God's Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) [1 ed.] 9780195325317, 0195325311

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God’s Irishmen

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY Series Editor David C. Steinmetz, Duke University Editorial Board Irena Backus, Universite´ de Gene`ve Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia THE CONFESSIONALIZATION OF HUMANISM IN REFORMATION GERMANY Erika Rummell

AFTER CALVIN Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition Richard A. Muller

THE PLEASURE OF DISCERNMENT Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian Carol Thysell

THE POVERTY OF RICHES St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered Kenneth Baxter Wolf

REFORMATION READINGS OF THE APOCALYPSE Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg Irena Backus

REFORMING MARY Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century Beth Kreitzer

WRITING THE WRONGS Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation John L. Thompson

TEACHING THE REFORMATION Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 Amy Nelson Burnett

THE HUNGRY ARE DYING Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia Susan R. Holman RESCUE FOR THE DEAD The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity Jeffrey A. Trumbower

GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS ON THE TRINITY AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD In Your Light We See Light Gregory A. Beeley GOD’S IRISHMEN Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland Crawford Gribben

God’s Irishmen Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland

crawford gribben

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2007

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright # 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gribben, Crawford. God’s Irishmen : theological debates in Cromwellian Ireland / Crawford Gribben. p. cm.—(Oxford studies in historical theology) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-532531-7 1. Protestant churches—Ireland—History—17th century. 2. Church controversies—Ireland—History—17th century. 3. Dissenters, Religious—Ireland—History—17th century. 4. Ireland—Church history—17th century. I. Title. BX4839.G75 2007 280'.40941509032—dc22 2006038508

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Rowena

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Preface

This book marks a return to a theological environment I first described in The puritan millennium: Literature and theology, 1550–1682. The world of John Rogers—radical preacher, republican, and emerging Fifth Monarchist—has been an intriguing background to a number of projects I have completed since my work on the seventeenth century began.1 Rogers has attracted other writers, though they tend not to discuss his importance in the context of Cromwellian Ireland. This book is therefore an attempt to contextualize some of the conclusions that have been offered by colleagues in literary studies, whose interest in Rogers’s conversion narratives has not always been sensitive to the wider theological debates of the period, and to challenge some of the conclusions of historians, who have explored that context but tend sometimes to downplay the intensely fissiparous environment of the cultures of Cromwellian Ireland.2 With all other scholars of the period, I record my debt to indispensable work by Toby Barnard, not least his seminal Cromwellian Ireland (1975), and to two older texts whose contribution goes far beyond the access they provide to documents destroyed in 1922: Robert Dunlop’s Ireland under the Commonwealth (1913) and St. John D. Seymour’s The Puritans in Ireland, 1647–1661 (1921). Unless otherwise noted, all texts listed in the bibliography have been published in London. Most of the research for this book was carried out during my appointment as research fellow in the Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies, Trinity College, Dublin. My four years in the Centre were

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formative, and my writing benefited immensely from the atmosphere of intellectual curiosity and generosity I shared with such colleagues as Michael Brown, David Dickson, Jane Ohlmeyer, and Ian Campbell Ross. The project also profited from my discussions with other colleagues in Dublin, including Robert Armstrong, Elizabethanne Boran, Raymond Gillespie, Sandra Hynes, Amanda Piesse, and, more recently, Mark Sweetnam. In Belfast, Stephen Gregory, librarian of Union Theological College, and James Davison, librarian of the Irish Baptist College, provided access to rare volumes, as well as other opportunities for the gathering of ideas. Since moving to the University of Manchester, I have been particularly grateful for the support of a coterie of scholars of the mid-seventeenth century, particularly Naomi Baker and Jerome de Groot, and have also gained immense help from conversations with Joe Bergin, Jeremy Gregory, John McAuliffe, Jackie Pearson, and Murray Pittock. In the wider scholarly community, I am particularly grateful for advice provided by Toby Barnard, Sylvia Brown, Ian Clary, John Coffey, Tim Cooper, David Farr, Alan Ford, Andrew Holmes, Kathleen Lynch, Simon Meeds, Garnet Milne, Mike Renihan, and David Shedden. Some materials in chapters 2 and 3 appeared previously in Church History and in the volume Converts and conversion in Ireland, 1650–1850 (2005), and I am grateful to the editors of these publications for their permission to reuse this material. Willy Maley, just before he took to the stage to deliver the University of Manchester’s John Stachniewski Memorial Lecture in April 2006, suggested the title for this book, which pays homage to definitive work by Christopher Hill, in God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English revolution, and Hilary Hinds, in God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century radical sectarian writing and feminist criticism. God’s Irishmen shares many of the interests of these colleagues and friends. I alone, of course, should be held responsible for the errors that will inevitably remain. In many ways this book is the product of a digital revolution. Both the University of Manchester and Trinity College, Dublin, provided access to the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, without which a range of materials of the 1650s could not easily have been collected. Though EEBO is a necessary resource, it is not sufficient, and this project could not have been completed without the additional assistance of staff at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast; the Special Collections unit at Queen’s University of Belfast; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; Trinity College Library, Dublin; Archbishop Narcissus Marsh’s Library, Dublin; the John Rylands University Library, Manchester; Chetham’s Library, Manchester; the library of Westminster College, Cambridge; the University Library, Cambridge;

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the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the British Library, London. I record my debt to Cynthia Read, my editor at Oxford University Press, who has patiently supported this project at every stage of its development. Most of all, I record my gratitude to my mother and father, to Pauline and to Daniel. Moladh go deo leis.

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Contents

Introduction, 3 1. The Religious Dynamic of the Cromwellian Invasion, 21 2. Conversion, 55 3. Baptism, 79 4. Church Government and Social Control, 99 5. The Possibility of the Extraordinary, 129 6. The Ecclesiastical Role of Women, 151 Conclusion, 175 Notes, 183 Bibliography, 237 Index, 265

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God’s Irishmen

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Introduction

This book describes some of the many kinds of Protestantism that competed for the souls of Cromwellian Ireland. Its principal purpose is to document the period’s most important theological debates, arguing that they were both a cause and consequence of protestant experiences in that turbulent period and that they illustrate surprising contests between and within several English, Scottish, and Irish varieties of protestant identity. Cromwellian protestants were sometimes less puritan, and often much less united by religious convictions, than has often been supposed. Even their resolute opposition to Roman Catholicism has, at times, been exaggerated. The military campaign and its aftermath have been associated with eschatological stringency and anti-Catholic rhetoric, but this rhetoric is largely absent from the treatises that survived the 1650s.1 In fact, where Antichrist does appear, it is almost always within the community of the godly. His presence marks the constantly shifting boundaries of projected systems of truth. These shifting boundaries reflect a sustained introspection that allows historians to trace the evolution of religious identities throughout this period. That introspection provides a key to our understanding of the period’s events, for the Cromwellian regime had an evidently religious base, and its exponents worked self-consciously for a second reformation. Nevertheless, the state failed to endorse an ecclesiastical ideal, and that failure made sectarian disagreements inevitable. This book documents the tenor and impact of these debates.

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I In 1653, John Rogers, a state-sponsored Independent preacher, looked back on his short ministry in Dublin with evident despair: ‘‘The Lord help poor Ireland! Still the land of Idols and Ire.’’2 In Ireland, throughout the 1650s, theological debates were a cause and consequence of ecclesiastical division, political violence, and ethnic conflict.3 Protestants were acutely aware that their struggle was primarily with the Catholic Irish, and they understood that the Cromwellian campaign was merely the latest stage in the unfolding war between Antichrist and the elect. The struggle, as protestants imagined it, was determined by the fact that the true church had experienced almost constant conflict since Christianity had been born. Colonel Edward Warren, a Presbyterian polemicist, argued that the kingdom of God had been driven to Ireland by persecution. It had first spread about Jerusalem, he argued, ‘‘then it Coasts up in Africa, by means of the Eunuch: then the light grows dark, and out it breaks in Europe, Spain, Italy, Greece; afterwards again, when Popery had overspread the earth, then it breaks out in France, Germany, Bohemia, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, England, Scotland, and Ireland,’’ where, in the 1650s, it was again embroiled in conflict.4 But the godly should not be alarmed, according to Warren. The difficulties of the 1650s reflected the experience of true Christians in every period of the history of the church; conflict with the world was unavoidable, he contended. Even among the elect, Rogers admitted, ‘‘errors are usefull, as well as truth, and it is expedient that they should be 1 Cor.11.19.’’5 Expedient or not, disagreements certainly existed among the elect. Rogers’s despair reflected his own difficulties as pastor of one of the most dysfunctional of the Irish Cromwellian congregations. He had stood with resolution against the Catholic faith of the island’s native population, but courted controversy when he identified the influence of Antichrist among the remnant of the elect. The ‘‘idols’’ of Roman Catholicism had their parallel in the ‘‘ire’’ generated by theological differences among Irish protestants, he believed, and his church had been controversial precisely because it had attempted to transcend one set of protestant ecclesiological divisions.6 But his experiment had failed, curtailed by the rise of emerging denominational allegiances and by broader patterns in the ideological conflicts of the period. The division in his church that had ended his Dublin ministry consolidated the trend toward church structures based upon distinctive patterns of theological commitment. His fellowship had been torn apart by an acute sense of difference at the same time as confessional contest was wreaking havoc the length of Ireland.

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Rogers’s fellowship experienced in microcosm many of the disagreements of the age. Cromwellians in Ireland launched an ambitious and aggressive attempt at national reformation, but, divided by competing ideas about conversion, baptism, church government, the possibility of the extraordinary, and the ecclesiastical role of women, they failed to effect the transformation for which many of their leaders hoped. The Cromwellian attempt at reformation failed because of the rise of intraprotestant disputes. It is hardly surprising that Rogers gave up and returned home. As long as there were ‘‘idols’’—ideological disagreements within their movement—the saints would experience ‘‘ire.’’ A greater emphasis on human responsibility might have led Edward Warren to understand the Irish reformation as another stage of the ‘‘London colonial exercise’’ that had begun with the Tudor attempt at conquest.7 The protestant reformation in Ireland had initially been designed to subjugate Henry VIII’s new kingdom to the religious demands of his metropolitan center.8 It was an ambitious scheme. Ireland’s population was larger than that of Scotland and growing rapidly, rising from around 1.4 million in 1600 to around 2.1 million in 1641, but it was devastated in the civil wars of the 1640s.9 By 1652, the survey prepared by Sir William Petty calculated that the population had fallen to 850,000, a number that included 160,000 protestants.10 These demographic fluctuations were perhaps one reason why Ireland was not economically advanced. Gerard Boate, in a topographical description that advanced the project of land settlement, reckoned that Ireland had four chief towns of significant size: Dublin, Galway, Waterford, and Limerick.11 Cork and Londonderry were smaller but ‘‘otherwise handsome places’’; Drogheda, Kilkenny, and Bandonbridge were ‘‘passable,’’ and Coleraine, Carrickfergus, Belfast, Dundalk, Wexford, Youghall, and Kinsale were but of ‘‘small moment, the best of these being hardly comparable to any of those fair Market-townes, which are to be found in almost all parts of England.’’12 Nevertheless, Boate explained, the island possessed immeasurable potential and should be ‘‘reckoned among the chief Islands of the whole World,’’ ripe for English exploitation.13 Only the ecclesiastical influence of Rome and the native propensity for rebellion stood in the way of success. Ireland’s religious situation was far from promising. Irish Cromwellians understood the population to be divided into three distinct cultures with individual patterns of religious commitment.14 The Old Irish, or ‘‘meer Irish,’’ were also known as the ‘‘Wild Irish, because that in all manner of wildness they may bee compared with the most barbarous nations of the earth.’’15 Representing the island’s native stock, speaking Gaelic, and sharing the clan structures of the Scottish highlands, the Old Irish dominated the western and northern regions. Their religion was a pre-Tridentine Catholicism that drew

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heavily on local superstition, melding traditional folk practices with a heavily naturalized medieval Christianity. Piety centered not on the sacrament of the mass but on the three thousand holy wells and unusual geological formations dotted across the landscape.16 But these traditional patterns of piety were threatened by a trend toward the Continental education of priests and concomitant pressures for conformity to Counter-Reformation norms. The international contacts of this older society were also being threatened. The ancient Gaelic culture the Old Irish shared with the population of the western Scottish highlands once had sufficient political clout to challenge the political projects of the London-based elite, but by the mid-seventeenth century it was in its final stages of decline.17 Despite this shrinking power base, the Old Irish managed to retain influence in Ireland through their assimilation of the second major cultural group. These ‘‘Old English,’’ the Anglo-Irish, were the old ascendancy, descendants of the Anglo-Norman settlers. Some of their number, to the horror of more recent English immigrants, had ‘‘degenerated,’’ ‘‘ joining themselves with the Irish’’ and adopting ‘‘their wild fashions and their language.’’18 Outside Connacht and Ulster, Old English families effectively controlled local government, but their loyalty to the Crown was increasingly pressurized by their retention of Catholicism, by the economic strains of successive plantations, and by the impact of administrative changes in Dublin. They viewed with deep suspicion the growing influence of the third cultural group, the New English, the most recent English settlers, who, since their arrival in the late sixteenth century, had skillfully appropriated large estates and senior positions in the Irish administration. Represented by individuals such as Edmund Spenser, the New English negotiated a complex loyalty to the Crown and were dominated by sometimes radical protestant interests. But their influence was always restricted. Despite several attempts at expansion, English political and religious influence extended effectively only through the Pale, in the counties Louth, Meath, Dublin, and Kildare.19 A fourth ethnic group, overlooked by Boate, was the Scottish Presbyterians in the northeast, whose recent ‘‘plantation’’ consolidated long patterns of demographic movement across the Irish Channel. The Ulster Scots were developing a distinctive social and religious culture, retaining the Presbyterianism of their roots while responding in innovative ways to their colonial situation. The Scots were certainly protestant, but their insistent Royalism, rooted in the National Covenant (1638) and Solemn League and Covenant (1643), set them at some distance from the monarchical skepticism of many influential English Parliamentarians.20 Oliver Cromwell, surveying the threat of the Irish populations, was happy to consider them the agents of Antichrist; but he made the same association with the

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Presbyterians in Ulster, whose distance from the Parliamentary regime was made obvious by their early condemnation of the regicide.21 Despite Boate’s misgivings about their economic value, it was in the Pale’s unpromising towns that the protestant faith was most successfully promoted. Religious polarization, as a reflection of depth of feeling and personal commitment, became obvious in Irish towns by the mid-1570s and in outlying areas by the 1590s.22 Many of those who had joined in the several plantation projects of the early 1600s would have had previous exposure to the theological ideas of the reformation. But their arrival did not persuade the native population of the virtues of the new faith. Plantation and reformation were complementary projects which simultaneously reinforced the alienation of the native Irish and drove them to identify personal and political losses with the losses of their church.23 This audience became profoundly hostile to the promotion of protestant ideas. One of the most basic difficulties in advancing Protestantism in Ireland related to the primitive state of Gaelic publishing.24 Unlike the situation in other European countries, the reformation in Ireland was not driven by a vernacular revolution. In 1571, Queen Elizabeth sent a font of Irish type with the hope that it would be used for the publication of a translated Bible.25 The first publication to use the font was Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma, an Irish-language alphabet and catechism, published later that year.26 The New Testament was eventually published in 1603, and a prayer book appeared in 1608, but thereafter, it seems, the font went missing.27 William Bedell, provost of Trinity College between 1627 and 1629, enacted a series of reforms designed to promote knowledge of the Irish language, an interest that he continued in his publication of The A.B.C., or, The institution of a Christian (1631) in parallel English and Irish columns after his promotion to the joint bishoprics of Kilmore, county Cavan, and Ardagh, county Longford.28 His enthusiasms were not widely shared, and this kind of linguistic creativity lapsed until the 1650s, when Godfrey Daniel took up the challenge, emphasizing, like Bedell, that the value of the project was linked to the value of the people he was trying to reach: ‘‘By Nature I know not any difference betwixt [the Irish] and the English nation.’’29 Daniel aimed to be ‘‘instrumental to bringing the Irish people to Receive and Embrace the more clear, full, and plain knowledge of God, and to a readie and chearfull obedience to the Gospel of Christ.’’ After all, he remembered, ‘‘when the Jews . . . heard Paul speak in the Hebrew tongue, Acts 22. they were willing to hear him.’’30 Nevertheless, the translation of the Old Testament that had been overseen by Bedell was not published until 1685— many decades after Parliament’s initial proclamation in favor of vernacular

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translation. The reformation attempted to progress without a consistent interest in communicating to natives in the language they preferred. As Patrick Collinson has put it, ‘‘the new faith . . . never learned to speak Irish.’’31 But vernacular accessibility and social influence were not deciding factors in the race between Ireland’s protestant and Catholic reformations. It was, ironically, in the English parts of Ireland that Counter-Reformation took hold more rapidly than protestant reform.32 Protestant ideas developed slowly. Not until 1615 did the established church agree on an indigenous doctrinal basis, albeit a doctrinal basis that marked a significant distance from the English via media.33 The Irish Articles adopted by Convocation in 1615 provided a theological foundation for the construction of a low-church protestant consensus that institutionalized the island’s confessional divisions even as its rigor appealed to disaffected protestants in England and Scotland. The Articles were vigorously Calvinistic and, crucially, were the first European confession of faith to formally identify the Antichrist as the Pope.34 Although it is not at all true to claim, with Austin Woolrych, that their combination of Calvinism and anti-Catholicism ‘‘put the rest of the Irish people literally beyond redemption,’’ the Articles did erect a deliberate barrier between protestant light and Catholic gloom—gloom that protestants found hard to dispel.35 James Ussher, the ‘‘outstanding intellect of the early Stuart Church of Ireland’’ and absentee archbishop of Armagh throughout much of the Cromwellian period, is often recognized as the theological genius behind the composition of the new confession of faith.36 He benefited from high personal standing across the theological spectrum, but his welcoming into the Irish ministry of refugee protestants from Scotland and England and his support for the development of theological training at Trinity College did little to satisfy the pastoral needs of his church. His progress had been handicapped from the beginning. In 1625, the year of his installation as archbishop of Armagh, only one-sixth of Irish parishes had a preaching minister.37 The situation did not rapidly improve. Whatever his other abilities, Ussher was not an organizational genius, and he failed to balance the complex factors of administering a reformation. Meanwhile, the Catholic hierarchy was providing for its representation throughout the island, and protestants were growing increasingly alarmed by their new confidence. These confessional divisions were reinforced by other tensions created by an inept Jacobean administration.38 The accession of Charles I did little to ease the situation. In return for substantial subsidies, Charles promised concessions to native Catholics in the mid-1620s. These ‘‘Graces’’ provoked the angry hostility of protestant bishops, but the king’s consistent failure to ratify the agreements cost him a great deal of political credibility. These religious tensions were exacerbated during the

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1630s, when an economic downturn heightened the native population’s sense of grievance, not least because of demographic concentration in Dublin, which, in the 1630s, was larger than any English town except London.39 Simultaneously, the absolutist policies pursued by Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland after 1632, undermined traditional church finances, split English political interests, and compromised the political clout of the Catholic gentry, leaving vital sectors of the population alienated from the Crown. By the end of the 1630s, Catholic political power had been largely extinguished, and it was also clear that the first wave of protestant reformation had failed.40 Nothing made that protestant failure and Catholic alienation more evident than the Ulster rising in autumn 1641.41 As the local rising mutated into national rebellion, its increasingly sectarian momentum wrought havoc in Ireland and generated a wave of antiCatholic hysteria throughout Scotland and England.42 The first reports of atrocities reached London on 1 November.43 The press, with increasing panic, produced tract after tract emphasizing the horrors endured by Irish protestants and the dangerous proximity of the Catholic threat, using such vivid titles as Bloody newes from Ireland, or, The barbarous crueltie by the papists used in that kingdome (1641). Estimates of the dead escalated from ‘‘above 100,000’’ in a London newsbook to ‘‘more than 200,000’’ in Milton’s Observations to 300,000 in the memoirs of a contemporary Presbyterian.44 The rebellion was a defining moment in the political and religious life of the mid-seventeenth century. Lurid rumors flew about the country, ascribing all manner of evil to the rebels. Not everyone was convinced by the accounts, but it was impossible to stop the panic.45 Along the western coast of Wales and England, fears of a projected Irish invasion grew at the beginning of 1642.46 Despite the fact that coverage of the atrocities declined after early summer, the threat of Catholic invasion loomed over England, and the worst fears of the sectarian imagination appeared confirmed.47 The impact of the rebellion and its aftermath dominated protestant political strategies throughout the mid-seventeenth century. Many of the most stringent measures later adopted against the Old Irish and Old English were justified on the basis of their participation in the affair. The rebellion provided the intellectual foundation for the Cromwellian enterprise, for it showed that Irish society was ‘‘depraved.’’48 Economically, it provided an excuse for the massive confiscations and systematic redistribution of almost half the island’s landmass: the 60 percent of the land that was owned by Catholics in 1641 was reduced to 20 percent in 1662.49 Politically, it justified extreme force and the idea that Catholics should be sent ‘‘to hell or Connacht.’’ Theologically, it suggested the inveterate hostility of the native Irish to the gospel. Nevertheless,

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much of the extremism of the earlier 1650s was moderated after Henry Cromwell’s arrival as governor.50 His moderation was a reflection of his relative independence from London and, perhaps, also a signal of his administration’s surer grasp of military power. But the rebellion—and the English reaction to it—should not disguise the basic continuity of English strategies of plantation and Irish strategies of resistance. Nicholas Canny has argued that those who imposed the Cromwellian settlement ‘‘were consciously pursuing the course set by Spenser and his fellow reformers during the late sixteenth century.’’51 The ‘‘experiment in social engineering’’ that began in the 1580s was developed in the plantation scheme of 1642, and the Cromwellian settlement was simply the ‘‘most ambitious’’ attempt at its implementation, with repeated references to Ireland as a tabula rasa.52 Neither should the rebellion disguise the basic continuity in the kinds of individuals attracted by the Irish adventures.53 Across the period, English interest in Ireland was a heady cocktail of religious fear and mercantile hope. A 1642 act allowed ‘‘adventurers’’ to balance capital risk against the achievement of religious and economic objectives.54 A total of 1,043 English investors were promised one quarter of the forfeited Irish land—some 2.5 million acres—and other land was set aside for the benefit of soldiers in service.55 The scheme proved attractive to a range of puritans and militant parliamentarians. At least one adventurer, George Thomson, with four thousand acres, became a Fifth Monarchist, while another, Thomas Rainsborough, became a leader of the Levellers.56 One of the reasons these radicals supported the Cromwellian campaign was that it allowed them to take control of their investments, realizing the value they represented while also advancing godly rule.57 Driven by these aspirations, they exercised a huge amount of influence on the project’s development and perhaps had a hand in the large degree of continuity in ecclesiastical policy between the 1640s and 1650s.58 But the process of redistribution developed. In 1653, the confiscations were expanded from the original 2.5 million acres to all land owned by Catholics, and the government turned to debentures to meet the army’s arrears of pay.59 Catholics and ‘‘malignant’’ protestants were to be transported to Connacht as their former possessions were redistributed among the English troops. Only those native Irish whose conversions to Protestantism could be officially attested were allowed to remain in the new English territories.60 The land settlement proposed by the administration showed the limits of its attempt at reformation. Only Catholics and ‘‘malignant’’ protestants were to be stripped of their landholdings.61 Mass conversions—which some preachers claimed occasionally to expect—would have irreversibly frustrated the colonial goals of the Parliamentarian and Cromwellian administrations, and those conversions which were officially attested were still regarded with some

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suspicion.62 The adventurers had bargained for land and the army arrears had been promised on the presupposition that protestant evangelism would not be successful.63 The ‘‘timely and effectual reliefe of Ireland,’’ anticipated by Henry Ireton in 1647, aimed to create protestant wealth and to impose national peace. It was not primarily designed to advance the evangelization of the natives.64 There was an evident contradiction between the objectives of senior clergy and those of the administrative elites, for the success of the ecclesiastical reformation would have bankrupted the regime. The Cromwellian reformation was underwritten by the expectation of its failure. But its failure was determined by theological conflicts that prised the movement apart. The inclusion of Royalist protestants in the plans for transplantation and the wholesale suppression of Anglicanism signal the fact that the Protestantism of the Cromwellian reformation was at odds with a great deal of that which had been promoted before. The Cromwellian reformation was to be a profoundly dividing affair.

II R. C. Richardson has described the literature on the Cromwellian revolution as ‘‘formidably large and indigestible.’’65 However accurate this claim might be as a description of writing on early modern England, it could hardly be made of writing on early modern Ireland.66 Toby Barnard has described the 1960s and early 1970s as an era ‘‘in which perhaps one book and a handful of articles’’ on early modern Irish history were published each year, and, although he has recognized that this ‘‘trickle’’ has recently grown into a ‘‘spate,’’ writing on Ireland is still overshadowed by the voluminous study of England.67 That writing on Ireland that does exist tends to be chronologically specific and narrower in interest than the text which reignited modern interest in the period, Jane Ohlmeyer’s Civil war and restoration in the three Stuart kingdoms.68 Most recent historical studies of mid-seventeenth-century Ireland have focused on the 1640s. Ohlmeyer led the way with her groundbreaking edited volume Ireland from independence to occupation, 1641–1660, which gathered together many of the voices that would most influence the direction of scholarship in the ensuing decade.69 This volume’s account has been developed in a flurry of more recent publications. Nicholas Canny has returned to the question of plantation in a substantial discussion of landownership in the first half of the seventeenth ´ Siochru´ represented the often-forgotten experiences of century.70 Michea´l O natives in Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649, and his treatment of the 1640s was ´ hAnnracha´in rapidly consolidated by Pa´draig Lenihan (2001) and Tadhg O

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´ Siochru´’s edited collection Kingdoms (2002).71 Simultaneously, the essays in O in crisis: Ireland in the 1640s emphasized broader patterns of experience on both sides of the confessional divide, some of which have been developed in David O’Hara’s English newsbooks and the Irish rebellion of 1641, Robert Armstrong’s Protestant war (a rich and complex study of protestant responses to that tumultuous decade), and Kevin McKenny’s account of The Laggan army in Ireland.72 Much less scholarly attention has been paid to the 1650s, where historical analysis is still dominated by the publications of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians and, of course, by the magisterial work of Toby Barnard. Barnard himself has recognized that the 1650s still remain ‘‘woefully neglected,’’ ‘‘an historiographical black hole.’’73 The basic patterns of subsequent discussions were provided by John P. Prendergast (1865), whose spirited Catholic nationalism provided his study of the land experiment with acerbic momentum despite its occasional forays into racial typologies of ‘‘the Saxon.’’74 Prendergast’s conclusions were more broadly contextualized by the work of S. R. Gardiner (1903), who pursued a ‘‘three-kingdoms’’ historiography many decades before it became fashionable, and by Robert Dunlop’s vitally important anthology of original documents (1913).75 Fortunately, St. John Seymour provided later students with a thorough description of The Puritans in Ireland (1921) before the destruction of the Cromwellian record books in the Four Courts fire of 1922.76 This loss of crucial documentation seems to have generated a crisis of confidence in the possibility of further work on the 1650s. The next generation of studies on that decade appeared almost fifty years later, in the immediate aftermath of a new outbreak of political and confessional conflict in Ireland, and was driven by the statistical turn of the historical writing of that period. Alongside a number of more minor works, Bottigheimer’s exhaustive analysis provided a definitive account of the Cromwellian redistribution of land.77 But it was Barnard’s Cromwellian Ireland that pulled together this earlier scholarship, even as it sidestepped extended consideration of many of its themes.78 In a masterly description of broader ideological and administrative contexts, Barnard’s emphasis on constructive intellectual activity challenged the view that Cromwellian policy could be summed up by references to transplantation and sectarian atrocity. His book summarized the advances of earlier writing on the period with a compelling finality that earlier publications had struggled to achieve. Shortly after its publication, one reviewer imagined that ‘‘there must be little left to add to this laborious work of assembly’’ and correctly anticipated that ‘‘our view of Cromwellian Ireland will never be the same again.’’79 There were, of course, new details to add, but Barnard’s influence has properly overshadowed a great deal of subsequent publication.80

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Recent writing on Cromwellian Ireland has tended to reflect wider trends in historiography. David Stevenson returned to Gardiner’s three-kingdoms comparisons when he published his consideration of Cromwell’s interests in Ireland and Scotland.81 Martyn Bennett attempted to develop this perspective in The civil wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651.82 But, despite its standing and potential value, the three-kingdoms approach has contributed much less than it might have to the study of the period. Publications advancing the ‘‘new British history’’ have not disguised the fact that many scholars of the civil wars continue to neglect its Irish dimension; simultaneously, scholars in Irish studies still hesitate to address the Cromwellian interlude. Allan Macinnes has voiced the frustrations of many: ‘‘The inclusion of Scottish and Irish illustrations to supplement an English narrative constitutes neither the writing of British history nor the advancing of comparative studies.’’83 The most productive scholarship on the 1650s has therefore appeared only in the very recent past. Ohlmeyer’s work led a charge of military historians, while James Scott Wheeler’s Cromwell in Ireland and The Irish and British wars, 1637–1654 consolidated its advance in detailed and persuasive contributions.84 Tom Reilly’s study of Cromwell as ‘‘honorable enemy’’ (1999) was a publication that generated significant media interest, even if its thesis was less novel than first ´ Siochru´’s new book on native responses to the Cromwellian appeared.85 O conquest, which have been neglected in many accounts of the period, is eagerly anticipated.86 These military histories have been followed by the results of a revival of interest in high politics.87 Patrick Little has considered the emergence of an Irish unionism during the 1650s and has discussed the wider situation of Ireland in his study of Lord Broghill, while Aidan Clarke has documented responses to the end of the Protectorate and the threat of Restoration.88 But the most interesting and ambitious research agenda of the last decade was also to look curiously old fashioned. A revival of interest in intellectual history has provided the most innovative turn in recent scholarship on Ireland in the 1650s. This return to the history of ideas has challenged the antiquated image of this kind of scholarly enterprise.89 One of its most exciting developments has been the consolidation of a new religious history. For many years, scholars agreed that ‘‘religion and politics have never been more inseparably intertwined than during the Civil War,’’ but historians have traditionally been wary of resorting to specifically religious explanations for the conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century—in England or in Ireland.90 This hesitance is ironic—not least because protestant ideology and politics have often been identified as a determining factor in Anglo-Irish relations throughout and beyond the early modern period.91 The identification

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of a new turn to religion does not imply that religious issues were ignored by earlier scholars. Seymour’s account was an extended discussion of ‘‘Puritanism,’’ and Barnard’s Cromwellian Ireland included a chapter on religious divisions and another on the development of church fabric. But there is some evidence that this hesitation is rapidly disappearing.92 Recent work by Richard Greaves, Phil Kilroy, Sandra Hynes, and the present author has nuanced a number of earlier conclusions.93 This turn to religious history is not entirely unproblematic. One continuing concern might be that the interests of its exponents tend toward the microscopic, focusing exclusively on religious expression within Ireland, thus downplaying the broader three-kingdom perspective, and replacing the ‘‘tight grids’’ of the older denominational historians with a sense of ecclesiastical ‘‘fluidity.’’94 Raymond Gillespie’s Devoted people emphasized that elements of popular belief were common to protestants and Catholics in early modern Ireland.95 Barnard made a similar argument, claiming that denominational labels among protestants may have simplified a fluid and dynamic ecclesiastical situation and that the godly (except in eastern Ulster) took advantage of whatever protestant fellowship they could find.96 Richard Greaves made a similar claim by focusing on a smaller group of denominations in God’s other children, which won the Albert C. Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History for its ecumenical contribution, and arguing that Irish Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Independents were not separated by any substantial difference of opinion until the aftermath of the Restoration.97 This sense of common allegiance was confirmed in Phil Kilroy’s consideration of protestant controversy in the post-Restoration period, which surveyed a number of important themes from the 1650s while entirely bypassing the importance and even the existence of the Baptists—one of the most controversial movements of the time. This new religious history might also be criticized for its elevation of religious practice over religious belief. For that reason it may not be useful for tracing the links between theological debates and sectarian conflicts. Wandering laity certainly took advantage of the religious fluidity they often found. There is evidence of some, like Jerome Sankey, oscillating for their own benefit between fledgling denominations, as we will later see. But this uncertainty was certainly not encouraged by the clerical elite, whose writers and preachers spent the decade hammering out denominational distinctions on the anvil of theological controversy. If denominational boundaries were permeable, it was certainly against the best efforts of those polemicists whose debates attempted to fix ecclesiastical differences and consolidate sectarian opinion. The clerical elite of the Cromwellian administration used theological debates to police the acceptable limits of belief. Although they never settled on an agreed ecclesiological

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system, or adjudicated finally on questions of baptism or congregational membership, they did try to define the boundaries of orthodoxy through the system of ‘‘triers,’’ committees whose job it was to maintain a state-sponsored orthodoxy. It is true that ‘‘we know almost nothing about how most people worshipped in the 1650s.’’98 We have no idea how extensive was the deference to the Westminster Directory for Public Worship and have only the slightest hints of how church services differed between the emerging denominations. Ulster Presbyterians must have followed the Directory to the letter—part, as it was, of the covenanted reformation they supported—but complaints against James Wood, minister in Youghall, suggest that a minister could also be registered on the Civil List while denying the validity of psalm singing and, presumably, other staple liturgical forms.99 But we have few hints as to the musical culture of these congregations. Similarly, Rogers’s church in Dublin made room for lay participation—which must have horrified those used to clerical dignity. And, while we have some indication of the contents of Cromwellian preaching, we have little indication of its manner and so can only guess whether preachers felt compelled to project a charismatic instead of an institutional authority or whether the preaching style of conservatives such as the Ulster Presbyterians differed from that of controversial populists such as John Rogers. Neither have we much record of the numbers of those who were likely to attend worship or the responses of those who did, though the dismissal of the Dublin schoolmaster John Stephens, who was caught asleep on the Sabbath in November 1655, suggests that Cromwellian preaching was not to everybody’s taste.100 Neither can we reconstruct the distinctive contribution made by the concentration of preachers in Dublin and other urban centers or judge the moods of those congregations dispersed in more isolated situations. But if we know little about Irish Cromwellian experiences of worship, we do know what many of the community’s opinion makers taught—and it is on their thought that this study concentrates. Despite its recent success, there is still a need to emphasize the importance of the history of religious ideas in early modern Ireland and to insist on the central importance of these ideas in the general crisis of the mid-seventeenth century. When doctrines are so repeatedly invoked to explain the mentality of the Cromwellian elite, it is essential that they be properly understood.

III One of the greatest difficulties in reconstructing the theological debates of this period is the lack of available evidence. I have already noted that an extensive

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collection of Commonwealth records was destroyed in the Four Courts fire of 1922.101 Fortunately, both Robert Dunlop and St. John Seymour had access to these documents before they were destroyed, and their volumes continue to influence scholarship in the field. But these volumes are evidently outdated. Seymour’s volume, in particular, bears the confessional stamp of an earlier age, almost entirely failing to engage with disputes between protestants. These volumes were published some time before the groundbreaking work of Perry Miller, whose analysis of ‘‘the New England mind’’ resuscitated interest in colonial Protestantism when it first appeared in 1939, long before the revolution in puritan studies in the second half of the twentieth century.102 Work by neither Dunlop nor Seymour can be compared to the publications on English, American, and even Scottish Puritanism that have appeared in the last twenty years. The religious cultures of mid-seventeenth-century Protestantism have been poorly served in a great deal of Irish historical writing. There have, nevertheless, been a number of valuable attempts to examine theological cultures in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and James Ussher, in particular, has been the subject of a number of important studies.103 Scholars of the period have been eagerly awaiting the conclusions of the Ussher correspondence project, led by Elizabethanne Boran, and the intellectual biography by Alan Ford.104 But on the whole, protestant theologians from early modern Ireland have been neglected. The literature of their controversy perhaps appears too insular, too aware of its peculiar colonial situation, and too prone to develop in ways that frustrate the model that historians of protestant scholasticism have developed.105 A large part of the theological literature of the seventeenth century remains unread: Ireland has never had its Perry Miller. But how should a study of theological controversy proceed? The literature of puritan studies may offer less guidance than might be expected. Carl Trueman has complained that ‘‘Anglo-American interest in Puritanism’’ has bypassed theology to emphasize the movement’s social, political, and psychological influence.106 He notes ‘‘a dearth of studies on seventeenth-century theology’’ and laments that there are ‘‘as yet . . . scarcely any published monographs on any leading Puritan thinker.’’107 There are, of course, important exceptions, such as John Coffey’s magisterial analysis of ‘‘the mind of Samuel Rutherford,’’ David George Mullan’s epochal Scottish Puritanism, and Chad B. Van Dixhoorn’s ‘‘Reforming the reformation: Theological debate at the Westminster Assembly.’’108 Nevertheless, Trueman complains, many puritan studies remain isolated from mainstream historiography and exhibit a dangerous insularity.109 Recent attempts to address that insularity—and here Trueman’s

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fine work on John Owen takes its place alongside a number of other titles recently published on that important theologian—have tended to concentrate on situating puritan thinkers within the wider context of the development of protestant scholasticism in the seventeenth century.110 Nevertheless, as a recent interest in the experience of lay protestants suggests, attention also needs to be paid to the spirituality and theological conviction of puritan conflicts ‘‘on the ground.’’111 The theological debates in which Irish Cromwellians engaged may not fit into the developmental models proposed by scholars of other geographical territories in the same period—nor should they be made to. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that debates about divinity were not the only ones that engaged the Cromwellian movement’s thinkers. John Cook, a regicide lawyer, advanced the cause of republican theory in opposition to those who held, like Walter Gostelo, sympathetic allegiance to the monarchist cause. Gostelo, in turn, opposed the ethics of the program for land redistribution. The scheme for transplantation was likewise fiercely disputed.112 But theological debates were regarded as being of defining importance. The topics they addressed had particular resonance, for programs across the range of Cromwellian social policy were invested with a particular religious dynamic. But theological debates are also important in demonstrating the relative independence of the Irish movement. Protestants in Ireland did not simply defer to English ecclesiastical developments, and, especially among the laity, were prepared to maintain eclectic and unusual conclusions or combinations of belief. But that observation should not occlude the conservatism of Irish Cromwellians. Religious adherents did not develop any new or indigenous sectarian movements, preferring to organize on the basis of English confessions of faith, if they organized at all; nor is there any evidence that their disputes reflected the substantial—and only recently discovered—soteriological divisions among delegates at the Westminster Assembly.113 There was no Cromwellian equivalent of the indigenous Irish Articles or the Westminster Assembly’s debates about justification. Although the Irish movement was much less rigorously policed than other puritan communities in the Old and New Worlds, and while Irish radicals were quite prepared to adopt mystical or radical ideas within a complex of conservative ideas, it took time for the most radical groups to gain a demographic foothold. Nevertheless, theological debate was indicative of the ideological conflict that became central to the failure of the Cromwellian administration. The English campaign of reconquest took place within a specific complex of ideas.114 Those ideas—and the debates they generated—defined the movement’s dynamic and provided for its ultimate failure.

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IV This study advances on previous scholarship by focusing its attention on the theological environment of the Cromwellian reformation. Rather than adopting a restrictively narrative or chronological approach, it concentrates on a series of doctrines that went to the heart of the reformation project. It assumes that these debates, carried on in publications, reflected actual debates on the ground. In these texts, at least, conversion, baptism, church government, the possibility of the extraordinary, and the ecclesiastical role of women were major themes, and the controversies these texts generated can be compared with similar debates taking place in England and New England in the same period. These debates had important social consequences, but this study attempts to take theological ideas seriously on their own terms, as Peter Lake has encouraged, ‘‘rather than assuming almost immediately that they can be interpreted as a code for talking about something else entirely.’’115 This study attempts to balance the causes and effects of radical religious change, highlighting some of the intellectual consequences of the Irish experiment, and illuminating what John Morrill has described as ‘‘the war that raged within men’s minds, . . . a mental world we have lost.’’116 By focusing on the colonial projects of English sects and Scottish Presbyterians, this study concentrates on colonial experiment rather than the reaction of the natives.117 By focusing on disputes, the study documents the changing boundaries of the Cromwellian reformation, the tense relationships between puritans and conservative protestants, and the internecine conflicts among puritans themselves. The study therefore contributes to the debate about the definition of ‘‘Puritanism’’; and it makes that contribution as it recognizes that Irish Cromwellians were involved in the same process of definition, policing the boundaries of their movement with scrupulous care. This study situates the Irish movement within broader contexts but repeatedly returns to examine the question of what it is that makes these debates Cromwellian and sometimes puritan, as well as what it is that makes them distinctively Irish. Irish Cromwellians developed highly eclectic habits of thought, intellectual commitments that regularly retained the central tenets of the English devotional mainstream alongside mystical commitments to the life of the Spirit and political commitments to the violent overthrow of Catholic superstition and, sometimes, particular forms of Cromwellian government. The theological debates that took place in Cromwellian Ireland emphasize above all else the intellectual eclecticism at the heart of the revolutionary administration. It is not enough to say, with Christopher Hill, that the Irish people found themselves

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on the wrong side in an international war against Antichrist.118 This malevolent influence was also believed to pervade the remnant of the elect. Irish Cromwellians were united in opposing Antichrist but recognized that many of their colleagues were also among his slaves. Theological debates were the means by which he could be resisted—but might also be means by which his influence could prevail. Ultimately, theological conflict among protestant clergy and laity provided for the failure of the regime. Despite the hopes for social and political change, the Cromwellian invasion was another phase in the failure of protestant reform in Ireland. John Rogers was right; heresies were unavoidable, and Ireland would long continue as a ‘‘land of Idols and Ire.’’119

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1 The Religious Dynamic of the Cromwellian Invasion

God’s work shall stand against all opposition. —Anonymous, A great and bloudy fight at Dublin in Ireland, between the king of Scots army, and the Parliaments (1649), p. 6 In 1641, a destitute woman, fleeing the Irish rebellion, found shelter in the porch of St. Margaret Westminster and relief through the charity of the church.1 Eight years later, with Ireland still gripped by civil war and England still reeling from the consequences, William Cooper began in St. Margaret’s pulpit a sermon that articulated the complexity of English responses to Ireland throughout the ensuing decade.2 Cooper owed his first benefice to William Laud, but his vigorous Protestantism had become clear during his appointment as chaplain to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, in The Hague between 1644 and 1648. His sermon, preached in August 1649, celebrated Parliament’s ‘‘signall Victory over the Lord ormond,’’ the protestant leader of the Royalist army that had been laying siege to Dublin.3 Cooper praised the efforts of Michael Jones, Parliamentarian colonel and nephew of James Ussher, whose forces had lifted the siege, yet seemed to qualify the victory in terms that resonated with the opportunities, as well as the dangers, represented by Ireland’s Catholic majority.4 The sermon was an exposition of Zechariah 12:2–5, a passage that described ‘‘ Jerusalem assaulted and distracted by Antiochus, defended and relieved by the Maccabees.’’ Cooper ‘‘mystically’’

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applied its message to ‘‘the Christian Church, or any part of it, persecuted by Antichrist and his powers.’’5 His sermon clearly arranged the competing sides in the Irish conflict. The soldiers were the agents of prophecy, he claimed: ‘‘Today is this word fulfilled to us.’’6 Dublin, like Jerusalem, was ‘‘no mean City; but a Mother in Israel.’’ Ormond’s forces, like Jerusalem’s besiegers, were ‘‘a numerous Host . . . sundry Nations, bad neighbours, such as bear evill will to Sion.’’7 The sermon illustrated the political necessities of the Irish campaign. God and his enemies were ‘‘as the two scales of a balance, put weight in one, it presseth down, and lifts the other up.’’8 There could be no mutually agreeable compromise. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the ‘‘rise of Sion’’ required the ‘‘fall of Babylon’’—even if, as in the case of Ormond, Babylon’s army was being led by a protestant.9 Cooper’s apocalyptic register located his rhetoric within a wider project to situate Ireland and England in God’s providential drama. The conflict between the Parliamentary and Royalist armies could be mapped onto the sectarian divisions that drove the conflict of the ages. It was important, Cooper argued, that the English executive should understand this ‘‘mercy’’ as ‘‘one deadly wound to the Beast, and the false Prophet.’’10 God had good purpose in creating confusion in Ireland. He was about ‘‘the great last restauration of the world,’’ but the new creation had to follow the pattern of the old: chaos had to precede order.11 God required wholesale destruction, a latter-day return to primeval chaos, before the new world and the new Ireland could emerge: Let all be covered over with darknesse, and jumbled into rubbish; nay, let all be shut up again, into the wombe of nothing, at least that nothing of inhability, improbability, and impossibility too . . . yet I will create deliverance, fetch out a cosmos, a beautiful pile, and face of things.12 The lifting of Ormond’s siege affirmed God’s approval of recent developments in the three kingdoms. It demonstrated the propriety of the execution of Charles I and Parliament’s aggressive constitutional strategy: ‘‘This mercy . . . is a owning by heaven of your present power, your late changes and transactions which the world so much disowned, and were startled at.’’13 But the lifting of the siege also emphasized Parliament’s new responsibility. ‘‘Much is given you, and therefore much shall be required of you,’’ Cooper explained; ‘‘although Warre be full of calamities, yet nothing is more dangerous than victory.’’14 To secure success, the London Parliament should take pains to promote harmony among those radicals moving increasingly into positions of power:

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O you Fathers of your Country, consider your children, some are stronger, some younger, some more heavy and sullen, others more sprightly and wanton; there are not only diversities, but divisions among them. Put forth your authority with wisdom and tendernesse effectually, that we may not alwayes bite and devoure one another.15 But Parliament should also take care not to ‘‘bite and devoure’’ the Irish population its army was so effectively subduing. It was essential, Cooper argued, that Parliament give ‘‘the Crown of Ireland to Jesus Christ,’’ that ‘‘there be as much care taken for the Lord as for the land.’’16 Parliament should remember the ‘‘spiritual estate of the poor people, as . . . the temporall estate of the rich.’’17 Although they had murdered Christians, ‘‘many of them did it ignorantly.’’18 Ireland’s suffering should be redemptive. When Ireland was converted to the Reformed faith, he assured his listeners, ‘‘your victory [shall] become theirs.’’19 Cooper exhorted ‘‘militant Saints’’ with overtly millennial hope.20 ‘‘Methinks the Lord is speaking louder every day,’’ he confided. The Irish campaign would show that Babylon’s walls were falling. God was ‘‘coming down neerer unto us, even among us . . . Who knoweth what he is doing for us at this instant?’’21 That question begged many more. Not all the English soldiers believed that their cause was necessarily the cause of God. Despite the massive impact of the war—and refugees in London churches had been harbingers of greater misery—some radical soldiers were arguing that an Irish campaign would be an unnecessary denial of the political and theological ideals at the heart of the English revolution.22 As early as 1646, Thomas Edwards, an English Presbyterian heresimach, complained that some radicals had ‘‘spoken and carried themselves unworthily to the bleeding condition of the Kingdome of Ireland and the Protestants there’’ by having ‘‘ justified the Irish Rebellion.’’23 The argument against invasion was regularly linked to the ideology of Levellers, but in fact the movement was deeply divided by the possible Irish campaign.24 Certain queries propounded to the consideration of those who are intended for the service of Ireland (1649) actively called on soldiers to abandon their military commitments.25 Other Leveller intellectuals proposed that the Agreement of the people (1647) should be extended to refer to the rights of the Irish population.26 After all, as was suggested in pamphlets such as Liberty of conscience asserted (1649), Irish Catholics were only following their conscience, and freedom of conscience had been one aim of the Parliamentary campaign.27 But others disagreed. The anonymous author of Discourse concerning the affaires of Ireland (1650) concluded that toleration for Irish Catholics did not deny the need for an

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English invasion. Following this lead, Levellers were coming round to the need for another campaign. With this kind of intellectual flexibility, radical soldiers could certainly not be uniformly represented as ‘‘obstructers to the reliefe of Ireland.’’28 But this very discussion was perceived to be growing dangerous when it moved outside the parameters advanced by the godly. Several ministers responded to the radical challenge by encouraging the army to consider itself ‘‘compleately aptified for the hand of God unto the breaking in peeces the envious enemies of his Son and his Saints, according to the predict counsels of his holy Word.’’29 Therefore, they continued, the Antichristian whore is filld with fears that you are the men comission’d by God to execute upon her the Judgement written, to stain her glory and spoil her beauty, to dash her bastards brains against the stones, & to give her blood for blood to drink, to burn her flesh with fire.30 If the army were not to act, they argued, England would be at risk, for ‘‘the Irish Rebels may come with all their Powers from all parts abroad, and in this Nation, like a mighty Torrent, sweeping all befor them, and put themselves into a capacity of putting in execution their bloody, cruel, tyrannical and revengeful thoughts.’’31 England’s salvation depended on the army whose ‘‘ones have chased tens’’ and whose ‘‘hundreds have put thousands to flight.’’32 Far from being unethical, as some Levellers were asserting, the Irish invasion was a political and theological necessity.33 The conflict would certainly need some justification: it was, Nicholas Canny has argued, ‘‘unquestionably’’ the bloodiest of the wars of the three nations.34 The Irish campaign, unlike the struggle in England, was ‘‘total war.’’35 It involved up to thirty-five thousand of the eighty thousand soldiers estimated to have served in Parliamentary land forces throughout the three nations, and, John Morrill has suggested, may have provoked ‘‘the greatest act of ethnic cleansing in European history.’’36 It was a theological struggle: English bloodthirstiness was ‘‘stimulated and fired’’ by an explicitly religious dynamic.37 Violence became a signal of religious commitment, proof of ‘‘the Diligence and Fidelity of your poor Servants.’’38 One letter, read in Parliament in July 1652, referred to a common determination ‘‘to take all Opportunities God shall please to put into our hands, to revenge the innocent Blood that hath been spilt in this Nation.’’39 And, claimed one nineteenth-century commentator, ‘‘they had no bloodier instrument than the Bible in all their arsenal of war.’’40 In 1641, the refugee woman found shelter in a church, but the expedition to revenge her distress would be driven by a theological hatred.

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I God hath caused us to sing Victoria And wee will answer: Soli Deo Gloria. —Anonymous, Ormondes breakfast, or, A true relation of the salley and skirmish performed by Collonell Michaell Jones and his party, against the Marques of Ormonde, and his forces encamped before Dublin the second of August 1649, p. 4 Theological resistance to Catholic power was underpinned by a determined push towards military victory. Michael Jones’s routing of Royalist forces at Rathmines on 2 August 1649 made possible the English Parliament’s contest with Irish Catholicism. His victory cleared the way for the landing of Oliver Cromwell and twelve thousand heavily armed veterans near Dublin two weeks later.41 The campaign’s religious dynamic was rapidly demonstrated. The soldiers devoted Sunday, 19 August, to ‘‘holy exercises’’ and kept the following Thursday as a day of thanksgiving for their safe arrival. On 26 August, it ‘‘being the Lord’s day, the forenoon was spent in publick exercises,’’ and in the afternoon ‘‘the Lord Lieutenant, the Major Generall with divers other officers spent their time in Prayer, and seeking Councell from God concerning their intended march on the week following.’’42 Religious activities were being coordinated across the Irish Sea. Three days later, Cooper’s sermon was delivered in London. The prayers that it encouraged were quickly rewarded. On 10 September, at Drogheda, Cromwell’s forces enjoyed their first victory.43 One observer noted ‘‘nothing but a desperate madnesse in the besieged,’’ but their resistance was heavily punished.44 Exulting in victory, Cromwell hailed ‘‘the righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’’ and hoped that the losses, so controversial in later history, would ‘‘tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’’45 Hugh Peter rushed the news to the London Parliament without any attempt at political nuance: ‘‘Three thousand five hundred fifty and two of the Enemies slain, and sixty foure of ours.’’46 Victory at Drogheda was a glorious confirmation of the campaign’s providential support. God and the English were fighting side by side. Flushed with success, Cromwell divided his army, sending five thousand men north under the leadership of colonels Robert Venables and Theophilus

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Jones, Michael Jones’s brother, and leading the remainder of his forces south. Within a matter of months, Parliamentary troops had successfully captured Wexford (11 October), New Ross (19 October), and Carrickfergus (2 November). With the onset of spring the Parliamentary army turned its attention to Kilkenny (27 March) and Clonmel (10 May). At Clonmel, Irish forces under the command of Hugh Dubh O’Neill mounted fierce resistance and lured the New Model Army into a trap, massacring fifteen hundred troops in what was to be Cromwell’s worst military defeat. Cromwell returned to England just before the outbreak of the third civil war in June 1650, but his troops fought on under the command of Henry Ireton, his son-in-law, capturing Carlow (24 July) and Charlemount (14 August). By mid-1650, English forces had pushed deep into Ormond’s territory, exploiting the low morale, internal feuds, and poor logistics of his forces. Ormond’s final hope, the army of Ulster, was defeated in Donegal on 21 June. In early December, he appointed a military deputy and fled to France. He missed the denouement of the Cromwellian campaign— victories at Limerick (27 October 1651) and Galway (12 April 1652) and the final, ignominious surrender of Irish forces at Cloughwater, county Cavan, on 27 April 1653. From the early 1640s, there had been several attempts to unify the island under a single administration. But in three years, the Parliamentary army had achieved what Ormond, the Catholic Confederates, and the Scottish Covenanters had not—they had established a single rule of government throughout Ireland.47 Parliamentary propaganda cited providential activity to explain this military success. Cromwell’s famous appeal was to ‘‘trust God and keep your powder dry,’’ and his letters from and to Ireland constantly reiterated the theme that divine sovereignty was every bit as necessary as English military endeavor. God was particularly on his side. Occasional voices suggested this divine interest might be to the spiritual advantage of the Irish natives—Godfrey Daniel argued that ‘‘it doth (or may) much comfort all the People of this Island, that Divine Providence hath now brought them under such a Government, and Governors, as endeavour more the Welfare of their Souls, than the Conquering of their Bodies’’—but the moral, religious, and ethnic dichotomies of English rhetoric generally assumed Irish inferiority.48 Ormondes breakfast (1649) showed little concern for the welfare of Irish souls when it explained Jones’s lifting of the Dublin siege with a simple maxim: God ‘‘made you lose, and made us win.’’49 This dynamic allowed English writers some latitude in expressing their Christian duty to love their enemies—not least when it had become obvious that their enemies were also the enemies of God. Even Quaker missionaries—so often identified as opposing the aggression of the English administration—addressed the ‘‘Natives of that Nation of Ireland’’ as those

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‘‘who are made a curse, and a prey to be destroyed of your enemies,’’ warning them that they were ‘‘a cursed brood’’ whom God’s ‘‘wrath waites to consume.’’50 Even as they lamented the island’s ‘‘bloody combustions,’’ the devastation of the ‘‘miserable Kingdome’’ and its ‘‘bleeding City,’’ publications from the period celebrated the role of ‘‘undaunted English Heroes,’’ for God was on their side.51 This military success, with its providential significance, encouraged the administration to maximize the opportunities of victory. But that encouragement concealed the basic indifference of successive English administrations.52 Those involved in the government of Ireland waited for an Act of Union that would define the relationship between the two nations.53 It was never passed. Instead, local government was pragmatic and improvised. Oliver Cromwell was appointed as lord lieutenant in July 1649. Little more than six months later, as Cromwell returned to England, he was replaced by his son-in-law, Henry Ireton. Subsequently, as military and civilian authority began to be differentiated and as Cromwell pushed Ireton to concentrate on military affairs, the responsibility of civilian government passed over to four Parliamentary Commissioners, Edmund Ludlow, Miles Corbett, John Jones, and John Weaver, who were provided with their official guidelines on 4 October 1650.54 Their religious priorities were made clear. The first paragraph of their commission emphasized their responsibility to ensure ‘‘the advancement of religion and propagation of the gospel . . . the suppression of idolatry, popery, superstition and profaneness in that land’’ and, subsequently, their duty to provide ‘‘encouragement’’ and proper maintenance for ‘‘all such persons, of pious life and conversation, as they shall find qualified with gifts for preaching,’’ to consider how best to train promising youths in ‘‘piety and literature,’’ and to remove ‘‘delinquents, malignants, pluralists and scandalous ministers.’’55 Yet ‘‘piety’’ and theological ‘‘scandal’’ were never defined. Ample room was left for the improvisation of policy in—and far beyond—religious affairs. The opportunity for political improvisation was illustrated in the aftermath of Ireton’s death in November 1651. John Lambert was briefly considered as his replacement, but he demurred when he realized that he was being offered Ireton’s responsibilities without his title of lord deputy. Eventually Parliament hit upon a suitable replacement. Charles Fleetwood arrived in Ireland—for the first time—in September 1652. He quickly established his military and political credentials. By the end of the year he had married Ireton’s widow, Cromwell’s daughter Bridget. In the summer of 1654, perhaps reflecting constitutional developments in England, the existing system of civil government in Ireland was replaced by that of a lord deputy and council. Fleetwood, who was then installed as lord deputy, maintained that position until 1657, when his term

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expired, despite Cromwell’s unhappiness about his close links to religious radicals and his recall to England in 1655. Fleetwood was effectively ousted by Henry Cromwell, who had investigated his links to the radicals and was subsequently appointed to the Irish Council to counter the instability those links had created.56 In effect, Toby Barnard has noted, Ireland had two competing governors between 1655 and 1657.57 But that official instability contrasts with Oliver Cromwell’s sustained interest in Irish affairs. His role in government had been replaced by that of his son-in-law Ireton; Ireton had been replaced by Fleetwood, who became another son-in-law; but Fleetwood was eventually replaced by Henry, Cromwell’s son, who succeeded formally to the rank of lord deputy some two months after Fleetwood’s commission expired.58 Ironically, as we will see, it was the latter administration that most obviously demonstrated its independence from London. Each of these administrations grappled with the same range of social, political, and economic difficulties. State finance was a constant problem that created widespread dismay when army pay fell into arrears.59 The military disaffection that accrued was compounded by evidence that new settlers were being discouraged from entering Ireland because of rumors in England of high taxation.60 These financial difficulties had obvious implications for religious policy, leading to a radical revision of the state financing of selected protestant clergy and a return to tithes, which, as we will see, proved extremely controversial.61 More generally, economic difficulty appeared to be a cause and consequence of the lack of free trade and a consequent scarcity of foodstuffs. There was a return to a degree of normality after 1655, but a lack of free trade continued to hamper economic growth.62 That misery was graphically illustrated in Dublin, an urban centre of around forty thousand inhabitants whose population was exceeded within the British Isles only by that of London, most obviously when its conditions proved an ideal venue for outbreaks of plague, with their rapid rise in mortalities.63 Neither were economic circumstances assisted by the policy of expelling Catholic merchants and property owners from walled towns.64 The urgent need to repopulate these urban centers drove projects for resettlement that included a number of appeals to foreign protestants.65 Those Catholics who did manage to remain within walled towns found their security entirely dependent on the caprice of local officials, despite, later in the decade, Henry Cromwell’s policy of de facto toleration.66 Policy on the ground could develop in ways quite different from those outlined in the Parliamentary Commissioners’ brief. But John Owen, at least, was quite clear as to his religious responsibility. He returned from the early stages of the Irish campaign to preach before the London Parliament a sermon that would be published as The stedfastness of

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promises, and the sinfulness of staggering (1650). Owen, who had been preaching in Dublin while the military campaign advanced, characterized his sermon as a ‘‘serious Proposal for the Advancement and Propagation of the Gospel’’ in Ireland.67 He called for Parliament to sponsor a number of pastors who would travel to meet the spiritual needs of the soldiers. His suggestion was approved. On 8 March 1650, Parliament passed the ‘‘Act for the better advancement of the Gospel and Learning in Ireland’’ and set about recruiting six preachers for pastoral work in the Dublin area. Working alongside and often in competition with the lay preachers of the army, radical prophets, sequestered Anglicans, and privately funded Presbyterians, the state-supported clergy provided for the spiritual needs of English troops. Their influence increased with their numbers. In August 1652, Bibles were being distributed to English troops along with their ammunition.68 Two years later, government publications were hailing ‘‘this Age of light and godliness,’’ while a radical military chaplain rejoiced that ‘‘the means of grace and knowledge of the Gospel’’ were being ‘‘plentifully held forth’’ in Ireland.69 Such celebratory sentiments could not disguise increasing evidence of theological division as religious preference developed into patterns of sectarian commitment, but this clerical recruitment and apparent spiritual advance continued into the second half of the decade. In 1657, the ministers of the Cork association, a conservative grouping of former Anglicans, noted that more official ministers had settled in Ireland since the mid-1650s ‘‘than in 15 years precedent.’’70 Some sections of the clerical elite entertained high hopes for their effectiveness. Dublin’s leading Independent minister noted with approval that ‘‘many a gracious spirit in these days . . . expects the fulfilling of many glorious promises.’’71 He was confident about the future of radical Protestantism in Ireland: ‘‘I dare boldly say, There is such a light kindled in the three nations . . . which all the adversaries in the world will never be able to extinguish.’’72 But the opportunity turned sour—and not just because of the competing goals of the administration. Protestant preachers struggled to control their own people. Borrowing a biblical metaphor for spiritual decay, Samuel Winter, a leading Dublin preacher, imagined that ‘‘night . . . is coming fast upon us, the shadows of the evening growing very long.’’73 Even in the Ulster counties, where protestant clergy exercised perhaps their strongest grip on society, Presbyterian ministers lamented the ‘‘unfruitfulness of the gospel,’’ ‘‘abounding wickedness in the land . . . fornications, adulteries, . . . drunkenness, railings, slanders, thefts, prodigality,’’ and the ‘‘palpable breach of the Sabbath.’’74 Ministers developed an Irish jeremiad in the ‘‘Apostatizing [sic] times’’ of religious experiment and failure as they realized with dismay that the problem their movement faced was ultimately internal.75 As patterns of denominational

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adherence developed, the ministers’ prophetic and providential rhetoric turned in upon itself to identify the enemies of reformation among those who were ostensibly its agents. Winter observed that ‘‘a spirit of delusion is gone forth into the world to deceive the nations; God having given Satan a commission (or rather a permission) judicially to harden, not onely carnal Gospellers, but some of his own dear people: and this is the sorest judgment that I know, that lies upon this nation this day.’’76 Edward Worth, leader of the Cork conservatives, noted that much of this rapidly mutating heresy was rooted in a popular anticlericalism: ‘‘We seldome see any who are against Ordinances, Sabbaths, Scriptures, christ, but such as were first against ordained Ministers.’’77 Winter, in turn, traced this anticlericalism, denial of the Sabbath, and opposition to the doctrine of the Trinity to their roots in the rejection of infant baptism; ‘‘If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?’’ (Psalm 11:3).78 One thing the clerical elite were keen to do was to control the religious dynamic of the army. Ironically, the heresies that many feared were undermining the Cromwellian reformation were accumulating in the force that was providing for its security. In Ireland, as in England, the New Model Army had become a hotbed of political and religious dissent.79 But, like any other army, it also provided ample opportunity for the ungodly. Colonel John Jones, one of the four Parliamentary Commissioners, complained that his troops had to ‘‘dwell in the midst of snares,’’ being ‘‘called to spend theire whole tyme in earthly and carnall Imploym[en]ts, having theire Speritts much deadened, and cooled in the things of Heaven, and affaires of the Soull.’’80 Their potential for backsliding was evident to observers across the theological spectrum: Presbyterian ministers in Antrim dealt with a range of moral offences involving soldiers, while Quaker missionaries in the south targeted those ‘‘poor desolate Souldiers of the lowest rank’’ who were living ‘‘a careless and a desolate life, without the fear of the Lord, in lying, in swearing, in drunkenesse, in whoredome, in oppression, and in the wickednesse of the world.’’81 Preachers from across the theological spectrum had difficulty in convincing soldiers of the value of religious faith. Death’s universal summons (1650) was an evangelistic poem— perhaps a ballad—aimed explicitly at English soldiers in Ireland. Although they had ‘‘made Men tremble at thy word/And scorn’d the terror of the Conquering Sword,’’ their ‘‘stubborn Heart . . . refus’d to know/The word of God.’’82 Cromwellian forces were failing to live up to their responsibility to be ‘‘humble under victories, meek under injuries, patient under provocations, [to] fear no men, yet tremble before God.’’83 The army was becoming a mission field all of its own. Regiments, we have noticed, were being given Bibles to distribute among troops: in August 1652, the Commissioners ordered that Bibles should

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be distributed to soldiers in Leinster, one for every file of men, and the military storekeeper in Galway was commanded to deliver one hundred Bibles to a Mr. Clark, who would distribute them at his own discretion.84 John Cook was hopeful for the outcome of such efforts: ‘‘Many poore English here are like corne, ready to be brought into God’s Barne by Conversion.’’ ‘‘The harvest is like to very great in this Nation,’’ he continued, ‘‘but there are very few painfull, skilfull, harvest-men, pray we therefore the Lord of the Vineyard, that he will send for Laborers.’’85 The Irish reformation Cook envisaged would be a harvest of English souls—or at least those souls who would succumb to the policy of Anglicization.86 That concentration on the religious needs of the army drew resources away from the religious needs of the natives. Some members of the clerical elite were guardedly optimistic about the chances of indigenous reformation. Irish audiences did seem to respond when exposed to suitable preaching.87 In 1651, Cook was lamenting that Irish audiences in Munster ‘‘will not come to our Sermons to heare their grobe Idolatries and superstitious fopperies reproved,’’ but he also admitted difficulty in retaining qualified clerical recruits.88 Similar difficulties in Galway led to the suggestion that Jeremiah O’Quinn, an Irish Catholic convert turned politically troublesome Ulster Presbyterian minister, should be moved away from his county Antrim stronghold to be engaged in native evangelism elsewhere.89 In contrast to these difficulties, John Hewson reported the conversion of 750 Catholics in Dublin in the first half of the same year.90 In 1653, John Tillinghast, an emerging Fifth Monarchist, reported ‘‘great conversions . . . in . . . some parts of Ireland.’’91 It is not clear how news of these ‘‘great conversions’’ spread. There is certainly some evidence of a burst of enthusiasm for Irish evangelism in Dublin—not least among the native Irish, who were to be transported if they refused to convert. Conversion carried immense economic value.92 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some conversions were regarded with a degree of suspicion. Soldiers were forbidden to marry Irish natives ‘‘that are Papists . . . or have lately been Papists (whose change of religion is not or can[not] be judged to flow from a real work of God upon their hearts), upon penalty of being cashiered.’’93 The conversions of their prospective partners were to be tested before the marriage could be formalized. It would be interesting to know whether the conversions of Catholic natives were tested with the same scrutiny as those of lay puritans.94 If they were, it would hardly be surprising that some purported conversions were formally dismissed. In July 1654, John Murcot and some others were instructed to adjudicate the conversions of some native Irish in Athy, who were claiming that as converts they should not be transplanted.95

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Others were less cynical of the natives’ response. In 1652, Godfrey Daniel, a Dublin minister, translated William Perkins’s The Christian doctrine, or, The foundation of Christian religion, gathered into six principles, printing English and Irish texts in parallel columns and appending a substantial primer to the Irish language, presumably for the benefit of those wanting to learn the language for evangelistic purposes.96 During the same period, Samuel Winter revived the teaching of Irish to undergraduates in Trinity College.97 His notebook listed a Gaelic catechism among goods he packed for a trip to Ulster in 1653, and it is possible that he made efforts to learn the language himself.98 He certainly made regular preaching trips to Maynooth, where he was credited with the conversions of many of the native listeners who ‘‘flocked to hear him.’’99 His notebook’s record of marriages and baptisms contains a number of Irish names.100 But it is possible that very few of the students who trained at Trinity College followed the linguistic interests of their provost. Only around ten of the four hundred ministers who benefited from state sponsorship were recorded as being involved in Irish-language evangelism.101 The fact that they were mainly former Anglicans suggests that an interest in vernacular evangelism never really took off among the younger, more radical clergy. This suggestion that preaching in Irish was an interest of older men is confirmed by the fact that some Presbyterian missionaries who were preaching in Irish had earlier experience of preaching in Gaelic in Scotland.102 Irish-language evangelism may have been much less typical than has been supposed. This division between the evangelistic interests of older and younger clergy seems to parallel the development of protestant denominations. Barnard suggests that the ecclesiastical groupings varied in their commitment to evangelizing the natives. While former Anglicans could be heavily committed to the project, Baptists and Independents, he claims, had virtually no interest in it at all.103 The activities of Samuel Winter, Dublin’s leading Independent, challenge this analysis but do not explain why the Irish Cromwellian administration, which was successively dominated by Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians, made no attempt to publish Bedell’s translation of the Old Testament, which remained partially completed in manuscript throughout the period, and did not act to provide an acceptable alternative to the Irish-language prayer book, which had been banned with the anti-Anglican legislation of 1647 and 1649.104 But some evangelistic progress was being made. Perhaps surprisingly, protestant evangelism appears to have enjoyed its most significant success in Presbyterian Ulster. Records from the period are full of Irish names. Those of the Antrim ministers show that many native locals, such as Oina O’donnally, Oyin McGukin, Murdock o’Donnallie, Shan O’Hagan, and Shilie O’donally, were successfully incorporated into the community of the godly.105 At least one

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of their number— Jeremiah O’Quinn—went on to become a Presbyterian minister.106 Their assimilation into Presbyterian worship may have been made easier by the fact that the eastern counties of Ulster were an area without an official plantation; its longer pattern of unofficial migration may have meant that the area was without the ethnic tensions that existed elsewhere.107 But there was some discussion as to how this evangelistic momentum should be maintained. Supporters of the project debated whether the attendance of Irish natives at public worship should be voluntary or compulsory. Henry Cromwell protested when the oath of abjuration was imposed by the London Parliament, acting to mitigate official severity against Irish Catholics and advocating a policy of persuasion—and de facto toleration—instead of compulsion.108 By contrast, the session book of Templepatrick Presbyterian church, which recorded a ‘‘remarkable’’ number of Irish names, noted with concern one member’s failure to compel ‘‘some Irishes under him’’ to attend the meetings of the church.109 Assimilation of Catholics in Ulster Presbyterian churches may have been less indicative of voluntary conversion than has been imagined. Thus Toby Barnard has argued that Cromwellian attempts at Irish evangelism were ‘‘totally inadequate and compared unfavorably with the efforts of the Church of Ireland.’’110 But perhaps Cromwellians could justify this neglect. Perhaps the infant baptism defended by the confessional mainstream was prejudicial to native evangelism, especially as infant baptism came to be invested with the claims of covenant theology more regularly than it had been in the Anglican past. If, as Samuel Winter claimed, ‘‘the Covenant runs in the natural line of believers’’ and ‘‘the vein of election shall run along in the loins of the seed of the elect, and their seeds seed for ever,’’ then those most likely to be among the elect and therefore those who were certain to be converted were already within the bounds of the church, attending services and listening to preaching with their parents every Sabbath.111 Paradoxically, those who opposed this theology of infant baptism may also have contributed to the evangelistic neglect of the natives. With no record of any native converts or any program of deliberate outreach, Baptists were the least interested of all the Cromwellian movements in the evangelism of the Irish. Baptists, with other sectarian groups, ‘‘devoted more energy to internecine liturgical, theological, and polity disputes than to missionary endeavours.’’112 Theological debates between emerging denominations robbed the evangelistic project of vital momentum. Explaining their failure to make significant impact, Cromwellian theologians began to worry whether they were the reason why most Catholics refused to abandon their faith. Some polemicists wondered whether the religious policies of successive administrations were in fact alienating potential converts. Edward Cooke, a Quaker convert who wrote with intense hostility

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to the conservative turn at the end of the decade, warned that ministers associated with the administration ‘‘are never like to convince the Papists with sound Doctrine’’ while ‘‘the Papists behold what devourers [protestant clergyman] are, that one must have as much as foure of theirs.’’113 Others feared that Catholics were appalled by the administration’s policy of tolerating religious difference. Irish natives were being invited to exchange a millennium and a half of ecclesiastical tradition for the cacophonous innovations of protestant sectarian debate. ‘‘Order and Unity are essential properties (in the Papists opinion) of the true Church,’’ Worth explained; the ‘‘disorder and Schisme’’ of ‘‘unordained Intruders’’ were forcing Catholics to conclude that ‘‘these contrary waies can not be . . . truth.’’114 The common European explanation—that reformation was about restoration, not innovation—failed to convince in a situation in which there was no agreement about what was to be restored.115 The reformation attempted by Irish Cromwellians was an invitation to join a debate, not a movement, in a situation where protestant nonconformity was itself a striking novelty: there is no record of protestant nonconformity in Dublin before 1641.116 Protestantism in Ireland—diffuse and increasingly divided—was fostering the conditions of its failure in its struggle to articulate the truth. That statement of truth was made possible by the development of a textual culture in Ireland.117 As in previous decades, the printed page was used as much to educate individuals into religious aspiration as to nuance their faith into the competing pieties of the various sectarian groups. Books in Ireland tended to be expensive.118 In the 1650s, the relatively small number of publications produced in Ireland suggests that much of the material favored by godly readers was still being imported from overseas. Marginal annotations in Claudius Gilbert’s Soveraign antidote against sinful errors (1658), for example, illustrate the wide range of material to which he could expect his readers to refer. Printing presses were located in Cork, Dublin, and possibly Belfast, where the Bangor declaration of the Presbyterian ministers may have been printed.119 Another press in Waterford was operated by Peter de Pienne, whose surname may suggest something of Ireland’s place in the textual culture of international Calvinism.120 But we have little idea of the significance of this publishing culture in Ireland.121 We have little sense of the numbers of books published, readers’ responses to published materials, popular manners of reading, and the price, distribution, and availability of books. It is impossible to know, therefore, how many Irish Cromwellians could have adequately read their way into the debates this book describes. But it is very likely that Ireland had nothing to compare to the three or four million broadsheets printed in London in the eighty years before 1640.122 There must have been many fewer

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publications in Dublin. The Irish reformations must have advanced with much less dependence on the construction and exploitation of a literary culture. The Irish Cromwellian elite were certainly keen to contain it. On 10 March 1657, the lord deputy and council demanded that the mayor of Cork provide a justification for the presence of a printing press in his city. Bemoaning the ‘‘great inconveniences that have risen from the too great liberty of the press, and not being willing that any thing either scandalous to religion or the present Government should have present rise,’’ they required ‘‘a speedy account from you of the necessity’’ of a printing press.123 Those books which were either printed in Ireland or imported into Ireland appear to have been rigorously scrutinized. In 1659, for example, customs agents seized imported Catholic books in Dublin harbor, while John Cook was appointed to examine other potentially blasphemous or anticlerical texts.124 This policy of control— perhaps more obvious in the later stages of the decade, in the context of Henry Cromwell’s religiously conservative turn—suggests that there may have been some official purpose in the provision of rhetorical space for theological debates. Or perhaps the authorities believed that these polemical texts could make little impact on most of their readers. It was preached sermons, rather than printed books, that were recorded as having most impact in the conversion narratives included in Rogers’s Ohel, for example. Little wonder that the government took such pains to control preaching, as we will later see. Yet books and sermons were closely related. Many of the controversialists whose opinions are recorded in this book would have preferred to think of themselves as pastors rather than writers—but no manuscripts of their pulpit materials remain. Perhaps the closest we come to the actual moment of preaching is in reading the sermon outlines recorded in Winter’s notebook.125 Books and the sermons they often collected were closely related—but books were nevertheless of secondary importance when all agreed that ‘‘faith cometh by hearing’’ (Romans 10:17). Perhaps this explains why the textual culture of Irish Cromwellians appears so limited. There are very few extant examples of commentaries or histories—two genres popular in England, for example—but many examples of printed sermons and occasional pamphlets on pietistic or controversial themes. Those documents that remain extant do not provide us with a complete textual culture. But its traces suggest that textual culture in Ireland was much more conservative and less concerned to compete with preaching than might have been the case elsewhere. Particularly in Ireland, it appears, ‘‘the book did not function as an autonomous agency, but within the context created by the intermingling of a whole range of communication media’’—like those mainly found in pulpits.126

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Producing their own texts, therefore, and accessing a broad range of material from the wider English-speaking world, Irish Protestants developed a series of interpretive communities with contesting objectives and beliefs. It was almost certainly Quakers who took most advantage of this textual culture. In England, they embraced opportunities for publication with astonishing urgency. The first of the movement’s tracts and broadsides appeared in late 1652; the publication of nearly three hundred titles by 1656 suggests that the Quaker bibliography was expanding by an average of more than one new title every week.127 Although Quakers found it much harder to publish in Ireland, one Limerick minister complained of the effect of their explosion of publications. ‘‘Friends,’’ he complained, had ‘‘spread multitudes of Pamphlets, Libels and Papers, full of their sad stuffe, and by all possible ways labored to gather a strong party, desperately engaged to their way.’’128 But the textuality of the radical groups could be confusing—novelty could be overwhelming. In November 1656, the godly people of Limerick were suffering a Quaker invasion: There are at present in the city of Limerick divers persons commonly called Quakers, who have repaired thither out of England and other places, making it their practice to wander up and down seducing divers honest people, neglecting and impoverishing their families, troubling the public peace of this nation, disturbing the congregations of sober Christians in the worship of God, and with railing accusations aspersing and discouraging divers of the godly ministers of the Gospel in their faithful labours, and therefore bringing into contempt the ordinances of God and encouraging evil-minded people to looseness and profaneness.129 One month later, Claudius Gilbert was surprised by the secret distribution of an anonymous pamphlet appearing to promote religious liberty.130 Its argument and tone caused him to suspect that its author was secretly defending Quakers, if he were not a Quaker himself.131 Gilbert was astonished, however, to realize that all of the pamphlet’s queries could be found in The storming of Antichrist (1644) by ‘‘Charles’’—actually Christopher—Blackwood, a Particular Baptist who had until recently been exercising a vigorous ministry in Ireland.132 In southern parts of Ireland, Baptists and Quakers, normally at theological loggerheads, were believed to share a common rhetorical currency in their promotion of religious toleration. Whatever their differences, these communities of sectarian readers fostered a literary climate that shared distinctive features of radical publications elsewhere. Even those Old English Catholics petitioning Cromwell cited a string of Bible verses in their defense,

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and, in 1652, in a letter to Cromwellian military leaders, former Irish rebels prayed that ‘‘the Lord of Hosts’’ would ‘‘be the judge of what innocent blood may be spilt hereafter.’’133 As even its victims realized, the religious culture of the 1650s demanded extensive appeal to distinctive habits of scriptural expression. This textual culture enabled Irish Cromwellians to participate in networks of friendship and clerical association that stretched across the Atlantic. Samuel Winter had studied with John Cotton in Boston, Lincolnshire, as a young Cambridge graduate in 1632, one year before Cotton emigrated to Massachusetts; twenty-five years later, Winter was teaching in Dublin alongside Samuel Mather, a well-connected Harvard graduate, whose brother Increase would marry Cotton’s daughter.134 Winter’s interest in New England was evident: he referred to the spirituality of colonial children and discussed the ‘‘praying Indians’’ whose conversions were described in John Eliot’s Tears of repentance (1653).135 Another of the ministers on the Civil List, Thomas Patient, was much less positive about the godly communities of the New World. Patient was one of at least ten ministers on the Civil List with firsthand experience of life in New England.136 His return to the Old World had been compelled by his refusal to have his child baptized and his resultant citation before the quarterly court of Essex county, Massachusetts, in June 1643.137 While Patient must have been happy to leave New England behind, others in the Cromwellian administration thought the colonies a good place to find clerical recruits, and Commissioners corresponded with Dr. Thomas Harrison, encouraging him and other friends in New England to settle in Ireland.138 The timing of the letter was propitious, for, in the early 1650s, New England Puritanism was beginning to lose some of its earlier momentum.139 Although the response was initially disappointing, a number of ministers, including Harrison, did travel to Ireland to participate in the reformation themselves. But Irish Cromwellians were also keen to develop links with brethren in England, though requests for their assistance met with little success. The reluctance of English clergy to move to Ireland was thought to relate to rumors suggesting that local authorities were forcibly silencing large numbers of ministers in certain parts of the south.140 Others explained that pastoral needs in England were too great for any clergy to be spared.141 But radicals took advantage of the theological vacuum, and the large number of those who traveled to Ireland so alarmed the clerical elite that they took urgent steps to control the flow of preachers. John Owen worried that ministers rejected for heresy in England could take their theological confusion elsewhere.142 But the Irish denominations were also closing ranks. As the decade progressed, several of

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their representatives made efforts to link themselves more securely into the three nations’ emerging denominational networks. Irish Baptists took a lead in associational thinking and encouraged sister churches in England and Wales to maintain regular days of fasting.143 Quaker missionaries combined ‘‘from several parts of Ireland and England’’ to disturb the peace in Limerick.144 Winter attempted to develop links with Richard Baxter’s association of churches in Worcester.145 The Cork association contacted Presbyterians in London, and Edward Worth traveled to the English universities as Henry Cromwell’s representative to investigate the possibility of a conservative settlement of a national church.146 Perhaps the Ulster Presbyterians were unique in maintaining a cautious distance from like-minded peers, their brethren in the Scottish church. Importing resources was one thing; but there was little point in the Ulster ministers exposing themselves to the theological conflicts that were tearing the Scottish church apart.147 Ulster Presbyterians were only too aware of the dangers, as well as the opportunities, of organizing across the three kingdoms. With the Irish Sea on one hand and the Atlantic on the other, Irish Cromwellians organized and disputed in the broad culture of Englishspeaking Protestantism. Clerical personnel moved across the Atlantic, but the theological debates they engaged in were perhaps more influenced by the context of the three nations than by those of the New World. Some debates began in Ireland and continued elsewhere. John Rogers’s description of the spiritual experiences of the Christ Church fellowship was published after his return to London in spring 1652.148 His claims were answered by Zachary Crofton, a conservative Presbyterian polemicist who had been born and educated in Dublin but was preaching in England throughout the 1650s.149 It was significant that the two theologians who were debating the spiritual experiences of a disbanded Dublin fellowship were based outside the island; the claims they made—which were either confirmed or disputed by the experiences of the Dublin saints—transcended merely local interest and became an issue of gospel-defining importance. Other debates engaging Irish Cromwellians began in England. Christopher Blackwood’s first book against infant baptism, published in 1644, was answered in England by Thomas Blake, Stephen Marshall, Richard Baxter, and Cuthbert Sydenham, but the debate continued after Blackwood’s move to Ireland in 1652, where he was answered by Samuel Winter and Edward Worth.150 Both the British and Atlantic contexts gave the Irish movement its distinctive character. These links between the old and new worlds facilitated the rapid dissemination of ideas. Protestantism in Cromwellian Ireland was a complex social and intellectual phenomenon that emerged from a British and American network of ideas and personnel.151

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II Anyone approaching Protestant religion in the mid-seventeenth century is compelled to consider the vexed issue of taxonomy. Of course, many of the period’s sectarian terms—puritan, most famously—were themselves the insulting by-products of theological debate. In fact, the term puritan rarely occurs in Irish literature of the 1650s. It had made earlier appearances, most notably in the ecclesiastical troubles of the 1630s, but its absence from the literature of controversy two decades later signals the extent to which the ‘‘Puritanism’’ condemned by certain of the bishops had asserted its status as the new theological and ecclesiological mainstream.152 Despite that hegemony, the term is too slippery to be used to describe the totality of religious cultures in Cromwellian Ireland. The movement was certainly dominated by puritans—those pushing for the further reformation of the church. But the religious culture of the period defies any collective categorization. John Coffey’s argument that we need more terms, rather than fewer, to describe the varieties of early modern Protestantism applies with force to the complex of religious contexts in Cromwellian Ireland.153 It is now a commonplace to begin studies of the ecclesiastical history of the seventeenth century with a definition of puritan. Despite recent trends in discussion, historians can never quite escape from the fact of their existence: ‘‘To define Puritan may be hard,’’ Geoffrey Nuttall has admitted, but puritans continue to be recognized.154 Irish protestants in the 1650s certainly struggled with the problem of definition. Across the board, they were committed to a policy of sola Scriptura and were interested in recovering for the present the conditions of the biblical church. Some thought that they had been closer to that ideal pattern before the abolition of episcopacy, but others looked to the past with dissatisfaction and pressed for further reformation. The groups that emerged throughout the decade policed their internal orthodoxy with vigor. Simultaneously, influential divines attempted to create a broader consensus, a kind of confessional mainstream which included pastors and congregations from a variety of ecclesiological backgrounds in a shared deference to the publications of the Westminster Assembly. The Dublin and Leinster association was composed of broad-minded Independents, who appeared to be open to an alliance with Baptists;155 the Ulster Presbyterians were theocrats who held to the continuing obligations of the Solemn League and Covenant; and the pragmatic Presbyterians of the Cork association were essentially Erastians, without definitive ecclesiastical convictions; but all of these groups adhered to the system of theology contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Clear

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differences remained, and even those who acknowledged the authority of the Westminster Confession were not consistently pushing for further reformation. The ministers of the Cork association were one of the ‘‘Old Protestant’’ groups favored by Henry Cromwell in the latter part of the 1650s, but their obvious continuities with and sympathy for the Anglican past set them at considerable distance from the Ulster Presbyterians, the other Old Protestant group, who had covenanted together to pursue the extirpation of prelacy. The term puritan, however it is understood, or any alternative means of categorization based merely on emerging denominational adherence, cannot adequately deal with the enormous range of protestant thought in Cromwellian Ireland. This range of opinion should not disguise the fact that Cromwellian administrators were deliberately and self-consciously sponsoring a reformation. Cromwell’s letters and speeches made it clear that he believed the Irish reformation would actually begin in 1649.156 In fact, the ecclesiastical movement he sponsored advanced on the basis of provisions that had been made two years before.157 In June 1647, Anglican clergy in Dublin were forbidden to use the Book of Common Prayer; the ruling was extended nationwide in 1649.158 But the legislating of reformation was a profoundly negative affair. The only systematic provision for theological renewal came with the institution of the Westminster Assembly’s Directory for Public Worship. Its spare provisions described good practice for a number of pastoral and ecclesiastical situations, but some thought even its brevity too much of a burden. John Cook mingled sentimental attachment to Anglicanism with an antiformal support for toleration when he lamented ‘‘that Anti-Christian state of men that would be obtruding and enforcing Liturgies and Directories upon God’s people.’’159 But a new lease on life was given to the reformation project in the aftermath of the sermon preached by John Owen at the end of February 1650. The ‘‘Act for the better advancement of the gospel and learning in Ireland,’’ passed in early March, did not define the boundaries of an idealized Irish protestant movement, but it did enact a series of administrative reforms, transferring the properties of the Archbishop of Dublin and the Dean and Chapter of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to a committee of fifteen commissioners, which included Owen, Henry Ireton, Henry Cromwell, Jonathan Goddard, and Jerome Sankey. The commissioners exercised a great deal of local power, seizing the property of Christ Church Cathedral, maintaining Trinity College, and investigating the possible establishment of a second college and a free school.160 Explicitly theological consideration was limited to Parliament’s agreement to send six preachers to Ireland.161 The preachers were recruited from across the theological board—Samuel Winter was a conservative Independent, somewhat given

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to mystical experiences; John Rogers was a supporter of the open-communion fellowships that attracted a membership of those baptized as children and those baptized as adults; and Thomas Patient was a vigorous opponent of anything but the Baptist ecclesiology for which he had already suffered. The London Parliament was slow to define the acceptable boundaries of orthodox thought, preferring to let the Irish movement take its own course within the theological spectrum found acceptable by the Cromwellian elite. The Irish reformation was purposefully undefined. Nevertheless, even when they disputed what it involved, everyone was clear that reformation was important. ‘‘Universal Reformation’’ was to be applied to each of the Irish institutions, and John Cook, for example, repeatedly maintained that Ireland needed reformation in her laws.162 A reformation of manners was directed towards the Anglicization of native names, dress, and language.163 But the idea of reformation was most consistently pursued with reference to theological ideas and ecclesiastical fabrics. It was certainly a timely project. Claudius Gilbert believed that ‘‘the special Season’’ for ‘‘the Work of Reformation’’ would be in ‘‘the latter dayes.’’164 It was also a vital necessity. The ministers of the Cork association explained that ‘‘the interests of the English Nacon or protestant religion’’ could not ‘‘in this Kingdome be long secured’’ without the reformation of the church.165 But others thought some notions defended by the idea of reformation were preventing the spread of truth. Replying to such claims, Major Richard Hodden, the Quaker governor of Kinsale, reminded Henry Cromwell that theological ideas should not be strictly controlled, for all truth could not yet be known: ‘‘Reformation is begun not finished.’’166 The idea of reformation provided a foil against which the Cromwellian experiment could be assessed. Quaker missionaries asked how Cromwellians could ‘‘tell of reformation’’ while pursuing the same persecutions as the bishops they claimed to replace.167 Everyone thought they knew what reformation meant— and some, like Edward Warren, were certain that it had gone too far. Radical groups were growing in influence and power, he lamented; Irish protestants were ‘‘like to come to a strange kind of Reformation at last.’’168 The need for ecclesiastical reformation was epitomized by the ruined state of many Irish church buildings. In Tallaght, Captain Aland demolished the church building in order to build a house in Kildare and pave a kitchen in Dublin.169 Walter Gostelo reported that the church in Lismore ‘‘had neither door to keep out the unclean beasts, nor in it any thing, becoming a House set apart for the worship and service of God Almighty. . . . Out of it I often hunted Beasts of several sorts; which (indeed) by their dung, recreating themselves in the ruins of it, had help to make it with their fellows, more like a Den of

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Thieves, than a House of God.’’170 It was ‘‘scandalous to the Protestant Religion,’’ he lamented, that such disrepair should be the effect of a war carried on by individuals ‘‘who pretend to them most and best of Piety.’’171 This kind of sacrilege was unacceptable, for native Catholics could see that ‘‘we deal with the House of God and his Worship (although we pretend much to both) as Amnon dealt with his sister Tamar; first Ravish her, then Defile her, and after turn her out of doors.’’172 Gostelo had highlighted an extreme example of the decay of ecclesiastical fabric, much of which actually predated 1641, but the administration was sensitive to the material needs of the churches and set about an ambitious program of institutional and administrative reform. A great deal of effort was expended to recruit and train more ministers, to provide for better clerical salaries, to reorganize ecclesiastical structures, and to improve the fabric of ecclesiastical buildings.173 The administration was properly concerned for church fabrics. But it was ideas rather than institutions that gave the Cromwellian movement its dynamic. Supremely, Cromwellian protestants were driven by a shared hostility to Irish Catholicism. That opposition was not often expressed in English-language publications. Ultimately, there was little need to rehearse in English what could not be read by most natives. But when anti-Catholicism did appear, it was certainly vituperative. John Cook gave vent to robust declamations: Their Popes have been monsters of mankinde, conjurers, witches, and divells in a humane figure; . . . Priests and Friars are very cheats and theeves in robbing poore deluded simple people; . . . their Priests by their law are not to marry, and by custome not to live chast; . . . the pretended miracles they brag on, are mere impostures; . . . their true miracles are onely such as these their Priests to have no wives, and yet many children; Friars to have no ground and yet most corne; no money nor vineyards yet the best Sellars of wines and provisions; . . . it is a miracle that they doe not all rise as one man against the Pope for his cruelty, that having power (as they hold, and himselfe confesses) to let out and discharge all their ancestors & friends from Purgatory (which they say, is as hot as Hell fire) yet will not doe, because they have not money enough to give him, and his Priests for it.174 Cook’s outright hostility to Catholicism went hand-in-hand with warm nostalgia for ‘‘old English puritans’’ such as the ‘‘heavenly Doctor Sibbs.’’175 The immediacy of the Catholic threat led Cook to imagine a pan-protestant solidarity that minimized the dangers of the old Anglican settlement. He argued that ‘‘the substance of the doctrine of the Church of England . . . is in most

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things inviolable, inalterable, and immutable.’’176 But others disagreed, opposing the via media for its rejection of the new light they had discovered. Sentimental attachment to Anglicanism grew less common as the decade progressed and as advanced saints popularized theologies that had first arrived in Ireland with the Cromwellian troops. The variety of belief the soldiers promoted was made possible only by a mood of toleration that many wanted to extend to as many protestants as possible. This sympathy was shared by many in the civilian administration. John Rogers was a strong supporter of such toleration, arguing that ‘‘putting to death is none of Christ’s Ordinance; and . . . fire and faggots are no good Reformers,’’ but he believed it should be maximally extended to ‘‘Turk, Saracen, Jew, Heretick, or what you will.’’177 Of course this policy would allow for the dissemination of errors—even serious errors—but ‘‘errors are usefull, as well as truth, and it is expedient that they should be 1 Cor.11.19.’’178 Errors illuminate truth and would be a service to the saints. Toleration should be supported, he argued, for ‘‘we must not sweep up Christ’s house with Antichrist’s broom; nor fight with his hands Christ’s battles, nor with his weapons our warfare.’’179 This kind of radical talk alarmed others. Edward Warren contended that all errors were certainly not useful. He hoped the state would burn ‘‘the whole Rabble of Erroneous and Hereticall peeces, that have been printed in these Licentious book-days’’ and construct an ‘‘Index Expurgatorius’’ of forbidden titles.180 Ulster Presbyterians opposed the idea consistently and set discourses against the toleration of the sects as an examination topic for ministers in training.181 Other radicals were so appalled by theological ferment that they began to attack the policy of toleration they had once endorsed.182 They certainly had cause for alarm. By the middle of the decade, a ‘‘chaotic outburst of creative energy and spiritual experience’’ offered evidence to whoever sought it that toleration had gone too far.183 Even Thomas Patient believed he could see the results: Seekers, those who ‘‘contradict and oppose the same saying, There is no Ordinance or Church to be found in the world,’’ and Quakers, those who ‘‘boast of their being above Ordinances, saying, That Christ and Ordinances are at an end, that dispensation being for that time or age, but now they have Christ in Spirit, the substance being come, the shadows vanish.’’184 This level of dissatisfaction led to a number of attempts at local regulation. In December 1652, Winter, Patient, and John Murcot met with several other ministers to ‘‘seriously advise and consider what course is best to be taken for the effectual preaching of the Gospel in Ireland, and what persons they know fitly qualified to be sent out for that work and purpose, as well into the Irish as into the English quarters, and to certify the same with all convenient speed to the Commissioners of Parliament.’’185 Other committees of triers met elsewhere, but

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the fact that they included Baptists with other protestants made their regulation unacceptable to some. At the end of the decade, William Morris remembered how religious radicals seemed drawn to Ireland: ‘‘What Legions of these devouring Locusts have spread themselves upon the earth! and what swarmes of them hath the East winds brought into this poor wasted countrie of Ireland?’’186 Yet the theological confusion Morris had in mind went no further than the four main groups the soldiers represented—Baptists, Independents, Presbyterians and Quakers.187

III These four emerging denominations had theologies that were both cause and consequence of their changing political status. Baptists—who insisted that baptism should be restricted to believers and tended to argue that church membership and communion should be restricted to those thus baptized—grew most rapidly and had greatest political influence in the early part of the 1650s, when they enjoyed the support of a number of influential soldiers. Baptists, like other Independents, advanced an ecclesiology based on the principle that church membership and the sacraments should only be made available to ‘‘visible saints’’: ‘‘the matter of the Church ought (now under the Gospel) to be saints by calling, 1 Cor. 1. 2. Spiritual Worshippers, John 4. 23. Lively Stones, 1 Pet. 2. 5. Such as are redeemed from their vain conversation, 1 Pet. 1. 18. Such brought out of darkness into his marvellous light, 1 Pet. 2. 9.’’188 Contemporary observers argued that the ‘‘visible saints’’ concept had much less integrity than Baptist leaders admitted—Edward Warren noted that ‘‘we see many of them turn Apostates from every thing that is good, and prove carnal wretches’’189—and they worried that Baptist influence on the Fleetwood administration might be much less sanguine than the biblical metaphors suggested. Some complained that a number of individuals had joined Baptist congregations for the social or vocational opportunities they afforded.190 John Rogers, campaigning against Baptists, also worried about the relationship between sectarian membership and social opportunity: ‘‘How often hath it been said in Dublin . . . Look yee! there is one that could not tell how to live, but hath lost his trade, and for some place is got in to be a member of such a Church; and he is now preferred, and made a Gentleman, &c. . . . never more Hypocrites than now.’’191 Baptists tended to take a militant view of the natives and were among the exponents of the some of the period’s harshest policies, such as the projected program for forcible transplantation of Catholics.192 The Parliamentary

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army and the Fleetwood administration they influenced also opposed the Ulster Presbyterians, because of their Royalism, and mounted a campaign of violent oppression. The minute book of the Antrim ministers explained gaps in its narrative in summer 1649 by ‘‘George Monro’s troubling ye ministers and country’’ and explained another blank page as representing ‘‘the time of our minister’s trouble, being pursued by orders from Cromwell’s army, which continued [so] that they were debarred of public preaching from the 1st of August, 1650, until May, 1652.’’193 The Baptist star faded after 1655, when Fleetwood was replaced by Henry Cromwell, who immediately pulled back from the radicals to build a broader-based coalition of the godly. His first instinct was to promote the political interests of the Independents, who shared the Baptist view that each congregation should be self-governing and composed of ‘‘visible saints’’ but also advocated the baptism of believers’ children. Henry Cromwell found Samuel Winter, the leading Independent in Dublin, a willing ally in that cause, though, as Winter’s hopes for Independent hegemony became clear, Cromwell quickly realized that the most natural allies of government were not the Independents but actually the Old Protestants—those clergy who represented the protestant religious communities that preexisted the Cromwellian invasion. As the 1650s progressed, Henry Cromwell courted Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster and those former Anglican clergy in county Cork who had adopted a pragmatic Presbyterianism under the leadership of Edward Worth. Independents felt themselves outmaneuvered, though as complaints were made in the later 1650s against power still wielded by Winter, it is possible that their position was less marginal than has been supposed.194 Nevertheless, part of Henry Cromwell’s interest in the Old Protestants was his belief that their Presbyterian theology supported his attempt to create a broader social base for his administration, for its system of ecclesiology did not restrict the membership of the church nor, often, its sacraments, to ‘‘visible saints.’’ Presbyterian theology would always have a broader and more conservative social appeal. Therefore, the administration’s movement from dependence upon Baptists to support for Old Protestants showed English political influence in Ireland moving increasingly away from the radical fringe. Baptists, Independents, and the more radical groups could easily be classified as ‘‘puritan,’’ insofar as they were pressing for a more thorough reformation than any yet attained; but the Old Protestants were a more ambiguous group, with the Cork association looking to the Episcopalian Irish reformation and the Ulster ministers looking to covenanted Scotland for their ideal ecclesiastical pattern. Despite their ambiguous position, Presbyterians in Ulster generally enjoyed their reversal of fortunes. Anthony Kennedy, the minister who had been

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hunted by Cromwellian forces, recovered his good graces with the administration and benefited financially as a result: in 1655, his salary of fifty-nine pounds was paid by the congregation; in 1657, his salary had been raised to one hundred pounds and was being paid by the government’s Civil List.195 Kennedy was one of over forty Irish Presbyterians who came to be supported by the state.196 But the policy of state support was divisive. The movement away from the support of congregational tithes was a movement away from Presbyterian norms. In addition, many of the Ulster Scots viewed the Civil List—which supported a wide variety of protestant clergy—as a contradiction of their covenanted responsibility to work for the implementation of a national church structured along purely Presbyterian lines. They viewed the administration and the groups it sponsored with suspicion and had good reason to be suspicious— even of other Presbyterians. The Cork association later admitted that it had adopted Presbyterianism reluctantly, to attend the flock while ‘‘the fold had broken downe rather than exposing the sheep to Wolves till the fold should be refixed.’’197 Old Protestants, therefore, were held together by a shared ecclesiology and a shared commitment to use that ecclesiology to foster a conservative program of social control. But there the similarities ended. The Scots were theocrats, while the ministers in Cork were Erastians. Despite their differences, these Old Protestants exercised immense influence in the later 1650s, reshaping the religious policies of the Protectorate.198 They established a new ascendancy, replacing the financial clout of adventurers and soldiers with the political influence of those protestants who had settled in Ireland before the Cromwellian invasion.199 The development of Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians clearly reflected the political changes of the 1650s. Nevertheless, while the religious ethos of the Cromwellian administration evolved throughout the 1650s and while the larger groups enjoyed bouts of political success, other groups remained consistently on the outside. There is evidence that a number of Anglican clergy were able to minister privately, sometimes as household chaplains, as Jeremy Taylor did, and sometimes as sequestered pastors retaining the financial support of their parishioners in outof-the-way locations.200 Quakers adopted a more public role, remaining outside the mainstream despite repeated—and sometimes shocking—attempts to influence it. Quakers voiced a wider disillusion with the state-sponsored program for religious reform and criticized those who once were ‘‘zealous to pull down the Episcopall Priests’’ but had since ‘‘exalted [them]selves in their Seates, some . . . in the same Temples . . . appearing more vile in deepe hippocrisie then [their] predecessors.’’201 Quakers became the victims of violence when the state turned its forces against the ‘‘new light’’ they represented. The ‘‘Servants of the

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Lord were halled out of your Assemblies and evill entreated, with mockings and cruell words,’’ one of their leaders remembered.202 In December 1655, the Parliamentary Commissioners ordered that all Quakers should be arrested, and the following January Quakers in Dublin were expelled to Chester, and Quakers in Waterford were expelled to Bristol.203 Nevertheless, Quakers insisted on their orthodoxy and took pains to distinguish themselves from some of the more radical movements. The Quaker leader Edward Burrough, addressing an Irish reading public, insisted that there was ‘‘much difference in Judgement and Practice’’ between Quakers and a dangerous sect with whom they were often confused—the Ranters.204 Claudius Gilbert was unconvinced by his defense: ‘‘The Ranters were merrily, the Quakers are melancholically mad,’’ he noted, as he suggested that ‘‘the Quaking crue’’ had become the victims of possession: They fume and foam, they range and rage. . . . The filthy excrements of these unclean spirits boil so excessively within them, that they do enormously work out at every part of their bodies. Their feet ramble, their tongues rail, all the faculties of their souls testifie the strangeness of their inmate. . . . The poison hath seized on their brains and spirits, as the pestilence is wont to do, and casts many into Phrensies, others into Lethargies.205 But it is difficult to know how many Ranters Gilbert might actually have met. Zachary Crofton had identified John Bywater, who had been a leading member of Rogers’s fellowship, as one of the most significant Ranters in Ireland.206 Other heretics were less obvious. Andrew Wyke, described by the Parliamentary Commissioners as a ‘‘man of meek spirit,’’ had been appointed in October 1651 to preach at Lisnegarvy and Belfast, some time before he was discovered to have been imprisoned in Coventry, on the basis of his Ranter convictions.207 Not for nothing did John Owen warn that unorthodox ministers could easily make the transition to Ireland.208 If a Ranter movement existed at all, it is most likely to have been extremely small, for radical sects proliferated at a much slower pace than they did in England. For all their eclecticism, Irish radicals were actually quite conservative. Muggletonians did not reach Ireland until the mid-1660s, for example, and claimed only a few (albeit high-placed) converts.209 Even possession and witchcraft did not represent a major threat. Seymour found only one reference to a witch trial in the Commonwealth records—and he noted that the trial ended with the acquittal of the accused.210 It was unnecessary to identify Ranters, expel demons, or pursue witches to consolidate the ranks of the godly when they were already surrounded by the violent slaves of Antichrist.

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IV This discussion of ‘‘mainstream’’ and ‘‘extreme,’’ ‘‘conservative’’ and ‘‘radical,’’ is only one way of approaching the fluid and dynamic religious world of Irish Cromwellians. In many ways, distinctions based on ecclesiological preferences are less helpful than others in explaining the variety of Cromwellian faith. Samuel Winter, for example, had much more in common with the Presbyterians of the Cork association than he had with his fellow Independent John Rogers, though he quarreled with both. Multiple matrixes of theological assent are therefore required to properly interpret the theological disputes of the period. As this anti- and multiformalism suggests, Cromwellian religiosity was driven by the rise of prophetic individualism. In Ireland, as in England, many voices from the period do not fit into any recognizable group. Walter Gostelo, who moved between Youghall, Cork, and Dublin in the period 1652–54, published Charls Stuart and Oliver Cromwell united (1655) to demonstrate his commitment to the Stuart monarchy and the Church of England but also interpreted astronomical prodigies and received visions predicting Cromwell’s engineering the restoration of Charles II, the conversion of the Jews, the fall of Rome, and an end to the wars of the Christian world: ‘‘I dare be so proud as to stile myself to often a Prophet, nay, a great Prophet also.’’211 His nearest comparables might be in England, such as Arise Evans, whom he later contacted. Gostelo was unusual, but Irish Protestantism had created the conditions for this kind of lay initiative. Preachers and other writers encouraged popular Bible reading. The ministers of the Cork association agreed that their parishioners should have ‘‘the Bereans commendation (Act. 17.11.) . . . Search the Scriptures daily.’’212 John Rogers maintained that the ignorance of native Catholics was explained by their biblical illiteracy: ‘‘Ask them what the Church believes, why they will say, as we believe; and what do ye believe? why, as the Church believes; and that is, they know not what.’’ But the godly should know scripture, he argued: ‘‘A Christian must be able to maintain his doctrine, and to warrant his opinion and judgement, whether in doctrine, or discipline, by the Word.’’213 John Cook went further, adding that the godly should be familiar with scripture in its entirety: ‘‘All such as pretend to Christianity [should] begin at the first of Genesis, and not be weary of reading till they come to the end of the Revelation, daily praying & casting themselves upon God’s assistance for the guidance of his holy spirit in the interpretation thereof. . . . It is a shame for a Child not to be acquainted with his Fathers will every legacie part and branch thereof.’’214 Lay protestants studied the sacred text assiduously. John Cook prepared for a sea journey from Wexford to Kinsale by noting ‘‘most

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of the chief places in Scripture concerning the Seas, as proper and useful for a Sea-voyage.’’215 It was as well that he did, for, in the midst of a dangerous storm, fearing for his life, Cook slipped into a coma and, in a vision, entered heaven and conversed with Jesus Christ, from whom he gained assurance that his boat would be preserved. Biblical allusions governed his reception of assurance. By providing individuals with this kind of certainty, lay Bible reading fostered the conditions for lay preaching. Popular Bible reading generated an intense distrust of the clergy. James Sicklemore, a convert to Quakerism, attacked the growing conservatism of his former pastor James Wood by appealing to his congregation to ‘‘look out no longer for a teacher, for the teachers that are without cause you to erre; but the word is nigh you, in your hearts and mouths, turn in to hear it speak, and it will shew you the way you should walk in.’’216 The believer, as an individual, already possessed everything he required to know the will of God: ‘‘It be always the Priests work to make the Scriptures clash one against another, that so they may get money of the people to reconcile them (as they say) by their meanings and interpretations: But this is deceit, and the Scriptures are true, and agree in one, being all given forth by one spirit, which doth not contradict itself.’’217 Others rejected his ideas as nonsense. The ‘‘false Prophets of this Commonwealth,’’ Edward Warren complained, ‘‘can without check smite the Prophets of God upon the face, with reviling words, dragon-like, casting a flood of waters out of their mouths, so that they may [sic] not escape.’’218 Warren’s apocalyptic register signaled that lay preaching was being driven by an untrained primitivism, finding patterns for Irish ecclesiology in descriptions of the early church. He was clearly frustrated by the rising challenges to godly order: ‘‘It is the common language of the children of Belial in these days, that if a man do but speak a word for the Ministry, and servants of God, imployed in that work of double honor, as I am here necessitated to do, there goes a Priest-ridden fellow.’’219 He had no doubt as to the source of the problem: ‘‘It is the devil’s policy now Antichrist is falling, to cry down all Gospel-truths for Antichristian, that so they may fall also.’’220 The strategy had been attempted before: It hath been the main policy of Satan in all times of Reformation, to endeavor the subversion of the Ministery of Christ, and by all means to make them fall as stars from heaven, because he then knows how to carry on his kingdom, works of darkness. And if Israel cannot be overcome when they are united to one God, in one way, in one Commonwealth; he will then divide them, because then he knows his work will thrive in the hands of Jeroboams Priests.221

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The complaint encoded a significant series of social concerns. Warren explained that Patient could be considered a ‘‘ Jeroboam’s priest’’ because he ‘‘was never ordained, to such a work’’ and because he ‘‘was made of the lowest of the people.’’222 It was an insult that spoke as much to the confusion of the times as to the inadequacy of its target. Jeroboam came to power as a leader of rebels against the Davidic monarchy and, to break the hold of Jerusalem on the minds of his people, inaugurated an alternative religious system among the northern tribes of Israel, appointing alternative cultic centers and appointing a new, non-Levitical priesthood (1 Kings 12:31). Warren’s complaint played with ideas of unjustified rebellion and unwarranted innovation. Little wonder, other writers agreed, that these irregular clergy were the cause of the falling number of true conversions. John Cook was ‘‘perswaded that there are fewer, converted and regenerated in this last ten yeares notwithstanding the multiplicities of Sermons and glorious freedome of the Gospel, then there was in ten yeares before.’’223 Winter claimed that Baptist pastors—generally unordained—were ‘‘not usually blessed by God for the conversion of poor sinners.’’ ‘‘Therefore,’’ he added, ‘‘I do not believe they were commissioned by Christ to preach the Gospel, seeing usually his presence doth not accompany them in their undertakings.’’224 Edward Worth agreed: ‘‘The most of those, who take upon them the Ministry, without ordination, are far from having such gifts, as are necessarily required in those that are instructours to others. . . . Conversion-worke went on more lively, when Ministeriall-worke was wholly in the hands of ordained men.’’225 Lay preaching was an offense to native Catholics. No wonder ‘‘the Irish and Papists are alienated from the Protestant Religion,’’ Worth noted.226 Popular Protestantism, these theologians recognized, was begetting a many-headed monster. Bookless Bible reading was the seedbed of those heresies which grew best in an atmosphere of speculation and debate. John Rogers remembered that his ministry in Dublin ‘‘had not there the help of Books . . . but the Bible, and the help of memory (but above all of the Spirit of God . . .).’’227 Others recognized that primitivism and error were produced by preachers that had ‘‘onely a little Conscience, a great deal of Confidence, and a great Concordance.’’228 Throughout the 1650s, those divines who held to the confessional tradition—especially as it had been represented at the Westminster Assembly—contrasted their classical orthodoxy with the social and theological disorder of the sectarian fringe. It is difficult to know whether they exaggerated the threat to truth for rhetorical purposes, and to what extent they may have done so, or whether the errors they identified represented genuine, existing dangers. In 1658, Thomas Harrison felt the need to refute disciples of Arminius and Socinius.229 One year later, the Dublin and Leinster

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association berated a number of ‘‘inventions of man’’ and listed Arminianism and Socinianism along with Antinomianism, Familism, ‘‘Seekerism,’’ Quakerism, ‘‘Antiscripturism,’’ Erastianism, ‘‘and what ever else is contrary to the acknowledging of the Truth which is according to godliness.’’230 Some groups appeared excessively orientated toward the law. Philip Tandy, a Seventh-day Baptist, was preaching in Lisburn in 1658.231 In 1659, the Quaker missionary Thomas Morford reported his interaction with a ‘‘Freewill’’ congregation led by Joseph Parsons, who seemed to be advocating a return to the Old Testament sacrificial system.232 Other groups were insufficiently orientated toward the law. Morford himself, as an advocate of sinless perfection, was not acceptable to the confessional mainstream, despite his claim that ‘‘thousands’’ now shared his sinless state.233 But this antinomian strain existed well beyond the boundaries of the Quaker fringe. Walter Gostelo listed the opinions of the ‘‘strange sort of cattle we have in Ireland for Religion. . . . Preachers and wise men they have amongst them, as they call them, that will tell you . . . that there is no Hell, and that their consciences never yet troubled them, though they daily swear, whore, drink drunk, besides other wickednesses, indeed what not, for sin by links is made like a chain.’’ Antinomianism was clearly contagious: ‘‘I am afraid to tell you what I have heard amongst the wicked rabble there of new opinionests.’’234 Conservative preachers had no doubt about the origin of heretical opinions—old and new. Patient slammed the tradition of infant baptism as ‘‘the Worship of Devils.’’235 Responding to accusations that he was ‘‘absolutely damned,’’ Morford turned tables on his opponents by explaining that ‘‘the cause of Damnation [is] unbelief, not believing in Christ the Light which Lighteth every one that comes into the world, which Light is within, and Spirit of Truth within, and Christ the hope of Glory within.’’236 Suddenly, everyone had the potential to become an Antichrist. Rogers thought his enemies ‘‘make their practices and principles, spell Popery, and end in Antichrist.’’237 Oliver Cromwell thought the Covenanters in Ulster on the side of Antichrist.238 Lay preachers ‘‘revile Gospell-Ministers . . . as Anti-Christian,’’ the leader of the Cork association worried.239 Significantly, radical protestants were identifying Antichrist’s influence among protestants at the same time as government propaganda was moving away from describing the Irish in such vituperatively apocalyptic terms.240 The result was hideous confusion, conservative theologians feared, and the concealing of the true Antichrist: ‘‘When that guilt is charged . . . on the Protestants, which the Protestants charge on the Papists, the Papists are thereby confirmed, as if they were as innocent as their professed Opposites and Reprovers.’’241 Antichrist’s influence was certainly not restricted to the Irish.242 It was even possible that Antichrist had instigated the

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theological debates that so engaged the Irish Cromwellians. One minister thought that the confusion of the sects could be traced to a Jesuit conspiracy. He observed that ‘‘Romish Engineers are alwaies at hand, to blow the bellows and widen differences; taking part now with one, now with the other, under a disguise. . . . They fish best in all such troubled waters.’’243 This jeremiad was taken up by the administration. Across the three nations, the political elite complained, ‘‘men are very apt to be rooting and striking at Fundamentals, and to be running out of one Form into another.’’244 ‘‘Subtil heads and carnal minds’’ were forming ‘‘innumerable parties and Factions under the banner of Religion, spreading abroad most blasphemous Opinions in defiance even of the holy Scriptures, and of God the Father, Son and Spirit, to the dishonour and scandal of our Christian profession. . . . In these things men do make shipwreck of Faith & good conscience.’’245 Orthodox puritan leaders were increasingly concerned. John Jones, a Parliamentary Commissioner, argued that ‘‘disputes produce neither grace nor knowledg but administers and ingenders striffes.’’246 One 1654 pamphlet placed the blame for religious confusion on the administrative elite Jones represented, announcing that ‘‘it is high time for our Governours to lay a healing hand to these mortall wounds and breaches’’ by establishing a formal religious settlement.247 Time was running out. God was turning against the protestants in Ireland: ‘‘There are sad symptoms,’’ Warren noticed, ‘‘and chiefly when reproach and contempt is cast upon the Ministers of Christ without check or controle.’’248 Henry Ireton saw God’s displeasure in an outbreak of plague in August 1650 and set up a number of fast days to seek the restoration of his favor.249 John Cook believed God’s judgments could be explained by the spiritual failures of Cromwellians, including their failure to properly honor the Lord’s Supper and the Sabbath day, their pride and status seeking, their pursuit of personal gain during a time of ecclesiastical crisis, and their lack of evangelistic concern for the natives.250 The rise of prophetic individualism was clearly disrupting the consolidation of the godly. Edward Warren longed for its passing: ‘‘Methinks the most acceptable news in these Athenian days, to all good men, would be, to hear our fallen Brethren reclaimed, and dissenting Protestant friends united in one Faith, under one Lord, in one Baptism.’’251 But Warren’s hopes were dashed. Piety declined as debate continued. Thomas Harrison, in 1658, complained of a ‘‘spirit of slumber, which hath so much weakened the spirit of Prayer in our days.’’252 Sidestepping controversy, his devotional sermons offered Irish audiences an example of the piety of the mainstream puritan tradition. Theological debates were a distraction. The ‘‘great plot’’ of personal salvation was sufficient to engage the Christian mind.253 But his readers could not have been

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fooled. As theologians turned to debates about conversion, baptism, church government, the possibility of the extraordinary, and the ecclesiastical role of women, Ireland, throughout the 1650s, would continue to be a land of ‘‘Idols and Ire.’’254 The invasion and its aftermath would be underpinned—then undermined—by an unstable religious dynamic.

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2 Conversion

In 1653, Zachary Crofton published Bethshemesh clouded to lament the rapid decline of Irish protestant life.1 ‘‘O poor Ireland!’’ he grieved, ‘‘delivered from Popery, into errors of another nature; from ignorance of true administrations to subjection to false and usurped administrations of the Doctrine and worship of God.’’2 It was a typically puritan jeremiad, but Crofton’s concerns had not been raised by recent experience of Irish life. Crofton had been ‘‘born, and for the most part educated in [the] City of Dublin,’’ entering Trinity College at the relatively late age of seventeen in July 1641, just weeks before the outbreak of the Ulster rebellion.3 In 1644 he left Ireland to pursue a career as a Presbyterian minister in Newcastle-under-Lyme and Wrenbury in Cheshire; he was expelled from the latter pastorate in 1651 for his refusal to support the new Republic.4 In 1653, when Bethshemesh clouded appeared, Crofton was a thirty-year-old Presbyterian committed to the conservative reform of the church in the three nations. His concerns about Irish protestant decline were not, nevertheless, due to his discovery of the continuing threat of Laudian, Arminian, or pre-reformation loyalties among Ireland’s recalcitrant natives. Dublin was being occupied by Cromwellian troops; Catholics could worship only in secret; even the plain-style worship of the Church of Ireland had been significantly reformed. Instead, Crofton’s Presbyterian sympathies were being challenged by the increasingly radical tenor of some of the most important Irish Cromwellian theologians, in particular by the evidence of spiritual decay he

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discovered in the conversion narratives emanating from one of the most influential Independent churches in Dublin. Bethshemesh clouded was published as an extended polemic against the spiritual experiences these conversion narratives described. Visions, dreams, miraculous healings, female participation in public worship—Crofton responded with real anxiety to the unorthodox and often ecstatic experiences that the conversion narratives affirmed. The new spirituality was promoting, he feared, a radically new view of the church. In Ireland, as in England, conversion narratives were being disowned by the parish-defined congregations of Presbyterianism but enthusiastically adopted by the Independent fellowships which required them of prospective members.5 Irish Independents defended the innovation on the basis that Christians should ‘‘be alwayes ready to give an Account, or Reason of his hope, to any that ask him, much more to Church Guides, as there is occasion.’’6 Even Claudius Gilbert, Presbyterian minister in Limerick, agreed that ‘‘Christians were virtually by a Parental consent, given up to the Lord, and united to his people’’ when they were baptized as infants; even so, ‘‘when they grow up to years of discretion,’’ it was ‘‘expedient they should solemnly ratifie the same in an explicite, actual manner, as they intend to enjoy the priviledge and perform the Duty of belonging to Christ’s family and Kingdom . . . whether by discourse, writing, or otherwise.’’7 To Crofton, a firm supporter of the Solemn League and Covenant, this defense of conversion narratives was anathema. Nevertheless, the new spirituality they promoted had attracted a number of high-profile converts—among them Colonel John Hewson, former regicide and recently appointed governor of Dublin, who had been ‘‘sometimes for the Presbyterians, and very rigid and bitter against all others of the Independents, till the Lord did shew . . . the Parish-Church was no true Church.’’8 Crofton lamented that by ‘‘the practice of her Princes and some of her Preachers’’ the parish churches were being characterized as ‘‘Heathen’’ and were, as a result, ‘‘generally demolished.’’9 The individualism that underpinned Independency was sapping the strength of the parochial settlement he was promoting. But there was more to spiritual decay than the crumbling of conservative ecclesiology. Bethshemesh clouded was also challenging the theology of experience the conversion narratives entailed. Against the tenor of puritan orthodoxy, the more radical of the narratives were promoting a view of conversion that promoted a new confidence in the interpretation of subjective experience and implied that assurance of one’s salvation was so normative that it should replace baptism as the requirement of admission into church fellowship. For Crofton, this challenge to conservative ecclesiology and divinity paralleled the antinomianism and emotional mayhem that was pushing some of the puritan churches ever closer to the anarchy that

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the documents of the Westminster Assembly had been drawn up to prevent. But Crofton realized he was fighting a losing battle, for the decline he was witnessing was not restricted to Dublin. His experiences in England had convinced him that Independency’s new views of the church and new theories of conversion were gaining popularity throughout the three kingdoms: ‘‘Not onely Ireland,’’ he complained, ‘‘but also England and Scotland [are] in the high-way to Apostasie, and Atheisme.’’10 Apostasy and atheism were hardly the terms that John Rogers would have chosen to describe the religious reforms he was promoting.11 Earlier that year, Rogers had published Ohel or Beth-shemesh as an extended statement of his developing theological position and as a description of the series of conversions that had seemed to signal God’s approval of it. The narratives of conversion were taken, almost in their entirety, from the Independent fellowship that Rogers had gathered in Dublin.12 After gaining his Cambridge B.A. in 1646, Rogers became a Presbyterian pastor in Essex but shook off his initial ecclesiastical conservatism when he left his Purleigh pastorate with only ‘‘a good conscience, an ill constitution, and an empty purse.’’13 In London he was offered the opportunity to gather an Independent and millennially orientated fellowship. When his preaching attracted the attention of Parliament, he was selected as one of a small number of pastors who were to be sent to Dublin to promote the work of reformation there. Arriving in August 1651, Rogers gathered a congregation in Christ Church Cathedral and introduced a range of ecclesiological practices that reflected his New England, mixed-communion, and emerging Fifth Monarchist influences. The innovations caused consternation among his more conservative peers. Baptists were outraged that their adherents were attracted by Rogers’ broad churchmanship, which allowed into church membership both those believing that baptism should be limited to believers and those favoring the baptism of believers’ infants; Presbyterians were appalled that Rogers’s church-membership policy excluded the infants of godly parents; and his fellow Independents were astonished by the fact that women were being encouraged to narrate their experience of conversion during the public worship of the church. Ohel or Beth-shemesh justified Rogers’s ecclesiological innovations by appealing to his millennial beliefs.14 Rogers’s millennialism, like that of many other puritans, was ‘‘a symbolic means of comprehending one’s personal place and duty in history.’’15 It was central to Rogers’s idea of ecclesiastical renewal. Since the late 1630s, advanced puritans had imagined the millennium as a period during which God would confirm the claims of the Independent fellowships by providing their members with unusual spiritual experiences. These experiences had been justified by an appeal to the prophetic chronology that

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seemed to suggest that a change of dispensation was imminent, such as those dates provided by ‘‘perhaps the leading English Independent of this period,’’ Thomas Goodwin.16 His Exposition of the book of Revelation (1639) stated that the biblical text ‘‘principally aimed’’ at providing believers with sufficient data to calculate an apocalyptic chronology. Goodwin suggested that the Jews would be converted by 1656, the papacy would be defeated by 1666, and the millennium would commence by 1700.17 His later (and anonymously published) sermon A glimpse of Sions glory (1641) revised these calculations, arguing that a series of apocalyptic judgments would begin in 1650 and that the millennium itself would begin in 1695.18 The increasing popularity of Independency, Goodwin believed, proved that this new age was at hand.19 Increasing numbers of gathered churches were ‘‘a beginning, or at least a near antecedent of Christ’s Kingdome upon Earth.’’20 The revival of Independency, marking the restoration of first-century ecclesiology, had been made possible only by the progressive revelation of God’s will to his people. This progressive revelation would provide Independents with spiritual experience of such intensity that they would ‘‘not need to take heed to the Word of Prophesie’’—scripture itself.21 Puritans would know the end was near when they no longer depended upon the Bible. Within the terms of this Independent millennial tradition, therefore, the spiritual experiences described in Rogers’s text were not simply evidences that God was continuing to convert his elect; they were also confirming Rogers’s claim that the blessings of the millennium were already being enjoyed within his fellowship in Dublin. Rogers was, in effect, proclaiming himself a prophet: ‘‘Experience tells me how to prophecy by the Spirit of the Lord . . . by both these together (for there is the Word and the Spirit agreeing in one) I am able to foretell, and testify to the approach of Christ, and his promises.’’22 His arguments therefore claimed divine credibility and argued for their insight into the hidden meaning of mid-seventeenth-century affairs: ‘‘I need not tell you, that all the teetering and tumbling affairs on earth now (which is universally shaking unto a new creation), are an history of Christ’s coming to reign.’’23 Everything, in Rogers’s worldview, was to be understood by its relation to the coming glory of the millennium. Certainly this millennial hope was basic to Rogers’s reading of history and current affairs. Like many other puritan restorationists, Rogers believed in the ‘‘fall of the church’’—the idea that the church’s early purity had been corrupted by the entry of ‘‘Popery, Prelacy, Superstition, Idolatry, and Formality.’’24 The protestant reformation had been incomplete—Queen Elizabeth had been ‘‘a sluttish housewife’’ for being satisfied with the via media.25 Nevertheless, God had not given up on his people. Rogers calculated from the biblical numbers

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that the church’s ‘‘Deliverance and Freedom’’ had come ‘‘running in’’ around 1643, when the London Parliament asserted its responsibility to pursue the further reformation of the church by calling the Westminster Assembly.26 In 1647, as the balance of ecclesiastical power grew increasingly radical, the theological intrusions that ‘‘brought the Church into the Wildernesse,’’ according to Rogers, began to be shaken; they would be still more ‘‘sorely shaken, and broken downe, that the Kingdome of Christ, which shall never be shaken, may remaine.’’27 As Rogers published Ohel or Beth-shemesh, the Independents had less than 45 years to wait for millennial magnificence: ‘‘At the expiration of which . . . the Kingdome of Christ shall bee glorious indeed.’’28 Rogers’s prophetic chronology was basic to the argument of his text. It explained the unusual occurrences of dreams and visions; it also justified the public participation of women in worship, as we will later see, for the Bible’s ‘‘last-days promises’’ required the development of their prophetic gifts.29 Thus Rogers’s invocation of the millennium provided him with a biblically grounded reason why the old ecclesiastical patterns could no longer apply. ‘‘We live on the brinke of the times promised,’’ he explained; ‘‘yea they are upon us, the worke is begun, God is about it, the Church is coming out of the Wildernesse, and Babylon is falling, and Zion is rising and repairing, and Gospel-order, Ordinances, and Discipline (lost in the wildernesse) restoring as at first.’’30 The millennium was about to commence, and the Dublin conversions were ‘‘a sweet posie of some of the chiefest flowers that I have met with this spring-time in the Garden of the Lord.’’31 At the climax of his prophetic chronology, Rogers was presenting his conversion narratives as nothing less than signs of the times. Whatever their dynamic theological potential, Rogers’s claims were too advanced to hold his congregation together. Shortly after his pastorate began, Rogers began to preach on the subject of church government. Even among the advanced opinions of the Dublin Independents, his theology of the church caused uproar: ‘‘There was such a nest of Hornets (which I knew not of ) till (stirring one) I angered all, who came out all at once upon me so fast, that many feared I would lose my life, ere I got away.’’32 Simultaneously, the Baptist church in Waterford appealed for their coreligionists within Rogers’s fellowship to withdraw from its mixed communion. Suddenly crippled by dissension, the Christ Church congregation suffered a damaging split. The ‘‘storm grew so high,’’ Crofton noted, that ‘‘at last it split his ship and sent him packing.’’33 Rogers returned to England as a convinced Fifth Monarchist, published Ohel or Beth-shemesh as a defense of his opinions, and progressed steadily towards the political subversion that would earn him public notoriety and eventual imprisonment.34 In Ireland, his opponents refused to be convinced by the evidence for divine approval that Ohel or Beth-shemesh had supplied. Thomas Patient, the

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former leader of the Waterford Baptist church took over Rogers’s pulpit in Christ Church, and the membership of the fellowship began to hemorrhage.35 From London, Crofton launched an all-out attack on Rogers’s claims to unusual spiritual experience and dismissed the miraculous elements of his conversion narratives as worth no more than a ‘‘Mahometan fancie.’’36 Rogers had appealed to his readers to ‘‘remember the prophecies which are ready to bring forth upon the Churches,’’ but Crofton, assuming that his readers were ‘‘rational’’ and ‘‘ judicious,’’ wondered whether Rogers’s statements were evidence of diabolical influence or merely of mental distress.37 Rogers had constructed an elaborate defense of his position, he admitted, but this ‘‘solid judicious Treatise will hardly bespeak him compos mentis.’’38 It was a ‘‘scribling age,’’ Crofton complained, and Rogers’s book was ‘‘dazling, or rather darkning the eyes of some poor souls.’’39 The theology of the Dublin fellowship was playing an influential role in Irish puritanism’s regression toward ‘‘Apostasie, and Atheisme.’’40

I The Crofton-Rogers debate illustrates the homogenizing tendency of a great deal of writing on historical theology. Since the eighteenth century, historians have tended to downplay the significance of the conversion debate. In particular, the debate suggests the limitations of the prevailing explanation of the relationship between seventeenth-century puritanism and eighteenth-century evangelicalism. In the aftermath of David Bebbington’s monumental and much-needed study of Evangelicalism in modern Britain, historical scholars have come to agree that ‘‘evangelicalism’’ began in the 1730s, with revivalist preaching and a new confidence in the understanding of spiritual experience based on developments in Enlightenment epistemology.41 Bebbington’s definition of evangelicalism— which, alongside its emphasis on conversion, highlights evangelicalism’s belief in the centrality of scripture (‘‘biblicism’’), the importance of the atonement (‘‘crucicentrism’’), and the necessity of social and religious activism—has also been widely accepted.42 He admits that evangelicalism exists in some kind of continuity with earlier forms of popular protestant piety and agrees that the puritan movement in particular seems to exhibit three of evangelicalism’s four characteristics.43 But it is evangelicalism’s emphasis on activism that makes it new, he claims; further, he claims that this evangelical activism emerged from a new view of assurance of salvation; and this new view of assurance was made possible only because of a simplified understanding of the nature of conversion

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and a new confidence in the comprehensibility of experience. Evangelicalism was, he therefore claims, a product of the Enlightenment. The Bebbington thesis’s value as an exegetical tool can be gauged by the fact that it achieved scholarly hegemony within ten years of its initial publication. There can be little doubt that conversion (along with other topics in evangelical theology) did become deeply imbued with Enlightenment ideas. Callum Brown, for example, has argued that conversion was ‘‘the most powerful and widely understood symbol of individual freedom in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.’’44 Nevertheless, a great deal of Bebbington’s discussion is built on one crucial distinction. Evangelicalism in modern Britain argues that, whereas ‘‘the Puritans held that assurance is rare, late and the fruit of struggle in the experience of believers, the Evangelicals believed it to be general, normally given at conversion and the result of simple acceptance of the gift of God.’’45 More recent publications have elucidated Bebbington’s historical dichotomy: compared to the conversion experience promoted by confessional puritans, evangelical conversion was ‘‘a simpler, shallower experience,’’46 less concerned with one’s attitude to predestinarian theology than with one’s ready acceptance of the gospel promises.47 This antithesis does not explain the Crofton-Rogers debate. Despite its frequent reiteration, therefore, the Bebbington thesis underplays the continuity between puritan and evangelical conversionism. This continuity has not been the subject of sustained study. Bruce Hindmarsh, for example, has noted that ‘‘the question of continuity and discontinuity from the Puritan to the evangelical conversion narrative . . . has yet to be explored.’’48 Nevertheless, Hindmarsh’s own research suggests that eighteenth-century evangelicals did deliberately pattern their conversions on paradigms established by puritan divines.49 Even when seventeenth-century paradigms could not be followed in detail, their authority as explanations of spiritual experience remained. The eighteenth-century American pastor and philosopher Jonathan Edwards, whom Bebbington identifies as a purveyor of the new view of assured conversion, worried about his ‘‘not having experienced conversion in those particular steps, wherein the people of New England, and anciently the Dissenters of Old England, used to experience it’’; he resolved ‘‘never to leave searching, till I have satisfyingly found out the very bottom and foundation, the real reason, why they used to be converted in those steps.’’50 Admittedly, Edwards makes this comment in 1723—before ‘‘evangelicalism’’ is believed to have emerged. But Edwards’s tortuous experience of conversion did nothing to challenge the discursive authority of the seventeenth-century divines whose writings had patterned his own dark night of the soul. Even after allegedly adopting a new conversionism in the 1730s, Edwards continued to focus on the experiential parameters

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he discovered in the English and Scottish puritan material from which he drew inspiration.51 His theology of conversion, published in his Treatise on religious affections (1746), continued to draw on the works of William Perkins (1558– 1602), Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), John Preston (1587–1628), Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), John Owen (1616–83), John Smith (1618–52), John Flavel (1630–91), and Anthony Burgess (d. 1664), among British divines, and Thomas Shepard (1605– 49) and Edwards’s grandfather Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729), among New England divines. Edwards’s experience and theology of conversion illustrates that its evangelical development could indeed be based on the experiential contours of the past. Perhaps more important, it is also possible that Bebbington’s dichotomy between puritans and evangelicals overestimates the theological homogeneity of puritan conversionism within the seventeenth century. While scholars debate the proper meaning and theological boundaries of ‘‘puritanism’’—and even its existence as a movement—they are also paying attention to the variety of theologies puritans espoused.52 The Crofton-Rogers debate demonstrates that mid-seventeenth-century puritans were debating conversion’s relationship to public worship, the validity of supernatural experience, and the relationship of ecstatic spirituality to apocalyptic expectation. Both parties were in substantial agreement that assurance should come as ‘‘the fruit of struggle.’’ Nevertheless, anticipating important developments among eighteenth-century evangelicals, they were already debating whether assurance should be ‘‘rare and late’’ (as Crofton implied) or ‘‘general and normally given at conversion’’ (as in Rogers’s narratives). Edwards’s theological progenitors among the Irish Independents were already holding to the kind of advances he would later be credited with promoting. The Crofton-Rogers debate destabilizes an important theme in the dominant historiography of protestant dissent.

II The variety of seventeenth-century theologies of conversion is easily illustrated. Conversion—however it was understood—was foundational to many kinds of puritan views of the life of faith.53 Edwards’s sources retained a commitment to the basic necessity of conversion despite competing ecclesiastical affiliations: William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, and John Preston were conforming Anglicans; Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish Covenanter; and John Owen, Thomas Shepard, and Solomon Stoddard were all Independents. But this emphasis on conversion was not limited to the leading theologians of the puritan mainstream— Baptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, and representatives of many other sects

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similarly endorsed the absolute necessity of conversion, though they may have explained it in different ways. Neither was the emphasis on conversion confined to puritans. The early modern protestant emphasis on conversionism was such that many English divines gained international fame for their attempts to help individuals pass ‘‘from death to life’’ (John 5:24; 1 John 3:14) and make their ‘‘calling and election sure’’ (2 Peter 1:10).54 Whatever other differences existed between them, ‘‘experimental predestinarians’’ agreed that the individual’s conversion was a basic necessity for salvation. Conversion was not simply necessary for those turning from one religion to another; it was necessary for anyone, whether born within the community of the church or not, to experience if they were to enter heaven. Because of this basic imperative, George Marsden has argued, ‘‘nothing was more distinctive about Puritanism than its encouragement of lay spirituality.’’55 Despite the centrality of conversion, however, the seventeenth-century confessions of faith have remarkably little to say about it. To a certain extent, their lack of extended discussion of conversion can be explained by changing patterns of theological vocabulary. Classical Calvinism did not define conversion as the entire experience of moving ‘‘from death to life’’ but as one part of the ordo salutis, one locus in the teleology of salvation. Puritan divines provided a number of theoretical paradigms for the interpretation of an individual’s spiritual experience, but regularly reduced salvation’s teleology to its most enduring metaphor, imagining it as a ‘‘golden chain’’ that stretched from the eternity before creation to the eternity after its consummation.56 Claudius Gilbert, for example, described the ‘‘golden chain of . . . salvation’’ as a ‘‘Soveraign Antidote against all fears.’’57 The ‘‘golden chain’’ idea had its roots in Romans 8:29–30, where foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification are linked. Puritan theologians added a number of other stages— including regeneration, faith, repentance, sanctification, and assurance—to complete their morphology of salvation. The ‘‘golden chain’’ then provided a vocabulary that was able to describe the individual’s entire experience of salvation, encompassing each stage of divine and human activity on the passage from election to ultimate glory. ‘‘Conversion,’’ in its technical sense, was figured as the individual’s divinely enabled response to regeneration, resulting in faith in the gospel promises and repentance from a life of sin. Defining conversion and agreeing on its importance did not put an end to the difficulties associated with it. Puritan readers anxiously inquired as to whether the faith and repentance they believed they were experiencing were actually genuine, as Rogers would put it, ‘‘real & substantial, and not shadowy, counterfeit & false.’’58 Assurance was therefore provided with entire chapters in the major confessions of faith.59 It arose as a problem because predestinarian

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divinity did not merely advance the possibility of a teleology of grace; it also theorized another teleology, leading from reprobation through the spiritual anxiety and occasional delight that led inexorably to hell. The dynamic of this confessional spirituality—and the ‘‘ideological claustrophobia’’ it seemed to encourage—became the anxious necessity of discovering which teleology best represented the path of one’s own life.60 For Calvinists, the difficulty of knowing whether the individual was saved ultimately boiled down to discovering whether God had predestined the individual to heaven or to hell. Those on the ‘‘golden chain’’ discovered that election was the foundation of their life of grace. Only God’s choice to save them could explain their enjoying true conversion despite innumerable failings. Reprobation, on the other hand, was the foundation of a life that was predestined to end in eternal torment—a fate which was ‘‘statistically much more probable’’ than salvation.61 Only God’s choice not to save the individual could explain their innumerable failings despite their occasional displays of what could look very much like the grace of conversion. Everyone had a settled teleology, the divines were arguing. Everyone’s life conformed to the narrative pattern either of ‘‘the pilgrim’s progress’’ or ‘‘the life and death of Mr. Badman.’’ The stark realities of pursuing salvation within this kind of theological system were memorably visualized by a series of theological maps. Two English translations of Theodore Beza’s Tabula Praedestinationis (1575 and 1576) popularized the idea of theological map making among English readers. William Perkins’s Golden chain (1590) introduced the idea to the puritan culture from which John Bunyan’s Mapp of salvation (1664) eventually emerged.62 The maps dramatized the theological anxiety of puritan conversion. The basic problem, which the maps ably illustrated, was that spiritual experience was profoundly ambiguous: ‘‘Up to a certain key point on the road to eternal life, things got better and better only insofar as they got worse and worse.’’63 Nor was the individual’s enjoyment of assurance necessarily anything from which comfort could be gained. Bunyan’s map admitted that individuals on both teleologies could experience assurance—the only difference was that the reprobate gained it too easily and too quickly for it to be real. The awful prospect of false assurance constantly reminded the godly of the dangers of temporary faith—a faith which looked real but did not last. False assurance, based on temporary faith, was the nightmare scenario in which puritans discovered that the assurance they believed to be genuine was based on false hopes and an improper interpretation of spiritual experience.64 As patterns of spiritual experience were mediated through maps and textbooks, conversion, for many puritans, became an intensely literary experience. The divines, wanting to make certain their readers were not ‘‘empty professors’’

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enjoying improper hope, propelled the quest for assurance to the front of the body of divinity. The quest became ‘‘perhaps the most important feature of Puritan spirituality.’’65 Puritan divines produced volume after volume answering and analyzing the resulting problems of those, like Bunyan, who wondered ‘‘how can you tell you have faith?’’66 Distinctive patterns began to emerge. Doubt, false hope, and renewed doubt became standard steps on the agonizing path towards true spiritual security. The divines represented suicide as a frequent temptation.67 Those grappling with conviction of sin were often represented as wishing themselves animals to escape their overwhelming despair.68 But distinctive and important differences also began to emerge as puritans developed competing theories of conversion. One of the most important differences among the divines was the length of time the conversion experience might take. Thomas Goodwin enjoyed a rapid conversion experience: ‘‘God was pleased on the sudden, and as it were in an instant, to alter the whole of his former dispensation towards me.’’69 Samuel Petto suspected that rapid conversions should be normative, but he was prepared to admit that many Christians might struggle for a long time without enjoying assurance: ‘‘Christians think to have assurance all at once, upon a sudden, and are apt to be very much troubled if it commeth not in by the lumpe: whereas the will of God is, to let it in sometimes by little and little; and the soule may be a long time in attaining it.’’70 That certainly seems similar to John Bunyan’s experience. In Pilgrim’s progress, Christian’s difficulties in getting through the Slough of Despond illustrate Bunyan’s own diffuse and protracted conversion experience; Christiana’s rapid progress, on the other hand, was similar to that of Bunyan’s wife, who progressed quickly to assurance of faith.71 Accounts of conversion, as Rogers would later affirm, demonstrated to readers ‘‘how various God is in his wayes and workings.’’72 ‘‘God hath diverse wayes, and diverse times, and diverse means to work with,’’ he continued; ‘‘if he doe not worke on thee or thine, one way, hee may another; he knows what means is proper.’’73 Some God calls ‘‘when younger; some when older (but that is most seldome) . . . some more violently . . . others more gently,’’ explained Rogers; to ‘‘some men he comes . . . in one way, to some in another; to some as a Lamb, to some as a Lion; to some as a whirlewind, to others as a Noah’s flood, to others as a flash of lightning, to others as a Thief in the night; to some by sicknesse, to others by crosses and losses, to others by Sermons, &c.’’74 Other differences emerged over the proper basis of assurance. John Preston maintained that true faith should be known by its fruit. Justification and a holy lifestyle were organically linked: ‘‘We are onely to take this [justifying] righteousness, and the other is but a consequent that followeth upon it.’’75

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Goodwin built on this consensus when he referred to three ‘‘levels’’ of assurance in The object and acts of justifying faith (1642). His exegesis of 1 John 5:7–8 explained that ‘‘the three which bear witness on earth,’’ providing the believer with a reliable basis of assurance, were justification, sanctification, and the inward witness of the Spirit.76 The Westminster Confession provided an alternative to Goodwin’s threefold division, describing true assurance as an ‘‘infallible’’ hope based upon ‘‘the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, [and] the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God’’; a true believer may wait long for assurance, it continued, but the ‘‘right use of ordinary means,’’ if used diligently, could bring him to wellgrounded hope. Dependence on ‘‘extraordinary revelation’’ was simply not necessary.77 Rogers, however, was ambivalent. He agreed with the puritan divines that assurance could not be based on intuitive knowledge of one’s election: ‘‘It is altogether irregular and anomalous . . . for any to pry, and pore, and peek first out for Election.’’78 Instead, because there is an ‘‘inseparable connexion between Election and Vocation,’’ one’s spiritual standing would certainly become clear in ‘‘Vocations, which is the way from Predestination to Glorification, Rom. 8. 30.’’79 ‘‘Vocations,’’ conversions, therefore enabled the church to know ‘‘who are the Elect of God.’’80 Assurance could be gained without extraordinary revelations—but extraordinary revelations were not being ruled out.

III Traditional English Calvinism, despite the stereotypes, activated individuals out of fatalistic passivity into intense self-scrutiny. Discussing the means by which spiritual experience could be properly interpreted, puritan writers encouraged believers to maintain a ledger of ethical debits and credits from which their spiritual condition might eventually become clear.81 Some emphasized the importance of spiritual journaling.82 Literary activity was essential because God’s dealings with the soul could be understood only when read in retrospect. One of the consequences of this encouragement of literary introspection was the production of hundreds of spiritual autobiographies throughout the seventeenth century.83 This substantial microcanon has recently attracted the attention of a number of literary scholars. Stephen Greenblatt’s interest in ‘‘self-fashioning’’ and identity formation has stimulated a great deal of interest in the literature of the radical and civil war sects, although, as David Loewenstein notes, ‘‘the newer historical criticism . . . has, until recently, too often ignored religion as

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a major ideological and cultural force.’’84 Within the last decade or so, a number of scholars with varying interests in Foucaultian theory have identified the process of conversion as central to the puritan experience of ‘‘subjectification.’’85 John Stachniewski noted that ‘‘seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographies exhibit, often very rawly, the way in which conceptions of the self developed through the interaction of available vocabularies and the social processes to which a human being was subjected.’’86 This process of subjectification, he and Anita Pacheco explained, is evident in the puritan quest to appropriate and articulate salvation, in which the mind was ‘‘captured by, made subject to, the experimental Calvinist culture, so that the sense of self frames itself unavoidably in its terms.’’87 These theories of conversion became ‘‘discursive mirrors against which the individual negotiated his/her self.’’88 Before the 1650s, those spiritual autobiographies that incorporated conversion accounts were generally prepared by clergy and were often appended to published versions of funeral sermons.89 Those narratives based on the lives of prominent pastors often concluded with a description of their subjects’ call to ministry.90 Despite this occasional vocational element, puritan pastors encouraged the laity to read these spiritual accounts and to adopt for themselves their characteristic virtues.91 The young Richard Baxter struggled to discern in his own experience the marks of saving faith the puritan preachers expounded.92 But his anxiety did not dispel his commitment to the didactic value of spiritual biography. Introducing a collection of the experiences of eminent divines, he was later to argue that ‘‘the true History of exemplary Lives, is a pleasant and profitable recreation to young persons; and may secretly work in them to a liking of Godliness and value of good men, which is the beginning of saving Grace: O how much better work is it, than Cards, Dice, Revels, StagePlays, Romances or idle Chat.’’93 Goodwin, similarly, used his own conversion experience to provide a model for others seeking assurance, both vocally, in sermons, and in written notes.94 He believed that examples of conversions ‘‘are to be held forth by God as flags of mercy before a company of rebels to win them in.’’95 Rogers also believed that conversion narratives could be means for the conversion of their readers: ‘‘Some that have said it to me often, have been exceedingly wrought upon by hearing the experiences of others. . . . I wish they were as much in use, whereby others might be encouraged to trust in God by hearing what he hath done for our soules.’’96 Whatever their utility, however, it was not until the 1650s that conversion narratives emerged as a separate genre. Their utility had first been theorized, within an ecclesiastical situation, by the refugee Independents in the 1630s. The Arnhem church, pastored by Goodwin and other future leaders of the movement, required candidates for membership to provide an account by

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which their status as ‘‘visible saints’’ might be attested, although, with regard to spiritual experience, their pastoral expectations were ‘‘minimal.’’97 Building on the conclusions of this experiment, radical puritans throughout the 1640s enjoyed a new liberty to organize and publicize an Independent ecclesiology that challenged the fundamental assumptions of the parish system and popularized the concept that churches should be composed only of voluntarily committed members. These congregations of ‘‘visible saints’’ required that the spiritual standing of potential members should be verified by performance, the individual’s articulation of the means by which they had themselves become assured that their conversion experience was real. Because of their role in assessing the conversions of prospective members, the ‘‘visible saints’’ were given a vital role in receiving and authenticating conversionist theology.98 This new use of conversion narratives proved to be profoundly divisive within the puritan communities. They were, in general, used only by Independents. In prospective church members, Presbyterians required only a basic declaration of faith and evidence that candidates were avoiding scandalous conduct. It was not simply that Presbyterians believed church membership should not be based on assurance because assurance could fluctuate and, on occasion, even disappear, for the Independents’ Savoy Declaration (1658) would later make the same observation.99 Instead, the churches’ attitudes toward conversion narratives were based on wider disagreements. Presbyterians and Independents disagreed about the extent to which the local congregation, the visible church, should correspond to the universal, invisible church, which consisted only of the elect. Presbyterians believed their covenant theology justified the baptism of believers’ children and therefore their church membership. Independents continued the practice of infant baptism but broke its link with church membership, which they limited to ‘‘visible saints’’; baptized children would have to recount their own conversion narrative before being admitted as church members ‘‘when they grow up to years of discretion.’’100 Presbyterians and Independents also debated the extent to which church membership operated as a means of grace rather than a confirmation of grace: Presbyterians tended to believe that the church’s administration of preaching, sacraments, prayer, and discipline had conversion as its goal rather than, as the Independents argued, its presupposition. Most basically, however, Presbyterians objected to the conversion narratives because they found no warrant for them in the Bible. God, they argued, simply did not require any public narrative of conversion in those seeking membership in his church, who may well be ‘‘the elect children of God, and really most gracious in his eyes, how unable or unwilling soever they be to make this much appeare to the worlde.’’101

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Only a fraction of the conversion narratives delivered to churches were ever published.102 However unwilling some were to see their experiences enter the public domain, many others were happy for their conversions to become the model for the experiences of others. A series of edited collections stylized the genre in the early 1650s. George Thomason, perhaps the most compulsive book buyer of the period, purchased the second edition of Spirituall experiences of sundry beleevers in January 1653.103 The work was anonymous, but the title page advertised Vavasor Powell’s recommendations of the book’s contents, and the second edition of the Short title catalogue amended its attribution of authorship to Powell from Henry Walker.104 It appears that Spirituall experiences did not emerge from a single congregation but was the product of deliberate collection; it is interesting, given the contents of later narratives in the genre, that its accounts emphasize the extent to which the converted had traveled, including references to visits to Ireland. This Irish context was also emphasized in John Rogers’s Ohel or Beth-shemesh (1653), which located its conversions within the distinctly millennial worldview propounded from its author’s pulpit in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral. This millennialism was combined with geographical range in Tears of repentance (1653), by the ‘‘apostle to the Indians,’’ the New England missionary John Eliot, which recorded the spiritual experiences of fifteen native Americans. Eliot’s missionary work was grounded in his millennial expectation that the providential ordering of the ages required the gathering of Independent fellowships among those American natives who were believed to constitute the lost tribes of Israel. In 1654, the fourth significant collection was published. Samuel Petto’s Roses from Sharon, or, Sweet experiences gathered up by some precious hearts whilst they followed in to know the Lord was printed, significantly, given the epistemological questions the puritan conversion mode raised, along with an essay describing the believer’s discerning The voice of the Spirit.105 Despite the concentration of these publications, the theology of conversion they presented was not uniform. The conversions recorded in Ohel or Bethshemesh were, for example, ‘‘more radically spiritual’’ than the conventionally Calvinist accounts in Spirituall experiences.106 But while these collections did not establish the hegemony of any particular view of conversion, they did provide models for even more radical kinds of spiritual autobiography. Susanna Parr’s Susanna’s apology (1659), for example, defended its author’s decision to abandon her Baptist church and her husband; its preparation was probably made possible by the ‘‘attention to self ’’ that the conversion narratives fostered.107 It was not, however, until the middle of the next decade that the most famous example of the genre was published. This is the context from which

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John Bunyan’s Grace abounding (1666) emerged. It is, despite its often confused chronology, a ‘‘richly exemplary text emerging from a shared cultural experience.’’108 Through Bunyan, conversion narratives were providing the paradigms for emerging literary forms. But, in the 1650s, these forms were still to consolidate, and authentic conversion was still a matter for debate.

IV Although they exist within a well-defined genre, it is difficult to assess the theology emanating from the conversion narratives recorded in Ohel or Bethshemesh. Rogers’s text candidly admitted his editorial influence and control. His accounts were reconstructed from notes that Rogers took as the original narratives were being delivered.109 For the sake of the ‘‘godly Reader,’’ he explained, he was obliged to ‘‘contract much their experiences as they were taken, least they be too voluminous,’’ providing extended space for the unusual but being ‘‘very short’’ with the more ordinary.110 His own conversion account is protracted—extending over twenty pages—while those of his church members are, by comparison, brief and sketchy, with many accounts not reaching the length of one page. Nevertheless, the accounts follow the basic paradigm established by the practical divinity of earlier predestinarian theologians: individuals are awakened to their spiritual plight, often by a famous preacher; they discover themselves under judgment, perhaps by a series of physical ills; their awakening is followed by a period of conviction, during which they suffer psychological and moral torment on account of their sin; and their conversions are often signaled by unusual spiritual manifestations that evidence God’s gracious disposition to them. Raymond Gillespie has noted that similarities between Rogers’s conversion experiences and the brevity of the church’s confession of faith indicate that it was his ‘‘emphasis on experience rather than doctrine’’ that ‘‘attempted to draw together individuals of different theological views within one godly assembly.’’111 Rogers’s fellowship emphasized conversion because it was this experience, rather than extensive theological agreement, that held it together. The members of the Christ Church congregation certainly understood the impact of social dislocation. Gillespie’s recent survey of their membership has suggested that almost all of the church members had recently arrived in Dublin.112 Of the twenty-five men and twenty women whose accounts are recorded in Ohel or Beth-shemesh, nine of the men and four of the women had traveled to Dublin in connection with the army.113 Others specifically mentioned the impact of the 1641 rebellion and the deaths and injuries their

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families incurred as a result.114 The accounts’ frequent references to English preachers support the view that many church members had strong English connections. Humphrey Mils and Elizabeth Marrow had heard the conforming Anglican, Richard Sibbes, ‘‘that sweet Saint (now in Heaven),’’ who had died in 1635;115 Anne Hewson had appreciated the London ministry of the nonconforming Ezekiel Culverwell, which had ended with his death in 1631;116 Andrew Manwaring heard the Independent leader John Owen, while he was Cromwell’s chaplain in Ireland;117 and John Spilman had been a member of William Bridge’s emerging Fifth Monarchist congregation in Yarmouth.118 Many of Rogers’s congregants therefore delivered their narratives with what could have been a fairly detailed knowledge of the English puritan tradition in all its theological breadth. Rogers’s own theology of conversion, outlined in Ohel or Beth-shemesh, similarly interacts with a range of protestant divines, including the influential puritan leaders Sibbes, Culverwell, Ames, Twisse and Rogers of Dedham, as well as the Independent leader Thomas Goodwin, the antinomian Tobias Crisp, and his own father and devoted Laudian, Nehemiah Rogers. Thus Rogers’s ‘‘ordinary’’ conversions, effected ‘‘by such means as, preaching, praying, reading, writings, or such like,’’ appear to follow the basic pattern advocated by the mainstream divines. They evidence a twofold call, Rogers claimed, ‘‘legal’’ and ‘‘evangelical’’; those who are ‘‘first called by the Word, and preaching, are then 2. confirmed by the Scriptures and promises; and 3. assured by the presence of Christ revealed in them.’’119 Actually, a great deal of Rogers’s conversion theology was defined within the boundaries of the confessional mainstream, though his terminology did tend to vary from it. Rogers theorized two approaches to gaining true assurance of faith. ‘‘Twin-testimonies,’’ so called because they went together ‘‘like a paire of Indentures,’’ involved the reciprocal and infallible witnessing of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit (Romans 8:16, 9:1), and the Holy Spirit and scripture.120 ‘‘Single testimonies,’’ by contrast, were not infallible. They were based on observing a lifestyle of holiness; they ‘‘follow in the effects and marks, which may be testimonies to others, as well as to ourselves, of our assurance; but such are not alwayes certaine, yet such as the Church judges upon in Charity.’’121 Rogers emphasized that a holy lifestyle could provide believers with confidence of their salvation but noted the danger of rooting assurance in the ‘‘single testimony’’ of sanctification. Even the unregenerate could display character changes that could easily be mistaken for true holiness. ‘‘It is dangerous to place assurance in mortification of sinne, and dying to our former lusts, or in vivification, and living a new, another life,’’ he claimed, because ‘‘such as are legally enlightened may lay hold on Promises, claspe about Christ; cry out, away with their lusts; meet with some soul meltings in praying, preaching,

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reading or the like . . . and yet be under darkness, doubts, fears, &c.’’122 Real salvation required real spiritual experience; ‘‘experience teaches more, and better’’ than ‘‘books, Scriptures or the like.’’123 As this eclipse of the centrality of scripture indicates, Rogers’s ambition was not merely to demonstrate his affinity with the puritan mainstream. Instead, emphasizing again and again the significance of the ‘‘extraordinary’’ conversions, he pointed to his narratives as proofs of impending millennial glory. If the narratives could only be more widely known, he mused, then how ‘‘obvious to every eye would be the work which God is about . . . in this age!’’ The doctrine of progressive revelation that justified the eclipse of scripture would then be confirmed: ‘‘Then we should see how far these experiences surpasse the former, or the Saints in former ages; and how far our childrens will be before us.’’124 The extraordinary elements in the conversion narratives were justifying Rogers’s revolutionary claims to the prophetic future of Independency. But not everyone was persuaded. Rogers himself admitted that experience was hard to quantify and open to deception.125 As we will see in chapter 5 experience itself was a matter of some debate. Nevertheless, the unusual experiences that signaled the incoming millennium had to be defended. The conversion narratives in his book reiterate the miraculous and the uncanny. Francis Bishop reported that he was impeached in Dublin ‘‘upon an Article of War, for to lose my life.’’ In prison and in despair, he remembered, ‘‘the room was all alight, and I saw my selfe as in a lightning, and being terrified, I looked till I saw it written in these words, Thy sinnes are pardoned, and thy life is hid with Christ in God.’’126 The faith of John Cooper was similarly confirmed in a dream. After spending time in prayer, he fell asleep and dreamed that he was walking with Rogers, Colonel Hewson, and the ‘‘Bishop of Clogher,’’ now Cromwellian scoutmaster Henry Jones. Rogers promised to lead them to ‘‘a place of great joy and comfort before too long, if you will but follow mee.’’ Rogers’s prayers opened a gate that led the quartet into a large garden, where their path led them to a pit containing a pike. Rogers, Hewson, and Jones all passed safely across, but Cooper, attempting to cross the pit, found the pike dangerously swaying and bending. He was able to pass over only when Rogers gave him his hand. ‘‘I might have known more,’’ Cooper complained, but he woke too soon. The dream called Cooper into the fellowship of the Independent church and simultaneously confirmed the charismatic authority of its pastor— perhaps the reason why Rogers included it as a fairly lengthy account.127 Despite the Westminster Confession’s dismissal of the necessity of extraordinary revelation, Rogers noted that the ‘‘most extraordinary’’ conversions involved words ‘‘uttered in Dream, Trance, Voice, or Vision.’’128 Elizabeth

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Avery heard a voice that finally brought her assurance.129 Edward Wayman remembered being converted through a dream of a ‘‘great black terrible dog, which seized upon me, and took hold on my ear fast, which I thought was the Devil.’’130 Dorothy Emett heard a voice while she was sleeping: ‘‘(I thought) that [it] said, I am the Fountain of living water: and when I awaked, I was much refreshed.’’131 Mary Burrill had in her dreams ‘‘two terrible conflicts with Satan.’’132 Ruth Emerson thought she heard the damned roaring in hell.133 Rogers, too, ‘‘thought [he] heard the damned roaring and raving, and saw them (as ’twere) roasting, and their frisking and frying in everlasting torments.’’134 It was in a dream that he eventually discovered God’s will for his call to the pastorate.135 In contrast to the puritan confessional mainstream, Rogers and his fellowship were attributing a great deal of merit to extraordinary revelation.

V Crofton did not share this enthusiasm for the unusual: Rogers’s claims were nothing more than ‘‘Rare Logick.’’136 Crofton repudiated the conversion narratives, not because he was opposed to conversion but because he recognized that puritan tradition was being manipulated to emphasize themes far to the left of the confessional mainstream. Crofton’s claim that Rogers had misinterpreted scripture was basic to his argument; but so too was his claim that Rogers had misinterpreted—even deliberately misrepresented—the opinions of earlier divines.137 Similarly, Crofton disputed Rogers’s reception of the puritan millennial tradition. Citing one of the fathers of the tradition, the Cambridge scholar Joseph Mede, Crofton disputed many of the conclusions that Rogers and his fellow radicals had drawn from Mede’s work.138 Citing Thomas Brightman, Crofton agreed that the rise of Antichrist began with Constantine but argued that Rogers’s belief in the subsequent fall of the church was grossly exaggerated: ‘‘For the Rabbi’’—the descriptor indicates Crofton’s mockery of Rogers’s display of Hebraic learning—’’at one clap to pronounce the whole Church to be fallen from the discipline of Christ (in his large sense) ever since the daies of Constantine, is to be more then will be justified, and too censorious of those who maintained the truth against particular innovators, and under the growing corruption of the Church.’’ Rogers’s claims set him apart from the reformation mainstream, Crofton continued: ‘‘All Protestant Churches . . . never denied to own the four first General Councils of Nice, Chalcedon, and Constantinople and Ephesus, in respect of their doctrine and authority.’’139 But Crofton’s ambition was as much to destabilize Rogers’s view of the future as of the past. He dismissed the millennial dream of an earthly

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reign of Christ and his people as a ‘‘strained fancy.’’140 Rogers’s belief that millennial societies would adopt the Mosaic legal system (an idea later propounded by Fifth Monarchists) was implausible, Crofton argued, for ‘‘the Jewish platform [was] never by the Lord imposed on any Nation.’’141 Neither could the end of the seventeenth century mark the beginning of millennial glory.142 Rogers’s hopes were bankrupt, Crofton was arguing—as bankrupt, but also as dangerous, as those of the revolutionary John of Leyden, whose millennial dreams brought chaos to the German states in the 1530s, when peasant radicals seized control of Mu¨nster, announced the beginning of the millennium, and inaugurated a series of policies so disruptive of civil order that it took the combined forces of local protestant and Catholic armies to suppress their primitivistic frenzy.143 The specter of Anabaptist terror was haunting revolutionary Dublin. Crofton was undermining the basic restorationism that pervaded Rogers’s arguments for church renewal and its millennial schema for conversions. Rogers’s reading of history and eschatology had provided the essential foundation for his antiformal ecclesiology. Only by dismissing the history and traditions of the church since the rise of Constantine—and even the continuing authority of scripture—could he advocate the radical reforms that located the Christ Church experiences simultaneously in the first century and at the dawn of the millennium. However, Crofton was not prepared to allow Rogers to claim that his faith represented that of the primitive church. Crofton’s scriptural citations demonstrated that Rogers’s primitivism was, in his opinion, not nearly primitivist enough. Scripture itself, he claimed, contained ‘‘no precept or practice . . . to prove, That every one admitted, must produce their experimental evidences of grace, doth in the least look towards such an inference, or give ground for the same.’’144 In fact, so radical was the first-century disjunction between sacrament and congregation that Crofton could demand of Rogers ‘‘What particular Church did Philip bring the Eunuch to, to declare his experiences to, and require consent of, before he baptized him?’’145 Of course, the Ethiopian eunuch had been required to testify of his faith before Philip (Acts 8:37). There was therefore nothing wrong with believers testifying of their spiritual experiences. ‘‘I never shall condemn the children of God for declaring their deliverances out of desperate dangers one to another,’’ Crofton averred, for ‘‘God gives not his children sweet meats to put in their pockets, but to communicate the comforts God gives us, he would have us comfort others withal.’’146 Nevertheless, the idea that candidates for church membership ‘‘must publish such experimental evidences of their conversion, and the truth of grace’’ to persuade the church of their ‘‘sincere sanctity’’ is

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a ‘‘humane invention, to be rejected as an imposition upon God’s people, or exaction from them, that God never required.’’147 Crofton also believed that Rogers’s understanding of church membership had strayed from biblical precepts. The demand for conversion narratives effectively prohibited from church membership all those who had yet to appropriate the dynamics of the conversion narrative genre, as well as all those who had insufficient assurance that they were the Lord’s: ‘‘Christians lately converted, weak in the faith, that are in a capacity of falling, and may need to be restored with a spirit of meekness, are . . . declared unfit matter for this Church.’’148 The consequence was that the purpose of church membership had been turned upside down. The new ecclesiology had conversion and assurance as its precondition—not, as Presbyterians argued, its goal.149 Thus, Crofton argued that Rogers had put the bar for church membership too high, as if Christ had ‘‘no lambs in his fold, to be born in his arms and bosom, no babes in his family to be fed with milk, no weak hands to be lift up, no feeble knees to be strengthened, no weak and little ones that may be offended.’’150 Not only were weaker or less experienced Christians, ‘‘who are many time more unable to speak the work of God wrought upon their heart,’’ excluded from the means by which their faith could be encouraged;151 Rogers’s restriction of church membership to ‘‘visible saints’’ also mounted an attack on the Presbyterian inclusion of infants in church membership. ‘‘Infants, though of such Saints, are utterly excluded, for they are not so tall heavenward, nor have such strength of grace as he requires: nor if they had, can they declare experiences, and give evidences of the work of grace on their soul.’’152 The effect of this innovative ecclesiology, Crofton argued, was to exclude from the benefits of church membership precisely those Christians who had most to gain from it: ‘‘Oh comfort-checking, heart-cutting doctrine, to shut out of the Church many a gracious heart, and poor beleeving soul, because not tallest, strongest, most beauteous most upright.’’153 Church membership, then, became not merely the privilege of ‘‘visible saints,’’ but of those ‘‘visible saints’’ who had wellgrounded assurance that they were truly converted and could articulate it in a persuasive manner. The purpose of the church, and its relation to conversion, had been inverted: ‘‘It is indeed no wonder that conversion is not made any end of his Gospel-discipline; for that they that by his meaning must be under it, are not only converted but confirmed Saints.’’154 Crofton denied that assurance of conversion could be a proper ground of church membership, because it could not be infallibly known. If it were difficult for puritan pastors to assess the signs of salvation, it would be harder for laypeople, untrained in the theoretical dynamics of the morphology of

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conversion. At least the Presbyterian pastors were using fairly objective terms of admission; but ‘‘will the Church judge impartially? . . . Can the church judge infallibly of the influences of soul-sanctifying graces? and by what characters must they judge?’’155 Only ‘‘an hot influence on their spirits,’’ Crofton feared, could enable radical congregations like the Christ Church fellowship to determine ‘‘that this is a real Saint, and that is none.’’156 But this means of assessment was displacing the traditional locus of ecclesiastical and pastoral authority. Now it was the congregation, not the clergy, who were policing the boundaries of the community of faith; and the means by which they did so were moving from the objective to the subjective, from the rational to the ecstatic. But Crofton’s sensibilities were outraged when the emphasis moved beyond the ecstatic to the miraculous. Rogers’s narratives had reiterated the miraculous components of his conversion because they affirmed his pastoral status, his claims of imminent millennial glory, and therefore divine sanction for his Independent ecclesiology. Like the Westminster divines, however, Crofton consistently argued that miracles or ‘‘extraordinary revelation’’ proved nothing. Despite their powerful spiritual appeal, Crofton found Rogers’s narratives ‘‘incredible’’ and ‘‘of no more force then the reported travel of Mahomet from Medina to Jerusalem, and so to heaven, where he saw the order of the Angels, & felt the cold hand of God.’’157 He claimed that the vision of Francis Bishop was no more than a dream.158 He denied that Thomas Huggins could have had the Spirit poured upon him because his narrative did not mention the visible form the Spirit took.159 But like Rogers, Crofton grounded his analysis of spiritual experience in an extended historiographical discourse. The ground of Crofton’s certainty was also a reading of history: ‘‘I consider miracles to be ceased . . . for more then a thousand yeares.’’160 But even if an appeal was to be made to primitive Christianity, Crofton argued, ‘‘these visions finde not a parallel in God’s book.’’161 To Crofton, Rogers’s claims for converting miracles ultimately proved nothing; when these miraculous claims were subtracted, the narratives lacked any compelling evidence of their subjects’ actual conversion. The ‘‘terrible convictions, trembling dejections, and dreadful despondencie of spirit’’ they celebrated, Crofton suggested, could be either ‘‘preparatives to grace’’ or ‘‘may be, and have been in many a soul where true saving grace was never seen.’’ Even spiritual ecstasy means nothing, Crofton noted: ‘‘The devil sometimes doth fill the soule with sudden raptures of transcendent joyes.’’ Thus, when ‘‘these extraordinary experiences [are] refused,’’ not ‘‘one infallible character of saving sincere grace is exhibited.’’162 The ultimate problem with Rogers’s conversion narratives was that, stripped of their charismatic and miraculous components, they were not narratives of conversion at all.

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Crofton could hardly have made a more serious allegation. Yes, Rogers was misquoting and misusing godly authors.163 His writing was full of confusion— ‘‘tautologies, solecism, paralogisms, incongruities, impertinences, extravagances, irrationalities, contradictions, railing epithets, reviling invectives, false glosses upon Scripture, & false charges upon the Presbyterians in general, or any particular Antagonist, and the like.’’164 Anyone who would follow him, Crofton feared, ‘‘may easily be lost in the walks of his Chronology thickets of similitudes, Prophetical rules, and pathetical exhortations placed on every hand.’’165 But Crofton was claiming that Rogers was confused on the most fundamental component of puritan divinity: ‘‘Mr. R. hath read the Bible (but left his reason behind him, when he comes to infer).’’166 It was to the Bible that Crofton made his final appeal: ‘‘Whilst you finde men so much moulded into spirit, as to seclude reason in their doctrine and practices, and to decry the external Ordinances of God, let it be your care to light your reason at the Lamp of God’s Word.’’167 Departure from scriptural norms—which Rogers argued was a sign of millennial spirituality—was dismissed by Crofton as an empty hope.

VI When Rogers left Dublin to return to London, he was provided with a certificate of good service from the authorities in Dublin Castle, commending him as ‘‘painfull and industrious in the work of the ministry.’’ ‘‘We shall be glad,’’ they said, ‘‘that such laborious faithful instruments may receive encouragement to repair to this land for the refreshment of poor souls, and for the propagating and carrying on the interests of Jesus Christ there.’’168 Actually, Rogers was about to begin a debate that would reach to the heart of the identity of the Cromwellian administration, a debate that would open up the definition of ‘‘puritan’’ by highlighting the remarkable spectrum of concerns the Irish movement encompassed. Crofton’s response emphasized the extent to which conservative puritan thinkers were vigorously policing the self-conscious boundaries of their movement. But it also demonstrated what was at stake. If Crofton was right that Rogers had misunderstood the most important locus of protestant theology, his concept of the gospel was fundamentally unreliable. If Crofton was right, Rogers was not simply insufficiently puritan—it was not certain that he was even a Christian. If this were the case, Ohel’s ‘‘conversions’’ illustrated the deception of Rogers’s adherents and proved that Rogers’s ‘‘church’’ was certainly unworthy of its name. These conclusions are evidence of the intensely self-critical spirit of radical protestants in Cromwellian Ireland. The Crofton-Rogers debate illustrated the

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contingency of their ‘‘puritanism,’’ the extent to which the reforming agenda shared by radical protestants could incorporate mutually incompatible goals and even subjectivities. But, eighty years before Jonathan Edwards, it also illustrates that protestant thinkers were already debating conversion in terms of the necessity and reliability of subjective experience. Ecstatic subjectivity was combining with millennial ideology to challenge dependence on ‘‘the Bible only.’’ Rogers and Crofton knew how much was at stake in conversion in Cromwellian Dublin.

3 Baptism

In May 1653, John Murcot, a well-connected graduate of Merton College, Oxford, traveled to Cork to preach at the request of local clergy.1 As a minister adhering to the Independent system of church order, he had already faced a series of challenges to the fulfillment of his clerical calling. In the 1640s, his studies had been interrupted when Royalist troops occupied his university; on his first journey to Dublin, in 1651, he had narrowly escaped capture at the hands of pirates in the Irish Sea.2 In Cork, Murcot’s ministry met with much success until he became entangled in a controversy that threatened to tear apart the local administration and, more widely, the Cromwellian reformation in Ireland. The tension was focused in the relationship between two leading members of the Cromwellian elite. Dr. John Harding, a former Anglican clergyman who had retained his position as trustee and senior fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, responded to the polemics of one of the most reputed local churchmen, Dr. Edward Worth, by agitating local puritans on the proper subjects of Christian baptism.3 The impact of their debate, if we are to believe Murcot, proved more deadly than the effects of Royalist soldiers or Irish Sea pirates, for it grew so serious as to actually impede ‘‘the free progress and passage of the Gospel‘‘ in the city.4 As the debate spiraled out of control, Murcot and Harding plunged into discussion about the validity of syllogistic reasoning, while Worth sought to bring closure by publishing his Scripture evidence for baptizing the children of Covenanters.

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Produced at Cork in two sermons, one preached April the 7th, the other June the 2nd, 1653 (1653). Discontent proved contagious, and theological uncertainty spread across Munster. In December, Dr. Lamb was denying infant baptism in public debates in Youghall.5 By then the worst of the damage was done. Murcot, Harding, Worth, and Lamb had successfully demonstrated the theological tensions crippling the Irish Cromwellians and the manner in which a debate about a sacrament could overwhelm wider aspects of the administration’s social program.6 The Cork dispute was symptomatic of a wider discontent. Debate about baptism took place across Ireland and throughout the decade, becoming, in Ireland and beyond, ‘‘one of the most substantial controversies of the revolutionary period.’’7 It typified the radical rethinking of the most trusted of religious verities. Systematically stripping their congregations of the remnants of medieval ecclesiastical assumptions, radical protestants had begun to consider the proper biblical boundaries of the local fellowship—its liturgy and discipline, its government, and its relationship to sister congregations. But while these issues generated extensive discussion, their significance was eclipsed by controversy over the church’s proper membership. The issue was of defining importance to both the supporters and the critics of the new religious movements, and the stakes were enormous. The debate about the boundaries of the local church attempted to define—and thus control—the contours of authentic Protestantism; and the contested ritual at the heart of this discussion was the sacrament of baptism.

I The baptism debate in Cromwellian Ireland shattered the traditional fluidity of Irish protestant life.8 Throughout the early seventeenth century, the unique situation of Irish protestants—surrounded by the armies of Antichrist and existing only with the uncertain support of successive English administrations— tended to generate a very fluid sense of denominational identity.9 Until Wentworth’s attempts to impose Laudian uniformity in the Irish church in the 1630s, several varieties of Protestantism had managed to coexist (with various degrees of uneasy compromise) inside the same establishment.10 During the 1640s, with the reassertion of the liberties of the English Parliament, Wentworth’s deposition, and the official replacement of the Prayer Book with the plain Westminster liturgy, Irish protestant church life returned to its familiar imprecision. While English sects and denominations could afford to live in comparative isolation from each other, in Ireland, during the 1650s, the

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boundaries between Independents, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians were decidedly ‘‘permeable.’’11 Despite their distinctive tenets, adherents of these groups were often prepared to worship together. There were significant theological differences, such as the Independents’ insistence on a church membership of ‘‘visible saints’’ in contrast to the Presbyterians’ wider inclusiveness;12 and the Independents’ limitation of baptism to the children of ‘‘visible saints’’ in contrast to the Presbyterian and Episcopalian ambition for a national comprehension;13 but their theoretical cooperation was made possible because each of these groups agreed on the basic structure of the local church community. Because of a common adherence to paedobaptism (the baptism of infants) and the covenant theology that was increasingly being cited in its support, they could recognize as true churches those fellowships that included in their membership both professing Christians and their children. Like membership of the body politic, they argued, the privilege and responsibility of church membership was essentially hereditary; theoretically, at least, church and nation could correspond. The theology of paedobaptism had obvious political implications, but its civil and religious presuppositions were challenged by the rise of the Baptists. With their apparent novelty and rapid organization, the early Baptists generated immense suspicion.14 The fact that most of their early fellowships were Arminian in emphasis put them clearly beyond the pale of confessional orthodoxy—or so their critics claimed. The first Calvinistic Baptist church had been formed in London in 1638, and immersion was only accepted as the proper mode of baptism in 1640, but in a short space of time the movement generated immense public interest. By 1644, recorded Robert Baillie, one of the commissioners from the Church of Scotland attending the Westminster Assembly, some forty-five Baptist churches were in existence in London alone.15 One year later, Thomas Edwards, encyclopedist of English heresies, noted with concern that as many as one thousand people were attending meetings addressed by Baptist leader Hanserd Knollys.16 These years were of immense significance for the development of the movement, which formally began with the October 1644 publication of the Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists.17 The publication of the Confession—and the spiraling sectarian movement that was expected to accompany it—sent the divines of the Westminster Assembly rushing to complete their confession of faith before the London puritan underworld irreparably fragmented.18 It was a race against time. Edwards, in 1645, noted the growing momentum of heterodoxy in the ‘‘Catalogue of Errours’’ that he believed had been ‘‘vented and broached within these four years last past, yea most of them within these two last years, and lesse.’’19

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Samuel Rutherford, another of the Scottish commissioners, later recorded his belief that twenty new sects had begun in 1645.20 By 29 January 1646, when Samuel Richardson and Benjamin Cox distributed copies of the second edition of the seven churches’ confession, it had become clear that the London radicals were taking full advantage of the Westminster Assembly’s deferral in establishing a national church structure.21 Delegates stood appalled at the result of their delay. But if the conservatives imagined the Baptists to be the most concerning examples of apostasy, the movement repudiated the revolutionary legacy attributed to it. The specter of the Anabaptists at Mu¨nster haunted the debates about baptism as much as debates about conversion. In the 1640s, Presbyterian writers suspected Baptists of exactly this kind of revolutionary potential. Baillie published several volumes of A dissuasive from the errours of the time (1645) to remind London puritans that it was the ‘‘Anabaptists’’ who had resurrected the ancient heresy of millennialism—a heresy which, in the 1640s, retained its destabilizing potential.22 ‘‘Their ways as yet are not well known,’’ Baillie complained in 1646, ‘‘but a little time it seems will discover them, for their singular zeal to propagate their way will not permit them long to lurk.’’23 He dismissed their confession of faith as disingenuous, though it represented ‘‘seven of their best Churches,’’ for ‘‘these seven congregations cannot prescribe, and are no ways Leaders to a great number of Anabaptistick Churches over all the land.’’24 In the other London congregations and throughout the rest of the country, Baillie believed, most Baptists were ‘‘exceeding farre from making these Articles the rule of their belief.’’25 Even within the seven churches, he claimed, ‘‘the very prime Subscribers’’ of the confession were at odds with many of its statements.26 The evidence of their frenzy seemed to be there for all to see. Baillie’s fellow heresy hunter, Thomas Edwards, wrote with similar ‘‘horror and fury’’ about the rise of those ‘‘whirlegigg spirits’’ who were challenging the hegemony of the Westminster Assembly.27 Edwards believed that Baptists represented all that was wrong with the direction of English society. In one town in Huntingdonshire, he noted, Parliamentary soldiers obstructed the due administration of baptism, ‘‘pissed in the Font, and went to a Gentlemen’s stable in the Town, and took out a horse, and brought it into the Church, and there baptized it.’’28 Samuel Rutherford’s Free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience (1649) continued the attack, repeatedly citing wild tales of human sacrifice while, paradoxically, pointing to the pacifist excesses implied by the Baptists’ literal hermeneutic: If there be no Magistracy, nor violence to bee done to ill-doers under the New Testament, neither must we defend our owne lives, nor flye,

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nor resist injuries, but turne up the other cheeke to him that smites the one, and if a man take your cloacke, give him your coat also, according to the sense that Anabaptists put on the words; yea and cut off your hands and feet, plucke out your eyes, if they cause you to offend and shed your owne blood, which is the greatest and most unnatural violence there is.29 Whether they were being accused of millenarian aggression or literalistic passivity, Baptists were anathema to the political and theological theorists of the paedobaptist consensus. Despite these negative representations, however, those Baptist puritans who adhered to the 1644 confession did seem to tend toward theological conservatism. One of their leaders, surveying the published attacks upon the movement, later condemned those writers who ridiculed believers’ baptism: ‘‘Satan manifests his malice in throwing contempt upon the obedient and upright practisers of the same, to raise prejudices from a story of what strange Creatures were of that opinion at Munster in Germany, and stirs up others to pry into the dark side of the Saints, I mean their personal frailties.’’30 Far from being revolutionary, these English Baptists—called Particular Baptists, after their adherence to the Calvinist doctrine of ‘‘particular redemption’’—articulated their faith within the paradigms established by the mainstream Reformed tradition. Their Confession, for example, had been firmly rooted in the Reformed ecumenism of the Canons of Dort (1618–19).31 But while they tended to maintain the established soteriology of the English reformers, Baptist groups gradually—though radically—redefined the boundaries of the covenant community to include within its ranks only those who had been ritually immersed after their profession of faith. In raising the issue of the proper subjects of baptism, Baptists were challenging assumptions at the heart of puritan identity and were redefining the proper boundaries of the godly and their relationship to the state.

II In Ireland, the Commonwealth seemed to encourage the expression of such theological novelty and gave every opportunity for its soldiers to respond to the progressive revelation of God’s purposes. At New Ross in October 1649, Cromwell had stated his intention not to ‘‘meddle . . . with any man’s conscience.’’32 Two years later, the Parliamentary Commissioners appealed for help from New England, promising returning settlers that those traveling to Ireland ‘‘shall enjoy free liberty of conscience in all religious or spiritual

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matters . . . as the Lord hereafter shall further make known to them to be his will.’’33 This atmosphere—apparently tolerant of progressive revelation—was extremely conducive to Baptist growth. Despite legends of the earlier existence of indigenous Baptist groups in Ireland—Baptist preachers were rumored to exist in county Antrim as early as 164234—the movement seems to have arrived with Cromwell’s army.35 They were not slow to gain a foothold, and their success demonstrated that Cromwell’s promise of toleration was politic; his army of occupation relied heavily upon soldiers who adhered to groups on the radical fringes of the puritan underworld. But as the balance of power shifted within the Parliamentary elite, and as conservative polemicists found themselves outmaneuvered by the army grandees, Baptist soldiers suddenly found themselves at the heart of the new Irish order. Fleetwood’s tacit support was made evident by the fact that Dublin’s first Baptist congregation met not in a house, like many of their sister fellowships in England, but in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.36 The fact that many of the civil and military leaders of the Commonwealth in Ireland were explicitly identified as Baptists gave the movement some degree of state sanction. Critics lamented their increasing popularity. Walter Gostelo, an eccentric prophet, complained that ‘‘there is a great increase of a sort of seeming strict, and conscientious living people gotten thither, they call them Anabaptists.’’37 In the first half of the 1650s, Baptists took advantage of military networks, and the growth of their movement was sudden and spectacular.38 The geographical distribution of the early congregations illustrates this system of dependence. By 1653, Baptist congregations had been planted in Dublin, Kilkenny, Waterford, Clonmel, Cork, Kinsale, Bandon, Limerick, Galway, and in county Kerry; in the same year, it was anticipated, another church would be constituted in Carrickfergus.39 The location of these towns, overwhelmingly southern, reflected the importance of the Baptists’ social base. These were all garrison towns; Baptist power bases were located in areas with a high density of English soldiers. Little surprise, therefore, that Irish Baptists were the most advanced of the puritan republicans in Ireland and, under the Fleetwood administration, tended to exercise much greater political clout than did their brethren in England.40 One critic of the movement complained in 1655 that its members were exercising too much influence: Baptists in positions of power in Ireland included ‘‘governors of towns and cities 12 at least, colonels 10, lieut. colonels 3 or 4, majors 10, captains 19 or 20, preachers in salary 2, officers in the civil list 23.’’41 Extant sources do suggest that there were at least nine Baptist preachers on the Civil List in the 1650s, including John Coleman (Cork, 1654 and 1658), William Dix (Carlow, 1653; Belfast, 1655; Derryaghy, 1656), John Hunt

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(Maryborough, 1653; Gowran, 1655), James Knight (Limerick, 1654; Dingle, 1658), and William Wilsby (county Kerry, 1654; Kilkenny, 1655).42 Similarly, in the early 1650s, at least seven military governors were Baptists—including colonels Richard Lawrence, William Leigh, and Richard Le Hunt in Waterford, and Jerome Sankey in Clonmel.43 In Dublin, several Baptists had obtained positions of civil prominence: the city’s advocate general was Dr. Philip Carteret, its deputy treasurer was James Standish, and its auditor general was Edward Roberts.44 The success of Baptists in army and state generated fears among some contemporaries that rebaptism had become ‘‘the way to preferment.’’45 The movement was keen to define its own boundaries. Dublin Baptists excommunicated and handed over to Satan a member who had joined the Independent fellowship pastored by Samuel Winter, for example.46 But the movement’s position was nevertheless precarious. One list describing the congregations gathered in the above-named towns referred to a general lack of proper pastoral provision—the churches in Limerick, Galway, Wexford, and Carrickfergus each lacked a teaching ministry.47 As a consequence, the movement lacked doctrinal homogeneity.48 Nor should the success of the Baptists be read as proof that the path to political influence demanded an exclusive commitment to their ideals. Jerome Sankey, for example, came to Dublin as a soldier in the 1650s and was soon immersed by Thomas Patient. But Sankey’s ecclesiastical adherence seems ambivalent. He was also involved in Presbyterian politics in the city and was at various times a candidate for the churchwardenship of the Anglican parish of St. Brides, a trustee of Trinity College, governor of Clonmel, representative of the Hartlib circle to the Irish council, and the recipient of a knighthood from the rather anti-Baptist Henry Cromwell in 1658.49 Similarly, in 1652, Richard Lawrence, leader of the Baptist church in Waterford, invited James Knight, Baptist preacher on the Civil List, to organize into a church the many ‘‘godly inhabitants of the City of Waterford’’ who had retained their membership in Independent—not Baptist—churches in England.50 The Irish Baptists certainly had room for the theologically ambiguous. Despite their influence and positions of power, however, it is difficult to access detailed information on early Baptist growth. The only Baptist records known to have survived the seventeenth century—the records of the Cork church—were destroyed by fire in 1729.51 What is certain is that the Irish Baptists exercised profound influence on the development of their movement throughout the Cromwellian islands. The wide influence of the 1644 confession and the fact that it was signed by one of the most vigorous Baptist leaders in Ireland, Thomas Patient, indicate the extent to which Irish Baptist life existed in regular contact with the movement’s intellectual headquarters in

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London.52 But the Irish Baptists were not merely derivative. Instead, their administrative centers took a lead in pushing the movement toward full denominational status. In June 1653, Irish Baptist leaders wrote from Waterford to their London brethren, lamenting the common condition of the Baptist movement throughout the three kingdoms.53 The delay of the second coming of Jesus Christ, they feared, was generating a degree of apathy among those regarded by their enemies as one of the most radical of the puritan sects: ‘‘The posture of those poor virgins in Matt. 25 hath been too much ours: For while our bridegroom tarrieth, do we not all slumber and sleep?’’54 The Irish leaders turned the attention of their brethren to the millennialism that often seemed to fuel the rhetoric of the Cromwellian administration, ‘‘the great and precious promises of the Lord, which are to be fulfilled in the last days, Luke 18:8; 2 Pet. 1:4.’’55 But the passage in Luke 18, to which the brethren referred, was profoundly ambiguous. It warned the enemies of believers that God will ‘‘avenge his own elect . . . he will avenge them speedily,’’ but nevertheless posed the question of spiritual decay: ‘‘When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?’’ (Luke 18:8). It was to address this problem of spiritual decay that Baptist leaders in Ireland proposed a system of congregational cooperation extending throughout the three kingdoms. Their proposal, they noted, was based on the successful emergence of a strong group identity among the Irish churches, which were enjoying the ‘‘great advantage’’ of ‘‘a more revived correspondence with each other by letters and loving epistles.’’ This had brought ‘‘a closer union and knitting of heart,’’ and the brethren—representing churches in Waterford, Kilkenny, and Dublin—were keen to see this bond of unity extend throughout Scotland, England, and Wales.56 The Waterford leaders called for an organized correspondence, with letters to circulate every three months to inform the association of the conditions of its constituent fellowships.57 In addition, the proposals called for the institution of a monthly fast—an alternative liturgical calendar designed to unite the scattered churches—and the provision of two itinerant missionaries to inculcate Baptist principles throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. Ireland was not mentioned; presumably, they felt, it was already sufficiently covered.58 Their appeal was urgent: ‘‘Let neither sea nor land, things present nor things to come, separate us from a Christian correspondence.’’59 The London leaders—operating a virtual clearinghouse for new ideas— eagerly adopted the Irish proposal. They responded appropriately: ‘‘It hath pleased the Keeper of Israel, who neither slumbers nor sleeps, to raise up a quickening spirit in the hearts of our brethren of Ireland, provoking them to call upon us to awake to righteousness, to remember our first love, to rend our

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hearts and not our garments, and to turn to the Lord with our whole hearts.’’60 But their response took on a different form than had, perhaps, been anticipated. On 20 January 1654, London Baptist leaders wrote to their Irish brethren urging them to curb their radicalism, arguing that they should not publicly oppose the apparent abandonment of republicanism in Oliver Cromwell’s investment as Lord Protector.61 The rebuke was echoed one year later, in April 1655, when the English Western Association wrote to the ‘‘churches of Christ at Dublin, Waxford [sic], Waterford or elsewhere in Ireland,’’ condemning certain Irish Baptist leaders for their ostentatious dress, their arrogance, and their acceptance of state stipends through their participation in the Civil List.62 In 1646 Robert Baillie had noted that Baptist ministers refused to wear black, the customary color of clerical dress;63 in Ireland, in 1655, they had apparently abandoned this earlier anticlericalism and were now, their English brethren believed, too closely identified with the state.64 With vigorous polemic, self-critical scrutiny, and a strong sense of collective identity, Baptists across the three kingdoms had begun to organize.

III It is likely that the English leaders’ acceptance of the Waterford proposals was assisted by the fact that the proposals had been endorsed by some of the three kingdoms’ foremost Baptist apologists. Many leaders of Irish Baptist life in the 1650s had developed within the English movement in the previous decade. Colonel Richard Lawrence, later an office bearer in the Waterford congregation, had published The Antichristian Presbyter, or, Antichrist transformed: Assuming the new shape of a Reformed Presbyter, as his last and subtlest disguise to deceive the nations (1647). His future Waterford colleague, John Vernon, had likewise appealed for the end of all civil authority over the religious sphere in The sword’s abuse asserted, or, A word to the Army, showing the weakness of carnal weapons in spiritual warfare (1648).65 Their status as leading apologists was recognized by their opponents. Vernon’s arguments, for example, were addressed by The depths of Satan discovered, or, The Jesuits last design to ruine religion: Being some observations upon a pamphlet called, The sword’s abuse asserted, by J. Vernon (1649), authored by the wonderfully pseudonymed Philopatrius Philalethes. If this kind of published opposition was a recognition of influence, then the foremost among the signatures of those supporting the Waterford proposals were Christopher Blackwood, then based in Kilkenny, and Thomas Patient, then based in Dublin.66 Blackwood had published The storming of Antichrist in

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his two last and strongest garrisons, of compulsion of conscience and infants baptism (1644), a sustained argument against the social and theological presuppositions of the Westminster Assembly. His contemporary reputation was such that his book’s title gained a place of distinguished opprobrium among Presbyterians. Claudius Gilbert, minister in Limerick, counted six published refutations by 1657, by Thomas Blake, Stephen Marshall, Richard Baxter, and Cuthbert Sydenham in England and by Worth and Winter in Ireland.67 Another polemicist complained about the endlessly apocalyptic rhetoric of the Baptist apologists: ‘‘There is scarce a Book extant of the Anabaptists, but hath a touch thereof; such is that Peece called The Storming of Antichrist, which came out long since, and others of the like stuffe.’’68 Thomas Edwards’s Gangræna (1646) likewise complained that Baptist writers gave ‘‘swelling Titles to their books they set forth, as, Innocency and Truth Triumphing together, as, Truth gloriously appearing, [and] The storming of Antichrist.’’69 But Edwards had also identified the importance of Patient as an exemplar of this novel theology, and it was his career that was to provide Irish Baptists with the first comprehensive defense of their faith. Much of Patient’s life remains shrouded in mystery.70 The biographical facts that are known have mostly been culled from personal references in his only publication, The doctrine of baptism, and the distinction of the covenants (1654). Although the old Dictionary of National Biography suggested that Patient had initially been ordained in the Church of England, he first appears as a Congregational exile in New England between 1630 and 1635.71 His slow conversion to Baptist ideals grew out of dissatisfaction with his contemporaries’ anxious defense of paedobaptist tradition: he ‘‘heard one man preach fifteen Sermons upon this subject’’ and ‘‘also searched many Authors who wrote thereof night and day.’’72 His intellectual dissatisfaction with paedobaptist polemic was eventually confirmed by a mystical experience, but he soon discovered that his new opinions did not satisfy the orthodox governors. The first New England law was passed against Baptists, and Patient’s heresy, reflected in his refusal to have his own child baptized, seems to have drawn personal attention, as he notes, ‘‘there being a Warrant at this time issued to apprehend and bring me before the General Court.’’73 Fleeing the new world, Patient returned to England and was appointed as ministerial assistant to William Kiffin, pastor of the Baptist congregation in Devonshire Square, London. Patient signed the 1644 confession of faith alongside Kiffin; he also signed its second edition in 1646 but seems to have left London by the publication of the third edition in 1651. It is known that Kiffin and Patient engaged in missionary activity throughout the southeast of England, though in one expedition to Kent in 1645 they lost their converts to the Arminian General Baptists.74

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In 1646, Edwards’s Gangræna accused Patient and Kiffin of impropriety with a female baptismal candidate in Smithfield and reported rumors of a miracle cure they had effected.75 Toward the end of the decade, Patient signed the ‘‘Epistle Dedicatory’’ to Daniel King’s A way to Sion (1649) and Heart bleedings for professors abominations (1650), endorsing its vigorous polemic against Quakers and Ranters. In March 1649, he was chosen by Parliament as one of the six ministers that were to be sent to Dublin on an annual salary of two hundred pounds.76 The first indication of his actually having arrived in Ireland is a letter from the newly captured Kilkenny in April 1650.77 By 1651, Patient had traveled to Waterford and Dublin, where he became pastor of a settled congregation and was made chaplain to Colonel John Jones, one of the Parliamentary Commissioners in Ireland.78 Initial impressions were good. John Cook referred to Patient as ‘‘a man of great experience in heavenly things.’’79 In Dublin, in December 1652, he consolidated his power by acting as a member of a committee of triers, which validated and rejected potential ministers, and later became an itinerant evangelist.80 It was this concern for theological precision that led to Patient’s attack on one of the most prominent Dublin churches. In January 1652, as we have seen, he wrote from Waterford to the Independent congregation that had been gathered in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, under the ministry of John Rogers. His letter, carried by William Allen and John Vernon, attacked the mixedcommunion basis of the Christ Church fellowship.81 This prestigious congregation had attracted into its membership many of the most prominent of the city’s military elite, including Colonel John Hewson, the military governor of Dublin.82 Hewson’s conversion narrative had made the typical claim of disinterest in matters of secondary theological importance: ‘‘(though I am in places of power, yet I) account them nothing, seeing an emptiness in all things, and a fulness in none but Christ.’’83 When Allen and Vernon arrived with their letter, Hewson changed his mind; baptism had become a defining issue. The ensuing confrontation was a turning point in Rogers’s pastoral career. The Christ Church fellowship, unlike most other churches in Ireland, had refused to adopt a strict baptismal policy as a condition of participating in communion. Membership was open to anyone who could satisfy the demand for a narrative of conversion, irrespective of when or by which method they had been baptized.84 Patient’s letter dropped a bombshell on this consensus. Advocating strict Baptist principles and calling for separation from non-Baptists, he addressed his argument to several of the Baptist members of the Christ Church congregation with a great deal of success. Patient’s appeals ‘‘did much mischief in the body,’’ Rogers complained, ‘‘and made a sore rent at first from us by some, whose judgement were blinded.’’85 Rogers refused to admit the

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validity of Patient’s reasoning and claimed that ‘‘all the Scripture is against Rebaptising, as being but the Idol of the Braine, and a brat that must be dashed a-peeces, Psal.137.9.’’86 Nevertheless, the dispute split the church and drove Rogers back to England in despair.87 Defections to the Baptists continued, and some of Rogers’s most prominent congregants appeared among the disaffected— Hewson, for example, later oversaw the installation of one of the Waterford Baptists, Peter Row, as minister in a church in Naas.88 Patient’s vision of a strictly Baptist church had won the day and had collapsed one of the most prominent and inclusive of the pandenominational Cromwellian churches. As military Baptists and civilian Independents grew increasingly apart, opinion polarized within the Cromwellian elite. Baptist polemic and paedobaptist resilience demonstrated that there was no room for any middle ground. Their doctrines manufactured incompatible concepts of church and state. Writing in London, in 1653, Rogers’s opinion of the Baptists was not high: ‘‘Those blazing, Meteor-like Comets (for I fear they are so in Ireland) those unchristian, rough, threatening Anabaptists . . . it is the love of the form, not the love of the Father which is in them.’’89 Dublin, he lamented, ‘‘hath the most of this Tribe of Dan that ever I met with.’’90 Patient’s victory was sealed when he was appointed, in Rogers’s place, to preach in Christ Church Cathedral, but it came to its conclusion in 1653, when Patient erected the first Baptist meeting house in Ireland, in Swift’s Alley, Dublin.91 Patient represented the Dublin Baptists at the Waterford conference in June 1653, but thereafter his reputation seems to have dipped. Cromwell’s secretary, John Thurloe, noted in April 1654 that Patient’s congregation seemed to be rapidly losing support.92 That same year, Patient’s only book, The doctrine of baptism, and the distinction of the covenants, was published in London in response, he claimed, to requests from ‘‘many of God’s People, formerly in England, and of late in Ireland, who have heard me upon the same subject deliver the substance of what is herein conteined.’’93 Refuting paedobaptism as an ‘‘Idol of man’s invention,’’ the book seems to have buttressed his personal prestige.94 One opponent of his position noted in 1656 that ‘‘the name T. P. is lookt upon as the chief in this moist climate . . . his name being so well known amongst us.’’95 Certainly Patient’s personal status seems to have been retained within the Baptist community; in 1657, he headed the list of 117 names appended to the Address from the baptised Christians in Dublin professing loyalty to the Protector.96 On 8 July 1659, Patient was described as ‘‘chaplain to the general officers.’’97 He returned to England around 1660 and became pastoral assistant to Henry Hynam in Bristol, where in 1663 the town’s mayor, Sir John Knight, imprisoned him for illegal preaching. In 1666, Patient returned to

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London to work as copastor with William Kiffin in the Devonshire Square church in which his pastoral career began. Within one month of his appointment, Patient had died of the plague, leaving his widow, Sarah Patient, as his sole legatee.

IV Irish Baptists were also living off Patient’s inheritance. His other testament— The doctrine of baptism—outlined the contours of a theological revolution, a return to the original truths of a ‘‘Solemn Ordinance’’ that, he believed, ‘‘for many hundred years, hath been neither preached, nor practiced.’’98 The book was an attempt to steal the theological high ground from the paedobaptist cause by appropriating the most compelling evidence cited in its defense— covenant theology. Historians have often recognized the centrality of covenant thinking within puritan thought, but its importance has not always been properly nuanced.99 In an otherwise excellent survey of radical religion in Irish puritanism, Phil Kilroy compared Baptists with Presbyterians, Independents, and Anglicans and concluded that ‘‘the Baptist position was very different from that of the three other traditions in Ireland since it focused on the theology of the Covenant and was, in a sense, the logical outcome of both predestinarian and covenant teaching.’’100 Few of Patient’s non-Baptist contemporaries would have agreed with Kilroy’s assertion. For them it was not obvious that the logical or biblical outcomes of predestination or covenant theology supported anything but the paedobaptism they endorsed. The proper ownership of covenant theology was at the heart of the baptism debate and the political questions it encouraged—in and beyond Cromwellian Ireland. By the 1650s, covenant theology had a long history. As a great deal of recent research has shown, the origins of covenant theology can be traced to postreformation attempts to discover the assumed unity of scripture. Over decades, protestant theologians constructed an elaborate system around a series of covenants they discovered in biblical history and prophecy. Though various schools of thought expounded the covenants within their own peculiar schema, the system essentially taught two basic covenants as the foundation for all valid theology—a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. According to the theological model validated in the Anglican Irish Articles (1615), the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) and the Independents’ Savoy Declaration (1658), God made the covenant of works with Adam (representing the entire human race)

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before the Fall. It was an agreement, promising eternal life, based upon Adam’s fulfilling ‘‘perfect and personal obedience.’’101 By eating the forbidden fruit, however, Adam ‘‘made himself uncapable of life by that covenant,’’ and God ordained a second covenant, the covenant of grace, by which Adam and the race he represented might come to enjoy the blessings they had forfeited by his first sin, without their being able to point to complete obedience.102 The term ‘‘covenant of grace’’ is, nevertheless, something of a misnomer, for this expression was used as an umbrella term describing the essential unity of a number of covenants recorded in the Bible after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden— covenants with Noah, Abraham, David, and the new covenant instituted by Jesus Christ. (Opinion varied about the status of the Mosaic covenant within the covenant of grace.) The paedobaptist divines at the Westminster Assembly argued that the covenant of grace spanned the basic differences of the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament ‘‘it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews.’’ In the New Testament, however, ‘‘the ordinances in which this covenant is dispensed are the preaching of the Word, and the administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.’’ Nevertheless, they argued, ‘‘there are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations.’’103 One basic theme in this standard account of covenant theology was therefore an emphasis upon the unity of scripture, minimizing the differences between the Old and New Testaments. According to the Westminster divines, for example, entrance into the church was still hereditary. Just as the circumcision of infant males signaled their inclusion within the membership of the Old Testament community of the covenant of grace, so in the New Testament age it was to be expected that the children of believers should be incorporated into the church by baptism. Circumcision and baptism were sacraments of the same covenant of grace. With baptism being represented as the New Testament counterpart of circumcision, the validity of paedobaptism was assured.104 The problem with this approach, Patient claimed, was that it concluded in favor of infant baptism despite the fact that the New Testament offered no command to baptize infants and no clear example that the apostolic church ever did so: ‘‘Such as defend childrens baptism, and the ablest I have met with, do grant they have no command or example in the New Testament for their practice, but ground the same on a consequence.’’105 Paedobaptist versions of covenant theology were superimposed upon the New Testament data to allow the reader to infer the validity of paedobaptism by the silences of the text. But, Patient claimed, there could be no merit in arguments from silence: ‘‘Where the Scripture hath not a Mouth to speak, we must not have an Ear to

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hear.’’106 Grounding his text on a detailed exegesis of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20), he set about his inquiry into New Testament baptism by examining the utility of the paedobaptists’ covenant theology. Patient’s textbook identified the ownership of covenant theology as the heart of the baptism debate and set about challenging its monopoly by paedobaptists. They had two basic arguments, he claimed: ‘‘That the Covenant of Grace, belongs to believers’ Children’’ and that ‘‘Baptism, being an Ordinance of that Covenant must needs belong to believers’ children.’’ In these two arguments, he claimed, ‘‘lyes our whole business.’’107 A redefinition of the covenant of grace was therefore foundational to Patient’s argument. Agreeing that the Bible presented a covenant of works and a covenant of grace, he denied that any of the covenants of Old Testament history—and specifically the covenant made with Abraham—should be identified with the theological covenant of grace. Instead, he claimed, the theological covenant of grace ran alongside these biblical covenants, never embracing the covenanted nation but only those true believers within it. The effect of this contention was to turn established covenant thinking on its head. Circumcision was now represented as a sacrament of the covenant of works, not of grace; now it was denied that believers in either testament entered the covenant of grace by physical birth; regeneration was now asserted as the only entrance into covenant fellowship with God; and baptism, as a sacrament of the covenant of grace, could not be a New Testament counterpart of circumcision. Now it was being argued that the covenant of grace, in both testaments, had as its members only true believers. True believers had therefore no basis for baptizing their children—only saints should be baptized. Patient’s argument read like a subtle refining of the established paradigm, but it shook paedobaptist polemic to its foundational assumptions. Patient’s defense of believer-baptism challenged the identity of godly clergy: ‘‘Though a man should be able to preach the doctrine of Faith, and that ably for the conversion of souls unto that Faith, yet being destitute of the true knowledge of the doctrine of Baptism, and how it ought to be dispensed, to be sure, this man is not a justifiable Minister according to the Commission, because he is ignorant of his Commission.’’108 Not only was such a minister ignorant of his commission, he was also implicitly denying the newness of the New Testament: ‘‘For any man to go about to defend a covenant in the flesh, it is a doctrine virtually denying, that Christ is come and fully manifested in the flesh.’’109 Worse than that, such a minister was guilty of idolatry: ‘‘This to be an Idol, either the worshipping of a false God, or the true God in a false manner. . . . Now though this be not an Idol of the first kind, it is without doubt an Idol of the second. It is setting up man’s Invention, instead of God’s solemn Ordinance.’’110 Such

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a minister was therefore not in the service of God: ‘‘The Lord doth callin Scripture such like worship, which men do in the room of God’s commanded worship, The Worship of Devils.’’111 Antichrist had indeed invaded the puritan brotherhood. But had he invaded the protestant nation? No, according to Patient, for there could be no protestant nation. Challenging the history of English national theories since the reformation, Patient’s attack on paedobaptism forthrightly denied any sense of national privilege. The English Parliament’s enthusiastic adoption of the Solemn League and Covenant made no difference to her status before God, he claimed; national covenants could only be covenants of works.112 National election ended with the coming of Christ.113 It was a feature only of Old Testament religion: ‘‘This blessedness which David holds out to be the Covenant confirmed of God in Christ, it was not entailed upon the flesh of Abraham and his fleshly seed, but made in Abraham as a Father of all the spiritual seed in all nations, and confirmed in the seed of Christ, to all nations. Here the Jews after the flesh have no more interest than any other nation.’’114 But the baptism of infants confuses this, Patient argued. If paedobaptism should be admitted, ‘‘we must necessarily have a Church that is national, consisting of succeeding generations for many hundred years.’’ Such a church could not maintain biblical purity: ‘‘It unavoidably admits into the Church all the unconverted and unregenerate children, born of the bodies of such persons, that either are or have been accounted believers. . . . I deny such an Assembly can be owned an orderly Church of Christ.’’115 Patient’s arguments challenged assumptions at the heart of the puritan national project, undermining the sacral state and redefining the nation—even the covenanted nation—as secular by default. In his version of Baptist apologetics, there could be no room for an elect or sacral state.

V But Patient’s challenge did not go unanswered. While Samuel Rutherford grew hysterical in claiming that ‘‘Anabaptists . . . show no revealed way of God of saving Infants of believing Parents dying in Infancy,’’ an Irish puritan was preparing a considered response to Patient’s claims.116 Edward Warren, ‘‘a Member of the Army in Ireland,’’ published Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan: By grace, not works. An answer to a book entitled The Doctrine of baptism, and distinction of the covenants, lately published by Tho. Patient (1656). Warren’s aim was to provide a systemic refutation of ‘‘this Doctor of dipping.’’117 Colonel Edward Warren appears to have been the son of Edward Warren, dean of Ossory.118 Edward Warren senior had trained at Trinity College under

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the teaching of James Ussher.119 Little is known of his son. By 1649, he and his brother Abel were, respectively, a lieutenant and captain in Colonel Whalley’s cavalry regiment; by 1650, Edward had been promoted to captain, and, by 1659, he had made the rank of major. The threat of Restoration brought an end to his success. He assisted in the surprising of Dublin Castle in December 1659, opposed Ludlow’s return to command, and was sent to England, where he was impeached in January 1660. Continuing involvement in antigovernment conspiracies in Ireland culminated in his participation in Colonel Blood’s plot to seize Dublin Castle. He was captured and was executed on 15 July 1663.120 Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan appears to have been his only publication. Warren combined his radical republicanism with conservative Calvinism. Throughout his text, he contextualized himself within the mainstream of the English Reformed tradition: ‘‘We are like to come to a strange kind of Reformation at last,’’ he noted; ‘‘these are boasting days, wherein men in false ways under false Ordinances, pretend to have much communion with God.’’121 Warren spoke from his own experience, having himself had a ‘‘narrow escape from the Baptists.’’122 He was, he claimed, very wary of Patient’s claims for extrabiblical revelation. There could be no common ground with the spirituality of the Quakers or the Ranters, whom Patient had already repudiated, according to Warren: ‘‘I shall tell thee no long story of experience to draw on thy belief to embrace either truth, or error, nor do I think that an Argument sufficient to perswade men.’’123 Instead, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan advanced a careful exploration of the most salient of Patient’s emphases and linked Warren’s refutation with the millennial worldview shared by many Irish puritans. Pleading for the unity of all ‘‘dissenting Protestant friends united in one Faith, under one Lord, in one Baptism,’’ Warren noted his belief that such unity would be a feature of the church in the days immediately preceding the second coming of Christ.124 Alluding to the prophecies of Daniel, he claimed, it is ‘‘the glory of the Fifth Monarchy, that shall stand as long as the world lasts, that it is but one stone cut out: and then it is like to be a swelling one.’’125 Ironically, it was those groups who spoke most about eschatological victory—groups such as the Fifth Monarchists and ‘‘the dipt Societies’’ of Baptists—who were doing most to prevent the unity of the brethren and the coming of the new world that Daniel predicted, according to Warren.126 ‘‘I doubt his charity is much of the same nature with those of the late fifth Monarchy,’’ he wrote of Patient, ‘‘who though they would use the word of Protestant Churches, yet they did look upon them but as the out-works of Anti-Christ, which were first to be storm’d.’’127 In the opening pages of Warren’s book, the struggle to define the biblical doctrine of baptism sounds very much like a struggle to appropriate the language of the apocalypse. But it would emerge as more than this.

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Warren’s rhetoric alluded to many of the staple elements in the antiBaptist diatribe. Like Thomas Edwards, he expressed concern about the possible moral implications of adult baptism: ‘‘For what gravity can there be for a Minister, who is God’s Ambassador to the World, 2 Cor. 5. 20. to put off his shoe’s and stockings, and to lead a Gentlewoman by the hand into a River, and throw her on her back? Is this a deportment fit for Ambassadors that come from God?’’128 Likewise, he claimed, Baptists were guilty of serious theological deviation. Their doctrine of the church was bankrupt. Warren invoked ‘‘the Covenant of Grace, into which, Believers and Professing-Christians with their Seed, are admitted,’’ and argued from the Bible’s silence for its basic continuity into the New Testament age: ‘‘In the old Testament, which was his first Legacie, [God] took Children into his kingdom. . . . Therefore Children still remain within Christ’s kingdom, except our opposits can shew us how, when, and where they were out-law’d.’’129 But their error was more serious than this, he claimed, for it affected the very heart of the gospel, the center around which the Cromwellian reformation gathered: many Baptists ‘‘denie the personalitie of the holy Ghost.’’130 The situation was so serious, he believed, that had believers’ baptism existed in the first century, St. Paul ‘‘would have lookt upon it as another Gospel’’ and therefore liable to the imprecations of Galatians 1.131 Thus, the struggle to define the sacrament of baptism had become a struggle to define the boundaries of the puritan movement and the orthodox center of Irish Cromwellian religion; and the struggle to define the movement had become a struggle to identify the essence of Christianity itself. In Warren’s rhetoric, the debate about baptism was ultimately a debate about the Gospel. It could not become more serious—or divisive—than this.

VI But many were not convinced of the danger Warren observed. In 1653, there were ten recognized Baptist churches in Ireland. By the end of the decade, throughout the three kingdoms, Baptist churches numbered around one hundred and thirty.132 The explosion of Baptist growth throughout the 1650s was undoubtedly linked to the strong support they received from the army—a fact which helps explain the success of Patient’s attack on the mixed communion of Rogers’s army-dominated fellowship. As this encounter demonstrates, Irish Baptists tended to promote their own identity at the expense of wider protestant unity, and their opponents were happy to marginalize them in return.

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Defining themselves not only against the Ranters, Seekers, and Quakers on the radical left, Baptists engaged in vigorous polemic also with the ecclesiastical flux of the wider protestant movement. Henry Cromwell’s arrival, in September 1655, marked the high-water mark of Baptist influence in Ireland. Their influence had to be broken if the regime was to appeal to a broader social base, for Henry Cromwell could not escape the fact that ‘‘the Protectorate seemed to be synonymous with government by an over-bearing, exclusive and extreme sect.’’133 Baptists responded to his arrival with hostility and led opposition to the administration after Fleetwood’s withdrawal.134 Many were delighted, including Timothy Taylor, Independent minister in Carrickfergus, who understood that Henry Cromwell had ended the influence of the Baptist movement when ‘‘almost like a land flood [it] carried all before it’’; he warned Cromwell not to be discouraged by the ‘‘impatience of your patients,’’ playing on the Baptist leader’s name.135 Henry Cromwell’s attempts to reconstruct the Irish economy drove him to attempt the downsizing of the occupying army, whose presence heightened the island’s tax burden.136 Baptist influence declined with the influence of the army, and their struggle to maintain political influence lasted only until December 1656, despite vigorous campaigning.137 That winter, it became clear that Irish Baptists were losing the propaganda battle. Earlier in the year, Samuel Winter published The summe of diverse sermons. Preached in Dublin before Lord Deputy Fleetwood, wherein the doctrine of infant-baptism is asserted (1656). Throughout the decade, Christ Church congregations had grown increasingly conservative.138 The movement had clearly begun to stall. Winter, preaching before Fleetwood, observed that Baptists could not advance their cause without the patronage of ‘‘higher powers.’’139 In Limerick, in December 1656, an anonymous disputant attacked the baptism of infants and was answered, early in the new year, by Claudius Gilbert, the town’s Presbyterian minister. Gilbert’s arguments, published as The libertine school’d (1657), reminded readers that Winter and Worth had already heard and comprehensively answered the most salient of the Baptist arguments.140 Just for good measure, Winter wrote the preface to Murcot’s biography, Moses in the mount (1657), reminding his readers of the confrontation in Cork and the danger that Baptist polemic could still impede ‘‘the free progress and passage of the Gospel’’ and could still undermine the possibility of a Cromwellian reformation.141 Baptists were losing their polemical advantage. By 1657, the tide was beginning to turn, and the definition of ‘‘puritan’’ was beginning to change. Though Baptist preachers remained in the Civil List, Irish Cromwellian Protestantism was reinventing its political mainstream, and Baptists were now

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on the outside. Their marginality would not be changed by their brief grasp of political influence in 1659.142 But for the paedobaptists, success was born in failure: Murcot’s fears had already been realized. The baptism debate had overwhelmed the administration’s social program and crippled the Irish Cromwellians.

4 Church Government and Social Control

During their regular monthly meeting, in December 1656, the Scottish Presbyterian ministers in county Antrim proclaimed a public fast.1 Conscious of the ‘‘sad shortcomings of the godly,’’ the ‘‘unfruitfulness of the gospel,’’ and ‘‘abounding wickedness’’ that contrasted with the values of their theocratic ecclesiology, they listed a number of reasons for their action. In the midst of the tumult of Irish Cromwellian reform, their concerns were not so much with dissensions in theology as with the continuity of godly order in their society and church. They worried that ‘‘disaffected persons’’ were promoting ‘‘contempt, reproach and hazard’’ of the gospel and its ordinances; they lamented the existence of ‘‘many desolate congregations through the land,’’ congregations they described as ‘‘sheep without a shepherd’’; and they noted the failure of social reform, the ‘‘great confusion’’ caused by the misbehavior of children, servants, and church members, and, especially in ‘‘desolate congregations,’’ the ‘‘palpable breach of the sabbath.’’2 The Antrim ministers’ proclamation of a fast was an extremely serious and therefore quite unusual response to difficult social conditions.3 The fast was a serious disruption of normal life. The Westminster Assembly’s Directory for Public Worship—which was most enthusiastically adopted by Scottish Presbyterians, despite the fact that it had become the sole liturgical standard of the Irish Cromwellian reformation4—identified ‘‘Publique solemne Fasting’’ as a duty that a ‘‘Nation, or people’’ should observe when ‘‘some great and

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notable Judgements are either inflicted . . . or apparently imminent.’’5 Individuals and families were to begin the fast day with efforts ‘‘to prepare their hearts to such a solemn work’’ and were directed to be ‘‘early at the Congregation.’’ This congregational worship was to involve ‘‘so large a portion of the Day, as conveniently may be.’’6 Ministers were directed to choose those sermon topics, scripture passages, and Psalms that would most ‘‘quicken affections suitable to such a Duty,’’ so that ‘‘both themselves and their people may be much affected, and even melted thereby; especially with sorrow for their sins, that it may be indeed a Day of deep Humiliation and afflicting of the soul.’’7 They may well have often been successful: fast days tended to see an increase in the numbers of those attending services in churches.8 But the demand for fast-day duties did not stop with the end of the congregational meeting. Religious fasting required ‘‘totall abstinence, not only from all food . . . but also from all worldly labour, discourses and thoughts, and from all bodily delights . . . rich apparel, ornaments and such like.’’9 In a situation where clothes marked their wearer’s social status, public fasts had significant social and political, as well as economic, repercussions. Their disruption of the normal patterns of daily life meant that fasts could be proclaimed only by those invested with proper authority—those who had, effectively, the authority to shut down normal life. At both national and local levels, the public fast was a powerful tool in the dramatizing of social power.10 The social and ecclesiastical concerns that lay behind the proclamation of the fast had coalesced in a meeting that had taken place earlier that year. Meeting in Ballyclare in February 1656, the Antrim ministers considered the case of How Catterwood, who had been charged with eloping with Margaret Pool, ‘‘contrar to her father’s mind,’’ and marrying her ‘‘by an unlawful minister without proclamation’’ while contracted to another woman.11 The incident raised a number of Presbyterian fears and related to specific details of the Covenanting legislative program.12 First, Catterwood’s engagement was understood to be a binding contract for marriage, which the Westminster Confession of Faith argued could be dissolved only with proof of ‘‘adultery, or fornication committed after a Contract, being detected before marriage.’’13 Second, in eloping with Pool and in neglecting to seek her father’s permission for the marriage, Catterwood had outraged the familial controls the Presbyterians encouraged. The Directory for Public Worship insisted that parents be consulted and their permission sought, even for the weddings of those who were no longer under age.14 Third, in omitting the process of proclamation, he had robbed the community of its right to adjudicate on the propriety of the proposal for marriage. The Directory for Public Worship required that the couple’s ‘‘purpose of Marriage shall be published by the Minister three severall

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Sabbath-dayes in the Congregation, at the place or places of their most usuall and constant abode respectively.’’15 Fourth, in fraternizing with an ‘‘unlawful minister,’’ Catterwood had rejected the ministers’ claim to have sole jurisdiction of their own communities. Seven years earlier, the presbytery had called for total separation from the sectaries in an effort to establish Presbyterian hegemony: ‘‘Wee beseech our people . . . not to joyn hands with such a course, or so medle with them who are given to change,’’ to ‘‘choose affliction rather then sinne.’’16 In seeking marriage from an ‘‘unlawful minister,’’ however, Catterwood had stepped outside the boundaries of the presbytery and had actively taken advantage of the confusion of the Cromwellian reformation to legitimize his own ambitions when they flew in the face of the church’s social demands. Upon discovery, his position had become extremely precarious. The legislation of the Kirk denied the validity of his ‘‘irregular marriage.’’17 He had abandoned a lawful contract; he had entered into an unlawful marriage, solemnized by an unlawful minister; and he was therefore guilty of adultery, a crime the Scots believed punishable by death.18 The minutes of the Antrim ministers’ meeting contain no hint of the distance Catterwood and Pool had to travel before encountering the ‘‘unlawful’’— non-Presbyterian—minister. They need not have gone far. Timothy Taylor had been an Independent minister in Carrickfergus, ten miles east of Ballyclare, since October 1651; in the mid-1650s, he was rapidly becoming ‘‘the most prominent Independent minister in Ulster.’’19 Belfast, a dozen miles to the southeast, was also a center of radical preaching activity. Wherever the unlawful minister was located, Presbyterians argued that he had no right to operate in defiance of the authority they claimed. The alternative he represented—and the ‘‘irregular’’ marriages he celebrated—existed as a fundamental challenge to their social and ecclesiastical program. The Catterwood marriage raised a specter that haunted the Presbyterian mind—the specter of an alternative ecclesiological system that could compete with Presbyterian norms. The ministers feared that the presence of rival ecclesiastical groupings, with ministers unregulated by synodical control, would encourage the social and ecclesiastical chaos that the Westminster Assembly had struggled to contain. In Antrim, Presbyterians were reeling from the impact of the sects. The unauthorized marriage highlighted the ease with which rival clergy could challenge the social demands of the church. Catterwood’s defection to an ‘‘unlawful minister’’ reflected the temper of the times. In 1649, the Ulster presbytery had complained that ‘‘religion can never be truly secured’’ without widespread adherence to the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant and the social monopoly of Presbyterian church courts.20 But the widespread

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taking of the Covenant was not sufficient to guard against the machinations of Independents. Seven years later, it was clearer than ever that ‘‘it hath pleased the Lord to suffer men among our selves to be our enemies; these, who took sweet counsell together with us, renewed the Covenant, and entered in a solemne Declaration.’’21 Covenanted reformation had not provided the Presbyterian monopoly its proponents had imagined. The administration had created a statesponsored alternative in the Civil List, and clergy concerned by its breadth had developed rival associations, each with the aim of establishing strict social control. But these competing associations were fragmenting the remnant of the elect and were setting up alternatives to a central administration of basic social norms. Little wonder the Antrim ministers thought it necessary to proclaim a fast. Unlawful clergy had precipitated a capital crime. ‘‘Eminent judgement’’ was ‘‘evidently ready to break.’’22

I The issues involved in the ministers’ proclamation of the fast tend to be ignored in much of the literature that has grown around the history of protestant ecumenism. Adherents of the Whig view of history and those who for other reasons have wanted to emphasize an historic ecumenism have tended to emphasize the rapid consolidation of a panprotestant theological consensus. Thus, Richard Greaves, in his otherwise excellent study of early protestant denominationalism in Ireland, exaggerated the unity of sects when he claimed that ‘‘the Scottish Presbyterians, the English Presbyterians, and the Congregationalists . . . disagreed on no substantive issue’’ until the beginning of the eighteenth century.23 By contrast, revisionists have argued that early modern ‘‘ecumenism’’ should be thoroughly historicized, and the debates that separated the emerging denominations should not be subsumed into a more general narrative of cooperative success.24 The contrasting titles of histories of the subject epitomize this distinction. While W. K. Jordan described The development of religious toleration in England (1932–1940), John Coffey has projected his study as Persecution and toleration in protestant England, 1558–1689 (2000). As the Catterwood wedding suggests, there were deep ecclesiological divisions among protestants in Cromwellian Ireland. Ulster Presbyterians believed that rival clergy should not even exist and were prepared, on occasion, to lend violent force to that conviction. In the late summer of 1657, worshippers in the Baptist church in Derryaghy found their service disturbed when Henry Livingston, preacher at Drumabo and nephew of the Presbyterian leader John

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Livingston, ‘‘came thither with three or four hundred men, who (after some reviling language) in a tumultuary way rushed into that assembly to their disturbance; . . . one of them in a rude manner laid hands upon the said Mr. Dix, being in the pulpit, to make room for Mr. Livingston, affirming they had order or authority from the Presbytery.’’25 Their intrusion highlighted the tensions underlying the attempted absorption of the Presbyterian faith. The Antrim meeting’s identification of the ‘‘unlawful minister’’ was therefore a reflection of the instability of the religious world of Cromwellian Ireland and a symptom of its most contentious disputes. The struggle to distinguish between ‘‘lawful’’ and ‘‘unlawful’’ ministers was a struggle that evolved out of the period’s ecclesiological debates. Notions of church government and intercongregational association differed widely among the emerging ecclesiastical groupings, many of which had quite varied opinions about the nature and even the value of ecclesiology. Sequestered Episcopalians maintained their argument that the church should be governed by a hierarchy of offices, from archbishops and bishops down to rectors and curates. Presbyterians argued that the church should instead be governed by a hierarchy of courts, with a national general assembly controlling subnational synods and regional presbyteries controlling local elders. Independents and Baptists denied the value of hierarchical government of any kind and strongly asserted the autonomy of the local church, the preeminence of its elders, and the decision-making power of the congregation. Local congregations might form associations, but the collective judgment of these associations had no compulsive or binding power on the theology or practice of the congregation. Among the more radical sects, opinions ranged from the Quaker denial of any system of church government—a position that developed alongside their emerging denominationalism—to the Seeker expectation that the church would be properly ordered only with the restoration of the apostolate.26 Even within the ecclesiastical mainstream, a degree of informality was officially endorsed. The Parliamentary Commissioners, realizing the ‘‘great scarcity of persons fitly qualified to be sent out to preach to the people,’’ encouraged military and ecclesiastical leaders in Ulster to countenance and encourage frequent Christian meetings, both publicly and privately, to confer with each others about Gospel duties, and declare unto one another their experiences of the Lord’s love and gracious dealing to them, to exercise their gifts in prayer and exhortations for the refreshing and edifying one another in love and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, avoiding vain and unnecessary questions and disputations, which administer strife, that the Lord Jesus may

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But this kind of lay initiative could easily backfire, as events were to attest. There were less significant differences when these emerging denominational groups debated what the local congregation should actually look like. Within the mainstream Reformed tradition, as we have noticed, Episcopalians and Presbyterians strove for national comprehension and assumed the church would be composed of adherents and their children, while Independents limited membership to ‘‘visible saints’’ but agreed that believers’ children should be baptized. Outside the confessional mainstream, Baptists did not believe that believers’ children had any automatic relationship to the church, as church members or as proper candidates for baptism, while the more radical groups often abandoned sacraments and church gatherings altogether and met either as ‘‘friends’’ in antiformal worship or as individual ‘‘seekers,’’ dissatisfied with even that bare expression of congregational life. There was, nevertheless, a considerable degree of variation within the mainstream Reformed tradition. The association of Presbyterian churches in Cork was most concerned with regularizing ordination; the association of Presbyterian and Independent fellowships in Dublin and Leinster was interested in broader church union, perhaps even courting some Baptists; and the theocratic Presbyterians in Ulster were organizing for total social control. Within the mainstream Reformed tradition, congregations could band together for quite different purposes. Of course, it is important not to overstate the differences implied by denominational distinctions. Ecclesiology was certainly linked to other debates about conversion and baptism, the proper membership of the church and its relationship to the state. Denominational allegiances encoded distinctive attitudes to ecclesiastical authority, locating it either in a hierarchy (Episcopalianism), in the elected elders of the congregation (Presbyterianism), in the congregation itself (Independents and Baptists), or in the individual conscience (Quakers and Seekers). The issue of authority was certainly significant, but ecclesiological systems did not offer a standard set of answers for every other question under debate. Some theological differences—such as the debate about the role of the Holy Spirit and the reliability of extraordinary experiences—cut across denominational groupings. Denominational adherence is therefore a less helpful means of categorization than some historians might realize. In Cromwellian Ireland, ecclesiological systems were not necessarily allencompassing theological manifestos. It was this very flexibility that Cromwellian administrators sought to exploit when they constructed an alternative to the emerging denominational

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networks. Their Civil List was designed to bypass what its administrators considered to be less significant theological differences, transcending distinctive denominational tenets to construct a national, state-controlled ministry rooted in a generic protestant orthodoxy. There was certainly need for such organization. The number of clergy in Ireland had fallen in the 1640s, and the inadequate supply of ministers was still a cause for concern one decade later, despite repeated attempts to recruit clerical candidates from England, Scotland, and New England.28 In August 1653, the Commissioners complained of ‘‘the great want of fit and able ministers for preaching the Gospel in this country. . . . We formerly invited several to that work; but (to our saddening) find but a slow compliance.’’29 Ministers in the southwest of Ireland noted that the old patterns of clerical provision could not cope with the increasing dispersal of settlers outside the garrison towns.30 In many ways, therefore, the Civil List was the ultimate expression of the ecclesiastical aspirations of Irish Cromwellian administrators. It represented the broadest uniting of protestant clergy, and its centralization of financial provision put these clergy firmly under the control of the state.31 It gave its members wide scope for preaching and freed them from dependence upon—and therefore need for the approval of—local congregations or patrons. The laity were disempowered at the expense of the central administration: the Civil List replaced deference to the congregation or ordaining body with deference to multidenominational adjudicating committees of triers in major towns. Building on the ecclesiological flexibility that had characterized earlier decades of the Irish reformation, it worked toward a broad definition of orthodoxy, made no provision for the implementation of specific patterns of church discipline, and devolved all discussion of the details of congregational organization to local preferences. In its national scope, state control, provision for clerical independence, and organizational apathy, the Civil List directly competed with the social power wielded by Ulster Presbyterians, consolidated in their proclamation of the fast.

II From the point of view of the Cromwellian administration, the ministers’ proclamation of a fast rested on a number of controversial assumptions—but the administration could not deny that it illustrated the significance of the ministers’ social control. Despite its significance, protestant fasting in Ireland has never received the attention it merits.32 This lack of attention reflects to some extent a lack of the information on which a detailed examination of its cultural

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impact might be based. Nevertheless, as Raymond Gillespie has noted, it is Presbyterian evidence that provides ‘‘perhaps the clearest picture’’ of the atmosphere that surrounded fast days in early modern Ireland.33 In their rigorous individuality and collective demands, Presbyterian fasts united private and public habits of devotion, instilled ‘‘a powerful sense of both individual and communal renewal,’’ and operated as ‘‘the religious community’s means of expressing and renewing its solidarity and distinctive identity.’’34 That solidarity was effectively expressed in the large attendances that fast-day services tended to attract. This ritualized and controlled assembling of the local population embodied the reintegration of ‘‘the social fabric of the community which, so God’s judgment seemed to imply, had been rent asunder by moral lapse.’’35 But the method of fasting achieved this integration in a manner quite different from the sacraments with which it has often been compared. While early modern Presbyterian ‘‘communion seasons’’ often approximated to the carnivalesque, offering a venue for manners of behavior the clergy could not endorse, public fasting exhibited the rigid and often inflexible control of the local spiritual elite. Public fasting signaled the social control of the godly. Fasting itself was nothing new in the history of Irish spirituality. The medieval church had incorporated periods of fasting into the sacred calendar, had identified its suitability as a means of devotion at specific liturgical sites, and had promoted its utility as a means of protest at perceived injustice.36 After the reformation, protestant fasting tended to be more occasional, related to personal or collective crisis, and therefore of greater value as an historical witness. These public fast days were often deliberately announced. In the late sixteenth century, the Church of Ireland issued special liturgies for days of public fast.37 In the early seventeenth century, the Church proclaimed ‘‘relatively few’’ public fasts, some of which were extended to address environmental concerns; one such proclamation was issued in 1624, in the parish around Bangor, county Down, when heavy rain threatened to destroy the harvest.38 Throughout the middle decades of the century, the frequency of fast days seemed to increase. Cromwellian authorities repeatedly proclaimed days of fasting and thanksgiving. Fasts were proclaimed for deliverance from the plague (21 August 1651), for an end to storms at sea that were preventing the importing of supplies (6 December 1651), and for public humiliation (21 June 1652), for example.39 Thanksgivings were proclaimed for victory over the Scots (12 September 1651),40 for the fall of Limerick (11 November 1651),41 for deliverance from Irish rebels (17 October 1656), and for the preservation of Oliver Cromwell (16 February 1657).42 Toward the end of the decade, authorities proclaimed a number of commemorative days: 23 October was restored as a commemoration of protestant deliverance (19 October 1655); an annual day

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of public thanksgiving was established to commemorate Michael Jones’s victories at Dungan Hill and Rathmines earlier in the decade (1 August 1656); and 5 November was appointed as a thanksgiving day for naval victories off Spanish coasts and as a perpetual commemoration of the failure of the Gunpowder plot (21 October 1656).43 Simultaneously, the emerging Presbyterian movement proclaimed a number of other fasts, which were mostly of brief duration, though when James Shaw, the minister of Carnmoney, suffered the haunting of a ghost in 1672, his fellow ministers judged the incident to be so serious as to warrant a local fast that lasted eight days.44 In the later part of the century, this kind of public fasting continued to be an unusual activity related to periods of social or ecclesiastical distress.45 For all of its occasional quality, nevertheless, protestant fasting was inherently political, dramatizing ecclesiastical resistance to centralized claims for social or political power. The Ulster Presbyterians traditionally refused to observe those fasts that had been sponsored by the government.46 The Dublin authorities were informed in March 1657 that Scots had refused to observe the solemnities they had proclaimed: ‘‘The said day and duty was very slightly observed, especially by the Scots ministers, in many parts of Ulster, where little or no care was taken to convene their respective congregations for performance of that duty . . . divers of which ministers are said to be at present under salary and established upon the Civil List.’’47 Ulster Scots nevertheless explained that this was not a contradiction of the subjection to temporal powers advocated by the Directory for Public Worship. In county Down, Presbyterians explained that this subjection was only due to lawful powers and that they could not submit to a fast required by a power that they considered to be unlawful.48 Presbyterians in Laggan addressed the same issue in 1658, when two of their ministers traveled to Dublin ‘‘to endeavour to allay the present fury of the governors, especially of Henry Cromwell and did plainly tell them that they could not in conscience join with them in these fasts and thanksgivings, and that it was no worldly consideration but conscience that kept them at that distance.’’49 Presbyterians maintained this policy after the Restoration, when the government perceived that the social fusion engineered by sectarian fasting could represent a significant military threat.50 In January 1661, the Lords Justices and Council condemned unlawful meetings of Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers and lamented that many of these dissenters had arrogated to themselves the authority to proclaim fast days in independence of the state.51 This official concern was related to the fact that those who proclaimed public fasts were identifying social crises that the government was failing to recognize. But if fasting showed the commonalities among dissenters in Ireland, it also demonstrated the differences between the puritan cultures of

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the old and new worlds. On the other side of the Atlantic, public fasts were proclaimed ‘‘in response to dire agricultural and meteorological conditions, ecclesiastical, military, political, and social crises,’’ and their proclamation ‘‘became a standard weapon in the arsenal of public rituals available in time of trouble.’’52 New England puritans were schematizing their patterns of public fasting and thanksgiving in a program that Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe has recognized as the ‘‘re-ritualizing’’ of the church calendar.53 This traditional— and almost medieval—regularity was not reintroduced in Ireland, where public fasting continued to be an unusual and often disruptive activity for protestants. Cromwellian protestants rewrote the liturgical calendar: emphasizing the holiness of the Sabbath, the Commissioners pushed for its stricter observance in Lucan, where a market had traditionally been held on Sundays, and in Dublin.54 They also suppressed the rituals associated with the holy wells,55 and undermined other ‘‘Popish superstitions’’ such as the traditional holidays of Christmas and Easter.56 Therefore, precisely because of their occasional quality, the fasts they proclaimed were loaded with cultural significance. Public fasting was less an expression of annual ritual than a powerful demonstration of temporal and ecclesiastical power. Perhaps that political significance can best be explained by comparing the Irish experience of fasting with that idealized in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition. When the Antrim ministers announced the fast in December 1656, it was clear that they were drawing on the social customs of the Covenanting ecclesiology into which they had been educated.57 The Scottish church had demonstrated a growing tendency to order public fasts in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, a period in which it attempted to consolidate the earlier gains of reformation, but fasting had also been a tool of the second wave of Scottish reformation, during which the established church had taken on an increasingly puritan bent.58 Ideologically, many of these public fasts had political causes, and, socially, they served to construct a foil of collective unity against which religious dissent might be easily observed.59 Scottish Presbyterians proclaimed fasts for at least two purposes: to lament and draw attention to the negligence of those who ought to have been godly and to make visible the incredible social power of the elite who claimed they were. In the midseventeenth century, the Antrim ministers drew on this Scottish heritage as they elaborated their vision for social control. Their fasts were aspirational: the ministers were acting together to create at a local level an expression of the national comprehension they craved. There is little doubt that public fasts were extremely effective tools in this struggle for hegemonic unity. Extant records suggest that fasts were broken only in unusual circumstances. In some parts of Scotland in the early seventeenth century, prosecutions for the violation of

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fasts could account for as little as 3 percent of cases managed by kirk sessions.60 One reason for the low numbers of prosecutions for violations would be that adherence at a public fast was a very visible indicator of commitment to the idea of collective reformation that—on one level, at least—held the community together. At the same time, the occasional nature of fast days made them an acute barometer of social and political threat in the Irish protestant world. The conflicts of the 1640s and early 1650s had stimulated a disruptive wave of reverse colonization, with Ulster Presbyterians returning to the southwest of Scotland;61 the ecclesiastical cohesion of Presbyterianism had been shattered by Scottish schism; and the social cohesion of Presbyterianism was undermined by apparently uncontrollable clerical itinerants, those ‘‘disaffected persons’’ who were pouring ‘‘contempt’’ on, and making ‘‘hazard’’ of, the gospel and its ordinances.62 The situation was certainly critical. In 1649, the Ulster presbytery described how it had ‘‘from our watch-towre blowen the trumpet unto the people’’ in ‘‘these darke and troublesome times’’ when the ‘‘Sectaries’’ and ‘‘Malignants’’ represented ‘‘a greater mysterie of iniquity being now discovered, then was any before.’’63 The military triumph of the ‘‘sectaries’’ presented Presbyterians with a major political problem, as the inherent Royalism of their covenant obligations made their church a potential threat to successive Cromwellian administrations.64 This perception of Royalist sympathy generated bitter opposition from the state. The records of the Antrim ministers referred to the wider political situation to explain a number of significant gaps in their narrative. In 1649, when the Declaration by the Presbytery at Bangor, in Ireland lamented the ‘‘apparent ruine of Religion, and the great violation of the covenant following upon the present change of Command in this Province,’’ George Monro was at the head of a Parliamentarian army in the northeast, ‘‘troubling ye ministers and country.’’65 Government opposition continued between August 1650 and May 1652, when the military’s pursuit of one minister made it impossible for his congregation to continue to worship in public.66 But violent harassment gave way to plans for forcible removal as authorities realized the political and cultural benefits of the Presbyterians’ geographical proximity to their homeland: authorities in Ulster complained to the Commissioners that the sea journey between Kintyre, in Scotland, and Glenarm, in Ireland, could take as little as two hours.67 Intending to break this link, the Fleetwood administration drew up a scheme to remove 260 leading Presbyterians to new settlements in counties Kilkenny, Tipperary, and Waterford, where, it was believed, their links with brethren in Scotland could be broken.68 The ministers resisted the Engagement—a government-sponsored oath of support for the new administration—by arguing for the validity of their

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preference for political quietism. In October 1652, preparing for a meeting in Belfast, prominent Presbyterians ‘‘drew up a paper . . . declaring that, though they could not own the government as lawful, nor bind themselves by any oath or subscription to it, yet their only calling and aim was to preach the Gospel to their congregations; and that, for their part, they were upon no intention of insurrection or disturbing the peace.’’69 There was no admission of the inherently political component of their program for social control. They evaded their enemies, though it was political changes in London, rather than the force of their arguments, that brought the scheme to an end. One day before the meeting to discuss the scheme was due to occur, news reached Carrickfergus that the Long Parliament, under whose auspices the Irish administration served, had been forcibly dissolved.70 Confused by the impact of constitutional turmoil, the administration agreed that ministers need not take the Engagement and permitted them liberty to preach.71 The plan for the transplantation of Presbyterians was never carried out, but it demonstrated the administration’s implacable hostility to sectarian attempts to regulate society in independence of the state.72 The transplantation scheme was one of a number of significant political challenges to Presbyterian continuity in the northeast of Ireland. Ulster Presbyterians were also reeling from divisions in the Scottish church, which had fissured in 1651 when a minority party withdrew from the General Assembly, claiming that it had been unlawfully constituted. Church courts—from synods to presbyteries—split between the minority ‘‘Remonstrants’’ (who were most supportive of the Cromwellians) and the majority ‘‘Resolutioners’’ (who were most supportive of the Stuarts). As the Kirk fragmented, the Antrim ministers called on their ministerial candidates not to take sides in the Scottish dispute. It was well known that ministers in Laggan and Route were all supporters of the original Remonstrant General Assembly, in contrast to their brethren elsewhere. But the aggression of the Dublin administration made it essential that Ulster Presbyterians present a united front. Faced with the prospect of crippling division, ministers agreed in August 1654 to forbear all discussion of the Scottish divisions.73 Refusing to choose between the divisions, Ulster Presbyterians attempted to operate within the Scottish Presbyterian system but outside the competing authority claims of either of the General Assemblies. However unsatisfactory the agreement may have appeared, it did allow the recruiting of a large number of ministers from Scotland, most of whom, like the ministers in Laggan and Route, were tacit supporters of the Cromwellian settlement.74 In an attempt to divide and conquer, the Dublin government offered these Remonstrant clergy the opportunity to join the Civil List.75 Doubtless, the prospect of financial security in a period of demographic turmoil led

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an increasing number of ministers to move from their initial hostility to the Cromwellian administration and their covenanted commitment to work for a uniformly Presbyterian nation to a more pragmatic approach, taking the state’s money while moderately preaching for its reformation. By November 1655, fourteen Presbyterian clergy in the Precinct of Belfast had names entered on the Civil List.76 This financial reorganization developed as the movement began its steady growth. In 1654, facing the difficulty of managing increasing numbers of clergy and adherents, the single Ulster presbytery dissolved into three ‘‘meetings,’’ which were gathered in Antrim, Down, and Laggan. In 1657 two new meetings were gathered in Route and Tyrone.77 The twenty-four Presbyterian ministers who had served in Ulster in 1653 saw their organization expand to such an extent that by 1659 it consisted of five presbyteries and nearly eighty clergy.78 By 1660, there were seventy-four Presbyterian parishes in Ulster, all but five of which were in counties Antrim, Down, Derry, Donegal, and Tyrone.79 Ulster ministers had moved from the principled opposition they had expressed in 1649 to a pragmatic toleration of the Cromwellian government, and their movement grew as a result. The policy of ‘‘divide and conquer’’ and the threat of forcible transplantation were part of a raft of oppressive measures adopted by the government in the early part of the decade. The situation of Ulster Presbyterians only improved with the transition to the Protectorate and the governance of Henry Cromwell.80 His arrival transformed Presbyterian political fortunes. One minister remembered that ‘‘this poor Church had a new sunshine of liberty to all ordinances,’’ and the meetings of ministers met ‘‘publickly and frequently without any restraint from the powers.’’81 Some limitations remained: Presbyterian ministers were not allowed to preach in Lisburn, Belfast, or Carrickfergus, as these garrison towns were served by Baptist and Independent chaplains, and Independents in Carrickfergus grew alarmed at the prospect of a popular Presbyterian preacher in their locality in 1657 and called for a moratorium on all Scottish preachers in Irish towns.82 But, despite these restrictions, the Presbyterian movement was emerging as a denomination, and its growth encouraged its aspiration for social control. This aspiration for social control is evident in the surviving records of the ‘‘meeting of ministers’’ in Antrim, which were not the meetings of a fully functioning presbytery but sat, rather vaguely, by the Ulster presbytery’s ‘‘commission and appointment.’’83 Nevertheless, the Antrim ministers set about an ambitious program, diligently overseeing the wider state of their churches. Ministers took a detailed interest in local congregational affairs. During a visit to the church in Templepatrick, they advised the minister to be ‘‘more clear and methodick in his preaching.’’84 Others were examined as to their success

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in church discipline. At Broadisland, one Sunday in September 1654, visiting clergy interviewed the church’s elders and inquired about the ‘‘soundness and authority’’ of their minister’s doctrine, ‘‘his painfulness in catechising, visiting of families, and sick persons,’’ and his ‘‘impartiality in discipline.’’85 Then, in turn, the minister was called in and examined as to the state of his elders, including ‘‘their unanimity with him and among themselves.’’86 It was vital that the kirk session should be united in their attempts to control their parishioners. This aspiration for successful social control was also part of younger ministers’ clerical training. The Antrim ministers took pains to oversee the training of candidates for clerical office. The ministers operated something like a finishing school: candidates received the initial part of their training at universities in Scotland, mostly at the University of Glasgow, and traveled to northeast Ireland to develop pastoral skills under the supervision of local clergy.87 The process of training was anything but straightforward. The meetings’ minutes describe a painful pathway to ordination, as candidates passed examinations of their abilities in theology and biblical languages and were tested according to their attitudes toward the division of the Scottish church. Two of the candidates, Thomas Crawford and Gilbert Simson, for example, were appointed tests in such varied areas as ‘‘cases of conscience,’’ biblical chronology, and Greek.88 But this regimen of training was directly related to the environment in which the candidates hoped to work. In the mid-1650s, while Scottish Presbyterianism was being torn apart, the Irish ministers, wishing to preserve the fabric of their unity, concentrated the minds of their students on the pastoral difficulties they were likely to face in Ulster and set assessments that were closely linked to the problems the ministers discussed. Gilbert Simson was to preach on the perseverance of the saints, perhaps a doctrine that the moral lapses of church members seemed to confute;89 Thomas Crawford addressed the criteria for membership in the visible church;90 and John Douglas was appointed to preach against the toleration of the sects.91 The choice of these familiar Presbyterian themes reflected the difficulty of establishing hegemony in a culture torn by social and ecclesiastical turmoil. And the ministers certainly faced a challenge. The minutes of their meetings contain references to ‘‘fornications, adulteries, . . . drunkenness, railings, slanders, thefts, prodigality.’’92 In August 1654, visiting the church in Templepatrick, they consulted on a number of moral problems, including the best method of dealing with James Weir, a bigamist from Ballyclare, who had left his first wife in Scotland and married another in county Antrim.93 His case was still causing problems in April 1655, when the ministers met to pronounce a

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sentence of excommunication against a Ballyclare woman who had confessed a relapse into fornication.94 Catterwood’s irregular marriage was just one problem among many. The land might be ready for ‘‘eminent judgement,’’ but in developing strategies for their consolidation of power and in the emergency proclamation of a fast the ministers were doing as much as they could to see it pass.

III This local control—proclaiming its determined autonomy from the Dublin administration—threatened the possibility of a state-sponsored and only generically protestant national reformation. With the express purpose of breaking this kind of Presbyterian and promonarchical social control, the Cromwellian authorities developed the Civil List to provide a series of alternatives to a single denominational monopoly. The list aimed to provide a varied supply of statesupported preachers throughout Ireland. Its financial provision attacked the Presbyterian system of tithes, prizing the minister apart from the congregation and promoting the administration’s plans for clerical reorganization.95 The arrangement appears to have commenced in 1651, as the pressure to recruit clergy began to grow, but none of its records have survived from before 1654. Between 1654 and 1659, at least 376 ministers were being supported by the Civil List, among which were 67 Presbyterians, at least 65 of whom retained broad Episcopalian sympathies, and perhaps no more than 11 Baptists. Of the remaining 233 ministers, 18 have been positively identified as Independents.96 The Civil List was certainly selective. Those ministers who gained the support of the state had been ‘‘tried’’—examined by a multidenominational committee of prestigious ministers—and were collectively known as ‘‘ministers of the Gospel.’’97 There is evidence that their stipends could vary enormously.98 Despite this uncertainty, the Civil List deliberately set out to break the financial ties between pastor, patron, and congregation. The financial was supporting the theological; replacing tithes, with all their reflection of local concern, the Civil List created a national ministry, with centrally controlled access, which could free participating clergy from deference to local opinion. The advantage of the Civil List was that a participating minister need not comply with the doctrinal wishes of his people. His financial independence allowed him to assume a great deal of clerical power. In some senses, the Civil List can be seen as fulfilling some of the ideals of the Westminster Assembly. The Confession of Faith had stated that the duty of the civil magistrate included ensuring that ‘‘Unity and Peace be preserved

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in the Church, that the Truth of God be kept pure, and intire; that all Blasphemies and Heresies be suppressed; all corruptions and abuses in Worship and Discipline prevented, or reformed.’’99 And, in its system of central oversight, the Civil List certainly provided for this kind of state role. But, in allowing the admission of Baptists, the Civil List went much further than the Westminster divines would have allowed. The project visibly demonstrated the moving center of the puritan mainstream as it responded to the pressures of the 1650s. Not everyone was convinced of the advantages of the scheme. Not all ministers joined. Private chaplains—such as Jeremy Taylor—found financial support among their patrons, especially as the power of presentations quietly revived.100 Episcopalians, continuing to use the forbidden Book of Common Prayer, generally remained within their liturgical underground, though the example of Episcopalian ministers in prominent Dublin churches suggests that their underground worship was not always covert.101 Other unofficial preachers preferred a merely local reputation. Baptists were more reluctant to join the scheme than ministers from any other of the major groupings, and they were criticized by their adherents when they did. There were also complaints about the quality of those ministers who were attracted to the scheme. John Murcot, who was employed as a trier, ‘‘often bewailed and greatly mourned for the evil, and dangerous consequence of corrupt men called to the Ministry who daub with untempered morter, and slightly heal the wound that is made with a faithful hand.’’102 Despite Murcot’s criticisms, access to the Civil List was strictly controlled. At the beginning of the Cromwellian period, the means of testing prospective ministers had varied geographically.103 Early members of the Civil List had been directly summoned by the Parliamentary Commissioners, and this practice was widened as other ministers were recruited, though ‘‘occasionally presentations made by private individuals were permitted or let stand.’’104 The process of admission was quickly regularized by the appointment of triers, whose activities paralleled those of their peers in England. Throughout the country, committees of triers assessed the clerical potential of candidates. In December 1652, Samuel Winter, Thomas Patient, and Murcot were appointed to meet with several other ministers to ‘‘seriously advise and consider what course is best to be taken for the effectual preaching of the Gospel in Ireland, and what persons they know fitly qualified to be sent out for that work and purpose, as well into the Irish as into the English quarters, and to certify the same with all convenient speed to the Commissioners of Parliament.’’105 In Dublin, the committee of triers included Winter, apparently its president, as well as such varied individuals as Patient, Stephen Charnock, Samuel Mather,

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and others.106 Other committees of triers operated in county Cork, though, as we will see, their decisions were subject to central approval.107 There were less formal mechanisms in the north of Ireland. Despite their aspiration for independence of the Dublin administration, Ulster ministers were mostly tried by the committee in the capital.108 They were not known for indulgent sympathy. In February 1655, a ‘‘Mr. Dunbarre’’ arrived from England with a certificate in his own writing but signed by the registrar of the Committee for the Approbation of Ministers claiming that he had received official sanction for his removal to pursue the work of the ministry in Ireland. But Dunbarre possessed no testimonials. He was put before the triers, who did not appreciate his sermon and sent him back to England.109 But, once on the list, ministers continued to be policed. In November 1652, the Commissioners complained to local authorities in Cork of a ‘‘Mr. Royle.’’ The Cork triers had approved him as a minister, apparently unaware that elsewhere he was suspected of ‘‘slight esteem of the Scriptures and Scripture ordinances.’’ The Commissioners suggested that all preachers should possess a testimonial letter from ‘‘some congregations in England, who have experience of their deportment and conversation, and whose duty most properly it is to send out Gospel ministers, or else from others of our friends in England, or Ireland, who are reputed religious and zealous promoters of godliness, before we can signify our approbation of them.’’110 In March 1653, John Cull, minister at Kildare, was similarly suspected of ‘‘some expressions . . . tending to atheism, and the stirring up of questions to lead the people to a light esteem of God.’’ The Commissioners demanded that he should clear himself of the charges, which he appears to have done successfully.111 Although the committee members tended to be men of some respect involved in preaching work, they had a wide range of clerical backgrounds. The Baptist leader Thomas Patient, for example, had never been ordained. As might be expected, therefore, the sheer variety of theological and pastoral perspectives involved in the Civil List project lent it a substantial degree of instability and is one explanation why it failed to identify and consolidate a generic protestant mainstream. Committee members could violently disagree with one another. Patient, who was a member of the Dublin committee in 1652, argued in 1654 that many of those included in the Civil List were not building authentic churches or pursuing an authentic ministry.112 He also worried that the infant baptism that many members of the Civil List promoted would ‘‘destroy . . . the Doctrine and foundation of all Gospel Churches where it is held.’’113 Others complained of the project’s unhappy social effect. When Edward Warren suggested that Patient himself represented the decay of the Irish clergy, he described him as being ‘‘in the number of Jeroboam’s Priests, who [were] made

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of the lowest of the people, in the fullest extent of that word.’’114 The allusion, as we have seen, aligned the Cromwellian reformation with the division of the Hebrew monarchy and the apostasy of the northern kingdom, which bypassed the Levites to appoint as priests men from any tribe or social rank who presented themselves for ordination (1 Kings 12:31). The Civil List was recognized as having deleterious social, as well as theological, effects. Warren’s comments typified wider dissatisfaction with the Civil List as Irish protestants developed a number of new approaches to ecclesiastical organization. Looking to the Ulster Presbyterians for inspiration, these alternative associations operated within and sometimes across the borders of the Civil List. They were not always intended to compete with the government’s policy. Although ministers in Cork banded together to oppose the financial arrangements that lay at the heart of the Civil List scheme, ministers in Dublin and Leinster proclaimed their deference to the project and campaigned vigorously, if unsuccessfully, for its retention. These associations differed visibly from one another but understood themselves to represent a faithful remnant facing common enemies Ministers in Dublin and Leinster proclaimed their decision to Decline and Abhorr all Blasphemy, Heresie, Schism, Superstition, Pride, Profaneness, Ungodliness, Unrighteousness, Intemperance, and All the other Manifest sinful fruits of the flesh. As also to disavow, and with all Prudence and faithfulness (as we have just Occasion) to Oppose Popery, Prelacy, (not onely as it is described in The Solemn League and covenant; but also as it is cried up by some in these days under the specious disguise of Moderated, Regulated or Primitive Episcopacy, And all inventions of Man tending thereunto), Arminianism, Socinianism, Antinomianism, Familism, Seekerism, Quakerism, Antiscripturism, Erastianism; and what ever else is contrary to the acknowledging of the Truth which is according to Godliness.115 The rise of associations, independent of government control and with sometimes limited aspiration for clerical monopoly, did not disguise their common proximity to the mainstream Reformed tradition. While the Dublin and Leinster association might not have been happy with the detail of George Gillespie’s Covenanting ecclesiology, for example, they were happy to cite his work in opposition to heresy.116 But there were clear tensions between the best interests of the associations and those of the Civil List. Samuel Winter, as a Dublin trier, would have appointed men into the Civil List that he could never have accepted into the association he also represented. The rise of the associations demonstrated growing awareness of the tensions between the best interests of church

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and state and the need to create on the ground a society guided by the moral convictions of cooperating churches. Irish associations varied in character and in the qualifications they required of prospective members. The Presbyterian theocrats in Ulster accepted no one but themselves. In the south, where this kind of ecclesiological rigidity had never been popular, or perhaps possible, clerical associations had to outline their acceptable boundaries more carefully. The Cork association might have shared the Presbyterian organization preferred by the Ulster Scots, but they were much less theologically defined and operated pragmatically as Presbyterians without any kind of official subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith. The association was composed of former Anglicans, ministers who had been ordained by bishops, and retained the basic Erastian outlook of their earlier Episcopalianism. The Dublin and Leinster association, by contrast, was less explicitly Presbyterian but did highlight its ecclesiological sympathies (in its emphasis on the Independents’ Savoy Declaration) and its confessional commitments. It was much more committed than the Cork association to the work of ongoing ecclesiological reformation. It is hardly surprising that members of associations sometimes changed their ecclesiological loyalties. Claudius Gilbert had been a signatory of the letter from Dublin ministers to Richard Baxter in 1655, an early and informal grouping of ministers under the leadership of Samuel Winter, but he appears to have moved toward the Cork association, perhaps for geographical reasons. Associations were not watertight denominations.117 The emergence of, and transfer between, associations is symptomatic of changing political contexts. The Cork association concerned itself with promoting church order and controlling ordination. Its movement towards an ecclesiastical settlement was an attempt, among other things, to codify social order; but its hurried references to lay preachers demonstrates that, even in 1657 and in contexts quite different from those of the Ulster Scots, there were still concerns about the existence of ‘‘unlawful ministers’’—and not only because of the challenge they posed to the strict regulation of marriage.118 Associational loyalties provided for the regulation of ordination, the dissemination of the gospel, and defined patterns of social control.

IV When the Cork association rejected lay ministry, it was complaining that the Civil List was too broad. It shared the assumption with other critics of

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the scheme that there could be a distinction between those ministers who were recognized by the Civil List and others who were recognized by God. Even the Baptist leader Thomas Patient—who, having never been ordained, would certainly have been regarded as an ‘‘unlawful minister’’ by the Cork Presbyterians—understood the problem: ‘‘Though a man should be able to preach the doctrine of Faith, and that ably for the conversion of souls unto that faith, yet being destitute of the true knowledge of the doctrine of Baptism, and how it ought to be dispensed, to be sure, this man is not a justifiable Minister.’’119 But while some were concerned by the scheme’s theological breadth, or its provision of opportunities for the socially unacceptable, others were concerned by the assumed preferences for a national church with state control that seemed to underlie it. While the ministers in Cork worked for greater unity across the three nations, the more radical groups, Baptists and Independents, thought plans for national comprehension had already gone too far. As they saw it, a national church was neither possible nor desirable. Driven by these kinds of concerns, a number of alternatives to the Civil List developed in the later 1650s. These associations gathered together likeminded churches in a given locality, following a pattern established in England, most notably by the Essex association, and in Ireland by the emerging Baptist movement, who were organizing into England as early as 1653, as we have already seen.120 One of the most important of the early associations was led by Richard Baxter. His Worcester association was less concerned with the details of ecclesiological unity than with achieving effective social discipline.121 Baxter wanted his associations to have the support of the state.122 The model—if not in its state link—was certainly popular among paedobaptists in Ireland. Claudius Gilbert suggested that ministers should labor for the provisional unity they involved. ‘‘Christian Associations,’’ he explained, ‘‘may gradually unite our Hearts and Hands, till our Minds may be further united.’’123 But associations demonstrated disunity as much as unity. Winter’s earliest association of ministers—which met briefly in 1655 and was supported by Gilbert—was fiercely opposed to the Baptists.124 The manifesto of the Dublin and Leinster association, which Winter later chaired, admitted that associations could gather together on competing principles. Associations also demonstrated differences between apparently like-minded groups of churches. Among Presbyterians, the Cork association was plainly Erastian, for example, while the Ulster Scots, with whom they were closely aligned in the late 1650s, were theocrats.125 Associations also illustrated the growing breach between many congregations and the state. Alongside a growing realization of the need for churches to work together to achieve their social and ecclesiastical goals, the development of associational models demonstrates that a significant number of Irish

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churches were growing in independence from the Cromwellian government. Little is know of the earliest Irish associations. It is possible that early associations were composed of ministers from some ‘‘scattered churches in the south and east,’’ but nothing is known of the outcome of their discussions.126 Seymour suggested that early associations had probably included one based around Waterford.127 In 1655, as we have seen, an informal group of ministers around Dublin, under the leadership of Samuel Winter, signed a letter to Baxter in which they discussed common ecclesiological projects. But this informal group appears to have dissolved. Nevertheless, the earliest formal association whose publications continue to exist was based in Cork.128 The Cork association seems to have been formed in 1656, though it is possible that it existed earlier.129 Certainly, the ministers in Cork do not appear to have known of any earlier examples for their banding together, even the close cooperation of Irish Baptist churches, for they feared the charge of innovation and cited the example of ‘‘many precedents’’ in England. Nevertheless, they argued, ‘‘some must begin,’’ and ‘‘of all, in this country, we apprehend the opportunity to associate is most, because ministers are most and nearest; the necessity most, because the congregations are the most and greatest.’’130 The association in Cork emerged from widespread unhappiness with the breadth of the Civil List. Its emergence highlighted the inherently conservative trend of associational networking. The formation of the Cork association also reflected a change in the balance of local power. Earlier in the 1650s, John Murcot had decided against a pastoral position in Cork because, he explained, of the ‘‘want of such a Magistrate . . . as would publickly and professedly own the waies and worship of God, and back the Ministry of the word by its Power and Authority.’’131 Murcot understood that the cooperation of civil and sacred was fundamental to ongoing reformation: ‘‘In vain doth a Minister preach up the morality of the Sabbath, and the necessity of a religious observance, if the Magistrate draw not forth the sword of Justice, and severly punish its prophane violators.’’132 But, later in the decade, Edward Worth got round the obstruction of the magistrates. He mounted a local campaign against the teaching of error—for example, in the baptism debate in which he and Murcot engaged with Harding—and received official backing with the arrival of Henry Cromwell, whom he was advising in November 1655.133 A number of reforms in local government, which eliminated the local influence of religious radicals in the army, allowed Worth’s power base to be consolidated.134 But the Cork association was heavyhanded in its aspirations for power. In August 1656, John Cook, chief justice of Munster, reported to Henry Cromwell that an emerging association was breaking up the unity that had

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been engineered by the Civil List. ‘‘Mr. Worth, Mr. Stawell, Mr. Ayres, and the rest of the classical Presbiterian ministers in this county’’ had set up a weekly lecture in Cork and had ‘‘rejected and excluded Mr. Weld, Mr. Wood, Mr. Nicolett, Mr. Coleman, and all the rest of the congregations ministers in this county, who are not ordained by bishops imediately or derivatively,’’ to the distress of many. Cook had attempted to resolve the situation himself in his charge to the grand jury in Cork ‘‘to desire all good people, that were lovers of and well affected to his highnes and your lordship, to decline all waies of sedition, and to study peace and love.’’ He had argued for ‘‘a reall and firme conjunction between all honest interests.’’ Nevertheless, the contest was clearly between those who traced their authority to Episcopal ordination and those who traced it to their sanctioning by Cromwellian authority. The ‘‘bitter expressions’’ of ‘‘young Mr. Ayres’’ included a claim that those who ‘‘countenanced’’ ministers other than those who had been ordained by bishops were ‘‘great enemies to religion’’ and argued, with some confusion, for the continuing necessity of apostolic succession, which came ‘‘through the pope, but not from the pope.’’ But, Cook argued, it was unacceptable for any minister to ‘‘disowne and vilifie their brethren, who were approved and sent forth to preache by his highnes and councel.’’ This ‘‘very high act of over boldness . . . had in it a very manifest tendency to the breache of the peace, and to make a difference betweene godly men.’’ An association which had been set up to promote closer unity was serving to highlight divisions among the clergy on the same Civil List, which in turn had been set up to emphasize national unity rather than local or ecclesiological division. Cook appealed to Henry Cromwell to bring an end to the conflict and to order the Cork Presbyterians to allow other ministers to ‘‘take their turnes with them.’’135 The situation in Munster seems to reflect a growing conservative trend— even among those the association had excluded. James Wood, one of those noted by Cook whose ordination had been rejected by the Cork Presbyterians, had abandoned his earlier and more radical commitments and, one former congregant complained, had ‘‘fallen back’’ into a more conservative pastoral role. Wood had adopted the ‘‘sprinkling of infants, which once he could not do, even since he first pretended a call to the Ministry, and his singing of David’s Psalms, which once he seemingly endeavoured to take off people from.’’ Worst of all, Wood was ‘‘now declaring it his judgement, that by the right of Magna Charta, Ministers may receive tythes, which once he did believe, was not according to the practice of the Ministers of the Gospel.’’136 Wood had evidently been entered into the Civil List while arguing against infant baptism, congregational singing, and the support of tithes, these objections being staple components of early Baptist theology; however, his rejection by the Cork

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Presbyterians may have caused him to reconsider these commitments. It is unclear whether he ever joined their association, even though they began to work for the provision of acceptable ordinations for those whose backgrounds they considered suspect, moving from their insistence on Episcopal ordination to the revised proposals outlined in The agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers in the county of Corke for the ordaining of ministers (1657).137 What is clear is that The agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers was particularly concerned about lay preaching, which it identified as the reason why ‘‘the Irish and Papists are alienated from the Protestant Religion.’’138 But pastoral confusion was also gripping the true church, for ‘‘Elect Ones’’ were also being deceived ‘‘by the uncertaine sound of Schismes brazen Trumpets.’’139 The ministers returned to the language of Jeroboam’s apostasy and, somewhat ironically given their new determination, lamented that ‘‘False Apostles, will . . . consecrate them selves.’’140 The ministers agreed that the anticlericalism that so often underlay lay preaching was one of ‘‘the worst of Sins,’’ for those who resist ordained clergy ‘‘are said to resist the holy ghost . . . dispisers of them are said to be despisers of god . . . to judge themselves unworthy of eternall life . . . [and worthy to be] punished with the worst of judgements.’’141 ‘‘To this Sin, temporall punnishments are often consequent . . . Spirituall always.’’142 It was to counteract this lay initiative that the ministers of the Cork association banded together. They formed an association to combat ‘‘divers sad consequents of non-ordination’’—the lack of learning, divisive spirit, and erroneous opinions of the lay preachers.143 The alternative, their manifesto outlined, was to ordain clergymen themselves. The agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers therefore showed the ministers moving rapidly from their original Episcopal base. They noted that the current confusion necessitated conservative clergy either to ‘‘seeke ordination from our Brethren, the Scots in Ulster; the inconveniences whereof (the present State of affairs considered) are too obvious to need our instances: or from our Brethren in England.’’ Neither solution was satisfactory: ‘‘They may probably want meanes of support for such a journey,’’ they recognized, and in any case ‘‘certificates from persons at this distance, may possibly be counterfeited, or if true, discredited, because the Subscribers unknown.’’144 The ministers cited the Westminster divines to justify the appropriateness of their action and set about their program of ecclesiastical renewal.145 Their association enjoyed some early successes. Its political clout was demonstrated in the Dublin Convention of April 1658, which featured a debate between Winter and Worth on the value of returning to a system of tithes. Winter, arguing in defense of the Civil List, found himself outmaneuvered by the increasingly powerful Old Protestant interest and their determination to return to traditional

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patterns of clerical maintenance. Worth’s victory in the Dublin Convention signaled that the Cork association had now eclipsed the earlier political standing of the Winter party.146 The sudden political influence of the Cork association can be explained with reference to the changing political context of the later 1650s. As he moved away from Fleetwood’s Baptist hegemony, Henry Cromwell had initially appealed to moderate Independents such as Winter but lost their support when he turned to Presbyterians and moderate Episcopalians as he sought to broaden the social base of his administration. In 1658 Independents and Baptists united in opposition to Henry Cromwell, but by that stage he had successfully forged a link between the two main groups of Old Protestants, the Ulster Presbyterians and the Cork association.147 It was on this basis that he invited John Livingstone to establish a Scottish Presbyterian church in Dublin.148 Cromwell appears to have thought highly of his new allies.149 He described Worth as ‘‘painful in his calling, and strives more to bring souls to Christ than to propagate his opinion’’ and was sufficiently impressed to allow Worth to mount a national experiment for the restoration of tithes, though this may also have reflected his urgent need to reduce state expenditure.150 The result of the Dublin Convention demonstrated that the Irish associations were reflecting an increasingly political polarization that stretched across the three kingdoms. Winter sought common cause with English Independents, while Worth gravitated toward English Presbyterians and was allied to the Ulster Scots.151 In 1658, Worth traveled to London and the English universities, encouraging conservative divines to imagine that their Presbyterianism could be as effective in England as his had been, under a benevolent government, in Ireland.152 His increasingly political links showed that the Cork association was also mutating rapidly. The Cork ministers were no longer concerned only with the proper authority for ordination. Now they were interested in controlling clerical organization at a national level. Winter followed Worth to England, sought alliances with English Independents, and was impressed by the Savoy Declaration they composed. Irish puritans were influencing and being influenced by ecclesiological developments in England.153 But their actions also had consequences in the northeast of their own island, for Worth’s lobbying had profound impact on the Ulster Scots. Henry Cromwell’s retreat from the radical sects provided these Presbyterians with increasing social confidence. The Ulster ministers were attracted to an impressively ambitious attempt to create a Presbyterian and national church structure that could purposefully encompass the contrasting situations of the three kingdoms. Ulster Presbyterians moved from the margins to the center of Cromwellian power.

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Meanwhile, having lost his political influence at the Dublin Convention but impressed by the organization of his English brethren, Winter set up the Dublin and Leinster association in 1659.154 The members met on 22 February 1659 with the intention of ‘‘furthering of a real and thorough Reformation of Persons Families and Congregations, in all matters of Religion, according to the written Word of God.’’155 There was no mistaking their intent—the word ‘‘reformation’’ was printed in capitals on every occasion it was used in the text they produced, The agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster. But their ambitions were aggressively ecumenical. The pamphlet’s title page quoted from the English Independents’ Savoy Declaration, only six months old, in a strategic signal of Winter’s basic ecclesiological direction: ‘‘Such Reforming Churches as consist of persons sound in the faith, and of conversation becoming the Gospel, ought not to despise the Communion of each other, so far as may consist with their own Principles respectively, though they walk not in all things according to the same Rules of Church-Order.’’156 Winter was attempting to outmaneuver Worth by drawing the circle of fellowship wide enough to include the Cork Presbyterians—and, apparently, even the Baptists that his earlier association had intended to defeat.157 It was an astute strategem, forcing Worth and his allies onto the defensive, requiring them to explain their reasons for noninvolvement at a national level. That reforming vision was evidently designed to cross denominational boundaries and to unite churches across the island. The Agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster contended that ‘‘all the faithfull Saints and Servants of jesus christ within this Nation, should strive-together for the Faith of the Gospel, The purity of God’s Worship, The integrity of Christ’s Discipline, The regular Administration of all Gospel-Ordinances, The Oneness of God’s People in Heart and Way, And their Progress in all Spirituals unto Perfection.’’158 But, as the Cork association maintained its critical distance, this was seen to be a difficult ambition to realize, and the Dublin and Leinster ministers had to settle for something much less comprehensive. Their meeting established an association that included moderate Presbyterians alongside Independents, even as it appeared to court the moderate Baptists. This cooperation of Presbyterians and Independents meant that the association’s member churches were not required to be totally committed to the ‘‘visible saints’’ principle—the association considered congregations that had merely ‘‘a sufficient number of . . . visible Saints’’ to be ‘‘true visible churches of Christ.’’159 This was a remarkable demonstration of the association’s limited aims—its members had not agreed even on such a basic issue

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as the proper membership of the church. But the ambiguity was problematic. The association had created a climate in which an individual who had been refused membership in one associated church could be admitted into membership in another. Similar ambiguity characterized the association’s confessional basis. While the title page of the Agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster quoted the ecumenical ambitions of the Independents’ Savoy Declaration, the reformation it envisaged required its adherents to agree to use the catechisms and confession of the more classically Presbyterian Westminster Assembly, as well as the Apostles’ Creed.160 But subscription was not expected to be precise, at least in ecclesiological matters: an unspecified ‘‘some of us’’ were to be permitted ‘‘Liberty of Judgement’’ about a few of the Westminster Confession of Faith’s statements on ‘‘Discipline.’’161 There was similar flexibility in the replacement of ‘‘the Antiquated Service-Book,’’ which was condemned for its ‘‘many Evils and Inexpediencyes.’’ In its place, the association agreed to ‘‘have an eye to the Substance, Sence, and Scope of the directory for God’s Publick Worship,’’ a rather ambiguous commitment to the Westminster ideal that, as we have seen, the Cromwellian Commissioners had officially imposed.162 Nevertheless, the purpose of the confessional agreement was clear, allowing the association’s ministers to promote ‘‘the Fundamentals of true Christian Religion, by one and the same Form of Sound Words’’ throughout Dublin and Leinster.163 The Agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster was designed to police public morality by reducing ecclesiological difference. Its discussion of clerical office highlighted its ambitions for hegemonic control. Its paragraph on the officers of the church—ministers, elders, and deacons—was ‘‘borrowed,’’ as the marginal comment indicated, ‘‘from the Assembly’s Confession of Faith,’’ and, in its discussion of calling to ecclesiastical office, it emphasized the importance of due ecclesiastical process: ‘‘These Officers are called by Christ himself, though not immediately but by Men.’’164 That calling was not to be recognized in independence of the church, but ‘‘the Solemn admission and Separation of Persons to the work of the Ministry, [was] to be performed by the Laying on of the Hands of the Presbytery with Fasting and Prayer’’ in the presence and with the consent of the congregation in which the candidate pastor was to work.165 The association perceived itself to be such a presbytery, discussing its own powers to ordain students and reserving the right to ‘‘regularly’’ ordain and include in its membership ‘‘any Orthodox Godly Brother’’ already active— however irregularly—in ministry.166 The association’s response to irregular ministry was to provide a mechanism by which nonordained paedobaptist clergy could be admitted into regular orders.

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Simultaneously, and in contrast to the aggression of the Baptists and the political participation of the Cork Presbyterians, the Dublin and Leinster association advertised its political quietism, denying the churches’ ‘‘intermedling beyond the Duty and limits of our calling with civil and CommonwealthAffairs’’ and determining to avoid ‘‘all giving of just Offence to those that are in Power and Authority over us in the Commonwealth.’’167 Unlike the Baptists or the Cork Presbyterians, the Dublin and Leinster churches could promise to do so because their association operated well within the orbit of the Civil List scheme. Complementing the work of the state, the Dublin and Leinster association was organizational without being exclusive. Instead, the ministers’ focus was entirely on family and congregational order. They called for a reformation beginning in the home ‘‘to promote, in every family under our spiritual care and inspection respectively, The Exercise of God’s Worship and Christian Religion in the Course of these too much neglected family-dutyes; (viz.) Reading of the Holy Scriptures, Prayer, Singing of Psalmes, Repetition of Sermons, Catechizing, Godly Conferences, and due Sanctification of the lord’s-dayes: That every Family may be as A little Church of jesus christ.’’168 They called for unity among the ministers, a unity grounded in common hostility to ‘‘all Blasphemy, Heresie, Schism, Superstition, Pride, Profaneness, Ungodliness, Unrighteousness, Intemperance, and All the other Manifest sinful fruits of the flesh,’’ as well as a range of protestant theological errors.169 But they also advanced a positive basis of unity in a common confessional commitment to the Bible, ‘‘as inspired of God, and of infallible Authority’’; ‘‘that brief, but Ancient Profession, or Summe of Christian Faith, called the apostles creed’’; and that ‘‘excellent confession of faith, comprized in thirty and three Chapters, and compiled by the Assembly of Divines for these three Nations,’’ which ministers were to receive as ‘‘their own confession of Faith in all the said Congregations, (Reserving onely to some of us our liberty of Judgement about a few expressions touching Discipline laid down in that confession).’’170 Ministers were also to use the Shorter and Longer catechisms of the Westminster Assembly, ‘‘unless some particular Brother shall think some other Catechism more convenient for his Congregation,’’ and ministers agreed to ‘‘restore into all the respective Congregations under our spiritual charge within this City and Province that church-government and Discipline, which Jesus Christ hath appointed in his Holy Scriptures.’’171 This reformation was advancing with an eschatological goal. Its system of ecclesiology—ambiguous though it was—should be ‘‘observed and kept inviolably till the second coming and Appearing of Christ, without any Additions or Inventions of men.’’172 Remarkably, the manifesto maintained an ecclesiological ambiguity at the same time as it claimed its synods and assemblies—

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the apparatus of Presbyterianism—were only useful ‘‘if need require.’’173 The Dublin and Leinster clergy were making very high claims for an ecclesiological system that they could not—or would not—define. But they were doing so as it entered its eclipse. Henry Cromwell was turning increasingly toward Presbyterians, encouraging their expansion throughout Ireland, appointing a personal Presbyterian chaplain, and even courting conservative Episcopalians.174 Even the Agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster—highlighting the inspiration of the Savoy Declaration—had to defer, however ambiguously, to the mainstream Presbyterian creed.

V Throughout the 1650s, the Civil List developed and denominations evolved as godly clergy struggled to enforce their system of social control. The Civil List emerged in response to the Dublin administration’s concerns about Presbyterian hegemony in Ulster; and associations developed in the south as clergy grew frustrated by the Civil List’s failure to judge on questions of church order. Associational thinking therefore reflected a widespread attempt to impose an ideal of social and ecclesiastical hegemony. But it was also indicative of social and religious disruption and dramatized in its scheme of ecclesiology the tensions that divided the state. Godly clergy recognized that associations could divide as well as unite the saints and promoted irenicism as an answer. Claudius Gilbert recognized that the theological revolution of the 1650s had developed a terrible, caustic momentum: ‘‘Reformation challenges Peace-making,’’ he agreed, but ‘‘Peace-making is still a chief part thereof, and a chief help thereto. . . . Is not the absence and estrangement from Peace, the great evil of these dayes?’’175 Other men of influence worked in their various spheres to promote harmony among all those whose energies were directed toward the edification of the elect. John Cook had found the clergy in Munster sequestered for their adherence to the ‘‘illegal authorities’’ represented by Royalists but worked to restore as many of them as were free from ‘‘scandal in life and doctrine’’: ‘‘Wherein they differ from us, I take it to be from a conscientious principle; & hope & daily pray, that there may be a right understanding and better agreement between all honest and conscientious people that feare the Lord, that we may all as one man with one shoulder, labour to exalt the Kingdome of Jesus Christ, and to advance holiness & righteousness in our severall Actions.’’176 Samuel Mather, when presented with an opportunity to undermine the ministry of Anglican recusants in Dublin, refused to do so ‘‘on

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the ground that he had been called into Ireland to preach the Gospel, not to hinder others from doing it.’’177 Gilbert advocated the same policy on more pragmatic grounds: ‘‘In such a publick and wofull Incendy, as now threatens all things Civil and Sacred, every one should bring what water he can get to the quenching of such devouring flames.’’178 On his deathbed, John Murcot, participant in some of the decade’s defining debates about baptism, longed for the peace of the church: ‘‘Drawing near his end, his sister said to him, Are you in charity with all the Lords people, though differing from you? Who lifting up his eyes affectionately, said, Yes; She desiring him to manifest it by his last request, he lifted up his hands and requested, that all the Lords people might be one, as his way was one.’’179 Murcot had come a long way from his earlier interest in ecclesiological polemics. In Dublin, his death was greeted with dismay, as ‘‘another sad hint of [God’s] having yet a further controversy with us, in his eclipsing (as to us) that glorious light and unwearied servant in the Gospel of his Son Jesus Christ, Mr. John Murcott.’’180 And yet, operating outside the Presbyterian fold, he could never cease to be an ‘‘irregular minister’’ to those most offended by such events as the Catterwood wedding. Associations, set up to advance the clerical control of Irish Cromwellian society, were functioning to divide the godly, but even those most advanced in the quest for theological exactitude knew their responsibility for the wider defense of the truth.

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5 The Possibility of the Extraordinary

The holy Ghost seems to have a special ey to these Islands. —Samuel Winter, The summe of diverse sermons, p. 83 In Kilkenny, in the early summer of 1651, Margaret Edwards, wife of the Parliamentary Commissioner Colonel John Jones, fell ill with jaundice ‘‘and some other distempers.’’1 Jones called together a number of friends and ministers to pray for her relief, including among their number Samuel Winter, then newly arrived in Ireland.2 Winter had become an integral part of the Cromwellian elite, as a chaplain to the Commissioners and brother-in-law of one of their number.3 He was the last to pray; but before he did, he asked the patient ‘‘whether she had Faith to be healed.’’4 Margaret Edwards thought she had. ‘‘According to your faith so things go with you,’’ Winter would later tell the Commissioners; ‘‘the prayers of the saints dyed in the bloud of Christ are of eternal efficacie; there being a necessity and tie lying upon Jehova that they should be fulfilled in due time, Acts 1. 16.’’5 On that basis, at Margaret Edwards’s bedside, he ‘‘wrestled exceedingly with God’’ in prayer, advised her to continue with her medication, and assured her that she would certainly recover. Winter’s confidence was made possible by his belief that ‘‘prayer is an ordinance to which God hath made such a gracious promise, and he often doth restore the sick, prayers being put up by believers for them.’’ To this conventional statement of Christian theology, he

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added the more remarkable claim that those who ‘‘have much communion with God, may know much of his mind, and have a particular faith for a particular mercie, whether spiritual or temporal.’’6 This was a confidence that Winter’s wife, Elizabeth Weaver, did not share. Instead of congratulating him on his prescience, she and her sister were ‘‘much troubled’’ by his public assurance of healing and wished that he had not vocalized this confidence among so many Baptists. Whatever the outcome of his prediction, they feared, Winter could only lose credibility. His very public affirmation negotiated a significant distance from the Independent theological mainstream. His position was made difficult by his assurance that miracles were possible in response to prayer and that miracles could actually be expected through an extraordinary revelation of the will of God. Winter’s prediction had created an impossible situation: if the expectation of healing were realized, his wife feared, it would confirm the Baptists’ ‘‘Enthusiastical conceits’’ and push Jones, already a radical, further from the theological mainstream; and if the expectation were not realized, Winter and his ministry would be ridiculed.7 Either way, her husband and his work would be marginalized. There was certainly cause for concern, as later events would demonstrate, but Winter’s expectations of healing were dramatically confirmed. Initially, with no progress evident, it seemed that his assertion had provided false hope. After a month, Margaret Edwards slipped into a coma, and all hopes for her recovery were abandoned. Winter was berated by his wife for risking the credibility of his ministry on a careless assertion. When, some time later, Margaret Edwards lost all control of her senses, Colonel Jones dispatched a messenger to Winter, advising him that if he wanted to see her again he had better come at once. Winter’s wife was furious at the apparent failure of his promise. But Winter, who received the news at dinner, ‘‘made no great hast to be gone, saying, That he well knew when God answered his prayers, and when not.’’ He finished his meal and then went to Jones’s house, finding Jones ready to shut his wife’s eyes. No doubt bitterly disappointed by the dashing of his hopes, Jones twice refused Winter permission to pray, claiming that his wife was already virtually dead. But Winter prevailed at the third attempt. As he knelt at the bedside, Margaret Edwards made a sudden recovery and, smiling, exclaimed, ‘‘O! See the fruit of Prayer! O! See the fruit of Prayer! Set me up, and give me something to eat: I am cured; but not by Doctors: Only Free-Grace, and Prayers have prevailed with God for me.’’8 It seemed a miraculous cure, but there is no evidence that Elizabeth Weaver’s fears of ‘‘Enthusiastical conceits’’ were being confirmed. John Jones was not particularly impressed by Winter’s prophecy. His first recorded letters, written from Dublin in September 1651, worried over his wife’s poor health but

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made no mention of Winter’s dramatic intervention. Instead, Jones attributed her unusual recovery to Morgan Llwyd, a Wales-based Independent minister and mystic. Jones remembered, earlier that summer, how it had appeared that ‘‘her course was finished, but the angel of his presence was with her, bearing up her spirit in the full assurance of his eternall love.’’ Although he admitted that ‘‘the S[ain]ts’’ were ‘‘very active in their Addresses at the Throne of grace,’’ he claimed that Margaret Edwards had been revived by the encouragement she had received in a number of letters that Llwyd had dispatched in August.9 Winter, Jones’s praying chaplain, was not even mentioned. Margaret Edwards’s recovery demanded explanation, but the Winter and Jones networks were interpreting it in remarkably different ways. For Winter and his circle, her miraculous recovery confirmed his claims to unusual spiritual sensitivity. For Jones and his correspondents, her recovery could be explained without any recourse to Winter or the gifts he claimed to posses. Jones was determined that his wife’s recovery should not accredit the ability or spirituality of the minister who would later do so much to exacerbate the baptismal debate Jones abhorred.10 But the recovery of Jones’s wife was not to last. Several months later, after the Winters had moved to Dublin, she again fell ill. On 13 November, the Commissioners noted that ‘‘there is little hope of life.’’11 On 19 November, Jones reported that his wife had ‘‘kept her bed this 4 monethes.’’ She ‘‘is now upon finishing her course, and rejoycingly longs to bee dissolved’’ and to be ‘‘with Christ,’’ he explained.12 But, once again, her encouragement came in a packet of letters from Morgan Llwyd, which persuaded her that she should certainly recover. Once again, Margaret Edwards declared that ‘‘she had faith enough to be healed.’’13 And, once again, Winter prayed. This time Winter’s wife and her sister were more cautious in dismissing his claims, but as he rose from the bedside he expressed no assurance that Margaret Edwards would recover, ‘‘for when in prayer he would have begged of God the restore of her to health, he could not do it, but could only pray for her eternal happiness.’’14 Her doctors continued to insist on the likelihood of recovery, but Margaret Edwards preferred Winter’s word to theirs, and ‘‘it pleased God presently after to take her to himself ’’ in the early winter of 1651.15 This incident, unusual as it appears in accounts of the puritan divines, hinges on a series of character contrasts that center on Winter’s personality: the doctors, who abandoned hope before Margaret Edwards recovered and retained hope when Winter pronounced her doom; Margaret Edwards, whose expectation of miraculous healing perhaps confirmed Elizabeth Weaver’s suspicion of the ‘‘Anabaptist’’ circle in which Colonel Jones was moving; Elizabeth

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Weaver, Winter’s somewhat difficult second wife, whose movement from skepticism to cautious approbation suggests that this was her first experience of Winter’s unusual spiritual gifts; and Winter and Jones themselves, whose spiritual discourses and mystical tendencies compete for the hegemony of miraculous explanation. The incident’s characters codify the basic argument propounded in The life and death of the eminently learned, pious, and painful minister of the Gospel, Dr. Samuel Winter (1671). The biography, prepared by John Weaver, Winter’s brother-in-law—a member of the Long Parliament, Parliamentary Commissioner, and a member of his Dublin congregation—ends by quoting Amos 3:7: ‘‘Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.’’ It was an appropriate text to conclude Winter’s life. John Jones would have disputed its relevance to Winter but could not have disputed its application in Cromwellian Ireland, in a reformation suffused by experiences of the marvelous.

I The idea of living in the ‘‘age of the Spirit’’ was fundamental to puritan thought. In the theology of the confessional mainstream, it was an apt description of the individual’s Christian life: the covenant of grace provided every believer with the Spirit’s indwelling presence. It was also an appropriate description of the entire church age. When Thomas Goodwin described the coming of the Spirit as ‘‘the great promise of the New Testament’’ just as Christ’s coming was ‘‘the great promise of the Old,’’ he might well have been reading Winter’s earlier statement that ‘‘the giving of the Messiah was the great promise of the old Testament; as the giving of the spirit is the great promise of the new.’’16 But the ‘‘age of the Spirit’’ was also an apt description of the spiritual history of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The incidents described in Winter’s biography, however unusual, are linked to a wider recovery of interest in the Holy Spirit in the postreformation period. Miracles had certainly been claimed in the medieval church but, in the early modern period, became invested with disputed significance. After the reformation, Alexandra Walsham has suggested, protestant divines were as liable to argue that ‘‘miracles had ceased’’ as they were to appropriate them for the defense of the new faith.17 This ambivalence was echoed in the writing of many puritans, some of whom retained an openness to the unusual while an increasing majority adopted the scholastic denial of ‘‘extraordinary gifts.’’ In puritan writing, unusual possibilities were linked to the revival of interest in the Holy Spirit and the articulation of his work, as the medieval marvelous became the protestant extraordinary.

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Pneumatology—the doctrine of the Holy Spirit—had been as central to the protestant reformation as the prioritization of scripture.18 Throughout the sixteenth century, protestant pneumatology recovered for the Holy Spirit what had been attributed to the medieval Church: it was the supernatural ministry of the Holy Spirit, rather than the church’s priesthood and sacraments, that was now understood to bring individuals to faith, keep them in faith, and assure them that their faith would bring them to heaven.19 Catholic observers noted the development. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the foremost sixteenth-century defender of Roman Catholic theology, described the normative nature of assurance—the Spirit-given certainty of one’s salvation—as the greatest of the protestant heresies.20 Edmund Campion, who became an English Jesuit martyr, similarly believed pneumatology to be the ‘‘fundamental difference’’ between protestants and Roman Catholics because, as he argued, it underlay the epistemological debate about the authority of scripture that split the church apart.21 Reformation theologians identified a new understanding of the Holy Spirit at the heart of protestant experience. This pneumatology was the presupposition of the protestant appeal to the individual. Reflecting this trend, protestant pneumatology developed in surprising ways. Calvin—described by B. B. Warfield, nineteenth-century professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, as ‘‘pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit’’—did not allow his emphasis on sola Scriptura to eclipse his openness to unusual spiritual activity.22 He was prepared to allow that the Holy Spirit could reactivate the gifts provided to the early church. Citing Ephesians 4:11, he listed apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers as the offices provided to the first-century Christians. Only the offices of pastor and teacher were ‘‘ordinary’’ and of enduring relevance, he explained; but as ‘‘the Lord raised up the first three at the beginning of his Kingdom,’’ he ‘‘now and again revives them as the need of the times demands.’’23 This provision for the extraordinary—always a minority theme within the Reformed tradition—was rapidly subsumed by the consolidation of the protestant scholasticism that demanded an authoritative appeal to scripture alone.24 Nevertheless, in the seventeenth century, English puritans developed pneumatology to such an extent that Warfield represented their thought as ‘‘almost entirely preoccupied’’ with the Holy Spirit.25 Geoffrey Nuttall noted that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was given a ‘‘more thorough and detailed consideration’’ in the seventeenth century than ‘‘at any other time in Christian history.’’26 A recent survey of Christian spirituality makes the same point: ‘‘Nothing more distinguishes Puritan spirituality than the major part played within it by the Holy Spirit, and the sense that the protestant Reformation had been a second Pentecost, allowing that Spirit to break forth from the rigid chains of ecclesial control

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and flood Christendom anew with peace and joy.’’27 Richard Sibbes memorably signaled this preoccupation. His ‘‘large influence’’ in directing attention to pneumatology can be seen in the rapid development of his thought and seems even to have extended to the vocabulary of discussion.28 His warning of the dangers of ‘‘strange sudden joys’’ was reiterated, without attribution, by James Ussher in the 1640s, and his equally memorable claim that God’s Word and Spirit went together like a pair of dentures was echoed, again without attribution, by John Rogers in 1653.29 This rhetorical dependence signals the conceptual continuities of puritan thought. When Rogers alluded to Sibbes’s dentures, he was appropriating the theology of the mainstream past in Ireland’s revolutionary landscape and charging it with emphases of his own, where the Spirit bypassed scripture to witness immediately to the individual. In early Stuart England, as in Cromwellian Ireland, the Holy Spirit was ‘‘the best news [Jesus] could bring.’’30 This enthusiasm for personal experience of the Holy Spirit sits uneasily with certain themes in the secondary literature of puritan studies. The movement’s relationship to modernization has led to its association with a rationalism that this antimodern spirituality appears to challenge.31 But Winter’s experiences seem highly unusual even amidst the burgeoning modern literature on puritan spirituality, with its emphasis on theological quietism and spiritual reflection.32 Winter’s modern reputation—like certain aspects of the larger reconstruction of puritanism’s interior life—is profoundly misleading. Winter has been portrayed more regularly as a scholastic than a charismatic, more often as a college administrator than a prophet in the making, and the Independent clerical network from which he emerged has rarely been regarded as a movement of the ecstatic. If anything, the Independent mainstream, following the contours of the Reformed orthodoxy it so closely paralleled, has been presented as reacting against claims to unusual spiritual experience by favoring, as an authoritative foundation, ‘‘the Bible only.’’33 There was a great deal of reflection on the centrality of scripture in Reformed theology’s ontological quest.34 In general revelation, it was agreed, creation continued to ‘‘declare the glory of God’’ (Psalm 19:1), but God’s special revelation was now exclusively contained in scripture. This prioritization of the authority of scripture was based on recognition of its unique character. Reformed orthodoxy admitted that, before the close of the canon, God had communicated his mind ‘‘at sundry times and in divers manners’’ (Hebrews 1:1), but there was no proof, as Thomas Goodwin noted, that ‘‘extraordinary gifts were . . . common to all saints . . . [even] in those days.’’35 Whatever their initial regularity, dreams, visions, voices, or other unusual spiritual phenomena were no longer required after the completion of scripture. Supernatural revelations

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that were not contained in nature or scripture were therefore ‘‘extraordinary,’’ and preachers warned their audiences of the dangers of such unfettered spiritual subjectivity: ‘‘strange sudden joys’’ stimulated the imagination, but could provide no replacement for scripture’s objective truth.36 Alternatives to the sole authority of scripture were, at worst, dangerous. John Owen, Cromwell’s chaplain during his Irish expedition, argued that extracanonical revelation was either unnecessary, because it agreed with scripture, or unbiblical, because it did not.37 Claudius Gilbert made the same observation in 1658: ‘‘Immediate Inspirations’’ should be regarded as ‘‘needless, the divine Rule of all being perfectly given out,’’ while ‘‘all pretended Enthusiasms not agreeing with the Word, must be suspected to be from evil spirits.’’38 Richard Baxter reminded readers of the psychological cost of the extraordinary: ‘‘Most in our age that have pretended to prophecy, or to inspirations, or revelations, have been melancholy, crack-brained persons, near to madness, who have proved deluded in the end.’’39 Their claims were supported by evidence provided in Robert Baillie’s A dissuasive from the errours of the time (1645) and Thomas Edwards’s Gangræna (1646), which consolidated the consensus of the nonextraordinary mainstream by cataloguing the contemporary aberrations these erratic revelations advanced. Whatever the reliability of reportage in these seventeenth-century accounts, mainstream theologians agreed, the godly had only to look to the sixteenth century to see the devastation these continuing revelations could wreak. The specter of Mu¨nster haunted claims to the unusual as it had haunted debates about conversion, baptism, and biblical eschatology: from the Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford to the Independent Samuel Winter, puritan theologians cited the Anabaptist revolution to warn of the dangers of the extraordinary.40 Samuel Ladyman, Independent minister in Clonmel, believed that the history of the Mu¨nster revolutionaries warned of the danger of the sects’ appropriation of the unusual and their adherents’ proclivity, on the basis of this continuing revelation, to ‘‘seize the Estates of all who dare not joyn with him in his wicked Projects: to convert heaps of learned and useful Volumes into a Flame.’’41 His warning was timely. Ladyman’s reference nodded in the direction of Lucretia Cooke, wife of Colonel Cooke and a member of the Bandon Quaker meeting whose expulsion from the Baptists—on the charge of heresy—led her into public confrontation with her former pastor and her burning of books in the market square.42 The Quaker leader Edward Burrough denied that the Mu¨nster charge had any application to his movement, but Ireland’s parallel with its excesses seemed complete.43 Resistance to extraordinary revelation was therefore a central component of puritanism’s confessional texts. The Westminster Confession argued that ‘‘the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life’’ was either stated in the Bible or could, by ‘‘good

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and necessary consequence,’’ be deduced from it. Critically, it added, ‘‘nothing at any time is to be added’’ to scripture, ‘‘whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.’’44 All ‘‘former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people’’ were ‘‘now ceased.’’45 Similarly, the Westminster Assembly’s Propositions concerning church government and ordination of ministers (1647) appeared to negate the possibility of continuing revelation when it declared that its vehicles, the offices of apostles, evangelists, and prophets, ‘‘are ceased.’’46 Edward Worth, from his conservative power base in Cork, echoed its language when he described the apostles as ‘‘the Lord’s Embassadours extraordinary on Earth,’’ whose unusual ministry had long since been discontinued.47 Further revelations were not to be expected, for God, he claimed, ‘‘hath made us his Stewards not his Secretaries, he therefore that pries into his Cabinet will prove more bold then welcome.’’48 This ‘‘cessationism’’—the doctrine that extraordinary revelation ceased with the close of the biblical canon—meant that the will of God could not now be found in revelations to the individual, as the radicals argued, or in appeals to the tradition or apostolic authority of the church, as Roman Catholic theologians claimed. Against the claims of the theological right and left, cessationists affirmed the reformation emphasis on scripture alone. Across the puritan scholastic mainstream, the completion, perfection, and finality of scripture were assumed to be axiomatic. But this cessationist theology was not a puritan consensus.49 Across the period, spiritual radicals progressed ‘‘from an appeal to the word and the spirit to an appeal to the spirit and the word and finally almost to the spirit alone.’’50 Their evolution was telescoped in the 1650s, when, among the radicals, puritanism’s incipient scholasticism seemed most completely eclipsed. During the Cromwellian period, as Robert Barclay memorably put it, ‘‘the air was thick with reports of prophecies and miracles, and there were men of all parties who lived on the border land between sanity and insanity.’’51 The secondary literature of puritan studies has been quick to consign such individuals to the margins of an otherwise largely scholastic movement, but it is clear that an openness to the unusual existed at the heart of the confessional mainstream. This possibility was perhaps most marked in the literature of Scottish puritans, where a long tradition pointed to the reality and reliability of extrabiblical revelation.52 Sixteenth-century tradition referred to early protestant preachers as prophets.53 In the 1640s, the leaders of the Covenanter revolution took pains to guard the potential for the marvelous while negotiating with the more scholastically inclined leaders of the English Parliament. We have already noted that the Westminster Assembly’s Propositions concerning church goverment and ordination of ministers stated that the three extraordinary offices of apostle, evangelist, and prophet ‘‘are ceased.’’ As one component of the developing

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Covenanter program, the Scots adopted this text alongside—rather than instead of—their Second book of discipline (1578), which argued that the ‘‘thrie extraordinar functionis’’ have ceased, ‘‘except,’’ it crucially added, echoing John Calvin, ‘‘quhen [God] pleased extraordinarlie for ane tyme to steir sum of thame agane.’’54 While, therefore, Westminster orthodoxy advanced a rigorously scholastic denial of unusual gifts, the Covenanter revolution, reflecting the older Scottish tradition, retained a constitutional openness to the extraordinary. At least two of the Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, Samuel Rutherford and George Gillespie, challenged the Confession’s consensus by admitting in their own published writings that extraordinary revelations had continued after the close of the canon. Gillespie, who may have been the first theologian to use the expression ‘‘extraordinary revelations,’’ certainly wrote of his intention to collect stories of these incidents and, in his Treatise of miscellany questions (1649), referred in passing to unusual revelations provided to George Wishart, John Knox, John Welsh, John Davidson, Robert Bruce, Alexander Simpson (the granduncle of Gillespie’s ward, Patrick Simpson), and David Fergusson.55 These men, he claimed, were ‘‘holy Prophets receaving extraordinary Revelations from God, and foretelling diverse strange and remarkable things, which did accordingly come to passe.’’56 Rutherford agreed but argued that the unusual was something on which the Scots had no monopoly.57 He noted how others had ‘‘foretold things to come even since the ceasing of the canon of the word,’’ including John Huss, John Wycliffe, Martin Luther and ‘‘diverse Holy and mortified preachers in England.’’58 Rutherford was also careful to delineate and restrict the authority of the extraordinary. A survey of the spirituall antichrist (1648) warned that unusual revelations could be false and established four categories through which the authentic could be ascertained. Those reformers who were alive to unusual spiritual experiences did not equate their prophecies with scripture; neither were their revelations contrary to scripture, nor did they share scripture’s level of authority. Explaining the latter, Rutherford claimed that individual revelations were not immediately inspired but developed from meditation on scripture: ‘‘an extraordinary strong impulse, or a scripture-spirit leading them, carried them to apply a general rule of divine justice, in their predictions, to particular godless men.’’ Finally, he argued, a prophet could be known by his fruit. True prophets, he implied, ‘‘were men sound in faith opposite to Popery, Prelacy, Socinianism, Papism, lawless enthusiasm, Antinomianism, Arminianism, Arianism, and what else is contrary to sound doctrine.’’59 True prophets would almost certainly be Presbyterian. In Scottish Presbyterianism, the Westminster Confession’s denial of ‘‘new revelations of the Spirit’’ may not have been understood to be as absolute as it might appear.

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In Ireland, in the 1650s, this confessional tradition was open to remarkable negotiation. There were occasional Presbyterian prophets—such as John McClelland, an Ulster minister, described as possessing ‘‘a singular sagacity, whereby from Scripture he did frequently foretell events’’60—but Presbyterians more generally appeared to embrace moderation. The ministers of the Cork association agreed that miracles had ceased and linked claims to the contrary to antiformal lay preachers: ‘‘Enthusiasms . . . we see often pretended to, and no wonder, when Learning, which in an ordinary way, should furnish with abilities, is wanting.’’61 Zachary Crofton, a Dublin graduate turned Presbyterian conservative, writing in horrified response to the claims and assumptions of John Rogers’s conversion narratives, similarly dismissed the continuing possibility of the marvelous. Whatever their content, he asserted, these unusual revelations could not have come from the Holy Spirit: ‘‘I consider miracles to be ceased, and immediate inspirations by vision and audible voice to have bin ceased in the Church for more then a thousand yeares; God in convincing and comforting his people to addresse himselfe to, and deal with them, as rational creatures.’’ Visions ‘‘finde not a parallel in God’s book,’’ he continued; ‘‘the enjoyment of the Spirit extraordinarily ceased’’ with the demise of the first apostles.62 The unusual experiences of Samuel Winter nevertheless appeared to bear out his sermonic claim that the Spirit was ‘‘more abundantly poured out now, than in the days of old.’’63 But for Winter extraordinary experience still had to be subordinated to the final authority of scripture, ‘‘delivered once and for ever, as a perpetual rule.’’64 The same subjection of Word to Spirit is evident in the visionary experiences of John Cook, an Independent judge and regicide who had been appointed chief justice of Munster.65 Near death by drowning almost prevented his taking up his post. In January 1650 he set out to sail from Wexford to Kinsale and, in preparation, spent some time in the study of relevant Bible passages, ‘‘God having put it into my minde . . . to note most of the chief places in Scripture concerning the Seas.’’66 Things quickly began to go wrong. Caught in ill winds, the ship began taking water. Like St. Paul, in a similar situation, Cook addressed ‘‘some words of Exhortation to the company out of that Scripture’’ that he had been studying, unhelpfully observing that ‘‘when a Christian is in God’s way, upon God’s errand sent to Sea, usually God makes the Winde and the Seas favourable to him.’’67 As the storm developed, the sailors were ‘‘at their wits end,’’ but Cook could hardly keep his eyes open. Despite the danger, he fell into a deep sleep, and, he wrote, ‘‘in my sleep I dreamed.’’68 His dream—extensively described—involved the other passengers, ‘‘a long table with an ordinary Carpet, and two candles standing upon it, two trenchers of Tobacco, and Pipes, and one

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Man walking up and downe’’ who welcomed Cook to his interview with Jesus Christ.69 Cook awoke, certain that the ship would be saved, and communicated his assurance to the other sailors and passengers on board. They ‘‘admired at my confidence,’’ Cook remembered, but did not believe.70 And yet, he concluded, when safely on shore, ‘‘extraordinary dreames many times prove true.’’71 His final paragraphs issued an extended defense of extraordinary revelation, and his wife confirmed its possibility in her thanksgiving text and commemorative poem: ‘‘There is no time excluded from god’s manifesting Himself to His People, but that it is all one to Him to speak in a Dreame by Night, as in a Cloud by Day.’’72 Cook’s prophetic encounter with Jesus Christ is remarkable, but his dream was clearly rooted in the biblical texts on which he had been meditating before the fateful voyage. The experience of the Spirit went hand-in-hand with the contemplation of scripture. John Rogers, however, loosened this biblical control. Early in his text, he proclaimed himself a prophet and emphasized that his revelations were grounded in the combination of scripture and Spirit: ‘‘Experience tells me how to prophecy by the Spirit of the Lord. . . . By both these together (for there is the Word and the Spirit agreeing in one) I am able to foretell, and testify to the approach of Christ, and his promises.’’73 Later, his dream narrative represented another encounter with the divine. His call to the ministry by ‘‘a grave ancient man full of white hairs (like wooll) a long white beard’’ reflected the biblical description of the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:9) but was evidently moving beyond the biblical text.74 From Crofton’s scholastic theology of cessationism, to Rogers’s full-blown reception of extraordinary revelation, Irish Cromwellians were negotiating with the complexities of their confessional tradition, alluding to the rhetoric while dismantling its conservative presuppositions. But others were moving further beyond the confessional mainstream. Throughout the later 1650s, representatives of the Quakers destabilized the biblical basis for personal spirituality and elevated the extraordinary to new heights. Dismissing scripture, they claimed to be themselves the channel of the words of God.75 Edward Burrough began his prophetic exhortation entitled To you that are called Anabaptists in the nation of Ireland (1657) with the assertion that ‘‘this is the word of the Lord God unto you’’ and justified it by claiming that Quakers ‘‘talk with God, and God with us . . . for all the Saints have converse with God.’’76 Writing in Clonmel, in 1659, the Quaker writer Thomas Morford similarly exalted experience above scripture when he emphatically denied that the Bible was the word of God: instead, his prophetic exhortation, ‘‘that which was spoken from the Spirit of God, were the Words of God.’’77 It was an astonishingly foundational challenge and one that struck at the heart of the Cromwellian

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reformation project. Not without reason did Henry Cromwell complain, on 6 February 1656, that Quakers had become ‘‘our most considerable enemy.’’78 Their opposition to Cromwellian social and religious norms and their appeal in the army, which Cromwell noted, was pitting them irrevocably against the regime—and their opposition was rooted in their appeal to an alternative source of spiritual authority, an authority solely rooted in the Holy Spirit’s revelation to the individual, the so-called ‘‘light within.’’ But as Quakers manipulated the pneumatological uncertainties of Irish Cromwellian discourse, the conservative reaction grew increasingly hysterical. Francis Howgil, in 1659, countered one claim that ‘‘the Quakers are bewitched and possessed by the Devil.’’79 In Cork, Barbara Blaugdone narrowly escaped assassination by a butcher’s cleaver before denying accusations that she was a witch.80 Given the rhetorical climate, it is remarkable that persecution of the Quakers should have moderated, as it seems to have done in the later 1650s. Winter, for example, was part of a clerical committee that was appointed to examine a suspicious packet of books that arrived in Dublin in 1659; discovering their Quaker contents, the committee recommended that the books should be burned.81 Quakers themselves were merely imprisoned. Despite vociferous opposition, nevertheless, Quakerlike discourses—unanchored in scripture and ambitious to appropriate the unusual—permeated the Irish Cromwellian mainstream. As orthodox preaching moved from exegesis to application, it drove the preacher toward the suggestive power of the marvelous. Even a conservative theologian such as Thomas Harrison could describe the Holy Spirit as ‘‘an Interpreter . . . to make known the mind of God to us, and ours to him’’; his activity ‘‘betraies the secrets of God to the Saints.’’82 The unusual recovery of Margaret Edwards and the competing explanations provided by the Jones and Winter networks were merely the tip of the iceberg. In competing accounts of the unusual, theology’s final authority— the Christian’s ultimate court of appeal—was at the center of dispute. Radical experience challenged the epistemological authority of scripture as Cromwellian Ireland became the borderland of the marvelous.

II Contemporary observers worried that this fascination with the Spirit would go too far. In one case, soldiers stationed in Ireland tricked their commander into believing he was hearing the voice of God by addressing him through a tube they had hidden under his bed.83 Their deceit was made possible because these were ‘‘boasting days,’’ Edward Warren complained, ‘‘wherein men in false ways under false Ordinances, pretend to have much communion with God.’’84

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Thomas Patient was combating similarly extravagant claims when he insisted that Christians no longer have any experience that would result in ‘‘the Holy Ghost falling down in fiery Cloven tongues in the sight and view of the bodily eyes . . . and that clear light, and fervent zeal, and love they had, in uttering the wonderful things of God in variety of strange tongues . . . there is now no man in the world hath this baptism.’’85 Patient also argued against the Quaker claim that ‘‘the baptism of the Holy Ghost . . . hath put an end to that Baptism of water.’’86 He referred to Acts 10 to prove that ‘‘enjoying the Holy Ghost, was so far from being an argument why souls should not be baptized with water, that it is an argument, that they ought to be baptized more especially.’’87 Turning tables on the radicals, he argued that God does not give his Spirit ‘‘to the end that souls should plead thereby freedom from the practice of those commanded Ordinances of Christ’’; ‘‘on the contrary, it is the end why God gives his Spirit to enable, and to cause them to walk in his way, and in his Ordinance, and in particular baptism.’’88 Two years later, Winter referred to the same chapter to make the same point: ‘‘Those in Acts 10 had as much of the spirit as any have, or ever will in this life, and yet were baptized.’’89 Yet the Spirit was repeatedly invoked to justify unusual behavior. These reiterated warnings were made necessary by the rise of the Quakers, whose arguments, widely disseminated in Cromwellian Ireland, consolidated the Spirit’s eclipse of the Word.90 Their ideas spread through a series of highlevel conversions, many of which occurred through the ministry of the first Quaker in Ireland, William Edmundson.91 He had been ‘‘convinced’’ of the ‘‘inner light’’ through the preaching of James Nayler while on business in the north of England. Edmundson returned to Ireland, convinced his brother, a Cromwellian trooper, and expanded his Lurgan base to set up Quaker meetings in Dublin and across the north. Among his early converts were the governor of Londonderry and Captain William Morris, ‘‘an Elder amongst the Baptists in great Repute, Captain of a Company, Justice of the Peace, Commissioner of the Revenues, Chief Treasurer in that Quarter, also Chief Governour of Three Garrisons.’’92 His efforts corresponded with those of Miles Halhead, James Lancaster, and Miles Bateman, who were preaching in Ireland in 1654, and with those of Elizabeth Fletcher and Elizabeth Smith, in Dublin, Youghal, Cork, and Limerick,93 where, in November 1656, it was complained that Quakers ‘‘have repaired thither out of England and other places,’’ and were making it their practice to wander up and down seducing divers honest people, neglecting and impoverishing their families, troubling the public peace of this nation, disturbing the congregations of sober Christians in the worship of God, and with railing accusations

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god’s irishmen aspersing and discouraging divers of the godly ministers of the Gospel in their faithful labours, and therefore bringing into contempt the ordinances of God and encouraging evil-minded people to looseness and profaneness.94

But whatever their unpopularity in some circles, Quakers were exercising considerable influence in Munster garrisons.95 The governor of Cork, Robert Phaire, articulated the convictions of many in the Munster garrisons when he stated that ‘‘more is done by the Quakers than all the priests in the country have done [in] a hundred years’’—and, as the son of an Anglican minister, he was well placed to know.96 It was, however, the 1655 visit of Edmund Burrough and Francis Howgil that provided a ‘‘sudden impetus’’ to the Irish movement.97 ‘‘By vertue of command given unto us, by the eternall Spirit of the Lord came we into this Land of Ireland,’’ they claimed, ‘‘contrary to the will of man, not to seek our selves, nor our own glory, nor to prejudice your Nation nor Government, nor to be hurtfull to your Common-wealth, but with the message of the Gospel of Christ Jesus we came to turn from darknes to light and from the power of Satan to the power of God.’’98 Their initial work was with Baptists, whose star was notably in decline after 1655, ‘‘so att the baptistes meetings,’’ wrote Francis Howgil to Margaret Fell, ‘‘we have gone and spoken but they harden.’’99 They also made a short visit to Drogheda, where they stayed with a local magistrate, before Howgil received a call to accompany an interested colonel into county Cork.100 After a series of adventures, he arrived in Bandon and Cork, where he debated with a Ranter and two Baptist preachers. By November, he was able to report that meetings had been successfully established in Bandonbridge, Kinsale, and Cork but admitted that the mission to county Cork was erroneously believed to have led to ‘‘great disorders, and disturbances.’’101 The effect of this misinformation was balanced by the support of the military base at Kinsale, where, Howgil reported, the soldiers were receptive to his message. The governor of the town, Major Richard Hodden, wrote to Henry Cromwell, whose administration was increasingly hostile to Quaker claims, defending the preachers on the grounds of their puritan inclination: ‘‘Many of them were persecuted in the daies of the Late Bishopps, by the name of Puritans (though unblamable in their Conversations) and since have faithfully Served this Commonwealth even in the worst of Times.’’102 Hodden’s concern was stimulated by the wave of opposition that followed the missionaries throughout Ireland. On 17 December 1655, Henry Cromwell commanded that Quakers throughout Ireland should be arrested.103 Later that month, in a Dublin prison, Howgil and Burrough composed their account of ‘‘the visitation

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of the rebellious nation of Ireland.’’ The pamphlet allowed a retrospective comment on their endeavors: ‘‘These six months, and upward have we laboured in travells, and sufferings, and reproaches, and have passed through your Cities and Towns in sobernesse, and meeknesse, have we preached the kingdome of God.’’104 The authors attributed the onset of persecution to God’s providence: ‘‘We were with you in the City of Dublin near three months, some of us, and none laid hands on us, but the time was not come, and till the testimony of the Lord was near finished, which he sent us to doe, none could lay hands on us.’’105 But their criticism of the city’s elite was insistent: ‘‘Oh thou City of Dublin, thou art as Moab at ease, and art lifted up in thy heart, and rejoicing in thy spoyle, and art making thy selfe merry in the abundance of thy delicacies; oh how full of prophanesse art thou? . . . Will neither plague, famin, nor sword bring thee into subjection unto the Lord. . . . How long shall the Lord bear with you?’’106 Their admonitions were unheeded, as, one month later, Irish Quakers were exported to Chester and Bristol,107 but they were developed by Barbara Blaugdone, who arrived in Dublin on the same day Howgil and Burrough were banished.108 Wasting no time, she appeared before Henry Cromwell, gaining an interview and denouncing ‘‘the Teachers of the People’’ that ‘‘did cause them to err.’’109 Thomas Harrison was standing by and, when Cromwell provided him with the opportunity to reply, admitted only that ‘‘it was all very good and true, and he had nothing to say against it.’’110 Perhaps, as Blaugdone represented it, Harrison’s admission was a remarkable confession of the Cromwellian ambivalence about early Quaker rhetoric. But the boundaries of orthodoxy were being vigorously policed. Cromwell wrote that February to secretary Thurloe, ‘‘I thinke their principles and practises are not verry consistent with civil government, much less with the discipline of an army. . . . Their counterfeited simplicitie renders them to me the more dangerous.’’111 This counterfeit simplicity may have been less disingenuous than Cromwell realized. Although they were ‘‘the most successful as well as the most radical of the Revolution sects,’’ the first Quaker missionaries ‘‘were not preoccupied with theology.’’112 Their early publications are insistently anticlerical and explicitly antitithe, and as a basis for their exhortations they repeatedly appeal to the light within. But they do not define a consistent doctrinal position, except, like Rogers, to elevate the Spirit above the Word. In itself, however, this provided for a radical theological critique. In 1657, James Sicklemore, a recent Quaker convert, elevated Spirit above Word to mount a searing attack on the Youghal ministry of James Wood. Wood had been identified as something of a radical in 1655, when he was in receipt of a ‘‘handsom Sallery’’ of £120 from the Civil List, but, by 1657, he had grown increasingly conservative.113 From this earlier commitment to Baptist principles, Wood had

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regressed to espouse the standard tenets of Independent ecclesiology— congregational singing, tithes, and infant baptism. Sicklemore had attempted to negotiate a return to truth, but Wood had not satisfactorily addressed his questions about his changing opinions on tithes and the ministerial calling. The frustrated debate allowed Sicklemore to comment on the epistemological possibilities of the inner light. Wood’s rejection of his advice demonstrated to Sicklemore that whatever light Wood possessed was not the provision of the Holy Spirit: ‘‘If my sending those Queries were not from the Lord, but from another spirit, he would quickly have known it, if he had had the same spirit that all the Ministers of Christ had: and they that have not his spirit are none of his.’’114 Wood’s light was natural, not spiritual, Sicklemore argued, and Wood was unworthy of his clerical calling. Their debate struggled for authentic (and authenticating) possession of the Spirit. Sicklemore claimed it as the basis for radical social and ecclesiastical critique. Ideologically advanced, Sicklemore’s pamphlet demonstrates the undeveloped theology of the early Quaker writers. It was their radical activities and social attitudes, rather than any extensive doctrinal program, that contemporaries regarded as dangerous. But those attitudes were grounded in a theological prioritization of the interior and were a reminder of the extent to which the movement was ‘‘essentially . . . ecstatic.’’115 The administration’s attack on the Quakers did not imply that members of the Cromwellian elite had no sympathy for their ideals. Several town governors converted, and others, like Winter, while certainly hostile to many of the Quaker claims, responded to their growth in ambivalent ways. Instead, Quakers were victimized because they were easy targets. Toward the end of the 1650s, pursuing his goal of Independent and Presbyterian union, Winter campaigned against the theology of the Quakers and other radical groups in an attempt to police the boundaries of the extraordinary. His targets responded in kind. In January 1659, Robert Turner heard him preach in Christ Church and attempted to reply; he described Winter’s church as ‘‘the synagogue of Satan where the deceivers and Robbers yet remaines un-whipped out.’’116 But his criticism may not have accounted for Winter’s sympathy for the unusual.

III Winter was a surprising candidate for the ecstatic. He was described by John Hewson, the governor of Dublin, as a ‘‘godly man,’’ a moderate Independent who oversaw the revival of Trinity College, Dublin, preserving the best of the Anglican past and, under the influence of Richard Baxter, worked toward the union

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of Irish paedobaptist churches on an ambivalent but broadly mainstream confessional basis.117 But his combination of theological conservatism and radical spiritual experience qualifies the ‘‘moderate’’ description. Winter’s preaching was appreciated among the civilian elite who attended his services. Unlike the members of Rogers’s congregation, the leaders of his church were not new to the city.118 They were also extremely well connected. Among the elders of Winter’s church, Thomas Hooke, John Preston, Richard Tighe, and Daniel Hutchinson each served as mayor during the Cromwellian period; Hutchinson was also the dedicatee of Zachary Crofton’s Bethshemesh clouded (1653), a text which, while attacking John Rogers’s view of conversion, also moderated many of Winter’s claims for the unusual.119 Along with the political connections provided by his congregational network, Winter’s situation in the establishment was reinforced in his roles as chaplain to the Parliamentary Commissioners, as provost of Trinity College (1651–1659), as pastor of the St. Nicholas congregation, as public preacher at Christ Church Cathedral, as an antiradical theological polemicist, and, under Henry Cromwell, as an ecumenical pioneer in the development of the Dublin and Leinster association.120 His articulation of unusual spiritual experiences signals the eclecticism at the heart of the Irish Cromwellian elite. Winter’s experience of the extraordinary began in his Warwickshire childhood. After his conversion, at the age of twelve, he began to express intense hopes that God would lead him into a pastoral career. One day, returning from school, he paused under a hedgerow to pray about his future. He heard a voice saying, ‘‘God hath heard thy Prayer, and hath designed thee for that Work, and thou shalt be an Instrument of Converting many Souls to God.’’121 Winter rushed home to tell his father, who set about providing his son with the best ministerial education he could afford. Winter enrolled as a sizar at Emanuel College, Cambridge, and gained his B.A. in 1632.122 After graduation, he began pastoral training under John Cotton at Boston, Lincolnshire, and spent some time school teaching in the town.123 Cotton oversaw his marriage to Ann Beeston, who provided Winter with five sons. While in Boston, however, Winter fell dangerously ill. His doctors and his wife gave up all hope of his recovery, but Winter persevered. God had not yet fulfilled his hedgerow promise, he argued, and he could not die until he had become a means for the conversion of many. Secure in this conviction, Winter recovered and moved to a pastoral charge at Woodborough, near Nottingham, before becoming a lecturer in York. During the civil war, in 1642, he gathered an Independent church in Cottingham, near Hull. It is unclear when Ann Beeston died and Winter married the independently minded Elizabeth Weaver, but it is certain that Weaver took time to be convinced of her new husband’s claims for the unusual and was vocally resistant to his move to Ireland when, in 1650, Winter took leave of his

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Cottingham pastorate and traveled as household chaplain for the Parliamentary Commissioners.124 It was in Ireland that his experiences of the unusual were most marked. Winter’s ministry in Ireland was an early success. He accompanied the Parliamentary Commissioners on several journeys into each of the provinces, and their appreciation of his preaching led them, in a letter to the Cottingham congregation dated 13 April 1651, to request that Winter should be allowed to postpone making the summer visit he had anticipated: ‘‘The great work he hath on his hand in this populous city, where able ministers are very scarce, hath caused us earnestly to desire his continuance.’’125 The ‘‘great work’’ to which the Commissioners referred grew in significance in September 1651, when Winter was appointed as the eleventh provost of Trinity College, perhaps at the suggestion of John Owen.126 The following November—around the time of Margaret Edwards’s death—Winter was awarded a B.D. and, in August 1654, a D.D.127 Winter was certainly diligent in academic administration. He prepared a full set of college accounts in November 1651 and, throughout the decade, oversaw the return of students and scholars who had dispersed when the college was hit by plague.128 Addressing the ‘‘Courteous Reader’’ of his biography, Weaver celebrated his brother-in-law’s pedagogic ability: he ‘‘attained to a more than ordinary dexterity, not only of knowing the mind of God in his Word in the general, but particularly in the most difficult, which he made sufficient proof of, in his opening of the Types and Prophesies, especially in the Revelations, having expounded a great part thereof in his Divinity Lectures in the Colledge of Dublin.’’129 Envisaging Trinity College as a seminary for Independents, Winter also pushed for the expansion of teaching, appointing John Stearne, grandnephew of James Ussher, to the college’s first position in Hebrew and incorporating Greek and Hebrew language requirements as compulsory courses.130 At the same time, Winter was extremely active in pastoral life and church politics. Every Sunday morning, he preached for the congregation he had gathered in St. Nicholas, a meeting which attracted the poor through its distribution of free bread.131 In December 1656, Thomas Jenner, pastor in Drogheda, and Timothy Taylor, pastor in Carrickfergus, joined Winter in St. Nicholas in ordaining Samuel Mather as his pastoral assistant. The ordination cemented links between the congregation, the college, and the New England puritan elite—Mather, the first Harvard graduate to become a fellow of his alma mater, refused the offer of a Trinity B.D. but graduated M.A. in 1654 and was appointed a senior fellow of the college.132 Concurrently, Winter’s name was appearing at the head of almost every list of those ministers appointed to examine clerical candidates.133

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In effect, Winter chaired the committee that controlled appointments to the Civil List and effectively regulated the provision of preaching within the statelinked churches.134 His ‘‘great work’’ was growing in importance. But Winter believed he owed the success of his Irish appointment to something more significant than his personal connections. In the preface to a series of sermons preached before Fleetwood and the Parliamentary Commissioners, Winter remembered his hedgerow revelation, that he, like St. Paul, had been ‘‘called from heaven to the Ministry’’ and ‘‘assured I should win many souls.’’135 The assurance provided Winter with significant critical leverage. Rather than downplaying his unusual call to the ministry, he made it central to his charismatic appeal. The sermons were designed to counter the influence of the Baptists by restating the main themes of Reformed baptismal orthodoxy. It was a daring move, as Fleetwood’s administration had been notoriously amenable to Baptist influence. But Winter’s sermons advanced his argument relentlessly. He determined to refute ‘‘the doctrine of Antipaedobaptism,’’ which, he complained, ‘‘was preached in many places in Ireland’’ and ‘‘urged as a thing necessary to salvation by many.’’136 He was equally vigorous in combating the influence of those radicals whose spiritual experiences were leading them to dismiss baptism and other ‘‘carnal ordinances’’ altogether. In The summe of diverse sermons, Winter sensed that heightened expectation of the unusual did away with interest in the baptismal debate, and his argument moved to undercut the radicals’ presuppositions. But the defense of the extraordinary was a central theme of his argument. He was careful not to dismiss the possibility of an unusual work of the Holy Spirit. Developing a discussion of the gift of the Spirit promised by Peter in Acts 2:38, Winter explained that the promise ‘‘meaneth not so much, or solely, the extraordinary gifts of the spirit, as regenerating graces, with the degrees of them.’’137 Peter, in other words, was promising his hearers salvation, not dramatic experience, ‘‘for what comfort had it been to them to tell them they should receive the gift of Tongues and working miracles when they hung over the chimnies of hell, (as I may so speak) or the smoak of the damned, ready to be cast into everlasting flames, for ought they knew, every moment.’’138 But neither were dramatic experiences excluded: Winter’s crucial qualification is ‘‘or solely.’’ Extraordinary gifts were included in the promise as it related to the first century and to the seventeenth. If modern Christians ‘‘do not receive any such extraordinary gifts . . . none in these days (for ought I know) are effectually called.’’139 Far from being unnecessary, the extraordinary was authenticating the faith. Winter’s biography certainly abounds in its descriptions of the marvelous. At various times in his life, he heard audible voices from the spiritual world.140

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On one occasion, Winter was interceding for the nation in a public prayer meeting when he ‘‘saw a great shining Light about him, and heard perfectly a voice saying: The Nations shall be spared for ten thousand Righteous Persons sake.’’141 The experience became a doctrine that Winter would return to at his death: ‘‘Doctor Winter afterwards told his Wife that he now perceived that a voice might be spoken to one in a Room, and none else hear it. When he lay upon his death-bed, his Wife again asked him about it, and he said, he did as plainly hear the Voice, as he heard her speak.’’142 John Weaver, preparing Winter’s biography, was justifiably defensive about these episodes: ‘‘Probably, the incredulous World will not believe these things to be true, but judge them rather to be Romances, and fancies than realities: But there are many Consciencious Persons, and of Good credit yet living, who can, and will attest the Truth of them.’’143 Winter’s defense of the unusual was balanced by a pragmatic negotiation with conservative orthodoxy. Throughout the 1650s, he was actively engaged in extending his local ecclesiastical power base. After Rogers’s return to England, in March 1652, Winter was appointed to a rota of ministers appointed to preach to the Christ Church congregation. The list included Thomas Patient, John Murcot, and two other Independents.144 Winter was expected to preach in the afternoons, when the congregation was at its largest.145 Some members of Rogers’s earlier congregation, such as Colonel John Hewson, did their utmost to preserve its radical tenor, but there is evidence that other members of Rogers’s congregation transferred their allegiances to Winter’s ministry.146 Elizabeth Avery, for example, had been an early advocate of discourses that would be recognized, in the 1650s, as typical of Quakers. Her Scripture-prophecies opened, which are to be accomplished in these last times (1647) idealized a ‘‘spiritual’’ exegesis that made metaphors from the biblical text and denied them any objective reality: ‘‘God will speak by me at present.’’147 Avery appears to have joined Rogers’s congregation in the second half of 1651, and her conversion narrative— which evidenced Rogers’s editorial control—noticeably moderated the rhetoric of her earlier realized eschatology.148 Her conservative drift seems to have continued. In June 1653, her child was baptized by Winter, according to his notebook, though a corresponding margin remark is ‘‘dead.’’149 Throughout the period, radicals seem to have paralleled Winter’s commitment to eclecticism. Perhaps it is Winter’s ecclesiastical rapprochement that makes his pneumatological radicalism so unlikely. Winter’s early ecclesiastical preferences reflected a return to pre-Laudian norms. In Christ Church, he removed the communion rail that had been erected in the 1630s and circulated the eucharistic elements among the celebrants who sat at tables ‘‘placed together in length from the choir up to altar.’’150 For some of his colleagues, his challenge

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to traditional ecclesiological patterns was not nearly radical enough. In 1651, Rogers complained of his cautious attitudes to the public ministry of women. Winter’s refusal to follow Rogers into admitting their public ministry was ‘‘one thing that helped to set at a distance the two societies in Dublin,’’ and Rogers accused Winter of attempting to ‘‘rob sisters of their just rights and privileges’’ in the church.151 As the 1650s progressed, this conservatism was reflected in Winter’s resurrection of a range of older ecclesiastical preferences. His notebook, detailing sermon outlines and college accounts, documents this trend, containing lists of ‘‘christenings,’’ as he describes them, including that of the son of Henry Cromwell at Christ Church on 24 April 1656, perhaps the high point of his political influence.152 The term ‘‘christening’’ is unusual in puritan writing; and the possibility of a deliberate nod back to Anglicanism is confirmed by Winter’s regular use of baptismal sponsors—as he variously describes them: ‘‘witnesses,’’ ‘‘sureties,’’ ‘‘gossips,’’ or, most regularly, ‘‘godparents.’’153 With only a handful of exceptions, his use of godparents conforms to ancient ecclesiastical practice and anticipates the Church of England’s 1662 ruling that the baptism of male children should be witnessed by two godfathers and one godmother and the baptism of female children by two godmothers and one godfather.154 The practice found no sanction in the Westminster documents his association cited to define its reforming course, but Winter’s sermons claimed apostolic authority for their use.155 Neither could the Westminster documents sanction his possible use of the sign of the cross in baptism or his regular churching of new mothers.156 As Hugh Jackson Lawlor has noted, ‘‘It is remarkable how little the Puritan leanings of Provost Winter obtrude themselves in these records.’’157 The conservative trend continued in the Dublin and Leinster association. The Agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster berated a number of ‘‘inventions of man’’ that included Arminianism, Socinianism, Antinomianism, Familism, ‘‘Seekerism,’’ Quakerism, ‘‘Antiscripturism,’’ Erastianism, ‘‘and what ever else is contrary to the acknowledging of the Truth which is according to godliness’’ and provided copious footnotes for those intending further reading in the refutation of heretical thought.158 Significantly, as we have seen, the Agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster highlighted its dependence on the Westminster Confession and catechisms. The ‘‘real and thorough Reformation’’ its subtitle imagined was an Irish Puritanism rooted in the Reformation mainstream and informed by the distinctive pietistic patterns of puritan divinity. But, as in Covenanted Scotland, the Confession’s denial of extraordinary revelation may not have been understood to be as absolute as it might at first appear.

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IV Imagining Winter as a conservative, historians have tended to focus on his political, educational, and ecclesiastical maneuverings, rather than the theological convictions and spiritual experiences that drove them. Winter has been too easily characterized in relative terms, as the foil to more radical figures such as John Rogers. In context, however, Winter’s life brought the extraordinary to the heart of the Irish Cromwellian administration, proving the contingency of the category of ‘‘the moderate,’’ which could, in midcentury Ireland, move far to the left of the English confessional mainstream, begging the question of the definition of the movement the elite sought to control. Winter’s convictions typify the eclectic theology of leading administrators and illustrate the possibility of the indigenization of religion in colonial contexts. His preaching, with all its openness to the extraordinary, represents a prophetic tradition juxtaposed with confessional norms. Pneumatology, in his hands, attempted the reenchantment of puritan thought. But Winter combined his radical pneumatology with an unusually conservative—even neo-Anglican—Independent ecclesiology. Paradoxically, Winter’s interest in the extraordinary, like his interest in christenings, godparents, and the churching of new mothers, located him within an older ecclesiastical tradition. The defense of the prophetic rooted Winter in the Scottish reformation insistence on the possibility of continuing revelation. Despite significant educational commitments, Winter’s articulation of the marvelous was simultaneously resisting the rise of scholasticism and the rise of the Quakers. The reformation he urged grew increasingly conservative, but he refused to abandon its eclectic mood. Like his behavior in Margaret Edwards’s healing, Winter’s career balanced the extraordinary against the perpetual danger of ‘‘enthusiastical conceits.’’

6 The Ecclesiastical Role of Women

Strange things were happening in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in the autumn of 1651.1 In the fellowship established by John Rogers, prospective members narrated their conversions before an auditory that evaluated whether they should be admitted into the church. What made their practice distinctive was the prominence the narratives gave to emotion—or, their opponents claimed, hysteria—and their assumption that women, as a substantial proportion of the church’s membership, could narrate their conversion in public and could judge the spiritual condition of their peers.2 The two issues were, of course, linked, as many in the early modern period identified femininity with emotional instability. But the church’s deference to emotional responses also undermined important elements in the Independent tradition. Earlier Independents in New England had required women to provide a written account of their conversion, which the pastor would read aloud to the congregation.3 Rogers, with a new generation of Independents, was providing women with their own public, congregational voice.4 One candidate for membership took advantage of this novelty to use an expression of grief to challenge her rejection by the church. Her conversion was examined ‘‘by the Churches appointment,‘‘ but she answered their questions so ‘‘fearfully, and uncertainly’’ that ‘‘some were unsatisfied, and desired that she might be past by for this present, till the next meeting.’’ When this verdict was mooted, she ‘‘burst out into tears bitterly’’ and referred to a recent sermon to insist that the decision should be reversed. ‘‘Last Lord’s

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day,’’ she remembered, the pastor had urged his listeners to consider that ‘‘Christ called us freely . . . and that he said . . . that those that come to him, he would in no wise put by.’’ Could the church be less approachable than Jesus? The church concluded that tears demonstrated sincerity, and the sermon provided a theological argument through which the church’s verdict would be successfully overturned.5 As early Independents had experimented with the collaborative examination of prospective members since at least the 1630s, this atmosphere of spiritual exactitude and mutual scrutiny was certainly not unusual.6 But it was unusual that a woman’s tears should mean the reversal of the verdict of a church court. Those audiences who were critical of Rogers’s innovations therefore cited his conversion narratives as evidence of a theological revolution. In an important section of the Cromwellian elite, his critics feared, both true spirituality and the government of the church were being feminized. Whatever their contribution to the gendering of puritan psychology, the Christ Church conversion narratives provided the basis for a significant challenge to the ecclesiological norms of protestant orthodoxy. Many of the conversion experiences alluded to the extraordinary—if not to the extravagant. But the narratives cited the emotional and the unusual with deliberate theological effect, for Rogers was arguing that the unusual experiences granted to his parishioners proved that ordinary women were suddenly capable of assuming authority in the church. For several decades, Independents had been admitting members—including women—as qualified individuals, rather than as members of a godly household, as in the mainstream Presbyterian tradition. But the Christ Church fellowship was going further in allowing women to test the spiritual experiences of men and was possibly the first Independent congregation to do so. Rather than minimizing the importance of the innovation, however, Rogers’s argument associated this female authority with the validity of his pastoral call. One member of the fellowship, Elizabeth Chambers, became his spiritual guarantor. Chambers had been searching for assurance of faith for some time before she returned to Ireland in the aftermath of the rebellion. Her spiritual interests had been encouraged by contacts with a puritan fellowship, ‘‘a poor despised people’’ in Bristol, but had been frustrated by a service she attended at St. Katherine’s in Dublin: ‘‘I could not well hear the Minister, and when I did, he railed so bitterly against the godly people, that I could not edifie anything by him.’’ Rogers’s arrival in August 1651 brought about a revolution in her understanding of the gospel. Preaching on Galatians 1:15–16, ‘‘he did show, that unless Christ were revealed in us, he was vailed to us; and the ablest preachers speak from inward revealings, Christ revealed in them.’’ The initial effect of the doctrine was devastating. Chambers was ‘‘cast down, and undone . . . upon the first sight and Sermon of this man,’’ yet she

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continued to listen to his preaching until she gained the assurance which she had been seeking. She believed she had good reason to persevere. Before Rogers’s arrival, she ‘‘had in a dream . . . a vision of him so plainly, that after he was in Dublin, the first Serm[on] he preached, she told her friends that this was the man that God had declared to her in a vision, should comfort her soul.’’7 The dream that led her to assurance had validated his ministry. The tears and visions of his church’s members confirmed Rogers’s pastoral calling and provided female members with an authoritative voice in an important, if controversial, spiritual community. But that authority was fiercely contested. Chambers’s claims, which Rogers included in Ohel or Beth-shemesh (1653), attracted the attention of Zachary Crofton, a Dublin graduate who had become an outspoken defender of conservative Presbyterianism in England. He lamented Rogers’s wider parading of gender inversions and argued that women in the Christ Church fellowship were an ‘‘affectionate feminine march’’ driven by emotional responses to an attractive and dynamic young preacher.8 Far from confirming his calling, the support of these hysterical witnesses proved that Rogers was the very antithesis of a faithful clergyman. Crofton reinterpreted the narratives of conversion with startling effect. It was false teachers who made targets of the ‘‘weaknesse, and affections’’ of women, he remembered. ‘‘Not without cause,’’ the Bible had described ‘‘apostatizing seducers to be such as creep into houses, to lead captive poor silly women led away with many lusts, 2 Tim.3.6.’’9 With Rogers’s true character exposed, his claims were ‘‘fitter to be exploded, then observed,’’ not least because they made an unimaginable nonsense of the civil and religious status quo.10 It was inconceivable that true Christianity should ‘‘destroy Civility, and Religion remove Male-sovereignty, and discharge Female-subjection . . . so that people once Christianized, must no more know any difference of Sexes.’’11 It was unthinkable that a woman should judge her own husband and ‘‘the shame of Christianity’’ that they should be made ‘‘so sovereignly superior.’’12 Crofton agreed that a woman could hold an office without necessarily possessing ‘‘reproving or judging authority’’; even his maidservant—perhaps the one he would later be charged with abusing13—was an ‘‘officer’’ in his family, he explained, though she was denied ‘‘authority in voting with, or objecting against my affaires.’’14 When others minimized their role, it was hardly surprising that women should be attracted to the new opportunities offered by Rogers’s fellowship, but Crofton was astonished that its assault on patriarchal order should be tolerated by some of the most influential of the Cromwellian elite, many of whom were among the church’s members. As the representatives of an administration that existed to impose order in Ireland, they of all people should know better than to disrupt the stable basis of society. Crofton felt that men should not be led away

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by arguments ‘‘so sinfully managed, and slenderly maintained’’; women should know their place and ‘‘be content in the places of subjection God and nature hath put them.’’15 In church and in society, he believed, the patriarchal order had to be maintained. Crofton’s hierarchy of genders paralleled the hierarchy of races the English policies assumed. Every scrupulous observer, Crofton averred, could see that ‘‘the masculine gender is naturally more worthy then the feminine.’’16 Women’s tears and visions only proved one thing, he feared: the Christ Church fellowship had been under the control of a dangerous and manipulative false prophet.

I Crofton’s conclusion epitomized an influential theme in early protestant divinity. Debates about the ecclesiastical role of women had continued within English Protestantism since the movement began. John Foxe’s Acts and monuments had celebrated the heroines of the English church alongside its venerable masculine martyrs. His accounts had emphasized the autonomy and theological imagination of its martyred women but cast his heroines in explicitly gendered roles.17 The literary culture of the Marian exiles, from which the ‘‘book of martyrs’’ emerged, was particularly ambivalent about the opportunities that women should be afforded. John Knox managed to embarrass the exiles with the publication of his First blast against the monstrous regiment of women—from which Calvin had to distance himself in a letter written to Queen Elizabeth. But, as protestant writers expanded their scholastic base, the ecclesiastical role of women was increasingly developed.18 It is dangerous, therefore, to homogenize ‘‘the experience of women’’ in any discussion of their ecclesiastical ‘‘role’’ in the early modern period.19 Such roles were varied and multifaceted, depending, among a host of other things, on such factors as religious affiliation, geography, social class, education, and family status. This pattern of variation precludes any essentialist narrative of their role. It is unhelpful to argue, therefore, that ‘‘the Puritan women could never belong fully to the society of the elect. Their piety was always compromised by physical characteristics that faith could not convert.’’20 Even in the reputedly patriarchal cultures of seventeenth-century Puritanism, it seems that women were granted a surprising range of opportunities. Recent work on the spirituality of early modern women suggests that puritan ‘‘sects and groupings were notable, to a greater or lesser degree, for the numbers of women active within them.’’21 Bernard Capp has suggested that women comprised the majority of members in Fifth Monarchist congregations, for example, and it is

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likely that the same pattern could be identified in other of the period’s sectarian groups.22 David Mullan, whose recent work focuses on the conservative cultures of early modern Scottish Presbyterianism, has described that ostensibly patriarchal culture as something of a women’s movement.23 But puritan theologians were regularly challenged by the need to theologize these opportunities with which their women were presented. The ecclesiastical status quo was based on something of a hermeneutic muddle. Puritan theologians had tended to move away from a number of the older rites of femininity—most notably the churching of new mothers. While the older Anglican service books had provided for the rite, the Westminster directory did not. John Milton noted the parallel between Old Testament and earlier Anglican customs in a sonnet recording the vision of his ‘‘late-espoused’’ wife, ‘‘washed from spot of child-bed taint.’’24 Samuel Winter’s reversion to this older tradition, noted in an earlier chapter, reflects his generally conservative bias toward older ecclesiastical norms.25 But puritan theologians admitted that their churches were also routinely offering to women roles that had no explicit sanction in scripture. Their participation in the eucharist, for example, could not rest on the citation of any scriptural example or command. Winter admitted that ‘‘there was no word for women to eat the Passover, yea it’s said expressly, No uncircumcised person should eat thereof ’’; nevertheless, he continued, it was a commonplace to agree that ‘‘women were to eat the Passover, being part of the household.’’26 But women also found their roles routinely circumscribed. They were routinely expected to be modestly dressed and veiled in public worship, in accordance with scriptural guidelines.27 They were expected to be quiet. Except in the most radical groups, their holding ecclesiastical office or preaching was out of the question. Protestant churches were still powerfully patriarchal institutions, often unable to imagine the reversal of the social hierarchy of genders. The theological regulation of women exploded in the late 1640s and early 1650s, when many of the women who participated in radical groups found liberation from the conservative theological codifications of the patriarchal mainstream.28 Many women were attracted to the ferment and fluidity of the ecclesiastical extremes, finding the radical groups more prepared than the confessional mainstream to accommodate—or even to celebrate—unusual patterns of thought and behavior. These opportunities were variously explained and defended. Female ministry could be thaumaturgical, a miraculous occurrence that transcended those patterns of behavior that should normally apply. It could also be providential, a sign that validated a prophetess’s claims. But explanations for female preaching could make more substantial arguments, using the individual to argue for wider historical changes. Thus female ministry

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could be interpreted as pneumatological, as evidence that the Spirit was being poured out on daughters as well as sons, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel. In addition, it could also be interpreted as eschatological, a sign that the end was at hand. These explanations regularly overlapped, providing apologists with several lines of rhetorical defense. It was the more radical of these explanations that were offered to explain the unusual ministry of women in Cromwellian Ireland.

II As Rogers’s narratives attest, women claimed unusual privileges in the religious cultures of Cromwellian Ireland. Of course, given the breadth of the theological spectrum they represented, the theologians of the Irish Cromwellian movement could be as patriarchal as anyone else. The Antrim ministers’ deliberations on matters of church discipline showed just how defensive of conservative social norms some of the period’s theologians could be.29 Similarly, Edward Warren, refuting the radicals’ blurring of social and theological norms, thought that references to the behavior normally expected of ladies and clergymen would be sufficient to refute the Baptist argument for immersion: ‘‘What gravity can there be for a Minister, who is God’s Ambassador to the World, 2 Cor.5.20. to put off his shooe’s and stockings, and to lead a Gentlewoman by the hand into a River, and throw her on her back?’’30 But these arguments did not prevail. Southern conservatives and the Ulster Presbyterians could not prevent a drift toward the radical groups. Especially in the southern counties and in the early years of the decade, women were breaking free of patriarchal conservatism and celebrating their ability to take advantage of the sudden diversity of theological opinion. The diversity appealed to women of high rank. Frances Cook, wife of a regicide judge who became chief justice of Munster, was the author of Mris. Cookes Meditations (1650), a devotional narrative and poem commemorating her delivery from a dangerous storm at sea, the miraculous assurance of deliverance committed to ‘‘my deere Husband’’ in a dream, and the ‘‘comfort and encouragement’’ he provided to the crew.31 Elizabeth Weaver, Samuel Winter’s second wife, was ‘‘once under a strong Temptation to become an Anabaptist, being perswaded that it was the way of God,’’ and only her fear that it would reflect negatively on her husband’s reputation persuaded her to hold back.32 Others were more skeptical of their husbands’ spiritual authority. Edward Worth’s wife, for example, appears to have become a Quaker.33 Such conversions—potential or actual—must have humiliated their husbands. Worth was actively building a national and confes-

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sional ecclesiastical consensus, and Winter was a notable antagonist of Baptist opinions, preaching before Fleetwood (of all people) the series of sermons on infant baptism he would publish in 1656. Perhaps the claims for Elizabeth Weaver’s interest in Baptist theology are ultimately inconclusive, but she certainly maintained a critical distance from other of her husband’s opinions. Such independent habits of thought would have been embarrassing to Dublin’s leading Independent divine; Elizabeth Weaver was certainly unmentioned in his notebook.34 Her brother, John Weaver, prepared Winter’s biography, but even he was prepared to record her vocal criticisms of her husband. Whatever the details of their relationship, Winter assumed the normality of marital discord: ‘‘There may be fallings out betwixt the wife and the husband, but unless she chuse another husband the marriage is not null.’’35 Female autonomy could threaten the husband’s authority but did not necessarily require the overturning of social norms. But others found their spiritual liberation more powerful than the bonds of the family unit. It was among the Quakers that Irish Cromwellian women seem to have been offered the greatest scope to challenge social and theological norms. Quaker women enjoyed notorious geographical mobility. In Limerick, in 1656, Claudius Gilbert lamented that women who protested against ‘‘Christ’s Ordinances, his Word, Sacraments, Prayers, Sabbath, &c. . . . molested us daily from several parts of Ireland and England.’’36 Others found in the fellowship of ‘‘friends’’ the confidence to challenge received notions of womanhood. In Bandon, sometime before January 1656, Lucretia Cooke was expelled from the Baptist fellowship after being found guilty of heresy. She publicly confronted her former pastor, burned books in the town’s market place, and joined the local community of ‘‘friends.’’37 Women in Quaker communities assisted likeminded missionaries and sometimes became missionaries themselves. In 1656, a minister in Limerick lamented the influence of two women, Barbara Blaugdone and Sarah Bennet, with six other male members of ‘‘that Gang.’’38 Two women from Youghal, Elizabeth Fletcher and Elizabeth Smith, provided crucial assistance to the itinerant ministry of Francis Howgil and were active in evangelistic activities of their own.39 Among their converts was James Sicklemore, who, in 1657, published his critique of the ministry of the ‘‘hireling’’ James Wood. Quaker women were also active in the centers of political power, but their ecstatic intrusions were not always appreciated. In 1656, two English missionaries interrupted the service in St. Audeon’s, Dublin and testified to the congregation, an activity made illegal only by an amendment to the Lord’s Day Act that year.40 In Kinsale, in the spring of that year, a congregation was astonished to find a Quaker stand up at the end of their service and abuse them in a ‘‘reviling manner.’’ They attempted to flee the church building, as ‘‘usually they

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doe uppon such occasions,’’ but, at the door, were met by a squad of soldiers who opened fire and forced them back into the church building. Henry Cromwell reported his belief that the Quaker protestor had in fact been supported by General Hodden, the governor of the town.41 This degree of access to the political elite was not unusual, though Hodden’s support for Quakers certainly was. Barbara Blaugdone testified to Henry Cromwell one day after her arrival in Dublin in 1656, complaining of his harsh treatment of her mentors.42 With this evidence of enthusiasm and spiritual power, the Cromwellian elite might have been impressed into adherence to the Quaker claims. After listening to Blaugdone’s testimony, Henry Cromwell was ‘‘so Sad and Melancholy . . . that he would not come forth to Bowls nor no Pastime at all.’’43 But his program of increasing conservatism could not lend its support to their challenge to gender norms. Nevertheless, as Rogers’s narratives attest, not all radical women joined the Quakers. In fact, evidence of enduring conservatism in the Cromwellian period may be found in the manner in which one the most notorious of the movement’s women increasingly tempered her voice. In the late 1640s, still in Oxford, Elizabeth Avery articulated a realized eschatology that would be as challenging as any that Quakers might later advance; but in the 1650s, in Dublin, she moved increasingly back toward the theological mainstream, apparently ending up in adherence to the ministry of Samuel Winter, in the most traditional of the city’s Independent churches. Significantly, Winter had objected to the role for women that she had found so appealing in the Christ Church fellowship. Avery had come full circle, maintaining a critical distance from the opinions of the men in her life throughout her theological journey. Her conclusions might have grown increasingly conservative, but she consistently refused to defer to the authority of men.44

III Avery’s claims were central to the debate about the ecclesiastical role of women that was engaging Dublin protestants in the early 1650s. In November 1651, John Jones reported that two gathered churches had been established in the city, and the number seems rapidly to have risen to at least five.45 Despite their shared ecclesiology, these groups took enormously varied approaches to a range of social and theological questions. John Rogers, pastor of the Christ Church fellowship between late summer 1651 and early spring 1652, noted that a difference in opinion about the ecclesiastical role of women was an issue that separated his fellowship from the one that met in St. Nicholas, led by Winter.46

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Their disagreement was pointed: ‘‘The Furies and Harpies are flowne up very high upon this point,’’ Rogers complained.47 There was a feeling among the Christ Church fellowship that Winter’s congregation left too little to the judgment of individual consciences, not realizing that ‘‘it is very dangerous and destructive to Christian liberty to urge a formal Church-Covenant, to presse opinions, & some nice points (which are left indifferent) as of necessity, without which a man must not be a member with them.’’48 By contrast, the Christ Church fellowship was driven by a conversionist primitivism that aimed to minimize the demand for theological assent.49 Rogers contrasted the biblical essentialism of his army-dominated congregation with the urbane civility of Winter’s church, with its strong university connections and close links to the civilian administration in Dublin; Rogers, who had graduated with a Cambridge B.A., criticized those ministers who are ‘‘at least, Masters of Art, if not Doctors.’’50 Whatever the explanation for their differences, the two churches had very distinctive moods. Both pastors agreed that women should ‘‘keep silence in the Churches’’ (1 Corinthians 14:34), but, while Winter took this as a blanket ban on audible leadership, Rogers was prepared to allow women to speak when they did so in subjection to the authority of the wider church.51 ‘‘Women are forbid to speak by way of Teaching, or Ruling in the Church,’’ Rogers explained, ‘‘but they are not forbid to speak, when it is in obedience, and subjection to the Church (for this suits with their sexes) as in this case to give account of faith, or the like, to answer to any questions that the Church asks, or the like.’’52 This was not a dispute about women’s preaching: ‘‘We plead not for this,’’ Rogers explained, ‘‘but for the common ordinary liberty due to them as members of the Church, viz. to speak, object, offer, or vote with the rest.’’53 Articulating these kinds of opinions, Rogers discovered that controversy was unavoidable: ‘‘Most men do arrogate a Soveraignty to themselves which I see no warrant for.’’54 Rogers based his argument on his exposition of a series of millennial prophecies. These prophecies, as we have seen, suggested that a new age—the age of the Spirit—was breaking in upon the Independent churches in the early 1650s. Rogers used the numbers in the biblical apocalyptic texts to calculate that ‘‘Deliverance and Freedom’’ had come to the church in 1643, when ‘‘the Congregational Churches got upon their feete, and began to look forth as the morning.’’55 By 1647, the ‘‘Churches blessednesse’’ was more visible than ever before, ‘‘for then the abomination (of Popery, Prelacy, Superstition, Idolatry, and Formality)’’ was ‘‘unsetled, sorely shaken, and broken downe, that the Kingdome of Christ, which shall never be shaken, may remaine.’’56 In 1652, Christ had begun to ‘‘reigne in . . . his Churches, more eminently than ever before; and then the Gospel-Discipline [began] to be restored, & the Abomination

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to be eradicated root and branch.’’57 The church’s present duty was to work for ‘‘a graduall restoration of Discipline,’’ for by 1700 Antichrist would be destroyed ‘‘in a spiritual manner, and by spiritual meanes, not by Policies, or Powers, or Armies of men, or Wars, or the like, (though they may be preparitives thereto).’’58 In its return to a New Testament ecclesiology, the Christ Church fellowship was playing a vital part in the most important historical drama. Eschatological excitement was suspending the old ecclesiastical norms.59 The new role for women was a vital component of this millennial advance. The new age would see the restoration of paradisiacal equality. Women were ‘‘being restored by Christ to that equall liberty (in the things of God, and in the Church of Christ) with men, which they lost by the fall,’’ becoming again ‘‘meet and mutual helps: for all are one in Christ, says the text.’’60 Rogers quoted the prophecy recorded in Joel 2:29 and interpreted in Acts 2:18 as a reference to the end of the Gospel age: ‘‘And on my servants and on mine handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.’’61 Insofar as Winter’s fellowship denied this, Rogers suggested, they were attempting to ‘‘rob sisters of their just rights and privileges’’ and were actually preventing the church’s advance toward the final defeat of evil.62 In the Christ Church fellowship, the authority of women was proof that millennial glory was at hand.

IV That apocalyptic intensity was marked in the expectations of one of the Christ Church fellowships’ most important women members, Elizabeth Avery.63 With significant ecclesiastical and political links, Avery was already a figure of some notoriety before she arrived in Dublin.64 She came from a family that had maintained its apocalyptic interests over several generations. Her father, Robert Parker, had attempted to avoid subscription to the canons of the Church of England but conformed in 1591 and took a clerical position in Wiltshire. His marriage and growing family did not dampen his zeal for further reformation, though his career in the Church of England effectively ended with the publication of his Scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in ceremonies, a massive and scholarly repudiation of liturgical innovation published in the Netherlands in 1607. Suspended from his ministry, Parker fled to Leiden and Amsterdam, where he was joined by his wife and children some time before his death in 1614. Two years later his reputation was established with the publication of De politeia ecclesiastica Christi (1616, with further editions in 1621 and 1638).65 In 1648, John Cotton traced the pedigree of New England Independency to Parker, among a handful of others from whom ‘‘we received light out of

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the word.’’66 In 1653, Rogers described Parker as an ‘‘able Divine,’’ and in 1657 he was still important enough for his son to advertise his lineage in the title page of the second edition of Methodus gratiæ divinæ in traductione hominis peccatoris ad vitam.67 Cotton Mather described Parker as ‘‘in some sort the father of all the non-conformists in our age.’’68 Avery, who had shared in his exile, remembered her father as ‘‘a godly man,’’ but it seems that his death left his family without access to the kind of radical preaching he had provided.69 They appear to have returned to England but, as Avery later remembered, ‘‘had then no good Preaching-Ministry to be had or heard about us’’ (she was sixteen at the time).70 Avery’s brother, Thomas Parker (1595–1677), set out to provide that kind of preaching himself. Thomas began his academic career at Magdalen College, Oxford, continued studying under James Ussher at Trinity College, Dublin, and eventually graduated from the University of Franeker in 1617. In the same year, he published Theses theologicae de traductione hominis peccatoris ad vitam, which was deemed so controversial that its contents were debated at the Synod of Dort. By this time, however, Parker had returned to England to work as an assistant to William Twisse and as a teacher in Newbury. In 1634, he emigrated to the New World, where he became a founder of Newbury, Massachusetts, and an organizer and minister of the settlement’s first church. From this base, he issued a series of publications in which he attempted to defend the validity of Presbyterian claims, including The true copy of a letter: Written by Mr. Thomas Parker, a learned and godly minister, in New-England, unto a member of the assembly of divines now at Westminster (1644). The book circulated widely among English Presbyterians and generated some debate, including the ‘‘modest, and innocent touches’’ of John Goodwin’s A reply of two of the Brethren to A. S. (1644).71 Over the first four decades of the seventeenth century, therefore, Avery’s father and brother had maintained a tradition of support for radical reform. As late as the 1640s, the family was still well known for their adherence to the Presbyterian cause. When Thomas Parker published The true copy of a letter in 1644, he was able to refer to their enduring conservatism: the letter noted that ‘‘my poore Sister, and Mother’’ had suffered with the letter’s addressee ‘‘for the sore afflictions of the Church.’’72 Parker’s later publication The vision and prophecies of Daniel expounded (1646) also emphasized the family’s theological commitments. Thomas Baylie, a former member of the Westminster Assembly who oversaw the publication of the book, noted that ‘‘the Author of this Discourse sent it over from New-England, without a Title, without a Dedication.’’73 He suggested that the book should be dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke, with whose family the Parkers had a long-standing connection, not least because of the ‘‘neer dependence’’ that Robert Parker had on the support of the Earl’s late father;

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Baylie noted that Robert Parker’s ‘‘Wife and Children’’ continue to speak of ‘‘many other great and extraordinary Favours . . . to this very day.’’74 But Baylie’s interest in the book was probably also linked to the family’s enduring apocalyptic commitment. Like his father, Thomas Parker believed that the times were propitious, but he would not confirm whether the end of the reign of the Antichrist and the beginning of the glory of the New Jerusalem should be dated to 1650 or to 1860: ‘‘Which of these two is to be chosen, I am not able at present to determine.’’75 Four years later—in the year in which the end might have come— Thomas witnessed the publication of his father’s final posthumous text, An exposition of the powring out of the fourth vial: Mentioned in the sixteenth of the Revelation. In the year in which the New Jerusalem might arrive, the Parker family was consolidating its reputation for eschatological zeal. With this kind of background, it is hardly surprising that Robert Parker’s two daughters also became associated with radical dissent as the 1640s developed. Sarah’s husband, Thomas Baylie, would later be identified as a suspected Fifth Monarchist.76 Elizabeth also developed eschatological interests, perhaps after her marriage to Timothy Avery. Little is known of her husband, except that he would serve on the committee that looked after the preaching of the gospel in Ireland.77 It may not have been a happy marriage: there does not appear to have been any significant meeting of minds. Elizabeth Avery took a curiously oblique attitude to her husband. Her conversion narrative notes a period of extended separation but does not name her husband and refers to him only insofar as he participates in a particular conversation. Perhaps their tensions were religious; perhaps Timothy Avery, with a civil service career and responsibility for overseeing the preachers on the Civil List, was embarrassed by the fact that his wife had been associated with some of the principal heretics of the age. Elizabeth Avery’s spiritual journey seems to have begun by the mid-1640s, when, probably in her forties, she experienced the death of several of her children. She received some comfort from ‘‘a Minister of Christ, that had power from God to do me good,’’ who ‘‘gave me much satisfaction by a Letter of his.’’ The effect of the letter was not long-lasting, and Avery was left in despair when the minister moved away. She grew in frustration as she searched for a new source of clerical support: ‘‘My greatest trouble, and that at which I took offense was, That we were so without the means, and without able Ministers; for now I could not be satisfied, but even doted on them, and could not wait with patience; for I had forgot how God had taught me within before, and without them.’’78 By 1646, her quest for assurance and her increasingly antinomian tendencies had been brought to the attention of John Lambert, governor of Oxford, who encouraged her to travel to that city to find fellowship with ‘‘godly people’’

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there.79 Again discouragement set in: she ‘‘heard their disputes between Master Kiffith and others, very hot, but saw nothing of God there, and was troubled at it.’’80 ‘‘Being thus afflicted, I desired to go home againe from Oxford, and writ to my Husband, but the Letter was burnt. . . . Thus I was three quarters of a year.’’81 But in 1647, ‘‘some three years agone, God came in upon my spirit, and gave me full assurance, and I heard a voice say ----, And sorrow thou shalt see no more. Then I writ down what God had done for me, and writ about to my friends.’’82 Separated from her husband and apparently unable to contact him, Avery published her letters as Scripture-prophecies opened (1647). The published letters demonstrate that Avery had moved far beyond antinomianism to advance a realized eschatology that would be popularized only with the rise of the Quakers in the subsequent decade. The letters began with the tropes of female modesty and domesticity common to many textual productions of the period. Avery emphasized their occasional nature: ‘‘The following Letters were intended onely for some particular Christians,’’ she explained, and had been published only because ‘‘that which is contained in them is of general concernment’’ and because ‘‘the power of God doth appear in it in respect of the weaknesse and contemptiblenesse of the instrument whom he doth here employ.’’83 This was an entirely conventional claim. It was a little less conventional to express defiance of the period’s social norms: ‘‘Though I may be counted mad to the world, I shall speak the words of sobernesse.’’84 But conventions were abandoned when Avery alluded to the modesty topos to make a series of explicitly prophetic claims: ‘‘I have followed God in making forth that which he is pleased to convey by me as his instrument; to whom I acknowledge all.’’85 In many ways, the letters were designed to appeal to those conservative puritans who were still pressing for the orderly reformation of the church. The government of the ‘‘National Church of England’’ had ‘‘no rule from the Word,’’ she explained, ‘‘neither for the calling of the Ministry, nor the institution of such a Church.’’86 They were highly critical of the existing political settlement. Avery lamented that ‘‘arbitrary power, which hath evidently appeared . . . in this Island; which arbitrary power hath not onely been in the Monarchical State, but in the foregoing Parliament of England.’’87 This political and religious critique was familiar enough in the protest literature of the 1640s, but Avery’s letters moved into a searing critique of the existing puritan churches as she justified her absence from formal gatherings for worship: ‘‘Antichristian Worship . . . hath formerly been understood to be the Worship of the Papists, but we have found it otherwise. . . . Babylon is in the purest Worship, that is most agreeable to the letter of the Word.’’88 For Avery, the problem and its solution were radical, for Antichrist was among the remnant of the elect.89

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Fortunately, Avery was assured, puritanism would survive its Babylonian captivity. Although ‘‘the persecuting of the Saints’’ was ‘‘hastening . . . the dreadful indignation of that God,’’ there was a future for those who persevered.90 Persecution would give way to the exaltation of the saints, for ‘‘the Lord will in his good time reveal unto his people those things which have been hidden from the beginning of the world.’’91 Progressive revelation would transform backslidden puritans into millennial theocrats, when ‘‘temporal power . . . shall go forth from the Saints.’’92 At the same time, the true people of God would begin to experience unusual spiritual power. Like many other puritan millennialists, Avery anticipated that this eschatological blessing would involve the ‘‘passing away of the Ordinances,’’ when the Bible and sacraments would give way to unshakable and entirely subjective experience of truth, ‘‘a heaven within us, even God manifested in the flesh of his Saints, as in the humanity of Christ.’’93 Independents had toyed with the idea of a future dispensing with ordinances since the anonymous publication of A glimpse of Sions glory (1641). In many ways, it was the logical extension of the doctrine of progressive revelation, the idea, popularized by a number of theologians and pamphleteers, that God would send to his people increasing understanding of his ways as the end of the age approached.94 The idea was certainly controversial: ‘‘Ordinances shall cease,’’ Edward Worth explained, but only at ‘‘the second coming of our lord . . . & not till then.’’95 Avery took that commonplace into her millennial theory and argued that millennial saints would have moved so far beyond the Bible and sacraments that God would begin to reveal further truth to them individually—before the second coming. Avery was firmly committed to this idea of an increasing apprehension of truth: ‘‘We must look for new discoveries, such as have not been yet.’’96 But there was one significant difference between the progressive revelation of the Independent divines and that which Avery advocated. For the Independent divines, the Bible and ordinances could only be dispensed with in the millennium—sometime in the future. Avery, on the other hand, believed she was already in the situation where the Bible and sacraments had become redundant. Thus, claiming access to supernatural voices, Avery believed that Scripture-prophecies opened was an improvement on the Bible.97 The apostles ‘‘saw no further then the letter onely,’’ she complained, but she had spoken more fully, or, as she put it, ‘‘so far as God hath carried me forth.’’98 Despite the familiarity of the rhetoric, however, it is not accurate to suggest that Avery was at this point a Quaker, as the entry about her in the Oxford DNB claims. This identification is extremely problematic at this stage. George Fox’s turning toward the inner light can be dated to 1647, when he received a series of ‘‘openings,’’ began articulating his growing conviction that spiritual truth

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could be found through the ministry of the inner light, and began to develop a network of the like-minded by linking together existing ‘‘Seekers’’ and preaching vigorously among the unconverted.99 Nevertheless, the ‘‘Quaker’’ ascription accurately signals the innovation in Avery’s thought. In 1647, she was an isolated Seeker, no longer affiliated to any fellowship of believers and linked to others only through the writing of letters. But Scripture-prophecies opened clearly anticipated the realized eschatology that Quakers would develop: ‘‘I shall leave thee (good Reader) to the manifestation of Christ in thy flesh, which doth begin to appear in some, and we do likewise expect it in general unto all the Saints, when God shall bring them out of darknesse into his marvellous light.’’100 This willingness to leave the reader to the witness of the inner light was justified on the basis of the radically spiritualizing hermeneutic that Avery’s letters advanced. ‘‘In this age . . . the Prophecies are to be accomplished in a Spiritual sense,’’ she argued; ‘‘all Prophecies must have a spiritual interpretation; for if it should be confined to the letter, there would follow great absurdities.’’101 Her reading of Scripture encouraged the identification of types and antitypes; just as ‘‘Christ’s being taken up into the clouds of this visible firmament’’ typified ‘‘the taking up of the Saints spiritually unto God, . . . accordingly do expect Christ coming in glory spiritually, and all his Saints with him, as the Scripture speaks.’’102 But this metaphorical reading of eschatology gave way to a strong materialism when the cosmos was taken into account. The end of the world ‘‘is to be understood otherwise then hath been formerly,’’ she explained; ‘‘we cannot finde in Scripture that this visible heaven and earth are to have an end; for we finde to the contrary, that they are to continue.’’103 Her realization that the physical universe was unending necessitated the wholesale reevaluation of the future of the individual. Avery abandoned the conventional doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. It made no sense to her ‘‘in that manner as formerly . . . conceived’’ but made perfect sense when ‘‘the resurrection from the dead’’ was understood ‘‘in a spiritual sense . . . whilst we are in the flesh, before the state of glory.’’104 The resurrection of the righteous is ‘‘the resurrection of the body mystical,’’ and there would be no resurrection of the wicked at all.105 These metaphorical approaches did not obscure her interest in the prophetic future of the Cromwellian nations. Her letters evidenced a strong national interest and were certain that ‘‘the fall of Babylon, which is begun in some, . . . shall be accomplished in all, even in this island of Great Britain.’’106 But there was not much time left. The title page of Scripture-prophecies opened suggested that its prophecies would be fulfilled in ‘‘these last times, which do attend the second coming of Christ.’’ His coming ‘‘shall be very shortly,’’ she explained; ‘‘it shall not be so long; for the Scripture doth prefix a time, Rev. 12. a

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time, and half a time; that is, three yeeres and a half.’’107 Christ’s second coming— his final revelation to his people—would occur midway through 1650, as Thomas Parker’s earlier writing had suggested. The dating showed that the family’s eschatological interests had converged. Like her brother, Elizabeth Avery had identified the moment when millennial glory could commence—and it was only three years away. Avery’s subsequent career is a study in apocalyptic disappointment, not least because her predictions were not well received. One year after the publication of her letters, Avery was identified as one of the nation’s principal heretics. A glasse for the times (1648), published by an association of London ministers, catalogued the opinions of a number of prominent ‘‘false Teachers’’ to enable the reader to ‘‘clearly behold the true ministers of Christ,’’ as the title page states. The pamphlet’s opening paragraphs celebrated the calling of the ‘‘Gospel Minister’’ and listed a catena of biblical passages to contrast and confute the rising tide of anticlericalism at the end of the 1640s. The pamphlet’s second page listed a series of biblical references to ‘‘False Prophets’’ and ‘‘their deceitfull and soule-murthering opinions.’’108 The ‘‘Errours of our Times’’ included heresies that the pamphlet associated with Lawrence Clarkson, John Bidle, Paul Best, Paul Hobson, John Saltmarsh, John Milton, and Roger Williams. Elizabeth Avery was the only woman listed among the heretics—and the description of her errors equaled all but the longest of the refutations, which dealt with Roger Williams’s proposal for unlimited toleration. The pamphlet complained of the Errour of E. Avery, Cited by the London Ministers. That there is no resurrection of the naturall body, but onely mysticall. That the bodies of flesh belonging to the Saints shall be annihilated, and that the soul is God. That hell is a non-entity. That no soules are yet in hell. That all torments of men and devills are yet to come, that Beasts shall rise again. That devills shall bee tormented in the bodies of the wicked.109 The analysis was neither accurate nor sympathetic, but the response to Avery’s ideas among her own family members would not be any better.110 In 1650, her brother, who might have found her identification of the importance of 1651 appealing, instead published The copy of a letter written by Mr. Thomas Parker, Pastor of the Church of Newbury in New-England, to his sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Avery, sometimes of the Newbury in the County of Berks, touching sundry opinions by her professed and maintained (1650).111 He was less impressed by their prophetic convergence than he was alarmed by his sister’s betrayal of the conservative Presbyterian cause.

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Parker’s text, written in New England, was dated November 1648 but was published in London only in 1650. Even in the New World, Parker’s relationship to Avery was evidently well known. He noted that he had received a number of other letters addressed to his sister which ‘‘for sundry Reasons are not Printed.’’112 These letters had come from several eminent New England divines, including John Cotton, who had admired her father, and her cousin James Noyse, who had become Thomas Parker’s pastoral assistant.113 The divines appear to have shared Parker’s horror at her notoriety. She had clearly progressed beyond feminine norms. Her ‘‘printing of a Book’’ was ‘‘beyond the custom of your Sex’’; it ‘‘doth rankly smell,’’ her brother complained.114 But it was her unorthodox ideas that caused him greatest shock: ‘‘By reason of your Book, you are (as I am credibly informed) printed by Name in the Catalogue of the Heretiques of this time, as one of the infamous Apostates.’’115 This was certainly a marked reversal: ‘‘Hardly any in the world, which have known you in former time, would have thought or dreamed, that you should ever have faln so deeply from your Faith.’’116 Parker hoped that his sister ‘‘may be reduced to her former Faith and Profession, from which she is so strangely turned away,’’ for despite her apostasy ‘‘it is possible,’’ he hoped, ‘‘that God may bring you back again from your Heretical Opinions.’’117 This ‘‘reduction’’ would confirm his patriarchal expectations, for Avery’s new faith had developed with her rejection of patriarchal authority in the family and the church: ‘‘You will not come to Ordinances, nor willingly joyn in private Prayer with your own Husband, but onely to condescend to his infirmities; for you say you are above Ordinances, above the Word and Sacraments, yea above the Blood of Christ himself, living as a glorified Saint, and taught immediately by the Spirit.’’118 These claims were ‘‘a horrible delusion of Satan,’’ Parker explained.119 He could not tolerate any of her ideas of a ‘‘mystical’’ second coming: ‘‘The plain words of Scripture are ever against you, neither can they be applied otherwise, then by making them a nose of wax. . . . If you turn these things into Allegories, nothing can be certain . . . this were to make a chaos and confusion of the Scriptures.’’120 Parker had no doubt that this ‘‘chaos and confusion’’ was due in no small part to his sister’s ‘‘new upstart friends.’’121 Parker appealed to his ‘‘dear Sister’’ to ‘‘renounce, cast off the Masters and Fomentors of your Heresies, never receive their Letters any more, never answer them.’’122 Instead, Avery was advised to return to the solidarity of family and the clerical network of her youth, her ‘‘old and sure friends, your Father, Mother, Husband, Brothers, Sister, Uncles and all the rest.’’123 Parker’s appeal rested on the memory of their shared past: ‘‘Dear Sister, with whom I have had sweet communion in the ways of God, let us not now part at least divided in the Faith, Eternally divided: Were you not in the Faith before you fell into these Opinions? and did you not then write unto me, that you

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had full Assurance?’’ Remember ‘‘the Doctrine of your Reverend Father, and of Dr. Twisse,’’ he pleaded.124 Restoration to the faith required the restoration of familial bonds under the authority of her male cousin and brother. The conservative appeal of the past was reinforced by publication of Robert Parker’s final posthumous text, An exposition of the powring out of the fourth vial: Mentioned in the sixteenth of the Revelation (1650). The text was important insofar as it reflected negatively on Avery’s hermeneutic and challenged the siblings’ apocalyptic interests in the very year in which they coalesced. The book’s editor, Thomas Gataker, described the time of its publication as ‘‘this last age . . . after the seven seals with their effects are past, and also six of the seven Trumpets have sounded.’’125 Gataker’s preface warned both Thomas and Elizabeth of the dangers of apocalyptic calculation, discouraged date setting, and focused specifically on the eschatological import of the year of publication: ‘‘Some are so hasty and rash in their opinions and predictions, that they seem to be guided more by passion, than reason. . . . These peremptory opinions prove false hitherto, and do give no satisfaction to wise and sober men.’’126 It was, most likely, a coded rebuke of their speculations. Gataker’s exhortations coincided with Avery’s moderation of her voice. She moved to Dublin with her husband, who was employed in the civil administration, and joined Rogers’s church some time in the autumn or winter of 1651. It is not hard to see why Avery found in Dublin the kind of fellowship she had failed to find in Oxford. Perhaps the reason why the Christ Church fellowship was prepared to tolerate her unorthodoxy, prepared to offer membership to one of those identified by the London ministers as one of the most dangerous theological voices of the day, was because it was dominated by those of like mind. Another of its female members had been influenced by Paul Hobson, one of the ‘‘heretics’’ listed alongside Avery in A glasse for the times.127 Others—notably women—advanced similarly individualistic readings of biblical prophecy. Tabitha Kelsall had been ‘‘long under a sad condition, and so as I could not read, nor pray, nor hear, but found all unprofitable to me,’’ until ‘‘the Lord came in by himselfe, and setled that in my minde, which is in Heb.12.26. Yet once more I will shake not the earth onely, but also heaven, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’’ Kelsall understood that the text referred not to the end of the physical world but to the end of her spiritual distress. Her assurance was provided by a realized eschatology: ‘‘The Lord by his voice did thus comfort me, that although heaven as well as earth, inward and outward man, my spirit as well as my flesh, and all my works, and righteousnesses were shaken, yet it was to make way for what could never be shaken.’’128 Other conversion narratives in Ohel or Beth-shemesh shared many of these themes; in fact, it is interesting to note that the conversion narratives

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that contained the clearest references to a realized eschatology were provided by women. Their insistent antiformalism was celebrated in the first stanza of one of the book’s dedicatory poems: The Substance of your Book’s beyond the leaf, Of which the Learned write so much of late. The Form’s the Leaf, the Spirit is the Life.129 Avery developed these themes in one of the longest of the conversion narratives recorded in Ohel or Beth-shemesh.130 Perhaps because of her controversial past, Rogers was clearly policing the narrative that Avery presented. In the margins of the text, he provided the theological parameters through which her conversion and the other conversions in the collection were to be understood, and, as editor of the narratives, he signaled ellipses in the account to demonstrate his editorial control. Avery’s family connections credited the fellowship, however, and Rogers’s account highlighted the elite network that evidently mattered so little to her. Rogers’s marginal annotation notes that ‘‘Mr. Parker was her Father, that able Divine that writ De Eccles. Polit. so largely; but she married Master Avery a Commissionary in Ireland’’—two representatives of patriarchal authority who remained, significantly, unnamed in her account.131 Avery’s conversion narrative demonstrated that she continued to be interested in the metaphorical—or ‘‘spiritual’’—interpretation of scripture. ‘‘In the times of the Wars in England,’’ she remembered, ‘‘I was brought out of Egypt into the wilderness’’ and, for ‘‘two or three years, . . . was much contented, and had [God’s] teachings within me, yea, and (many times) without his outward instruments; for I had his Spirit, his voice speaking within me.’’132 Her narrative climaxed ‘‘some three years’’ previously—sometime in 1647 or 1648— when, she said, ‘‘God came in upon my spirit, and gave me full assurance, and I heard a voice say ----, And sorrow thou shalt see no more. Then I writ down what God had done for me, and writ about to my friends.’’133 If this is a reference to the publication of her letters—and the concurrence of dates suggests that it is—then the conversion narrative demonstrates that Avery was continuing to look to her unorthodox mystical experiences as the source of her continuing assurance of faith. But the quotation is ambiguous. The unidentified voice appeared to promise relief, but it was also locating Avery’s spiritual experience as that of the Whore of Babylon, whose destruction she had predicted. The extraordinary voice appeared to be promising the uninterrupted pleasure of the new world, when ‘‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away’’ (Revelation 21:4); but the allusion

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was actually to the prophecy of the destruction of the city which ‘‘saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow’’ (Revelation 18:7). Avery was locating herself as the Babylon she had abominated in Scriptureprophecies opened. The quotation emphasized the uncertainty of Avery’s spiritual condition. The relief she anticipated might actually be her destruction. Avery’s identification with the Whore of Babylon paralleled her other identification with the virtuous woman of Revelation 12. Avery, who had by this stage lost at least four children, described the removal of sin in language which she drew explicitly from the description of the woman ‘‘clothed with the sun’’ in Revelation 12: ‘‘He hath caught the man-childe up to God, which I brought forth, i.e. the flesh . . . and I have found in me (and do yet) his judgement-seat set, to judge and sentence sin, and lust, and corruption, and his throne is there for himself to sit, and to rule.’’134 Describing the removal of sin in terms of the children that she had already lost, Avery was continuing to make metaphors of spiritual experience. But, three years earlier, she had identified the ‘‘man child’’ in her earlier book, where the ‘‘man child’’ was not sin but its opposite, ‘‘the glorious manifestations of God in the flesh of that number of Saints in whom he doth appear.’’135 Avery was making the same allusions, continuing to make metaphors of scripture but reversing their meaning. She was moderating her content, not her hermeneutic. She was not repenting of her earlier radical voice, which she claimed succeeded her attaining assurance of salvation. Her conversion narrative was employing the same metaphorical eschatology that had been so controversial in Scripture-prophecies opened. The complexity of Avery’s changing voices perhaps suggests one reason why her theological position has been contested. The Oxford DNB has described her as a Quaker; David Farr has described her as an antinomian; and Phyllis Mack has described her as a Fifth Monarchist.136 This is symptomatic of contemporaneous disagreements, as well as those in the secondary literature: Naomi Baker has noted that contemporaries often confused Quakers with Fifth Monarchists and that both were associated with antinomian ideas.137 Whatever else this debate suggests, however, it demonstrates that Avery was situated at an important theological nexus. There was a very close relationship between some antinomian and millennial groups in the 1650s.138 But the combination of antinomianism, prophetic aspiration, disdain for ordinances, and separation from church fellowship perhaps suggests that Avery can be best classified as a Seeker in the period immediately before the delivery of her conversion narrative. Avery was already articulating the kind of realized eschatology that Quakers would develop after their first arrival in Ireland in 1654.139 Ireland’s first significant early modern woman writer certainly possessed an innovative and complex voice.

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But not everyone was convinced of its value. Writing from England, Zachary Crofton intended his Bethshemesh clouded (1653) as an intervention in the debate about the ecclesiastical role of women. As part of his wider refutation of Rogers’s ecclesiology and theology of conversion, Crofton spent a substantial section of his argument on the propriety of the Christ Church women’s accounts. Crofton made no reference to Avery’s earlier notoriety, despite his connections to the London Presbyterians who had cited her heresies.140 It is unlikely that he would have deliberately avoided such embarrassing information as he put together his case against the Christ Church fellowship. Instead, he disputed the actuality of her claims but could not offer an argument much better than that it was impossible that someone could have told Avery she was ‘‘under the fifth seale.’’141 Crofton advanced his traditional ecclesiastical paternalism. The ruling power of women in the church was ‘‘a position fitter to be exploded, then observed,’’ he maintained.142 The very prominence of women in the radical fellowships was a danger to the continuity of orthodoxy: ‘‘Such is the heat of women’s affections, and many times height of their spirit; that I desire to know what expedient the Rabbi would prescribe to reduce them, if they should be (as many times they are) more then men in Congregational Churches, and run into errour, vote with the loudest voices against the truth.’’143 But Rogers’s changing family situation meant that he was growing less likely to address women’s influence; Crofton believed that Rogers’s thinking was unduly dominated by the influence of his new wife: ‘‘Charity commands us to consider that his late Mistris becoming his wife, may well engage his affections to attribute equal power at least to the sexe, and that was sometime his superior, and so happily became his equal.’’144 Crofton paralleled that lack of biblical reasoning with other evidence of Rogers’s careless scholarship. He implied that Rogers was making up some of the references he cited. One reference was patently erroneous, for in the cited title ‘‘there [were] not so many pages, Epistles and Index excluded.’’145 Crofton suggested that other quotations had been manipulated and that Rogers had made at least one writer ‘‘to speak what he professedly speaks against.’’146 Furthermore, Rogers’s quotations were partial and selective. His argument for ‘‘women’s voting, objecting, and rouling power in the Church’’ was not at all advanced by citations of ‘‘Sibbs, Whitaker, Willet, Calvin, Pareus, Theodores, and many others,’’ Crofton argued, for they ‘‘are known to have proclaimed his dainties distasteful.’’147 Rogers could not have made the assertions he did if he had been ‘‘pleased to read . . . to the end of the Page.’’148 Whatever Rogers’s claims for subjective experience or objective argumentation, there was simply no evidence to support the high claims made for his ‘‘affectionate feminine march.’’149

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V Crofton’s reaction to Rogers’s arguments for a new ecclesiastical role for women may well have epitomized an important strand in protestant divinity, but they actually disguise the extent to which Avery—like many other former radicals— was returning to the orthodoxy of the confessional mainstream. Claudius Gilbert noted the phenomenon of the ‘‘recovering radical’’ at the end of 1656. Some ‘‘horribly blasphemous’’ English Quakers, he remembered, had been ‘‘much reclaimed by the prison and lash; and Ireland knows others of that tribe, who are come back again to sobriety, by the sense of that poverty, whereinto their idle courses and ill companions had reduced them.’’150 Avery’s conservative trend appears to have continued after Rogers returned to England in March 1652. After Rogers’s departure, Avery dropped out of sight, except for one brief mention in Samuel Winter’s diary that records a ‘‘christening’’ for her child on 14 June 1653.151 This tantalizing reference hints at a number of suggestive possibilities. First, in 1647, Avery had believed herself to be above ordinances altogether. It was a remarkable step for a Seeker to move into a fellowship that observed any sacraments at all and then move further to the theological right in a reversion to the baptism of infants. Second, while Winter’s other references to ‘‘christenings’’ list both parents, his reference to the ‘‘christening’’ of Avery’s child cites her name without her husband’s. Timothy Avery was certainly not dead, for, in the same month as the baptism, he was appointed to a committee to enact legislation designed to curb an outbreak of plague and, as late as September 1656, was being ordered to deliver muskets and powder for the use of the ‘‘trainbands.’’152 It is possible, therefore, that Avery had taken the initiative for the baptism by herself; perhaps even possible, given the history of their troubled relationship, that their child was baptized against her husband’s will.153 Whatever the explanation for the baptism, the baby appears not to have lived: Winter’s diary marks ‘‘dead’’ next to its record of the event.154 Avery, who by this stage must have been in her fifties, had recorded the deaths of four children prior to her meeting with Rogers’s congregation, but even her transference to the ministrations of the most conservative of the Dublin Independents was not a sufficient promise of life.155 Avery’s ‘‘reduction’’ to orthodoxy is remarkable evidence for the eclecticism of radical religion in Cromwellian Ireland. Rogers offered her an ecclesiastical voice when the conservative forces of reform stood appalled by her rejection of the ordinances in a church that understood pastoral authority as

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shored up, rather than undermined, by the expression of transgressing femininity. Fewer than two years later, she sought the baptism of her child from the one individual in Dublin who most clearly stood against the opportunities for women that Rogers had defended and which she had enjoyed. Avery’s spiritual development took place in the context of a transatlantic family drama. But it is a fascinating example of the opportunities that puritan women could take— and the identities that they could fashion for themselves in, and beyond, Cromwellian Ireland.

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Conclusion

‘‘There is such a light kindled in the three nations (as the Martyr once said of the Gospel in England), which all the adversaries in the world will never be able to extinguish’’: Samuel Winter’s expectations seemed ready to be fulfilled when they were announced in a series of sermons before Charles Fleetwood in the middle of the 1650s.1 Things would certainly have looked promising to Winter. The protestant administration had consolidated its control of Ireland; the godly were exercising significant political clout; the enemies of truth were being successfully outmaneuvered;2 and there was a small but steady stream of conversions among those native Catholics unhappy with the prospect of forced transplantation. But Winter lived in a fractured intellectual world. Even as he raised his listeners’ expectations, the Irish Cromwellian reformation, which he attempted to steer, had begun to fragment. Many of the debates documented in this volume—debates that reached to the heart of the reformation enterprise—had already emerged to rock the unstable alliance of Irish protestant life. Irish protestants were already worrying about the authenticity of purported conversions, the challenge to the paedobaptist consensus, and the proper role of women in church and society. As Quaker ideas circulated after 1654 and congregations associated together against the radical threat, the government of the church and the experience of the supernatural would become increasingly contested issues. Their theological tensions did not simply result from the move towards denominational

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organization. While a number of issues reflected distinctions between emerging denominations, others reflected differences of opinion within them, others cut across them, and some were no more than responses to a vocal and often heretical prophetic individualism. The ‘‘reduction’’ of Elizabeth Avery ought to warn historians about the dangers of pigeonholing individuals who are often much more complex and much less denominationally consistent than we might imagine. But that unpredictable individualism showed the reformation project at its worst. Winter may have been sure that the light would never be extinguished; but Claudius Gilbert, two years later, worried that God was threatening ‘‘the removal of his Candle-stick, when people grow wanton, playing by their Light, blowing at it, abusing of it, throwing water thereon, and following false Lights instead thereof.’’3 Perhaps the light of the gospel—and the Irish reformation it engendered—could be extinguished after all. The complexity and innovation of the Cromwellian reformation challenges stable categories of a religious ‘‘mainstream’’ and ‘‘periphery.’’ Some groups, such as Quakers and the more radical sectarian movements, remained consistently on the social margins. Other groups enjoyed periods of genuine political significance. The political mainstream, the series of groups that enjoyed the support of leading administrators, may well have constantly developed, as Baptists gave way to Independents and Independents gave way to Old Protestants, but there was another, more consistent, popular mainstream in the substantial number of preachers and theologians who, however informally, adhered to the system of theology outlined in the Westminster Confession of Faith. This popular mainstream existed long before it was patronized by Henry Cromwell, who cemented it together by encouraging links between paedobaptist groups across—and beyond—the island. Throughout the 1650s, this popular mainstream proved relatively stable, building on the convictions of earlier stages of reformation, in contrast to the earlier stages of the political mainstream, in which innovating groups repeatedly failed to consolidate at their moment of greatest influence. Their reasons for adhering to the Westminster Confession may have been as pragmatic as principled, but the conservative habits of thought were rewarded with greater social and political clout as the decade progressed and as the political and popular elites began to converge. Nevertheless, the mixed nature of this popular mainstream makes it difficult to describe the Irish Cromwellian movement as a movement of puritans. There is no doubt that many of the period’s movements and congregations were developed by puritan pastors and preachers, and many of these congregations and individuals were in regular contact with puritan brethren in England. Their ‘‘puritan’’ interests and influences closely paralleled the existing interests

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and influences of many of those protestants whose presence in Ireland predated the Cromwellian invasion. The Church of Ireland, although it was undermined by Cromwellian reform, had maintained a strongly puritan character without necessarily becoming a movement of ‘‘the hotter sort.’’4 But, because of the powerful influence of the Cork association, a group of former Episcopalians who remained sympathetic to the old ecclesiastical settlement, the popular or confessional mainstream can only be considered as puritan as the state church which preceded it. Conservative voices in these debates clearly emerge from the old status quo. Crofton’s ideas of conversion, for example, corresponded to those popular in earlier stages of Irish reformation, as did Warren’s defense of infant baptism and Winter’s talk of ‘‘christenings.’’ Nevertheless, these debates are evidence, often, of energetic and innovative puritan voices contesting this tradition. The Cromwellian reformation therefore reflected both continuity and discontinuity in the existing pattern of reformation in Ireland. It was innovative in many of its personnel, policies, and ideas, while its representatives reiterated a number of long-standing themes and expectations in Irish Reformed thought. But these contests between the old and new demonstrate something of the problem of the Cromwellian reformation. It was undermining the old confessional patterns without replacing them with a clear agenda for ecclesiastical change. The old order had imprinted itself, to a greater or lesser degree, through processes that historians increasingly recognize as ‘‘confessionalization.’’ But Cromwellians were offering nothing to compare to the order of the older norms. Their reformation was haphazard, unprogrammed, and, despite vigorous attempts to control the Civil List and promote a state-supporting spirituality, inherently fissiparous. The intellectual culture of the period was inherently divisive. The Cromwellian campaign in Ireland cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy of an army of saints combating the native slaves of Antichrist.5 Eschatological vituperation was as often directed at fellow protestants as at native Catholics. Antichrist could always be identified inside the elect—at least until such times as the sheer weight of external opposition forced Cromwellian protestants into a politic alliance as the Restoration loomed before them. Theologians, preachers, and polemicists faced the tension between their earnest defense of truth and the need to maintain an unflinching panprotestant unity in the face of the native Catholic threat. The anxiety caused by this tension appears throughout the corpus of this controversial divinity. And that anxiety is reflected in the contingency of the positions maintained. The theological world of Irish Cromwellians was much less coherent than has often been imagined. Preaching before Fleetwood, Winter was not yet wondering whether the friends of the Gospel, rather than its

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‘‘adversaries,’’ would extinguish the ‘‘light kindled’’ in Ireland, but Gilbert was forming his suspicions. Historians have often wondered whether the Cromwellian reformation developed a distinctively Irish theology. Arguably, the Ulster Scots’ withdrawal from the Remonstrant-Resolutioner contest in their homeland was the most significant signal of intellectual independence in the decade. But perhaps the national focus of the question is too broad. Some of the debates were entirely local in character—debates about baptism do not appear to have generated much interest in the northeast, which, by midcentury, had emphatic Presbyterian loyalties, perhaps an indication that specific areas within Ireland had theological environments of their own. Other of the debates transcended Ireland altogether. Crofton and Rogers used Irish examples to debate their theologies of conversion, but they did so from the safe distance of new pastoral bases in England. The theological debates of Irish Cromwellians were part of conversations that crossed England and Scotland as much as they crossed the Irish Sea. But there was something distinctively Irish about these series of encounters. The political context of Irish protestants made these debates differ from their closest parallels in England and Scotland. Irish protestants were, inescapably, a political, social, and religious minority, and their discussions were carried out in a wider context of continuing Catholic threat. In this colonial situation, besieged by representatives of a nation they believed capable of the grossest crimes, Irish protestants turned their attention in upon themselves, largely ignoring the evangelization of the natives in favor of cross-examining the orthodoxy of their peers. The result was a highly unusual pattern of reformation, in which the tendency toward voluntary church membership required individuals to have much more of an understanding of conversionist theological topics than members of many other protestant churches elsewhere.6 Irish Cromwellians were constructing an overtly theological reformation. But as that concentration on theological ideas drove the reformation movement toward disputation, the administration charged with the duty of its oversight moved consistently away from the radical left. Henry Cromwell’s appeal to Old Protestants signaled that the Irish reformation of the 1650s was taking a markedly different path from that being pursued in England, where Independents remained in most positions of influence. But some Cromwellians worried that the Irish debates were marginalizing an already marginal community. There were fears that the search for doctrinal purity would demonstrate that the truly godly were a much smaller group than already they feared. That sense of threat seems to have encouraged Henry Cromwell’s movement back toward the Old

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Protestant associations. His later breadth was a clear signal of the distance he was prepared to move to generate some real ecclesiastical innovations in Ireland. The Cromwellian reformation may have been idiosyncratic, but it was not entirely incoherent. The movement’s return to an older and more normative generic Protestantism reflected developments in its wider social and economic context. State finances were significantly improved by reducing the power of the army: concomitant benefits included lowering the tax burden and undermining the problematic Baptist network. Army influence also diminished as merchants resisted their power in local boroughs and corporations. Simultaneously, Ireland opened up to new ideas. The Hartlib circle may not have enjoyed the influence it had elsewhere and the intellectual energies of its representatives may have been frustrated by the introspection of sectarian discussion, but Irish Cromwellians were supporting a series of scientific innovations that Restoration authorities would be keen to develop.7 Of course, protestants of all persuasions jockeyed for position during the radical turn of 1659–1660.8 Baptists and Independents, in particular, attempted to outmaneuver the other protestant groups. Individual groups competed for specific and overlapping religious and political goals as if to illustrate the extent to which their debates had permanently divided the already contingent protestant interest in Ireland.9 But the unflattering spectacle of sectarian division at a moment of supreme political crisis set the tone for the widespread rejection of dissenting religion in the aftermath of the Restoration. Cromwellian innovations in clerical maintenance, parish organization, and the improvement of church fabrics were continued.10 But the large degree of ecclesiastical continuity after the 1650s could not disguise the fact that the events at the end of the Commonwealth, so ably described by Aidan Clarke, reflected the pattern of sectarian division that had bedeviled Cromwellians throughout the troubled decade and set the agenda for future patterns of Irish denominational life.11 Theological contests forestalled any attempt to fashion a cohesive protestant mentalite´. They reflected and actively contributed to the fall of the regime. Of course, this volume has only provided a partial reconstruction of the debates on which it has focused. Like many other texts in intellectual history, this volume may be guilty of overplaying the importance of print in the construction and maintenance of religious difference. Debates ranged beyond the book and the literate population, across media and social strata. But it should also be recognized that many of the texts examined in this volume were themselves the transcripts—or at least the only surviving records—of sermons. This volume has therefore had to elevate the book (as a material object) into a

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‘‘primary instrument’’ of religious change.12 Andrew Pettegree is correct to argue that this is an essentially modern way of valuing reading, among the many factors influencing the religious decision making of early modern individuals; but it is an elevation that the exigencies of the historical record force upon those who attempt its reconstruction. This qualification does not undermine this book’s series of claims as to why the Cromwellian reformation failed. Whatever conclusions may be drawn about earlier periods of reformation in Ireland, it is evident that Oliver Cromwell, at least, was driven by the need to assert the triumph of the protestant faith. But with its reiterated introversion, the Cromwellian movement failed to establish that which was required in each of the European movements of religious change, ‘‘a new dialectic of belonging and rejection.’’13 Nevertheless, even as a short-term interlude, the Cromwellian reformation in Ireland did establish longer-term patterns of adherence and commitment. The Old Protestants did triumph in the ecclesiastical and political settlements of the Restoration period, but other species of English sects and Scottish Presbyterians resisted Anglican hegemony in the later seventeenth century, often managing to survive and occasionally outflank the established church. This identification of short-term discontinuity and longer-term continuity demands that historians of Irish religion reconsider the significance of the theological debates of the 1650s. The debates represented in this volume do not reflect the totality of Cromwellian ideological division, but they do signal its importance. The theological debates of the 1650s laid the foundations for long-term denominational life in Ireland. The decade consolidated the division between Catholicism and Protestantism—and Catholic rhetoric in subsequent centuries has regularly returned to the ‘‘curse of Cromwell.’’ But it also contributed to continuing divisions among dissenters, in the later seventeenth century, and especially among evangelicals, in the eighteenth century and beyond. Contemporary Irish evangelicals live with little awareness of the ambivalence with which many of their denominational ancestors regarded each other, and many fail to appreciate that the debates that continue to rock the movement—about true and false conversion, infant and believers’ baptism, church government, charismatic manifestations, and the role of women—all find their roots in the vital and dynamic decade that continues to haunt the Irish imagination. Most remarkably, many of the arguments advanced among contemporary evangelicals are extremely similar to those first articulated 350 years ago. Modern evangelicalism has continued the dangerous vitality of puritan faith. Often linking political and religious loyalties, often focusing their missiological interests in situations other than those of their Catholic neighbors, modern Irish evangelicals repeat the debates of the past. But they do so, generally, without echoing

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the dangerous competition between the sects. Irish Cromwellians were much more divided than has often been realized. Samuel Winter voiced his optimistic spirit when he argued that the ‘‘light kindled in the three nations’’ could never be put out.14 Claudius Gilbert thought some among his brethren were attempting to snuff it out.15 But John Rogers would not have been surprised. Nothing could be certain in a ‘‘land of Idols and Ire.’’16

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Notes

preface 1. See, for example, Crawford Gribben, ‘‘Lay conversion and Calvinist doctrine during the English Commonwealth,’’ in Deryck W. Lovegrove (ed.), The rise of the laity in evangelical Protestantism (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 36– 46. 2. See, for example, Patricia Crawford, The puritan conversion narrative: The beginnings of American expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); C. L. Cohen, God’s caress: The psychology of puritan religious experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Elaine Hobby, Virtue of necessity: English women’s writing, 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988); Nigel Smith, Perfection proclaimed: Language and literature in English radical religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Bruce Hindmarsh, The evangelical conversion narrative: Spiritual autobiography in early modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

introduction 1. Rare examples of anti-Catholic apocalyptic rhetoric can be found in Robert Dunlop (ed.), Ireland under the Commonwealth: Being a selection of documents relating to the government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659 (London: Manchester University Press, 1913), 1:61–62, 74. 2. John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh (1653), p. 305. On Rogers, see Richard L. Greaves, ‘‘Rogers, John (b. 1627),’’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press; hereafter cited as Oxford DNB). 3. Norah Carlin’s studies of political opposition to the Cromwellian invasion are a reminder that theological ideas were not the only ones shaping

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English policy. Norah Carlin, ‘‘Extreme or mainstream? The English radicals and the reconquest of Ireland,’’ in Brendan Bradshaw et al. (eds.), Representing Ireland: Literature and the origins of conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 210–26; Norah Carlin, ‘‘The Levellers and the conquest of Ireland in 1649,’’ Historical Journal 30:2 (1987), pp. 269–88. 4. Edward Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan: By grace, not works (1656), p. 82. See also Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller (eds.), Biographical dictionary of British radicals in the seventeenth century, 3 vols. (Brighton, Eng.: Harvester Press, 1982–84), s.v. ‘‘Warren, Edward.’’ 5. Rogers, Ohel, p. 206. 6. On the open membership policy of Rogers’s congregation, see Crawford Gribben, The puritan millennium: Literature and theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), pp. 149–71. 7. Patrick Collinson, The reformation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), pp. 115, 118. For English attempts at conquest in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see John McGurk, The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland: The 1590s crisis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Stephen G. Ellis, Ireland in the age of the Tudors: English expansion and the end of Gaelic rule (London: Longman, 1998); Keith Lindley, ‘‘Irish adventurers and godly militants in the 1640s,’’ Irish Historical Studies 29:113 (1994), pp. 1–12; and Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 8. The best and most recent general account of religious policy and experience in this period has been provided by Alan Ford, The protestant reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1997). Other valuable texts include Samantha A. Meigs, The reformations in Ireland: Tradition and confessionalism, 1400–1690 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1997); Ian Hazlett, The reformation in Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2003); and Felicity Heal, The reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9. These figures are those provided by L. M. Cullen in T. W. Moody et al. (eds.), A new history of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 3:388–90. 10. Sir William Petty, The political anatomy of Ireland (1691), p. 17. Toby Barnard notes that Petty elsewhere calculated the population of Ireland in 1653 as 900,000; Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ in Toby Barnard, Irish protestant ascents and descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), p. 1 n. 3. On Petty, see Toby Barnard, ‘‘Petty, Sir William (1623–1687),’’ Oxford DNB. 11. On Boate, see Elizabeth Baigent, ‘‘Boate, Gerard (1604–1650),’’ Oxford DNB. 12. Gerard Boate, Irelands naturall history (1657), p. 9. 13. Ibid., p. 4. 14. Aidan Clarke, ‘‘Colonial identity in early seventeenth-century Ireland,’’ in T. W. Moody (ed.), Nationality and the pursuit of national independence: Historical studies XI (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1978), pp. 57–71; Nicholas Canny, ‘‘Identity formation in Ireland: The emergence of the Anglo-Irish,’’ in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds.), Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Princeton, NJ:

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Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 159–212; Austin Woolrych, Britain in revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 28. 15. Boate, Irelands naturall history, pp. 6–7. 16. Michael P. Carroll, Irish pilgrimage: Holy wells and popular Catholic devotion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 17. Steven G. Ellis, ‘‘The collapse of the Gaelic world, 1450–1650,’’ Irish Historical Studies 31:124 (1999), pp. 449–69. 18. Boate, Irelands naturall history, p. 7. 19. Ibid., pp. 6–8. 20. In the early 1650s, Ulster Presbyterians split over competing understandings of their covenanted obligation to the monarchy; see chapter 4 below. 21. Oliver Cromwell, The writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell: With an introduction, notes and an account of his life, ed. W. C. Abbott (1939; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2:199; Toby Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English government and reform in Ireland, 1649–1660, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 11. 22. Steven G. Ellis, ‘‘Ireland,’’ in Hans J. Hillerbrand (gen. ed.), The Oxford encyclopedia of the reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2:322. 23. This context is explored in Canny, Making Ireland British, and Gra´inne Henry, ‘‘The native Ulster mentalite´ as revealed in Gaelic sources, 1600–1650,’’ in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the rising (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1993), pp. 61–92. 24. For early modern printing in Ireland, see Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘Irish printing in the early seventeenth century,’’ Irish Economic and Social History 15 (1988), pp. 81–88; and Elizabethanne Boran, ‘‘Printing in early seventeenth-century Dublin: Combatting heresy in serpentine days,’’ in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 40–65. For a discussion of literacy in early modern Ireland, see Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘Reading the Bible in seventeenth-century Ireland,’’ in Bernadette Cunningham and Ma´ire Kennedy (eds.), The experience of reading: Irish historical perspectives (Dublin: Rare Books Group of the Library Association of Ireland and Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1999), pp. 10–38. 25. D. B. Quinn, ‘‘Information about Dublin printers, 1566–1573, in English financial records,’’ Irish Book Lover 28 (1942), p. 113. See Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 173–80, for an account of the place of the Irish language in ecclesiastical reform. 26. Roger Blaney, Presbyterians and the Irish language (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1996), pp. 6–7. 27. Ellis, ‘‘Ireland,’’ p. 322; Terence P. McCaughey, ‘‘Andrew Sall (1624–82): Textual editor and facilitator of the Irish translation of the Old Testament,’’ in Cathal G. ´ Ha´inle and Donald E. Meek (eds.), Unity in diversity: Studies in Irish and Scottish O Gaelic language, literature and history, Trinity Irish Studies 1 (Dublin: School of Irish, Trinity College, 2004), p. 153; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 179.

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28. On Bedell, see Karl S. Bottigheimer and Vivienne Larminie, ‘‘Bedell, William (bap. 1572, d. 1642),’’ Oxford DNB. 29. Godfrey Daniel, ‘‘To the Right Honourable, the Commissioners of the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England, for the affairs of Ireland,’’ in [William Perkins], The Christian doctrine, or, The foundation of Christian religion, gathered into six principles, translated into Irish by Godfrey Daniel (Dublin, 1652), sig. A3r. 30. Ibid., sig. A2v. 31. Collinson, Reformation, p. 118. 32. Ellis, ‘‘Ireland,’’ p. 321. 33. Ford, Protestant reformation in Ireland, pp. 155–90. 34. Crawford Gribben, ‘‘The eschatology of the puritan confessions,’’ Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 20:1 (2002), pp. 51–78. 35. Woolrych, Britain in revolution, p. 29; cf. p. 48. 36. Ibid., p. 48. 37. Alan Ford, ‘‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1641: A puritan church?’’ in Alan Ford et al. (eds.), As by law established: The Church of Ireland since the reformation (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), pp. 52–68; Woolrych, Britain in revolution, p. 47. For the enduring problem of clerical supply, see Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 164. 38. Woolrych, Britain in revolution, p. 31; Marc Caball, ‘‘Providence and exile in early seventeenth-century Ireland,’’ Irish Historical Studies 29:114 (1994), p. 174. 39. Martyn Bennett, The civil wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 12–13. 40. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 2; M. Bennett, Civil wars in Britain and Ireland, p. 14. 41. Toby Barnard, ‘‘1641: A bibliographical essay,’’ in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the rising (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1993), pp. 173–86 (see also other essays in that collection); Nicholas Canny, ‘‘What really happened in 1641,’’ in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from independence to occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 24– 42; Michael Perceval-Maxwell, ‘‘The Ulster rising of 1641 and the depositions,’’ Irish Historical Studies 21 (1978–79), pp. 144–67; Aidan Clarke, ‘‘The 1641 depositions,’’ in Peter Fox (ed.), Treasures of the library, Trinity College Dublin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1986). 42. Lindley, ‘‘Irish adventurers and godly militants in the 1640s,’’ p. 3. For the impact of the 1641 rising outside Ireland, see Keith J. Lindley, ‘‘The impact of the 1641 rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5,’’ Irish Historical Studies 18:70 (1972), pp. 143–76; Conrad Russell, ‘‘The British background to the Irish rebellion of 1641,’’ Historical Research 61 (1988), pp. 165–82; and David A. O’Hara, English newsbooks and the Irish rebellion of 1641 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005). See also Alan Ford, ‘‘Martyrdom, history and memory in early modern Ireland,’’ in Ian McBride (ed.), History and memory in modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 43–66. Some of the essays in Laurence M. Geary (ed.), Rebellion and remembrance in modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001) are also of relevance to this discussion. 43. Lindley, ‘‘Impact of the 1641 rebellion upon England and Wales,’’ p. 145.

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44. Moderate intelligencer 215 (2 May 1649); John Milton, Observations upon the articles of peace with the Irish rebels (1649), p. 49; Patrick Adair, A true narrative of the rise and progress of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (1623–1670) (Belfast: C. Aitchison, 1866), p. 74. Prendergast reckoned that no more than one hundred protestants were killed in the entire rebellion. John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin: McGlashan and Gill, 1875), p. 66. 45. No pamphlet, but a detestation against all such pamphlets as are printed, concerning the Irish rebellion, plainely demonstrating the falshood of them (1642) alleged, as its title suggests, that a number of accounts had clearly been forged. The impression was confirmed by Good and bad newes from Ireland: In a letter of credit from Youghall, not forged, as are most of pamphlets lately published (1642). 46. Lindley, ‘‘Impact of the 1641 rebellion upon England and Wales,’’ pp. 154–55. 47. Ibid., p. 145. 48. Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 551. 49. John Morrill, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The civil wars: A military history of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xx. For a discussion of the Cromwellian land settlement, see Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland; and Karl S. Bottigheimer, English money and Irish land: The ‘‘Adventurers’’ in the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Many local studies of the land settlement also now exist: L. J. Arnold, The Restoration land settlement in county Dublin, 1660–1668: A history of the administration of the Acts of Settlement and Explanation (Blackrock, Ire.: Irish Academic Press, 1993); Harold O’Sullivan, ‘‘The Cromwellian and restoration settlements in the civil parish of Dundalk, 1649–73,’’ County Louth Archaeological and Historical Journal 19 (1977), pp. 24–58; Harold O’Sullivan, ‘‘The plantation of the Cromwellian soldiers in the barony of Ardee,’’ County Louth Archaeological and Historical Journal 21 (1998), pp. 415–52; Harold O’Sullivan, ‘‘Land ownership changes in the county of Louth in the seventeenth century’’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Dublin, 1992); Kevin McKenny, ‘‘The seventeenth-century land settlement in Ireland: Towards a statistical interpretation,’’ in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from independence to occupation, 1649–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 181–200; and see the updated version of Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland.’’ 50. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 13. 51. Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 552. 52. Ibid., pp. 551, 553, 558; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 14. 53. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 11–12. 54. Lindley, ‘‘Irish adventurers and godly militants in the 1640s,’’ p. 2. 55. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 2. 56. Details of their biographies can be found in Alan Thomson, ‘‘Thomson, George (bap. 1607, d. 1691),’’ Oxford DNB; Lindley, ‘‘Irish adventurers and godly militants in the 1640s,’’ pp. 4–7, 9, 10; and Ian J. Gentles, ‘‘Rainborowe, Thomas (d. 1648),’’ Oxford DNB. 57. Lindley, ‘‘Irish adventurers and godly militants in the 1640s,’’ p. 12.

188

notes to pages 10–12

58. Ibid., p. 1; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 135. 59. Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 2nd ed., pp. 196–201. 60. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:413, 515. 61. McKenny, ‘‘Seventeenth-century land settlement in Ireland,’’ pp. 181–200. 62. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:413. 63. ‘‘While popery had to be regarded as an abomination its abandonment by large numbers of papists would pose an intolerable threat to a political settlement based on extensive confiscation.’’ Patrick J. Corish, review of Cromwellian Ireland: English government and reform in Ireland, 1649–1660, by Toby Barnard, Irish Historical Studies 20:77 (1976), p. 67. 64. [Henry Ireton], A declaration, or, representation from his excellency, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the army under his command, humbly tendered to the Parliament, concerning the just and fundamentall rights and liberties of themselves and the Kingdome (1647), p. 2. 65. R. C. Richardson, The debate on the English revolution, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 1. 66. Early modern Ireland has been provided with two important narrative overviews: Moody et al., New history of Ireland, vol. 3 (1978); and Brendan Fitzpatrick, Seventeenth-century Ireland: The war of religions (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988). 67. Barnard, Irish Protestant ascents and descents, p. xii. 68. Jane Ohlmeyer, Civil war and restoration in the three Stuart kingdoms: The career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 69. Ohlmeyer, Ireland from independence to occupation. 70. Canny, Making Ireland British. ´ Siochru´, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649 (Dublin: Four Courts, 71. Michea´l O ´ 1999); Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at war, 1641–1649 (Cork, Ire.: Cork ´ hAnnracha´in, Catholic reformation in Ireland: University Press, 2001); Tadhg O The mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). ´ Siochru´ (ed.), Kingdoms in crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin: Four 72. Michea´l O Courts, 2001); O’Hara, English newsbooks and the Irish rebellion of 1641; Robert Armstrong, Protestant war: The ‘‘British’’ of Ireland and the wars of the three kingdoms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Kevin McKenny, The Laggan army in Ireland, 1640–80: The landed interests, political ideologies and military campaigns of the north-west Ulster settlers (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005). 73. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. viii, xvii; Toby Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1690–1770 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. vi. 74. Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland. 75. S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656 (London: Longmans, 1903); Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth. 76. St. John D. Seymour, The Puritans in Ireland, 1647–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). 77. Bottigheimer, English money and Irish land.

notes to pages 12–13

189

78. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland. 79. Corish, review of Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 66–67. 80. See, for example, Christopher Hill’s comments on the hesitancy of English radicals to intervene in Irish affairs in his essay ‘‘Seventeenth-century English radicals and Ireland,’’ in A nation of change and novelty (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 133–51. 81. David Stevenson, ‘‘Cromwell, Scotland and Ireland,’’ in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English revolution (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 149–80. 82. M. Bennett, Civil wars in Britain and Ireland. 83. Allan I. Macinnes, The British revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave, 2005), p. 2. 84. See, in particular, relevant essays in Ohlmeyer, Ireland from independence to occupation; and John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The civil wars: A military history of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); as well as James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999); and James Scott Wheeler, The Irish and British wars, 1637–1654 (London: Routledge, 2002). 85. Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An honourable enemy: The untold story of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland (Dingle, Ire.: Bandon, 1999). ´ Siochru´, Conflict and conquest: Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (London: 86. Micheal O Faber and Faber, forthcoming). 87. See Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart kingdoms in the seventeenth century: Awkward neighbours (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002). 88. Patrick Little, ‘‘The first unionists? Irish Protestant attitudes to union with England, 1653–59,’’ Irish Historical Studies 32:125 (2000), pp. 44–58; Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell and Brewer, 2004); and Aidan Clarke, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland: The end of the Commonwealth, 1659–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 89. See, for example, Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political thought in seventeenth-century Ireland: Kingdom or colony? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jane Ohlmeyer and Ciaran Brady (eds.), British interventions in early modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); D. George Boyce et al. (eds.), Political thought in Ireland since the seventeenth century (London: Routledge, 1993); D. George Boyce et al. (eds.), Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave, 2001); Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999); and, more generally, Thomas Duddy, A history of Irish thought (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 45–81. 90. Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan faith and experience (1946; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 119. A return to religious categories of explanation is signaled in Woolrych, Britain in revolution, pp. 31– 48. Recent trends in Irish religious history have been surveyed in Sean Connolly, ‘‘ ‘The moving statue and the turtle dove’: Approaches to the history of Irish religion,’’ Irish Economic and Social History 31 (2004), pp. 1–22. 91. See, for example, Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 90–134.

190

notes to pages 14–16

92. Norah Carlin has argued that ‘‘the religious extremism of the period needs closer examination,’’ and Peter Lake has detected a welcome ‘‘turn back toward religion’’ as a category of scholarly analysis. Carlin, ‘‘Extreme or mainstream?’’ p. 209; and Peter Lake, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan faith and experience (1946; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. ix. Barnard discusses the new religious history in Cromwellian Ireland, p. xxv. 93. Phil Kilroy, Protestant dissent and controversy in Ireland, 1660–1714 (Cork, Ire.: Cork University Press, 1994); Phil Kilroy, ‘‘Radical religion in Ireland, 1641–1660,’’ in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from independence to occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 201–17; Richard L. Greaves, God’s other children: Protestant nonconformists and the emergence of denominational churches in Ireland, 1660–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Sandra Maria Hynes, ‘‘ ‘Walk according to the Gospel order’: Theology and discipline in the Quaker meeting system, 1650–1700’’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Dublin, 2003); Crawford Gribben, ‘‘Defining the puritans? The baptism debate in Cromwellian Ireland, 1654–56,’’ Church History 73:1 (2004), pp. 63–89; Crawford Gribben, ‘‘Puritan subjectivities: The conversion debate in Cromwellian Dublin,’’ in Michael Brown et al. (eds.), Converts and conversions in Ireland, 1650–1850 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), pp. 79–106. See also Kevin Herlihy, ‘‘The Irish Baptists, 1650–1780’’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Dublin, 1992). 94. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. xxvii. 95. Raymond Gillespie, Devoted people: Belief and religion in early modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 96. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. xxvii. 97. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 7. 98. Blair Worden, ‘‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate,’’ in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and toleration, Studies in Church History 21 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 205. 99. James Sicklemore, To all the inhabitants of the town of Youghall, who are under the teachings of James Wood (1657), p. 5. 100. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:548. The severity of the sin is reflected in the fact that it was more difficult to recruit schoolmasters than ministers. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 188. 101. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth; Seymour, Puritans in Ireland. Copies of some of these records have been preserved in National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MSS 11 and 959. 102. Perry Miller, The New England mind: The seventeenth century, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1939–1953). 103. A complete bibliography for James Ussher can be found on the website of the Ussher Project, edited by Elizabethanne Boran, at Trinity College, Dublin. Ussher’s work has recently been discussed from the point of view of reformation dogmatics, as in J. V. Fesko, Diversity within the Reformed tradition: Supra- and infralapsarianism in Calvin, Dort and Westminster (Greenville, SC: Reformed Academic Press, 2001), and of Renaissance rhetoric, as in Crawford Gribben, ‘‘Rhetoric, fiction and theology:

notes to pages 16–18

191

James Ussher and the death of Jesus Christ,’’ Seventeenth Century 20:1 (2005), pp. 53–76. 104. Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, history and identity in early modern Ireland and Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 105. Carl Trueman and R. Scott Clark (eds.), Protestant scholasticism: Essays in reassessment (Carlisle, Eng.: Paternoster, 1999); Richard A. Muller, Post-reformation Reformed dogmatics: The rise and development of Reformed orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003). 106. Carl Trueman, The claims of truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian theology (Carlisle, Eng.: Paternoster, 1998), p. 2. See also George Marsden, ‘‘Perry Miller’s rehabilitation of the puritans,’’ Church History 39 (1970), pp. 91–105. 107. Trueman, Claims of truth, p. 4. 108. John Coffey, Politics, religion and the British revolutions: The mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David G. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Chad B. Van Dixhoorn, ‘‘Reforming the reformation: Theological debate at the Westminster Assembly’’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004). 109. Trueman, Claims of truth, p. 6. 110. Trueman, Claims of truth, p. 13. To situate Trueman’s John Owen (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2007), see Steve Griffiths, Redeem the time: The problem of sin in the writings of John Owen (Fearn, Scot.: Mentor, 2001); Sebastian Rehnman, Divine discourse: The theological methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2002); and Kelly Kapic, Communion with God: Relations between the divine and human in the theology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006). 111. See Gribben, ‘‘Lay conversion and Calvinist doctrine,’’ pp. 36– 46, and other essays in Deryck W. Lovegrove (ed.), The rise of the laity in evangelical Protestantism (London: Routledge, 2002). 112. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ pp. 10–13. See the background to the Lawrence-Gookin debate in 1655 in Toby Barnard, ‘‘Interests in Ireland: The ‘fanatical zeal and irregular ambition’ of Richard Lawrence,’’ in Jane Ohlmeyer and Ciaran Brady (eds.), British interventions in early modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 299–314; and Patricia Coughlan, ‘‘Counter-currents in colonial discourse: The political thought of Vincent and Daniel Gookin,’’ in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political thought in seventeenth-century Ireland: Kingdom or colony? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 56–82. 113. See, for the first fruits of this promising line of inquiry, Van Dixhoorn, ‘‘Reforming the reformation.’’ 114. Carlin, ‘‘Extreme or mainstream?’’ p. 209. 115. Lake, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxiii. 116. Morrill, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxiv. 117. Steven Ellis has described this emphasis on ‘‘colonial’’ rather than ‘‘native’’ as traditional in British historiography. Ellis, ‘‘Collapse of the Gaelic world,’’ p. 450. Some ‘‘native’’ responses have been gathered by Andrew Carpenter (ed.), Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork, Ire.: Cork University Press, 2003).

192

notes to pages 19–24 118. Hill, ‘‘Seventeenth-century English radicals and Ireland,’’ p. 150. 119. Rogers, Ohel, p. 305.

chapter 1 1. Lindley, ‘‘Irish adventurers and godly militants in the 1640s,’’ p. 3, citing churchwardens’ accounts, St Margaret Westminster. On the impact of the Irish rebellion in England, see O’Hara, English newsbooks and the Irish rebellion of 1641. 2. Stephen Wright, ‘‘Cooper, William (fl. 1640–1681),’’ Oxford DNB. 3. William Cooper, hlM !wygx Higayon selah: Ierusalem fatall to her assailants. Discovered in a sermon before the honorable House of COMMONS August 29. 1649 (1649), title page. On Ormond, see Toby Barnard, ‘‘Butler, James, first duke of Ormond (1610–1688),’’ Oxford DNB. 4. On Jones, see Aidan Clarke, ‘‘ Jones, Michael (1606x10–1649),’’ Oxford DNB. 5. Cooper, hlM !wygx, p. 3. 6. Ibid., p. 1. 7. Ibid., p. 2. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Ibid., p. 4. 10. Ibid., p. 30. 11. Ibid., p. 6. See also the use of this metaphor in 1654: ‘‘the beginning of a new Government, necessitated to create a little World out of Chaos.’’ A true state of the case of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging in reference to the late established government by a Lord protector and a Parliament (Dublin, 1654), p. 47. 12. Cooper, hlM !wygx, p. 5. 13. Ibid., p. 30. 14. Ibid., sig. A3v. 15. Ibid., sig. A4r. 16. Ibid., p. 34 [wrongly p. 30]. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 5. 21. Ibid., p. 31. 22. For an extensive discussion of this theme, see Hill, ‘‘Seventeenth-century English radicals and Ireland.’’ 23. Thomas Edwards, Gangræna (1646), 3:227. 24. Carlin, ‘‘Levellers and the conquest of Ireland,’’ p. 273. 25. Carlin, ‘‘Extreme or mainstream?’’ p. 214. 26. A. L. Morton, The world of the Ranters: Religious radicalism in the English revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 15. 27. Carlin, ‘‘Extreme or mainstream?’’ p. 213. 28. A new found stratagem framed in the old forge of Machivilisme (1647), pp. 8, 11.

notes to pages 24–25

193

29. William Haller and Godfrey Davies (eds.), The Leveller tracts, 1647–1653 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), p. 285. Walwins wiles found replies in Humphrey Brooke’s The charity of church-men (1649) and William Walwyn’s own The fountain of slaunder (1649). 30. Walwins wiles, or, The manifestators manifested viz. Lieut. Col. John Lilburn, Mr William Walwin, Mr Richard Overton, and Mr Tho. Prince. Discovering themselves to be Englands new chains and Irelands back friends. Or, The hunting of the old fox with his cubs and the picture of the picturers of the Councel of State. Declaring the subtle and crafty wiles the atheisticall blasphemous, foul-murthering principles . . . (1649), sig. A2v. 31. Ibid., sig. A3v. 32. Ibid., sig. A2v. 33. Ibid., sig. A3v; Carlin, ‘‘Levellers and the conquest of Ireland’’; Carlin, ‘‘Extreme or mainstream?’’ 34. Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 569–70. 35. In England, ‘‘Royalists and Parliamentarians were militant minorities, fighting was seasonal, and some parts of the land were relatively unaffected.’’ R. C. Richardson, ‘‘Writing and re-writing the English Civil Wars,’’ Literature and History 11:2 (2002), p. 101. 36. True state of the case of the Commonwealth, p. 45. The figure of 35,000 is provided by Bottigheimer, English money and Irish land, p. 117; and Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 10. Morrill, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xix. 37. Barry Reay, ‘‘Radicalism and religion in the English revolution: An introduction,’’ in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical religion in the English revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 1. 38. Several letters from Ireland read in Parliament the sixth of July, 1652 (1652), p. 5. 39. Ibid., p. 7. 40. Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 2nd ed., p. 78. 41. Ohlmeyer, Civil war and restoration in the three Stuart kingdoms, p. 230. For an overview of the Cromwellian campaign, see Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘‘The civil wars in Ireland,’’ in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The civil wars: A military history of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 73–102; and Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland. 42. Two letters, one from Dublin in Ireland, and the other from Liverpoole, or, A bloody fight in Ireland, at the taking of Drogheda by the Lord Lieutenant Cromwell (1649), pp. 3– 4. 43. Reilly’s Cromwell: An honourable enemy is the latest attempt to deny that Cromwellian forces ‘‘indiscriminately massacred’’ civilians at Drogheda. Reilly cites other local historians who share this opinion, including Gerard Rice, ‘‘Cromwell—was there really a massacre?’’ Drogheda 800, 31 January 1984; and Harold O’Sullivan, ‘‘Cromwell in Drogheda—Cromwell, no evidence of Drogheda massacre,’’ Drogheda ´ Siochru´ has claimed Tom Reilly’s ‘‘unconIndependent, 1 October 1993. Michea´l O vincing effort’’ is ‘‘littered with factual errors, makes no use of manuscript sources and ´ Siochru´, fails to incorporate the findings of any recent research on the period.’’ O Kingdoms in crisis, p. 11. For a description of the siege, see Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 84–92.

194

notes to pages 25–29

44. Two letters, one from Dublin in Ireland, and the other from Liverpoole, p. 5. 45. Cromwell, Writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2:127. 46. Hugh Peters, A letter from Ireland read in the House of Commons on Friday Septemb. 28. 1649 (1649), p. 4. On Hugh Peter[s], see Carla Gardina Pestana, ‘‘Peter, Hugh (bap. 1598, d. 1660),’’ Oxford DNB. 47. Ohlmeyer, Civil war and restoration in the three Stuart kingdoms, p. 230. 48. Daniel, ‘‘To the Right Honourable, the Commissioners of the Parliament,’’ sig. A2r. 49. Ormondes breakfast, or, A true relation of the salley and skirmish performed by Collonell Michaell Jones and his party, against the Marques of Ormonde, and his forces encamped before Dublin the second of August 1649 (Dublin, 1649), p. 5. 50. [Francis Howgil and Edward Burrough], The visitation of the rebellious nation of Ireland (1656), p. 37. 51. Arnold Boate, ‘‘To the Reader,’’ in Gerard Boate, Irelands naturall history (1657), n.p.; Hugh Peters, A true relation of the passages of Gods providence in a voyage for Ireland (1642), sig. A3r; A great and bloudy fight at Dublin in Ireland, between the King of Scots Army, and the Parliaments (1649), pp. 2, 4. 52. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 16. 53. Ibid., p. 98. 54. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:cxxvii; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 16–20. The document is reprinted in Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:1– 4. 55. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:1–2. These emphases were repeated in August 1652. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth,1:264. 56. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 18–20. 57. Toby Barnard, ‘‘ Fleetwood, Charles, appointed Lord Fleetwood under the protectorate (c. 1618–1692),’’ Oxford DNB. 58. Ibid. 59. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 26. 60. Ibid., p. 30. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., pp. 33–34. 63. Ibid., pp. 77, 78. 64. Ibid., p. 50. 65. Ibid., pp. 53–57, 85. 66. Ibid., p. 68. 67. The 1649 date is in old style. John Owen, The stedfastness of promises, and the sinfulness of staggering (1650), sig. A2v. 68. Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 2nd ed., p. 78; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:242, 256. 69. True state of the case of the Commonwealth, p. 18; Thomas Patient, The doctrine of baptism and the distinction of the covenants (1654), p. 95. 70. [Edward Worth], The agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers in the county of Corke for the ordaining of ministers (1657), p. 18.

notes to pages 29–32

195

71. Samuel Winter, Summe of diverse sermons preached in Dublin (1656), p. 58. 72. Ibid., p. 173. 73. Ibid., pp. 47– 48. 74. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers, 11 October 1654–13 May 1658,’’ 3 December 1656, pp. 166–67. 75. Thomas Harrison, Topica sacra: Spiritual logick: Some brief hints and helps to faith, meditation, and prayer, comfort and holiness. Communicated at Christ Church, Dublin, in Ireland (1658), p. 58. 76. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 66. 77. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, pp. 13–14. 78. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 169. 79. On the New Model Army, see Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 80. John Jones to Morgan Lloyd, 23 August 1652, in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ ed. Joseph Mayer, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, n.s., 1 (1860–61), p. 211. 81. W. T. Latimer (ed.), ‘‘The old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 5th ser. 11 (1901), pp. 269, 271; Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ pp. 21, 63; [Howgil and Burrough], Visitation of the rebellious nation of Ireland, pp. 35–36. 82. Death’s universal summons, or, A general call, to all mankind, to the grave (Dublin, 1650), p. 3. 83. Walwins wiles, sig. A2v. 84. Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 2nd ed., p. 78; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:242, 256. 85. John Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making (1651), sig. f7. 86. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:542– 43. 87. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 180–82. 88. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. f4. 89. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:78. 90. ‘‘Several proceedings in Parliament, from 26th of June to 3rd day of July, 1651,’’ quoted in John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 1st ed. (London: Longman Green Roberts and Green, 1865), p. 139. This evidence qualifies Barnard’s assertion that native evangelism was neglected until 1655. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 91, 180–82. 91. John Tillinghast, Generation-work (1653), pt. 1, p. 44. 92. See, for example, Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:413. 93. Ibid., 2:363. 94. See chapter 2 below. 95. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:434. 96. On Daniel, see Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 178 n. 194. On the Irish language and the Irish reformation, see Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 173–80. 97. Toby Barnard, ‘‘Winter, Samuel (1603–1666),’’ Oxford DNB.

196

notes to pages 32–34

98. Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805, p. 39; Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 107. 99. Barnard, ‘‘Winter, Samuel (1603–1666),’’ Oxford DNB; J[ohn] W[eaver], The life and death of the eminently learned, pious, and painful minister of the Gospel, Dr. Samuel Winter (1671), pp. 13–14. 100. See, for example, Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805, p. 40, for references to Donel Linch, Murtagh Musgraue, Honora Donel, Reynett Mcnemarra, Teage Carty, and Slany Mcnemarra. 101. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 207–22. It is impossible to calculate the exact number of ministers on the Civil List, for, as Seymour reports, no lists from before 1654 have survived. Ibid., p. 52. 102. Blaney, Presbyterians and the Irish language, pp. 6–19. See also Felicity Heal, ‘‘Mediating the word: Language and dialects in the British and Irish reformations,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 56:2 (2005), pp. 261–86. 103. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 135. 104. Ibid., p. 178. 105. W. T. Latimer (ed.), ‘‘The old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 5th ser. 5 (1895), pp. 130, 133; Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 11 (1901), pp. 167, 175. 106. Blaney, Presbyterians and the Irish language, pp. 10–11. 107. I owe this suggestion to Andrew Holmes. 108. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ pp. 12, 33. 109. Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 5 (1895), p. 132; Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 11 (1901), p. 165 n. 2, p. 271. 110. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 172; see also, more generally, pp. 171–82. 111. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, pp. 30, 37. 112. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 1. 113. Edward Cooke, Here is something of concernment in Ireland (1660), p. 2. 114. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 15. 115. About this common European explanation, see Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the culture of persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 1; and Bruce Gordon, ‘‘The changing face of protestant history and identity in the sixteenth century,’’ in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant history and identity in sixteenthcentury Europe, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1996), 1:1–23. 116. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 58. 117. This wider textual culture is described in Gillespie, ‘‘Reading the Bible in seventeenth-century Ireland,’’ pp. 10–38; Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘Lay spirituality and worship, 1558–1750: Holy books and godly readers,’’ in Raymond Gillespie and W. G. Neely (eds.), The laity and the Church of Ireland, 1000–2000 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002), pp. 133–51; and Raymond Gillespie, Reading Ireland: Print, reading and social change in early modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). For

notes to pages 34–37

197

a recent discussion of the textual culture of the reformation, see Pettegree, Reformation and the culture of persuasion. 118. Gillespie, ‘‘Reading the Bible in seventeenth-century Ireland,’’ p. 13. 119. This information is derived from title pages of publications. Barnard notes that there was only one printing press in Dublin. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 228. 120. Peter de Pienne is listed on the title page of Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making. 121. For the previous period, see Elizabethanne Boran, ‘‘Printing in early seventeenth-century Dublin,’’ and the references this provides; and Gillespie, Reading Ireland. 122. Tessa Watt, Cheap print and popular piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 11. 123. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:658. 124. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:695, 716. 125. Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805. 126. Pettegree, Reformation and the culture of persuasion, p. 128. 127. Kate Peters, Print culture and the early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 1. 128. Claudius Gilbert, The libertine school’d, or, A vindication of the magistrates power in religious matters. In answer to some fallacious quæries scattered about the City of Limerick, by a nameless author, about the 15th of December, 1656 (1657), p. 56. On Gilbert, see Toby Barnard, ‘‘Gilbert, Claudius, the elder (d. 1696?),’’ Oxford DNB. 129. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:638–39. 130. For the reformation context of anonymous leafleting, see Pettegree, Reformation and the culture of persuasion, pp. 153–55. 131. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, p. 18. 132. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, pp. 54–55. On Blackwood, see Richard L. Greaves, ‘‘Blackwood, Christopher (1607/8–1670),’’ Oxford DNB. 133. National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS 31996; Gillespie, ‘‘Reading the Bible in seventeenth-century Ireland,’’ p. 15; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:246. 134. Barnard, ‘‘Winter, Samuel (1603–1666),’’ Oxford DNB; Francis J. Bremer, ‘‘Mather, Increase (1639–1723),’’ Oxford DNB. 135. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, pp. 140, 154–55. For Eliot, see J. Frederick Fausz, ‘‘Eliot, John (1604–1690),’’ Oxford DNB. 136. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 206–24. 137. Richard L. Greaves, ‘‘Patient, Thomas (d. 1666),’’ Oxford DNB. 138. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 63; Public Record Office, Dublin, Commonwealth Records, A-39, fol. 120, since destroyed, cited in William Urwick, The early history of Trinity College Dublin, 1591–1660 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), p. 57; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:54–55, 2:450–51, 476. On Harrison, see Richard L. Greaves, ‘‘Harrison, Thomas (1617–18—1682),’’ Oxford DNB. 139. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 113; Harry S. Stout, The New England soul: Preaching and religious culture in colonial New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 58–59.

198

notes to pages 37–40

140. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. f5. 141. [Richard Baxter], Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (1696), 1:169–72. 142. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 99; Owen, Steadfastness of promises, pp. 44– 45; Cromwell, Writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2:108. 143. Joseph Ivimey, A history of the English Baptists (1814), 1:247. 144. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, p. 56. 145. [Baxter], Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1:169–72. 146. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 19. 147. This context is described in ch. 4. 148. Greaves, ‘‘Rogers, John (b. 1627),’’ Oxford DNB. 149. E. C. Vernon, ‘‘Crofton, Zachary (1626–1672),’’ Oxford DNB. 150. Claudius Gilbert noted the debate in Libertine school’d, pp. 54–55. See also Greaves, ‘‘Blackwood, Christopher (1607/8–1670),’’ Oxford DNB. On the debate between Blake and Baxter, see William Lamont, ‘‘Blake, Thomas (1596/7–1657),’’ Oxford DNB. 151. Links between Presbyterians in Scotland, Ireland, and New England in the mid-1630s are described in John R. Young, ‘‘Scotland and Ulster in the seventeenth century: The movement of peoples over the North Channel,’’ in William Kelly and John R. Young (eds.), Ulster and Scotland, 1600–2000: History, language and identity (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), pp. 14–15. 152. See, for example, [Henry Leslie], A full confutation of the Covenant, lately sworne and subscribed by many in Scotland; Delivered in a speech at the visitation of Downe and Conner, held in Lisnegarvy the 26th of September, 1638 (1639). On Irish Puritanism, see Crawford Gribben, ‘‘Puritanism in Ireland and Wales,’’ in John Coffey and Paul C.-H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 153. John Coffey, ‘‘The problem of ‘Scottish Puritanism,’ 1590–1638,’’ in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 66–90. 154. Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘‘Puritan and Quaker mysticism,’’ Theology 78 (1975), p. 519. 155. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 129. 156. Cromwell, Writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2:107, 201, 203. 157. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 95–97. 158. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 2. 159. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. b. 160. Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘The crisis of reform, 1625–60,’’ in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: A history (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), pp. 209–10. 161. Peter Toon (ed.), The correspondence of John Owen (1616–1683): With an account of his life and work (Cambridge, Eng.: James Clarke, 1970), p. 37; C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1911), 2:355.

notes to pages 41–45

199

162. Henry Ireton, A declaration and proclamation of the Deputy-General of Ireland, concerning the present hand of God in the visitation of the plague; and for the exercise of fasting and prayer in relation thereunto (1650), p. 8. 163. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:542– 43. 164. Claudius Gilbert, The blessed peace-maker and Christian reconciler: Intended for the healing of all unnatural and unchristian divisions, in all relations (1658), p. 67. 165. Chetham’s Library, Manchester, Irish History MS, p. 338. 166. Friends Reference Library, A. R. B. Collection, no. 65, quoted in William C. Braithwaite, The beginnings of Quakerism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), p. 216. 167. [Howgil and Burrough], Visitation of the rebellious nation of Ireland, p. 22. 168. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 5. 169. Clarke, Prelude to the Restoration in Ireland, p. 15. The general distress of church fabric is described in Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 168–71. 170. Walter Gostelo, Charls Stuart and Oliver Cromwel united (1654), p. 7. 171. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 172. Ibid., p. 21. 173. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 135. 174. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. f4. 175. John Cook, The vindication of the law (1652), p. 13. 176. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. e4. 177. Rogers, Ohel, p. 179. 178. Ibid., p. 206. 179. Ibid., p. 179. 180. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 27. 181. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ p. 31. 182. Sicklemore, To all the inhabitants of the town of Youghall (1657), p. 5. 183. Lake, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxiii. 184. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, ‘‘The Epistle to the Christian Reader,’’ sig. c. 185. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:304. 186. William Morris, To the supream authoritie (under God) of the Common-wealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Commons in Parliament assembled (1659), p. 9. 187. Ibid., p. 8. 188. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, pp. 80–81. 189. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 38. 190. Kevin Herlihy, ‘‘A gay and flattering world: Irish Baptist piety and perspective, 1650–1780,’’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The religion of Irish dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), pp. 53–54. 191. Rogers, Ohel, p. 211. 192. Barnard, ‘‘Interests in Ireland’’; Coughlan, ‘‘Counter-currents in colonial discourse.’’ 193. Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 11 (1901), p. 163; Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 5 (1895), p. 134.

200

notes to pages 45–49

194. Archbishop Narcissus Marsh’s Library, Dublin, MS Z3.1.1, ‘‘Letter to Lord Deputy Henry Cromwell, against Provost Winter, about 1650,’’ pp. 72–73. The date provided in the printed catalogue of the Marsh manuscripts cannot be correct, as Winter was Provost between 1651 and 1660 and Henry Cromwell officiated as lord deputy between 1655 and 1659. 195. Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 11 (1901), pp. 162–63. 196. Ibid., p. 163 n. 1. 197. Chetham’s Library, Manchester, Irish History MS, p. 339. 198. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 3. 199. Ibid., p. 2. 200. John Spurr, ‘‘Taylor, Jeremy (bap. 1613, d. 1667),’’ Oxford DNB. 201. Edward Burrough, To you that are called Anabaptists in the nation of Ireland (1657), pp. 3– 4. 202. Ibid., p. 4. 203. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:557, 563. 204. Edward Burrough, A vindication of the people of God, called Quakers (1660), p. 8. The existence of the Ranters has become an issue in some recent historical writing. The term has been put in inverted commas by Jonathan Scott in England’s troubles: Seventeenth-century English political instability in European perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 260. See also Tim Cooper, Fear and polemic in seventeenth-century England: Richard Baxter and antinomianism (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2001), p. 9; and Nicholas McDowell, The English radical imagination: Culture, religion, and revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 23–6. I am grateful to Tim Cooper for his advice on this issue. 205. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, pp. 24–25. 206. Zachary Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, or, Some animadversions on the Rabbinical Talmud of Rabbi John Rogers of Thomas-Apostles London (1653), pp. 185–87. 207. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 99; Morton, World of the Ranters, p. 119. 208. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 99. 209. T. L. Underwood (ed.), The acts of the witnesses: The autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and other early Muggletonian writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 10, 98; Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 197. 210. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 140. 211. Gostelo, Charls Stuart and Oliver Cromwel united, p. 193. 212. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 19. 213. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 244– 45. 214. Cook, Monarchy, no creature of Gods making, p. 5. 215. John Cook, A true relation of Mr. John Cook’s passage by sea from Wexford to Kinsale in that great storm January 5. Wherein is related the strangeness of the storm, and the frame of his spirit in it. Also the vision that he saw in his sleep (1650), p. 6. 216. Sicklemore, To all the inhabitants of the town of Youghall, p. 7. 217. Ibid., p. 4.

notes to pages 49–52

201

218. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 75. Warren’s allusion is to Revelation 12:15. 219. Ibid., sig. A3r. 220. Ibid., p. 98. 221. Ibid., p. 75. 222. Ibid., p. 2. 223. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sigs. b3, d1, e5. 224. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, pp. 167–68. 225. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 13. 226. Ibid., p. 15. 227. Rogers, Ohel, p. 54. 228. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 100. 229. Harrison, Topica sacra, pp. 57–58. Robert Fleming later confirmed the existence of a congregation of Arminians in Antrim in The fulfilling of the Scripture, 3rd ed. (1693), p. 392. Barnard has found ‘‘strong evidence’’ that Benjamin Worsley, the secretary to the Parliamentary Commissioners who was later appointed surveyorgeneral, was a Socinian. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 221. 230. The agreement and resolution of the ministers of Christ associated within the City of Dublin, and Province of Leinster; for the furthering of a real and thorough reformation according to the written word of God (1659), pp. 3– 4. 231. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 171. 232. Thomas Morford, The Baptist and Independent Churches (so called) set on fire (1660), p. 22. Greaves reports that this text was written in Clonmel in 1659, although it was published in London the following year. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 33. 233. Morford, Baptist and Independent Churches (so called) set on fire, pp. 2–3. 234. Gostelo, Charls Stuart and Oliver Cromwel united, pp. 264–66. 235. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, p. 149. 236. Morford, Baptist and Independent Churches (so called) set on fire, p. 43. 237. Rogers, Ohel, p. 57. 238. Cromwell, Writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2:199. 239. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 16. 240. Carlin, ‘‘Extreme or mainstream?’’ p. 212. 241. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 16. 242. Hill claims that ‘‘the Irish people, through no fault of their own, found themselves on the wrong side in an international war between England and Antichrist.’’ Hill, ‘‘Seventeenth-century English radicals and Ireland,’’ p. 150. 243. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, sig. B2v. 244. True state of the case of the Commonwealth, p. 34. 245. Ibid., pp. 43, 44. 246. John Jones to Morgan Lloyd, 23 August 1652, in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ p. 214. 247. True state of the case of the Commonwealth, p. 44. 248. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 82.

202

notes to pages 52–57 249. Ireton, Declaration and proclamation of the Deputy-General of Ireland. 250. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. g5–g6. 251. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, sig. A3v. 252. Harrison, Topica sacra, p. 6. 253. Ibid., p. 36. 254. Rogers, Ohel, p. 305.

chapter 2 1. On Crofton, see Vernon, ‘‘Crofton, Zachary (1626–1672),’’ Oxford DNB; and, for a recent discussion of his literary interests, Sylvia Brown, ‘‘The Presbyterian Lash: Zachary Crofton and the discipline of dissent, 1657, 1662’’ (paper presented to the International John Bunyan Conference, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scot., 1 September 1998). 2. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 158. 3. Ibid., sig. A2r; Queen’s University of Belfast, Special Collection MS 1/127, ‘‘Transcript of entrance register to Trinity College, Dublin, 1637–1730,’’ p. 9. A chro´ Siochru´, Kingdoms in crisis, nology of Irish events in the 1640s can be found in O pp. 252–63. 4. Vernon, ‘‘Crofton, Zachary (1626–1672),’’ Oxford DNB. 5. Edmund S. Morgan notes that Independent church government, with its emphasis on conversion narratives, was only popularized after 1640. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible saints: The history of a puritan idea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 13. 6. Gilbert, Blessed peace-maker, p. 77. 7. Ibid. 8. Rogers, Ohel, p. 396. On Hewson, see Christopher Durston, ‘‘Hewson, John, appointed Lord Hewson under the protectorate ( fl. 1630–1660),’’ Oxford DNB. 9. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 118. 10. Ibid., p. 158. 11. On Rogers, see Greaves, ‘‘Rogers, John (b. 1627),’’ Oxford DNB; Greaves and Zaller, Biographical dictionary of British Radicals in the seventeenth century, s.v. ‘‘Rogers, John’’; R. M. Gibson, ‘‘ John Rogers: Religion and politics in the life of a puritan saint’’ (Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State University, 1973); Edward Rogers, Some account of the life and opinions of a Fifth-Monarchy-Man: Chiefly extracted from the writings of John Rogers, preacher (London: Longman, 1867); Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 22–24; Gribben, Puritan millennium, pp. 149–71; Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘War and the Irish town: The early modern experience,’’ in Pa´draig Lenihan (ed.), Conquest and resistance: War in seventeenth-century Ireland (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 312–13; and McDowell, English radical imagination, pp. 184–88, 190–92. Rogers’s Ohel also contains significant biographical detail. Kathleen Lynch’s study The uses of religious experience in the seventeenthcentury Anglo-Atlantic world (forthcoming) examines Rogers’s conversion narratives within the wider context of Atlantic puritanism. 12. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 392– 450.

notes to pages 57–59

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13. Ibid., p. 237. 14. On Rogers’s eschatology, see Gribben, Puritan millennium, pp. 155–58; and on puritan eschatology more generally, see Richard W. Cogley, ‘‘The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the restoration of Israel in the ‘Judeo-Centric’ strand of puritan millenarianism,’’ Church History 72:2 (2003), pp. 304–32. 15. W. Clark Gilpin, The millenarian piety of Roger Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 9. 16. Caldwell, Puritan conversion narrative, p. 77. On Goodwin, see T. M. Lawrence, ‘‘Goodwin, Thomas (1600–1680),’’ Oxford DNB. 17. Thomas Goodwin, The works of Thomas Goodwin, ed. John C. Miller and Robert Halley, (Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1861–66), 3:73, 122, 158, 198. For the popularity of 1700, see Cogley, ‘‘ Fall of the Ottoman Empire,’’ pp. 324–27. 18. [Thomas Goodwin], A glimpse of Sions glory (1641), p. 32. This sermon is reprinted in Goodwin, Works, vol. 12, and, in edited form, in A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and liberty: Being the Army debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with supplementary documents, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1974), pp. 233– 41. The debate about the authorship of the sermon is discussed in John F. Wilson, ‘‘A Glimpse of Syons Glory,’’ Church History 31 (1962), pp. 66–73. 19. On the relationship between millennial ideology and ecclesiastical reform, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To live ancient lives: The primitivist dimension in puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 238–62; and T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s war: The Baptist-Quaker conflict in seventeenth-century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 20. Robert Baillie, A dissuasive from the errours of the time wherein the tenets of the principall sects, especially of the independents, are drawn together in one map, for the most part in the words of their own authours, and their maine principles are examined by the touch-stone of the Holy Scriptures (1645), p. 80, quotes this passage from the sermon and attributes it to Goodwin. 21. [Goodwin], Glimpse of Sions glory, p. 27. 22. Rogers, Ohel, p. 27. 23. Ibid., p. xviii. 24. Ibid., p. 22. 25. Ibid., p. xv. 26. Ibid., pp. 19–20. 27. Ibid., p. 22. 28. Ibid., p. 23. 29. Ibid., p. 464. The subject of the ecclesiastical role of women is considered in ch. 6. 30. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 23–24. 31. Ibid., p. 391. 32. Ibid., p. 50. 33. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 119. 34. P. G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy men (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 22–23.

204

notes to pages 60–62

35. Gillespie, ‘‘Crisis of reform, 1625–60,’’ pp. 212–13; Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 33, 34, 213. 36. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, pp. 179–80. 37. Rogers, Ohel, p. 73; Ibid., pp. 179–80, 182–83. 38. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 180. 39. Ibid., sig. a2v, sig. A2r. 40. Ibid., p. 158. 41. Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘‘The Olney autobiographers: English conversion narrative in the mid-eighteenth century,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49:1 (1998), pp. 61–85; David Bebbington, ‘‘Evangelical conversion, c.1740–1850,’’ Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 18:2 (2000), pp. 102–27; Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘‘Reshaping individualism: The private Christian, eighteenth-century religion and the Enlightenment,’’ in Deryck W. Lovegrove (ed.), The rise of the laity in evangelical Protestantism (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 67–84; Garry J. Williams, ‘‘Was evangelicalism created by the Enlightenment?’’ Tyndale Bulletin 53:2 (2002), pp. 283–312. See also F. W. B. Bullock, Evangelical conversion in Great Britain, 1516–1695 (St. Leonards-on-Sea, Eng.: Budd and Gillatt, 1959); and Peter Marshall, ‘‘Evangelical conversion in the reign of Henry VIII,’’ in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds.), The beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 14–37. The strengths and weaknesses of the Bebbington thesis are to be reviewed in Kenneth Stewart and Michael Haykin (eds.), Continuities in evangelical history (Leicester, Eng.: IVP, forthcoming). 42. David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in modern Britain: A history from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–17. Timothy Larsen, in the introduction to Timothy Larsen et al. (eds), Biographical dictionary of evangelicals (Leicester, Eng.: IVP, 2003), p. 1, describes Bebbington’s definition as ‘‘standard.’’ 43. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in modern Britain, p. 35. 44. Callum G. Brown, The death of Christian Britain: Understanding secularisation, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 37. 45. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in modern Britain, p. 43. 46. Bebbington, ‘‘Evangelical conversion,’’ p. 126. 47. Andrew Pettegree provides a thorough discussion of conversion in the sixteenth century in Reformation and the culture of persuasion, pp. 1–9. 48. Hindmarsh, ‘‘Olney autobiographers,’’ p. 63. Hindmarsh has developed this argument in Evangelical conversion narrative. 49. Hindmarsh, ‘‘Olney autobiographers,’’ pp. 63, 67, 71. 50. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 57; Jonathan Edwards, ‘‘Diary,’’ 12 August 1723, in Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn, Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 16:779. See also D. G. Hart, ‘‘ Jonathan Edwards and the origins of experimental Calvinism,’’ in D. G. Hart et al. (eds.), The legacy of Jonathan Edwards: American religion and the evangelical tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003), pp. 161–80. 51. This is discussed in John E. Smith’s introduction to A treatise concerning religious affections, ed. John E. Smith, Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT:

notes to pages 62–63

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Yale University Press, 1959), 2:52–73. Smith makes the point that ‘‘no other work of Edwards’ is so heavily dotted with footnotes containing long extracts from the works of other theologians and divines’’ (p. 52). Brad Walton’s Jonathan Edwards, religious affections and the puritan analysis of true piety, spiritual sensation and heart religion (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2002) similarly traces the footnotes of Religious affections to find the roots of his religious psychology in the puritan writers of the seventeenth century, which Williams points out in ‘‘Was evangelicalism created by the Enlightenment?’’ p. 297. Edwards’s debt to Cambridge puritans is extensively surveyed in Amy Plantinga Pauw, The supreme harmony of all: The Trinitarian theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). 52. Historians continue to debate the meaning of ‘‘puritan.’’ J. C. Davies and (occasionally) Patrick Collinson have rejected it, while Kenneth Fincham, Nicholas Tyacke, and Peter Lake have embraced it with qualification. For representative positions, see Basil Hall, ‘‘Puritanism: The problem of definition,’’ Studies in Church History 2 (1965), pp. 283–96; Peter Lake, ‘‘Puritan identities,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984), pp. 112–23; William M. Lamont, Puritanism and historical controversy (London: UCL Press, 1996); and Peter Lake, The boxmaker’s revenge: ‘‘Orthodoxy,’’ ‘‘heterodoxy’’ and the politics of the parish in early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 11–16. In an Irish context, use of the term has been examined in Ford, ‘‘Church of Ireland, 1558–1641’’; and Gribben, ‘‘Puritanism in Ireland and Wales.’’ 53. An excellent recent discussion of the importance and theology of puritan conversionism can be found in Mullan, Scottish puritanism, pp. 85–110. Mullan describes conversion as the ‘‘ focal point of puritan piety’’ (p. 87). For variety in puritan conversionism, see C. L. Cohen, ‘‘Two Biblical models of conversion: An example of puritan hermeneutics,’’ Church History 58 (1989), pp. 182–96. 54. Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the frontier, 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 49–52. Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) noted that ‘‘grave and frugal’’ Transylvanians traveled to England to learn ‘‘our theologic arts.’’ John Milton, Areopagitica, ed. J. W. Hales, new ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), p. 45. 55. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, p. 156. 56. Richard A. Muller, ‘‘Perkins’ A golden chaine: Predestinarian system or schematized Ordo Salutis?’’ Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978), pp. 69–81; Gordon Campbell, ‘‘The source of Bunyan’s Mapp of salvation,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981), pp. 240– 41; and, more generally, Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and predestination: Grace in English protestant theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). 57. Claudius Gilbert, A pleasant walk to heaven (1658), p. 12. 58. Rogers, Ohel, p. 372. This culture of religious despair is examined, somewhat controversially, in John Stachniewski, The persecutory imagination: English puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 59. The doctrine of assurance is covered in chapters 18 of each of the Westminster, Savoy, and Second London (Baptist) confessions of faith.

206

notes to pages 64–66

60. John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco, ‘‘Introduction,’’Grace abounding: With other spiritual autobiographies, by John Bunyan, ed. John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xxviii. 61. Ibid., p. xiv. 62. On Perkins, see Michael Jinkins, ‘‘Perkins, William (1558–1602),’’ Oxford DNB; on Bunyan, see Richard L. Greaves, ‘‘Bunyan, John (bap. 1628, d. 1688),’’ Oxford DNB. 63. James West Davidson, The logic of millennial thought: Eighteenth-century New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 131. 64. Alister E. McGrath, Justitia dei: A history of the Christian doctrine of justification, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 301. 65. Ibid., p. 299. 66. Bunyan, Grace abounding, [p. 49]. 67. Elspeth Graham et al. (eds.), Her own life: Autobiographical writings by seventeenth-century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 3– 4. 68. William Perkins noted the ‘‘enviability’’ of dogs and toads for individuals under conviction of sin. Quoted in Michael Mullett, John Bunyan in context (Keele, Eng.: Keele University Press, 1996), p. 65 n. 78. In 1653, John Rogers remembered wishing he was a stone. Rogers, Ohel, p. 426. In 1657, Thomas Brooks imagined that an afflicted conscience would wish itself ‘‘a bird, a beast, a toad, a stone.’’ Thomas Brooks, The works of Thomas Brooks, ed. A. B. Grosart (1861–67; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1980), 1:437. John Bunyan also wished himself a ‘‘dog or toad.’’ Bunyan, Grace abounding, [p. 104]. There is evidence that this tradition continued into eighteenth-century spiritual autobiography. 69. Goodwin, Works, 2:lxi; see also Joel R. Beeke, The quest for full assurance: The legacy of Calvin and his successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1999), p. 249. 70. Samuel Petto, The voice of the Spirit, or, An essay towards a discoverie of the witnessings of the Spirit (1654), p. 20. 71. Beeke, Quest for full assurance, p. 252. Stachniewski and Pacheco note that ‘‘it is extremely difficult to say when Bunyan is converted.’’ ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xix. 72. Rogers, Ohel, p. 366. 73. Ibid., p. 367. 74. Ibid., pp. 361, 366. 75. John Preston, The breast-plate of faith and love (1630), p. 33. On Preston, see Jonathan D. Moore, ‘‘Preston, John (1587–1628),’’ Oxford DNB. 76. Goodwin, Works, 8:861. 77. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 18:2–3. 78. Rogers, Ohel, p. 360. 79. Ibid., p. 359. 80. Ibid., p. 358. 81. James Reid, in Memoirs of the lives and writings of those eminent divines, who convened in the famous Assembly at Westminster, in the seventeenth century (Paisley, Scot.: S. and A. Young, 1811), 1:320, notes that ‘‘nothing so clearly and fully unfolds the work of the Holy Spirit, and the exercise of the soul, in conversion, as a person’s diary.’’

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82. Gribben, ‘‘Lay conversion and Calvinist doctrine during the English Commonwealth,’’ p. 39; Mullan, Scottish puritanism, p. 137. 83. Stachniewski and Pacheco, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxviii; Leopold Damrosch, God’s plot and man’s stories: Studies in the fictional imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Paul Delany, British autobiography in the seventeenth century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Owen C. Watkins included an appendix listing those narratives published before 1725 in The puritan experience: Studies in spiritual autobiography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). 84. David Loewenstein, Representing revolution in Milton and his contemporaries: Religion, politics, and polemics in radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 2–3. This recent interest in radical puritan writing can be seen in Michael Wilding, Dragon’s teeth: Literature in the English revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); N. Smith, Perfection proclaimed; Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English civil war (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stachniewski, Persecutory imagination; and Nigel Smith, Literature and revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 85. The processes of early modern religious self-fashioning are described in Margo Todd, ‘‘Puritan self-fashioning,’’ in Francis J. Bremer (ed.), Puritanism: Transatlantic perspectives on a seventeenth-century Anglo-American faith (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), pp. 57–87; Richard Pointer, ‘‘Selves and others in early New England: Refashioning American puritan studies,’’ in Ronald A. Wells (ed.), History and the Christian historian (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 137–58; Roger M. Payne, The self and the sacred: Conversion and autobiography in early American Protestantism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998); Carl Trueman, review of The self and the sacred: Conversion and autobiography in early American Protestantism, by Roger M. Payne, Evangelical Quarterly 75:1 (2003), pp. 83–84; Dale W. Johnson and James Edward McGoldrick, ‘‘Prophet in Scotland: The self-image of John Knox,’’ Calvin Theological Journal 33 (1998), pp. 76–86; Muriel C. McClendon and Joseph P. Ward, ‘‘Religion, society, and self-fashioning in post-reformation England,’’ in Muriel McClendon et al. (eds.), Protestant identities: Religion, society, and selffashioning in post-reformation England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–15; and Eile´an Nı´ Chuilleana´in, ‘‘ ‘Strange ceremonies’: Sacred space and bodily presence in the English reformation,’’ in A. J. Piesse (ed.), Sixteenth-century identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 133–54. 86. Stachniewski, Persecutory imagination, pp. 4–6. 87. Stachniewski and Pacheco, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxxii; see also Stachniewski, Persecutory imagination, p. 6. 88. Brown, Death of Christian Britain, p. 36. 89. On early modern spiritual autobiography, see Joan Webber, The eloquent ‘‘I’’: Style and self in seventeenth-century prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Dean Ebner, Autobiography in seventeenth-century England: Theology and the self (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Robert Bell, ‘‘Metamorphoses of spiritual autobiography,’’ English Literary History 44 (1977), pp. 108–26; Roger Pooley, ‘‘Spiritual experience and spiritual autobiography,’’ Baptist Quarterly 32 (1988), pp. 393– 402;

208

notes to pages 67–70

Hobby, Virtue of necessity; Graham et al., Her own life; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century radical sectarian writing and feminist criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Michael Mascuch, Origins of the individualist self: Autobiography and self-identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Tom Webster, ‘‘Writing to redundancy: Approaches to spiritual journals in early modern spirituality,’’ Historical Journal 39 (1996), pp. 33–56. 90. Stachniewski and Pacheco, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxiv. 91. On the development of puritan spiritual autobiography, see Watkins, Puritan experience; Sacvan Bercovitch, The puritan origins of the American self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); Caldwell, Puritan conversion narrative; Cohen, God’s caress; N. H. Keeble, The literary culture of nonconformity in later seventeenth-century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987); Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of faith: Calvin, English Puritanism, and the Second Dutch Reformation (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Janel M. Mueller, ‘‘Pain, persecution, and the construction of selfhood in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,’’ in Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (eds.), Religion and culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 161–87; Underwood, Acts of the witnesses; Beeke, Quest for full assurance; and Gribben, ‘‘Lay conversion and Calvinist doctrine,’’ pp. 36–46. 92. Gribben, ‘‘Lay conversion and Calvinist doctrine,’’ p. 38. 93. Samuel Clarke, Lives of sundry eminent divines (1683), sig. A3v. A number of these accounts have been republished in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Bunyan’s Grace abounding. 94. Beeke, Quest for full assurance, p. 251. 95. Goodwin, Works, 2:lxii. 96. Rogers, Ohel, p. 368. 97. Beeke, Quest for full assurance, p. 253. 98. Stachniewski and Pacheco, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xxiii; Caldwell, Puritan conversion narrative, p. 108. 99. The Westminster and Savoy confessions of faith both discuss this theme in 18:3. 100. Gilbert, Blessed peace-maker, p. 77. 101. Baillie, Dissuasive, p. 171. 102. N. Smith, Perfection proclaimed, p. 34. 103. On Thomason, see David Stoker, ‘‘Thomason, George (c.1602–1666),’’ Oxford DNB. 104. On Powell, see Stephen K. Roberts, ‘‘Powell, Vavasor (1617–1670),’’ Oxford DNB; on Walker, see Joad Raymond, ‘‘Walker, Henry ( fl. 1638–1660),’’ Oxford DNB. 105. The article in the Oxford DNB, Stephen Wright’s ‘‘Petto, Samuel (c. 1624– 1711),’’ does not include a reference to either of these texts. This wider context is documented in Lynch, Uses of religious experience. 106. N. Smith, Perfection proclaimed, p. 38. 107. Graham et al., Her own life, p. 5. 108. Stachniewski and Pacheco, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. ix. According to Charles Doe, Bunyan was baptized and entered the Bedford fellowship between 1651 and 1653.

notes to pages 70–73

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R. L. Greaves, Glimpses of glory: John Bunyan and English dissent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 33–35, 54. Grace abounding is therefore a contemporary of the Rogers narratives. Greaves offers no evidence to support his claim that Bunyan found ‘‘contemporary spiritual autobiographers . . . imitative as well as inadequate in dealing with the perplexities of inner struggle.’’ Ibid., p. 48. 109. Rogers, Ohel, p. 391. 110. Ibid., p. 392. 111. Gillespie, ‘‘Crisis of reform,’’ pp. 211–12. 112. Ibid., p. 211. 113. Ibid. 114. Gillespie, ‘‘War and the Irish town,’’ pp. 312–13. 115. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 410, 412 (12); the figure in parentheses refers to the pagination of an inserted gathering of pages after p. 412. On Sibbes, see Mark E. Dever, ‘‘Sibbes, Richard (1577?–1635),’’ Oxford DNB; and Mark E. Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000). 116. Rogers, Ohel, p. 412. On Culverwell, see Brett Usher, ‘‘Culverwell family (per. c. 1545–c. 1640),’’ Oxford DNB. 117. Rogers, Ohel, p. 412 (3). On Owen, see Richard L. Greaves, ‘‘Owen, John (1616–1683),’’ Oxford DNB. 118. Rogers, Ohel, p. 412 (4). 119. Ibid., p. 450. 120. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 372, 374. Rogers appears to have borrowed this expression from Sibbes. See Richard Sibbes, The complete works of Richard Sibbes, ed. A. B. Grosart (Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1862–64), 5:441. 121. Rogers, Ohel, p. 376. 122. Ibid., pp. 377–78. 123. Ibid., p. 384. 124. Ibid., p. 450. 125. Ibid., p. 373. 126. Ibid., p. 398. 127. Ibid., pp. 390– 402 (the pagination skips from p. 390 to p. 401). 128. Ibid., p. 449. 129. Ibid., p. 406. 130. Ibid., p. 409. 131. Ibid., p. 412 (1). 132. Ibid., p. 413. 133. Ibid., p. 411. 134. Ibid., p. 430. 135. Ibid., p. 435. 136. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 53. 137. Ibid., p. 135. 138. Ibid., p. 31. 139. Ibid., p. 28.

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notes to pages 74–79

140. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 141. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 142. Ibid., pp. 35–36. 143. Ibid., p. 26. 144. Ibid., p. 176. 145. Ibid., p. 144. 146. Ibid., pp. 176–77. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid., pp. 44– 45. 149. Ibid., p. 55. 150. Ibid., pp. 16, 45. 151. Ibid., p. 47. 152. Ibid., p. 44. 153. Ibid., p. 45. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid., p. 56. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid., p. 178. 158. Ibid., pp. 178–79. 159. Ibid., p. 178. 160. Ibid., p. 181. 161. Ibid., p. 181. 162. Ibid., p. 184. 163. Ibid., pp. 18–19. 164. Ibid., p. 134. 165. Ibid., p. 35. 166. Ibid., p. 57. 167. Ibid., sig. (a)r. 168. James Seaton Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2nd ed. (London: Whittaker and Co., 1853), 2:168 n. 52.

chapter 3 1. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 140. For a contemporary account of Murcot’s ministry, see [J. G.], Moses in the mount, or The beloved disciple leaning on Jesus’s bosom. Being a narrative of the life and death of Mr. John Murcot, minister of the Gospel, and teacher of the church at Dublin. Written by a friend (1657). 2. For a discussion of Irish privateers, see Rolf Loeber and Geoffrey Parker, ‘‘The military revolution in seventeenth-century Ireland,’’ in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from independence to occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 86. 3. Harding and Worth would later serve together on the committee for the second college in Dublin. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 210. 4. [J. G.], Moses in the mount, p. 17.

notes to pages 80–82

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5. Gostelo, Charls Stuart and Oliver Cromwel united, pp. 262–63. 6. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 64–70, 217. 7. Murray Tolmie, The triumph of the saints: The separate churches of London, 1616– 1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 50. 8. The general history of seventeenth-century Baptist polemic is usefully surveyed in Tolmie, Triumph of the saints; B. R. White, The English Baptists of the seventeenth century (Didcot, Eng.: Baptist Historical Society, 1996); and Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s war. 9. Ford, ‘‘Church of Ireland, 1558–1634,’’ pp. 52–68; Alan Ford, ‘‘ James Ussher and the creation of an Irish protestant identity,’’ in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.), British consciousness and identity: The making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 185–212. 10. Hugh F. Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633– 41: A study in absolutism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959); Ford, Protestant reformation in Ireland, pp. 75–76. 11. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. xxvii. 12. Coffey, Politics, religion and the British revolutions, pp. 167–68, 205–6, 210, 219–24. 13. Ibid., p. 206. 14. See Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s war, pp. 68–81; and Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, pp. 50–84. 15. Kevin Herlihy, ‘‘ ‘The Faithful Remnant’: Irish Baptists, 1650–1750,’’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Irish dissenting tradition, 1650–1750 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1995), pp. 66–67; Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, ch. 2; White, English Baptists of the seventeenth century, p. 60; Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, the true fountaine of Independency, Brownisme, antinomy, Familisme, and the most of the other errours, which for the time doe trouble the Church of England, unsealed. Also the questions of paedobaptisme and dipping handled from Scripture. In a second part of the Dissuasive from the errors of the time (1646), p. 49. 16. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, p. 60; Edwards, Gangræna, 1:98. 17. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, pp. 55–61. The text of the 1644 confession can be found in William L. Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, rev. ed. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1969), pp. 143–71. 18. S. W. Carruthers, The everyday work of the Westminster Assembly (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1943), p. 103. 19. Edwards, Gangræna, 1:1. 20. Samuel Rutherford, A free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience (1649), p. 254. 21. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, p. 63. 22. Baillie, Dissuasive, p. 224. 23. Baillie, Anabaptism, p. 18. 24. Ibid., pp. 48, 18. 25. Ibid., p. 49. 26. Ibid., p. 48.

212

notes to pages 82–85

27. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 94; Edwards, Gangræna, sig. A4v. 28. Edwards, Gangræna, iii. 17. 29. Rutherford, Free disputation, p. 80. 30. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, sig. Cv. 31. Lumpkin notes suggestions that the 1644 confession also alluded to the Aberdeen Confession (1616). Baptist confessions of faith, p. 145. 32. Oliver Cromwell, quoted in Patrick J. Corish, ‘‘The Cromwellian Regime, 1650–60,’’ in T. W. Moody et al. (eds.), A New History of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 3:375. 33. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:54–55. 34. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 85. 35. Robert Dunlop, ‘‘Dublin Baptists from 1650 onwards,’’ Journal of the Irish Baptist Historical Society 21 (1988–89), pp. 5–16. For a general survey of the history of Baptists in Ireland, see Herlihy, ‘‘Irish Baptists.’’ The Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland’s Annual report and accounts, 2003 (privately published, 2003) dates the beginnings of the Cork church to 1640, but this seems to be mistaken (p. 36). 36. Steven ffeary-Smyrl, ‘‘Theatres of worship: Dissenting meeting houses in Dublin, 1650–1750,’’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650–1750 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995), p. 53. 37. Gostelo, Charls Stuart and Oliver Cromwel united, p. 262. 38. Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘‘Ireland independent: Confederate foreign policy and international relations during the mid-seventeenth century,’’ in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from independence to occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 96. 39. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 26; White, English Baptists of the seventeenth century, p. 81. 40. White, English Baptists of the seventeenth century, p. 85. 41. Quoted in Herlihy, ‘‘A gay and flattering world,’’ pp. 53–54. 42. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 206–24. 43. Herlihy, ‘‘A gay and flattering world,’’ p. 53. 44. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson MS A13, fol. 25; John Thurloe, A collection of the state papers of John Thurloe, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1742), 3:445; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:324; Herlihy, ‘‘A gay and flattering world,’’ p. 53. 45. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, p. 213. 46. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 124. 47. Ivimey, History of the English Baptists, 1:240. 48. Herlihy, ‘‘The Irish Baptists,’’ pp. 40–41. 49. Ibid., p. 67; Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘Dissenters and nonconformists, 1661– 1700,’’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Irish dissenting tradition, 1650–1750 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1995), p. 22; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 210, 231; B. R. White, ‘‘Thomas Patient in England and Ireland,’’ Journal of the Irish Baptist Historical Society 2 (1969– 70), p. 40; Greaves, God’s other children, p. 25. For the Hartlib circle, see Mark

notes to pages 85–88

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Greengrass et al., Samuel Hartlib and universal reformation: Studies in intellectual communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 50. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:142. 51. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 26; B. R. White, ‘‘The organisation of the Particular Baptists, 1644–1660,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 17:2 (1966), p. 209. 52. Although an edition of the confession was published in Leith, Scotland, in 1653, there is no evidence that any editions were ever published in Ireland. Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, p. 151. 53. The text of this correspondence and related correspondence is found in Ivimey, History of the English Baptists, 1:220–71. 54. Ivimey, History of the English Baptists, 1:243. 55. Ibid., 1:249. 56. Ibid., 1:245. 57. Ibid. 58. White, English Baptists of the seventeenth century, p. 81; White, ‘‘The organisation of the Particular Baptists,’’ p. 213 n. 6; Ivimey, History of the English Baptists, 1:248. This demonstrates the Baptist emphasis on evangelizing English settlers, rather than Irish natives or the Old Protestants, especially the Ulster Presbyterians. Their concentrations in English garrison towns were being judged sufficient witness. 59. Ivimey, History of the English Baptists, 1:247. 60. Ibid., 1:250. 61. White, English Baptists of the seventeenth century, pp. 85–86. 62. White, ‘‘The organisation of the Particular Baptists,’’ p. 222; Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘‘The Baptist Western Association, 1653–1658,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 11 (1960), pp. 214–15. 63. Baillie, Anabaptism, p. 53. 64. Like some Ulster Presbyterians during the same period, Baptist preachers on the Civil List did not necessarily believe that their acceptance of state stipends prohibited their criticism of the government. 65. Vernon changed his mind in the later 1650s and worked for a paramilitary alliance between Baptists and Fifth Monarchists. White, English Baptists of the seventeenth century, p. 88. 66. For Blackwood and Patient, see Greaves and Zaller, Biographical dictionary of British radicals in the seventeenth century, s.vv. ‘‘Blackwood, Christopher’’ and ‘‘Patient, Thomas.’’ 67. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, pp. 54–55. 68. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 9. Bryan W. Ball similarly notes ‘‘the significance of the Fifth Monarchy influence in the Baptist churches in Ireland’’ in the 1650s. The Seventh-day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and Wales, 1600–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 332 n. 18. 69. Edwards, Gangræna, 1:67. 70. Greaves, ‘‘Patient, Thomas (d. 1666),’’ Oxford DNB. 71. Charlotte Fell-Smith, ‘‘Patient or patience, Thomas (d. 1666),’’ DNB, 1st ser. 72. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, sig. B3v.

214

notes to pages 88–91

73. Ibid., sig. B4r. 74. White, English Baptists of the seventeenth century, p. 72. 75. Edwards, Gangræna, 1:56 (irregular pagination). 76. Fell-Smith, ‘‘Patient or patience, Thomas (d. 1666).’’ Patient later abandoned his state salary. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 59. 77. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 60. 78. See John Jones to Morgan Lloyd, 23 August 1652, in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ p. 216; and Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:167. 79. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. g3. 80. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 146; Thurloe, State papers, 4:90; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:304. 81. Dunlop, ‘‘Dublin Baptists from 1650 onwards,’’ p. 6. 82. The social composition of this church is described in Gillespie, ‘‘The crisis of reform, 1625–60,’’ pp. 210–15. 83. Rogers, Ohel, p. 396. 84. For an analysis of the church’s conversion narratives, see Gribben, Puritan millennium, pp. 149–71; and Gribben, ‘‘Lay conversion and Calvinist doctrine,’’ pp. 36– 46. 85. Rogers, Ohel, p. 301. 86. Ibid., p. 307. 87. Ibid., p. 370. 88. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 103 n. 66. 89. Rogers, Ohel, p. 453. 90. Ibid., p. 93; Gillespie, ‘‘The crisis of reform, 1625–60,’’ p. 212; British Library, London, Egerton MS 1762, fols. 54v–55. 91. Dunlop, ‘‘Dublin Baptists from 1650 onwards,’’ p. 7. 92. Thurloe, State papers, 2:213. 93. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, sig. A2v. 94. Ibid., p. 23. 95. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, sig. A3r. 96. Benjamin Brook, Lives of the Puritans: Containing a biographical account of those divines who distinguished themselves in the cause of religious liberty, from the reformation under Queen Elizabeth, to the Act of Uniformity in 1662 (London: J. Black, 1813), 3:425. 97. Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, domestic series, 1659– 1660, (London: Longman and Co., 1875–1886), 12:13. 98. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, p. 23. 99. Perry Miller, Errand into the wilderness (1956; repr., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1981); Jens G. Møller, ‘‘The beginnings of Puritan covenant theology,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 14 (1963), pp. 46–67; John von Rohr, ‘‘Covenant and assurance in early English Puritanism,’’ Church History 34 (1965), pp. 195–203; Harry S. Stout, ‘‘Word and order in colonial New England,’’ in D. G. Hart (ed.), Reckoning with the past: Historical essays on American evangelicalism

notes to pages 91–95

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from the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), pp. 39–57; Coffey, Politics, religion and the British revolutions, pp. 130–38; Mullan, Scottish puritanism, pp. 171–207; Richard A. Muller, The unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the foundation of a theological tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 100. Kilroy, ‘‘Radical religion in Ireland, 1641–1660,’’ p. 212. 101. The humble advice of the Assembly of Divines, now by authority of Parliament sitting at Westminster, concerning a confession of faith, presented by them lately to both houses of Parliament. A certain number of copies are ordered to be printed only for the use of the members of both houses and of the Assembly of Divines, to the end that they may advise thereupon (London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1647, hereafter cited as the Westminster Confession of Faith), 7:2; A declaration of the faith and order owned and practised in the Congregational Churches in England agreed upon and consented unto by their elders and messengers in their meeting at the Savoy, October 12. 1658 (Imprint: London: printed by John Field, and are to be sold by John Allen at the Sun Rising in Pauls Church-yard, 1658, hereafter cited as the Savoy Declaration), 7:2. 102. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 7:3; [Savoy Declaration], 7:3. 103. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 7:5–6; [Savoy Declaration], 20:1. 104. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 28:4; [Savoy Declaration], 28:5. 105. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, pp. 145– 46. 106. Ibid., p. 54. 107. Ibid., p. 27. 108. Ibid., p. 7. 109. Ibid., p. 93. 110. Ibid., p. 24. 111. Ibid., p. 149. 112. Ibid., p. 48. 113. Ibid., p. 115. 114. Ibid., p. 41. 115. Ibid., pp. 81–82, contra Samuel Rutherford. Coffey, Politics, religion and the British revolutions, p. 206. 116. Samuel Rutherford, The covenant of life opened, or, A treatise of the covenant of grace (1655), p. 91. 117. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 3. 118. Greaves and Zaller, Biographical dictionary of British radicals in the seventeenth century, s.v. ‘‘Warren, Edward.’’ This entry is for Edward Warren junior. 119. Ford, Protestant reformation in Ireland, p. 182; James Ussher, The whole works of James Ussher, ed. C. R. Elrington and J. R. Todd (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1847–64), 16:342– 43. 120. Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 1st ed., p. 131n. Warren’s final speech is recorded in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Carte MSS, Ireland, 7:248–49. 121. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 5, sig. A2. 122. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 66 n. 83. Aidan Clarke seems to misread the references to Daniel’s prophecies in Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan when he describes

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Warren as a ‘‘radical’’ writing from an ‘‘avowedly Fifth Monarchist position.’’ Prelude to the Restoration in Ireland, pp. 1, 60. 123. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, sig. A2. 124. Ibid., sig. A3v. 125. Ibid., sig. A3v–A4r. 126. Ibid., p. 38. 127. Ibid., p. 9. 128. Ibid., p. 11. 129. Ibid., pp. 23, 26. 130. Ibid., p. 16. 131. Ibid., p. 49. 132. Michael A. G. Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys and Keach: Rediscovering our English Baptist heritage (Leeds: Carey, 1996), p. 40. 133. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 14. 134. Thurloe, State papers, 2:149, 162–64; Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ pp. 14–17. 135. Thurloe, State papers, 4:286–87. 136. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 26. 137. Herlihy, ‘‘A gay and flattering world,’’ p. 54. 138. Gillespie, ‘‘The crisis of reform, 1625–60,’’ p. 213. 139. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 170. 140. Kilroy, ‘‘Radical religion in Ireland,’’ p. 212. 141. [J. G.], Moses in the mount, p. 17. 142. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 132–33.

chapter 4 1. On the Ulster Presbyterians, see Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland; and, more recently, Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 122–26; Ford, Protestant reformation in Ireland, pp. 127–54; Edward M. Furgol, ‘‘The military and ministers as agents of Presbyterian imperialism in England and Ireland, 1640–1648,’’ in J. Dwyer et al. (eds.), New perspectives on the politics and culture of early modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 95–115; and Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘The Presbyterian revolution in Ulster, 1660–1690,’’ in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), The churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History 25 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 159–70. 2. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ pp. 166–67. 3. On early modern fasting in Ireland, see Greaves, God’s other children, pp. 20, 227–232; Ian Hazlett, ‘‘Playing God’s hand: Knox and fasting, 1565–66,’’ in Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British reformations, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 176–98; John Young, ‘‘The Covenanters and the Scottish Parliament, 1639–1651: The rule of the godly and the ‘second Scottish reformation,’ ’’ in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.),

notes to pages 99–103

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Enforcing reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 131–58. Most of the material on fasting relates to the post-Restoration period, but Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘‘The fast sermons of the Long Parliament,’’ in The crisis of the seventeenth century: Religion, the reformation and social change (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 272–316, still contains much of value. 4. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 3. 5. [Westminster Assembly], A directory for the publique worship of God in the three kingdomes (1647), p. 35. 6. Ibid., p. 36. Ulster Presbyterian fasts did not necessarily take up the whole day. Alexander G. Lecky, In the days of the Laggan Presbytery (Belfast: Davidson and McCormack, 1908), p. 116. 7. [Westminster Assembly], Directory for the publique worship of God, pp. 36–37. 8. Raymond Gillespie, ‘‘ ‘Into another intensity’: Prayer in Irish nonconformity, 1650–1700,’’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The religion of Irish dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), p. 33. 9. [Westminster Assembly], Directory for the publique worship of God, p. 36. 10. According to the Westminster directory, fasts could be proclaimed by the heads of families, by the leaders of congregations, and ‘‘by Authority.’’ 11. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ p. 89. 12. Young, ‘‘The Covenanters and the Scottish Parliament, 1639–1651,’’ discusses Covenanter legislation relating to marriage. 13. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 24:5. 14. [Westminster Assembly], Directory for the publique worship of God, p. 28. 15. Ibid., p. 28. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 92–93. 16. Declaration by the Presbytery at Bangor, in Ireland (1649), sig. A4v–A4r. 17. This legislation is described in Young, ‘‘The Covenanters and the Scottish Parliament.’’ 18. Longer catechism question 139; Young, ‘‘The Covenanters and the Scottish Parliament,’’ p. 152. 19. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 57, 221. 20. Declaration by the Presbytery at Bangor, sig. A3. 21. Ibid., sig. A2. 22. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ pp. 166–67. 23. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 7. 24. Paul Chang-Ha Lim, In pursuit of purity, unity, and liberty: Richard Baxter’s puritan ecclesiology in its seventeenth-century context, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 117. 25. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:671. 26. Seymour argues that ‘‘it does not appear that any of the strange sects which were to be found in England obtained any footing in Ireland.’’ Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 50. The Muggletonians were certainly exotic, but they appeared early in

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the 1660s and made little impact beyond the conversion of Colonel Robert Phayre and his family; the numbers involved in the entire movement probably never exceeded several hundred. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 198–99; Underwood, Acts of the witnesses, pp. 10, 98; Toby Barnard, ‘‘Phayre, Robert (1618/19–1682),’’ Oxford DNB. 27. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:60–61. 28. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 17, 58; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 145. 29. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:371. 30. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 17. 31. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 144–50. 32. Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the laity: Scots-Irish piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), is a notable exception. 33. Gillespie, Devoted people, p. 49. 34. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 215. 35. Gillespie, Devoted people, p. 49. 36. Ibid., p. 85; Carroll, Irish pilgrimage, p. 38; Meigs, Reformations in Ireland, p. 34. 37. Gillespie, Devoted people, pp. 48–49. 38. Thomas McCrie (ed.), The life of Mr Robert Blair (Edinburgh: Woodrow Society, 1848), pp. 62–63. 39. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:28, 109, 219. 40. Ibid., 1:43. 41. Ibid., 1:76, 82. 42. Ibid., 2:629, 653. 43. Ibid., 2:544, 613, 630. 44. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 20; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, D1759/1A/2, pp. 54, 57, 64. 45. Gillespie, Devoted people, pp. 49–50. 46. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 138; Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:212–13. See also Thurloe, State papers, 6:143. 47. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:658. 48. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:214. 49. Lecky, In the days of the Laggan Presbytery, p. 117. Lecky does not provide a source for this quotation. 50. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 121. 51. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 199. 52. Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The practice of piety: Puritan devotional disciplines in seventeenth-century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 100–101. 53. Ibid., p. 103. 54. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:509, 707. 55. Ibid., 2:712. 56. Ibid., 2:464, 502, 558, 717. 57. Fasting had a long tradition within Puritanism, as Patrick Collinson has documented. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan puritan movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 214–19.

notes to pages 108–11

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58. Michael F. Graham, The uses of reform: ‘‘Godly discipline’’ and popular behaviour in Scotland and beyond, 1560–1610, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 70; Margo Todd, The culture of Protestantism in early modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 344–52. 59. In August 1588, for example, the General Assembly of the Scottish church feared an attack from the Spanish Armada. They proclaimed a public fast and required the Edinburgh presbytery to act against a number of high-profile Catholics at court. Graham, Uses of reform, pp. 143–44. 60. Ibid., p. 254. 61. Young, ‘‘Scotland and Ulster in the seventeenth century,’’ pp. 17–20. 62. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ pp. 166–67. 63. Declaration by the Presbytery at Bangor, sig. A2. 64. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 19. 65. Declaration by the Presbytery at Bangor, title page; Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 11 (1901), p. 163. 66. Latimer, ‘‘Old session-book of Templepatrick Presbyterian Church,’’ 5th ser. 5 (1895), p. 134. 67. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:331. 68. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:168. 69. Patrick Adair, quoted in Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:169. 70. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:177. 71. Ibid., 2:174. 72. Ibid., p. 181. The Antrim ministers recorded that Patrick Adair had gone to ‘‘Dublin on publick concern.’’ Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ p. 24. Adair was in Dublin with Sir John Clotworthy to negotiate state maintenance for Presbyterian ministers, having joined him to negotiate state maintenance for Ulster Presbyterian ministers. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:196–97; Thurloe, State papers, 2:733, 3:305. 73. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 18; Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:189. 74. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:192–93; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 122–24. 75. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 18; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 123. 76. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 101. 77. Lecky, In the days of the Laggan Presbytery, p. 4. 78. Kilroy, ‘‘Radical religion in Ireland,’’ p. 204. 79. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 21. 80. Ibid., p. 18. 81. Patrick Adair, quoted in Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:185. 82. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:194 n. 10; Thurloe, State papers, 6:349.

220

notes to pages 111–17

83. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ n.p. No records remain from this presbytery. 84. Ibid., p. 10. 85. Ibid., n.p. 86. Ibid., n.p. 87. Lecky, In the days of the Laggan Presbytery, pp. 23–24. 88. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ p. 31. 89. Ibid., p. 28. 90. Ibid., pp. 25–26. 91. Ibid., p. 31. 92. Ibid., pp. 166–67. 93. Ibid., p. 12. A similar case in Dublin had resulted in the banishment of the bigamist Edward Axford, a shoemaker, in January 1653. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:309. 94. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ pp. 19, 21. 95. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 153–60. 96. A list of Civil List ministers and schoolmasters is provided in Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 206–27. 97. Ibid., p. 43. 98. Ibid., p. 44; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 136–44. 99. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 23:3. 100. Spurr, ‘‘Taylor, Jeremy (bap. 1613, d. 1667),’’ Oxford DNB; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 150–53. 101. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 3, 54; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 150. 102. [J. G.], Moses in the mount, p. 27. 103. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 40. 104. Ibid., p. 41. 105. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:304. 106. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 36, 88–89. 107. Ibid., p. 90. 108. Ibid., p. 91. 109. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:480–81. 110. Ibid., 2:295. 111. Ibid., 2:325. 112. Ibid., 2:304. 113. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, p. 80. 114. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 2. 115. Agreement and resolution of the ministers, pp. 2–4. 116. Ibid., p. 4. 117. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 2:202 n. 18; Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 113. The Winter-Baxter correspondence is recorded in Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1:169–72.

notes to pages 117–23

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118. Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers,’’ p. 89. 119. Patient, Doctrine of baptism, p. 7. 120. Lim, In pursuit of purity, unity, and liberty, p. 135; Ivimey, History of the English Baptists, 1:245. 121. Lim, In pursuit of purity, unity, and liberty, p. 119. 122. Ibid., p. 138. 123. Gilbert, Blessed peace-maker, p. 75. 124. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 120; Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 160. 125. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 22. 126. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 160. 127. Ibid., p. 165. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., p. 162. 130. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 17. 131. [J. G.], Moses in the mount, p. 15. 132. Ibid. 133. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 17. 134. Ibid., p. 18. 135. John Cook to Henry Cromwell, 28 August 1656, in Thurloe, State papers, 5:353–54. 136. Sicklemore, To all the inhabitants of the town of Youghall, p. 5. 137. A copy in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, is ascribed to Edward Worth. 138. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 15. 139. Ibid., p. 2. 140. Ibid., pp. 2, 5. 141. Ibid., p. 6. 142. Ibid., p. 7. 143. Ibid., p. 13. 144. Ibid., p. 18. 145. Ibid. 146. Greaves, God’s other children, pp. 13, 25; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 117, 126–32. 147. Greaves, God’s other children, p. 12. 148. Ibid. 149. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 124–31, records Henry Cromwell’s patronage of Presbyterians. 150. Thurloe, State papers, 7:162; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 26–27, 30. 151. Barnard, ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 18. 152. Ibid., p. 19. 153. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 128. 154. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 160–62. 155. Agreement and resolution of the ministers, p. 1.

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notes to pages 123–29

156. Ibid., title page. 157. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 129. 158. Agreement and resolution of the ministers, sig. A2. 159. Ibid., p. 5. 160. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 161. Ibid., p. 7. 162. Ibid., p. 8. 163. Ibid., p. 6. 164. Ibid., p. 10. It seems difficult to explain this in the light of Winter’s extraordinary and ‘‘immediate’’ call to the ministry, as described in chapter 5. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid., p. 12. 167. Ibid., p. 14. 168. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 169. Ibid., pp. 2–4. 170. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 171. Ibid., pp. 5–6, 9. 172. Ibid., p. 9. 173. Ibid., p. 11. 174. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 124, 127, 131. 175. Gilbert, Blessed peace-maker, p. 67. 176. Cook, Monarchy no creature of Gods making, sig. f7. 177. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 39. 178. Gilbert, Blessed peace-maker, sig. a2v. 179. [J. G.], Moses in the mount, p. 44. 180. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:464.

chapter 5 1. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, pp. 43–49. John Jones’s letters are reprinted in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ pp. 177–300. 2. On Winter, see W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter; Urwick, Early history of Trinity College Dublin, pp. 57–72; Hugh Jackson Lawlor (ed.), The registers of Provost Winter (Trinity College, Dublin), 1650 to 1660, and of the Liberties of Cashel (Co. Tipperary), 1654 to 1657 (London: Parish Register Society of Dublin, 1907); Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, pp. 27–39; St. John D. Seymour, Samuel Winter (Dublin, 1941); Greaves and Zallers, Biographical dictionary of British radicals in the seventeenth century, s.v. ‘‘Winter, Samuel’’; Barnard, ‘‘Winter, Samuel (1603–1666),’’ Oxford DNB. 3. Toby Barnard describes Winter as leader of ‘‘the obvious Cromwellian party in Ireland’’ in ‘‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland,’’ p. 13. 4. Toby Barnard, ‘‘Weaver, John (d. 1685),’’ Oxford DNB; W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, p. 43. 5. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 105, sigs. 3r–3v.

notes to pages 130–33

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6. Ibid., pp. 105–6. 7. The first-series DNB article on Winter errs in claiming his wife had ‘‘strong anabaptist leanings.’’ In Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, pp. 50–51, John Weaver notes that his sister ‘‘was once under a strong Temptation to become an Anabaptist, being perswaded that it was the way of God, and she had been dipped but that she feared it would reflect upon her Husband’s credit.’’ Her occasional sympathy for the theology of believers’ baptism appears to have been balanced by her horror of the ‘‘Enthusiastical conceits’’ with which Baptists were as often credited. Her fears contest Geoffrey F. Nuttall’s claim that Baptists and Congregationalists had no differences in their doctrines of the Holy Spirit. Nuttall, Holy Spirit in puritan faith and experience, p. 13. 8. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, pp. 45–46. 9. John Jones to Morgan Llwyd, 9 September 1651, in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ p. 183. 10. Evidence of their later hostility can perhaps be found in a manuscript of complaints leveled against Winter by one ‘‘ Jo: Jo,’’ though it is possible these complaints emanated from within Trinity College. Archbishop Narcissus Marsh’s Library, Dublin, MS Z3.1.1, no. 72. 11. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:79. 12. John Jones to William Stane, 19 November 1651, in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ p. 190. 13. John Jones to Morgan Llwyd, 19 November 1651, in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ p. 193. 14. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, p. 48. 15. Ibid., p. 49. From the evidence of John Jones’s letters, his wife must have died some time between 19 November and 25 December 1651. ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ p. 198. 16. Goodwin, Works, 6:8, 53; Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 27. 17. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic: Studies in popular belief in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971); Blair Worden, ‘‘Providence and politics in Cromwellian England,’’ Past and Present 109 (1985), pp. 55–99; Robert W. Scribner, ‘‘The reformation, popular magic, and the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ ’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23:3 (1993), pp. 475–94. Puritan discourses of the marvelous should be distinguished from those of the popular press described in Watt, Cheap print and popular piety. 18. For an extensive discussion of Reformed pneumatology, see Muller, Postreformation Reformed dogmatics, 4:333–81. 19. Sinclair B. Ferguson, ‘‘ John Owen and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit,’’ in Robert W. Oliver (ed.), John Owen: The man and his theology (Darlington, Eng.: Evangelical Press, 2002), p. 104. 20. Robert Bellarmine, De justificatione, bk. III, ch. 2, par. 3. 21. Nuttall, Holy Spirit in puritan faith and experience, p. 5.

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notes to pages 133–34

22. Augustus Nicodemus Lopes, ‘‘Calvin, theologian of the Holy Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Word of God,’’ Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 15:1 (1997), pp. 38–49. 23. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian religion, ed. John T. McNeill (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), bk. iv, ch. iii, par. 4; Jon Ruthven, On the cessation of the charismata: The protestant polemic on postbiblical miracles (Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), p. 34. 24. The rise of protestant scholasticism is surveyed in Trueman and Clark, Protestant scholasticism. 25. B. B. Warfield, ‘‘Calvin’s doctrine of the knowledge of God,’’ in B. B. Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, ed. Samuel G. Craig (1956; repr., Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1980), p. 107; B. B. Warfield, ‘‘Introductory note,’’ in Abraham Kuyper, The work of the Holy Spirit (1900; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), p. xxviii. John Owen’s pneumatology is briefly discussed in Sinclair B. Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian life (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), pp. 92– 98; and Trueman, Claims of truth. See also Alan Spence, ‘‘ John Owen and Trinitarian agency,’’ Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1990), pp. 157–73; and Barry H. Howson, ‘‘The puritan hermeneutics of John Owen: A recommendation,’’ Westminster Theological Journal 63 (2001), pp. 351–76, especially pp. 365–72. Patterns of puritan spirituality are described in Irvonwy Morgan, Puritan spirituality (London: Epworth Press, 1973); Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘‘The Holy Spirit in puritan piety,’’ in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit: Essays and addresses (London: Epworth Press, 1967), pp. 95–103; Gordon Rupp, ‘‘A devotion of rapture in English Puritanism,’’ in R. Buick Knox (ed.), Reformation, conformity and dissent: Essays in honour of Geoffrey Nuttall (London: Epworth Press, 1977), pp. 115–31; and R. Tudor Jones, ‘‘Union with Christ: The existential nerve of puritan piety,’’ Tyndale Bulletin 41 (1990), pp. 186–208. Patterns of confessional puritan pneumatology are described in O. Palmer Robertson, ‘‘The Holy Spirit in the Westminster Confession,’’ in J. Ligon Duncan (ed.), The Westminster Confession into the 21st century: Essays in remembrance of the 350th anniversary of the Westminster Assembly (Fearn, Scot.: Mentor, 2003), 1:57–99. 26. Nuttall, Holy Spirit in puritan faith and experience, p. xxviii. 27. Gordon Mursell, English spirituality: From earliest times to 1700 (London: SPCK, 2001), pp. 358–59. 28. Nuttall, Holy Spirit in puritan faith and experience, p. 14. This may suggest the significance of references to Sibbes by members of Rogers’s church and by Rogers himself. 29. Sibbes, Complete works of Richard Sibbes, 7:382–83; Ussher, Whole works, 13:330; Nuttall, Holy Spirit in puritan faith and experience, p. 43; Rogers, Ohel, pp. 372, 374. 30. Harrison, Topica sacra, p. 63. 31. See the discussion in Lamont, Puritanism and historical controversy, pp. 159–93. 32. See, for example, J. I. Packer, Among God’s giants: The puritan vision of the Christian life (Eastbourne, Eng.: Kingsway, 1991), and the various ‘‘Puritan Paperback’’ reprints published by the Banner of Truth Trust. A movement for revision has begun

notes to pages 134–36

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in Dean R. Smith, ‘‘The Scottish Presbyterians and Covenanters: A continuationist experience in a cessationist theology,’’ Westminster Theological Journal 63 (2001), pp. 39–63, which owes its context to a discussion fostered by popular-level evangelical texts such as Jack Deere, Surprised by the voice of God (Eastbourne, Eng.: Kingsway, 1996), pp. 64–86. 33. Patrick Collinson, The religion of protestants: The Church in English society, 1559– 1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 34. See, for a discussion of this theme, Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics, vol. 2; and B. B. Warfield, ‘‘The Westminster doctrine of Holy Scripture’’ and ‘‘The doctrine of inspiration in the Westminster divines,’’ in The Westminster Assembly and its work, ed. Ethelbert D. Warfield et al., The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 6:155–336. 35. Goodwin, Of the work of the Holy Ghost in our salvation (1696), in Goodwin, Works, 6:54. 36. Sibbes, Complete works, 7:382–83; Ussher, Whole works, 13:330. 37. John Owen, Pneumatologı´a, or, A discourse concerning the Holy Spirit (1674), in The works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (London: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–53), 3:13. 38. Claudius Gilbert, A soveraign antidote against sinful errors (1658), p. 117. 39. Richard Baxter, quoted in Nuttall, Holy Spirit in puritan faith and experience, p. 57. 40. Samuel Rutherford, A survey of the spirituall antichrist (1648), p. 42; Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, pp. 174–75. 41. Samuel Ladyman, The dangerous rule (1658), p. 79. 42. Friends House Library, London, A. R. Barclay MS LXV, cited in K. L. Carroll, ‘‘Quakerism and the Cromwellian army in Ireland,’’ Journal of the Friends Historical Society 54:3 (1978), p. 142. 43. Edward Burrough complained of the comparison when George Pressick, the Dublin-based author of A brief relation of some remarkable passages of the Anabaptists in Germany, ‘‘gathered up . . . the most remarkable passages both of the Doctrine and Practice of the Anabaptists (so called) in Germany, 129 years ago; and then he charges the same things upon the Anabaptists and Quakers (as he scornfully calls them).’’ As Burrough went on to explain, there was really no basis for the comparison. Vindication of the people of God, called Quakers, p. 5. 44. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 1:6. 45. [Westminster Confession of Faith], 1:1. The context of this remark is surveyed in Garnet Howard Milne, The Westminster Confession of Faith and the cessation of special revelation: The majority Puritan viewpoint on whether extra-biblical prophecy is still possible, Studies in Christian History and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), which is, unfortunately, still forthcoming at the time of this writing. 46. [Westminster Assembly], Propositions concerning church government and ordination of ministers (1647), p. 4. 47. Edward Worth, The servant doing, and the Lord blessing (1659), p. 3. 48. Ibid., p. 4.

226

notes to pages 136–39

49. D. Smith, ‘‘The Scottish Presbyterians and Covenanters,’’ pp. 39–63; Christopher Bennett, ‘‘The Puritans and the direct operations of the Holy Spirit,’’ in Building a sure foundation (London: Westminster Conference, 1994), pp. 108–22. 50. Lake, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. xx. 51. Robert Barclay, The inner life of the religious societies of the Commonwealth (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876), p. 216. 52. Mullan, Scottish puritanism, pp. 18, 21–22, 34, 54–55. 53. Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish church history and theology (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1993), s.v. ‘‘Peden, Alexander.’’ 54. James Kirk (ed.), The Second Book of Discipline (Edinburgh: St. Andrews Press, 1980), pp. 175–76. 55. D. Smith, ‘‘The Scottish Presbyterians and Covenanters,’’ p. 44. See also the relevant biographical entries in Cameron, Dictionary of Scottish church history and theology. 56. George Gillespie, A treatise of miscellany questions (1649), pp. 69–70. 57. For a detailed examination of Rutherford’s theology, see Coffey, Politics, religion and the British revolutions. 58. Rutherford, Survey of the spirituall antichrist, p. 42. 59. Ibid., pp. 43–44. 60. Adair, True narrative, p. 59. I owe this reference to Robert Armstrong. 61. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, pp. 10, 13. 62. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 181. 63. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 80. 64. Ibid., p. 51. 65. On Cook, see Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 262–82; Sarah Barber, ‘‘ ‘Nothing but the first chaos’: Making sense of Ireland,’’ Seventeenth Century 14:1 (1999), p. 27; and Wilfrid Prest, ‘‘Cook, John (bap. 1608, d. 1660),’’ Oxford DNB. 66. Cook, True relation of Mr. John Cook’s passage, p. 6. 67. Ibid., p. 5. 68. Ibid., pp. 4, 9. 69. Ibid., p. 9. 70. Ibid., p. 12. 71. Ibid., p. 14. 72. Frances Cook, Mris. Cookes Meditations (Cork, 1650), p. 11. 73. Rogers, Ohel, p. 27. 74. Ibid., p. 436. There are also strong parallels with the description of Jesus Christ in Revelation 1. 75. A survey of the development of the early Quaker theology of the ‘‘inner light’’ can be found in Catherine M. Wilcox, Theology and women’s ministry in seventeenthcentury English Quakerism: Handmaids of the Lord (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995); see also Richard S. Harrison, ‘‘Spiritual perception and the evolution of the Irish Quakers,’’ in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The religion of Irish dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), pp. 68–82. 76. Burrough, To you that are called Anabaptists in the nation of Ireland, p. 1; Burrough, Vindication of the people of God, called Quakers, p. 10.

notes to pages 139–42

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77. Morford, Baptist and Independent Churches (so called) set on fire, p. 30. 78. Thurloe, State papers, 4:508. 79. Francis Howgil, The mouth of the pit stopped (1659), p. 21. 80. [Barbara Blaugdone], An account of the travels, sufferings and persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone (1691), pp. 27–28. 81. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 135; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:716. 82. Harrison, Topica sacra, p. 22. 83. William Penn, The new witnesses proved old hereticks, or, Information to the ignorant (1672), pp. 61–62. 84. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, sig. A2r. 85. Patient,Doctrine of baptism, p. 157. 86. Ibid., p. 153. 87. Ibid., p. 155. 88. Ibid., p. 156. 89. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, pp. 11–12. 90. For recent surveys of Quaker origins, see Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985); and Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism and the Lamb’s war. Irish Quaker origins are discussed in Richard L. Greaves, Dublin’s merchant-Quaker: Anthony Sharp and the community of Friends, 1643–1707 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Richard L. Greaves, ‘‘The ‘Great Persecution’ reconsidered: The Irish Quakers and the ethic of suffering,’’ in Muriel C. McClendon et al. (eds.), Protestant identities: Religion, society, and self-fashioning in postReformation England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 211–17. 91. Details of his life can be found in [William Edmundson], A journal of the life, travels, sufferings, and labour of love in the work of the ministry, of that worthy elder, and faithful servant of Jesus Christ, William Edmundson (1715). 92. [Edmundson], Journal, p. 31. 93. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, p. 211; Kilroy, Protestant dissent and controversy in Ireland, p. 83. 94. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:638–39. 95. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 109–10. 96. The Friends’ Library, ix. 406, cited in Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 110; British Library, London, Landsdowne MS 821, fol. 68. 97. Kilroy, Protestant dissent and controversy in Ireland, p. 84; Carroll, ‘‘Quakerism and the Cromwellian army in Ireland,’’ p. 137. 98. [Howgil and Burrough], Visitation of the rebellious nation of Ireland, p. 26. 99. Friends House Library, London, A. R. Barclay MSS, CXVIII. the letter is dated 7 July 1655. 100. Carroll, ‘‘Quakerism and the Cromwellian army in Ireland,’’ pp. 138–39. 101. Ibid., p. 140; [Howgil and Burrough],Visitation of the rebellious nation of Ireland, p. 20. 102. British Library, London, Lansdowne MS 821, fol. 68. The letter is dated 4 January 1656.

228

notes to pages 142–46

103. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:557. 104. [Howgil and Burrough], Visitation of the rebellious nation of Ireland, pp. 26–27. 105. Ibid., p. 23. 106. Ibid., p. 24. 107. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:563. 108. [Blaugdone], Account of the travels, p. 22. 109. Ibid., p. 25. 110. Ibid. 111. Thurloe, State papers, 4:508. 112. Barry Reay, ‘‘Quakerism and society,’’ in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical religion in the English revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 142, 145. 113. Gostelo, Charls Stuart and Oliver Cromwel united, p. 120. 114. Sicklemore, To all the inhabitants of the town of Youghall, p. 2. 115. Reay, ‘‘Quakerism and society,’’ p. 147. 116. Quoted in Greaves, God’s other children, p. 35. 117. ‘‘Several proceedings in Parliament, from 26th of June to 3rd day of July, 1651,’’ quoted in Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 1st ed., p. 139; Greaves, God’s other children, p. 12; W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter. Seymour describes him as ‘‘a shrewd man of business, an energetic worker in things spiritual and temporal, and a godly divine, broad-minded to a degree that can scarcely be recognized.’’ Puritans in Ireland, p. 28. The Winter-Baxter correspondence is recorded in Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1:169–72. 118. Raymond Gillespie discusses the membership of Rogers’s congregation in ‘‘The crisis of reform, 1625–60.’’ 119. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 81–82. 120. Kilroy, ‘‘Radical religion in Ireland,’’ p. 208. 121. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, p. 2. 122. The first-series DNB claims Winter attended Queen’s College, Cambridge, where his tutor was John Preston. 123. Pishey Thompson, in The history and antiquities of Boston, and the villages of Skirbeck, Fishtoft, Freiston, Butterwick, Benington, Leverton, Leake, and Wrangle (Boston: John Noble, 1856), claims that Winter was an usher in the school between 1626 and 1627 and headmaster between 1627 and 1631. I owe this reference to Simon Meeds, editor of the Old Bostonian Association magazine. 124. Lawlor, Registers of Provost Winter, p. 7. Weaver’s biography errs in claiming that Winter resigned his pastorate. Urwick, Early history of Trinity College Dublin, p. 57. 125. Public Records Office, Dublin, Commonwealth Records, A-39, fol. 10 (since destroyed), cited in Urwick, Early history of Trinity College Dublin, p. 57. The letter is reprinted in Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:172. 126. Winter’s provostship is extensively described in Urwick, Early history of Trinity College Dublin, pp. 57–72. Urwick claims that Cromwell confirmed the appointment on 3 June 1652 (p. 59). It is possible that Winter’s appointment was assisted

notes to pages 146–49

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by a possible link to the Ussher family. Lawlor, Registers of Provost Winter, p. 7. Owen’s involvement is suggested in Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 27. 127. Urwick, Early history of Trinity College Dublin, p. 58; W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, p. 11–13. 128. Public Records Office, Dublin, Commonwealth Records, A-81, col. 74 (since destroyed), cited in Urwick, Early history of Trinity College Dublin, p. 58; W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, pp. 10, 11. 129. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, n. p. 130. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 201; Urwick, Early history of Trinity College Dublin, pp. 60, 62. 131. Alexander Gordon, ‘‘Winter, Samuel, D. D. (1603–1666), provost of Trinity College, Dublin,’’ DNB 1st ser. The history of the St. Nicholas fellowship, as it developed into the New Row and Eustace Street Presbyterian churches, is developed in ffeary-Smyrl, ‘‘Theatres of worship,’’ pp. 49–50. ffeary-Smyrl notes that the first baptism is recorded in 1653, perhaps indicating the date of the congregation’s inception. St. Stephen’s Green Unitarian Church, Dublin, New Row Baptismal Register, p. 1. 132. Robert H. Murray, Dublin University and the New World (London: SPCK, 1921), pp. 18–19. 133. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 89. 134. Ibid., p. 136. 135. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, pp. 2v–3r. 136. Ibid., pp. 2r–2v. 137. Ibid., p. 28. Winter’s text incorrectly cites Acts 2:37. 138. Ibid., p. 33. 139. Ibid. 140. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, p. 41. 141. Ibid., p. 56. 142. Ibid., p. 57. 143. Ibid., p. 60. 144. British Library, London, Egerton MS 1762, fols. 54v–55. 145. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, p. 9. 146. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 103 n. 66; ‘‘Several proceedings in Parliament, from 26th of June to 3rd day of July, 1651,’’ quoted in Prendergast, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 1st ed., p. 139; Rogers, Ohel, p. 396; British Library, London, Landsdowne MS 821, fol. 222. 147. Elizabeth Avery, Scripture-prophecies opened, which are to be accomplished in these last times, which do attend the second coming of Christ: In several letters written to Christian friends (1647), p. 36. 148. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 402–6. 149. Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805, p. 93. Avery’s conversion account is discussed in Gribben, Puritan millennium, pp. 162–67. 150. James Ware, The hunting of the Romish fox, and the quenching of sectarian firebrands being a specimen of popery and separation (1683), p. 228. 151. Rogers, Ohel, p. 464.

230

notes to pages 149–54

152. This notebook, Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805, has been partially reprinted in Lawlor, Registers of Provost Winter, pp. 3–23. 153. Winter claims apostolic sanction for the use of godparents in Summe of diverse sermons, p. 164. 154. Lawlor, Registers of Provost Winter, p. 5. 155. Agreement and resolution of the ministers, pp. 5–8, refers to the Westminster catechisms, Confession of Faith, and Directory of Public Worship. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 164. 156. Winter’s use of the sign of the cross is discussed in Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 38. Incidents of churchings are recorded, for example, in Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805, pp. 34–36, 50, 52. 157. Lawlor,Registers of Provost Winter, p. 6. 158. Agreement and resolution of the ministers, pp. 3–4.

chapter 6 1. Gillespie, ‘‘The crisis of reform, 1625–60,’’ pp. 209–15. 2. For the history of the ‘‘visible saints’’ ecclesiology, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible saints: The Congregational way, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957); and E. Morgan, Visible saints. 3. E. Morgan, Visible saints, p. 62. 4. Gribben, Puritan millennium, p. 158. 5. Rogers, Ohel, p. 291. 6. Stephen Brachlow, The communion of saints: Radical puritan and separatist ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 7. Rogers, Ohel, p. 406. 8. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 197. 9. Ibid., p. 199. 10. Ibid., p. 187. 11. Ibid., p. 195. 12. Ibid. 13. The accusation was dramatized in Francis Kirkman, The Presbyterian lash, or, Noctroff ’s maid whipt: A tragy-comedy as it was lately acted in the great roome at the Pye Tavern at Aldgate (1661). 14. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 194. 15. Ibid., p. 199. 16. Ibid., p. 188. 17. Catharine Randall Coats, (Em)bodying the Word: Textual resurrections in the martyrological narratives of Foxe, Crespin, de B
eze and d’Aubigne´ (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); Mueller, ‘‘Pain, persecution, and the construction of selfhood,’’ pp. 161–87. 18. Christine Peters, Patterns of piety: Women, gender and religion in late medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ben BarkerBenfield, ‘‘Anne Hutchinson and the puritan attitude towards women,’’ Feminist

notes to pages 154–58

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Studies 1:2 (1972), pp. 65–69; Stevie Davies, Unbridled spirits: Women of the English revolution, 1640–1660 (London: Women’s Press, 1998). 19. Patricia Crawford, review of Patterns of piety: Women, gender and religion in late medieval and Reformation England, by Christine Peters, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 56:2 (2005), pp. 374–75. See also Mary O’Dowd, A history of women in Ireland, 1500– 1800 (London: Longman, 2004). 20. Ann Kibbey, The interpretation of material shapes in Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 119. 21. Graham et al., Her own life, p. 15. 22. Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy men: A study in seventeenth-century English millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber), p. 82. 23. Mullan, Scottish puritanism, pp. 140–70. 24. John Milton, ‘‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint,’’ in John Milton, The complete English poems, ed. G. R. Campbell (London: Everyman’s Library, 1980), p. 108. 25. These ‘‘churchings’’ are recorded in Winter’s notebook, Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805. 26. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 148. 27. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 11. 28. On women in puritanism, see Hinds, God’s Englishwomen. David Booy notes the recent ‘‘exponential growth’’ of scholarship on early Quaker history. Autobiographical writings by early modern Quaker women (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2004), p. xiv. 29. See Gamble Library, Union Theological College, Belfast, ‘‘Minutes of the Antrim Meeting of Ministers, 11 October 1654–13 May 1658.’’ 30. Warren, Caleb’s inheritance in Canaan, p. 11. 31. Cook, Mris. Cookes Meditations, p. 11. The contents of the dream are described in Cook, True relation. 32. W[eaver], Life and death of . . . Samuel Winter, pp. 50–51. The first-series DNB article on Winter seems to exaggerate in claiming that she had ‘‘strong anabaptist leanings.’’ DNB, 1st series, s.v. ‘‘Winter, Samuel.’’ 33. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 132. 34. Lawlor, Registers of Provost Winter, p. 7. 35. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 92. 36. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, p. 56. 37. Friends House Library, London, A. R. Barclay MS LXV. Dunlop records mentions of a Colonel George Cooke, who became governor of Wexford but was killed in action in April 1652. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:5, 171. 38. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, p. 56. 39. Carroll, ‘‘Quakerism and the Cromwellian army in Ireland,’’ p. 142. 40. Olive C. Goodbody, ‘‘Anthony Sharp, wool merchant, 1643–1707, and the Quaker community in Dublin,’’ Journal of the Friends Historical Society 48:1 (1956), p. 40; Booy, Autobiographical writings by early modern Quaker women, pp. 4–5. 41. Thurloe, State papers, 4:672–73. 42. [Blaugdone], Account of the travels, p. 26.

232

notes to pages 158–60

43. Ibid. 44. Avery is discussed in Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Mack describes Avery as a supporter of the Fifth Monarchists (pp. 101, 413). 45. John Jones to William Stane, 19 November 1651, in ‘‘Inedited letters of Cromwell, Colonel Jones, Bradshaw, and other regicides,’’ p. 191; Greaves, God’s other children, p. 22. 46. Rogers, Ohel, p. 464. 47. Ibid., p. 563 [p. 463 (irregular pagination)]. 48. Ibid., p. 66. 49. Ibid., p. 54. 50. Ibid., p. 169. 51. Ibid., p. 249. 52. Ibid., p. 294. 53. Ibid., p. 475. 54. Ibid., p. 563 [p. 463 (irregular pagination)]. 55. Ibid., pp. 19–20. 56. Ibid., p. 22. 57. Ibid., p. 23. 58. Ibid. 59. For a description of Rogers’s millennialism, see Gribben, Puritan millennium, pp. 149–71; and Rogers, Ohel, p. 464. 60. Rogers, Ohel, p. 472. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., p. 249. 63. For Avery’s biography, see Jane Baston, ‘‘Avery, Elizabeth ( fl. 1614–1653),’’ Oxford DNB, though note this chapter’s corrections of several of the entry’s details. Since the 1980s, Avery’s writings have been attracting attention as some of the earliest women’s writings in Ireland. Rogers’s narratives have been discussed in Dorothy Paula Ludlow, ‘‘ ‘Arise and be doing’: English preaching women, 1640–1660,’’ (Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University), pp. 259–70; Caldwell, Puritan conversion narrative; Cohen, God’s caress; Hobby, Virtue of necessity; N. Smith, Perfection proclaimed; Mack, Visionary women; and Gribben, Puritan millennium. Rogers’s narratives have been anthologized in Suzanne Trill et al. (eds.), Lay by your needles ladies, take the pen: Writing women in England, 1500–1700 (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 182–86. Recognizing their importance in the wider history of Irish literature, the editors of the fourth volume of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing gathered the testimonies of Elizabeth Chambers, Frances Curtis, and Mary Turrant from Rogers’s anthology, noting that the testimonies ‘‘provide the sole record found of several women at this time in Ireland.’’ Angela Bourke et al. (eds.), Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 4, Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork, Ire.: Cork University Press/Field Day, 2002), pp. 480–82. Most of these discussions interact with Rogers’s narratives in isolation from the debates they stimulated. Ludlow, for example, noticed that Avery was at the center of a pamphlet debate in the later 1640s. Despite the ready availability of sources, scholars of early

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modern religion and gender have been slow to follow up the trail of references that Ludlow’s thesis had first provided. 64. It is difficult to establish exactly when in the late 1640s or very early 1650s she arrived in Ireland. 65. See Keith L. Sprunger, ‘‘Parker, Robert (c. 1564–1614),’’ Oxford DNB, for all of the above. 66. John Cotton, The way of the Congregational churches cleared (1648), pt. 1, p. 13. 67. Rogers, Ohel, p. 403. 68. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or, The ecclesiastical history of NewEngland; from its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of Our Lord 1698 (Hartford, CT: S. Andrus and Son, 1853), 1:480. Tom Webster notes that Parker’s ecclesiology is somewhere between Independency and Presbyterianism. Godly clergy in early Stuart England: The Caroline puritan movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 292. 69. Rogers, Ohel, p. 403. 70. Ibid. 71. John Goodwin, A reply of two of the brethren to A. S. wherein you have observations on his considerations, annotations, etc. upon the apologeticall narration (1644), title page. 72. Thomas Parker, The true copy of a letter: Written by Mr Thomas Parker, a learned and godly minister, in New-England, unto a member of the assembly of divines now at Westminster (1644), pp. 1–2. It is possible that the letter was written to William Twisse, who had been Thomas Parker’s pastoral mentor during his first clerical appointment and who was chair of the Westminster Assembly until his replacement in January 1645. E. C. Vernon, ‘‘Twisse, William (1577/8–1646),’’ Oxford DNB. Parker later encouraged Avery to remember Twisse’s earlier influence. Thomas Parker, The copy of a letter written by Mr. Thomas Parker, pastor of the church of Newbury in New-England, to his sister, Mrs Elizabeth Avery, sometimes of Newbury in the county of Berks, touching sundry opinions by her professed and maintained (1650), pp. 11–12. 73. Thomas Parker, The visions and prophecies of Daniel expounded (1646), sig. A2. 74. Ibid. Dorothy Avery was therefore still alive in 1646. 75. Ibid., sig. A2v. 76. Thompson Cooper, ‘‘Baylie, Thomas (1581/2–1663),’’ rev. Vivienne Larminie, Oxford DNB. Baston, ‘‘Avery, Elizabeth ( fl. 1614–1653),’’ Oxford DNB. 77. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 61. The Oxford DNB errs in suggesting that her husband was Henry Avery, a soldier. See Baston, ‘‘Avery, Elizabeth ( fl. 1614–1653),’’ Oxford DNB; and Green, Calendar of State Papers, domestic series, 1659–1660, 12 February 1656, 9:11. Rogers describes Elizabeth’s husband as a ‘‘Commissionary’’ in Ireland (Ohel, p. 403), which strongly suggests that he was Timothy Avery, the only Avery mentioned in Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, as being in Ireland. He was a member of a committee that met weekly in Dublin to assist in civil governance during an outbreak of plague (2:344–45, 626). Samuel Avery was a representative of the Adventurers in London (1:cxlii, 44, 56; 2:483), and Joseph Avery also appears to have been based in London (2:465).

234

notes to pages 162–67

78. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 403–4. 79. On Lambert, see David Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619–1684 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003). 80. Rogers, Ohel, p. 404. 81. Ibid., p. 405. 82. Ibid., p. 406. 83. Avery, Scripture-prophecies opened, sig. A3. 84. Ibid., sig. A3v. 85. Ibid., p. 11. 86. Ibid., p. 14. 87. Ibid., p. 15. 88. Ibid., p. 2. 89. Ibid., p. 1. 90. Ibid., p. 15. 91. Ibid., p. 35. 92. Ibid., p. 18. 93. Ibid., p. 21. 94. Gribben, Puritan millennium, pp. 157, 169, 170. 95. [Worth], Agreement and resolution of severall associated ministers, p. 20. 96. Avery, Scripture-prophecies opened, p. 2. 97. Ludlow, ‘‘ ‘Arise and be doing,’ ’’ p. 261. 98. Avery, Scripture-prophecies opened, pp. 30, 46. 99. H. Larry Ingle, ‘‘Fox, George (1624–1691),’’ Oxford DNB; Booy, Autobiographical writings by early modern Quaker women, pp. 2–3; Peters, Print culture and the early Quakers, p. 2; H. Larry Ingle, First among friends: George Fox and the creation of Quakerism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 100. Avery, Scripture-prophecies opened, sig. A3v. 101. Ibid., p. 2, 13. 102. Ibid., p. 25. 103. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 104. Ibid., pp. 22–23. 105. Ibid., pp. 40, 43. 106. Ibid., p. 5. 107. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 108. T. C., A glasse for the times by which according to the Scriptures, you may clearly behold the true ministers of Christ, how farre differing from false teachers (1648), pp. 1–2. 109. Ibid., p. 5. 110. Francis J. Bremer, Puritan crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, 1630–1670 (London: Garland, 1989), pp. 178–83, 288–95. 111. Francis J. Bremer, ‘‘Parker, Thomas (1595–1677),’’ Oxford DNB. 112. T. Parker, To his sister, Mrs Elizabeth Avery, sig. A2. 113. Ibid. For Noyse, see Bremer, ‘‘Parker, Thomas (1595–1677),’’ Oxford DNB. 114. T. Parker, To his sister, Mrs Elizabeth Avery, p. 13.

notes to pages 167–72

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115. Ibid., p. 17. 116. Ibid., p. 8. 117. Ibid., sig. A2, p. 5. 118. Ibid., p. 5. 119. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 120. Ibid., p. 9. 121. Ibid., p. 16. 122. Ibid., p. 13. 123. Ibid., p. 16. Bremer, ‘‘Parker, Thomas (1595–1677),’’ Oxford DNB, does not refer to as many siblings as this. 124. T. Parker, To his sister, Mrs Elizabeth Avery, pp. 11–12. 125. Robert Parker, An exposition of the powring out of the fourth vial: Mentioned in the sixteenth of the Revelation (1650), sig. A2v. 126. Ibid., p. 13. 127. Rogers, Ohel, p. 412 (2). The figure in parentheses refers to the pagination of an inserted gathering of pages at p. 412. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., p. 80. 130. Ibid., pp. 402–6. 131. Ibid., p. 403. 132. Ibid., p. 404. 133. Ibid., p. 406. 134. Ibid. 135. Avery, Scripture-prophecies opened, p. 6. 136. Baston, ‘‘Avery, Elizabeth ( fl. 1614–1653),’’ Oxford DNB; David Farr, ‘‘The military and political career of John Lambert, 1619–57’’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1996), p. 179; Mack, Visionary women, pp. 101, 413. 137. Naomi Baker, ‘‘ ‘Break down the walls of flesh’: Anna Trapnel, John James and Fifth Monarchist self-representation,’’ in Sylvia Brown and Julie Hirst (eds.), Women, gender and radical religion in early modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 138. Gertrude Huehns, Antinomianism in English history: With special reference to the period 1640–1660 (London: Cresset Press, 1951), pp. 128–29. 139. Booy, Autobiographical writings by early modern Quaker women, p. 4. 140. Vernon, ‘‘Crofton, Zachary (1626–1672),’’ Oxford DNB. 141. Crofton, Bethshemesh clouded, p. 179. 142. Ibid., p. 187. 143. Ibid., p. 196. 144. Ibid., p. 187. 145. Ibid., p. 188. 146. Ibid., p. 189. 147. Ibid., p. 135. 148. Ibid., p. 190. 149. Ibid., p. 197. 150. Gilbert, Libertine school’d, pp. 32–33.

236

notes to pages 172–81

151. This qualifies Baston’s statement that ‘‘nothing is further known of her life after Rogers published her testimony.’’ ‘‘Avery, Elizabeth ( fl. 1614–1653),’’ Oxford DNB. 152. Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:344, 626. 153. Seymour, Puritans in Ireland, p. 61, records his association with Baptists on the committee of triers. 154. Trinity College Library, Dublin, MS 805, p. 93. 155. Rogers, Ohel, pp. 402–6.

conclusion 1. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 173. 2. While Fleetwood was closely associated with and influenced by Baptists, Winter’s sermons were a sustained attack on their theology. 3. Gilbert, Pleasant walk to heaven, p. 66. 4. For a recent description of the ‘‘puritanism’’ of the Church of Ireland, see Gribben, ‘‘Puritanism in Ireland and Wales.’’ 5. Hill, ‘‘Seventeenth-century English radicals and Ireland,’’ p. 150. 6. Pettegree, Reformation and the culture of persuasion, p. 7. 7. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 213–48. 8. Ibid., pp. 132–34. 9. Ibid., p. 171. 10. Ibid., pp. 160–68. 11. Ibid., p. 135. For a detailed discussion of the period, see Clarke, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland. 12. Pettegree, Reformation and the culture of persuasion, p. 8. 13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. Winter, Summe of diverse sermons, p. 173. 15. Gilbert, Pleasant walk to heaven, p. 66. 16. Rogers, Ohel, p. 305.

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Index

The following abbreviations are used in this index: b. born bap. baptized b. c. born circa c. circa d. died d. c. died circa fl. floruit fl. c. floruit circa Adair, Patrick (1624?–93/94; Presbyterian minister in Ulster) 9, 219n72 Adultery 101. See also Bigamy; Marriage ‘‘Adventurers’’ 10–11 Allen, William (fl. 1642–67; Baptist preacher) 89 Ames, William (1576–1633; Church of England clergyman and puritan theologian) 71 Amsterdam 160 Anabaptists 82, 135. See also Baptists; Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists (1644)

Anglicanism. See Church of Ireland Anglicization 31, 41 Anglo-Irish. See Native populations Anti-Catholicism exaggeration of the anti-Catholic nature of Cromwellian campaign 3, 42 expulsion of Catholics from walled towns 28 Pope as Antichrist 8 and the 1641 rising 9 See also Antichrist; Transplantation scheme Antichrist 159 as compulsion in religious opinion 43 and Cromwellian hostility to Presbyterianism 7

266

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Antichrist (continued) and Cromwellian hostility to Roman Catholicism 6, 177 and protestant hostility to Roman Catholicism 4, 8, 19, 22, 24, 47, 73, 80 and protestant sectarianism 3, 40, 49, 51, 94–95, 163 See also Anti-Catholicism; Eschatology Anticlericalism and Baptists 87 as an explanation for the failure of the reformation 121 and lay Bible reading 48 and the London ministers 166 and official encouragement of lay piety 103– 4 as a provocation of God 52 and Quaker polemic 143 See also Antiformalism; Cork association; Laity; Primivitism; Quakers; Seekers Antiformalism 40, 48, 74, 104, 169. See also Anticlericalism; Eclecticism; Primivitism; Quakers; Seekers Antinomianism 51, 56, 71, 116, 137, 149, 163, 170. See also Heresy Anti-Trinitarianism 30, 50–51, 137, 149, 201n229. See also Heresy Antrim, county 31, 32, 84, 99, 101, 111 Antrim ministers 156. See also Presbyterianism in Ulster Apostles’ Creed 124–25 Armagh 8. See also James Ussher Arminianism 50–51, 55, 81, 88, 116, 137, 149, 201n229. See also Heresy Armstrong, Robert 12 Army 70, 96, 97, 179 political dynamic of the 30 religious dynamic of the 30 See also Baptists; Charles Fleetwood Associations 102–3, 116–17, 118–26 as an alternative to the Civil List 117–18 Baptist associations 38 Independent associations 38 and the need for state support 118, 119 as a sign of distance from the state 118 transfer between associations 117

Waterford association 119 Winter’s early association (1655) 118–19, 123 See also Civil List; Confessions of faith; Cork association; Denominations; Dublin and Leinster association Atheism 60, 115. See also Heresy Avery, Elizabeth (fl. 1614–fl. 1653; radical prophet) 160–73 difficulty in categorizing 170, 176 growing conservatism 158, 172 as a heretic 166–67 as a mystic 71–72 and Rogers’s congregation 148 See also Timothy Avery; Christ Church Cathedral congregation; Conversion narratives; Eclecticism; Mysticism; John Rogers; Seekers; Women Avery, Timothy (fl. c. 1645–fl. 1656; Cromwellian administrator in Dublin) 162, 169, 172, 233n77, 236n153. See also Elizabeth Avery Baillie, Robert (1602–62; Church of Scotland minister and theologian) 81–82, 87, 135 Baker, Naomi 170 Ballyclare, county Antrim 100–101, 112–13 Bandon, county Cork 84, 135, 142, 157 Bandonbridge, county Cork 5, 142 Bangor, county Down 34, 106 Baptism, debate about 38, 79–98, 131, 175, 180 Baptism and church membership 56, 74. See also Church membership Baptism of believers 37, 41. See also Baptism of infants; Baptists Baptism of infants as ‘‘christenings’’ 148–50, 172, 177 and church membership 41, 45, 56, 68 and conservative theology 120, 144 and social control 37 as undermining evangelistic zeal 33 See also Baptism of believers Baptism of natives 32

index Baptists 14, 44– 45, 62, 79–98 baptism by immersion 81, 156 and church membership 57, 89 and the Civil List 84–85, 87, 97, 114, 125, 213n64 and covenant theology 91–94 and the Cromwellian army 97, 179 and denominational structures 38, 57, 86, 89 and the Dublin and Leinster association 39, 104, 123 and excommunication 85, 157 first church building in Swift’s Alley, Dublin 90 first meeting place in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin 84 history of the movement 81–83, 84, 85, 96–97, 103, 111, 122, 142, 147 and a national church 118 and native evangelism 32–33, 44 and political influence 44, 111 and problems of clerical supply 85 and theological confusion 44, 57, 102–3 and theological decay 86 See also Anabaptists; Army; Baptism of believers; Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists (1644); Charles Fleetwood Barclay, Robert 136 Barnard, Toby 11–12, 14, 28, 33 Bateman, Miles (fl. 1654; Quaker missionary) 141 Baxter, Richard (1615–91; English Presbyterian minister and theologian) and the baptism debate 88 and conversion 67 and extraordinary revelation 135 and Samuel Winter 38, 117, 119, 144 and the Worcester association 118 Baylie, Thomas (1581/2–1663; member of the Westminster Assembly and suspected Fifth Monarchist) 161–62

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Bebbington, David 60–62 Bedell, William (bap. 1572, d. 1642; Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and Church of Ireland bishop of Kilmore) 7, 32. See also Bible; Gaelic language; Daniel Godfrey Beeston, Ann (d. c. 1650; married to Samuel Winter) 145 Belfast 5, 47, 84, 101, 111 printing press 34 Bellarmine, Robert (1542–1621; Roman Catholic cardinal and saint) 133 Bennet, Martyn 13 Bennet, Sarah (fl. 1656; Quaker missionary) 157 Best, Paul (1590–1657; anti-Trinitarian polemicist) 166 Beza, Theodore (1519–1605; French reformer and theologian) 64 Bible in English 29, 30–31 in Gaelic 7 and progressive revelation 164 reading the Bible 48, 50, 167 See also William Bedell; Godfrey Daniel; Gaelic language; Preaching; Worship Bidle [Biddle], John (1615/16–62; antiTrinitarian polemicist) 166 Bigamy 112, 220n93. See also Adultery; Marriage Bishop, Francis (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 72, 76 Blackwood, Christopher (1607/8–70; Particular Baptist preacher and polemicist) 36, 38, 87 Blake, Thomas (1596/7–1657; Church of England minister and theologian) 38, 88 Blaugdone, Barbara (c. 1609–1704; Quaker preacher) 140, 143, 157, 158 Boate, Gerard (1604–50; physician and natural historian) 5–7 Book of Common Prayer 7, 32, 40, 80, 114, 124, 155. See also Church of Ireland; Liturgy; Worship

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Books 35–36 burning of 135, 140, 157 commentaries 35 control over import of 35, 140 histories 35 influence of 179–80 printed sermons 35 publication of 167 See also Preaching; Publication Boran, Elizabethanne 16 Bottigheimer, Karl S. 12 Bridge, William (1600/01–1671; Independent and Fifth Monarchist minister and theologian) 71 Brightman, Thomas (1562–1607; Church of England clergyman and Presbyterian polemicist) 73 Bristol 47, 143, 152 Broadisland, county Antrim 112 Brown, Callum 61 Bruce, Robert (1554–1631; Church of Scotland minister and theologian) 137 Bunyan, John (bap. 1628, d. 1688; Baptist preacher and theologian) 64–65, 70, 206n68 Burgess, Anthony (d. 1664; Church of England clergyman and Presbyterian polemicist) 62 Burrill, Mary (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 73 Burrough, Edward (1633–63; Quaker preacher and theologian) 47, 135, 139, 142– 43 Bywater, John (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation and alleged Ranter) 47 Calvin, John (1509–64; French reformer and theologian) 133, 137, 154, 171. See also Calvinism Calvinism 8, 33, 95. See also John Calvin; Covenant theology Cambridge, University of 37, 57, 73, 145, 159, 205n51 Campion, Edmund (1540–81; English Jesuit and martyr) 133

Canny, Nicholas 10, 11, 24 Capp, Bernard 154 Carlow, county Carlow 26, 84 Carnmoney, county Antrim 107 Carrickfergus, county Antrim 5, 84–85, 97, 101, 110, 111, 146. See also Timothy Taylor Carteret, Philip (fl. 1650s; Cromwellian advocate general of Dublin) 85 Catechisms 112, 124, 125 in Gaelic 7, 32 See also Confessionalization; Reformation in Ireland Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism Catterwood, How (fl. 1656; errant Ulster Presbyterian) 100, 113, 127. See also Adultery; Anticlericalism; Marriage Cessationism. See Holy Spirit Chambers, Elizabeth (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 152–53, 232n63 Charlemount, county Armagh 26 Charles I (1600–1649; king of England, Scotland, and Ireland) 8, 22. See also Regicide Charnock, Stephen (1628–80; Independent minister and theologian) 114 Chester 47, 143 Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin 40, 57, 69, 90, 97, 144, 145, 148, 149 Christ Church Cathedral congregation 70, 74, 89, 150, 168 experience of division 5, 59 See also Thomas Patient; John Rogers; Samuel Winter Christenings. See Baptism of infants Church fabric 41– 42, 179 Church government 99–127, 152, 160, 175, 180. See also Associations; Denominations; Primitivism; Quakers; Seekers Church membership 80, 104, 112 immersed visible saints as church members 83 open membership principle 89

index possibility of infants as church members 75, 81, 104 and the ‘‘visible saints’’ principle 44– 45, 68, 75–76, 81, 104, 123–24 See also Baptism and church membership Church of England 48, 88 Cromwellian nostalgia for 42– 43 Church of Ireland 55, 103, 104, 106, 122, 144 Anglican clergy as household chaplains 46, 114 and native evangelism in the 1650s 32 Puritan character of 177 suppression under the Cromwellian regime 11, 29, 32, 126 See also Book of Common Prayer; Liturgy Church of Scotland 81. See also Presbyterianism in Ulster; Scotland; Westminster Assembly Circumcision 92 Civil List and Baptists 84–85, 87, 97, 213n64 and evangelism 32 instability of 115 organization and membership 113–18, 162 and pan-protestant orthodoxy 105 and radical theology 143 and ‘‘tiers’’ 15, 147 and Ulster Presbyterians 46, 102, 107, 110–11, 126 See also Associations; Cromwellian administration in Ireland; Dublin Convention (1658); Tithes; ‘‘Triers’’ Clarke, Aidan 13, 179 Clarkson, Lawrence [Laurence Claxton] (1615–67; Ranter polemicist) 166 Clerical salaries 46, 89, 113, 143, 179, 214n76 Clerical supply attempts at clerical recruitment 42, 105, 110, 113 attempts to recruit clergy from England 37 attempts to recruit clergy from New England 37, 83–84 and Baptists 85

269

decreasing supply in the earlier 1650s 31, 103– 4 increasing supply in the later 1650s 29 and Presbyterians 99, 101, 109 and Quakers 142 six preachers recruited by Parliament in 1650 57, 89 in the 1620s 8 in the 1640s 105 See also Itinerant preachers Clonmel, county Tipperary 26, 84–85, 135, 139, 201n232 Cloughwater, county Antrim 26 Coffey, John 16, 39, 102 Coleman, John (fl. 1654–58; Baptist preacher on the Civil List) 84, 120 Coleraine, county Derry 5 Communion seasons. See Eucharist Confederacy, Catholic 26 Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists (1644) 81–82, 83, 85, 88. See also Anabaptists; Baptists; Confessions of faith Confessional mainstream 63, 81, 104–5, 150. See also Irish Articles (1615); Savoy Declaration (1648); Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) Confessionalization 27, 112, 177. See also Catechisms; Confessions of faith; Irenicism; Reformation in Ireland; Toleration Confessions of faith 17. See also Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists (1644); Irish Articles (1615); Savoy Declaration (1648); Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) Connacht 6, 9, 10 Conversion assurance of 56, 71–72, 133 authenticity of 175, 180 debate about 55–78 and ecclesiology 56, 75–76, 104, 151–52

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Conversion (continued) experiences of 64–66, 70, 72–73, 145, 148, 156 and land redistribution 10 of protestants 35, 50 of Roman Catholics 10, 31, 32, 50, 175 theology of 60–62, 71–72, 177 See also Conversion narratives; Spirituality Conversion narratives 35, 56–57, 66–70, 168–70. See also Elizabeth Avery; Conversion; Laity; John Rogers; Spirituality Cook, Frances (d. c. 1659; married to John Cook) 156 Cook, John (bap. 1608, d. 1660; regicide lawyer and chief justice of Munster) and censorship 35 and conversion of English soldiers 31 and ecclesiastical controversy in Cork 119–20 and irenicism 126 and legal reform 41 and mysticism 138–39 religious opinions of 40, 42, 48– 49, 50, 52 and republicanism 17 and Thomas Patient 89 Cooke, Edward (fl. 1660; Quaker convert) 33–34 Cooke, Lucretia (fl. 1658; Quaker convert) 135, 157 Cooper, John (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 72 Cooper, William (fl. 1640–81; English Presbyterian minister) 21–24, 25 Corbett, Miles (1594/5–1662; politician and regicide) 27. See also Parliamentary Commissioners Cork, county Cork 5, 48 and the baptism debate 79–80, 84, 97 printing press 34–35 and the Quakers 141, 142 Triers in 115 Cork association the earliest recorded association 119

encouragement of lay piety 48 and Erastianism 39, 46, 117 as former Anglicans 29, 117, 121, 177 and hopes for national reformation 41, 122 links with English Presbyterians 38, 121–22 as ‘‘Old Protestants’’ 40, 45, 121 opposition to the Civil List 116, 125 opposition to the Dublin and Leinster association 121–23 and opposition to lay preaching 121, 138 and ordination 104, 121, 122 political influence 122 as reluctant Presbyterians 46, 48, 117, 121 See also Associations; Dublin and Leinster association; Dublin Convention (1658); Erastianism; ‘‘Old Protestants’’; Presbyterianism outside Ulster; Edward Worth Cotton, John (1585–1652; New England Independent minister and theologian) 37, 145, 160–61, 167 Covenant theology 81, 91–94, 132. See also Calvinism Coventry 47 Cox, Benjamin (bap. 1595, d. c. 1663; Particular Baptist preacher) 82 Crawford, Thomas (fl. 1654; Presbyterian minister in Ulster) 112 Crofton, Zachary (1626–72; English Presbyterian minister and theologian) biographical details 55–57 dismissive of mysticism 138, 145 dispute with John Rogers 38, 60, 73–77, 153–54, 171–73 and the Ranters 47 and the role of women 153–54 theology of conversion 62 Cromwell, Henry (1628–74; lord lieutenant of Ireland) conservatism 35, 97, 122 his ecclesiological allegiances 122, 126 and Edward Worth 38, 119, 120 and the end of Baptist political power 97, 119

index independence from London 10, 28, 35 and ‘‘Old Protestants’’ 40, 45, 119, 120, 176 opposition to Baptists 85 opposition to Quakers 140, 142– 43, 158 and pan-protestant unity 45, 81, 120 and Samuel Winter 149 and Samuel Winter’s baptism of his son 149 and the toleration of protestant sects 41, 43, 45 and the toleration of Roman Catholics, 28, 33 and Ulster Presbyterians 107 See also Cromwellian administration in Ireland; Toleration Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658; lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland) and the government of Ireland 28 invasion of Ireland 25–26 as lord protector 87, 90, 106 and protestant sects in Ireland 51 and providentialism 26 and reformation in Ireland 180 and the threat of the native populations 6 See also Cromwellian administration in Ireland; Toleration Cromwellian administration in Ireland army arrears of pay 10, 28 civil government 27–28 destruction of the record books in 1922 12, 16 ecclesiastical policies 10, 17, 26, 27, 113 economic duress 122 end of the Protectorate 13 evangelistic efforts 31–32, 52 growing breach between associations and the state 118 growing conservatism 34, 38, 47, 97, 120, 143– 44, 149 independence from London 17 military campaign 21–27

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opposition to the military campaign 23–24 redistribution of land 9–10, 17, 31 and the war against Antichrist 4 See also Civil List; Henry Cromwell; Charles Fleetwood; Parliamentary Commissioners; Transplantation schemes Crisp, Tobias (1600–1643; Church of England clergyman and antinomian polemicist) 71 Cull, John (fl. 1653; Kildare minister) 115 Culverwell, Ezekiel (c. 1554–1631; Church of England clergyman and theologian) 71 Daniel, Godfrey (fl. 1652; Church of Ireland clergyman and theologian) 7, 26, 32. See also William Bedell; Bible; Gaelic language Davidson, John (c. 1549–1604; Church of Scotland minister) 137 Denominational structures consolidation of 37–38, 86, 175–76 distinctive doctrines 44– 46 emergence of 29 enduring shape of 180 theological variety across 40, 80–81 See also Denominations Denominations differing levels of interest in native evangelism 32–33 and the failure of the Cromwellian reformation 4, 14, 19, 29 and protestant irenicism 14, 42 See also Associations; Baptists; Denominational structures; Independency; Presbyterianism; Quakers; Seekers Derry, county 111 Derryaghy, county Antrim 84, 102 Dingle, county Kerry 85 Dix, William (fl. 1653–fl. 1670s; Baptist preacher on the Civil List) 84, 103 Donegal, county 26, 111

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Dort, Synod of 83, 161 Douglas, John (fl. 1654; Presbyterian minister in Ulster) 112 Down, county 111 Drogheda, county Louth 5, 142 Cromwellian siege of 25 Drumabo, county Down 102 Dublin 5, 22, 41, 48, 55 and Baptists 84–85, 86, 87 civil administration 6, 107, 114 Dublin Castle 95 as a focus of reformation activity 29, 31, 89 as a focus of theological strife 44, 47, 50, 57 John Rogers’s ministry in 4 population of 9, 28 printing press 34 and Quakers 141 Dublin and Leinster association 123–26 and the Civil List 116, 125 ecumenical ambitions 104, 118, 123, 125, 145 and heresy 50–51, 116, 149 membership 39 and ordination 124 and Presbyterianism 117 and the Savoy Declaration 117, 122, 124 See also Associations; Confessions of faith; Dublin Convention (1658); Erastianism Dublin Convention (1658) 121–22. See also Civil List; Cork association; Dublin and Leinster association; Tithes; Winter; Worth Dundalk, county Louth 5 Dunlop, Robert 12, 16 Eclecticism, theological and antiformalism 104 and Baptists 85 and clerical control 101 and conservatism 18, 47, 148 and denominational fluidity 80–81, 148 and historiography 62

and mysticism 145, 148, 150, 177 See also Antiformalism; Samuel Winter Ecumenism. See Irenicism Edmundson, William (1627–1712; Quaker merchant and missionary) 141 Edwards, Jonathan (1703–58; New England Congregational minister, theologian and philosopher) 61–62, 78 Edwards, Margaret (d. 1651) 129–32, 140, 146, 150 Edwards, Thomas (c. 1599–1648; Church of England minister and Presbyterian polemicist) 23, 81–82, 88, 96, 135 Eliot, John (1604–90; New England Congregational minister and missionary) 37, 69 Elizabeth I (1533–1603; Queen of England and Ireland) 7, 58, 154 Emerson, Ruth (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 73 Emett, Dorothy (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 73 England 9, 86, 105, 121 English conquest of Ireland 5 Enlightenment 60–62 Episcopalianism. See Church of England; Church of Ireland Erastianism 51, 116, 149. See also Church of Ireland; Cork association; Dublin and Leinster association Eschatology the Beast 22 and the conquest of Ireland 22 eschatological rhetoric 3, 22, 24, 30, 88, 168, 177 the False Prophet 22 millennialism 23, 57–60, 73–74, 76, 82, 86, 95, 159, 164, 168 as the second coming 86, 125 1650s as the latter days 41, 156, 162, 166 the Whore of Babylon 24 and women’s ministry 156 See also Antichrist Eschatology, realized. See Mysticism Essex association 118. See also Associations Ethnic conflict 4, 33

index Eucharist judgment for neglect of 52 and the millennium 164 mixed communion fellowships 57, 89, 96 as a new covenant ordinance 92 and nostalgia for Anglicanism 148 and the participation of women 155 and Presbyterian ‘‘communion seasons’’ 106 and Quakers 157 and ‘‘visible saints’’ ecclesiology 44 See also Liturgy; Worship Evangelicalism 60–62, 180 Evans, Arise (b. c. 1607, d. c. 1660; Welsh prophet) 48 Extraordinary revelations. See Mysticism Familism 51, 116, 149. See also Heresy Farr, David 170 Fell, Margaret (1614–1702; Quaker missionary) 142 Ferguson, David (b. c. 1533, d. 1598; Church of Scotland minister and theologian) 137 Fifth Monarchism and Baptists 213n68 and conversion 62 and Edward Warren 216n122 and Elizabeth Avery 162, 170, 232n44 and John Rogers 57, 59, 71, 74 and protestant disunity 95 and women 154 Flavel, John (bap. 1630, d. 1691; Presbyterian minister and theologian) 62 Fleetwood, Charles (c. 1618–92; Lord Fleetwood) biographical details 27–28 hostility to Presbyterians in Ulster 109 influence of Baptists on his administration 44– 45, 122, 147 and Samuel Winter 147, 175, 177 sympathy for Baptists 84, 97 See also Army; Baptists; Cromwellian administration in Ireland;

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Parliamentary Commissioners; Transplantation scheme Fletcher, Elizabeth (1638?–58; Quaker missionary) 141, 157 Ford, Alan 16 Fox, George (1624–91; founder of the Quakers) 164–65. See also Quakers; Seekers Foxe, John (1516/17–87; English protestant martyrologist) 154 France 26 Franeker, University of 161 Gaelic language 5–6 publishing 7, 32 See also William Bedell; Godfrey Daniel Galway 5 Cromwellian capture of 26 religious environment of 31, 84, 85 Gardiner, S. R. 12–13 Gataker, Thomas (1574–1654; Church of England clergyman and theologian) 168 Geography of theological debates in Ireland 178 Ghosts 107. See also Mysticism Gilbert, Claudius (d. 1696?; Church of Ireland minister and theologian) and anonymous leafleting 36 and associational change 117 and baptism 56, 88, 97 and Calvinism 63 and eschatology 41 and extraordinary revelation 135 and the failure of the reformation 176, 178, 181 his publications 34 and irenicism 126–27 and the project of reformation 41 and Quakers 47, 157 and state support for ecclesiastical controls 118 Gillespie, George (1613– 48; Church of Scotland minister and theologian) 116, 137 Gillespie, Raymond 14, 70

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Glasgow, University of 112 Glenarm, county Antrim 109 Goodwin, John (c. 1594–1665; English Independent minister and theologian) 161 Goodwin, Thomas (1600–1680; English Independent minister and theologian) and conversion 65–66, 67–68 and the Holy Spirit 132, 134 and John Rogers 71 Gostelo [Gorstelow], Walter (bap. 1604, d. 1662?; Royalist prophet and pamphleteer) and the disrepair of church fabric 41– 42 and his opposition to heresy 51, 84 as a Royalist 17, 48 Gowran, county Kilkenny 85 Greaves, Richard L. 14, 102 Greenblatt, Stephen 66 Halhead, Miles (fl. 1654–c. 1670; Quaker missionary) 141 Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. 108 Harding, John (fl. 1636–64; Church of Ireland clergyman and vice-provost of Trinity College, Dublin) 79–80, 119, 210n3 Harrison, Thomas (1617/18–82; Independent minister and theologian) 37, 50, 52, 140, 143 Hartlib circle in Ireland 85, 179 Hebraic learning 73 Hell 73. See also Heresy Henry VIII (1491–1547; King of England and Ireland) 5 Heresy debates about the Holy Spirit’s activities 104 denial of hell 51, 166 denial of the personality of the Holy Spirit 96 denial of the resurrection 165 denial of the Sabbath 30 and the Dublin and Leinster association 116, 125

as a Jesuit plot 52 and the practice of infant baptism 51, 92 and primitivism 50 and prophetic authenticity 137 and the rejection of infant baptism 30 and Quakers 157 See also Anticlericalism; Antiformalism; Antinomianism; Anti-Trinitarianism; Arianism; Arminianism; Atheism; Elizabeth Avery; Familism; Seekers Hewson, Anne (fl. 1653; married to John Hewson) 71 Hewson, John (fl. 1630–60; Lord Hewson, regicide, military officer, and politician) 31, 56, 72, 89–90, 144, 148 Hill, Christopher 18 Hindmarsh, Bruce 61 Historiography intellectual history 13 ‘‘New British History’’ 12–13 new religious history 13–14, 190n92 Hobson, Paul (d. 1666; Particular Baptist minister) 166, 168 Hodden, Richard (d. 1684?; Quaker and governor of Kinsale) 41, 142, 158 Holy Spirit 132– 40, 156, 159, 224n25. See also Anti-Trinitarianism Holy wells 6, 108 Howgil, Francis (1618?–69; Quaker preacher) 140, 142– 43, 157 Huggins, Thomas (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 76 Hull 145 Human sacrifice 82 Hunt, John (fl. 1653–fl. 1655; Baptist preacher on the Civil List) 84–85 Huntingdonshire 82 Huss, John (c. 1370–1415; Czech theologian) 137 Hynam, Henry (fl. 1660; Particular Baptist minister) 90 Hynes, Sandra 14 Independency conservative Independents 40

index Independent ministers before the Civil List 4 and John Murcot 79 and John Rogers 56, 57 and millennial expectation 58, 164 and native evangelism 32 opposition to a national church 118, 103 and political influence 45– 46, 122 theology of 44, 102, 131, 144 and Trinity College, Dublin 146 See also Associations; Civil List; Denominations Ireland civil wars of the 1640s 5 economic development 5, 9, 28 population of 5 Irenicism 4, 10, 14, 23, 102– 4, 126. See also Toleration Ireton, Henry (bap. 1611, d. 1651; regicide and military officer) 11, 26, 28, 40, 52 Irish Articles (1615) 8, 17, 91. See also Confessions of faith Islam 60, 76 Itinerant preachers 109. See also Clerical supply; Preaching; Quakers Jenner, Thomas (b. 1606/7, d. c. 1676; Independent minister and theologian) 146 Jeremiad 29, 52, 55, 86, 99 Jesuits 52, 133. See also Roman Catholicism Jones, Henry (1605–82; Church of Ireland bishop of Meath, Cromwellian Scoutmaster-General and state historian) 72 Jones, John (c. 1597–1660; military officer and regicide) the miraculous healing of his wife 129–32 as a Parliamentary Commissioner 27 and spiritual conditions in Dublin 158 and spiritual decline in the army 30 and theological debate 52 and Thomas Patient 89 See also Parliamentary Commissioners Jones, Michael (1606/10– 49; military officer) 21, 25–26, 107

275

Jones, Theophilus (d. 1685; Parliamentarian military officer) 25–26 Jordan, W. K. 102 Kelsal, Tabitha (fl. 1653; member of Rogers’s congregation) 168 Kennedy, Anthony (fl. 1654; Civil List and Presbyterian minister in Ulster) 45– 46 Kiffin, William (1616–1701; Particular Baptist minister and theologian) 88–90, 163 Kildare, county Kildare 41, 115 Kilkenny, county Kilkenny 5, 84–85, 86, 87, 109, 129 Cromwellian capture of 26 Kilroy, Phil 14, 91 Kinsale, county Cork 5, 41, 48, 84, 138, 142, 157 Knight, James (fl. 1654–58; Baptist preacher on the Civil List) 85 Knollys, Hanserd (1598–1691; Particular Baptist minister and theologian) 81 Knox, John (c. 1514–72; Scottish reformer and theologian) 137, 154 Ladyman, Samuel (1625/6–84; Church of Ireland clergyman) 135 Laggan presbytery 107, 110, 111. See also Ulster Presbyterians Laity Civil List disempowered laity 105 lay participation in worship 15, 75–76 lay piety and Bible reading 17, 48, 49, 60, 62, 103– 4 lay preachers 29, 34, 50, 51, 117 and theological debate 19 See also Anticlericalism; Anti-formalism; Conversion narratives; Ordination Lake, Peter 18 Lambert, John (bap. 1619, d. 1684; military officer and politician) 27, 162–63 Lancaster, James (fl. 1654; Quaker missionary) 141 Laud, William (1573–1645; archbishop of Canterbury) 21. See also Laudianism

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Laudianism 55, 71, 80, 148. See also Arminianism; Laud, William Lawlor, Hugh Jackson 149 Lawrence, Richard (fl. 1643–84; military offer and Baptist polemicist) 85, 87 Le Hunt, Richard (fl. 1644–fl. c. 1655; military offer and Baptist) 85 Leiden 160 Leinster 31 Lenihan, Pa´draig 11 Levellers involvement in the Irish campaign 10 opposition to the Irish campaign 23–24 Limerick 5 and the Baptists 84–85, 97 Cromwellian capture of 26 Quaker activity in 36, 141 Linsnegarvy, county Antrim 47 Lisburn, county Down 51, 111 Lismore, county Waterford 41 Little, Patrick 13 Liturgy Book of Common Prayer translated into Gaelic 7, 32 and the Directory for Public Worship 99 and fasting 106 liturgical sites 106 and reformation 40, 80, 160 See also Book of Common Prayer; Westminster Directory for Public Worship; Worship Livingston, Henry (fl. 1657; Scottish Presbyterian minister in Ulster) 102–3 Livingston, John (1603–72; Scottish Presbyterian minister in Ulster) 102–3, 122 Llwyd, Morgan (1619–59; Independent minister and mystic) 131–32 Loewenstein, David 66 London 57, 60, 77, 81–82, 86–87, 88, 110 Londonderry, county Derry 5, 141 Lucan, county Dublin 108

Ludlow, Edmund (1616/17–92; military officer and regicide) 27. See also Parliamentary Commissioners Lurgan, county Armagh 141 Luther, Martin (1483–1546; German reformer and theologian) 137 Macinnes, Allan 13 Mack, Phyllis 170 Manwaring, Andrew (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 71 Marriage 100–102, 117, 162, 217n12. See also Adultery; Bigamy Marrow, Elizabeth (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 71 Marsden, George 63 Marshall, Stephen (1594/5–1655; Church of England clergyman and Independent polemicist) 38, 88 Maryborough, Queen’s county 85 Mather, Cotton (1663–1728; New England Congregational minister and theologian) 161 Mather, Increase (1639–1723; New England Congregational minister and theologian) 37 Mather, Samuel (1626–71; Independent minister and academic) 37, 114, 126, 146 Maynooth, county Kildare 32 McClelland, John (fl. 1650s; Ulster Presbyterian minister) 138 McKenny, Kevin 12 Mede, Joseph (1586–1638; Cambridge academic) 73 Miller, Perry 16 Mils, Humphrey (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 71 Milton, John (1608–74; poet and polemicist) 155, 166 and the 1641 rising 9 Miracles 129–32. See also Mysticism Monro, George (d. 1694; military officer) 45, 109 Morford, Thomas (fl. 1659; Quaker preacher) 51, 139

index Morrill, John 18, 24 Morris, William (fl. 1659; military officer, Baptist elder, and Quaker convert) 44, 141 Muggletonians 47. See also Mysticism Mullan, David George 16, 155 Munster 31, 80, 126, 138, 142 Murcot, John (1624/5–54; Independent minister) and the authenticity of conversions 31 and the baptism debate 79–80, 97, 98 and irenicism 127 and the magistrate’s support for reformation 119 preaching in Christ Church Cathedral 148 as a ‘‘trier’’ 43, 114 Music. See Worship Mysticism as a challenge to orthodoxy 78, 95, 157, 175, 180 claims for the status of prophet 29, 48, 49 and conservative theology 17, 18, 40– 41, 76, 104, 129–50, 167, 170 and demon possession 47 and miracles 56, 72–73, 8 and visionary experiences 59, 72–73 and women’s experience 155, 164, 169 See also Elizabeth Avery; Eclecticism; Miracles; Muggletonians; Quakers; Ranters; Spirituality; Superstition Naas, county Kildare 90 National Covenant (1638) 6. See also Presbyterianism; Solemn League and Covenant (1643) Native populations Anglo-Irish 6 hostility to protestant reformation 5, 55 New English 6–7, 36 Old Irish 5–6 responses to Cromwellian interlude 18 and Roman Catholicism 4–6 their religious needs overlooked 31, 178

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Naylor, James (1618–60; Quaker preacher and polemicist) 141 New England 57, 88, 105, 108 New Ross, county Wexford 26, 83 Newbury, MA 161 Newcastle-under-Lyme 55 Noyse, James (fl. 1634; New England Presbyterian minister) 167 Nuttall, Geoffrey 39, 133 ´ hAnnracha´in, Tadhg 11 O ´ Siochru´, Michea´l 11, 13 O O’Hara, David 12 Ohlmeyer, Jane 11, 13 ‘‘Old Protestants’’ 121–22. See also Cork association; Presbyterianism in Ulster O’Neill, Hugh Dubh (1611–60; Confederate military officer) 26 O’Quinn, Jeremiah (fl. 1651; Presbyterian minister and convert from Catholicism) 31, 33 Ordination 104, 117, 120–21, 124. See also Anticlericalism; Cork association; Laity Ormond, first duke of, James Butler (1610–88; lord lieutenant of Ireland) 21–27 Owen, John (1616–83; Independent minister and theologian) and the appointment of Samuel Winter as provost of Trinity College 146 and clerical recruitment 40 and conversion 62 fears that heretical preachers could find work in Ireland 37, 47 his ministry in Dublin 71 and the possibility of the extraordinary 135, 224n25 in recent research 17 sermon before Parliament 28–29 Oxford, University of 79, 161 Pacheco, Anita 67 Pale 6–7 and Counter-Reformation 8 See also counties Dublin, Kildare, Louth and Meath

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Parker, Robert (c. 1564–1614; Church of England clergyman and Independent polemicist) 160–62, 168 Parker, Thomas (1595–1677; New England Presbyterian minister) 161, 166–68 Parliament, London 6, 25, 28–29, 57, 80 Long Parliament 110 Parliamentary Commissioners chaplains of the 89, 145, 147 and concern about the Ulster Scots 109 membership 27–28 and religious duty 27–28, 103– 4, 105, 108, 124 as ‘‘triers’’ for the Civil List 114–15 See also Miles Corbett; Cromwellian administration in Ireland; Charles Fleetwood; John Jones; Edmund Ludlow; John Weaver Parsons, Joseph (fl. 1659; Arminian preacher) 51 Patient, Thomas (d. 1666; Particular Baptist preacher and polemicist) biographical details 37, 85, 87, 88–91, 114 financed by the Civil List 37, 214n76 lack of ordination 50, 115, 118 opposition to infant baptism 37, 41 and toleration of protestant sects 43, 95, 141 victory over John Rogers 59–60, 148 Perkins, William (1558–1602; Church of England clergyman and puritan theologian) 32, 62, 64, 206n68 Persecution 4 Peter [Peters], Hugh (bap. 1598, d. 1660; Independent minister and polemicist) 25 Petto, Samuel (c. 1624–1711; Independent minister and theologian) 65, 69 Petty, Sir William (1623–87; natural philosopher and administrator) 5 Phaire [Phayre], Robert (1618/19–82; military officer and governor of Cork) 142 Piety 6, 27, 52, 103– 4. See also Mysticism; Worship Pirates 79

Plague 28, 52, 106, 146, 172 Plantation schemes 6, 7, 10, 33 Pneumatology. See Holy Spirit Pool, Margaret (fl. 1656; errant Ulster Presbyterian) 100 Powell, Vavasor (1617–70; Independent minister and Fifth Monarchist polemicist) 69 Preaching church control of 111 and clerical recruitment 27, 103, 105 and conversions of natives 31, 32 and conversions of protestants 35, 103 importance of 179–80 and the military campaign 21–24, 28–29 as a new covenant ordinance 92 state control of 110 style of 15, 152 and theological controversy 30 See also Bible; Books; Itinerant preachers; Laity; Worship Prendergast, John P. 12, 24 Presbyterianism in Ulster 99–127 and church discipline 112–13 and the Church of Scotland 38, 110, 178 and the Civil List 46, 107 and clerical supply 110 and clerical training 112 and the Engagement 109–10 as an ethnic group 6 expansion of 111 and native populations 31, 32–33 and ‘‘Old Protestants’’ 121 and political influence 122, 126 remonstrants 110–11, 178 resolutioners 110, 178 and Royalism 45 and social control 26, 29–30, 33, 39, 99–127 and the Solemn League and Covenant 40 their persecution by Cromwellians 45, 110, 111 and toleration 43, 101, 112

index See also Antrim ministers; Church of Scotland; Laggan presbytery; ‘‘Old Protestants’’; Presbyterianism outside Ulster; Route presbytery; Solemn League and Covenant (1643) Presbyterianism outside Ulster and conversion narratives 56 and the Cromwellian army 4 in Dublin 85 and Henry Cromwell 122, 126 independent of state support 29 and John Rogers 57 and native evangelism 32 and New England 161 and Royalism 6, 7, 45 and theological confluence 102 and theological confusion 44, 85 and Zachary Crofton 73–77 See also Cork association; Presbyterianism in Ulster Preston, John (1587–1628; Church of England clergyman and puritan theologian) 62, 65 Primitivism 49–50, 74, 76–77, 159–60. See also Anticlericalism; Anti-formalism; Laity; Mysticism; Restorationism Prophecy. See Mysticism Protectorate 111. See also Henry Cromwell; Oliver Cromwell Providentialism 22, 25–27, 30, 52 Publication 34, 167 printing presses 34–35 See also Bible; Book of Common Prayer; Books; Gaelic language Puritanism 3, 18, 60, 71, 77–78, 142, 176 as a difficult term 39– 40, 45 See also Puritans; Taxonomy Puritans and Cromwellians in Ireland 3, 18, 142, 176 in England 8 in Scotland 8, 16 See also Puritanism Purleigh, Essex 57

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Quakers and the Baptists 97 and church government 103– 4 conversion from Quakerism 172 conversion to Quakerism 156 cooperation between 39 history of growth 141– 43 and the hostility of protestant sects 43, 47, 51, 89, 116, 140, 149 hostility toward the native populations 26 imprisonment of 140, 172 opposition of the administration 47, 140, 142 opposition to protestant sects 49, 95 and public protest against the theological mainstream 46– 47 and publication 36 and realized eschatology 148 targeting soldiers 30 and theological confusion 44, 138 unusual behavior by 135, 138, 157–58 See also Anticlericalism; Antiformalism; George Fox; Heresy; Mysticism; Seekers Rainsborough [Rainborow], Thomas (d. 1648; military officer, adventurer, and Leveller leader) 10 Ranters 47, 89, 95, 97, 142. See also Mysticism; Quakers; Seekers Rathmines, county Dublin 107 Reading, activity of 34–35. See also Books; Publication Reformation in Ireland administrative reform 42 Counter-Reformation 6, 8 Cromwellian attempts at reformation 3, 5, 27, 31, 178 evangelization of the natives 31, 43, 178 failure of the protestant reformation 9, 11, 19, 29 and Gaelic language 7–8 indigenization of religion 150, 178 legal reformation 41

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Reformation in Ireland (continued) reformation of manners 41 and religious polarization 7, 90 religious publications 30 Stuart attempts at reformation 7 Tudor attempts at reformation 5 See also Catechisms; Confessionalization Regicide 7, 17, 22, 56. See also Charles I; Republicanism Reilly, Tom 13 Republicanism and the Baptists 84, 87 and Edward Warren 95 and the Parliamentarians 6 Republican theory 17 See also Regicide; Royalism Restoration (1660) 13, 14, 95, 107, 177, 179–80 Restorationism 58, 74. See also Church government; Primitivism Richardson, R. C. 11 Richardson, Samuel (fl. 1637–58; Particular Baptist polemicist) 82 Rising, 1641 9, 21, 42, 55, 70, 152 as a justification of Cromwellian violence 23, 25 See also Violence Rogers, John (c. 1570–1636; Church of England clergyman) 71 Rogers, John (c. 1627–65; Independent minister and Fifth Monarchist theologian) and assurance of conversion 134 and conversion 62–63, 69 debate with Zachary Crofton 38, 66, 70–73, 74 and Dublin 77 and the ecclesiastical role of women 156 and heresy 19, 181 his account of his own conversion 70, 206n68 his assessment of his Dublin ministry 4, 50, 51, 158–60 his claim for prophetic status 139 his opposition to Baptists 44

and lay participation in worship 15 and millennialism 57–60 open communion ecclesiology 40, 59–60 as a theologian 48, 161 and toleration 43, 159 See also Christ Church Cathedral congregation; Conversion narratives Rogers, Nehemiah (bap. 1594, d. 1660; Church of England clergyman) 71 Roman Catholicism 3 Counter-Reformation 6 ‘‘the Graces’’ 8 pre-Tridentine Catholicism of the Old Irish 5 See also Anti-Catholicism; Jesuits Route presbytery 110, 111. See also Presbyterianism in Ulster Royalism and the English civil war 79 and land redistribution 10–11, 17 and the Munster clergy 126 and Ormond 21 and Presbyterianism 6, 109, 113 and prophecy 17, 48 Royalist army 21–27 See also Presbyterianism in Ulster; Republicanism; Solemn League and Covenant (1643) Rutherford, Samuel (1600–1661; Scottish Presbyterian minister and theologian) 62, 82, 94, 135, 137 Sacrilege 82. See also Heresy; Worship St. Audeon’s Church, Dublin 157 St. Katherine’s Church, Dublin 152 St. Nicholas’s Church, Dublin 145, 146, 158. See also Samuel Winter St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin 40, 84 Saltmarsh, John (c. 1612– 47; Church of England clergyman and antinomian polemicist) 166 Sankey, Sir Jerome (c. 1620–85; administrator and politician) 14, 40, 85 Satan 30

index Savoy Declaration (1658) 68, 91, 122, 123, 124, 126. See also Confessions of faith Scholasticism, protestant 16–17, 133, 136, 138 Scotland and the Baptists 86 and clerical recruitment 105 dangerous proximity of 109 Highland clans 5–6, 32 population of 5 and Presbyterian education 112 See also Church of Scotland; Presbyterianism in Ulster Second book of discipline (1578) 137 Seekers 43, 51, 97, 103– 4, 116, 149, 165, 172. See also Anticlericalism; Antiformalism; Elizabeth Avery; George Fox; Heresy Seymour, St. John D. 12, 14, 16, 47, 119 Shaw, James (fl. 1672; Presbyterian minister in Carnmoney) 107 Shepherd, Thomas (1605– 49; Congregational minister and theologian) 62 Sibbes, Richard (1577?–1635; Church of England clergyman and puritan theologian) 42, 62, 71, 134, 171 Sicklemore, James (fl. 1657; Quaker convert) 49, 143– 44, 157 Simson, Gilbert (fl. 1654; Presbyterian minister in Ulster) 112 Smith, Elizabeth (fl. 1656; Quaker missionary) 141, 157 Smith, John (1618–52; philosopher) 62 Solemn League and Covenant (1643) 6, 39, 56, 94, 100, 101–2, 116. See also Church of Scotland; National Covenant (1638); Presbyterianism in Ulster; Royalism Spenser, Edmund (1552?–99; poet and administrator) 6, 10 Spilman, John (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 71 Spirituality of children in New England 37 and claims to prophecy 48

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and eschatology 77 and the extraordinary 56 and fasting 106–7 and gender 152, 154 and the Holy Spirit 133–34 of the laity 17, 63–64 and Puritanism 63–64, 133–34, 224n25 and the radical sects 47, 154 See also Conversion; Conversion narratives; Laity; Mysticism Stachniewski, John 67 Stearne, John (1624–69; physician and academic) 146 Stephens, John (fl. 1655; Dublin schoolmaster) 15 Stevenson, David 13 Stoddard, Solomon (1643–1729; New England Congregational minister and theologian) 62 Superstition 6. See also Holy wells; Mysticism; Piety Sydenham, Cuthbert (bap. 1623, d. 1654; Independent minister and polemicist) 38, 88 Tallaght, county Dublin 41 Tandy, Philip (fl. 1658; Seventh-day Baptist preacher) 51 Taylor, Jeremy (bap. 1613, d. 1667; Church of Ireland bishop of Down and Connor) 46, 114 Taylor, Timothy (fl. 1650s; Independent minister) 97, 101, 146. See also Carrickfergus Taxonomy 39, 48, 176. See also Puritanism Templepatrick, county Antrim 33, 111, 112 Thomason, George (c. 1602–66; bookseller and collector) 69 Thomson, George (bap. 1607, d. 1691; adventurer and Fifth Monarchist) 10 Thurloe, John (bap. 1616, d. 1688; government official) 90, 143 Tillinghast, John (bap. 1604, d. 1655; Fifth Monarchist) 31

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Tipperary, county 109 Tithes 28, 46, 113, 120, 122, 143– 44. See also Civil List; Dublin Convention (1658) Toleration and Baptists and Quakers 36 and Henry Cromwell 10, 34, 41 and the Levellers 23–24 and Oliver Cromwell 83–84 and the Parliamentary Commissioners 83–84 and Roger Williams 166 and Roman Catholics 8, 23–24 See also Henry Cromwell; Oliver Cromwell; Irenicism; Roger Williams Transplantation scheme and the Baptists 44 and protestant Royalists 11 and Roman Catholics 12, 17, 31, 44, 175 and Ulster Presbyterians 109–10, 111 See also Anti-Catholicism; Cromwellian administration in Ireland; Charles Fleetwood; Presbyterianism in Ulster; Violence ‘‘Triers’’ 15, 89, 105, 113–15, 146– 47. See also Civil List; Samuel Winter Trinity College, Dublin and Gaelic language training 32 and James Ussher 94–95, 161 and Jerome Sankey 85 and John Harding 79 maintenance of 40 and the proposed second college 40, 210n3 and protestant theological training 8 and Samuel Mather 37 and Samuel Winter 37, 144, 145, 146 and Zachary Crofton 38, 55 Trueman, Carl 16 Turner, Robert (fl. 1659; Quaker missionary) 144 Twisse, William (1577/8–1646; Church of England minister and puritan theologian) 71, 161, 168, 233n72 Tyrone, county 111

Union, Act of 27 Ussher, James (1581–1656; Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh) extended family of 21, 146 and historiography 16 and the Irish Articles 8 and the puritan tradition 134 and Trinity College, Dublin 94–95, 161 See also Church of Ireland; Irish Articles (1615); Trinity College, Dublin Van Dixhoorn, Chad B. 16 Venables, Robert (1612/3–87; military officer) 25 Vernon, John (d. 1667; military officer and Baptist and Fifth Monarchist polemicist) 87, 89 Violence as ethnic cleansing 24 and the military campaign 4, 12, 18 and Presbyterianism 102–3, 109–10 and the 1641 rebellion 23, 70 See also Rising, 1641; Transplantation Wales 9, 86, 131 Walker, Henry (fl. 1638–60; preacher and journalist) 69 Walsham, Alexandra 132 Warfield, B. B. (1851–1921; Princeton Theological Seminary theologian) 133 Warren, Edward (fl. 1603–fl. 1626; Church of Ireland dean of Ossory) 94 Warren, Edward (d. 1663; military officer and Presbyterian polemicist) and anticlericalism 49–50, 52 and the Baptists 44, 94–96, 115–16, 156 and church history 4, 5 and the limits of toleration 41, 43 and mysticism 140 Waterford 5 and the Baptists 59–60, 84, 85, 86–87, 89–90 and the Presbyterians 109 printing press 34 and Quakers 47

index Wayman, Edward (fl. 1653; member of John Rogers’s congregation) 73 Weaver, Elizabeth (fl. 1652; married to Samuel Winter) 131–32, 145, 156–57 Weaver, John (fl. 1631–84; politician and administrator) 27, 132, 148, 157. See also Parliamentary Commissioners Welsh, John (1568/9–1622; Church of Scotland minister and theologian) 137 Weir, James (fl. 1654–fl. 1655; errant Ulster Presbyterian) 112 Wentworth, Thomas (1593–1641; first earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant of Ireland) 9, 80 Westminster Assembly and the Civil List 113 and the confessional mainstream 39, 50, 57, 76, 88, 92, 101, 136 and the Cork association 121 and the Dublin and Leinster association 149 as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy 59 and Scottish Presbyterians 81–82 and theological division 17 and Thomas Baylie 161 See also Westminster Confession of Faith (1647); Westminster Directory for Public Worship (1647); Westminster shorter and longer catechisms Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) and assurance of conversion 66 and the confessional mainstream 39– 40 and the Cork association 39– 40, 117 and covenant theology 91 and the Dublin and Leinster association 39– 40, 124, 125, 149 and the duties of the civil magistrate 113 and extraordinary revelation 72, 135–36 See also Catechisms; Confessions of faith; Westminster Assembly; Westminster Directory for Public Worship (1647); Westminster shorter and longer catechisms Westminster Directory for Public Worship (1647) 15, 40, 80, 99–100, 107, 124, 155. See also Book of Common Prayer;

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Liturgy; Westminster Assembly; Worship Westminster shorter and longer catechisms 149. See also Catechisms; Westminster Assembly Wexford 5, 26, 48, 85, 87, 138 Wheeler, James Scott 13 Williams, Roger (1603–84; Baptist polemicist) 166 Wilsby, William (fl. 1654–fl. 1655; Baptist preacher on the Civil List) 85 Winter, Samuel (1603–66; Independent preacher, provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and theologian) and the baptism debate 88, 97, 118 biographical details 144–50 and the Civil List 116 clerical network 37 criticism of Baptists 50 and the curriculum 32 and denominational preferences 48, 144 and Elizabeth Weaver 129–32, 156 and the evangelization of the native Irish 43 and the first association 118 and the fulfillment of prophecy 29–30, 175–76, 177–78, 181 and Henry Cromwell’s administration 45, 122 and mysticism 40, 129–32, 134, 138, 141, 144–50 as a pastor 85, 158, 172 and preaching 35, 79, 114 See also Dublin and Leinster association; Dublin Convention (1658); Eclecticism; ‘‘Triers’’ Wishart, George (c. 1513– 46; Scottish reformer and martyr) 137 Witchcraft 47, 140. See also Ghosts; Mysticism; Superstition Women 151–73, 181 and the danger of public emotionalism 151 opportunities in public worship 56–57, 59, 149 and radical religion 154–56, 157

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Women (continued) and spirituality 154 See also Elizabeth Avery Wood, James (fl. 1655–fl. 1657; Civil List minister) 15, 120, 143– 44, 157 Woolrych, Austin 8 Worship, public 15, 157 calendar 106–8 churching of new mothers 149, 150, 155 and the Cromwellian military campaign 25 fasting 38, 52, 86, 99–100, 102, 105–9 prayer 25, 52, 129–32, 148, 157, 167 Sabbath observance 52, 99, 108, 119, 125, 157 singing 15, 120, 144 See also Baptism; Bible; Book of Common Prayer; Eucharist; Liturgy; Preaching; Sacrilege; Tithes; Westminster Directory for Public Worship (1647) Worth, Edward (c. 1620–69; Church of Ireland bishop of Killaloe)

and anticlericalism 30, 50–51 and the baptism debate 79–80, 88, 97, 119 and English Presbyterians 122 and Episcopacy 120–21 and extraordinary revelation 136, 164 and his wife 156–57 and political power in Cork 119 representative of Henry Cromwell to English universities 38 and the second college in Dublin 210n3 and Ulster Presbyterians 122 See also Cork association; Dublin Convention (1658) Wrenbury, Cheshire 55 Wycliffe, John (c. 1320–84; English theologian and Bible translator) 137 Wyke, Andrew (fl. 1651; Civil List minister) 47 York 145 Youghall, county Cork 5, 48, 80, 141, 143– 44, 157