–94; Mercurius Politicus (29 May–5 June 1656), pp. 6997–98. 59  DRO 3700D–O/M.1, p. 5. 60  ‘A relation of some passages at the meeting at Alhallowes’, 5 January 1657, CSPD, p. 758. 61  Ibid., p. 759. 62  Bell, Apocalypse How?, pp. 190–91.

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had put between themselves and the radical Fifth Monarchist Baptists, writing that ‘some of Zions pretended lovers raised and lifted up (it’s to be feared too highly) by her, are dealing unkindly with her; and that under highest pretences of real affection to the name and cause of God, and interest of his people’ (A6). Here, Allen asks his readers to refer to Isaiah 66:5, where the humble are comforted by God’s promise that the ‘brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name’s sake, said, Let the LORD be glorified: but he shall appear to your joy, and they shall be ashamed’. Kiffin and the conservative Baptists, Allen wrote, were to be aligned with the hypocritical brethren that ‘hated them that feared God’, as the Geneva gloss asserted. Failing hopes in the Baptist movement led William Allen and John Vernon to attempt to unite the Baptists and Fifth Monarchists when they attended a meeting of the Baptist Western Association, with three hundred others, at a church in Dorchester on 12–15 May 1658. Thurloe’s spies recorded that epistles from each church represented were read aloud to enquire as to the state of other Baptist churches. They all judged the time to be of ‘apostasy and persecution, wherein the sufferings of Syon were’ and all of them much complained of the bonds and suffereings of the saints; some callinge itt the time of Syon’s affliction, wherein those that have beene glorious lights on the right and left hand, are shutt up in bonds; vehemently prayinge, that in order to there deliverance, God would put a hooke into the nostrils of, and destroy him, who is the enemy of God and his people.63

These were dangerous words, encouraged by Allen and Vernon who gathered a private meeting ‘in the George’ Inn to urge the London Baptists to unite with the Fifth Monarchists, to put pressure on the government. Here, ‘a greate contest ar[o]se aboute there joyneinge with the fifth-monarchy-men; but for that time not concluded, by reason of captaine [William] Kiffin’s opposeing itt’.64 Kiffin, a fervent and conservative supporter of the Protectorate, worked hard to distance the Baptists from the Fifth Monarchists, foiling Allen and Vernon’s plans to unite them. The men returned, disillusioned, to Loughwood, and published The Captive after they received a further blow to their hopes: Cromwell died on 3 September 1658.65  ‘Sir John Cooke &c. to Sir John Copleston, 15 May 1658’, TSP, 7: p. 139.  Ibid. 65  The surviving copies of The Captive were all published after Cromwell’s death on 63 64

3 September 1658: John Vernon’s preface makes reference to ‘the kindnesse of Gideon’, a biblical name often applied to Cromwell, ‘who unweariedly with unparalell’d uprightnesse, shewed forth his labour of love to the Lord, and to us in the Lord unto death’ (b1). In the Bible, Gideon followed Deborah as a judge of Israel, after freeing the people from their oppressors and preventing their worship of idols. Vernon’s preface, however, combined with the prefaces written by Doyley, and Parsons, Owen, and Hill, has been inserted on two four-leaf gatherings named ‘a’ and ‘b’, between Allen’s preface on the ‘A’ gathering and Huish’s narrative on the ‘B’ gathering. Allen’s preface, by contrast, is dated 2 March 1657,

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As has already been noted earlier in this chapter, the Fifth Monarchists appear to have considered the experiences and prophetic outpourings of women as particularly valuable to their cause. Rather than the recorded forceful prophetic outpourings of Trapnel’s, which occurred between October 1657 and August 1658, Huish’s prefatory writers emphasise her ‘weakness’ and modesty when speaking aloud to her church. Allen recounted that she ‘declared these things, much in that frame of Spirit, mentioned in 1 Cor. 2.3. In weaknesse, in fear, and in much trembling. And her speech (though plain and mean) thou wilt find in some measure, answering that in the fourth verse of that second Chapter, viz. In the demonstration of the Spirit, and of Power’ (A3v). In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul advocates preaching with simplicity of speech, rather than with the ‘enticing words of man’s wisdom’ (2:4), so that the people’s faith would come from the ‘Spirit’ and ‘power’ of God, and not from persuasive rhetoric. Huish’s spoken narrative is compared to Paul’s excellent preaching, connecting weakness and modesty with effective, godly speech that had the power to convert both listeners and readers. The Loughwood elders, Parsons, Owen, and Hill, also compare Huish to Paul in their preface, writing that they desire to commit all his chosen Vessels to honour, for his calling in his season unto, and for his establishing and growth of those that are called in the truth, as it is in Jesus: which Jesus we desire to own as our King, our Crown, and hope of glory; and to whose appearing with that glorious Kingdom, we desire to be dayly better prepared: That at his coming we may have the honour to be of that blessed number that shall wait upon him with Hallelujahs. (A8v)

By committing Huish (one of God’s chosen vessels) to posterity, the elders show that God would soon call on other members by revealing himself to them, and further establish the faith of others that had already recognised that they were ‘called in the truth’. The phrase ‘chosen Vessel’ alludes to Paul’s calling to discipleship on the road to Damascus, to bear the Lord’s ‘name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel’ while suffering for God’s name (Acts 9:15–16). Although, as a woman, Huish was named ‘the weaker vessel’ (1 but because it responds to Huish’s narrative which cannot have been transcribed until late January 1658, 1657/8 must be what is meant. The book’s publisher, Livewell Chapman, was examined on 23 March 1658 regarding ‘a book reflecting on the Government’ (CSPD, 1657–58, pp. 339), which may have led him to delay the publication of a Fifth Monarchist work of support until later, by which time Huish’s congregation sought to witness for her recovery. Catharine Gray and Leona Rostenberg have both explored the possibility that The Captive was the book for which Chapman was examined (if it was then it was not in the form in which we can view it now), but Maureen Bell suggests it was John Eliot’s The Christian Commonwealth (Rostenberg, ‘Sectarianism and Revolt: Livewell Chapman, Publisher to the Fifth Monarchy’, in Literary, Political, Scientific, Religious, and Legal Publishing, Printing and Bookselling in England, 1551–1700: Twelve Studies (New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), pp. 203–36 (p. 225); Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate, p. 99; Bell, ‘Chapman, Livewell (fl. 1643–1665)’, ODNB.

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Peter 3:7), her brethren specified that all vessels, whether sinful or female, should be celebrated if God had chosen them to be disciples. Throughout her narrative, Huish depicts herself as a good disciple, constantly seeking the Lord despite fears that he would allow Satan to take her to hell. During a time of fading hopes for her congregation and the Fifth Monarchists, Huish was extremely anxious that her single example ‘might also be to the dishonour of his name, and occasion of stumbling to others’ (p. 56). Convinced of her sins, she believed she was sometimes in hell and her only escape would be to ask the Lord for mercy. She resolved she ‘Would try: for if I lie still, I shall certainly perish’ (p. 23). Seeing the ‘danger of lying still’, she drew courage from the words of Queen Esther (4:16) whose guardian Mordecai had asked her to plead with King Ahasuerus for the life of her people, the Jews, because they were under threat from the king’s favourite, Haman. Despite the custom that all who went before the king in the inner court unsummoned would be put to death, Esther resolves to do this because Mordecai tells her it is God’s purpose: ‘For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place’ (4:14). Huish subsequently began to attend meetings of the Sidbury branch of the Loughwood congregation, pleading for help from the Lord, despite continuing to believe that she was a hypocrite and that she would perish at his hand. John Vernon echoed Huish’s identification of herself with Esther in his preface, praying that she would always act as the queen ‘in the Court of the miss-informed’, ‘saved from all vain pomp, infecting Company, and customes; the fury of the highest of men, and from smoother temptations more near to her, promising her liberty in neglects’ (a8v–b1). Vernon and Allen’s disagreements with the conservative London Baptists, including William Kiffin, about the importance of continual reform in their congregations and in their government provide the context for this passage. Kiffin was then considered Cromwell’s ‘courtier’, wholeheartedly supporting the Protectorate and advocating peace because, many thought, it brought him prosperity. Vernon’s use of Esther’s narrative figured Kiffin as Haman the king’s (Cromwell’s) favourite, who sought revenge on Mordecai because he would bow down to no one but God. Mordecai, who had saved the king from assassination (supporting the king in a similar way to Allen and Vernon supported Cromwell in the Civil Wars), used Esther’s skill at petitioning to persuade King Ahasuerus not to allow the persecution of her people (in Huish’s case the Baptist Fifth Monarchists). As Susan Wiseman has noted, Esther was often ‘used as an example of [ … ] loyalty to a community’, where love to her people carried her through all adversity, and, in a similar way, Huish petitioned the Lord during her conversion for mercy, and after conversion the work becomes a petition to her ruler (then Richard Cromwell) against inaction and misguided counsellors.66 In the book of Esther, Haman is hanged and the king grants the Jewish people a day where they can take revenge on their foes, a 66  Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 46.

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dangerous allusion in the period following Venner’s rebellion because it condoned the violence of the Fifth Monarchists. However, the biblical passage declares that only petitioning against evil counsellors could possibly bring about such a decree: lying still could not bring about the reform of the kingdom ready to receive the Lord. In her narrative, Huish speaks many times of the danger of sin and unbelief when any day could bring about the beginning of the Fifth Monarchy: for instance, she references Joel 2:31 when she saw the sun rise red in the morning, believing it was a sign before ‘the great and notable day of the Lord’ (p. 14), and, at the behest of Baptist preacher Thomas Patient, she expected that she would imminently ‘drop immediately into Hell’ if the ‘Lord should cut the thrid of life’ (p. 8). The second half of her narrative recounts her spiritual progress during the month of January 1658, focusing on her many arguments for and against baptism, highlighting for her readers the importance of obedience to God’s will. Baptism was the crowning glory of a believer’s spiritual progression: Huish recognised, after meditating on Romans 6:4–5, that she ‘ought by my visible obedience to this his Command, to declare my putting him on, and my being planted in the likenesse of his death, being buried with him by Baptism into death; and also my being raised with and by him, and the Power of his Resurrection, unto newnesse of life’ (pp. 70–71). Undergoing baptism under the water involved a similar descent into darkness as Christ underwent before rising again, and baptism reflected these steps, also including some degree of peril to the health of those who underwent it.67 For Fifth Monarchists expecting Christ’s immediate return, obedience to this scriptural precedent was extremely important. Huish understood that she had only resolved to undertake the ordinance, which she had previously been tempted to think was ‘contemn’d and despised’ (p. 57), because she was under the receipt of grace, referring to John 14:21 (‘He that hath my Commandments [ … ], I will love him, and will manifest my self unto him’). Her baptism, that the elders of her congregation indicate took place soon after she gave the transcribed narrative in front of the church, therefore becomes a symbol of her election, freeing her of the doubts that caused temptations and despair (and the devil’s assaults), and promised her that she would receive Christ because she had imitated his own suffering and resurrection. Baptism could be understood as the promise of God to ‘manifest’ Christ to those who undertook the ordinance, which had added significance for Fifth Monarchists who believed that Christ would soon appear in the world again and look for those that had been obedient to his word. Huish and her prefatory writers clearly published her text to guide others through the conversion process, including lists of helpful scriptures to help its readers at the end of the book, including ‘Scriptures convincing and confirming her in the duty of Baptism’ (p. 77). William Allen’s preface observes that at this time ‘many of Zions Friends’ spoke ‘sadly and doubtfully of them, as they of Christ’, recorded in Luke 24:20–23 where the apostles (at first doubting the resurrection of Christ because the news  Dunan-Page, ‘John Bunyan’s A Confession of my Faith’, 29.

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was given to them by women, 24:10–11) spoke sadly and doubtfully of his death rather than glorying at his resurrection. Just as the women had brought the good news to the apostles, Huish’s text is presented as foretelling the second coming and advising all the saints to be properly prepared, particularly the more conservative Baptists in London who had distanced themselves from associating with Fifth Monarchists and their millennial excitement. Evidence for the regard paid to the ‘good news’ of women can be gathered from John Vernon’s addressing of Huish’s narrative to ‘such in the Churches of Christ in Ireland, to whom the soul-sinking sorrows of Mistrisse Deborah Huish, the Subject of the ensuing treatise, was well known’ (A8). Chapter 3 discussed Jane Turner’s Choice Experiences which was addressed to churches in the north of England and Scotland under similar circumstances to Huish’s narrative: Turner’s work was also prefaced by her nearest male relation, in her case, her husband, and active Baptist preachers, in order to urge isolated Baptist churches to unite against the proselytising missions of the Quakers. Huish’s narrative was also an example of individual affliction and recovery, but both her own words, and the framing works of her prefatory writers, also ascribe larger significance to her experiences, using them as an allegory for the plight of the Baptists in England and Ireland, who saw their hopes were fading. On 17 April 1658, a time roughly contemporary with William Allen’s preface to Huish’s work, and a month before the Fifth Monarchist meeting at Dorchester, Nathaniel Strange, on behalf of the West Country Baptists, wrote to his co-religionists in the Abingdon Association to report the purging of the devil from two maids in Barnstable, Devon: The Lord hath wonderfully appeared of late in this towne in owning the great worke of prayer and fasting to the rebukeing and casting out of the devill out of the bodyes of two maides, the one of them not twelve yeares old, which both were apparently possest. And I have good ground to judge that the worke of grace is passed upon both their soules. Many strange and, I thinke, unheard-of passages have fallen out in the businesse, both of the mightie power of God and the violent rage of the devill. I hope it may proove much to the glorie of God and the furtherance of the Gospell in this place.68

Strange, also a Fifth Monarchist, clearly interpreted the maids’ recoveries as evidence that God was using his mighty power to bring his people into obedience, and, in a similar way to the Loughwood Baptists, hoped that the maids’ recoveries would encourage obedience to the Gospel, and the furtherance of Baptist doctrine. Huish also understood the importance of her recovery to the rest of those in her congregation, as well as those she had encountered in the Irish churches. After Huish recounts attending the Loughwood congregation to listen to her brethren expounding the word, for instance, she frequently replaces the pronoun ‘me’ with ‘us’, reflecting that she saw herself as an integral part of her new community, 68  Letter from Nathaniel Strange, 19 April 1658, ‘Records of the Abingdon Association’, AR, III: p. 183.

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which brought with it some responsibility. Indeed, although Huish herself had ‘some sad considerations about falling away, after grace received’, this made her ‘soul to tremble in the thoughts of it, to think how dishonourable that would be to the name of God’ (p. 56). As well as encouraging ‘poor, drooping, disconsolate, discouraged souls’ (A4) like herself, Huish stood as a metaphor for the wider body of ‘drooping’ believers by Allen and Vernon: her ‘raising’ from the assaults and temptations of Satan was, according to Allen, a ‘signal mercy’ for the people of God and a ‘pledge and pattern of what God will yet do, not onely for poor disconsolate souls in like conditions; but also for the recovery and raising his publicke works, so far gone back in these Nations’ (A5v). The West Country and Irish Baptists were linked by their radical ideas, which were able to flourish outside of London away from the more conservative leadership of William Kiffin. As Mark Bell observes, ‘geographically, enthusiastic Baptists had to go to the west of England or to Ireland to escape the constriction of the Kiffin circle. Theologically, intensely apocalyptic Baptists were forced into the folds of the Fifth Monarchists or the Seventh-Day Baptists.’69 As early as 1653, in response to the London Baptists’ failing enthusiasm, Vernon, who was already connected to the Loughwood congregation, carried letters between the Irish and London churches reproving the latter for their neglect, and for their lack of zeal. Vernon, the Irish churches in Dublin, Waterford, and Kilkenny agreed, was to promote a ‘more revived correspondency’ by delivering ‘letters and  Bell, Apocalypse How?, p. 129. Allen and Vernon were active in evangelising in Ireland: It was from Waterford that Patient sent a message dated 14 January 1651[2] to the Independent congregation which had been gathered in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral by John Rogers. Rogers recorded in his Ohel or Beth-shemesh, a defence of the congregation’s practices, that the letter was brought by ‘Capt. Vernon, and A.[djutant] G.[eneral] A.[llen] to some seven or eight of their judgement, whom they withdrew from the Church into private meetings on the Lords dayes’ (p. 302). Allen and Vernon, while travelling around Ireland in the army, were acting as messengers to those in the Rogers’s Dublin congregation who were sympathetic to Baptist ideas, whose correspondence Rogers believed was sent ‘on purpose to break us’ (p. 300). The letter encouraged the members to secede by announcing that Patient’s Waterford church took ‘offence at [their] so walking’, and made it clear using scripture that they were not to mix with those of different religious opinions. Rogers vindicated his beliefs by disproving the Baptists’ scriptural arguments, but all to no avail. The members seceded, and Rogers returned, seemingly disheartened, to England. He reflected afterwards that Allen and Vernon ‘did much mischief in the body, and made a sore rent at first from us by some whose judgement were blinded’ (p. 301). It is difficult to ascertain the exact reason why Baptist principles proliferated so much in Ireland. Barnard suggests that the reasons for the unprecedented increase in instances of believers’ baptism was that the ‘exclusive doctrine attracted soldiers anxious to retain their distinctive identity as the elect in a country of unregenerate papists’ (T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 104). He also observes that a large proportion of high-ranking army men, as well as the governors of towns and cities, were Baptists, and this encouraged those seeking power to convert. The circulation of Huish’s experience would no doubt have helped the spread of Baptist ideas. 69

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loveing epistles’ in which they had previously ‘found great advantage not only by weakning Satan’s suggestions and jealousyes, but it hath begott a closer union and knitting upp of heart’.70 The Irish churches mourned: Oh, how many packetts have passed filled with worldly matters since wee have heard one word from you, or you from us, of the condition, increase, growth and decrease of the commonwealth of Israell [ … ] who were some yeeres since brought low through oppressions, afflictions and sorrow [ … ] Doth it not appeare by our litle zeale for him, and lesse delight in his wayes, with constant complaynings, with litle sense of our victory over our leanese, our drynese and barrennese. Are not these instead of the songs of Syon [ … ] For, doubtless now, if ever, wee are especially called uppon to put on the whole armoure of God that wee may be able to stand in this day, and, having done all, to stand.71

Huish’s testimony, though written later, was just such a call to believers to put their faith in God and rise up against their enemies and mend their flagging expectations – without this zeal congregations would be ‘sick’ and ‘barren’ and lose their capacity to bring forth joy, by establishing the kingdom on earth. In the preface to Huish’s work, Vernon addressed the Irish churches, expressing his regret at the dividedness of God’s people, certainly drawing on his and Allen’s failed attempt to get the West Country Association churches to join with the Fifth Monarchists at Dorchester. He wrote: And seeing the Lord alone can heal our sicknesse, and our wound [Hosea 5:13]; and the breach upon us, which is wide as the Sea; let every true Mourner humbly approach before him, on the behalf of our selves, and whole Zion [ … ] & on behalf of the afflicted, deserted, unbelieving, divided, and thereby liable to be destroyed people. [ … ] for now all men almost see our sicknesse, and our wound; how foolish many Physicians and our false refuges have proved. (b3)

The people of Zion are presented as both literally and metaphorically wounded and divided from each other. The congregations are separated by something ‘which is wide as’ the Irish Sea, but they are also experiencing a spiritual breach: one that cannot be cured by a physician. Like Huish, members should fight their afflictions and unite against Satan, whatever he might represent. Her text is both a literal and allegorical message for uniting the churches in preparation for the  B. R. White, ed., ‘The Irish Correspondence of 1653’, AR, II: p. 114. It was signed by, among others, Christopher Blackwood and Thomas Patient. 71  Ibid., pp. 112–13. The Loughwood congregation’s records have a reference to holding a day of humiliation on behalf of their Irish brethren. On 14 March 1654 the church wrote: ‘Findinge much deadness uppon the spirits of the members in generall and much unsutablenesse appearing in our Carriages to the rich grace of god manifested to us in his severall dealings with us, and having many weighty causes laid before us by our Brethren of Ireland all calling upon us for godly sorrow and humiliation’ (DRO 3700D–O/M.1, p. 7). 70

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second coming of Christ. Catharine Gray similarly notes the text’s propagandistic qualities, writing that it evokes ‘a specific community that keeps its identity intact even as it crosses the borders of kingdom’.72 Huish’s text is both part of an urge to heal the ‘wound’ that has occurred between the geographically separate Baptist congregations, and also to heal the ‘wounds’ of individual believers that make up the whole body. As Huish had been present at Baptist meetings in Dublin, between 1653 and 1656, including the house of Thomas Patient, the leader of the Dublin Baptist congregation, and the foremost exponent of adult baptism in Ireland, and at meetings in Loughwood, she was a terrific example of how the two congregations could work together to help a believer in their conversion. A record of her experience appears to have been used to unite the disparate congregations across the Irish Sea, encouraging a closer union and more fruitful network between the two. Allen and Vernon use Huish’s individual struggle as a metaphor for the plight of the saints ‘in these worse days of declining’ (a1). Allen, in particular, aligns the plight of the saints under the failing protectorate with the plight of the people of Jerusalem in the biblical book of Lamentations as they sought to understand why God had abandoned them to a war which ended in their invasion by the Babylonians, a devastating famine, and spiritual doubt: Jerusalem’s ‘virgins [are said to be] afflicted’, and her ‘children are gone into captivity’ (Lamentations 1:4–5), to which the title of Huish’s published narrative refers. Women in Lamentations, as Kathleen M. O’Connor writes, ‘figure prominently in the book’s description of war’s atrocities and serve as symbols for the pain of the people’, and Huish’s own experiences are similarly used as symbolic for the plight of the saints in the late 1650s.73 Lamentations also personifies Jerusalem as a ‘daughter of Zion’, who herself laments and weeps that God has left her, because of the sin and infidelity of his people. Chapter 1, to which Allen alludes in particular, relates the words of the ‘daughter of Zion’ who laments her sorrows that were inflicted by God, who ‘afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger. From above hath he sent fire into my bones, [ … ] he hath made me desolate and faint all the day’ (1:12–13). John Vernon’s preface records Huish’s behaviour while she was under the belief that she had committed unforgiveable sins, highlighting similarities between her desperate utterances and those of David’s Psalms (particularly 22, 32, and 102): Psalm 32 depicts the punishment for silence, rather than prayer, where the speaker’s ‘bones waxed old, through my roaring all the day long; [ … ] my moisture is turned into the drought of Summer’ (3–4). All three psalms lead their speakers to call upon the Lord for help, and find comfort, mercy, and remission of sins, and in Huish’s experience drought, famine, and barrenness was to be replaced at the end of her testimony with the healing moisture of baptism. Vernon asks his readers and his Baptist church not to act as the friends of Job, who ‘fainted, left off, relinquished her, concluding hopelessly!’, urging them not to ignore the  Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate, p. 101.  Kathleen M. O’Connor, ‘Lamentations’, in Women’s Bible Commentary, p. 187.

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suffering of the people of the Lord, as Vernon berated himself for doing, but to rise up together and keep their cause alive. Every member of the church was cherished: when Vernon recounted the death of his sister-in-law Mary Allen, he wrote that ‘in her stead hath God seasonably raised this her Sister to supply the breach made in the visible body of Christ’ (a1v). As well as suffering privately, however, Huish is presented as Jerusalem or Zion personified, the spokeswoman of Lamentations, lamenting her case, but also (through the framing works of Allen and Vernon) begging God to avenge her against her enemies, her ‘friends [who] have dealt treacherously with her’ (1:2). Instead of her fellow people regarding her sufferings as trivial, the ‘Daughter of Zion’ articulates her sufferings, as Huish does, asking, ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?’ (1:12). Huish’s testimony draws attention to the plight of the Baptists, under the failing hopes of the Protectorate and the perceived hypocrisy of their leading members, asking her co-religionists not to neglect calling on the name of the Lord ‘out of the low dungeon’ (3:55) they were in. Vernon remembered the saints’ previous victories, accomplished under God’s favour: Neither in our dayes have any persons ground to suppose (much lesse to conclude) that the Lords eminent presence in the high places of the field, scil. Naasby and other parts with his people, while they faithfully followed him, can now yeeld any incouragement to expect the like presence of God, while they are turning back, and declining from him. (a6r–v)

Despite these observations, however, Vernon reflected that in the New Testament God allowed Lazarus to die and be buried ‘to the intent they might believe [John 11:15]’ (a6v), so that in times to come the people would believe in this ‘proof of his Power’ (a7): Huish’s raising up, like Lazarus’s resurrection, was a sign of God’s favour even when all hope had diminished, and an experience to spur the Fifth Monarchists on to further action. Beyond the Restoration, printed women’s experiential prophecies appear much less frequently: Katherine Sutton’s A Christian Womans Experiences was published abroad in 1663, but it was not until the 1670s, when Anne Wentworth wrote and published her experiences and prophecies in a series of four works, A True Account of Anne Wentworth (1676), A Vindication of A.W. (1677/8), The Revelation of Jesus Christ (1679), and Englands Spiritual Pill (1679), that femaleauthored millenarian Baptist prophecy would re-emerge. As Chapter 2 has already discussed, Wentworth was in dispute with her husband, William Wentworth, and the leaders of the Baptists churches in London, particularly Hanserd Knollys, William Dix, and Thomas Hicks, because they excommunicated her for publishing things ‘to the prejudice and scandal’ of her husband and his church.74 She was alerted to the empty formalism of the Baptists, and all the English churches whom she believed were unregenerate, and sent a prophecy to Charles II, via the London Mayor, asking for an audience to notify him of ‘the severest judgements that ever  Wentworth, A Vindication, p. 2.

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was, now a coming on the land, such as never was before nor never will be again, and good reason there is for it’.75 Disagreement with and separation from members of the larger, more conservative Baptist churches, therefore, were the impetus for Wentworth’s prophecies, as well as the publication of the utterances of Anna Trapnel and Deborah Huish. Like those women, who were also part of smaller, more radical groups who believed that the main body of believers had lost sight of their original aim, by 5 January 1678 Wentworth was publishing her works for a ‘little flock | of Christ I late have seen | Who have to me [ … ]; a comfort been’, and who were fellow ‘sufferers with me, and are not ashamed of me in my bonds’.76 Wentworth’s 1677–78 prophecies were viewed with interest by the authorities, particularly after she had sent some directly to Charles II that had ‘much affected’ some ‘considerable and otherwise ingenious persons’.77 When some of Wentworth’s writings were stolen by her husband and taken to his congregation meeting at Glovers’ Hall, in September 1677, including her spiritual experiences, a mother’s legacy to her daughter, and some verses, an informant called Thomas Barnes reported that there was such interest in the papers that William Wentworth had been summoned before the Lord Mayor and a warrant issued from the Lord Chief Justice for his arrest.78 ‘There begins to be much discourse about the former papers’, wrote Barnes, especially by some in authority: ‘I hear also that one day last week this person [Wentworth] and her papers were to have been heard by Lady Hanson and others, but that the man got them away, and ’tis said, this lady knows where she is.’79 Lady Hanson, the wife of a previous mayor of London, Sir Robert Hanson, likely afforded Wentworth support and even maintenance, and is a candidate for the female-authored preface to The Revelation of Jesus Christ (1679), where the writer declares that the verses ‘so wrought upon her, that she resolved to have them Printed’.80 A month later, a letter from ‘divers serious Christians’, who had seen the prophecies Wentworth had written to the king and the mayor, pleaded that the Baptist ‘party’ should release her writings unless they wanted their ‘secret practices [ … ] exposed to public discussion’: if they were to avoid such consequences, they were ‘without delay to deliver all those writings  ‘From my abode this 11 years in Kingshead Court’, 31 July 1677, CSPD.  Wentworth, A Vindication, p. 21, p. 22. 77  ‘T. B[arnes] to ----’, 30 November 1677, CSPD. 78  See Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 17. Biographers of Wentworth have tended to 75 76

assume her husband was a glover; however, a Baptist/Fifth Monarchist group was meeting in this hall from 1675 which had previously been led by John Vernon and Thomas Glasse (Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 216). 79  ‘T. B[arnes] to ----]’, 30 September 1677, CSPD. The works her husband stole, and which have never come to light (Wentworth feared he had burnt them), were ‘1. A book with a white parchment cover. The Epistle to the Lady Tyddle. The title, A Mother’s Legacy to her Daughter, dated 22 Sept., 1677. 2. A little book with a painted red cover having 8 or 9 titles with a prayer of faith to show my wrestling with God till I prevailed. 3. A paper of verses dated 22 Sept.’ (‘----- to -----’, October 1677, CSPD). 80  Wentworth, The Revelation, A2.

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of Mrs. Anne Wentworth to the hand of Lady Hanson, dwelling on Snow Hill, otherwise you will find you have to do with those, who will not trifle in so weighty a business and are backed by such authority as you can neither evade or resist [i.e. God]’.81 By November 1677, however, Barnes reported that her ‘friends begin to decline her predictions and her too; because she cannot or will not be positive when and what the great things she wrote about to the King will be’, which appears to have caused Wentworth to issue ‘some printed papers’ of ‘Anne Wentworth’s predictions’ the following December, which appeared in a small print-run of 300.82 A response by the contemporary prophetess Jane Lead, written in her spiritual diary on 30 December, indicated that these papers had prophesied a more specific time frame for the Lord’s judgement showing that Wentworth had desired ‘Plagues and Vials of Wrath to come so immediately upon the Formal Churches’: Lead had been shown by God, ‘that is was not the Time, nor the Manner revealed yet, how they should be overturned’.83 Wentworth’s popularity was soon on the wane. Beyond the end of 1677, Wentworth’s writings appear not to have provoked any reaction from the authorities, if, indeed, they took their threats seriously in the first place. Her followers appear not to have been politically influential or numerous enough, compared with the communities of Huish and Trapnel, and there is no evidence to suggest that they gathered together as a congregation. Two years later, the ‘Reflection on the Message and Testimony of Mrs. Wentworth’, appended to Englands Spiritual Pill by a writer identified only by the initials ‘M. O.’, marvelled that Wentworth was able to support herself financially because ‘we a very few, that do own her, have it not in our power, to do it for her’.84 They appear not, for instance, to have had the financial resources necessary to support a work like Trapnel’s untitled folio, although certain followers contributed testimonies to the truth of her claims and the manner of her prophetic outbursts. Wentworth’s maintenance was instead fulfilled by the ‘ever living unchangeable God’ and his moving ‘upon his servants, as he pleaseth, to come and send as she needeth, out of Country and City; by some whose faces she never saw, and strangers to one another, and they must not know, what one another doth, nor none asketh her, if she wants, nor doth she ever complain to any’.85 These anonymous donors are described as being independently inspired, rather than part of a mobilised group,  ‘----- to -----’, October 1677, CSPD.  ‘T. B[arnes] to ----’, 26 December 1677, CSPD. The publisher of Wentworth’s

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works is unknown, but she does record that either assisted with or made the books herself: ‘as I was set alone about my Fathers [God’s] business which he gave me to do, foulding up these Printed papers; the Lord did so own the work’, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 45. 83  Jane Lead, A Fountain of Gardens Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure, 2 vols. (London: Printed by J. Bradford, 1696), II: p. 520, cited in Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs, p. 168. 84  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 47. The last prophecy included is from 22 November 1679. 85  Ibid.

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but must have established some networks between London and other parts of the country. Towards the end of 1677, anxiety was growing over toleration towards Catholicism and the future of the monarchy, which was to find vent in the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis over the succeeding three years. The anxieties of this period were comparable with those of the 1650s which produced the experiential prophecies of Huish, Trapnel, and Sutton: belief in corruption in high places abounded, particularly because the heir to the throne, the Duke of York (later James II), was a practising Catholic and rumours of popery at the heart of government would soon become commonplace. In June 1677, Spymaster Williamson received a report of a woman who pretended ‘great devotion and frequent[ed] the services of the church, practises the wicked art of fortune telling near Lothbury, [ … ] that there should be an alteration of religion now by law established, which alteration notwithstanding should not continue long, for the Protestants should be delivered’.86 On 21 October, Thomas Barnes reported several prophecies of a ‘maiden gentlewoman’ that had seen the ‘Whore of Babylon, clothed in purple and scarlet, riding into the City, crying for a drink, that she was athirst. She saw her going into dark places to drink, and, when she returned, she saw blood running out of her mouth.’87 Both prophecies indicated that the nation would be saved by the Dukes of Buckingham and Monmouth, as Protestant heroes, but in Anne Wentworth’s prophecies, by contrast, Christ is her hero and saviour: she wrote that a corrupt and unregenerate England would soon ‘feel King Jesus[’s] Rod’ upon it.88 Such language recalls the Fifth Monarchist works of Trapnel, Huish, and Sutton, and Wentworth’s earlier prophecies, particularly those that appear in A Vindication, also echo Trapnel’s consistent use of ballad metre for outpourings of the spirit. Both women split from their former, more conservative congregations, and also seem to have acquired a separate, more radical following. A later Scottish writer bound the only known copy of Englands Spiritual Pill with two of Anna Trapnel’s works, The Cry of a Stone and Report and Plea, in, or soon after, 1689, linking the works by their attempts ‘To Intimat to all the severall sects of Christianity in England how that God is heighlie provoked with their formalities in religion without the lyff and power theirof’.89 Writing with hindsight, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the compiler praises the work of both women in foretelling the fall of those that had become ‘degenerat from their first sincere love to the gospell’, and clearly connects both the manner of their messages and their aims. Wentworth’s contemporaries certainly associated news of her prophecies  ‘---- to Williamson’, 2 June 1677, CSPD.  ‘T. B[arnes] to ---’, 21 October 1677, CSPD. 88  Wentworth, The Revelation, p. 2. 89  Edin. *z.8.1/1, ‘A “Memorandum” to the reidar of this book’. The manuscript is 86 87

transcribed in Natasha Simonova, ‘New Evidence for the Reading of Sectarian Women’s Prophecies’, Notes & Queries, 60:1 (2013), 66–70 (pp. 69–70). Simonova dates the manuscript to 1689 because of a contemporary reference.

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with the Fifth Monarchists: Barnes’s report of September 1677 records directly after his account of Wentworth’s audience with Lady Hanson, ‘I hear of many other papers of some others of our old friends of the Fifth Monarchy men are to come forth’.90 It is possible that Wentworth found alliances with Fifth Monarchists living in London: she records that her husband took her stolen writings to Glovers’ Hall where a Fifth Monarchist congregation met after 1675, and her writings share many similarities with those of Trapnel and Huish. Wentworth’s works are all concerned, in various ways, with reforming the formal churches and the people of England more generally: akin to the Fifth Monarchists of the 1650s, who had, as Bernard Capp writes, ‘a desire for liberty in place of tyranny, and for godliness in place of idolatry’, Wentworth experienced what she believed to be the tyranny of an ungodly and unregenerate husband and church, allowing her to see the full extent of the encroachment of all kinds of corrupt people and practices on the Christian nations.91 Her first published work, A True Account (1676) which focused on vindicating herself from excommunication from Knollys’s Baptist church the previous year, refers on its first page to Ephesians 6 which advises that believers put on ‘the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day’ (6:13). Wentworth justifies her speaking by taking up ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ (6:17) in order to tackle ‘spiritual wickedness in high places’ (6:12), quoting from Revelation 21:7 that ‘he which overcometh shall inherit all things, and I will be his God, and he shall be my Son’, but adding that this ‘includes daughters as well as sons’.92 Her first published verse prophecy, taught to her by the Holy Spirit ‘in the Night-Season’ of 5 January 1678, aligned her with the militant Deborah: she was made to ‘Sing unto him a Triumphant Victorious Song over my Enemies, with a command from God to send it forth into the World’.93 The song asks that the Lord fulfil his promise to ‘pour thy Plagues on that great Whore | Babylon’, the Baptists who accused her, but also mourned for her ‘Native soyl and folks’ who would not give credence to her words and would not repent.94 From mid-1677, Wentworth began to reveal the full extent of the punishments that would be dealt out when King Jesus arrived to fight in order to give the ‘Kingdom’ to his ‘little Flock’, destroying all those that opposed them.95 On 31 July 1677 she warned Charles II ‘to prepare for such an overturn as never was since the world began [ … ] mercy and judgement is a coming’, urgently pleading with him to repent, and subsequently addressed a ‘Revelation’ to the city of London on 6 September 1677 urging them to ‘Make

 ‘T. B[arnes] to ----]’, 30 September 1677, CSPD.  Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, p. 2. 92  Wentworth, A True Account, p. 1. 93  Wentworth, A Vindication, p. 17. 94  Ibid., p. 20, p. 21. 95  Wentworth, The Revelation, p. 12. 90 91

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haste! fly to the Ark!’.96 By 5 January 1678, recorded in A Vindication, she was prophesising that judgement would arrive on New Year’s Day (25 March 1678). Three days before the day, she reminded her persecutors, ‘For you love God, why do ye then me so hate?’, and the King himself: ‘And why so high, will not repent, before it be too late?’97 New Year’s Day 1678 came and went without event, causing Wentworth some disappointment, writing a year later that ‘the reason why it [a great wonder from Heaven] came no sooner to be seen’ was because she ‘was not strong enough in Spirit, nor they ripe enough in Sin’.98 Her followers had evidently become disillusioned with her prophecies. However, she received a prophecy twelve days later that reiterated the promise that ‘King Jesus’ would return to battle alongside his fellow saints: But the Hypocrites in Zion they will all mourn, All the wicked, proud in heart, that did so scorn, When they see the Battel of the Lord to be fought, And how it was the Lord alone, that me taught, And in his strength I was by Grace enabled to stand, Against all my Enemies, with his Battel-ax in my hand, To wound, kill, amaze, put to flight, and cut them down, And when they are in their Graves, I shall wear a Crown. O this God! so great in power! Wonderful is his Name! Who will exalt those of low degree, & give his Enemies shame. When the time, to advance poor Mordecai, was come, Then was the time, for to hang up proud Haman.99

Whereas Wentworth’s prophecy of 22 March declared that she would ‘leave all to God, and let you [her foes] alone, | For him and you to fight out the Battel begun’, the post–New Year’s Day prophecy styles her as an instrument of God’s vengeance and draws heavily on the violence of the book of Esther (in which Esther petitions King Ahasuerus for more killing [9:13]). It is ambiguous throughout the prophecy whether Wentworth’s violence was to precede Christ’s arrival, preparing the way, or whether it was intended to respond to the divine event. Similar language was used in the anonymous Fifth Monarchist pamphlet, Some Considerations by Way of Proposal, published in 1657, which was followed by the arrest of the most vocal Fifth Monarchists, John Rogers, John Portman, and Hugh Courtney. The work asked its readers to consider whether God would use ‘the Saints as his Battleaxe, to break and consume, both the Magistraticall and Ministeriall Authority of the Beast and his horns, before his personall coming and 96  ‘From my abode this 11 years in Kingshead Court’, 31 July 1677, CSPD; Wentworth, The Revelation, p. 1. 97  Wentworth, The Revelation, p. 2. 98  Ibid., p. 6. 99  Ibid., p. 4.

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appearance?’ and to consider whether the scriptures and earlier declarations of the army supported this.100 Wentworth’s work does not appear to have provoked the same level of concern, however, despite her depiction of herself as a warrior fighting against wickedness in high places, but her battle axe aligns her with Medes and Persians whom God appointed as his instruments to destroy Babylon, the scourge of the saints: Jeremiah 51:18 prophesied that ‘in the time of their visitation they shall perish’, explaining that the Medes and Persians would be God’s ‘battle axe and weapons of war’ to ‘break in pieces the nations, [ … ] captains and rulers’ (51:20–23). This dramatic overturning promised a reversal of fortunes, made explicit by Wentworth’s allusion to Haman’s fall to death as a proud and lofty counsellor and Mordecai’s advancement. Esther’s management of her husband the king led him to allow Mordecai and Esther’s people, the Jews, to revenge themselves on their persecutors. Haman had desired the honour of wearing the king’s crown, but the king bestowed the honour, instead, on Mordecai for his actions. As Wentworth prophesied, the poor people of ‘low degree’ would be exalted and would ‘wear a Crown’ for aiding God’s plan, rather than usurping his power. There is a clear message that men should not make themselves gods: at the beginning of the prophecy she berates ‘the English people’ for regarding their king, a man, as ‘a God’ that ‘they love above God’.101 After New Year’s Day, and the failure of King Jesus to arrive to the fight, Wentworth’s prophecies focused more on the allegorical interpretation of her own experiences, explaining that the sceptical among her audience just did not understand her work properly. Wentworth’s husband and her church had accused her of publishing lies about his cruel usage of her, and had succeeded in tarnishing her reputation, but their argument had a larger significance. On 31 March 1678, Wentworth wrote: The Lord shewed me why the people did not understand me, nor my work; Because they will not (saith the Lord) go to the root of the matter, but blind themselves with poring so much upon a Man and his Wife, and will look no further: but continue writing all faults in thy forehead, as delusions and disobeying of thy Husband, and see none in themselves: [ … ] They will not see, how I have placed the two Spirits in a Man and his Wife, to figure out Zion and Babylon, which I purposed before the beginning of the World.102

This particular prophecy lists Wentworth’s trials as figures for the conflict between God’s chosen people and their enemies; the true church and their assailants. For this reason, Wentworth suffered for eighteen years married to a husband whose tongue was ‘a sharp sword to make thy heart bleed for 18. years, and his teeth that were as spears and arrows to wast thy flesh from thy bones’, where she came close to death: ‘great oppression, and sorrow of heart’ that she  Some Considerations by Way of Proposal, C1v.  Wentworth, The Revelation, p. 3. 102  Ibid., p. 9. 100 101

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could not give voice to, caused her to be ‘consumed to skin and bone, a forlorn sad spectacle to be seen, unlike a woman; for my days had been spent with sighing, and my years with crying’.103 Following eighteen years of suffering, which Wentworth aligned with the time period after which a woman in Luke 13:11 was healed by Christ of a debilitating disease, she wrote that the ‘Lord Jesus came to hear my cry’ and ‘took me from the Grave’, giving her a ‘new Body’, so that she could have ‘a hand in Babylons Ashes’.104 During this period of oppression, Wentworth aligned herself with the afflicted and distressed Jerusalem of Isaiah 51:23, writing that she had ‘laid my body as the ground, and as the street for him [my husband] to go over for 18 years together’. At the end of Isaiah 51 the Lord promises that he will pass the cup of fury to those who have trampled over and afflicted his people, and in the following chapter persuades Zion, the church, to believe that he will raise her up and release her from her bonds. The Geneva note on 52:1 that ‘no wicked tyrant, who will subvert God’s true religion and oppress the conscience’ should ever come into Zion, which phrase Wentworth later borrowed to describe her ‘cruel oppressing Husband, that Tyrant King, that would bow [her] Soul and body down to him, and takes upon him greater power then ever I the Lord did give unto man’.105 This translation also links this persecution with that experienced by the Israelites as they fled Pharaoh, ‘the dragon’ mentioned at 51:9, and Wentworth adds her own persecution to this tradition, calling her husband an ‘oppressing King’ writing that she was 18 years under as hard a task-master as ever the children of Israel were, and had cried as hard unto God as ever they did, and they were not more spent out with sorrow than I was, and may say without any offence to God, that Pharaoh’s heart was never more hard than some Anabaptist Church-members.106

Isaiah recalls the desolation of Lamentations, an important allusion in Huish’s testimony, but both women’s works show how God would raise his people up and free them from captivity. Wentworth also draws on another image to represent the persecutions of the community of saints used in Revelation (and elsewhere in the Bible): the travailing woman who fled into the wilderness after giving birth (12:6). Isaiah 51:3 promises that Zion’s wilderness will be made as an Eden, suggesting that a period of labour would be followed by joy, gladness, and thanksgiving. Wentworth had experienced her own period in the wilderness, exiled from her home by her husband, and dispossessed of all her belongings following a miscarriage bought on by the Baptist elders’ treatment of her in the lead-up to her excommunication. In Englands Spiritual Pill her prophecy reveals that ‘their cruelty made thee  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 7; A True Account, p. 9.  Wentworth, A True Account, p. 9; The Revelation, p. 9. 105  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 27. 106  Ibid., p. 17, p. 15. 103 104

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miscarry: they shed innocent blood which crys aloud for vengeance’.107 The prefatory writer to these prophecies, named only as ‘A. S.’, drew meaning from these events, as well as Wentworth’s seemingly miraculous repossessing of her house in midsummer 1679, which the Lord had shown would happen in an earlier prophecy of 26 April 1678. A. S. chastised the sceptical readers of the work: Think not in thy heart, what a ridiculous thing is this, that God should busie himself thus much about returning of a silly woman unto her former house again. For what if God should intimate by it, that now he would bring his exiled Church (turned out by Babylon) to her primitive state again, wouldst thou answer for thy rashness? And so in the rest, that is acted and spoken of this so mean a woman as the true Church now is, whose figure she could not have been, if a great Lady. Think on the woman in the Wilderness, she was but a mean one too, in a desperate condition, forced to flie, yet her Son was caught up to Heaven.108

Wentworth’s meanness and weakness, as an exiled woman without a home and livelihood, made her an effective symbol for the exiled church in need, figured in Revelation, persecuted by her Babylonian husband and his Baptist church while she was great with child.109 While her opponents used these qualities to discredit her testimony, A. S. asked Wentworth’s readers to look further than the ‘literal sense of the history’, and see her life as an allegory for the persecution of the saints and their church, who would bring forth the Messiah, the King of Kings who would take vengeance on their enemies. In her earlier A True Account, Wentworth had aligned her conversion process, during the eighteen years she was oppressed by her husband, with the plight of ‘such a woman of sorrow, and acquainted with grief, and from man could have no relief’.110 Alluding to the travailing woman in John 16:21 that ‘hath sorrow, because her hour is come’, Wentworth showed that her travails of distress and melancholy, as discussed above, could not be cured by ‘man’, who only aggravated her sufferings. After this ‘long travail in the wilderness’ where she was ‘brought even to the gates of Death’, she was ‘raised up by the immediate and mighty hand of God [ … ] from the grave’.111 She contrasts this with her husband’s spiritual credentials who ‘never yet knew the new birth, the life of the new man’ and other members of his congregation: ‘nor they must needs be no Saints or Christians in deed and in truth, nor know the new birth themselves, if they take him to be one that is born again’.112 Her husband’s ‘new birth’ is shown to be false, and those who believe in it are also shown to have  Ibid., p. 27.  Ibid., p. 3. 109  Wentworth was not a ‘mean’ woman before her marriage. At the end of Englands 107 108

Spiritual Pill, M. O. testifies to Wentworth’s character as ‘a modest chast virtuous Woman, and of no mean parantage, as is well known in Lincolnshier, and to her Relations’ (p. 48). 110  Wentworth, A True Account, p. 15. 111  Wentworth, A Vindication of Anne Wentworth, p. 7. 112  Wentworth, A True Account, p. 7.

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equally immaterial experiences: although they had been washed in water, the ‘soul was never yet washed from the filth of [their] inbred natural corruption’. By contrast, Wentworth’s testimony uses the metaphor of a true baptism of the spirit and body to show how she would be raised up from the grave and reborn in a new body, overcoming any subsequent trials: she recorded Hanserd Knollys’s promise that her writings, despite their godliness and exemplarity, written ‘for the good of Souls’, would ‘cost [her] dear’, foreseeing that she ‘would wade to the knees, and up to the chin, and over head and ears, but I would rise up again’.113 The flood issued by the persecuting dragon’s mouth in Revelation 12:15, the raging tumults of persecutors, could not drown the woman in the wilderness who had experienced the new birth. Wentworth drew on her experience of baptism, as Anna Trapnel had done before her, to show how the godly and their church could undergo persecution and tribulations. Overcoming persecution and affliction meant returning Wentworth to her ‘primitive state’ in her marital home, and God promised her that he would ‘deliver thee out of thy afflictions, bonds, captivity, and pilgrim-state thou art in; and now thou hast my will, I will return thee into thy home again, from whence thou camest, and ever since hast bin turned out as a stranger and pilgrim upon the Earth’.114 Wentworth, like Deborah Huish, was figured as Zion in captivity, lamenting her plight under Babylon, and like Huish, she was freed from her captivity and affliction by the Lord. In April and May 1678 the Lord had given Wentworth a prophecy that he would return her to her husband’s house from which she had been excluded for two years. He promised that he would ‘justify thee against those unjust Men, which did thee much wrong, and make it appear thou needst not to be ashamed of that thou hast done’.115 As Zion is described as an ashamed, abandoned wife in Isaiah 54, Wentworth is redeemed by her heavenly husband who sends her where she ‘canst shew thy head, where thou art well known’, with those who saw ‘how deeply thou didst suffer’. As Susan Dwyer Amussen writes, ‘neighbors provided moral and evidentiary support for women who left their husbands’, and exile from her home would have left Wentworth friendless and scandalised.116 Returning her to her community would be akin to bringing her back to the Promised Land. It is clear that the fulfilment of this prophecy was extremely significant in the eyes of both Wentworth and her followers. In her later prophecies, The Revelation and Englands Spiritual Pill, contributors to Wentworth’s works were keen to relay accounts of how she was restored to her spiritual home; in the first of the two sets of prophecies, the anonymous concluding ‘stop-press’ statement summarising Wentworth’s triumphant return advertises that the whole tale could not possibly fit 113  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 5. This is an example of the way baptism was used as a metaphor for suffering and recovery. Featley’s The Dippers Dipt sought to descry the Baptists who would be ‘plunged over head and ears’ in their own sedition. 114  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 19. 115  Ibid., p. 27. 116  Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”’, p. 80.

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‘crowded’ in its final pages, but was being written to a ‘larger extent’.117 Englands Spiritual Pill presented a fuller account of Wentworth’s return. ‘An Admonition to the Reader’, written by ‘A. B.’, testified that there was no possible way for Wentworth to get into her house: temporarily leaving the city, her husband had left the house in the care of the landlord, and a woman who was in possession of another key gave it to William Dix, one of the Baptist elders, for safekeeping. Wentworth had come to the locked door the day before and had ‘declared her Testimony’, presumably to gain the support and sympathy of friends, neighbours, and her followers. The next day a stranger told her that the door was open, so Wentworth returned and ‘took possession; and being denied the key to the door, bought a new lock, set it on, and locked the door’.118 Furniture, linen, and rent were all provided by various means and her husband was subsequently unable to remove her. After the account, A. B. declared that this was a sign given to the Nation, that she was sent to give warning, viz. That such an overturn was a coming upon the Nation as never was, nor ever shall come again, wherefore the premises put together, confirm me she is the Lords messenger.119

Wentworth’s repossession of her house signified an overturning of roles present in the reversal of the Jew Mordecai’s fortunes, but also the return of the Jews exiled in Babylon to Jerusalem. Both Wentworth’s Englands Spiritual Pill and Huish’s Captive Taken from the Strong, as well as Trapnel’s folio, were works that aimed to set free, heal, and inspire down-trodden communities that were sick, corrupted, and demoralised. Their purpose was undoubtedly to show how God gave a voice to the poor and dispossessed, whether they had been abandoned financially (as in Wentworth’s case), imprisoned and persecuted (as had Trapnel), or left spiritually bereft (in the case of Huish). The fact that women’s experiences and prophecies appear to have been printed more often than men’s (suggesting that men tended to preach rather than prophesy, although as Chapter 2 observed, the boundaries between these utterances were fluid), also suggests that their followers were attracted to the strength God had made manifest in their weakness: what better image to represent the overturning of authority than a conventionally ‘weak’ woman endowed with powerful and spiritually authentic rhetoric? God, the Fifth Monarchists suggested, was on the side of the weak and oppressed, and would pay the oppressors back in kind. The experiences of Huish and Wentworth, as well as the earlier works of Trapnel, focus on suffering through trials before a deliverance towards the end of the published works, although the suggestion is (particularly in Huish’s case) that these trials will continue and the believer will have to continue to rise up from under them, always looking back to their experience of being ‘plunged over head  Wentworth, The Revelation, p. 23.  Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, p. 33. 119  Ibid., p. 34. 117 118

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and ears’ at their baptism. These struggles were part of working to establish the Fifth Monarchy, and examples for others to suffer and overcome. Women could also, conveniently, draw on the gendered presentations of the Church in the Bible, particularly the woman in travel from Revelation, and the spouse of the Song of Songs, which made them apt symbols for the Church in peril and deliverance. Through these images, which were also appropriated, with mixed results, by men, women could present themselves as leaders and nurturers of religious communities: the seed of women, whether understood as their writings or their fellow elect church members, was what could bring the Fifth Monarchy nearer to fruition, and could bring about an overturning of the nation.

Conclusion The aim of this book has been to contribute to research on women’s part in revolutionary religion by examining, in its course, many under-utilised and under-discussed publications by female members of gathered churches, particularly those that are identifiably Baptist. Quite apart from the illicit behaviour, fascination with heresy, and propensity to be captivated by influential male figures that heresiographers were fascinated by, female-authored works present a view of Baptist women as godly co-inheritors of the kingdom of God, having equal interest in preparing the world for the coming of Christ. Although their work often conformed to the expectations and strictures of their male coreligionists, this did not prevent them from taking part in the separation and formation of gathered churches, contributing to the development of Baptist theology, and helping to nurture their fellow believers in their prophecies and writings. These women were not blindly following a new, attractive doctrine: they were actively strengthening and reforming the movement from within, often urging their ministers or elders to go further in their separation, or to clarify points of doctrine. By examining Baptist women’s publications more closely, this book has demonstrated a hitherto unappreciated level of achievement in these works by considering their conformity to, as well as their departure from, established and developing congregational practices, their use of different rhetorical strategies to support their participation in theological debate, and the responses of their male co-religionists to their activities and writings. This book’s literary approach has paid attention to both the content and the method of production of women’s writings, because the publishing environment and evidence of readership for the texts are an essential part of understanding their impact, both in Baptist communities, and in seventeenth-century revolutionary culture. Baptists were interested in recurring patterns and signs, so women’s works were directed to and interpreted by their communities, for example the conversion narratives of Deborah Huish and Jane Turner; this community context is important to understanding how and why they were produced. Without knowledge of the godly community these women wrote in and for, which this book provides, it is not possible to explore their contribution to community imperatives, or, indeed, just how extraordinary their body of work is. This study covers a major period of formation and development of the gathered churches, and the growth of believers’ baptism in these communities. The Baptists developed from disparate pockets of separated believers to organising national (and even international) associations to connect believers despite geographical separation. This early period of the movement was a time for experimentation of religious doctrine, and arguments within and between different groups of believers flourished, to which women did not hesitate to

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contribute. The works of Sara Jones, Anna Trapnel, Jane Turner, Susanna Parr, and Anne Wentworth all demonstrate women’s desire to contribute to the development of new practices as well as the organisation of new congregations, and many of them disagreed with the existing practices of their male ministers. Some women’s voices were celebrated, in the case of Jane Turner’s narrative that advised the Baptists that they separate entirely from the paedobaptists to combat Quaker designs on their membership. Anna Trapnel’s latter prophecies that disagreed with her former minister, John Simpson, appear to have found an enthusiastic audience in a more radical Fifth Monarchist splinter group. The contributions of Susanna Parr and Anne Wentworth brought them excommunication from their existing congregations, but they both received support from friends and followers. Wentworth continued to prophesy against the Baptist churches as empty formalists, while Parr returned to worshipping in the established church. The women included in this book were skilled in presenting arguments to develop their congregations, and to define more clearly (and to support) their own roles in their congregations and their published outputs. What has not always been acknowledged by previous studies of these women’s works (though not all the women have been given scholarly attention before) is that by taking part in published discussions of church government and organisation, women were shaping the development of their groups. Previous studies have often concentrated more on women’s opposition to their congregations and the ruling authorities (as in the attention paid to Trapnel, Parr, and Wentworth), rather than the nuanced theological arguments they produced in support of them (for instance, the arguments made by Katherine Sutton and Turner). What this book has shown is that women’s conformity to their Baptist groups could produce rhetorically engaging works that deserve to be considered in studies of revolutionary activity. Was becoming a member of a Baptist group empowering for women? While Baptist groups have often been thought to be constraining for women in comparison with the Quakers whose female ministry found support from male adherents, membership offered opportunities for action and publication that were unavailable for those who remained in the established church. Many Baptist congregations allowed and even encouraged women to prophesy in their congregations, but discussions of their writings have highlighted that they were playing other important roles within their congregations. In most cases women were allowed some liberty to speak in front of church meetings, vote on aspects of church government and admittance, travel as messengers of the church, and nurse sick and dying believers as female deacons. In their writings they argued over doctrine and practice and they aimed to unite their followers by vindicating their practices and disproving the validity of the established church, they were godly examples to others, and they interpreted their own experiences as signs for the whole body of believers. These women were not just concerned with their own spiritual states: they felt that they had a duty to assist others in need as nursing mothers, helping other members to their own ‘new births’ in Christ. It did not suit the consciences

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of many women to stay silent, as they believed that they had received signs of what was to come. The prevalence of women’s experiential and prophetic works in comparison with their male contemporaries is yet more evidence to suggest that women were thought to be better placed to be vessels for the divine word. Believers’ baptism was an attractive doctrine in revolutionary times because it was a visible sign that set apart the godly from their unregenerate acquaintance, and, for the women represented in this book, baptism encouraged them to speak out in order to evangelise and to strengthen their fellow believers. Following the pattern of Christ’s resurrection, by burying themselves under the water and then rising up renewed and cleansed, though also a dangerous undertaking, brought all believers closer to God. The period of study of this book, 1640–1680, saw a rise and fall of the Particular Baptists and Fifth Monarchists. Following the Restoration, there is a marked decrease in the amount of surviving Baptist women’s works until the early 1670s following Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence. Unfortunately, because of restrictions of space, this book could not consider the involvement of Baptist women and their writings from the Exclusion Crisis through the Monmouth Rebellion to the Glorious Revolution. Baptists played an active role in Whig opposition to the succession of James II, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Baptist women were actively engaged in radical activity during the Monmouth rebellion. As Melinda Zook has discussed in her book, Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660–1714, the Baptist Elizabeth Gaunt was arrested for aiding rebels to escape overseas in the wake of the rebellion, but her punishment, to be burnt alive at the stake, was enacted because of her activities on behalf of those involved in the Duke of Monmouth’s invasion.1 As Zook summarises, ‘English agents in Utrecht and Amsterdam reported her movements and repeatedly pressed for her capture’, but it was only her imprisonment for harbouring a fugitive (who subsequently testified against her and was pardoned) that allowed her to be questioned.2 She did not reveal information about her co-activists, and her sentence was not commuted, leaving her to posterity as the last woman in Britain to be executed for high treason. Zook’s comment, that Gaunt and other women who took part in opposition politics were less interested in ‘transgress[ing] gender norms or threaten[ing] domestic patriarchy’, than they were in supporting their cause, is also true of the women and their work discussed in this book, but undoubtedly Baptist networks allowed women more freedom to step outside their conventional roles. The role of women in this kind of Baptist activity, then, would be revelatory. So, too, would be a study of the educational books and hymns of the  See Crosby, The History of the English Baptists, III: pp. 185–93; Mrs Gaunt’s Last Speech, who was Burnt at London, Oct. 23. 1685. as it was Written by her own Hand ([London: n. pub.], 1685). 2  Melinda Zook, Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 55. See also Zook, ‘Nursing Sedition: Women, Dissent, and the Whig Struggle’, pp. 189–203. 1

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well-known Baptist Benjamin Keach, particularly his advice to young women, as Elizabeth Clarke has done in her recent Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England.3 Seventeenth-century Baptists are a group that have received scant attention from literary scholars in recent years, but they have much to offer to our understandings of this period’s revolutionary culture.

 For example, Benjamin Keach’s The Glorious Lover, a Divine Poem (London: Printed by J. D., 1679), has on its first page an illustration of a woman succumbing to temptation and then being pushed towards a gaping hell-mouth by two soldiers. For Keach see Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs, pp. 192–99. 3

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———, To Sions Virgins: or, A Short Forme of Catechisme of the Doctrine of Baptisme ([London: n. pub.], 1644) ———, To Sions Lovers, being a Golden Egge, to Avoid Infection ([London: n. pub.], 1644) Jones, Sara [Quaker writer], This is Lights Appearance in the Truth ([n. p.: n. pub.], 1650) Keach, Benjamin, The Glorious Lover. A Divine Poem (London: Printed by J. D., 1679) Kiffin, William, A Briefe Remonstrance of the Reasons and Grounds of those People commonly Called Anabaptists ([London: n. pub.], 1645) Kiffin, William, and others, The Confession of Faith, of those Churches which are commonly (though Falsly) Called Anabaptists (London: Printed by Matthew Simmons, 1644) Knollys, Hanserd, The Life and Death of that Old Disciple of Jesus Christ (London: Printed for John Harris, 1692) Knutton, Immanuel, Seven questions about the controversie betweene the Church of England, and the Separatists and Anabaptists (London: Printed by Thomas Paine, 1645) Lead, Jane, A Fountain of Gardens Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure, 2 vols (London: Printed by J. Bradford, 1696) Lilburne, Robert, A Remonstrance sent from Colonell Lilburnes Regiment to his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax (London: Printed for Giles Calvert, 1647) Lupton, Donald, The Quacking Mountebanck or the Jesuite turn’d Quaker (London: Printed for E. B., 1655) Mall, Thomas, True Account of what was done by a Church of Christ in Exon (London: Printed by R. W. for Matthew Keinton, 1658) Marshall, Stephen, Meroz Cursed, or, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons (London: Printed by R. Badger for Samuel Gellibrand, 1641) Nicolls, J., Original Letters and Papers of State Addressed to Oliver Cromwell (London: Printed by William Bowyer, 1743) Overton, Mary, To the Right Honourable, the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses, the Parliament of England, Assembled at Westminster ([London: n. pub.], 1646) Overton, Richard, The Commoners Complaint: or, A Dreadful Warning from Newgate ([London: n. pub.], 1646) Pagitt, Ephraim, Heresiography: or A Description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these Latter Times (London: Printed by M. Okes, 1645) Parr, Susanna, Susanna’s Apologie against the Elders ([Oxford: Printed by Henry Hall for T. Robinson], 1659) Poole, Elizabeth, A Vision: Wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure of the Kingdome (London: [n. pub.], 1648/9) ———, An Alarum of War, Given to the Army, and to Their High Court of Iustice (So Called) Revealed by the Will of God in a Vision to E. Poole (London: [n. pub.], 1649)

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———, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Newsom, Carol A., and Sharon H. Ringe, eds, Women’s Bible Commentary: Expanded Edition with Apocrypha (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1998) Nuttall, Geoffrey, ‘The Baptist Western Association, 1653–1658’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11 (1960), 213–18 ———, ‘Thomas Lambe, William Allen and Richard Baxter: an additional note’, Baptist Quarterly, 27 (1977–78), 139–40 ———, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957) Osherow, Michelle, Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) Ottway, Sheila, ‘Autobiography’, in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 231–47 Pacheco, Anita, ed., A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) ———, Early Women Writers (London and New York: Longman, 1998) Pooley, Roger, ‘Grace Abounding and the New Sense of the Self’, in John Bunyan and His England, 1628–88, ed. by Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1990), pp. 105–14 Prineas, Matthew, ‘The Discourse of Love and the Rhetoric of Apocalypse in Anna Trapnel’s Folio Songs’, Comitatus, 28 (1997), 90–110 Purkiss, Diane, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740, ed. by Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (London: Batsford, 1992), pp. 139–58 Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Read, Sara, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Ritter Dailey, Barbara, ‘The Visitation of Sarah Wight: Holy Carnival and the Revolution of the Saints in Civil War London’, Studies in Church History, 55 (1986), 438–55 Robertson, Randy, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2009) Rogers, P. G., The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) Rostenberg, Leona, ‘Sectarianism and Revolt: Livewell Chapman, Publisher to the Fifth Monarchy’, in Literary, Political, Scientific, Religious, and Legal Publishing, Printing and Bookselling in England, 1551–1700: Twelve Studies (New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), pp. 203–36 Schmidt, Jeremy, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Scott-Luckens, Carola, ‘Propaganda or Marks of Grace? The Impact of the Reported Ordeals of Sarah Wight in Revolutionary London, 1647–52’, Women’s Writing, 9 (2002), 215–32

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Index 1 Corinthians 1, 4, 7, 13, 25, 27, 51, 52, 70, 71, 79, 81–83, 85, 89, 94, 98, 99–101, 102, 103, 112, 115, 140, 156, 162, 172 1 Timothy 8, 9–10, 64, 79, 80, 81, 83, 102, 154 Act of Uniformity 72, 90 Allein, Mary 29, 52n, 104–08, 109, 110, 111–12, 113n Alleine, Joseph 106 Allen, Adjutant-General William 50, 153, 165, 166n, 167–79 Allhallows, Upper Thames Street 54, 60, 77, 79, 94n, 126, 147, 170 Amsterdam 9n, 42, 75, 80n, 193 Anabaptism, sixteenth-century 16, 22, 29, 33–35, 37, 39, 41, 48–49, 67, 124, Ananias (biblical figure) 42 Attaway, Mrs 5–6 baptism debates surrounding 24–26, 119–30 misconduct associated with 24–26, 29–68 women administering 20, 22–24, 77n Baptist Associations 135–36, 176–77 Abingdon Association 5–6, 80n, 82, 85, 103n, 105, 110–11, 154, 175 Irish Association 176–77 Midlands Association 79, 120 South Wales Association 10, 120 West Country Association 5, 51n, 81, 85, 109, 110n, 171, 177 Baptist publications Confession of Faith (1644) 46, 78, 123, 129, 158 Confession of Faith (1677) 21 Barak (biblical figure) 71, 78, 98 Barebone, Praisegod 35 Barebones Parliament 54n, 55, 65, 169, 170

Barton, Elizabeth 60n Baruch (biblical figure) 61–62 Beaumont, Agnes 11, 26, 30–33, 35, 37, 40–41, 46–47, 48, 54, 62–68 Bedford church (later Bunyan Meeting) 30, 31, 47, 67, 109 Berwick-upon-Tweed 27, 118, 135, 144 Book of Common Prayer 20, 73, 75, 77, 95 Bridewell prison 55, 56, 160, 161 Broadmead Church, Bristol 2, 4, 8, 10, 74, 77–78, 79, 86, 104n, 120, 122, 155 Bunyan, John 6, 7, 8, 11, 18, 30–32, 35, 40, 46, 47, 63, 64, 67, 75, 120, 143n, 154 A Case of Conscience Resolved 6, 8, 79 Grace Abounding 6, 7, 31, 75, 154 The Pilgrim’s Progress 67 A Relation of the Imprisonment 19, 47 Some Gospel-Truths Opened 143n, 145 Bunyan, Elizabeth 18–19 Bunyan Meeting, see Bedford church Burrough, Edward 36, 144 Canne, John 75–77 Champion, Mary 26, 37–40, 41, 49, 53, 62 Charles I 14, 17, 34, 36, 49, 52, 69n, 72, 99, 170 Charles II 18, 29, 39n, 56n, 74n, 90, 108, 179, 180, 183, 193 Chidley, Katherine 51, 76, 99n, 125n churching 76, 81, 122 circumcision 21–22, 26n, 120–22 Civil War 1, 2, 16, 17, 29, 34, 69, 71, 77, 78n, 95, 133, 167, 173 Clarendon, Earl of 18 Clarendon code 17 Collinges, John 87–88 congregational practice deacons (male and female) 3, 9–11, 15, 18n, 79, 98, 119, 125, 126, 192

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elders 8, 9, 10, 15, 35n, 64, 74n, 98, 105, 113–14, 122, 125, 126, 133, 150, 154, 155, 166n, 167, 172, 174, 186, 189, 191 excommunication 6, 27, 47, 52, 84, 104n, 107–08, 112, 124, 183, 186, 192 laying on of hands 101, 119–20, 123, 125, 136 marriage 4–5, 11, 39, 50–52, 75, 89, 110–11, 114 open-communion worship 17n, 77, 117, 119–22, 126, 136, 139, 145, 147, 154n voting 3, 83–84, 88, 105, 192 women speaking in church 1, 6–9, 13, 27, 70–71, 78–115, 118, 156, 172 Courtney, Hugh 162, 169, 170, 184 Cox, Nehemiah 108, 109, 110n Cragge, John 22 Crofton, Zachary 127, 129 Cromwell, Oliver 16, 17, 36, 50, 54, 61, 105, 127, 133, 144, 147, 151, 162, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173 Dalkeith, Edinburgh 134, 137, 144 Daniel (biblical figure) 113, 114 Daniel, book of 54, 150 Danvers, Henry 158 Davies, Lady Eleanor 49 Davy, Sarah 42 Deborah (biblical figure) 27, 47, 70–71, 74–75, 77, 78, 79, 83, 88, 90, 92, 95, 96, 98–100, 101, 103, 114, 115, 118, 119, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 145, 148, 150, 171n, 183 Dix, William 109, 110n, 179, 189 dreams 34, 48, 49n, 54, 59–60, 62–66, 67, 117 Dublin 3, 40n, 84n, 88, 167, 176, 178 Durham 144 Edwards, Thomas 5, 22n, 35, 36–37, 41, 44, 51, 158n Esther (biblical figure) 173, 184–85 Eve (biblical figure) 13, 102, 111, 152 Exeter 106, 107, 108, 111 during the Civil War 69–70, 167 St Peter’s Cathedral congregation 14, 40n, 83, 104

excommunication: see congregational practices Ezekiel, book of 100, 128, 160 Feake, Christopher 54, 55, 159, 170 Featley, Daniel 43–44, 45, 46, 48–49, 51n, 121, 188n Fenstanton church 2n, 6, 136 Fiennes, Nathaniel 77–78 Fifth Monarchists 2, 12, 17–18, 20, 27, 28, 54–55, 88, 90, 94n, 95, 105, 126–27, 147–54, 157–65, 166, 169–79, 180n, 182–85, 189–90, 192, 193 Fleetwood, Lord Deputy John 16 Fountain, John 52 Gardiner, John 118, 131, 132, 134, 135, 144 Gaunt, Elizabeth 193 General Baptists 5, 9, 16, 34n, 35, 56n, 134, 158n Geneva Bible 65, 66, 69, 74, 91, 92, 99, 100, 101, 112, 117, 118, 139, 171, 186 Gideon (biblical figure) 171n Gower, Thomas 136, 144 Hannah (biblical figure) 27, 47, 55, 58–59, 60–61, 67, 152n Harriman, Anne 82–83, 86 Hazzard, Dorothy 74–78, 79, 104n, 115 Hexham church 120, 134–35, 136–40, 142, 143, 145, 154n Hickeringill, Edmund 137, 139, 143 Hicks, Thomas 109, 110n, 179 High Commission, Court of 15, 34, 97 Hills, Henry 137, 144 Hobbes, Thomas 54 Hobson, Paul 46, 133, 136, 142, 144 House of Commons 86–87 Huish, Deborah 8, 17n, 24, 27, 28, 118, 129, 132n, 150, 152, 153, 165–79, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 188, 189, 191 Hutchinson, Lucy 24–26, 36, 122 illness see also madness 29, 72, 84, 90–91, 111, 158, 167, 186–87

Index Irish rebellion 39 Isaiah, book of 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 87, 92, 99, 109, 124, 128, 148, 150, 153, 160, 161, 171, 186, 188 Israelites 6, 20, 48, 61, 64, 70–72, 74–75, 78, 83, 92, 100, 118, 119, 125, 127, 128, 139, 145, 151, 160, 162, 164, 171n, 172, 177, 186 Jael (biblical figure) 88, 99 James II 182, 193 Jeremiah, book of 61–62, 70, 74, 78, 83, 124, 153, 185 Jessey, Henry 17n, 18n, 53n, 54, 97n, 98, 117n, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 136, 155, 170, Job (biblical figure) 41, 65, 178 Joel, book of 88, 95–96, 150, 163, 174 Jones, Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh 18 Jones, Sara 18n, 90, 96–102, 103, 115, 117n, 123, 129, 131, 145, 192, The Relation of a Gentlewoman 9–10, 96–101, 102–03, 124–26, 155–56 To Sions Lovers 101–02, 123 To Sions Virgins 98, 121–22, 123–24, 125–26 Jonson, Ben The Alchemist 42 Joseph (biblical figure) 60 Jourdaine, Ignatius 69 Judith (biblical figure) 48–49, 68, 101

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madness 29, 32, 37, 40, 47, 48, 55, 62 Mall, Thomas 52n, 70, 104, 105, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114 Millenary Petition 20 Miriam (biblical figure) 47, 101, 151 monstrous births 36–37 Newcastle church 27, 36, 118, 133, 135, 136, 140, 142, 144 New Model Army 12, 16, 39 newsbook reports 37, 59, 60n Oath of Allegiance 18 Overton, Richard 56n Parr, Susanna 14, 40n, 52n, 69–71, 83–86, 103–06, 110, 111–14, 115, 192 Patient, Thomas 17n, 46, 52, 123, 174, 176n, 177n, 178 persecution 1, 14, 18–19, 20, 22, 29, 39, 47, 62, 72, 74, 76, 90, 96–98, 100, 101, 111, 114, 125, 138, 163, 165, 173, 186–88, 193 Peter (biblical figure) 62, 66, 95 Phoebe (biblical figure) 79 Poole, Elizabeth 27, 36, 43, 48, 49–53, 56, 67, 78 Powell, Vavasor 3, 7, 12n, 53, 54, 55, 56, 117n Priscilla (biblical figure) 9, 77, 79, 85, 87, 88

Kiffin, William 18, 43, 46, 50, 52, 53n, 78, 122–23, 158, 170, 171, 173, 176 Knollys, Hanserd 10, 40n, 74, 90, 94–95, 108, 109, 110, 118, 122, 123, 136, 140, 163, 179, 183, 188

Quakerism 4, 5, 8, 12–13, 14, 36, 60–61, 78, 81n, 88, 104n, 109, 110n, 117, 119, 122n, 130, 132–35, 137, 139, 141n, 142, 143–44, 145, 148, 175, 192

Lamentations, book of 150, 153, 178, 179, 186 Langdon, Capt. Francis 55, 59n, 170 Lathrop, John 97, 98 Laud, Archbishop William 97, 99, 101, Laudian reform 15, 34, 71, 72, 73, 90, 125 Lead, Jane 181 Levellers 50, 56n, 58 Lilburne, Robert 133, 134, 137 Llanvaches 78n Loughwood church 129, 166, 167, 169–73, 175, 176, 177n, 178

Ranters 44, 141, 142, 143 regicide, the 17, 36, 49–53 Revelation, book of 28, 54, 66, 75, 92, 124, 148, 150, 183, 186–87, 188, 190 Rogers, John 3, 55n, 88–89, 148–49, 159, 162, 170, 176n, 184 Ohel: or Bethshemesh 3, 12n, 40n, 84n, 88–89, 117n, 176n A Reviving Word 149, 150 Romans, biblical book 9, 79, 95, 121, 129, 141, 157–58, 174

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Rotterdam 72, 74, 90, 94n Royalists 14, 39, 69, 71, 77–78, 167 Sarah (biblical figure) 121, 124, 125, 156, 166 Scottish churches 133–37, 142, 143, 144, 145, 175 Sharp, Jane 36, 132n, 155n Simpson, John 54, 55, 120, 126, 127, 147, 149, 150, 156, 162n, 170, 192 Simpson, Mary 87 Song of Songs 28, 65, 117, 124, 138, 150, 154, 166, 190 Spilsbury, John 15, 46, 119, 123, 131, 133, 135, 144 Stucley, Lewis 40n, 70–71, 83–85, 104, 105–107, 112, 113, 114 Susanna (biblical figure) 113–14 Sutton, Katherine 18n, 24, 40n, 72–74, 90–96, 115, 118, 148–49, 150, 152, 153, 159, 160, 162–64, 179, 182, 192 Temple, Anna 71–72 Terrill, Edward 74–77, 78, 86, 120, 121, 122 Tillam, Thomas 136–37, 138, 140, 143, 154n Tombes, John 21, 22, 25–26, 120, 136 Trapnel, Anna 11, 27, 48, 64, 77, 79, 88, 115, 126, 145, 163, 169–70, 180, 181, 182, 183, 188, 192 Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea 8, 36, 55–62, 87–88, 160–61, 164–65, 182 The Cry of a Stone 53–54, 65–66, 164, 182 A Legacy for Saints 14, 141 A Lively Voice for the King of Saints 147

[Poetical addresses or discourses] 4, 13, 19–20, 24, 92, 102, 126–30, 142n, 147–53, 156–60, 162, 164, 172, 181, 189, 192 Turner, Capt. John 131, 132n, 133n, 134–35, 136, 144, 168 Turner, Jane 12n, 27, 35, 117–19, 120, 126, 130–45, 175, 191, 192 Vaughan, Henry 22 Venn, Anne 141n, 150 Venner, Thomas 17, 90, 94n, 105, 148, 149, 150, 151, 156, 170, 174 Vernon, John 18n, 35n, 110n, 153, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178–79, 180n Weld, Thomas 140, 141n, 144, 150n Wentworth, Anne 11, 28, 94n, 104, 108, 157, 165–66, 179–90, 192 Englands Spiritual Pill 66n, 108, 110–11, 114, 165–66, 179–81, 186–89 The Revelation of Jesus Christ 104, 111, 179, 182, 184–85, 186, 187, 188–89 A True Account 109, 114, 157, 179, 183, 186, 187 A Vindication of Anne Wentworth 108–10, 179, 180, 183 Whitehall 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 58, 88 Wight, Sarah 16n, 117n, 156n witchcraft, accusations of 31, 35–36, 50, 55, 59, 61, 160 Zion 28, 64, 74, 83, 92, 95, 99, 111, 114, 150, 151, 153, 161, 164–66, 171, 174, 177–79, 184–86, 188