- CCRB
Calendar of the correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Oxford 1991
- DWL, ms BC
Dr Williams' Library, London, Baxter correspondence
It is well-known that the relationship between Richard Baxter (1615–91) and John Owen (1616–83) was, to say the least, strained. ‘[A]ll our business with each other’, said Baxter at one point, late in their interactions, ‘had been contradiction.’Footnote 1 And there was plenty to contradict each other about. Their earliest clashes had come over soteriology. In 1649 Baxter accused Owen of Antinomian inclinations,Footnote 2 while Owen attacked Baxter's idiosyncratic blend of Amyraldian Calvinism.Footnote 3 In the early 1650s ecclesiology came to the fore as both men were involved in practical efforts to find a religious settlement for Interregnum England.Footnote 4 Baxter viewed Owen's congregational convictions as the death of genuine pastoral care and parish-based evangelism, since in his mind congregationalism plucked out the very best, leaving the rest largely to perish in their ignorance.Footnote 5 In 1658 Baxter was bitterly disappointed by the determinations that emerged from the Independents' conference at the Savoy, which, to his mind, only confirmed their separatist impulses and proto-Antinomian proclivities.Footnote 6 A few months later Baxter saw Owen's hand in the downfall of Richard Cromwell, on whom Baxter had pinned his hopes for parish reformation in England.Footnote 7 And two years after that Baxter would have greatly offended Owen by his denial of religious toleration for the Independents before the freshly minted King Charles ii.Footnote 8 This was not the last instance that comprehension and toleration would be played off against each other, to the detriment of both, and that inevitably entangled their respective proponents, Baxter and Owen.Footnote 9 When Baxter made an effort to find common ecclesiological ground with the Independents, through communication with Owen in early 1669, little came of it. The endeavour foundered on Baxter's ‘chiding’ personal style and ended with Owen's singular and enigmatic comment that ‘I am still a well-wisher to those Mathematicks.’Footnote 10
These are just some of the indications of strain, offence, disagreement and misunderstanding that marked the relationship between Baxter and Owen – enough to give a sense of the main difficulties between the two men. Not surprisingly, their mutual dislike has been a feature of the historiography from the very beginning, although Edmund Calamy did his best to bury it as far as he could. As he and Matthew Sylvester wrestled with the gargantuan monster that is Baxter's autobiography, the Reliquiae Baxterianae, Calamy constantly urged Sylvester (who had been commissioned by Baxter to publish the manuscript after his death) to make some judicious editorial amendments. Sylvester could hardly bring himself to tamper with Baxter's compilations, though in the case of a few personalities he was prepared to do so:
But our greatest difficulty was, with relation to Dr. Owen, upon whom there were several reflections. Some of these, (after frequent debates) he [Sylvester] did allow me to blot out, and I did it, cheerfully, with my own hand. But, as to the main reflection upon him, with regard to the affair of Wallingford House, and his concern in it, on which Baxter laid a considerable stress, (and which Mr. Sylvester had often heard Mr. Baxter discourse of with great freedom,) he would not by any means give his consent to have that out.Footnote 11
It is apparent from Calamy's recollections that Owen was the most regularly slighted figure in all of the Reliquiae Baxterianae, a fact that would have been even more apparent if Calamy had been less successful in his interventions.Footnote 12
William Orme's nineteenth-century memoirs of John Owen indicate that the extent of the difficulties between Owen and Baxter remained in full view, though Orme struggled to account for their cause: ‘The differences between them on various subjects, lay more, perhaps, in words than in things; and it must be regretted, that a degree of keenness marked the conduct of their discussions, which the importance of the points at issue, and the meekness of wisdom, will by no means justify.’Footnote 13 To chart their relationship was to record ‘a series of discussions and collisions between Baxter and Owen, which continued on one subject or another till the death of both these eminent men’.Footnote 14 These collisions occurred over intricate theological niceties as well as skirmishes in more political terrain as the two men sought to advance their separate ecclesiological agendas.Footnote 15 Owen was clearly the hero of Orme's story and Baxter was cast as the villain:Footnote 16
Justice obliges me to state, that Baxter was invariably the aggressor; as Owen seems never to have meddled with him but in the way of self-defence. Whatever his reasons, Baxter seldom omitted an opportunity of hitting a blot in Owen's conduct and writings; and not content with wrangling during his life, he left a legacy of reproach on the memory of his brother, which continued to operate long after his death.Footnote 17
The strain between Owen and Baxter has had only a quiet presence in more recent historiography.Footnote 18 Generally, individual disagreements are identified but the quality of the relationship itself is not examined in any extensive manner. Several instances of major works will suffice to illustrate the pattern. In the most recent biography of Owen (even then, it was published in 1971) Peter Toon notes that Baxter was ‘biased against Owen’, and he points out that the differences that separated them in 1654, when they were part of the subcommittee on religious fundamentals, still kept them apart in 1669, the year of their failed rapprochement.Footnote 19 But for the most part disagreements – ecclesiological and soteriological – are noted in passing as they occurred. William Lamont highlights the three major barriers in Baxter's view to rapprochement with Owen in the late 1660s: Owen's part in the collapse of Richard Cromwell's protectorate; Owen's influence on the exclusive ecclesiology of the Independents' Savoy Declaration of faith in 1658; and Owen's soteriological emphasis on free grace.Footnote 20 Carl Trueman has an excellent sense of the nature of the theological disagreements between Owen and Baxter – his ‘old adversary’ and ‘greatest opponent’.Footnote 21 ‘After the Restoration there was a certain amount of rapprochement between the two men, but their relationship never appears to have been particularly warm.’Footnote 22 Trueman rightly observes that both theologians worked within a scholastic methodology,Footnote 23 while clarifying their disagreements in a very broad range of theological issues, from the scope of God's decrees in the economy of salvation, to the structure of their theological systems, to their contrasting views on the place of human reason within theology.Footnote 24 Finally, Paul Lim offers what might serve as a useful summary of the prevailing view of the two men:
Owen and his high Calvinist colleagues emphasized two things which were repugnant to Baxter: the necessity of confessions to curb the spread of heretical ideas, and Antinomian-leaning theological tendencies, which Baxter felt led people from parochial churches and a life of holiness. This ecclesiological and doctrinal divergence played a significant role in pre-empting the prospect for achieving godly unity during the Interregnum and beyond. Combining their ecclesiological and soteriological differences, we can trace the trajectory of these two ‘traditions’ within Puritanism.Footnote 25
The emphasis again is on soteriological and ecclesiological differences, and rightly so.
Indeed, all of these are valid and apt observations. One cannot ignore the aggravation of the theological differences between Baxter and Owen and the complex interactions of their competing hopes for England's ecclesiological settlement. In the seventeenth century such material was easily combustible; it is no surprise to observe the two men frequently in disagreement over a very large number of issues. And yet the issues and disagreements that have been routinely explored by historians and theologians do not in themselves go far enough in explaining the poor relationship between the two men. There are at least two reasons to say this.
The first is that there were plenty of people in Baxter's world with whom he disagreed, and yet he could maintain warm relations despite those theological differences.Footnote 26 Several examples might illustrate this, but it may be best to choose two who were closest in ecclesiological persuasion to Owen. Lewis du Moulin held the Camden Chair of History at Oxford University from 1649 until his ejection in 1660. He dedicated his inaugural lecture to John Owen, his friend and vice-chancellor of the university.Footnote 27 After the Restoration he ‘threw in his lot with the Independents and defended them with fanatical determination’.Footnote 28 Yet that did not prevent him from corresponding extensively with Baxter: the first extant letter was written in 1654;Footnote 29 the last, a copy privately endorsed to ‘my worthy friend Dr Lewis Moulin’, was penned in 1671.Footnote 30 Baxter disagreed with du Moulin that justification came before faith – a conviction that, in Baxter's mind, could only lead to Antinomianism – and disliked du Moulin's ‘partiality … against the Presbyterians’.Footnote 31 In other words, the broad areas of disagreement were similar to those of Baxter's differences with Owen, yet the relationship showed itself to be relatively warm and enduring, certainly on the part of du Moulin.Footnote 32 The second example is Ambrose Upton, who was appointed as a canon at Christ Church, Oxford, by John Owen during the 1650s,Footnote 33 and who was also the brother-in-law of Margaret Baxter, Richard's wife.Footnote 34 The origins of their relationship are unclear.Footnote 35 Upton's first appearance in Baxter's correspondence came in April 1658: Baxter obliquely mentioned a conversation with Upton in the context of discussions over church unity.Footnote 36 A letter of June 1658 also shows that Baxter and his ‘Reverend friend’ were engaged in conversation.Footnote 37 A further letter of May 1659 makes reference to a letter from Baxter to Upton, which is not extant.Footnote 38 There is only one brief extant letter between them in all of Baxter's correspondence, possibly dated May 1662, and it is not particularly significant or illuminating.Footnote 39 Yet the indications are that, once again, ecclesiological differences did not preclude a reasonably warm relationship with Baxter. It is true that there are very few Independents among Baxter's correspondents – he was much more likely to engage with, in his words, ‘Presbyterians and Moderate Episcopal Men’Footnote 40 – but these two examples are sufficient evidence to demonstrate that ecclesiological differences did not in themselves necessitate also a breakdown of relationship with Richard Baxter. Something else must be brought in fully to account for such breakdown where it occurred, something likely to go much deeper and be more deeply personal.
The second reason why we need to look back further beyond merely theological differences is the fact that in the early 1640s Baxter and Owen occupied similar theological positions. In terms of soteriology, both men were high Calvinists. Owen's credentials here are beyond dispute, but Baxter, too, initially moved in soteriological circles that he would later see as near-Antinomian. For ten years, he recalled, he believed that salvation was passive on the part of the believer.Footnote 41 He was also ‘once half ensnared my self in the opinions of Justification before faith, and that Justification by Faith, was but in foro Conscientia, &c.’,Footnote 42 the very error he would later criticise in Lewis du Moulin. And Baxter described himself then as ‘a Disputer against Universal redemption’.Footnote 43 So too was John Owen. Thus the two men initially had a broadly similar soteriological understanding. They were also similar in their ecclesiology. Baxter preferred to think of himself as a ‘meere nonconformist’, of course, but he could hardly avoid the label of Presbyterian.Footnote 44 For his part, in the early 1640s, Owen was happy to own it. In 1643 he published The duty of pastors and people distinguished. At the outset he declared that ‘the principles and rules of that church government from which, in the following assertions, I desire not to wander are of that kind … which commonly are called presbyterial or synodical, in opposition to prelatical or diocesan on the one side, and that which is commonly called independent or congregational on the other’.Footnote 45 Upon reflection ‘not long after’ this publication, and by reading ‘Mr [John] Cotton's book of the Keys’,Footnote 46 it became clear to Owen that his principles were, in fact, much more closely aligned to those of the Independents.Footnote 47 Before long he had gathered a church within his parish of St Peter's in Coggeshall.Footnote 48 He now owned the label of Independent.
Therefore, Baxter and Owen were not always separated theologically. The larger and more important question, then, is how their theological differences came about. Here attention might profitably be turned to the mid-1640s, the period in which the trajectory of their theology began to diverge. Indeed, if the origin and the nature of the strain between Baxter and Owen is to be fully understood, their contrasting experiences of the First Civil War must be considered. It is that experience, I contend, that placed them in different worlds before they had even met. And when they did finally meet, understanding each other would have been so much more difficult and even, as it turns out, impossible. This article, then, is not a complete explanation for the strained relationship between Baxter and Owen.Footnote 49 It is, instead, an examination of an explanatory factor of profound importance that has so far been entirely overlooked.
I
‘The Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies.’Footnote 50 This gloomy assessment reflected Baxter's experience. For him, the war came early and stayed long. In June 1642 Charles presented his Commissions of Array that appointed his own local army commanders, in response to the Militia Ordinance that passed control of the militia from the king to Parliament.Footnote 51 As the commission was being read out in the streets of Kidderminster, ‘the Reader (a violent Country Gentleman) seeing me pass in the Streets, stopt and said, There goeth a Traitor, without ever giving a syllable of Reason for it’.Footnote 52 This unpleasant outburst did not bode well. For one thing, it demonstrates that Baxter was living in staunchly royalist territory. As the war began, Shropshire was where the royalist forces were most closely concentrated.Footnote 53 Baxter felt that he might have been killed shortly after by a mob determined to defend the images in the parish church, had he not been walking a mile out of town at the time.Footnote 54 Even so, he ‘was by the insurrection of a rabble that with clubs sought to kill me, driven from Kederminster’.Footnote 55 Thus Baxter's fledgling ministry in the town came to an abrupt end and he retreated to the relative safety of Gloucester.Footnote 56 After a month some friends from Kidderminster encouraged him to come home, since his absence was all too easily interpreted as a sign of guilt, or support for Parliament. But his return to the town was a brief one. By then Charles was urgently gathering his forces among the Midland counties and the ‘Fury of the Rabble was so hot at home, that I was fain to withdraw again.’Footnote 57 It is important to appreciate how unsettling, traumatic, disappointing and frustrating the experience would have been.Whatever his hopes for his ministry in the town, they were dashed by the force of external events well beyond his ability to control.
This ushered Baxter into a brief period of itinerancy during which time he encountered the early skirmishes of the war. Indeed, Baxter's proximity to most of the main battles of the First Civil War is striking. He must have been one of very few who were there to witness the first physical engagement between royalists and parliamentarians, on the afternoon of 23 September 1642 at Powick Bridge, just south of Worcester.Footnote 58 Baxter was staying nearby at Inkborough. Hearing that a parliamentarian force was camping in a meadow near the village of Powick, ‘I had a great mind to go see them, having never seen any part of an Army.’Footnote 59 He seems to have been aware of the deliberations that prompted the force to cross Powick Bridge and thus spring the ambush, and he certainly witnessed the rout: ‘The Sight quickly told me the Vanity of Armies; and how little Confidence is to be placed in them.’Footnote 60 Baxter was also on hand to observe the deathly aftermath of the first battle of the war, at Edgehill exactly one month later. Being a Sunday, Baxter was preaching, at Alcester, within earshot of the fighting:
As I was preaching the People heard the Cannon play, and perceived that the Armies were engaged; when Sermon was done (in the Afternoon) the report was more audible, which made us all long to hear of the success … The next Morning being willing to see the Field where they had fought, I went to Edghill, and found the Earl of Essex with the remaining part of his Army keeping the ground, and the King's Army facing them upon the Hill, a mile off; and about a Thousand dead Bodies in the Field between them (and I suppose many more buried before).Footnote 61
This later account betrayed no great emotion, but the gruesome scene must have been shocking at the time. Certainly it was a sight unknown in living memory, if ever in England's history, and it is doubtful that anything could have prepared Baxter for the grisly reality of what he saw. In the words of one onlooker, ‘the field was covered with the dead, yet no one could tell to what party they belonged’.Footnote 62 Edward Benlowes, poet and army captain, mused on the carnage: ‘Edgehill, with graves looked white/With blood looked red/Maz'd at the numbers of the dead.’Footnote 63 The sight must have stayed in Baxter's mind. Several years later he reflected on the sheer brutality and ruination of the recent war: ‘Oh the sad and heart-piercing spectacles that our eyes have seen in four years’ space! In this fight a dear friend is slain; scarce a month, scarce a week, without the sight or noise of blood … the earth covered with the carcasses of the slain.'Footnote 64 The images and memories had taken their toll.
For the next two years Baxter found some measure of security at Coventry, where he preached to the soldiers twice a week and to the people on Sundays. He came as close as he could to being an army chaplain without taking a commission, for which he received food, accommodation and protection.Footnote 65 Yet even if Baxter was sheltered from the worst of the violence buffeting the Midlands, there was no escaping the tension as reports of battles and losses filtered through:
So that hearing such sad News on one side or other was our daily Work; insomuch as duly as I awakened in the Morning I expected to hear one come and tell me, such a Garrison is won or lost, or such a Defeat received or given: And [do you hear the News] was commonly the first Word I heard. So miserable were those bloody Days, in which he was the most honourable, that could kill most of his Enemies.Footnote 66
In such a fashion Baxter would have received word of the battle of Naseby in June 1645: ‘the mother of all battles’ and the military climax of the First Civil War.Footnote 67 Once again, he was there to witness the aftermath, visiting the battle scene two days after the victory.Footnote 68 This time the shock of his visit seems to have been doctrinal, not physical. Previously, Baxter had heard rumours of bad theology percolating through the New Model Army, but had disbelieved them. His Naseby visit convinced him otherwise, and he was stunned by what he saw: ‘I found a new face of things which I never dreamt of … Independency and Anabaptistry were most prevalent: Antinomianism and Arminianism were equally distributed.’Footnote 69 In response, he enlisted as a chaplain in Colonel Whalley's regiment.Footnote 70
Thus began a second phase of much more gruelling itinerancy in which Baxter accompanied Whalley's regiment as it travelled the breadth of England during the last year of the First Civil War. His journeys began with a march into the south-west where he witnessed firsthand the battle of Langport on 10 July 1645.Footnote 71 From there Baxter's regiment took part in a succession of sieges. They began with Bristol in August then moved on to other sieges of Sherbourne Castle, Winchester Castle and Exeter before ending up in Cornwall.Footnote 72 As the country emerged from the heart of winter and as the war entered its final phases Baxter was present at the sieges of Banbury Castle, Worcester and, finally, Oxford itself, the headquarters of the king and the city from which he escaped in late April 1646.Footnote 73 Even then, Baxter's long war continued. Just when he might have returned to Kidderminster, he extended his service as army chaplain to continue his campaign against bad doctrine and, as he would later have it, to prevent those schemes that would culminate in the execution of King Charles i:Footnote 74
I set my self from day to day to find out the Corruptions of the Soldiers; and to discourse and dispute them out of their mistakes, both Religious and Political: My Life among them was a daily contending against Seducers, and gently arguing with the more Tractable, and another kind of Militia I had than theirs … So that I was almost always, when I had opportunity, disputing with one or other of them; sometimes for our Civil Government, and sometimes for Church Order and Government; sometimes for Infant Baptism, and oft against Antinomianism and the contrary Extream.Footnote 75
These efforts were largely ineffectual and disappointing. Baxter later admitted that he could ‘prevaile with none to purpose’.Footnote 76 All the while, the strain of army life was bearing down on his already frail body. After his service had ended he pointed out how he had ‘endured so many cold stormes, & unseasonable marches, & lain out of doores so many raining nights together, & bin in so many bloody fights, as I have bin in the space of 4 yeares & a halfe; & contracted so many sicknesses to my body, & at last even death it selfe; which is to me even at the doore in all probability, occasioned by these distemperings of my body’.Footnote 77
Finally, his health collapsed. Deep in the winter of early 1647 his nose began to bleed copiously. In the medical wisdom of the day this was taken to represent a surfeit of blood in the body, so Baxter opened four veins, followed by another more substantial purge. The drastic loss of blood very nearly killed him.Footnote 78
The episode certainly brought Baxter's army career to a close, but in other ways it was the beginning of a dramatic period of theological reflection and transformation. Baxter's soteriology shifted on its axis – reversing from near-Antinomianism to near-Arminianism – in a context of acute anxiety about the spread of Antinomianism.Footnote 79 At the same time he began to write. Of most relevance here is The saints' everlasting rest, published in 1650 but penned in the months following that 1647 crisis of ill health.Footnote 80 The book reveals the effect of his experience of the First Civil War in far more emotive and immediate terms than his autobiography, written in stages after the Restoration. ‘Look on England's four years’ blood', Baxter lamented, ‘a flourishing land almost made ruinate.’Footnote 81 These were the ‘days of common sufferings, when nothing appears to our sight but ruin; families ruined, congregations ruined; sumptuous structures ruined; cities ruined; country [county] ruined; court ruined, kingdoms ruined’.Footnote 82 Even at war's end there were too many places in which Baxter observed ‘the weeping eyes, the bleeding sides, the lacerated members, of [English] churches; the reproached gospel, the disappointed reformation, the hideous doctrines, and unheard-of wickedness, that hath followed them; the contemned ordinances, the reproached, slandered, and ejected ministers; the weak that are scandalized, the professors apostasized, the wicked hardened, and the open enemies of the gospel that now insult’.Footnote 83
It should be very apparent from these telling references to the ‘reproached gospel’ and the ‘disappointed reformation’ that Baxter viewed the war as a disaster for the Gospel. It had brought about only the subversion of the true Gospel, as endless numbers of heresies and errors proliferated all around. ‘It is natural,’ he explained, ‘for both wars and private contentions to produce errors, schisms, contempt of magistracy, ministry and ordinances, as it is for a dead carrion to breed worms and vermin: believe it from one that hath too many years’ experience of both in armies and garrisons.'Footnote 84 His perspective was bleak indeed, coloured by sad experience: ‘Oh, what abundance of excellent, hopeful fruits of godliness have I seen blown down before they were ripe, by the impetuous winds of war.’Footnote 85 No harvest here. ‘In a word’, he concluded, ‘I never yet saw the work of the gospel go on well in wars.’Footnote 86
II
John Owen's experience of the First Civil War could hardly have been more different from Baxter's. In large part that was simply a matter of geography: Owen spent most of the war living in Essex. If Baxter's Shropshire was the English county that saw most of the fighting,Footnote 87 Owen's Essex experienced the least. While the war was carried on across most of England,Footnote 88 it stopped at a line that might be drawn from King's Lynn through Cambridge and London and on down to Arundel. East of that line, a region of strong parliamentarian control, there was settled calm during the First Civil War.Footnote 89 Of the 563 known incidents in that phase of the fighting, only one took place in Essex.Footnote 90 Thus Owen was spared first-hand experience of the carnage and devastation caused by the war. It is true that he made two early trips from London to Ashford, Kent (as the guest of Sir Edward Scott, in December 1642 and July 1643) when the war impinged on his experience: ‘Twice, by God's providence, have I been with you [that is, Sir Edward] when your country hath been in great danger to be ruined, – once by the horrid insurrection of a rude, godless multitude, and again by the invasion of a potent enemy in the prevailing country.’Footnote 91 But these were minor alarms. Owen himself does not seem to have been personally threatened or involved. And for the remainder of the First Civil War he was able, unlike Baxter, to enjoy a settled phase of pastoral ministry, first at Fordham and then at Coggeshall, both near Colchester. He reminded his parishioners at Fordham:
You know how I have been amongst you, and in what manner, for these few years past, and how I have kept back nothing (to the utmost of the dispensation to me committed) that was profitable for you; but have showed you and taught you publicly from house to house, testifying to all repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ.Footnote 92
His recollection speaks of security and stability. Around April 1646 Owen moved to the parish of Coggeshall, where he followed in a long line of Puritan preachers in the town. His immediate predecessor was Obadiah Sedgwick, a member of the Westminster Assembly. About 2,000 souls gathered every Sunday to hear Owen preach.Footnote 93 It is suggestive that where Baxter's soteriological shift came about in the context of anxious itinerancy, Owen's ecclesiological realignment resulted from reading a book.
Clearly, Owen had proven adept at building an effective pastoral career, demonstrating a deft touch at the practice of seeking patronage that would serve him well through the course of his life. One fruit of that came into fullness on 29 April 1646, when Owen preached his first sermon to parliament at the instigation of a friend and MP, Thomas Westrow.Footnote 94 Owen titled his sermon, ‘A vision of unchangeable, free mercy, in sending the means of grace to undeserving sinners’, and he chose Acts xvi.9 for his text. In its context, the Apostle Paul was prevented by the holy spirit from taking the Gospel into the province of Asia. Instead, this verse describes Paul's vision of a man calling him to go to Macedonia. Owen used this passage to demonstrate, in classically Calvinist fashion, that God chooses some, but not others, to salvation.Footnote 95 Yet Owen's choice of text made it possible for him to read ‘this discriminating counsel of God from eternity’ not just in the experience of individuals, but in the history of entire countries and in England's present troubles: ‘Amongst other nations, this is the day of England's visitation … a man of England hath prevailed for assistance, and the free grace of God hath wrought us help by the gospel.’ Thus Owen discerned ‘the mighty working of Providence’ in England's civil war.Footnote 96 His purpose was ‘to discover how the great variety which we see in the dispensation of the means of grace, proceedeth from, and is regulated by, some eternal purpose of God, unfolded in his word’, understanding that ‘[a]ll things below in their events are but the wax, whereon the eternal seal of God's purposes hath left its own impression; and they every way answer to it’.Footnote 97 Framed in such a way, Owen's sermon identified the hand of God in the nation's history. Going all the way back to the fifth century, Owen showed how the country had twice been blessed with the Gospel and twice had allowed it to be lost to corruption, first at the hand of the Saxons, then at the hands of the ‘Roman harlot’, the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote 98 More recently, and much more urgently, the Gospel had again been endangered, this time by the Arminians who had risen to such dominance in the Church of England.
Arminianism was simply the wet cement that, left to settle, would harden into outright Catholicism. Even if this was only a matter of perception, it was a powerful one,Footnote 99 and Owen's sermon tied into such anxieties. He assured his auditors that the Arminians had wanted nothing less than to deliver England up to the pope:
In worship, their paintings, crossings, crucifixes, bowings, cringings, altars, tapers, wafers, organs, anthems, litany, rails, images, copes, vestments – what were they but Roman varnish, an Italian dress for our devotion, to draw on conformity with that enemy of the Lord Jesus? In doctrine, the divinity of Episcopacy, auricular confession, free-will, predestination on faith, yea, works foreseen, ‘limbus patrum,’ justification by works, falling from grace, authority of a church, which none knew what it was, canonical obedience, holiness of churches, and the like innumerable, – what were they but helps to Sancta Clara, to make all our articles of religion to speak good Roman Catholic?Footnote 100
The Arminians had brought England to the brink of corrupting the Gospel for a third time in its history, a betrayal that would surely bring in its train God's wrath and judgement. But the providence of God had gloriously intervened. The plot had been foiled. ‘O Lord, how was England of late, by thy mercy, delivered from this snare! … O how hath thy grace fought against our backsliding!’Footnote 101 The First Civil War had been England's redemption. Looking back, it was clear to Owen that England had come to the brink of repudiating the Gospel for the last time. Had that occurred, the nation's lamp stand – the English Church – might have been removed.Footnote 102 But disaster had been averted by the free grace of God whose greatest concern was the Gospel itself. Owen brought his hearers back to the sovereign purposes of God, ‘by discovering that all revolutions here below – especially every thing that concerns the dispensation of the Gospel and kingdom of the Lord Jesus – are carried along according to the eternally fixed purpose of God’.Footnote 103 Seen in this light, the war had been a vindication of God's unchanging purposes. The Gospel had been rescued, preserved, secured. The hazards and hardships that England had so recently navigated were necessary sacrifices in a great cause that had the backing of God himself.
But such a view dismissed too quickly the pain involved in such sacrifices. At one point in his sermon, Owen, looking for the best in the worst of storms, compared the nation's travails to mere seasickness:
If there had been no difficulties, there had been no deliverances. And did we never find our hearts so enlarged towards God upon such advantages as to say, Well, this day's temper of spirit was cheaply purchased by yesterday's anguish and fear; – that was but a being sick at sea?Footnote 104
It is difficult to think that anyone who had lost a loved one among the many tens of thousands killed in the fighting or struck down by the attendant disease and devastation could have thought that England's relief in April 1646 was ‘cheaply purchased’. True, Owen's task was to preach a sermon that would boost morale in a time of national crisis. He might not have been so casual or optimistic in other, more pastoral, contexts. And yet there can be no doubt that Owen had cultivated an extremely positive view of the war. Such a perspective was surely helped by the fact that he had emerged from the upheaval remarkably unscathed.
Thus Owen stood before Parliament to preach, wholeheartedly supportive of its cause and determined that all the gains should not now be lost. He was acting as an army chaplain on the largest possible stage, if only temporarily, a context which makes his pronouncements not at all unusual. Barbara Donagan has shown how the battle sermons of army chaplains ‘were of course designed to spur troops to action, but they also served to connect men in the field to the larger, national purposes of the war, for ministers were spokesmen for parliament as well as for God’.Footnote 105 Michael Walzer demonstrates how the Puritans repeatedly evoked the Exodus when they argued for freedom from ecclesiastical bondage and political tyranny.Footnote 106 So it was for Owen: the Arminian trek back to Egypt had been halted only by the grace of God, but England remained in the wilderness and should now press on to the promised land.Footnote 107 Owen urged England's leaders to forge ahead, confident that those to whom he spoke shared his concern: ‘From the beginning of these troubles’, he reminded them, ‘you have held forth religion and the gospel, as whose preservation and restoration was principally in your aims’.Footnote 108 Now that the battles were over, it was time for Parliament to fulfil its promise of ‘reforming [God's] churches and settling the gospel’.Footnote 109 This ‘is our day, wherein we must mend or end’.Footnote 110 Owen urged Parliament to give every effort to preserving and preaching the Gospel in every corner of the land. If it did not, judgement would follow. But if it did, bright days lay ahead: ‘the Reformation of England shall be more glorious than of any nation in the world’.Footnote 111
Yet while much had already been gained,Footnote 112 no small number of obstacles stood in the way.Footnote 113 In particular, Owen identified ‘two sorts of men’ who were too quick to dismiss the danger that England had been in, and therefore reluctant to pursue any sort of costly pilgrimage towards Owen's promised land. The first sort were those who had been ‘industriously instrumental’ in England's apostasy, ‘whose suffrages had been loud for the choice of a captain to return to Egypt’. This sort would have been obvious enough, but the second type were much more subtle,
those who are disturbed in their optics, or have gotten false glasses, representing all things unto them in dubious colours. Which way soever they look, they can see nothing but errors – errors of all sizes, sorts, sects and sexes – errors and heresies from the beginning to the end; which have deceived some men, not of the worst, and made them think that all before was nothing, in comparison of the present confusion. A great sign they felt it not, or were not troubled at it; as if men should come into a field, and seeing some red weeds and cockle among the corn, should instantly affirm there is no corn there, but all weeds, and that it were much better the hedges were down, and the whole field laid open to the boars of the forest: but the harvest will one day show the truth of these things.Footnote 114
This is a remarkable statement, since Owen is describing with astonishing precision a man whom he has almost certainly never met. If Owen marvelled at the harvest of grain, Baxter lamented among the weeds.
III
It is clear that the civil war perspectives of Baxter and Owen could hardly have been further apart, making it impossible for them to relate easily when they met. But caution must be employed with such an argument.Footnote 115 It is, to begin with, limited to just these two men, and while their experience certainly has something to say about how the English responded to the civil war not all individuals would have responded in exactly the same way. For instance, few men would have witnessed the carnage of war in closer proximity than Oliver Cromwell, but that did not prevent him from assuring the father of a soldier killed at Marston Moor that the battle ‘had all the evidence of an absolute Victory obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the Godly Party principally’.Footnote 116 Here, in the most acute and personal of circumstances, Cromwell presented much the same vision as Owen would offer to Parliament two years later. So detachment from the experience of war was not a necessary prerequisite to holding a supremely positive view of what the fighting was about. Nor was engagement with the battles, even from the sidelines, always going to evoke Baxter's pessimism about the overall purpose and merit of the war. Hugh Peter, an Independent minister and army chaplain, also witnessed much of the war at close hand, yet he was an effective communicator of Parliament's cause, raising support in numerous counties through his sermons.Footnote 117 Moreover, Baxter consistently defended the writings of John GoodwinFootnote 118 even though he was in some ways similar to Owen: an Independent parish minister detached from the experience of the fighting, who advocated its aims and causes.Footnote 119 Goodwin was among the first ministers explicitly to advocate armed resistance to the king: ‘the cause … is just, and holy, and good’.Footnote 120 The telling difference is that Goodwin was something of an ally in Baxter's most pressing cause, the fight against Antinomianism.Footnote 121 Certainly, one correspondent of Baxter's referred to the helpful ministrations of Goodwin in preserving him from Antinomian error,Footnote 122 and if Baxter defended anything in Goodwin, it was the thrust of his soteriology. This brings us back to the horror felt by Baxter at the apparent proliferation of heresy during the war years, though it is impossible to detach this from the traumatic experience of the war itself. Baxter's obsession with Antinomianism was a means of channelling the fears and anxieties that the dislocation of the war provoked in him.Footnote 123 In this light, Goodwin at least offered some comfort; Owen offered only further disequilibrium.
So the examples of other individuals, either in relationship with Baxter or not, make it impossible to say that this divergence in experience between Baxter and Owen is enough in itself to explain their mutual antipathy. Yet it remains an extremely significant factor in the particularly personal nature of their mutual misunderstanding, if only because the contrasts are so glaring and so numerous. Owen's life was relatively untouched by the war. He maintained his pastoral ministry throughout the conflict, enjoying the peace and stability of the one region in England that saw none of the fighting. He was detached in a way that Baxter never was. Even before the war started Baxter found himself in troubled waters, and he was early ejected from Kidderminster, a promising season of ministry abruptly truncated. Being driven out of town by a mob threatening to club him to death would hardly lead Baxter to welcome the coming violence. It is worth noting how the ‘vulgar Rabble’ were on several occasions decisive in Baxter's life, intimating threat and violence, whereas powerful benefactors were decisive in Owen's career, bringing privilege and preferment. That difference would have shaped their view of the world, and even their view of the war. Baxter knew of its brutality in a way that Owen did not. It is remarkable how many times Baxter showed up on the sidelines at key events during the war, beginning with Powick Bridge. If Edgewater, Marston Moor and Naseby were the three decisive engagements of the war,Footnote 124 Baxter was nearby for two of them. He experienced life in a garrison and life on the ground, living among the soldiers. He was too well aware of the pain, loss and devastation inflicted by the war. It is inconceivable that he could have claimed, as Owen did, that the gains from all the fighting had been ‘cheaply purchased by yesterday's anguish and fear’. This was no mere seasickness. It is not that Owen was necessarily glib or offhand about the war, but it had not been his firsthand experience as it had for most of his compatriots. This gave him much greater freedom to focus on the strategic objectives of the war, as he understood them, without their clarity being muddied by the harsh reality of the carnage it caused. There is little doubt in Owen; Baxter was much less certain about what the war achieved, if anything constructive at all. Owen viewed the Arminians as the enemy, gloriously vanquished; Baxter saw the Antinomians as the enemy, disturbingly ascendant. Owen viewed the war as a welcome liberation of the Gospel; Baxter saw only its corruption and demise. Owen felt England to be on the brink of a glorious reformation; Baxter felt that it had been jettisoned. Owen testified to the freedom of the Gospel, newly rescued from the Arminian snare; Baxter saw only ‘the gospel departing’.Footnote 125
To return to Owen's image of the cornfield. He acknowledged the stray weed, but was impressed by the corn. Baxter saw only the weeds. He was one of those who, to use Owen's words, ‘[w]hich way soever they look, they can see nothing but errors – errors of all sizes, sorts, sects and sexes – errors and heresies from the beginning to the end’. It is conceivable that at precisely the moment when Owen was preaching his sermon to Parliament, Baxter was contending with his fellow soldiers, arguing them out of their mistakes, heresies and schisms. Looking down on a field of corn the weeds would be much less apparent; weeding around the stalks, they become much more obvious and urgent. The field is the same, the perspectives are not. Indeed, Baxter offered his own image from nature to describe the war. England's inhabitants were ‘like the pond that should grudge at the banks and dam, and thinks it injurious to be thus restrained of its liberty, and therefore combine with the winds to raise a tempest, and so assault and break down the banks in their rage; and now where is that peaceable association of waters?’Footnote 126 This is a much more disturbing image. A body of water is a massive, uncontrollable thing, and once the damage is done it cannot be repaired. One is powerless in the face of it; mere weeds, however rampant, can at least be pared back.
Both Owen and Baxter looked for the hand of God in contemporary events, yet they interpreted that hand in very different ways. Owen was convinced that ‘all things here below, especially such as concern the gospel and Church of Christ, are carried along through innumerable varieties and a world of contingencies, according to the regular motions and goings forth of a free, eternal, unchangeable decree: as all inferior orbs, notwithstanding the eccentricities and irregularities of their own inhabitants, are orderly carried about by the first Mover’.Footnote 127 The sense of order here is striking, given the chaos of battles and slaughter and sieges. Owen easily rose above all that to see how God had been moving against the Arminians to defeat them, to frustrate their plans and to rescue the Gospel from its captivity. But when Baxter looked for the hand of God, he offered a drastically different interpretation. The war was not an expression of God's free grace towards England; it represented, instead, his judgement on the nation. ‘I know that you are not such atheists, but you believe it is God that sendeth sickness, and famine, and war; and also that it is only sin that moveth him to this indignation.’Footnote 128 In Baxter's view, Christians had been reluctant to reprove their neighbours for their drunkenness, swearing, worldliness and ignorance, so God had acted to speak his own judgement on such behaviour: ‘Guns and cannons speak against sin in England, because the inhabitants would not speak.’Footnote 129 Thus Owen saw the war as a blessing from God; Baxter interpreted it as God's judgement on a sinful people. There is no doubt that Baxter would have thought Owen's view mistaken. Even when he wrote the first part of his autobiography in the early 1660s, Baxter critiqued the error. In this case he was referring to a former friend, James Berry, who had turned on him during the war, but he might just as aptly have spoken of Owen himself. Berry had risen to high prominence during the Interregnum and been instrumental, in Baxter's mind, in the downfall of Richard Cromwell. ‘And all this was promoted by the misunderstanding of Providence, which he verily thought that God, by their Victories, had so called them to look after the Government of the Land.’Footnote 130 The tenor of Owen's sermon to Parliament would have been, then, a similar misunderstanding of providence. Owen read into Parliament's victories the blessing of God, but Baxter was too closely tied up in the upheaval to see anything else but judgement.
All of this illuminates the terrain in several directions. First, it provides further evidence that each side in the First Civil War was hardly monolithic, and it gives some indication of just how greatly different points of view could vary among those who were supposed to be allies in the same cause. Owen was intimately connected with those in Parliament who could advance his career and opportunities, and it made sense for him consciously to support Parliament against the king. Baxter made no such conscious choice. He drifted into one of Parliament's garrisons only for his personal safety and from a lack of empathy with the royalist rabble; he resisted a formal commission; and he took one up only when he felt that the Gospel was under threat.Footnote 131 His posture towards the cause, then, was markedly different from Owen's.
Second, it illustrates how the civil war could continue to shape movements and ideas long after the fighting had finished. Its legacy was complex and enduring, since the experience shaped individuals profoundly, but in profoundly different ways. Alongside the diverging theology of Baxter and Owen, there was a fundamental divergence of experience and understanding, which in turn demonstrates at least one way in which simple geography and its attendant experience can shape theology and history. This opens up potential for further examination of the interaction between perspective and experience. It is not simply that Baxter and Owen had different experiences first and arrived at their ecclesiological differences second. Their own Presbyterianism and Independency provided very different filters through which they interpreted their experience. In this essay at least, all those who held to a high view of the First Civil War were Independents. That pattern became more pronounced as time went on, and was particularly apparent in the Second Civil War, since it advanced the cause of the Independents so visibly. Thus Baxter's doubts about the war had very clear ecclesiological and soteriological overtones – ‘the disappointed reformation, the hideous doctrines’ – suggesting a complex interplay between belief and experience and perspective. For Owen, we can discern a transition in an essay appended to his 1646 sermon, an essay on toleration written sometime earlier. It is ‘certainly true’, he explained, that ‘heresies and errors ought not to be tolerated’. He urged his readers ‘to root them up and cast them out, that they may not, as noxious weeds and tares, overgrow and choke the corn, amongst which they are covertly scattered’.Footnote 132 At the very least, this impression of the corn sits in tension with that conveyed in his sermon to Parliament. Whenever he wrote his essay, he was much more concerned about the weeds. The decline in that concern may well reflect a transition from Presbyterianism to Independency, since ‘he was at this time [1646] undergoing the change of view which led him in the end to profess Congregationalism’.Footnote 133
Third, this approach helps to clarify Orme's confusion and even to vindicate his perspective. He struggled to understand the heat in the debates between Baxter and Owen, a passion that was unmerited by the issues themselves. ‘Whatever his reasons’, he said of Baxter, in noting that he was usually the aggressor. Orme found those reasons obscure, but they may well go back to the intensity and trauma of Baxter's civil war experience, a trauma that has, if anything, been underestimated by his historians.
Fourth, it shows the value of placing Owen alongside Baxter, in order to elucidate Owen. The two men are a study in contrasts well beyond those identified here. One of the differences is that while Baxter was so biographical in style, Owen gave little of himself away. His writing style is cool and remote, and, unlike Baxter, he left almost nothing in the way of private papers and letters. It is hard to avoid Baxter; it is difficult to find Owen. But if Owen is placed next to Baxter, what might have seemed unremarkable aspects of his own writings take on a new significance. His 1646 sermon to Parliament is a case in point.
Finally, all of this is an important ingredient in the failure of the two men to relate, even though they did not know each other at the time. When they did eventually meet, they were never going to understand each other naturally or easily. It is as if they had served in different wars, so they came from different worlds. Their contrasting views and experience of the First Civil War ensured that their relationship was doomed to struggle before it had even begun.
