I

Francis Bremer has recently drawn attention to Puritan historiography's longstanding neglect of the ways in which ‘ordinary people influenced faith and practice’, a ‘substantial omission’ which Bremer and others have done much to address.Footnote ³ Arnold Hunt and Ann Hughes have each examined the role of the laity in attending to sermons, while Andrew Cambers has looked at Puritan reading practices and the diverse ways in which lay people interacted with their texts.Footnote ⁴ Alec Ryrie has encompassed many of these themes and more in his sweeping study of Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Although he maintains that his is not ‘a book about puritans’, and rightly problematises the temptation to make over-hasty distinctions between a distinctively ‘Puritan’ piety and its ‘conformist’ counterpart, he provides a panoramic treatment of a broad Protestant spiritual life that encompasses lay Puritanism even while describing a wider religious culture.Footnote ⁵ Ryrie's book also contributes to a growing body of literature which draws insight from wider scholarly inquiry into the history of the emotions and makes application to early modern and Puritan lay contexts.Footnote ⁶ Looking specifically at New England, James Cooper, David Hall and Michael Winship have considered how the congregational polity pioneered on American shores fostered a form of church and civic life that was more amenable to lay participation than that which the colonists left behind. Footnote ⁷ And Bremer's most recent work considers directly lay empowerment and the development of Puritanism in a trans-Atlantic context and applied across a broad range of themes.Footnote ⁸

But while Bremer and others are primarily concerned with Puritan laity acting as laity to effect change within their own religious subculture, the focus here is upon ways in which untrained religious separatists – and more specifically Baptist separatists like John Spilsbery – began to transcend the very categories of lay and ordained so as to interact directly with established ministers outside their own immediate circles. As Peter Lake has observed, ‘the delicate balance between the authority of godly ministers and the spiritual autonomy of the activist laity’ always ‘lay at the heart of Puritan religion’.Footnote ⁹ But during the early 1640s longstanding rules of engagement between ordained clergy and the ‘activist laity’ were discarded, and an emerging cadre of lay theologians – many of whom were Baptists – stood at the forefront of this social change. Using a variety of innovative techniques, Baptist lay theologians often managed to initiate and dictate the terms of theological argument, forcing university trained clerics to meet them, however reluctantly, as peers. In many ways this line of inquiry expands upon material explored by Bernard Capp, who has surveyed the role of public disputations within the formation of a new ‘religious marketplace’ during the 1640s and 1650s.Footnote ¹⁰ The present article likewise considers the role of mid seventeenth-century public debate, but situates disputations as one of many factors through which lay theologians, and specifically Baptist lay theologians, worked during the 1640s to advance their aims and, in the process, democratise the production of theological knowledge.

Earlier scholarship has often failed fully to appreciate the distinctive contribution of Baptists, largely due to a tendency among historians to treat ‘separatists’ or ‘radical religion’ as a collective entity.Footnote ¹¹ The significance of separatism – as a conceptual unit – can then be measured in terms of the degree to which it brought about and reflected back a mid seventeenth- century world in flux. In this way, separatism in aggregate becomes the subject of mainstream scholarship, while sustained attention to the peculiarities of any specific sect becomes the niche purview of the denominational historian – interesting for the interested, but of little consequence for our understanding of the broader religious culture. This flattening of categories in the study of seventeenth-century separatists can be seen in the common practice of grouping many of them together to form the collective subject of a single study, or of prefacing discussion of them with a long, colourful list – descriptions, for example, of London streets teeming with Familists, Adamites, Antinomians, Traskites, Socinians, Ranters, Quakers and Anabaptists. Of course, as the work of Christopher Hill and Michael Watts can attest, the treatment of mid seventeenth-century ‘radicals’ and ‘dissenters’ under a single heading can often function as useful tool.Footnote ¹² And yet, when this approach is overused, or used uncritically, one risks minimising the contributions of individual groups by inadvertently mimicking the approach of seventeenth-century heresiographers who routinely conflated contemporary ‘sectaries’ so as to discredit them.Footnote ¹³

Some seventeenth-century religious groups were, undoubtedly, marginal in their influence, but this was not always the case and it does not appear to have been the case with Baptists. Baptists in particular exerted an influence on ecclesiastical affairs and religious culture far greater than their small numbers might suggest.Footnote ¹⁴ This was because many who would not have considered formally joining a separatist Church were intrigued by Baptist arguments, and Baptists were often openly tolerated among paedobaptist Congregational churches.Footnote ¹⁵ As Baptists became ever more entrenched within the ranks of parliamentary armies, victories on the battlefield became opportunities to spread Baptist ideas across a far wider geographic range than would have been otherwise possible.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, unlike more abstract doctrinal points that might have been privately questioned but never publicly challenged, the practical dimension of the baptismal question often forced troubled consciences to reveal themselves, one spur to debate being the reluctance of parents to present their newborns at the font. Indeed, by the mid-1640s conflicts over infant baptism were evidently so common that the Westminster divines felt compelled to remind readers that ‘it be a great sin to contemn or neglect this ordinance’, an admonition which likely had English ‘Anabaptists’ in view.Footnote ¹⁷ Additionally, during the mid-seventeenth century a number of prominent individuals adopted baptistic views, a diverse group that included the parliamentarian army officer John Hutchinson and his wife Lucy,Footnote ¹⁸ the life-long Church of England clergyman John Tombes,Footnote ¹⁹ the radical individualist John MiltonFootnote ²⁰ and the first president of Harvard College, Henry Dunster.Footnote ²¹ While other movements considered heretical at the time exerted their own influence on civic and religious life,Footnote ²² much of the above applies uniquely to Baptists and baptistic thought and indicates something of the degree to which Baptist influence extended well beyond any proto-denominational Baptist boundaries.

II

When John Spilsbery wrote in 1643 on behalf of those ‘godly persons, whose consciences were scrupled about the baptizing of children’, he was responding to a developing situation that predated his own involvement and illustrates the rapidly evolving role of lay people within theological debate. The case revolved around George Phillips (d. 1644), a Cambridge-educated clergyman who, since July 1630, had been serving as pastor of the Congregational church in Watertown, Massachusetts.Footnote ²³ In 1643 Phillips's opinions on the doctrines of baptism and the nature of the Church were subjected to a published critique by the London soap boiler and Baptist lay theologian Thomas Lambe. Lambe argued that by baptising infants Phillips and his paedobaptist allies had hollowed out the Church, emptying it of authentic, believing saints and filling it up instead with hypocrites who possessed ‘the Baptisme of Christ in name but not in deed and in truth’. Baptism was only for believers who could make a credible profession of faith, and baptised infants were ‘Christians in name but not in deed and truth’.Footnote ²⁴

Such rhetoric was typical of Baptist polemic, but what makes the Phillips-Lambe exchange noteworthy for our purposes is the manner in which it came to public view. Anyone reading Lambe's Confutation of infants baptism in 1643 would have assumed that its author was replying to the previously published positions of Phillips, an assumption seemingly vindicated by the work's extended subtitle: Or an answer, to a tretice written by Georg Phillips, of Wattertowne in New England. In a style typical of the period and genre, lengthy passages from Phillips are reproduced verbatim and replied to immediately thereafter by Lambe, furthering the impression of a standard, public, published dialogue. But, these clues notwithstanding, a reader drawing such inferences would have been mistaken. For upon encountering the book in which he played a leading role, an astonished George Phillips stated that he had never heard of Thomas Lambe, nor had he ever ‘writ one word to him … nor to any other in England about this matter’. ‘It put me into a kinde of wonderment’, continued Phillips, ‘to see my name put forth in print, and as Author of a Treatise, who never writ any such Treatise, nor even desired or intended the publication of any Discourse upon that, or any other subject.’ Clearly nonplussed, Phillips charged Lambe with having ‘done contrary to just and Christian dealing, in publishing such a thing … and making that common which ought first to have been cleared by private dealing’.Footnote ²⁵

And yet Phillips could not deny ownership of the words attributed to him. Sometime before the publication of Lambe's treatise, Phillips had received an unexpected visitor at his home in Watertown. This visitor, Nathaniel Biscoe, had come from England and presented himself to Phillips as a man earnestly looking for answers to various ecclesial questions. Chief among Biscoe's concerns was the question of the proper subjects of baptism. Phillips ‘yeelded to his request’ and granted the stranger ‘a private conference about those particulars for further light’. Initially, the exchange seemed to go well: ‘in my chamber with him alone, [I] agitated those two points, both hearing what he could say, and answering unto every objection he made … divers hours wee spent in that discourse’. The end result, however, was not what Phillips had expected. After acceding to his visitor's request that he ‘pen down those arguments that had passed betwixt us’, George Phillips heard nothing more from Nathaniel Biscoe. Until, that is, he encountered afresh his own arguments, now transmuted from a record of a private conference in New England into a published theological dialogue in London with Thomas Lambe, Baptist provocateur.Footnote ²⁶

This information is known to anyone familiar with the writings of either Phillips or Lambe.Footnote ²⁷ But what has not been recognised is that the Phillips-Lambe discussion contained a third conversation partner, namely, John Spilsbery. Published in 1643, the same year as Lambe's reply to Phillips, Spilsbery's A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme critiqued paedobaptism on exegetical and theological grounds and interacted with several ancillary issues such as the legitimacy of a baptism administered by a false Church. In his opening sentences, as Spilsbery elaborated upon his reason for writing, he described a set of circumstances that impinged upon the Phillips-Lambe material. Spilsbery had received a series of letters ‘from beyond the Seas’ written by ‘Some godly persons whose conscienses were scrupled about the baptizing of children before they came to know what they doe in the same.’Footnote ²⁸ These unnamed New Englanders sent Spilsbery ‘Letter after Letter’ urging him to reply to ‘certaine Reasons and Arguments, gathered up against them’. Initially, Spilsbery intended to assist them ‘onely in a private way’, but after reading some of the works then being published on the subject of baptism Spilsbery changed his mind. The published books that were causing Spilsbery such concern came from disputants on both sides of the controversy. Some, evidently writing against the Baptist position, ‘published their evill affections in a reproachfull manner; casting such unseemly aspersions upon the truth of God, and godly persons … to make the same hatefull in the eyes of all men’. Still others, though, seem to have been publishing in support of baptistic views but in a manner that Spilsbery found unacceptable. These unnamed persons wrote ‘in resemblance of the truth’, but did so ‘in such a confused way, both in respect of corrupt doctrine, and as bad order; by reason of which disorder, the blessedness of God, and his holy truth are exposed unto much suffering’. With the doctrine of baptism being thus mishandled by both foe and would-be friend alike, Spilsbery felt ‘bound in conscience to come forth to the helpe of the Lord against the mightie’ and ‘to speake a word in the defence of his blessed truth’.Footnote ²⁹

Although he did not identify anyone by name, Spilsbery referenced four individuals or groups of individuals in explaining his decision to publish: the ‘godly persons’ in New England who requested Spilsbery's help; the originator of the ‘Reasons and Arguments’ against believers’ baptism; those in England casting ‘unseemly aspersions’ against Baptists; and, finally, the baptistic separatists publishing in ‘a confused way’. The ‘godly persons’ allied with Spilsbery remain unknown, as do those publishing against believers’ baptism – although given the volume of polemic published against Baptists at this time it is unnecessary to assume that Spilsbery had any specific authors in mind. It is now clear, however, that the source of the original anti-baptist polemic and the ‘confused’ baptistic author were George Phillips and Thomas Lambe respectively. In addition to general similarities in circumstance, the passages extracted and answered by Spilsbery correspond exactly to those extracted and answered by Thomas Lambe.Footnote ³⁰ Such correspondence virtually assures the identity of Phillips. And while the identification of Lambe as the ‘confused’ BaptistFootnote ³¹ is somewhat less certain, this hypothesis fits the evidence and comports with known doctrinal divisions amongst baptistic separatists. Spilsbery's Calvinist convictions would never have allowed him to ally himself with the Arminian-influenced Lambe, a point made clear when, in the conclusion to his treatise, Spilsbery condemned unnamed individuals who ‘seem to be of my judgment about Baptism’ as ‘teachers … from Satan, and not from God’ for their denial of Calvinistic soteriology.Footnote ³²

As Spilsbery nowhere mentions Phillips by name, the latter's role as Spilsbery's polemical foil in the treatise has not been recognised.Footnote ³³ But Spilsbery's participation in the Phillips-Lambe exchange is significant, for it offers a glimpse into otherwise obscure Baptist networks. Somehow, George Phillip's manuscript defending believers’ baptism made its way into the hands of both Thomas Lambe and John Spilsbery, a distribution which points to the trans-Atlantic context of the theological conversation taking place at a lay level. The fact that the manuscript crossed between followers of the Arminian-influenced Lambe and the Calvinist Spilsbery also suggests that despite the division being perpetuated by their leaders, literary networks among Baptist laity stretched across the Particular-General divide. Many lay people were more interested in the baptismal question itself than they were in attaching themselves to any specific Baptist leader or church. If correct, this would further illustrate the degree to which the impact of baptistic ideas extended beyond the formal membership rolls of Baptist churches.

Yet even more important still is the way in which this exchange draws our attention to changing attitudes toward the production of theological knowledge. A theologically diverse range of baptistic separatists pressed religious authority figures on doctrinal questions and then exchanged notes on what they heard. They were passing manuscripts and talking among themselves in an effort not simply to better understand theological arguments, but to actually determine theological truth. The production of new theological knowledge by lay people had been going on for some time among previous generations of English separatists. But, unlike participants in earlier underground movements whose activities remained hidden in secretive networks operating beneath the public gaze,Footnote ³⁴ Baptist lay theologians actively sought publicity. Empowered by the collapse of print censorship and episcopal authority, Baptists began to engage directly and publicly with their putative betters, drawing otherwise unwilling ministers into participation in serious debate.

The significance and novelty of this trans-Atlantic, intra-Puritan exchange comes into sharper relief when juxtaposed with ostensibly similar lay-clerical encounters which occurred prior to the cultural and political upheavals of the early 1640s. The Phillips-Lambe-Spilsbery episode can be usefully contrasted, for example, with a mid-1620s confrontation between the Puritan minister Stephen Denison and the boxmaker John Etherington. The latter has been meticulously reconstructed by Peter Lake and provides a useful benchmark against which the religious and social changes of the early 1640s can be more accurately measured. Although the theological concerns animating the two encounters varied considerably – Denison and Etherington crossed swords over such issues as Familism, sabbatarianism and antinomianism – for our present purpose, at least, the specific doctrinal content disputed is of far less significance than the form of the dispute. When the forms are compared, one can recognise both the dramatic degree to which lay-clerical relations had changed over a span of less than twenty years, and the ways in which later developments emerged organically from the very same mechanisms and networks long at work within Puritan circles.

The Denison-Etherington affair, as expounded by Lake, was notable, first and foremost, for its novelty, offering ‘an example, almost unique for the period before 1640, of an interaction between a godly minister and an active, critical and relatively humble member of his flock’.Footnote ³⁵ When such lay-clerical disputes did arise during the earlier period, they were usually kept private or semi-private, and this by ministerial design. Intra-Puritan disputes were intentionally adjudicated within the ‘hidden underworld of London Puritanism’ and rarely made public through print.Footnote ³⁶ When news of intra-Puritan conflict did reach the printing press, the medium ‘could be used to close down rather than open up debate’ as tenaciously guarded licensing privileges ensured that subversive lay opinion was suppressed.Footnote ³⁷ During the 1640s, by contrast, lay-clerical confrontations were taking place with startling regularity, with George Phillips's remarks on baptism attracting not one, but, if we count Nathaniel Biscoe, at least three lay antagonists spread across two continents. Widespread access to print during the 1640s allowed zealous lay people to circumvent the carefully constructed clerical barriers that would have made the actions of Lambe and Spilsbery inconceivable in previous decades. Rather than remaining hidden behind the high walls of respectable clerical discourse, the doctrinal views of Baptist lay theologians quickly moved from private conversation, to private scribal publication, to trans-Atlantic dissemination by means of public pamphleteering.

Crucially, this access to print in turn compelled ordained ministers to respond in new ways, a reluctant engagement which unintentionally conferred status and legitimacy on the lay theologians involved. The Denison-Etherington exchange again provides an illustrative counterpoint to that between Phillips and Lambe. For though, as Lake notes, it would have been ‘eminently logical’ for Denison and Etherington ‘simply to debate the substantive points of disagreement between’ them, this did not happen. Rather than ‘debating discrete points of doctrine with Etherington, Denison chose systematically to ignore Etherington the man while attacking his own version of the boxmaker's opinions’. During the 1620s, the sense of hierarchical distance between lay persons and ordained clergy was still sufficiently robust that Denison could easily get away with such tactics. The reputable minister of St Katherine Cree had no reason to argue straightforwardly with a man such as Etherington, for to do so ‘would have been to cede the boxmaker an implicit parity of authority and standing that, in fact, Denison was desperate to deny him’.Footnote ³⁸

In a telling contrast, then, we find that this sort of systematic and serious doctrinal debate was precisely what George Phillips granted to Thomas Lambe some twenty years after Denison denied the same to Etherington. George Phillips was a minister of some stature. He was heavily involved in the effort to shape the Congregational church government that would become synonymous with New England and was, arguably, a more eminent minister than Denison.Footnote ³⁹ And yet, despite his prominence, he took time to compose a detailed, theologically nuanced, 154-page reply to a London Baptist soap boiler. Reading Phillips's account of his decision to publish, one recognises the liminality of the moment: clerical authority figures were struggling to keep pace with the quick erosion of their once unquestioned sense of ministerial privilege. Phillips claimed that if it were up to him, he ‘would not trouble you [i.e. the reader] with reading any thing’ written by him. And ‘yet’, he continued, ‘seeing I cannot avoid it, being provoked by one who hath made himselfe my adversary without a cause, and especially in a matter of so great weight and consequence’, Phillips had no choice but to reply to Lambe in a straightforward manner which would have scandalised Stephen Denison during the 1620s.Footnote ⁴⁰ That such an effort was undertaken at all testifies to the impact that Baptist lay theologians were having during the period, and the professed hesitancy with which Phillips decided to publish only underscores this point. Denison's encounter with Etherington during the 1620s reflected a period in which the Puritan project's inherent spirit of lay enthusiasm was carefully managed by a series of interlocking ministerial checks designed to severely curtail the possibilities for lay-clerical engagement. But as those checks were weakened by larger societal shifts during the early 1640s, ‘there was little to hinder the rapid transition of private disagreement into semi-public dispute and then fully public altercation’.Footnote ⁴¹ The Phillips-Lambe-Spilsbery affair thus stands as a prototypical example of how this acceleration from private to public took place, and how the status of the lay theologian was radically elevated as a key and enduring consequence.

III

Like many clergy during the early 1640s, Phillips lamented the rising profile of baptistic separatists while simultaneously validating the phenomenon in the very act of responding to their claims. As baptistic groups grew in numbers and influence, the educated parish clergy gestured in vain towards the well-ordered lay-clerical relations of past decades, routinely denouncing Baptists and their books as so foolish and wrongheaded as to be unworthy of reply. ‘I confesse’, one wrote, ‘considering the grosse and manifest errours, the fantasticall conceits … the evident absurdities, where with the Booke is stuffed … it may seeme unworthy an answer.’Footnote ⁴² And yet, this dismissive attitude was belied by the sheer volume of print which those same ministers devoted to the refutation of these arguments. Breaking their virtual silence on the question of believers’ baptism, Church of England clergy published at least thirteen treatises directly refuting Baptist writers between 1642 and 1647. This tally does not include anti-Baptist polemic written by other separatists or semi-separatists (for example, Samuel Chidley's A Christian plea for infants baptisme, 1643), nor does it include large-scale works of heresiography in which Baptists are addressed along with numerous other separatist groups (for example, Thomas Edwards's Gangraena, 1646).Footnote ⁴³ This profusion of published critique led an exasperated Robert Baillie to wonder over the obstinancy of people who persisted in error despite having been corrected ‘over and over publickly in print’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet for those interested in cultural change over time, the unprecedented willingness of ordained clergy to offer substantive answers was at least as striking as the persistence of Baptist questions.

The outpouring of opposition to Baptists and their arguments represented an impressive level of theological interaction between clerics and lay people. In both its volume and its sophistication, the energy expended by religious authority figures in response to Baptist lay theologians signalled changing attitudes toward lay participation in doctrinal debate and was predicated upon a tacit assumption that lay people had both the ability and the responsibility to adjudicate between competing theological positions. Much of this change flowed from the effective collapse of episcopal authority during the early 1640s, a development that afforded English churchgoers the possibility of real choice in religious questions. This possibility, in turn, encouraged both proponents of theological novelty and defenders of established orthodoxy to justify their convictions in public and on rational grounds. The Baptist John Mabbat identified his historical moment as one characterised by ‘Controversie, Contention, Tumults’ and ‘Oppositions’ in religious matters. Amidst such tumult, Mabbat urged his lay readers not to look to ecclesial authority for direction, but instead to directly engage the arguments themselves: ‘let the Word of God dwell plenteously or richly, try the spirits, search the Scriptures, examine the texts of Scriptures alleged in proof in this matter’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rather than simply receiving correct dogma from a remote bishop, council or synod, this process of searching, examining and trying was to become the measure of a religious proposition's worth.

For clergy accustomed to more authoritarian and well-ordered relations between themselves and their parishioners, such developments could seem shocking. ‘Sectaries make bold’, wrote Baillie, ‘without any fear, any fainting, any ceasing, in season, and out of season, by preaching, printing, disputing in all places, all companies, towards all relations, to propagate their erroneous ways.’Footnote ⁴⁶ And while for Baillie and other high-profile defenders of orthodoxy baptistic ideas raised the spectre of religious dislocation and chaos on a national level, among less prominent clergy outside London, this same underlying fear was being refracted through the lens of regional concern at the local parish level. Ralph Josselin's diary, for example, indicates that he had several encounters with baptistically inclined lay people during the 1640s while serving as the vicar of Earls Colne, Essex. One such encounter, dated 29 June 1646, even found Josselin publicly debating the Baptist Samuel Oates, father of the more notorious Titus Oates. But whatever Josselin thought of the incident – ‘the man boldly continued in towne till Wednesday, exercising all three dayes’ – the reality was that by the time Josselin made his diary entry, the sight of ordained clergy engaging in live, public debate with Baptist lay theologians was no longer an uncommon one.Footnote ⁴⁷

On 11 January 1643, the year during which he would publish his written reply to George Phillips on paedobaptism, the Baptist Thomas Lambe participated in a public debate on the same subject. Held at the parish church in Terling, Essex – just south of Josselin's ministry at Earls Colne – the debate pitted three ordained ministers against Lambe and his fellow Baptist lay theologian Timothy Batt. As Bernard Capp's recent survey of ‘public disputations in civil war and Interregnum England’ demonstrates, debates such as this one represented a genuinely novel phenomenon in English life. Although formalised oral argument was a longstanding fixture in certain contexts, ‘Tudor disputations were generally initiated by the crown, stage-managed, and confined to elite audiences in London and the universities.’Footnote ⁴⁸ In place of actual debate, these predictable exercises offered mere simulacra, ritualised affairs in which standard arguments and counterarguments were rehearsed for the express purpose of reaching predetermined ends. By contrast, when the Baptists Lambe and Batt took the floor at Terling in the beginning of 1643, they participated in something altogether different: a genuine clash of conflicting views in which lay theologians openly challenged the orthodoxies of ordained clergy. Such a contest would have seemed an unthinkable mismatch just a few years earlier. And yet, by the time the debate took place, the religious landscape had been so radically altered that the parish vicar John Stalham not only consented to hold the event, but took it seriously, evincing a real concern to defend his doctrine openly before a critically engaged lay public.Footnote ⁴⁹

In a revealing passage, Stalham explained his motivation for participating in such an event: ‘some of this Parish doe differ from me in the point of Baptisme; with whom I have conferred heretofore but have not prevailed’. As increasing numbers from within his parish questioned the validity of infant baptism, Stalham hoped that by publicly debating the question the ‘strayed sheepe, may be fetcht back, who went after the Anabaptists whistle’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, Stalham consistently framed the results of the exercise in terms of his desire to persuade and, thus, retain his parishioners:

Stalham's anxiety points to the erosion of ecclesiastical authority and the seriousness with which parish ministers approached the encroaching Baptist threat. The once orderly, uniform and top-down world of English religion had been transformed into something resembling a marketplace of ideas, in which professional clergymen duelled with soap-boilers and physicians to determine the correct interpretation of holy writ. In addition, these theological competitions were enacted not behind the veil of abstruse Latin prose, but in the vernacular language, and set before a watching lay audience whose judgement would be announced the following Sunday through their attendance at a chosen house of worship.Footnote ⁵²

The debate at Terling yields further insight when we remember that from the perspective of parish clergy like John Stalham, public disputations of this sort were largely reactive affairs. Religious authorities did not participate in them in order to stir up lay interest in a topic, but rather to suppress it, to decisively vindicate received orthodoxy, and, as Stalham himself put it, to ‘do some good, to satisfie weake spirits, who are ready to be turned about with every winde of doctrine’. And yet, while established religious authorities might have hoped to silence the voices of dissenting lay people, their actions seem to have had the opposite effect. For through their participation in public disputes with Baptist lay preachers, the parish clergy effectively legitimised their opposition and contributed to the accelerating diminution of their own theological authority. The participatory spirit then swelling the ranks of ecclesial troublemakers was even given explicit validation when, after the conference had concluded, ‘some of the Ministers desired to know of the people, whether they had received satisfaction and did conclude with us, that Infants were to be baptized’. Here were Church of England ministers eager to learn whether or not their theological arguments had proven acceptable, not to a bishop or synod, but to whatever lay audience they had been fortunate enough to find.Footnote ⁵³

IV

Published polemic and public debate represented two different ways in which Baptist lay theologians sought to challenge ordained clergy and propagate their own ideas. But these strategies could also be perceived as socially disruptive – in December 1645 a scheduled ‘publike dispute touching the lawfulnesse of Peaedobaptisme’ was cancelled by London authorities who feared a ‘disturbance of the publike Peace’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus it is not surprising that some Baptists also exhibited a desire to work with ordained clergy and to operate as best they could within the ecclesiastical framework set by those responsible for the future direction of the national Church. During the mid-1640s this meant appealing to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, a task which a group of London Baptist lay theologians sought to accomplish through the publication of an official confession of faith in October 1644.

Speaking broadly, one can explain the appearance of the Baptist confession late in 1644 in terms of large scale social and political factors then affecting not just Baptists, but the entire spectrum of Puritan dissent. During the early 1640s England witnessed an unprecedented social and religious unravelling as Church and crown, Parliament and people all experienced what David Cressy has described as ‘an earthquake of cosmic proportions’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This collapse of longstanding institutions suggested to religious outsiders that a divine movement was imminent, that ‘God [was] beginning to stirre in the World, and to doe great things in the World’.Footnote ⁵⁶ John Pym's death in December 1643 created a leadership void which was quickly filled by MPs who would prove even more amenable to Baptist concerns. The rising profile of men such as Oliver St John, Sir Henry Vane the younger and Oliver Cromwell both reflected and furthered a changing political context in which Baptist lay theologians might plausibly imagine a national Church settlement broad enough to accommodate them.

Yet these macro factors alone do not tell the entire story, and the timing and intent of the Baptists’ decision to publish their 1644 confession only becomes explicable when set in the micro-context furnished by debates taking place within the Westminster Assembly itself. Only here can we intuit that the publication of the confession was, in all likelihood, a deliberate attempt by Baptist lay theologians to bend the Assembly's collective ear. This, of course, was a task not easily accomplished by lay theologians operating outside of official clerical channels. Hunter Powell's recent work on intra-Puritan dispute at the Assembly has highlighted, among other things, the ‘oddly overlooked … fact that the methodological rules of scholastic debate were a fundamental part of the way these divines thought and argued’.Footnote ⁵⁷ These elaborate, sometimes baffling rhetorical conventions reinforced the perception that the Westminster divines were professional clerics who neither needed nor desired the interference of unlettered outsiders. Lay theologians were intended to remain, both literally and metaphorically, outside the walls of the Jerusalem Chamber, and yet these barriers did not prevent their number among the Baptists from at least attempting to gain a hearing.

In the months leading up to the confession's publication, the subject of separatists, and Baptists specifically, had been gaining attention among the Assembly's leading divines. On 9 August 1644 Stephen Marshall took the assembly floor to address the increasingly problematic activity of London Baptists: ‘we find them to be many and very high & extremely dangerous’. Marshall warned his fellow divines that if there were not ‘some stop to it we are afraid it will prove soe great a mischefe as none of us shall be able to stand before it’. Several Baptist ministers were then identified as especially troublesome, ‘particularly one Mr. Knowles, an active man’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The man here identified was the London Baptist Hanserd Knollys, and in light of recent events it was not at all surprising that he would have been the object of Marshall's particular concern.

Earlier that year, in March 1644, Knollys was involved in several private conferences on the subject of baptism, during which he not only critiqued paedobaptism, but also persuaded the prominent London Independent minister Henry Jessey to join him in rejecting the doctrine. Even more worrisome was the fact that these dangerous conferences also involved other leading London Independent ministers, several of whom – namely Thomas Goodwin, Phillip Nye and Jeremiah Burroughes – were serving alongside Marshall at the Westminster Assembly. At the conferences in question, Goodwin, Nye and Burroughes responded to Knollys's retreat from orthodoxy in disturbingly irenic fashion, the Independent ministers recommending ‘not to Excom[m]unicate, no, nor admonish’, but instead ‘to count them still of our Church; & pray, & love them’.Footnote ⁵⁹ If word of this had reached Marshall, then his deliberate mention of Knollys's heightened ‘activity’ in the presence of the very ‘Dissenting Brethren’ with whom Knollys had been working takes on a new and more threatening shade of meaning.

But, whatever messages Marshall may or may not have intended to subtly convey to other assembly members, his warning about the danger of Baptist activity was clear and direct. That same day the assembly implored both houses of parliament ‘to prevent the spreading Opinions of Anabaptism and Antinomianism’, for ‘those Men have cast off all Affection, and are so imbitterated, that it is high time to suppress them’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Over the ensuing month, the assembly prepared a document offering parliamentary leaders ‘humble Advise … for preventing the mischiefes that will arise from, & follow upon the divulging the dangerous opinions of Antinomianisme & Anabaptisme’. On 5 September 1644, the day when the report was to be submitted, Phillip Nye requested that he and his Congregational colleagues be allowed to append to the report their disagreement with the assembly's conclusions, a request which prompted the London minister Lazarus Seaman to demand that Nye ‘declare in whose name he speaks’. ‘I desire to be spared in this’, Nye replied, adding that there is ‘noe order to compel me to it’. Seaman's seemingly odd request and Nye's terse refusal hinted at the growing tension between the main body of Presbyterians and Nye's congregationally-minded minority. Indeed, John Lightfoot recalled that the exchange prompted a ‘large and hot debate’, with the assembly ultimately refusing to allow Nye and his fellow travellers to append their reservations. The report was instead submitted immediately to the ‘Honourable Committee of Plundered Ministers’ without emendation.Footnote ⁶¹

This report – and Nye's concern about its content – sheds new light on Baptist activity during this period and especially the decision of the seven London churches to publish a formal confessional statement. The report contained seven recommendations as to how the state might best stifle the spread of baptistic ideas. And while much of the advice was predictable and straightforward – ‘That no man be permitted to preach or publickly expound the Scriptures, who is not ordained a Minister’ – the document's fourth recommendation becomes intriguing in light of subsequent Baptist activity:

On 16 October 1644, little more than a month after the Assembly decided upon these words, the London book collector George Thomason purchased a pamphlet entitled The confession of faith, of those churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists.Footnote ⁶³ With the publication of this document, the London Baptists were attempting to engage with the Assembly on its own terms, and to participate, however ineffectually, in the ecclesiastical life of the nation. For their confession of faith indeed brought together ‘the grounds & reasons of their opinions in a brief & compendious manner in writing under their hands’; to this last provision, the confession was endorsed by fifteen signatories – all lay people – including John Spilsbery, whose earlier trans-Atlantic disputation on baptism we have already examined. The advice given by the Westminster divines in the fourth provision was clearly directed toward ordained ministers in the national Church – they were certainly not intending to legitimise wild-eyed sectaries through an open call for dialogue. And yet, by submitting their own confession of faith for public evaluation, the London Baptist lay theologians were declaring that their churches and ministers were as valid as those established and ordained by the national Church.

Several lines of evidence lend support to the suggestion that the London Baptists composed and published their confession in direct response to the Assembly's request that baptistically inclined ministers clarify their beliefs in writing. The first step must be to establish that those composing the Baptist confession could have had access to the Assembly's report. Although the report was submitted by the divines to the Committee for Plundered Ministers on 5 September 1644, the House of Commons did not formally take up the matter until 12 November that same year, well after the Baptist confession was published.Footnote ⁶⁴ This does not, however, eliminate the possibility that members of the seven Baptist churches might have received early word directly from ministers present at the Assembly, the obvious candidates being Philip Nye, Thomas Goodwin and Jeremiah Burroughes. The three Dissenting Brethren were directly linked to the London Baptists through the aforementioned private conferences. The London Baptist leader William Kiffin, for one, was both actively involved in the conferences and a signatory of the 1644 confession. Another of the conference participants, Hanserd Knollys, did not sign the 1644 confession but did sign its 1646 revision.Footnote ⁶⁵ These are links in a chain connecting Baptists with London Independents, and other points of contact between the two groups abound. For example, in the years following the events in question, Henry Lawrence published a treatise attacking paedobaptism. Lawrence had served as an elder in the Arnhem independent church once pastored by Thomas Goodwin and would later be appointed lord president of Cromwell's Council of State. Lawrence continued his contact with the Arnhem congregation upon his return to England in 1646, and the relationship offers further evidence of the degree to which ‘Anabaptist’ views were tolerated among mainstream English Congregationalists.Footnote ⁶⁶

Furthermore, the ecclesiology presented in the 1644 confession was strikingly similar in key respects to that advanced earlier that year by the Dissenting Brethren's own ‘Apollogetical Narration’. Both documents sketched an ecclesiastical structure in which individual congregations were vested with autonomous authority while also encouraged to work in close cooperation with one another.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus both the Baptists and the Dissenting Brethren were pressing for an essentially voluntarist model of church membership that was fundamentally at odds with the comprehensive, geographically oriented parish system advocated by the Westminster Presbyterians. If, as Ethan Shagan has recently argued, ‘Kiffin and his particular baptist allies were close associates of the apologists and they saw their movement as a natural successor to independency’, then it becomes more plausible to suggest that Nye and company were leaking information to the Baptists concerning the Assembly's intentions and perhaps even encouraging them to act accordingly.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, on the very same day that Nye found his personal affiliations openly questioned after he objected to the harder line then being adopted against ‘Anabaptists’, the assembly closed the session by resolving not to allow the Dissenting Brethren extra time to append their objections ‘because of the great scandal to this Assembly by coppyes that goe from hand to hand of the Advise of this Assembly, which doe misreport the mind of the Assembly’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Someone inside the chamber was slipping notes from the proceedings to theological opponents on the outside, and the overt hostility and suspicion directed that morning toward Nye and his associates marks them out as the most likely suspects.

In addition to the relationship between London Baptists and the Dissenting Brethren, there are three further clues within the text of the 1644 confession itself that would support a connection between the document's publication and the Assembly's previous instructions that all those advancing baptistic opinions explain themselves in writing. First, the timing is plausible. If we assume that Nye and others leaked the information to their Baptist associates on or soon after 5 September, this would allow the 1644 signatories just over one month to compose and publish their confession of faith. Given that the confession's wording draws heavily upon already extant materials,Footnote ⁷⁰ this period of time is long enough to allow the production of such a document, yet short enough to reasonably infer a connection between the two events. Second, the wording of the confession's title-page echoes the language of the Assembly's pronouncement. The divines requested written explanations from heterodox teachers so that their ideas might be ‘examined according to the Word of God’ and the London Baptists responded with a confession ‘Presented to the view of all that feare God, to examine by the touchstone of the Word of Truth’.Footnote ⁷¹ Third, the confession's prefatory epistle elaborates upon its authors’ intentions with reference to ‘those that thinke themselves much wronged, if they be not looked upon as the chiefe Worthies of the Church of God, and Watchmen of the Citie’. The nod toward the perceived hubris of ecclesiastical authorities who would take as their exclusive prerogative the duty to ‘reform the Reformation it self’ leads one to suspect that the 1644 signatories wrote deliberately with the Westminster Assembly of Divines in view.Footnote ⁷²

If correct, this reconstruction of events leading up to the publication of the 1644 confession would be significant for at least three reasons. First, it would further our understanding of why the seven London Baptist churches formally united when they did. Many have speculated that the timing of the confession's publication was influenced by the Assembly's growing hostility toward separatists, and the argument presented above would confirm and clarify these suspicions.Footnote ⁷³ Second, it evidences Baptist cooperation with ordained clergy by drawing London Baptists and London Congregationalists closer together than has been supposed. If the Dissenting Brethren were indeed feeding useful information to the Baptists then this cooperation would indicate two groups who saw themselves as sharing at least something of a common purpose, and would cut against a longstanding historiographical tendency to distance all Baptists from the mainstream of religious life, classifying them instead among the ‘religious radicals’. Third, and perhaps most germane to the themes of this essay, the narrative presented here depicts Baptist lay theologians attempting to engage the clergy sitting at Westminster in a manner that the latter could have conceivably found respectable and worthy. All of the initial fifteen signatories on the 1644 confession were lay people, all lacked formal theological training. And yet, here is a clear example of such lay theologians working both alongside and against ordained ministers to contribute their ideas to the nation's ongoing quest for religious settlement.

V

The Baptist efforts to gain a hearing among the Westminster divines were, in the short term, an abject failure. Their 1644 confession was, at least on an official level, ignored. Their attempt in January 1646 to distribute physically a revised edition of the confession to members of parliament resulted in the prompt arrest of the two Baptists involved.Footnote ⁷⁴ And then, on 2 May 1648, parliament passed ‘An Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies’, according to which all found guilty of teaching that ‘the baptizing of Infants is unlawfull … shall be committed to prison’ until they satisfactorily renounced their errors.Footnote ⁷⁵

Despite these obvious failures, it would be a mistake to dismiss Baptist activity during the 1640s as the work of fringe zealots with only marginal influence on mainstream religious life. Instead, when viewed in the context of their many substantive interactions with established clergy, these individuals can be more fully appreciated as lay theologians who began, though haltingly and perhaps unwittingly, to contribute to a wider cultural movement through which societal assumptions regarding the proper distribution of theological authority were collectively reassessed. Harnessing a variety of innovative methods including the publication of private conferences, the shrewd use of an increasingly participatory print culture, the insistence on public disputations within parish churches, and even direct attempts to influence the Westminster Assembly itself, mid seventeenth-century Baptists challenged established clergy in ways that would have been impossible prior to the transformative political and ecclesiastical events of the early 1640s. In doing so, they persuaded religious authority figures to engage seriously and in public with arguments that they would have otherwise preferred to ignore, arguments whose effects continued to be felt throughout the Interregnum and beyond. Indeed, during the ensuing decade, Baptists and their ideas impacted civic and church life on both sides of the Atlantic. In the American colonies arguments dangerously close to those advanced by Baptists lay at the heart of the ‘Half-Way Covenant’ controversy.Footnote ⁷⁶ Meanwhile, in England, the 1648 blasphemy legislation was passed but never enacted, and the growing legitimacy of Baptists during the Interregnum was evidenced by both their toleration under the Instrument of Government, and their officially sanctioned participation in the effort to craft a Cromwellian religious settlement.Footnote ⁷⁷ But beyond whatever tangible gains Baptists may have won for themselves during the mid-seventeenth century, their more lasting contribution lay in the innovative ways through which they challenged regnant conceptions of religious authority. By prodding and manipulating established clergy into theological debate, Baptist lay theologians furthered an ongoing process through which marginal religious voices were legitimised in the democratisation of early modern Christianity.