Peckard’s Memoirs and the Defense of Little Gidding

The most important of these readers was surely Peter Peckard, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Dean of Peterborough Cathedral, who published his Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Nicholas Ferrar (1790) when he himself was an aging and accomplished cleric in the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁰ Peckard had married Martha Ferrar in 1755 and had consequently inherited the books and papers of his father-in-law, Edward Ferrar. Peckard constructed the Memoirs by mining a biography written by Nicholas’s brother, John, and other manuscript materials, but he also delayed publication of the Memoirs while he searched in vain for a lost manuscript by Francis Peck.Footnote ¹¹ In the preface to the Memoirs, Peckard notes that the John Ferrar manuscript was the basis both for the Peck biography (which remains lost to this day) and for a manuscript biography written by the nonjuring bishop Francis Turner, which was published in condensed form in The Christian’s Magazine as The Life of Mr. Nicholas Ferrar in 1761.Footnote ¹² Peckard goes on ‘to inform the public, that both these accounts, so far as they go, are authentic’, meaning that both Peck and Turner followed the John Ferrar manuscript with a reasonable degree of fidelity.Footnote ¹³ As the curator of the Ferrar papers, Peckard was uniquely qualified to speak to questions of authenticity.

Throughout the preface to the Memoirs, Peckard presents himself as a scholar committed to the careful preservation and transmission of the historical record. The Memoirs does indeed have a certain archival value. For example, Peckard is the first writer to give an account in print of the plundering of Little Gidding by puritan soldiers in the English Civil Wars, an account that may well reproduce an otherwise elusive piece of family tradition.Footnote ¹⁴ Nonetheless, there is some reason to regard Peckard as the author of his own narrative rather than an editor of pre-existing materials. In the preface, Peckard acknowledges his efforts to modernize the language of the manuscript and ‘to add now and then a few sentences for the sake of connection’, and he likewise excuses his boldness in inserting his own tendentious reflections upon the ‘modern System of Education’.Footnote ¹⁵ He might also have pointed to several passages in the Memoirs in which he evaluates, more or less ambivalently, the ritualized asceticism that he saw at work in the Little Gidding household. Peckard makes his authorial presence felt in any number of ways, both explicit and implicit, with the result that even those passages that have been copied more or less directly from Peckard’s source materials come to reflect his own way of thinking.

This way of thinking has been described as liberal and latitudinarian, and the present article will attempt to enrich that description. ‘As a theologian he travelled light,’ John Walsh has written in his account of Peckard as a liberal churchman, ‘shedding some doctrines which most fellow Anglicans would have deemed central to their faith, among them the Trinity and original sin.’Footnote ¹⁶ Peckard’s theology leaned toward that of the Unitarians, and his ecclesiology pointed in the direction of comprehension. Like the signatories of the Feathers Tavern petition, Peckard wanted to see the Thirty-Nine Articles removed as an instrument of clerical subscription and replaced with a more general confession of faith in the Bible, a change that would have made room for all manner of doctrinal positions within the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁷ In his sermons, Peckard supported religious toleration for everyone but atheists (‘every Man is at Liberty to decide for himself in Matters of religious Faith’) and spoke passionately against the Atlantic slave trade.Footnote ¹⁸ His thinking was shaped by a strong sense of social responsibility, a conviction that true religion requires the exercise of ‘universal and disinterested benevolence’.Footnote ¹⁹ As he worked to shape the manuscript materials that he inherited from his father-in-law into a publishable book, Peckard may well have been haunted by the proposition that religious retirement tends to compromise one’s ethical engagement with the world.

Even so, Peckard was intent on shaping the biography of his wife’s ancestor in such a way as to defend the family honor. In the last few pages of the Memoirs, Peckard attempts to refute the characterization of Nicholas Ferrar as ‘An Useless Enthusiast’ (he capitalizes and italicizes Gough’s phrase) by claiming that Ferrar was able to unite a ‘spiritual exaltation of mind’ with the ‘active virtues of a citizen of the world’.Footnote ²⁰ Peckard’s case depends on the early portions of Ferrar’s life story – his travels across the European continent, his exertions on behalf of the Virginia Company, his brief but vigorous career in the House of Commons – all of which are featured prominently in Peckard’s Memoirs. With these early chapters in mind, Peckard interprets Ferrar’s later decision to retire to Little Gidding as a gesture of fulfillment rather than one of renunciation: ‘And having thus discharged the duties of a virtuous citizen,’ Peckard writes, ‘he devoted the rest of his life to the instruction of youth, to works of Christian charity, and to the worship of God in a religious retirement, while he was yet in possession of his health and strength, and in the prime of manhood.’Footnote ²¹ Peckard reads the various chapters of Ferrar’s biography as coherent expressions of a stable and consistent moral character, which is to say that he refuses to recognize any necessary disjunction between the active and the contemplative lives. And in any event, Peckard insists that the activities that characterized Little Gidding were suffused with their own kind of active benevolence. Although the Ferrar who led the Little Gidding household was no longer a public-spirited ‘citizen of the world’, he was nonetheless engaged in ‘works of Christian charity’ to the benefit of all those who lived around him. For this reason, among other reasons, his religious retirement did not deserve to be characterized as ‘useless’.

In interpreting the life of Nicholas Ferrar, Peckard sought to render the Protestant ethic as a broad path rather than a narrow one. Peckard presumably acknowledged that ‘every one ought, in his lawful vocation and calling, to give himself to labour’, as the Elizabethan ‘Homily Against Idleness’ (1563) had proclaimed more than two centuries before the publication of Peckard’s text.Footnote ²² But Peckard was prepared to recognize a wide range of callings as legitimate, and he was less concerned with the question of utility than he was with that of benevolence: ‘they behaved themselves quietly’, Peckard writes of the residents of Little Gidding, ‘and with Christian benevolence towards all men of all denominations’, and one senses that this is the highest praise the old latitudinarian could bestow.Footnote ²³ Nicholas Ferrar’s greatest achievement, Peckard suggests, was to transcend the contemporary environment of religious conflict, although Peckard also makes it clear that such transcendence had its price:

This is the Peckard who supported the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753 and lamented its repeal, who campaigned for the end of clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, and who preached that ‘we are obliged to condemn every Kind, and every Degree of Persecution for difference of religious Opinion’.Footnote ²⁵ In Peckard’s review of early modern ecclesiastical history, the ‘governors’ of the Church of England were no less culpable than the papists and the puritans because all three groups were equally intolerant of one another. By contrast, Peckard suggests that the members of the Little Gidding household refused to participate in the exercise of religious violence, including the violence enacted by Archbishop William Laud and other prelates of the established church. Although Peckard does not say this in so many words, he seems to understand the Ferrars’ retirement to Little Gidding as a kind of honorable retreat from the battlefield of sectarian conflict. Retirement here looks like a solution rather than a problem, and Little Gidding looks like a fragile sacred space within an England that was, from Peckard’s perspective, sadly corrupt.

Hence the pathos surrounding the English Civil Wars whenever they are mentioned in Peckard’s text. We hear John Williams, then bishop of Lincoln, on his last visit to Little Gidding before the outbreak of civil war, complain that the ‘times grow high and turbulent’, and we hear Nicholas Ferrar on his deathbed project a similar observation in the form of prophecy: ‘Sad times are coming on, very sad times indeed.’Footnote ²⁶ Nicholas predicts in the latter passage that the ‘true worship of God’ will be ‘brought to nought, and suppressed’, and he is clearly thinking about the liturgical use of the Book of Common Prayer as authorized by the established Church of England. But it seems safe to say that Peckard himself is working on a less partisan level: when we compare the Memoirs with the John Ferrar manuscript, we see that Peckard has edited out Nicholas’s celebration of the ‘right good old way’, with his defense of bodily gestures in worship, just as he has obscured Nicholas’s Anglican ecclesiology by replacing the ‘divine service and worship of God by supreme authority’ with the simpler ‘true worship of God’. Peckard, after all, abhors any attempt to suppress anyone’s religious expression in the name of any alleged orthodoxy. The puritan revolutionaries are cast as the villains in Peckard’s text, in other words, not because they adhered to a mistaken theology, but because they allowed themselves to become the bearers of enmity, violence and oppression.

And so, when Peckard relates the plundering of Little Gidding by puritan soldiers, he presents this as a study in the psychology of religious extremism. Peckard’s account is worth quoting in full:

In keeping with the eighteenth-century critique of enthusiasm, Peckard reads the plundering of Little Gidding as motivated by certain kinds of emotional excess, namely ‘zeal’, ‘rage’, and ‘spite’. Peckard thus casts himself as an enlightened Protestant who is willing to accuse the puritan soldiers of not thinking clearly, of deceiving themselves into believing that violence can have anything to do with the spirit of true religion. Indeed, Peckard’s alliterative reference to the ‘rage of what they called Reformation’ offers an elegant way of characterizing the power of religious emotion to confuse one’s moral judgment.Footnote ²⁸ The implicit rationalism of this passage is paired with a more or less conservative regard for the artifacts of high culture – manuscripts and organ music, for example – and with a corresponding sense that such things can all too easily be destroyed. In very broad terms, we might say that the plundering of Little Gidding is treated as an assault against civilization itself. That this is also a crime against property is simply the final and most obvious point in Peckard’s case against religious intolerance. As we watch the roasting of sheep and the seizure of ‘plate, furniture, and provision’, we are asked to contemplate the degree to which zeal can be wedded to greed (and, perhaps, hunger) in such a way as to invalidate the whole fanatical enterprise.

The critique of religious extremism in this passage contributes to Peckard’s defense of Nicholas Ferrar and the other residents of Little Gidding by confirming their status as innocent victims: in the struggle between universal benevolence and factional violence, the Ferrars are positioned firmly on the side of benevolence. Even so, the critical energies that are at work in this passage may serve to blur the otherwise sharp distinction between critique and defense. The puritan-lit bonfire, fueled by pieces from the spitefully mangled organ, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the fire that is said to have consumed all those secular books (‘Comedies, Tragedies, Heroic Poems, and Romances’) that Nicholas had kept ‘locked up many years’ in his study.Footnote ²⁹ Nicholas ordered these books to be burned shortly before his death, on the place that he had chosen for his grave just outside the Little Gidding church, and he intended this as a true bonfire of the vanities: ‘he desired that this act might be considered as the testimony of his disapprobation of all such productions,’ Peckard writes, paraphrasing a document that Nicholas composed on the occasion, ‘as tending to corrupt the mind of man, and improper for the perusal of every good and sincere Christian’.Footnote ³⁰ Peckard records the book-burning incident without intruding his own moral judgments, but the parallel between the two fire scenes is hard to ignore. There is at least room here for the suggestion that the denial of self is morally and psychologically comparable to the policing of others, that both involve the needless destruction of what we might call cultural property. In the burning of ‘Comedies, Tragedies, Heroic Poems, and Romances’, Peckard may well have recognized a kind of puritanical violence by other means.

Elsewhere, Peckard’s doubts about the value of the Little Gidding experiment are registered in more explicit terms. In a key passage in the Memoirs, Peckard acknowledges that the ‘ceremonials’ of the Ferrar family were enough to strike some seventeenth-century observers as superstitious, and he offers a rather tepid defense: ‘where there was error,’ he writes, ‘it was error on the side of virtue and goodness’. Peckard later worries over the ‘austerities’ practiced by the Ferrars, although in the same breath he insists that things could have been worse: ‘they neither required them from others,’ he writes, ‘nor in themselves attributed any saving merit to them’.Footnote ³¹ As a child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Peckard looks back upon these instances of seventeenth-century High Church piety and recognizes some cause for suspicion.

And yet Peckard shows little interest in restaging the battle between enlightenment and error. Having chosen to describe Nicholas Ferrar as someone who was ‘eminently pious towards God’ and ‘benevolent towards man’, Peckard likewise chooses to treat the ritualism and asceticism of Little Gidding as relatively minor blemishes that only occasionally disturb the surface of a generally flattering portrait.Footnote ³² What is at stake here, I think, is the latitudinarian principle that the truths of religion are few and simple, and that all other issues fall into the category of things indifferent.Footnote ³³ The Memoirs may be described as latitudinarian in the best sense – charitable, generous, and inclusive – insofar as the account of Little Gidding shows a willingness to find value in a wide range of theological and devotional styles, including those that were more or less foreign to Peckard’s own. Peckard’s Memoirs differs in this way from Gough’s British Topography, and also from the periodical literature that I shall examine in the following section. Reading the Memoirs in context, in other words, confirms the degree to which Peckard declined to participate in the more militant versions of enlightened Protestantism.

The Reception of Peckard’s Memoirs

Like many of his contemporaries, Peckard saw Christianity as a set of simple and ultimately rational moral truths, and he seems to have persuaded himself that these truths were embodied in the pious and benevolent lives of the Ferrars. And yet, to judge by the printed evidence, Peckard failed to convince at least some of his readers to adopt the same view. Several reviews of Peckard’s Memoirs picked up on Gough’s dismissive phrase – his characterization of Nicholas Ferrar as a ‘useless enthusiast’ – and the reviewers went on to articulate their own assessments of Little Gidding with varying degrees of ambivalence. Gough had, it seems, hit a nerve. While enlightened Protestants could appreciate the Ferrars’ humble piety, they were less inclined to admire the ritualized asceticism of believers who had arguably forsaken all useful employment. Confronted by these aspects of the Little Gidding legacy, writers in the 1790s were left to consider the relative appropriateness of terms like enthusiasm and superstition, terms that communicated an Enlightenment distrust of religious extremism in all its forms.

Reviewing Peckard’s Memoirs in The Analytical Review in April 1791, one anonymous critic complained that Nicholas Ferrar (‘a man who appears to have possessed excellent talents for business’) had retired from the world at the early age of 32, at a point in his life when he could have remained a ‘useful member of society’ for many years to come.^{Footnote 34} Similarly, in the Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1791, a reviewer seized upon Peckard’s account of Nicholas as a well-traveled, public-minded man of business and then lamented that his active virtues had been submerged or confined by his subsequent retirement: ‘and after all that Dr. P, with the partiality natural to a writer allied to such a family, has said of his abilities and talents for figuring on the stage of the world, we cannot commend his renunciation of it for a life of less extensive benevolence, much less recommend his example; but all persecution of him we utterly detest’.Footnote ³⁵ A few months later, in August 1791, a writer in The Critical Review took up the same theme: ‘To see openings so brilliant, talents so varied and useful, knowledge of such importance, buried in a cloister, disappoints the eager hopes and leads us to indulge a spirit of invective against institutions, once perhaps defensible, but, in a better æra of refinement, at least “useless,” and often injurious to society.’Footnote ³⁶ For all three reviewers, Peckard’s argument had fallen on deaf ears. Peckard had suggested that Nicholas was able to unite the ‘active virtues of a citizen of the world’ with a ‘spiritual exaltation of mind’ in such a way as to remove any conceptual opposition between the active life and the contemplative. Peckard’s reviewers, however, insisted on reading Nicholas’s life story as a disjunctive one in which the exercise of some virtues displaced the exercise of others. In this way, they managed to interpret his retirement to Little Gidding as a negation of his earlier achievements.

The central issue here was one of scale. Peckard’s readers could acknowledge the charitable works that characterized life at Little Gidding, but they were still inclined to object that those works were performed for the benefit of a few rustics rather than, say, the entire nation. They complained of Nicholas Ferrar’s decision to pursue a ‘life of less extensive benevolence’, and they tended to see this life as a waste of a gentleman’s talents and education: ‘To give medicine occasionally,’ opined the reviewer in the Critical, ‘to advise, or to bestow alms within a limited circle, were not the employments of a mind equally able and comprehensive, stored with the wisdom of antiquity, experienced in business, and matured by travel and exercise.’Footnote ³⁷ Behind this passage lies the belief that a classical education and continental travel are the best preparatives for a gentlemanly career, as well as the related belief that a gentleman so prepared should commit himself to performing significant work of some kind on the public stage. In other words, the criticisms here are grounded in certain normative assumptions relating both to gender and to social class. Nicholas emerges as someone who violated these intersectional assumptions, who chose to work within a ‘limited circle’ rather than figuring on the ‘stage of the world’, and who thereby shirked the obligations that were attached to men of birth and breeding. Implicitly, it seems, Nicholas’s retirement is cast as a feminized retreat to the private or domestic sphere, a failure to act like the right kind of man.Footnote ³⁸

Just as they were willing to affirm that Nicholas Ferrar had made himself ‘useless’ in retirement, so Peckard’s critics were prepared to argue that the ‘enthusiast’ label was at least partly deserved. Writing in the Monthly Review for July 1792, the dissenting minister Jabez Hirons acknowledged that Nicholas was ‘firmly fixed as to the foundations of religious and Christian truth’ but then went on to complain that he was ‘misled in application by enthusiastic and romantic notions, together with a mixture of superstition’.Footnote ³⁹ This passage seeks to amplify Gough’s original insult – by calling Nicholas’s notions both ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘romantic’, and by throwing in a ‘mixture of superstition’ to boot – and it thus manages to underscore the proposition that the ritual piety of Little Gidding was the outgrowth of an extravagant and undisciplined imagination. And yet the piece in the Monthly does not cast Nicholas as a freak or an eccentric. To the contrary, this review attempts to understand him as an explainable part within a historical and contextual whole:

The reviewer describes a world in which the weakness of critical reason left room for certain archaic political and religious concepts to flourish – archaic, at least, from the standpoint of the enlightened eighteenth century. The list of outdated concepts here evokes the seventeenth-century alliance between Laudian ritualism and Stuart absolutism, and the critic sees this alliance as sadly resistant to the advance of reason and true religion. The Laudian moment is thus described as a kind of counter- or anti-Enlightenment, and the Ferrars are fully implicated in this moment. None of this, however, is intended to weaken the accusations brought by Gough and then echoed, albeit defensively, by Peckard. By historicizing the High Church piety of Little Gidding, the reviewer in the Monthly suggests that such piety is too distant, chronologically and conceptually, for most readers of the 1790s to take with much seriousness.

To my knowledge, a total of five reviews of Peckard’s Memoirs appeared in British periodicals in the final decade of the eighteenth century. The reviewers typically seized upon the ‘useless enthusiast’ phrase, and they all concluded that one or both halves of the phrase were more or less apt.Footnote ⁴¹ For anyone who takes an interest in the vagaries of public argument, it is worth suggesting that none of these critics would have even noticed Gough’s rhetorical assault on the memory of Little Gidding had it not been for Peckard’s earnest defense. But the really striking point here is that no one who took the time to respond to the Memoirs in print seemed to share Peckard’s deep appreciation for the Ferrars’ piety and benevolence. When the reviewers looked at the Little Gidding household as described in Peckard’s Memoirs, they saw the unmistakable marks of enthusiasm and superstition – needless austerity, a profusion of external ceremonies, a perverse withdrawal from all useful employment. They tended to read Nicholas Ferrar’s biography as a cautionary tale about a well-educated man of business who allowed his talents and energies to be diverted into the most irrational forms of religious expression. Peckard’s critics measured Nicholas against the values of an enlightened Protestantism, and they consistently found him wanting.

We know that Gough was a close friend of John Nichols, the leading editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine in the final decades of the eighteenth century, and we also know that Gough edited reviews for the magazine from 1786 onward.Footnote ⁴² Although there is no evidence to confirm that Gough himself composed the review of Peckard’s Memoirs in the Gentleman’s Magazine, it nonetheless seems possible that he influenced the composition of this piece in such a way as to confirm his original critique of Little Gidding.Footnote ⁴³ In the case of the remarks published in the Analytical, the Monthly, and the Critical, the relevant contextual forces would seem to be less personal and more broadly ideological. The Monthly, after all, was identified with liberal and reformist causes throughout the period of the French Revolution, and the Critical in 1791 was moving in a similar direction.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Analytical, edited by the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson, was the ‘most radical of the Reviews’, according to Derek Roper.^{Footnote 45} It seems fair to say, then, that the contemporary reviews of Peckard’s Memoirs tell us how a certain number of dissenters, Low Church Anglicans, and reform-minded Whigs were inclined to respond to the story of Little Gidding.

Apart from the periodical reviewers, one might ask, who read Peckard’s biography of Nicholas Ferrar in the decade or so after its publication, and what did they glean from their reading? The available evidence is meager, but suggestive. The Memoirs shows up in several sales catalogues from the 1790s, including a catalogue of books once owned by Robert Masters, the historian of Corpus Christi College, and another catalogue from the estate of Richard Farmer, master of Emmanuel College.Footnote ⁴⁶ Peckard’s book was also listed among the permanent holdings of the Huntingdonshire Book Club Society, an organization that, intriguingly enough, claimed Edward Ferrar as a founding member.Footnote ⁴⁷ Masters may have been drawn to the Cambridge element of the Memoirs – Nicholas Ferrar was a fellow of Clare College prior to his European travels – and Farmer was presumably interested in the literary accomplishments of a university colleague. The Memoirs held value for the members of the Huntingdonshire Book Club, one supposes, because it reconstructs a crucial episode in the history of a prominent local family. How any of these readers responded to Peckard’s treatment of the story of Little Gidding, one can only conjecture.

A slightly fuller picture emerges from the work of the Yorkshire cleric Thomas Zouch, who published a carefully edited version of Izaak Walton’s Lives in 1796, just one year before Peckard’s death. In his text of The Life of Mr. George Herbert, Zouch inserted three footnotes citing Peckard’s Memoirs as an authority, including one note referring to Peckard’s printing of a ‘prayer drawn up by Mr. Ferrar, on the particular occasion of the dangerous illness of his dear friend, Mr. George Herbert’.Footnote ⁴⁸ A fourth footnote characterizes Nicholas Ferrar as ‘a recluse almost to monachism’ – the phrasing is borrowed directly, without attribution, from the review of the Memoirs in the Monthly – before concluding that ‘surely he and his society are not deserving of that censure with which they have been treated by the author of “British Topography”’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Zouch had clearly studied Peckard’s Memoirs and had internalized its central argument.

Zouch’s clerical and scholarly activities suggest a High Church orientation. In his text of The Life of Dr. Robert Sanderson, for example, Zouch supplied a footnote praising Archbishop Laud for his learning, his generosity, and his ‘sincere attachment to the Church of England’, and he provided another footnote on the same page celebrating the virtue and piety of Charles I.Footnote ⁵⁰ Zouch admired Walton himself as a model of humble conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England: in addition to the Lives, Zouch edited two letters attributed to Walton, collectively entitled Love and Truth (1795), both of which served to defend the established church against what Walton saw as the fractious demands of the dissenters. In 1792, Zouch congratulated the clergy of the deaneries of Richmond, Catterick, and Boroughbridge for having ‘publicly avowed their firm and zealous attachment to our present ecclesiastical and civil Constitution’ by adopting a declaration of loyalty that he himself had proposed.Footnote ⁵¹ In the revolutionary context of the 1790s, Zouch came down on the side of orthodoxy and the institutional status quo.

Partial though it may be, the available evidence suggests that Peckard’s Memoirs became a valuable source of historical information for churchmen of several stripes. Retelling the story of Little Gidding, after all, allowed the clergy to contemplate a version of Anglican spirituality as more or less worthy of imitation. Consider, for example, the case of Christopher Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Biography (1810). Wordsworth reprinted the bulk of the Memoirs but omitted the final paragraphs addressing Gough’s acerbic phrase, perhaps because he felt that Peckard’s defense gave too much prominence to a dangerously pointed attack. And in any event, Wordsworth had a simpler and more resonant way to defend the Ferrars’ religious retirement, by quoting as an epigraph the final lines of John Milton’s sonnet on his blindness: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’Footnote ⁵² Wordsworth wanted to celebrate the spiritual heritage of the Church of England by compiling a set of exemplary biographies, and he regarded Nicholas Ferrar as a fitting subject for this quasi-hagiographical project. The Ecclesiastical Biography thus marks the point at which Peckard’s Memoirs was publicly accepted into a canon of edifying discourses. The inclusion of Peckard’s text in Wordsworth’s anthology reminds us that, despite the ambivalence expressed in the periodical reviews of the 1790s, there were at least some Anglicans at the beginning of the nineteenth century who were prepared to regard Little Gidding as the locus of a valid spiritual practice.

While Wordsworth records the High Church embrace of Peckard’s Memoirs, one suspects that the Memoirs invited a similarly favorable response from members of the Evangelical branch of the Church of England. Historians tell us that Peckard was on good terms with the Evangelicals who flocked to Magdalene College in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, many of them sponsored by the Elland Society.Footnote ⁵³ Peckard must have respected the philanthropic energies associated with Evangelicalism, and he shared with many Evangelicals a commitment to the abolitionist cause. When we hear William Wilberforce, in the year of Peckard’s death, recommending the ‘generous and wakeful spirit of Christian benevolence’, we are reminded that a certain amount of overlap existed between Peckard’s moral vocabulary and that of his Evangelical brethren.Footnote ⁵⁴ It seems likely, indeed, that at least some of Peckard’s Evangelical contemporaries admired his account of the pious and disciplined way of life at Little Gidding.

One belated, and admittedly oblique, confirmation comes from the Brief Memoirs of Nicholas Ferrar (1829), a volume edited by one T.M. Macdonogh. Macdonogh’s work was primarily a revision of the Turner biography that had appeared in the Christian’s Magazine some 70 years earlier, but Macdonogh had obviously consulted Peckard’s Memoirs as well: an appendix in the first edition of the Brief Memoirs, for example, reproduces Peckard’s account of the plundering of Little Gidding more or less verbatim.Footnote ⁵⁵ Macdonogh’s Evangelical sympathies may be inferred from at least two passages, one extolling the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the other defending the practice of extemporary prayer.Footnote ⁵⁶ The latter passage corrects what Macdonogh sees as an overstatement on the part of Nicholas Ferrar, whose devotion to the established liturgy led him to reject extemporary prayer tout court. For the most part, however, Macdonogh’s response to Little Gidding is strongly approving. Macdonogh admires Nicholas’s constant Bible study, his purposeful acts of self-denial, his commitment to prayer and meditation, and his determination to keep the Sabbath holy. He emphasizes the desire of the Virginia Company to contribute to the ‘conversion of the rude and miserable savages to the Christian faith’, a point that allows him to link the seventeenth-century Ferrars with the nineteenth-century Christian missionary movement.Footnote ⁵⁷ In general, Macdonogh sees Little Gidding as a place where the disciplined pursuit of holiness was grounded in a theologically principled combination of sola fide and sola scriptura, and he offers Nicholas Ferrar (who was, after all, ordained as deacon) as an appropriate model of clerical zeal.

Relaxed Devotionalism

Reconstructing the reception history of Peckard’s Memoirs allows us to trace some of the fault lines that ran through the religious culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. There were readers who tended to regard Nicholas Ferrar as a ‘useless enthusiast’ – who judged expressions of piety according to rationalist and utilitarian standards, and who distrusted the ‘external ceremonies’ that were associated, to one degree or another, with Anglican practice. There were others who welcomed images of zealous and self-sacrificing devotion, who valued ‘religious exercises’ because they were the ‘means of more intimate communion between God and the soul’, and who were accordingly prepared to see Nicholas as one of the ornaments of the established church.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such distinctions were both deep seated and long lasting. The skeptical tone that one hears in the periodical reviews of the 1790s, for example, emerges again in a satirical account of Little Gidding by Thomas Carlyle in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845).Footnote ⁵⁹ Working in the other chronological direction, one notes that the admiration expressed in Macdonogh’s Brief Memoirs echoes the hagiographic tradition that originated, in the seventeenth century, in the John Ferrar manuscript and in printed comments by Barnabas Oley and Izaak Walton. My plan now is to turn back to this tradition, and to the tradition of High Church piety more generally, in order to highlight some of the complex ways in which Peckard responded to the ascetic elements of the Little Gidding story.

In the preface to Herbert’s Remains (1652), Oley focuses on three important figures of the Caroline church – Thomas Jackson, Nicholas Ferrar, and George Herbert – and he sees all three of them as united by their ‘singular sincerity in Imbracing, and transcendent Dexterity in Defending the Protestant Religion established in the Church of England’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Oley notes that during Nicholas’s youthful travels, certain Roman Catholic agents tried and failed to convert the young man to their religion. Oley praises Nicholas’s success in resisting the popish temptation, but he also applauds his zealous determination ‘to adorn our Protestant Religion, by a right renouncing the world with all it’s profits and honours, in a true crucifying the flesh, with all it’s pleasures, by continued Temperance, Fasting, and Watching unto Prayers’.Footnote ⁶¹ In effect, Oley acknowledges that the ritualized asceticism that the Ferrars pursued at Little Gidding was shaped by Nicholas’s earlier encounter with Roman Catholicism on the continent. And yet Oley sees Nicholas’s appropriation of Catholic asceticism as no cause for ecclesiastical scandal. For the pertinent question, in Oley’s view, is not whether the Ferrars’ devotional practices had a genetic relationship to Roman Catholic monasticism, but whether these practices were likely to assist in the pursuit of holiness. Insofar as this question could be answered in the affirmative, accusations of ‘Popery’ and ‘Superstition’ could be confidently set aside.

A similar confidence may be felt in Walton’s The Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670), in a passage focusing on the Ferrar household at Little Gidding. Writing just a few years after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the consequent triumph of prayer-book Anglicanism, Walton shapes his account of the Ferrars in such a way as to emphasize their dutiful conformity. In his description of the devotional life at Little Gidding, for example, Walton notes that Nicholas Ferrar ‘did himself use to read the Common prayers (for he was a Deacon) every day, at the appointed hours of Ten and Four’, where the word appointed works to situate the Ferrars’ piety within the dynamic of authority and obedience. The same word appears, and with the same effect, when Walton describes the ascetic practices of the Ferrar household:

In this case, however, Walton goes well beyond a merely legalistic justification. Walton here invokes a penitential tradition in which prayer, fasting and almsgiving have often been understood as mutually reinforcing, a tradition in which the moral purpose of fasting is properly fulfilled in the practice of charity. Walton likewise invokes the biblical source of this tradition, namely the passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 6.1-18) in which prayer, fasting and almsgiving are treated sequentially and in parallel fashion. The biblical passage urges Jesus’ followers not to do these things as the ‘hypocrites’ do them, for the sake of public recognition, and Walton suggests that Nicholas took this teaching to heart: the claim that ‘none but God and he’ could measure the full extent of his charity, after all, serves to concretize the gospel’s injunction not to do one’s alms before men. The liturgical calendar here provides a framework for the expression of charity and humility, and the presence of these virtues implicitly serves to validate the appointed sequence of feasts and fasts. To put the case in simpler terms, we might say that Walton celebrates a kind of Anglicanism that fulfills both the letter and the spirit of the law.

Oley and Walton were committed to the public liturgy and also to strenuous private devotion: in his Life of Dr. Sanderson (1678), for example, Walton suggests that piety is best nourished by the ‘Common Prayer of the Church’ and by the ‘frequent use of the Psalter or Psalms of David’.Footnote ⁶³ Their understanding of the Christian life was serenely, even proudly, ascetic. They assumed, that is, that devotional exercises (‘continued Temperance, Fasting, and Watching unto Prayers’) should contribute to the crucifixion or mortification of the flesh, and they saw no reason why this assumption would need to be defended. Nor was this version of piety confined to Nicholas Ferrar’s seventeenth-century contemporaries. In A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), William Law favored daily prayers scheduled at five canonical hours, and he insisted on the disciplinary value of rising early for one’s prayers.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Serious Call represents a potent combination of asceticism and devotionalism, with an emphasis on the spiritual value of the Psalms: Law argued that one should always chant or sing a Psalm before one’s private prayers, and he held that persons with unmusical voices were not excused from this obligation.Footnote ⁶⁵

Within this High Church devotional context, it was possible to look back to the Little Gidding household, with no ambivalence whatsoever, as a model of severe and systematic piety. The Turner biography describes in some detail the regularized recitation of the Psalms by the residents at Little Gidding, a practice that ensured that the ‘whole Psalter was duly and devoutly said over by them verse by verse interchangeably within the compass of the twenty-four hours’. Turner also provides an account of the ‘antient christian discipline’ of watching, whereby teams of volunteers maintained the antiphonal recitation of the Psalms from 9:00 in the evening to 1:00 in the morning.Footnote ⁶⁶ In A Commentary on the Book of Psalms (1776), George Horne draws upon these passages in order to produce a graceful, if somewhat exaggerated, compliment:

Whereas Turner says that the Ferrars recited the entire psalter once each day (‘within the compass of the twenty-four hours’), Horne claims that this recitation was maintained through every hour of the day and night. Whether intentional or not, Horne’s misreading of Turner suggests a willingness to endorse a particularly arduous kind of devotional practice. Indeed, what is most remarkable about the passage from the Commentary is the ease with which Horne applauds an austere and highly regimented way of life. There is no sense that ‘fasting, watching, prayer, and reading’ might constitute a waste of time and energy, as in the passage from Gough’s British Topography. There are no worries surrounding the loss of sleep or the numbing effects of monastic repetition. Working within a milieu that still values certain strenuous kinds of spiritual discipline, Horne can read the ‘constant course of psalmody’ at Little Gidding as something like a virtuous literalization of the biblical injunction to pray without ceasing. Although he gives no indication of having read Gough’s stringent critique, it seems fair to say that Horne outlines a High Church vision within which the ascetic practices of Little Gidding required no vindication.

Horne was a stout defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy against what he saw as the corrosive effects of skepticism, infidelity, and heterodox speculation.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1786, just a few years before the publication of Peckard’s Memoirs, Horne preached one sermon on the importance of contending for the faith and another in defense of the doctrine of the Trinity. The two sermons were printed together in a single pamphlet, along with a prefatory note announcing Horne’s intention to compose a treatise ‘on the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, and the different arguments which have been urged against it’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Clearly, Horne and Peckard were on different sides of the ecclesiastical aisle. In the final decade of his life, Peckard subscribed to the Works of John Jebb (1787), the Works of Nathaniel Lardner (1788), Robert Robinson’s Ecclesiastical Researches (1790), and Gilbert Wakefield’s A Translation of the New Testament (1791). All four authors were dissenting ministers, Jebb and Wakefield having separated from the Church of England when they could no longer square the Thirty-Nine Articles with their own Unitarian convictions. Subscribing to these works allowed Peckard to demonstrate his support for intellectuals excluded from the Anglican fold, and hence to maintain his public defense of the freedom of conscience. Here and elsewhere, Peckard was less inclined to contend for the Trinitarian faith than he was to advocate for the ‘Liberty of Private Judgment’.Footnote ⁷⁰

The differences between Horne and Peckard point to a contrast between two very different ways of understanding the purpose of religion in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Horne espoused a more or less Augustinian view of human nature as corrupt and depraved, and he accordingly recommended ascetic practices as a way of disciplining the sinful passions. In a Lenten sermon on the duty of self-denial, Horne argued that it was perfectly reasonable to expect each believer ‘to live in sobriety and purity, to subdue a turbulent passion, to watch an hour sometimes unto prayer’, and ‘to miss a meal now and then, during the season of repentance and humiliation’, because such spiritual exercises were a tactical necessity in the ongoing struggle between the spirit and the flesh.Footnote ⁷¹ Peckard, on the other hand, saw no need to preach the mortification of the flesh. He seems to have distrusted the ascetic impulse, perhaps because he saw it as a distraction from the central moral imperatives of Christianity as he understood them. For Peckard, indeed, the main task for any right-thinking Christian was not to mortify the works of the flesh but rather to ‘cultivate’ the two principles of benevolence and self-love so that ‘both will thrive, and prosper well together’. The pairing of self-love and benevolence – one oriented toward the ‘preservation and well-being of the Individual’, the other focused on the ‘preservation and well-being of Society’ – thus constituted a moral psychology in which the primary objective was the flourishing of human beings, individually and collectively, in the here and now.Footnote ⁷²

Peckard confronts the ascetic practices of the Ferrars in a crucial passage in the Memoirs, which I have already quoted in part:

This passage underscores Peckard’s view of the Ferrars as the innocent victims of religious persecution, and it implies that this persecution was motivated by a contemporary distrust of monastic, hence papist, practices. Peckard’s defense of the Ferrars here hinges on his eagerness to distance them from Roman Catholic theology, to insist that they saw no ‘saving merit’ in the austerities they imposed upon themselves. And yet this defense is curiously negative, focusing only on what the Ferrars did not believe, as if Peckard is unwilling to articulate any valid theological basis for the ascetic or monastic way of life. Reticence quickly leads to ambiguity, as the passage leaves us to wonder whether ‘mistaken piety’ should be attributed to the Ferrars, to the founders of ‘Monastic institutions’, or to both. In the end, however, Peckard is willing to state the case in plain terms: asceticism may be tolerated if one is inclined to be tolerant, but asceticism cannot be justified by any appeal to the Christian gospel. The critique of asceticism is here grounded in an explicitly biblical standard, while the Enlightenment conception of a benevolent and life-affirming God remains, presumably, somewhere in the background.Footnote ⁷⁴

Peckard was by no means the first to cast doubt on the value of monastic ‘austerities’. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), for example, the skeptical philosopher David Hume rejected the ‘whole train of monkish virtues’ on the grounds that they were literally useless: ascetic practices such as fasting and celibacy ‘neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment’.Footnote ⁷⁵ One hears a vaguely similar argument in The Complete Duty of Man (1763), where the Evangelical clergyman Henry Venn seeks to distance himself from the ascetic tradition: ‘The Gospel enjoins none of the works or penances of superstition, no abuse of the body, nor rigorous austerities to embitter what God gave us richly to enjoy’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Venn advocated a program of self-denial, but his version of spiritual discipline was divorced from physical or mechanical actions (‘what hypocrites may perform’) and was consistent with the enjoyment of God-given pleasures. Venn thus offered a pious counterpart to Hume’s utilitarian argument, although the historical point here is that both piety and utilitarianism could lead to similar conclusions. A distrust of ‘rigorous austerities’ was in the air, so to speak, and this was the air that Peckard breathed.

In his account of the devotional practices at Little Gidding, Peckard manages to counter the praise of the Ferrars’ asceticism by introducing the curiously oppositional voice of Nicholas’s mother, Mary Ferrar. In Turner’s Life, we read that Mary repeatedly sought to persuade Nicholas ‘to abate of his rigours in watching’ and that, by virtue of her matronly authority, she ‘over-ruled him into a little more indulgence to himself ’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Peckard expands on this point, with a new emphasis on the persuasive power of a mother’s tears:

It is surely no accident that this passage is followed by an encomium to Mary Ferrar, in which Nicholas’s mother is remembered as a ‘pattern of piety, benevolence, and charity’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Peckard evidently wants to position Mary as a normative figure, and hence to surround her call for moderation with an aura of moral authority. Nicholas, on the other hand, is cast as an obedient son whose obedience had its limits: following the death of his mother, Nicholas insisted on ‘wrapping himself in a loose frieze gown’ and sleeping on the floor rather than in his bed.Footnote ⁸⁰ This detail is connected, in Peckard’s mind, with Nicholas’s tendency to deprive himself of sleep – he typically slept only four hours each night, except for those nights in which he participated in the organized vigils – and with the general question of physical health.

And on this point, Peckard is unequivocal. Whereas Turner claims that Nicholas Ferrar ‘felt no decay of his strength in the last seven years of his life, and all this while his health was rather improving than impairing in the midst of all his austerities’, Peckard sharply reverses this assessment: ‘There cannot be any doubt’, he writes, ‘but that these austerities gradually reduced a constitution originally not very strong, and shortened the life of a most virtuous, and most valuable man’.Footnote ⁸¹ In the debate between Nicholas and his mother, Peckard goes out of his way to give Mary the last word. Peckard thus comes down on the side of moderation, on the importance of restraining the ascetic impulse in order to preserve one’s physical well-being, as he insists that ‘mortifications’ and ‘austerities’ can shorten and impoverish life.

But there is more. Having described the ‘nightly watchings’ at Little Gidding, Peckard provides a footnote in which he remarks that a ‘most respectable Author hath given his sanction, if not to the severity, at least to a moderate observation of this mode of Psalmody’.Footnote ⁸² This ‘most respectable Author’ turns out to be Horne himself, whose passage celebrating the ‘constant course of psalmody’ at Little Gidding – the passage we have quoted earlier from A Commentary on the Book of Psalms – is now reproduced in full. Peckard still has his doubts about the value of the Ferrars’ devotional practices, which is why he feels the need to appeal to the ‘sanction’ of an authoritative source. Nonetheless, Peckard wants to do what he can to normalize Nicholas Ferrar’s commitment to the Psalms as a devotional text. The important thing, in other words, is to show that Nicholas was not altogether ‘singular’ in his religious habits: while Peckard is forced to concede to accusations of severity, he can at least refute the charge of singularity by appealing to the authority of a Psalm-centered Anglican tradition. And so the quotation from Horne’s Commentary is followed in Peckard’s footnote by two quotations from Horne’s preface to the same work, the second of which is actually a quotation taken by Horne from the ‘pious and judicious Hooker’, as Peckard assembles multiple sources that speak to the spiritual value of the Psalms. ‘On such respectable authority,’ Peckard writes, bringing this long footnote to a close, ‘I may safely recommend a proper degree of attention to the example of Mr. Ferrar, so far as time, and opportunity, and the peculiar circumstances of situation will admit.’Footnote ⁸³

One finds a fruitful tension here in the relationship between text and paratext. The main text of the Memoirs develops a critique of self-imposed ‘austerities’, and the Horne footnote reinforces this critique. At the same time, however, the footnote tries to rehabilitate an earnest devotionalism by appealing to a tradition that goes back to the origins of Anglican thought. Peckard reads this as a humane and flexible tradition, on the strength of which he can insist that the recitation of the Psalms should accommodate ‘time’ and ‘opportunity’ and the ‘peculiar circumstances of situation’ – in other words, that devotion need not interfere with one’s business or one’s health. And yet, precisely because it is humane and flexible, Peckard’s version of tradition has a place for the ascetic regimen of Little Gidding. Peckard’s impulse is to moderate what he sees as excess rather than, say, rejecting what he sees as error, and it is this impulse that leads him to recommend a modified version of the Ferrars’ devotional practices. The emphasis here is on a generous or charitable sort of inclusion, an inclusion that shows itself not only in the praise of regularized psalmody but also in the decision to cite Horne (a ‘most respectable Author’) as part of an authoritative tradition. The Horne footnote gains a certain Broad Church resonance, after all, when we reflect on the theological and ecclesiological differences between Horne and Peckard, and on Peckard’s determination to look past those differences in search of a common devotional commitment.