[H]e hath often gone upon Crutches unto the Congregation of his own people … scarce able to get into the Pulpit, and his Friends with much difficulty holp him out of the Church homewards … Many times these were his words, If I could but preach, I should be much better; and he would rejoyce with cheerfulness and thankfulness, when in the times of his weakness he found not himself more distempered by his preaching, and would mention such experiences, as arguments to move; and induce his friends to yeeld to his preaching when they disswaded him from it as prejudicial to his health.Footnote 1
This is a description of the eminent Presbyterian clergyman Jeremiah Whitaker, rector of St Mary Magdalen's, Bermondsey, from 1643 until his death in 1654, aged 54 or 55. This passage first appeared in Simeon Ashe's funeral encomium of Whitaker entitled Living Loves betwixt Christ and Dying (1654), whose characterization of his preaching while ill was attested in various godly sermons, tracts and diaries.Footnote 2 Whitaker's discomfort was largely the result of the ‘violent pain of the Stone’, later discovered to have measured an ‘inch and an half long, and one inch broad, weighing about two ounces’.Footnote 3 Despite his infirmity, Whitaker preached regularly until the end of his life.Footnote 4 Though Ashe's account may have embellished, or been overly sympathetic to, the sufferings of a close friend and colleague, such claims deserve further investigation.Footnote 5 This article examines whether other clergymen were just as ‘able to creep into the Pulpit, or to crawle unto the Congregation’ during illness.Footnote 6 By exploring occasions of, and motivations for, sermonizing while sick in seventeenth-century England, such a study may reveal that illness played a much larger role in the pulpit performances of England's preachers, especially amongst puritan clerics, than has been hitherto acknowledged.
The term ‘puritan’ is deployed here to encompass Church of England, and later Nonconformist, ministers who espoused the significance of preaching God's word as a pastoral duty.Footnote 7 Recent scholarship supports this broad approach, demonstrating important continuities in ‘puritan’ and ‘nonconformist’ experiences.Footnote 8 Examining such preaching across the seventeenth century has been deliberately chosen to overcome the popular division in scholarship between pre- and post-Restoration sermon praxis.Footnote 9 By taking a broader historical view, one encounters surprising continuities in pulpit practices among a range of denominationally diverse ministers. Several of the clergymen discussed here went on to have complicated relationships with conformity after the Restoration that defy easy categorization. The label of ‘puritan’ is thus suggestive rather than definitive. This is not to suppose that conformist clergymen did not encounter the same bodily strains and pains during their pulpit labours.Footnote 10 Rather, because of the puritan emphasis on regular and impactful preaching, godly clergymen were more likely to sermonize when ill.Footnote 11 This article, then, provides a case study of the relationship between preaching and ill-health amongst the godly. In order to do so, the focus will fall on several areas: the ailments and illnesses experienced by ministers in their pulpits; the health risks associated with travelling to and speaking at preaching venues (especially during the winter months); and finally, the theological justifications for preaching when sick.
A wave of recent scholarship within the field of medical humanities has expertly charted the various sickbed behaviours, medical practices and recovery rituals of early modern Britain.Footnote 12 Some of this research has included a small but important selection of English clergymen such as Ralph Josselin, Henry Newcome and Richard Baxter. When examining the ill-health of the clerical class, however, studies have tended to focus on individual men and their households, godly deathbed speeches and generic conventions in writing about illness.Footnote 13 This article takes a broader and more holistic approach which allows us to appreciate certain hitherto undiscovered religious and cultural trends that governed clerical experiences of sickness. This reveals that, like ordinary layfolk, clergymen possessed a strong work ethic, undertaking work even when ill.Footnote 14 This showcases the convictions and costs associated with puritan preaching, and perhaps preaching more generally. Such investigations also highlight how ministers behaved in their public ministry when ill, as opposed to how they responded to illness in their own homes, a space which has received more scholarly attention.Footnote 15 Finally, the article complements the work of Alison Searle, who has recently examined the theology of pain as expressed by puritan women and clergymen's wives during pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.Footnote 16 In particular, this article concurs with Searle's assertion that physical suffering was an ‘experiential and conceptual category for Calvinists’ that was seen as ‘potentially beneficial’, and, completing the picture, this study provides a viewpoint from the male perspective.Footnote 17 This research also contributes to the history of pain and its intersections with religious belief and praxis amongst the godly by reconceptualizing early modern preaching as a total commitment of the body, and not just of the mind or soul, incorporating the somatic into the sermonic.
Printed conduct literature of the period was vague on whether preaching while sick was to be prescribed or prohibited. George Herbert argued that though the country parson ‘preacheth constantly’ whereby ‘the pulpit is his joy and his throne’, if he ‘at any time intermit, it is … for want of health’, and that in all things a minister should never ‘overdo it, to the loss of their quiet, and health’.Footnote 18 Churchmen across the religious spectrum, such as Lancelot Andrewes, William Perkins and Jeremy Taylor seemed to concur, omitting any meaningful discussions on preaching when ill in their popular conduct manuals.Footnote 19 In contrast, others such as the ejected minister Edward Lawrence asserted that ‘[t]hey must be sick, that they may the better teach you to prepare for sickness’, and that those clergymen who had never experienced ill-health ‘are like to be no lively feeling Preachers’.Footnote 20 This acknowledged that illness helped ministers write relatable sermons, but said nothing of whether those sermons were expected to be delivered during an illness. Despite the common maxim of the period, adapted from Vespasian, that ‘[i]t becommeth best a Bishop to die preaching in the pulpit’, the absence of a clear consensus regarding preaching while unwell shows that such an eventuality was either ignored, discouraged or taken for granted.Footnote 21 This is surprising, given the number of contemporary debates surrounding whether ministers should stay with or flee from their flocks during times of plague.Footnote 22
Though advice was somewhat lacking in print, the practice of preaching when sick was not infrequent. Dedicated to spreading the gospel, puritan ministers sometimes preached whilst suffering from minor or major ailments. The Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin records ‘this Sabbath day I preached thrice’, despite being ‘ill in my stomacke’ which caused ‘great looseness and griping of my body’.Footnote 23 Isaac Archer could ‘scar[c]e study, or preach but with pain’ when he endured a searing ‘toothach[e]’ and persistent ‘rhewme’ in the winter of 1679.Footnote 24 Pulpit ailments included accidental injuries. After a serious ‘fall backward’ in 1683, Thomas Jolly suffered something like a concussion. He described in his notebook how ‘weakness seized on my head’ and ‘empair[ed] my sight’. Despite experiencing ‘much pain and sickness’, Jolly continued to ‘work in my study and preaching’, continuing to exercise his ministry as normal, even though the symptoms only abated weeks later.Footnote 25 Some illnesses were more common than others. It was not unusual to see ministers enter the pulpit exhibiting influenza-like symptoms. In 1645 the usually valetudinarious Josselin ‘preach[e]d 2 sermons. very ill with my cold’.Footnote 26 ‘I preached in much pain by the chollick through a cold I took’, Jolly declared in 1678.Footnote 27 It must be remembered that early modern colds laid low many a hardy preacher.Footnote 28 Preaching with an ‘ague’ was also not unusual.Footnote 29 The Flintshire minister Philip Henry records in his diary on 29 February 1680: ‘I quakt of ye Ague from 8. to 11. yet preached, neither eat nor drank betw’.Footnote 30 So ‘exceedingly weak’ was Henry Newcome from ‘a fit of an ague’ that he needed assistance getting to church and with administering communion.Footnote 31
The pain threshold of these men is both harrowing and astonishing. The sixty-six-year-old nonconformist minister Samuel Jeake preached at a meeting in the port town of Rye, Sussex, on 31 August 1690. He did so with a gangrenated finger, swollen arm and gout in each foot.Footnote 32 Jeake died a month later. Other older ministers preached with infected limbs. In the spring of 1675, the fifty-nine-year-old Josselin preached in ‘sorenes’ with a ‘sweld leg brake … gangrening by the blacknes of it’.Footnote 33 At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Cumberland clergyman Richard Gilpin preached his final sermon with ‘pneumonia’ whereby, ‘his lungs being at that time too tender for his work’, he ‘rather groaned than spake’.Footnote 34 The ability (or inability) of ministers to preach God's word while sick was only matched by their capacity to endure pain and discomfort. There was, however, a notable downside, as the example of Gilpin aptly demonstrates: preaching while ill was at times counterproductive as congregants struggled to hear the sermon and digest its message.Footnote 35
Some pulpit illnesses manifested themselves in dramatic ways. The vicar of Wormingford, Essex, Thomas Pilgrim, suffered a seizure in 1644 and ‘fell down dead in his pulpit’.Footnote 36 A year later, the Newbury pulpiteer William Twisse fainted while preaching at St Andrew's, Holborn.Footnote 37 While preaching at Copley Chapel in the 1650s, Oliver Heywood was ‘taken so ill one sabbath in the pulpit’, that he was obliged to ‘break off the service abruptly and return home’. For the next three weeks he remained bedridden with a ‘severe fever’ which made him ‘sick nigh unto death’.Footnote 38 Heywood was no old man: he was in his mid-twenties. There was widespread panic in July 1691 when an elderly Richard Baxter exhibited a ‘great weaknes, fainting, or sinking in the Pulpit’ and, ‘not able to pronounce the blessing’, it was assumed he was ‘in all probability near to Death’.Footnote 39 On this occasion Baxter lived up to his reputation as being one who ‘preach[ed] as a dying man to dying men’; he perished on 8 December the same year.Footnote 40 If the illness of a clergymen proved serious enough, however, they could arrange for regular and ready replacements. A commitment to uninterrupted Sabbath preaching ensured that throughout the seventeenth century sick ministers called on their colleagues to preach in their stead.Footnote 41 This practice even crossed religious divides after the Restoration, whereby conformists occasionally filled in for nonconformist preachers (and vice versa) when they found themselves ill or incumbered.Footnote 42 Although clergymen routinely fell ill during this period, such contingencies ensured that congregants did not have to go without regular preaching.
Instances of preaching when sick were recorded and remembered by the godly to evidence commitment to God, the physical perils of preaching, the need to value it and the work of preachers and, more generally, the bodily cost of faith which was to be imitated by all. Sometimes pulpit fatalities were also used to admonish the irreligious behaviour of congregants. When John Oakes died in the middle of preaching a sermon in London in 1689, his eulogist asked of his congregation: ‘Was he not thus stricken for your rebellion against his calls?’Footnote 43
If ministers preached while sick, could preaching make them sick? Delivering a sermon worthy of respect and admiration in early modern England, whether in church or chapel, was no easy feat.Footnote 44 Ministers had to demonstrate the rhetorical skills of elocutio and actio, and were advised to commit their sermon notes to memory, not to hug the pulpit and to ensure their sermons were topical rather than overly historical; in short, they had to provide a lively and memorable performance.Footnote 45 While scholars have examined how the godly preached, scant attention has been paid to how hard this was on the preacher's body. The work of God's pulpiteers was exhausting: with some sermons lasting two or three hours, it was an exercise in physical endurance. Strenuous pulpit exertions were highly demanding on the throat, lungs and voice, and took a physical toll. The Cambridgeshire clergyman Isaac Archer confessed that if his sermons went on for too long, or he had to preach before a large audience, ‘it spent mee too much, and would soon have killed me’.Footnote 46 Sapped of energy, ministers often felt bereft of strength after sermonizing. The Presbyterian clergyman Henry Newcome wrote plaintively one Sabbath in 1674: ‘I preached twice and repeated at night, and was abundantly tired’.Footnote 47 Itinerant preachers, ejected from their livings after the Restoration, suffered particularly with bodily strain, some preaching as much as ten times in twelve days, finding the exercise ‘toylsom if not so usefull’.Footnote 48 It is safe to assume that even those clergymen who preached shorter sermons, or less regularly, still felt this duty to be a physically demanding one. The physical ‘wear and tear’ caused by such constant preaching did not go unnoticed by auditors. Thomas Holborough observed of the nonconformist preacher Samuel Blackerby (a godly stalwart of Stowmarket, Suffolk), ‘I have seen him divers times in the Pulpit, when he had more need to have been in his Bed’, adding ominously that Blackerby was, ‘seeming to me, reduced almost into his Socket, having spent his Lamp in giving light to others’.Footnote 49 Medical practitioners concurred. The physician of the West Country clergyman Samuel Crooke informed him that ‘he might live longer if he would preach seldomer’.Footnote 50
There were also environmental factors which greatly affected the health of godly ministers. Before even entering the pulpit, some clerics had to run the gauntlet of getting there. Routinely exposed to the elements, clergymen risked injury or infection on their travels. The winter months were the hardest, and arguably the most hazardous. Oliver Heywood remarked in his diary, ‘According to promise I was to goe preach at Idle chappel Jan 11 [16]82 and though it was an exceeding stormy morning of wind and snow and the ways deep and dangerous, yet I went, because of my promise’.Footnote 51 Heywood's initial reservations were not unfounded. In mid-August 1688, at a neighbour's request, John Bunyan went to Reading to mediate in a quarrel between father and son. On the way Bunyan was drenched in a storm and soon ‘fell sick of a violent Feavor’. On 19 August, likely suffering from the onset of this fever, Bunyan preached a rousing sermon at the congregation of John Gammon in Boar's Head Yard, London. Succumbing to his ‘sweating Distemper’, Bunyan perished on 31 August 1688. He probably died of influenza, or pneumonia, as a result of his undertaking this journey.Footnote 52 Travelling in inclement weather was often blamed by ministers for their colds, fits, agues and fevers.Footnote 53 If journeying in the cold did not hamper health, then preaching in cold churches was almost certainly injurious. Alice Thornton's experience of one wintry Sunday in 1661 was surely typical: ‘I was in the church, when it was a frost and snow, sitting in the minister's pewe, I feltt myselfe exceeding cold, and by fitts continued till the Tuesday following, very ill’.Footnote 54 Cold churches were clearly a concern for godly clergymen. After recovering from a ‘cold’ in the winter of 1647, Josselin recorded: ‘I preached twice through mercy, and found no prejudice though the day was bitter cold … in the open Church’.Footnote 55 Simeon Ashe, however, was not so lucky. In August 1662, Ashe, preparing to give his lecture at St Peter Cornhill, ‘took cold in the Vestry’. Thinking it would have proved but ‘one of his old fits of the Gout’, Ashe travelled to Highgate only to die of fever a few days later.Footnote 56 It is likely that many more clergymen fell dangerously ill when travelling and preaching in such conditions.Footnote 57
Regular preaching also took a considerable bodily toll as a preacher grew older. The puritan luminary William Gouge, ‘being then about Seventy three years old’, was described as having ‘spent himself so far’ in his sermons during the Civil Wars that he ‘strained a veyn in his lungs’ and was found to be ‘spitting blood’.Footnote 58 This greatly diminished the frequency and quality of his preaching.Footnote 59 Similar fatigues were felt by the ejected clergymen of the Restoration period. Preaching at his home in Stoke Newington in February 1669, the fifty-three-year-old Independent minister John Owen admitted to his auditors that though he had hoped to have ‘added a word or two of direction how to put this counsel into execution’, he must relent because ‘my strength is gone’.Footnote 60 These and similar difficulties meant that ageing godly ministers eventually had to accept their physical limitations. Nearing the end of his life during the late 1670s, the veteran John Angier of Denton (father-in-law of Oliver Heywood) resigned himself to the fact that his ministry was coming to a close, as he was ‘scarce able to get into the Pulpit for Age, and Weakness accompanying it’.Footnote 61 Seniority brought mental as well as physical deterioration. Alongside his ‘bodily frailty’, the sixty-one-year-old Jolly discovered that he was losing his memory recall. In 1690 he lamented experiencing ‘unusuall dullness in mine head as I was preaching’. This continued into his administration of the Lord's Supper whereby his ‘memory was taken away in great measure’. Dotage was a clear sign that Jolly's ‘spirits, strength, and gifts [were] failing’.Footnote 62 Congregants also complained that elderly ministers, no longer able to project their voices, delivered inaudible sermons. In 1682 the diarist John Evelyn remarked of Benjamin Whichcote, the seventy-three-year-old vicar of St Lawrence Jewry, that he ‘spake so very low, & was so feeble an old man, that I could by no meanes hear what he saied’.Footnote 63 Effective and affecting preaching, it seems, was either a young or middle-aged man's game.
There were several reasons why puritan pulpiteers risked their lives for (and in) the pulpit. Godly clergymen took their cue from early rarefied reformers such as John Knox who, as Oliver Heywood wrote, set the bar high, in that he frequently ‘rose off from his sick and death-bed, and would needs go to the pulpit’.Footnote 64 There was also a providential impetus for preaching when ill. The day he was due at a baptism in 1678, Heywood felt ‘desperately sick’, his ‘head akt very bitterly’ and he ‘vomited’, unable to keep his food down. Despite his condition, Heywood attended the event and was able to preach ‘extempore for a full hour’. Returning home, and feeling much recovered, Heywood surmised this moral lesson: ‘o[h] wonder of mercy! preaching and praying hath helpt my soul and body, both at once’.Footnote 65 Seen this way, clergymen preached not just in spite of, but because of, their fevers, colds, agues and distempers. Doing God's work, as opposed to enjoying a period of restful convalescence, was why, Heywood averred, he had been ‘perfectly cured’.Footnote 66 Preaching was curative, its honest labour was healing labour.Footnote 67 As Josselin avowed, ‘I ventured abroad and preacht twice, knowing my strength belongd to god that gave it and he could preserve my body from danger while I was in his service’.Footnote 68 Similarly, Isaac Archer declared: ‘went to preach, when scar[c]e able to goe, my health being chiefly to serve God in’.Footnote 69 Whether sick or well, clergymen trusted that God's divine will was manifest in either condition. Theologically speaking, to Reformed Englishmen and women, the presence of pain among the saints was also seen as God's cure for sin and selfishness.Footnote 70 In continuing, rather than postponing, their sermons when ill, ministers hoped to receive a double blessing by way of spiritual and physical cleansing, ‘soul and body, both at once’.Footnote 71
Long-suffering pulpiteers were also meant to be exemplars themselves, showing congregants that certain kinds of illness were not an excuse for church or chapel absenteeism. If the preacher could preach while ill, then the laity could sit and listen while ill. In this, godly ministers created a kind of double obligation for church attendance. Not only was church attendance a devotional duty – and before 1650 and after the Restoration a legal one – but godly clergymen taught that God sometimes sent illness to individuals as an admonition for neglecting Sabbath sermons.Footnote 72 If one abandoned church services, especially when sick, one risked becoming even sicker. But if one attended church, even when sick, one had the chance of being physically and spiritually healed. This helps to explain the sermon attendance rates of some of the godly, and sickly, laity.Footnote 73 Preaching with pain was also believed to make sermons more arresting. The ejected Worcestershire minister Thomas Baldwin was said to have been much ‘troubled both with gout and stone, and often preached with those pains upon him; which some of his auditors thought excited the greater earnestness, and made his expressions the more affecting’.Footnote 74 For all these reasons, preaching when sick was a logical activity, if not an inescapable duty, amongst puritan clergymen.
There is no space here to discuss the plethora of other pastoral duties that might affect the health of godly preachers, such as visiting the sick, administering the Lord's Supper to a large congregation, officiating at baptisms and burials and leading thanksgivings, the headaches and nausea from fasting or night-long prayer sessions, not to mention the strains of facilitating family worship and prayers.Footnote 75 Some ministers were so busy that they sacrificed family devotions for a devotion to church work.Footnote 76 Occasionally, we even glimpse frustrations at the onerous ‘worke enough to doe’ by which conscientious clergymen felt overwhelmed.Footnote 77 Puritan preachers performed honest work, but it was also hard work, which took a toll on their bodies and on their families.
The wealth of admissions and confessions, in print and manuscript, to the health hazards of sermonizing, tells us that such experiences were widespread amongst the godly clerical class. This radically changes the way we think about early modern preaching, not just as an intellectual and spiritual exercise, but as a physically onerous one. The importance of a robust preaching ministry amongst puritan clerics was, then, not simply a theological notion. Those who campaigned for and practised it knew they did so to the detriment of their bodies, but believed it was for the betterment of souls. Ministers tended to their flocks, despite their physical frailties and disabilities, with resilience, patience and enthusiasm. Their generosity of spirit and courage cautions us not just to focus on what or how they preached, but how they were feeling when they preached, because that will tell us a great deal about why they preached.
This essay's findings have broader implications for the ‘lived religion’ of English Protestantism and its relationship to sickness during the seventeenth century. Preaching while unwell was noble in theory, but precarious, arduous and potentially dangerous in practice. If ministers preached with colds, agues and fevers, they risked infecting others and exacerbating their own pain and discomfort, or worse. When congregants followed their example, attending church with all manner of ailments, they too risked making themselves and others sicker. A belief in divine providence, the power of preaching and strict sabbatarianism superseded modern notions of communal health and safety and held a powerful sway throughout the seventeenth century. Preaching while ill also illustrates the practical and bodily difficulties clergymen had to overcome when sermonizing, which highlights the need to examine the performativity, not just the literariness, of early modern sermons. True, preaching when unwell could hamper a sermon's audibility, but the physical presence of an ill minister could have a powerful impact and leave a lasting impression. This also tells us something about the work ethic of God's shepherds. Experience of sickness was an accepted part of a clergyman's vocation; his sufferings were to be seen publicly rather than concealed privately, to build faith and serve as a living exemplar. Consequently, puritan clerics frequently exchanged their sickbeds for their pulpits, for various reasons and in a variety of contexts, which both problematizes and enriches our conception of the nature and role of early modern preaching and preachers.
