In the years following the Popish Plot of 1678, one of the most prominent Dissenting divines of Restoration England anticipated a war with Catholics and was forced to confront the question of political violence. While historians have given considerable attention to John Owen’s (1616–83) religious leadership during the 1650s – as a regicide preacher, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell and vice-chancellor of Oxford University – his post-Restoration activity has received far less attention. Yet it was during this later period that Owen’s radicalism reached new heights despite the escalating consequences of rebellion. By 1679, he found himself increasingly entangled in a world of physical violence and political manipulation – developments that may have been the inevitable outcomes of an anti-Catholic theology arising from reports of conspiracy and deep frustration with the government’s failure to secure Protestant Dissenters’ interests. His opposition to ‘Romanism’ remained central to his sermons and publications, yet Owen’s concerns increasingly found expression beyond the pulpit. Accordingly, the evidence examined in this article suggests that Owen’s anti-Catholicism was not merely theoretical but intensely practical, appearing in his sermons, his involvement in political discussions surrounding the succession crisis, and his connection to networks from which anti-Catholic conspiracies to assassinate the king would emerge.
There is already a conventional view within Owen scholarship that, near the end of his life, support for active resistance would have been ‘neither implausible nor out of character’. Owen’s modern biographer Crawford Gribben rightly argued that, while the evidence of conspiracy against Owen is largely circumstantial and Owen denied complicity, involvement in anti-government activity would not have been inconsistent with either his earlier career or his political instincts.Footnote 1 Richard Greaves likewise noted that, by 1682, Owen had begun to look favourably upon historical examples of European Protestants taking up arms in defence of their religion.Footnote 2 These are strong observations. For, by 1682, Owen was openly reflecting upon Protestant resistance traditions, and the evidence associated with the Rye House Plot – a 1683 conspiracy by a group of English Protestants to assassinate Charles II and his Catholic brother, James, duke of York, as they returned to London near Rye House – has long suggested that Owen’s relationship to radical anti-Catholic politics deserves serious consideration. Yet the prevailing tendency has been to treat that evidence with caution. Because Owen denied the allegations against him and because much of the testimony is circumstantial, historians have stopped short of assigning him a direct role in conspiratorial activity. In broad terms, this remains the current state of the question.
Whereas previous studies have largely considered Owen’s possible radicalisation through the lens of the Rye House Plot and the testimony generated in its aftermath, this article examines whether the process was already underway by 1679–81. The purpose is not to provide an exhaustive account of all the evidence linking Owen to anti-Catholic conspiracy. Indeed, several important lines of evidence that emerged after Rye House – including testimony from figures connected to the plot itself, reports concerning Owen’s associations with leading conspirators, and other materials not yet fully integrated into the scholarship – lie beyond the scope of the present study.Footnote 3
The argument here draws upon a combination of sources, both old and new, that have not previously been considered together in discussions of Owen’s political activity. By analysing governmental depositions, election reports, published and unpublished sermons, and other manuscript evidence concerning Owen’s associates alongside one another, this article reconstructs the political and theological context in which Owen confronted the prospect of a Catholic succession. Considered individually, these sources can appear fragmentary and inconclusive. Considered together, they provide a fuller picture of Owen’s intensifying relationship to underground Restoration political movements and views about active resistance.
The article proceeds in three parts. The first section examines Owen’s political networks. Who was he meeting with? What reports mention him? What can reasonably be inferred from those connections? It argues that Owen participated in discussions concerning an election involving officials whose role became politically significant in the very succession crisis that his conspiring associates sought to influence. The second section turns to Owen’s sermons and publications. Before asking whether Owen approved of forms of political violence, we must first understand how he interpreted the crisis itself. The sermons do not independently demonstrate conspiratorial activity, nor do they secretly reveal a plot. Rather, they show that Owen viewed England’s circumstances in terms of extraordinary crisis, impending judgement and the inadequacy of ordinary political remedies – precisely the concerns that also appear in reports linking men within his circle to anti-Catholic resistance. Owen’s sermons establish the mental and theological world in which the reports about plotting become more intelligible. The final section asks how Owen understood the relationship between providence and human agency. By examining his interpretation of other historical events as acts of divine judgement and deliverance, it becomes possible to reconsider whether his language of judgement, reformation and providential intervention referred solely to spiritual realities or also encompassed forms of active resistance. Taken together, the evidence presented in this article suggests that Owen’s willingness to contemplate political violence was more likely and emerged earlier than has been previously supposed.
Politics and plotting
On 27 April 1679, the Whig forerunner Lord William Russell appealed to the Commons that, ‘If we do not something related to the Succession, we must resolve, when we have a Prince of the Popish Religion, to be Papists, or burn. And I will do neither.’Footnote 4 Russell was not alone. The Commons passed the Exclusion Bill two weeks later, legislation designed to exclude the Roman Catholic James, duke of York – brother and heir presumptive of Charles II – from the succession to the throne. Among its supporters were followers of Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, the leading advocate of exclusion, including the Northamptonshire MP Sir John Hartopp, a member of John Owen’s congregation and the most dutiful notetaker of his sermons.Footnote 5 But, despite the support for the bill – in fact, because of it – Charles prorogued parliament until 12 July, when he dissolved it completely.
While support for exclusion ran high in the Commons, causing concern for Charles, many members proved unwilling or unable to translate Protestant anxieties into effective measures against a Catholic succession. Owen may have expected more of Hartopp, a prominent member of his congregation and a direct conduit for political influence between the congregation and the state, but his involvement tended to vacillate. In the Habeas Corpus Parliament (March–May 1679), the first Exclusion Parliament, Hartopp was completely inactive. In the next parliament, which was summoned in July 1679 but did not assemble until October 1680, he joined eight committees and, among other responsibilities, was instructed to bring about bills for the cause of Protestant unity, before once again ‘[leaving] no trace’ of activity after his following re-election in 1681.Footnote 6 By the autumn of 1679, the path to exclusion had been made more difficult. In September, James Scott, duke of Monmouth, the king’s illegitimate Protestant son whom many exclusionists viewed as a Protestant alternative to the duke of York, had been driven into exile by his father, and in the following month, the day before Charles prorogued the newly elected parliament, the king removed Shaftesbury from the privy council, his principal advisory body.Footnote 7
Despite their motivation, and because of strong opposition from the royal family, exclusionists were failing to gain traction. Hartopp’s participation in parliament had yielded few results for the exclusionist cause. Yet parliamentary politics were not Owen’s only connection to the struggle against a Catholic succession. As exclusionism faltered, he entertained a network of men outside parliament: his brother, Col. Henry Owen, who lived near Owen’s church, and his pastoral assistant, Robert Ferguson – a former government spy and known plotter.Footnote 8 The significance of these relationships becomes clearer in light of reports that later placed Ferguson and Henry Owen together with John Owen in his home during the closing stages of the Exclusion Crisis.Footnote 9
Government officials regarded these men as closely connected and potentially dangerous. After Robert Ferguson had fled to the continent following the discovery of the Rye House Plot of 1683, Col. Henry Owen was called on 17 December 1684 to give an account of their relationship.Footnote 10 He described an occasion on which, in December 1679, he, his brother and Ferguson met together to discuss the election for London sheriff, for which a member of Owen’s Leadenhall Street congregation would soon be a candidate: ‘Mr. Shute’, referring to Samuel Shute.Footnote 11 The details of the meeting are limited, but they become more suggestive when read alongside other evidence. The men disagreed over Shute’s prospects in the election, yet the very fact of their discussion raises a larger question: what was at stake in Shute’s success or failure, and why did his candidacy command the attention of Ferguson and John and Henry Owen?
The same month as this meeting took place, on 5 December 1679, in an address to his congregation on their need to renew the church covenant, Owen complained that appeals to the king for help in matters of religion were now futile.Footnote 12 Concerns about the long-term apostasy of Protestant Dissenting churches had occupied Owen throughout the preceding months, he having reflected in an undated sermon that summer on the afflictions of the Scottish Covenanters at the hands of the government. As he turned to address his own congregation, he regarded their circumstances as part of the same broader pattern, Reformed Churches having ‘universally all over the World been prone to Apostasy and Backsliding’.Footnote 13 Despite this tendency, Owen believed there was a remedy: the congregation needed to renew its church covenant with God. Yet what is most revealing in this sermon is not merely the solution he proposed, but the alternatives he rejected. Appealing to the biblical prophet Hosea, Owen argued that previous generations had repeatedly failed by seeking relief through earthly authorities rather than through genuine reformation. He explained,
You are wise Men, judge what I say. They saw their Sore oftentimes. Wee have the Writings of many of them wherein they complaine of the wofull State of the Church in their Dayes. But when they saw their Sore, they went to King Jareb, to him that could not heale them. What Course did they take? Why they called Councills of Ministers and Priests, and made good Order; that was all.
He continued, ‘They never attempted any thing elce for the Cure of their Apostasy.’Footnote 14 Owen was worried that the judgement of God was soon to come upon them, as it had upon the Covenanters. Renewing the church covenant was necessary to preserve the congregation from immorality and unbelief. His solution was therefore not simply political; spiritual renewal remained an essential duty. Yet such renewal existed alongside a growing conviction that the traditional political mechanisms upon which English Protestants had relied were failing.
This is why Shute’s candidacy in the election and Owen’s participation in the discussion of it matter. For the fact that this discussion included Owen’s brother allows us to gain insight into several governmental depositions that have never been linked to Owen before. The testimony of one witness, John Harrison, for example, taken on 12 March 1683, described his understanding of an abortive plot to assassinate the king in the autumn of 1681, that is, prior to the Rye House Plot. Listed among those who were integral to the success of the mission was Col. Henry Owen. One of the others listed with Col. Owen, a man called Powell, detailed to Harrison their ‘design to surprise the Tower, by clothing a foot company as the King’s Guards and, a little before the true Guards were relieved, the false ones should enter and be seconded with many others that should be ready’.Footnote 15 The plotters also discussed what would be required of them upon the king’s death, recognising that the duke of York’s succession must be opposed by ‘great numbers of resolute men’. Were the plan to succeed, the responsibility of publicly proclaiming the new monarch would fall upon civic officials in London, led by the lord mayor. The conspirators anticipated resistance from those officials who would facilitate James’s succession. Thus they agreed that, if there were ‘any officers as the Lord Mayor or any other that should go about’ naming the duke of York, they would draw arms.Footnote 16
In light of this report, the earlier discussion in John Owen’s home acquires a different significance. Sarah Cook’s 1972 Harvard dissertation details that the two Owens and Ferguson were surveying the likelihood of Shute winning the election for lord mayor, not sheriff.Footnote 17 Shute never appears to have run for lord mayor, though, and the reference seems to be a mistake. The report nevertheless clarifies why such civic offices carried political importance during a contested succession crisis. The plotters anticipated armed resistance against officials responsible for the ceremonial announcement and public recognition of the lawful successor, including the lord mayor and other London officials. Henry Owen thus appears both in a conspiracy report concerned with such officials and in a meeting at John Owen’s house discussing the election of a member of Owen’s congregation to one of those civic offices. The connection is at least plausible, for the prospect of a sympathetic officeholder would hardly have been irrelevant to men contemplating resistance against those officials who might publicly recognise and proclaim James’s succession. While this evidence is not conclusive, it does offer a new vantage point on the context of those talks in the Leadenhall Street home with Ferguson and the Owen brothers.
Were these only talks, and was John Owen only a passive observer in them? There is another critical piece of evidence that further clarifies Owen’s proximity to political conspiracy. A notorious informant, Francisco de Faria, an associate of the Portuguese embassy in England, mentioned Owen by name in a 1681 deposition about the election for sheriff. Faria had garnered serious attention from the English government in November 1680 after he testified about a plot by the Catholic ambassador to Portugal to kill Shaftesbury.Footnote 18 Although one modern study has questioned aspects of that testimony, contemporaries regarded the allegations seriously enough to warrant official investigation.Footnote 19 Faria had claimed to be bribed by the lord ambassador to do the ‘Catholick Cause a great Service’ by getting Shaftesbury ‘out of the way’, offering specific instruction on how he would go about it: ‘Shaftesbury goes often into the country, and I know you are excellent at hand-Granadoes, you shall throw one of them into Shaftesbury’s Coach, which will destroy all that are in the Coach upon the breaking, and you … shall have Fire Arms to kill, if the others do not full Execution.’Footnote 20 Whatever the merits of the earlier allegation, the episode placed Faria in a position to provide testimony regarding a subsequent event that was observed by numerous witnesses. In his deposition to Sir Leoline Jenkins, Charles II’s secretary of state, on 29 June 1681, he recounted how ‘Nothing of late has given my thoughts such trouble to find the reason thereof as the miscarriage of the poll for sheriffs.’Footnote 21 The election between the candidates Ralph Box and Samuel Shute, the member of Owen’s church, was apparently one of great contention and even foul play, according to Faria, who was confounded by Box’s defeat, despite, in his estimation, having won popular support. In his testimony, Faria blamed the ‘villainous hate of that faction against the government’, who, he continued, opposed ‘whatever the King approves’ and raised ‘scandalous reflections on Box’.Footnote 22 Owen was located right in the middle of these charges.
For the attack against Box included propaganda in print, like that published in the Courant, but there were also rumours circulating about him through conversations overheard by ‘informed persons’ in various coffee houses. The rumours fell into one of four categories: Box was hostile towards Nonconformists; he would not last as sheriff, were he to be chosen; he held family ties to papists; and he was an enemy of John Owen and others.Footnote 23 Two things are unclear from this report as it pertains to Owen: why would Box have had ‘very bad things’ to say of ‘Dr. Owen’, and why were Londoners defending Owen in their conversations about Box? As it pertains to Box, the report indicates that Owen’s association with Shute’s candidacy was sufficiently well known to become a subject of electioneering rhetoric. And as it pertains to the coffee house gossipers, Owen’s view must have become believable if Box’s admonition towards him was used as a reason not to support his candidacy. The rumour of Box’s sympathy towards Catholics having been told alongside the Owen rumour is not insignificant either, for many who were opposed to Box were apparently motivated in their gossip out of fear of a Catholic succession: ‘they affright with the bugbears of a Popish successor and arbitrary government and calumniate all that love the King and his government as being Popishly affected’.Footnote 24 Using ‘Factious’ instigators to cause a disturbance among crowds and even incite violence, as some feared, could be a useful strategy to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the king and government officials.
There is no report that Owen was ever present in these crowds that spoke ill of Shute’s opponent, Box. Furthermore, the mere fact that he was mentioned by these crowds, taken alone, does not prove that he had any agency in seeking to alter the results of the election. However, the report is most revealing when considered alongside the other evidence. Owen’s brother, Henry, was named as a conspirator by an informant who had testified to the existence of an anti-Catholic plot to force their choice of the king’s successor over and against the lord mayor or any other official that might stand in their way. Henry met with his brother in John’s home – around the time the latter was preaching on the futility of hope in governmental processes – to discuss the election of one of these key London officials. Finally, it was an election in which a prominent member of Owen’s church would become a candidate. And so, in this context, Owen, afraid of a Catholic succession and despondent over the state of the government, meeting with plotters who had cause to ease future tension with London officers for the sake of their plot, appears as a point of reference in election rumours portraying Box as sympathetic to Catholics and hostile to Nonconformists, and is himself singled out for criticism by Box. Taken together, the reports suggest that Owen’s relationship to the political activities of his brother was more substantial than a reading of the sources in isolation would imply.
From print and the pulpit
This theory must be considered in light of Owen’s publishing and sermonic record, too. His 1680 publication Some considerations about union among Protestants, like A brief vindication of the Non-Conformists published the same year, disclosed his fear that, if ‘Popery’ would come to ‘possess this Church-State’, or the ‘Managers of it’ become ‘influenced by a Popish Prince, the Religion of the whole Nation [would] be lost immediately’.Footnote 25 The fact that Owen would refer to the popish prince in this anonymous work illustrates that he was coming to terms with what he regarded as an increasingly imminent threat. But we are given no indication about how he may have been willing to respond to such a threat. The treatise served as a forecast of possibilities: some which could strengthen England’s Protestant credentials; some – namely, by awaiting James’s succession under the present religious establishment – which would yield disaster. There are, however, many unpublished sermons that Owen preached to his congregation, as well as sermons later published anonymously, that clarify how he understood the crisis facing Protestant England, why he regarded it as an extraordinary moment, and what responsibilities he believed it imposed upon those entrusted with the preservation of Protestant religion in the nation.
Several sermons that Owen preached in February and May 1680 illustrate the urgency with which he viewed matters. On 15 February 1680, he asked his audience to consider whether they heard ‘extraordinary calls and warnings of God toward the nation’ and how they might respond to them.Footnote 26 The nation, he reminded them, was ‘very wicked’, but ignorant of its responsibility to turn to God in repentance. It had not ‘consulted … what it is in particular that the Lord our God requireth of us’.Footnote 27 One ‘great means’, he commended, ‘for the beginning and carrying on’ in the task of turning unto God, ‘is by earnest crying unto God, – by prayers and supplications, and humiliations’.Footnote 28 But, while many acts of prayer and outward displays of contrition over the sins of the nation had seldom led to reformation, Owen suggested that the times demanded renewed seriousness and self-examination. In an unpublished sermon preached two weeks earlier, on 4 February 1680, he returned to the question of Christian responsibility in a time of danger, describing the present day in apocalyptic terms.Footnote 29 Imminent judgement, he argued, ought to create ‘a compassionate Frame of heart in us, till wee may have a due pity and compassion’. The church must ‘Pitty England, Pitty London, Pitty our selves’.Footnote 30
This may have been Owen’s most urgent message to his congregation after the Restoration. Drawing upon the biblical prophet Zechariah, who heralded the coming day of the Lord as one that would bring both judgement and deliverance, Owen preached:
Methinkes (I know not how it is with you but) I see it as evident at this Day, as if writt before my eyes, as if writt with the Beams of the Sun. There is the Light of a day of grace and Patience upon us; but there is a mighty mixture upon it of the night and dawning of judgment approaching.Footnote 31
The prophet had spoken to God’s people who had been delivered from Babylonian captivity but were once again afflicted by an oppressive king, Darius of Persia. God would bring judgement on the oppressors, but judgement would also come upon his people for their sins committed under oppression. The theme was not merely rhetorical. Owen confessed to his congregation: ‘Brethren! My mind is solicitous about [these judgements] continually.’Footnote 32 For him, England’s situation resembled that of post-exilic Israel. Just as God’s people had been delivered from Babylonian captivity only to face renewed affliction, England had been delivered from papal tyranny during the Reformation, yet its future again appeared uncertain.Footnote 33 God must deliver the nation, but Owen thought that the Church had a key role to play; they were to ‘be at the Charge of it’, especially ‘us who are ministers’.Footnote 34 Some of the action that he was advocating is unclear. At one level, he thought that repentance and reformation were required in the face of approaching judgement. But other exhortations in the sermon imply a practical response that could be met with temporal opposition. It seemed that, with spiritual renewal, Owen’s church should expect physical difficulties. Many, he recognised, were ‘unwilling to give trouble unto Persons’. But ‘all endeavours of Reformation’, he continued, ‘will be assuredly attended with some trouble and disorder’. Owen was calling for ‘extraordinary’ action that ‘Truly … is not for every one to undertake and undergoe’.Footnote 35 The question raised by these February sermons is how Owen understood the obligations imposed by such a national emergency – and what forms of action those obligations might entail.
By May 1680, Owen was addressing these concerns more directly. Around this time, the government was cracking down on unlicensed newssheets that promoted ideas about Monmouth’s legitimacy, as his popularity was growing among the Whigs and debates in parliament were centred on the duke of York. The political tension related to the topic of Catholicism must have provoked the series of sermons Owen would preach on the topic from the book of Micah, for his apocalyptic vision was now directly linked to the collision he foresaw with Catholics. In his sermon ‘The use of faith, if popery should return upon us’, preached on 7 May 1680, Owen remarked that ‘half the talk of the world is upon this subject’ of a Catholic rising.Footnote 36 He therefore used the occasion to instruct his congregation how to respond should such fears be realised.
On the surface, the sermon represented a Christian call to pacifism despite the fact that the Church was being ‘threatened by hell and the world, which’, he continued, ‘are at this day combining together to bring … profaneness and idolatry … again upon this nation’.Footnote 37 He told his congregation not to speculate about the precise date that God would bring judgement on anti-Christian Romanism. These ‘computations’ were not for them to make: ‘It may be to-morrow; it may be not these hundred years.’Footnote 38 And when the ‘day of battle’ came, the fight for them would not be won with ‘wisdom and contrivances’, but by abiding in faith. Invoking Hebrews 12:4, Owen told the church that their fight was to be in ‘“resisting unto blood against sin” … that is your duty … nothing will save you but faith, courage, and constancy’.Footnote 39 The advice seemed simple enough – and simple to interpret as a historical event – were it not for the February sermons, which suggested that Owen regarded the moment as requiring more than private contemplation.
Arguing that God would judge the ‘antichristian world’ when Catholics least expected it, Owen quoted Revelation 18:8, ‘Her plagues shall come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire.’ His point was not to make a direct connection to the means of destruction – whether by fire, plague or famine – but the time. Assuming some would doubt that God would accomplish his purposes in ‘one day’, Owen continued that it would be done even in ‘one hour’.Footnote 40 Taken alone, the passage is unremarkable. Revelation 18 itself details the suddenness with which divine judgement overtakes Babylon. Yet, when read alongside reports connecting Owen to men contemplating the forcible removal of the royal brothers, the significance of the passages lies less in their language of suddenness than in the broader framework they reveal: Owen anticipated an extraordinary crisis, expected divine judgement upon anti-Christian power and regarded England as standing on the brink of a decisive reversal.
Those assumptions are strikingly similar to those expressed in reports concerning men later implicated in anti-Catholic conspiracy. The sworn oath of Edward Massey recorded in 1683 named around twenty men who were involved in an abortive plot to assassinate Charles and replace him with Monmouth.Footnote 41 Massey named notable men such as the preacher Isaac Bugby, an ‘eminent clothier’ and Thomas Swift, as well as Lord Grey and Col. Mildmay, but most interesting on the list was the name Valentine Desborough, son of the late Major-General John Desborough, husband of Oliver Cromwell’s sister, and a member of Owen’s church until his death on 10 September 1680.Footnote 42 Massey had reported that the younger Desborough had ‘at several times and in several places inveighed against the present government’, and had disclosed his involvement in a plot ‘against his Majesty and the present government’, requiring him to solicit Massey’s help for the manufacturing of armour – ‘shot proof and light’.Footnote 43 Desborough expected opposition, and thus remarked on their need to move ‘speedily’, and also harshly, requesting the provision of swords, muskets and pistols to:
be rid of that hellish brood the King and his successors … First we must cut off that incestuous king and his beloved brother, York, and then religion will flourish, but it will cost us bloody noses, and it shall be the most fatal blow ever given to that cursed generation. What should we do but cut off root and branch and leave no such seed? I may fall in the encounter, but I should be glad to see this day.Footnote 44
The plotters boasted that ‘more than half the nation is for it’: that is, to remove the king ‘and his beloved brother’ and to ‘[set] up Monmouth in his stead’. More significant than the boast itself was the report’s claim that Owen was ‘very much for it’, placing him, at least in the mind of the informant, among those sympathetic to the scheme.Footnote 45
What these materials reveal is not a hidden plot encoded in Owen’s sermons, but a striking convergence between the crisis he described from the pulpit and the assumptions of men later implicated in anti-Catholic conspiracy. Owen preached impending judgement, the extraordinary character of the times, the responsibilities of Christians and the inadequacy of complacent responses to England’s condition. Set against the backdrop of the Massey report, such themes help explain why contemporaries could plausibly associate him with more radical anti-Catholic activity. Whether Owen approved of every proposal attributed to Desborough and others cannot be determined. What can be said is that the theological and political outlook reflected in these sermons was compatible with a much broader range of anti-Catholic responses than Owen’s public exhortations alone might suggest.
Spiritual or literal
A further question concerns how Owen understood the relationship between divine providence and human action. Several other passages from 1680 and 1681 might initially appear to describe a strictly spiritual deliverance from the dangers confronting Protestant England. Yet elsewhere Owen interpreted concrete historical events as manifestations of divine intervention. Examining these passages together helps clarify how he understood the role of human agents in the providential overthrow of anti-Christian power.
One such passage directly follows Owen’s comments on Revelation 18 in The use of faith, if popery should return upon us (1680): ‘And I do verily believe that the destruction of this cursed antichristian state (of [sic] the head of it) will be brought about by none of those means we see or know of; but that the strong Lord God shall break in upon her and destroy her by ways unknown to us.’Footnote 46 Several features of the passage merit close attention. When Owen said that the anti-Christian state – namely, popery – will come down not by ‘those means we see or know of’, Greaves notes that Owen knew some of those to whom he preached were already considering other ‘means of deliverance’.Footnote 47 If that is the case, it is important to read this in light of the previous discussion on the probability that Owen was connected to secretive operations himself. But the second part of the statement is more challenging: that God should be the one to enact judgement.
The same sort of statement was made the following year in Owen’s An humble testimony unto the goodness and severity of God in his dealing with sinful churches and nations (1681).Footnote 48 In his prefatory address to the reader, Owen argued that the escape from ‘continual Apprehensions of publick Calamities’ and ‘the Ways of Deliverance’ were to come by ‘no other [means] but sincere Repentance and universal Reformation’.Footnote 49 Greaves rightly notes that Owen’s mention of ‘publick Calamities’ was ‘an obvious reference to a Catholic succession’.Footnote 50 But he is uncertain of Owen’s intent with the statement. Gribben has pointed out that this publication ‘marked a sharpening of tone, and a much more critical view of the government’ and that Owen had begun in this period to ‘re-think his commitment to passive resistance’.Footnote 51 Owen even acknowledged that he was confronting ‘the wisdom of politicians’ in his call for reformation.Footnote 52 Thus, his frustration with the government, and perhaps also with the failure of the Exclusion project, appears to have contributed to his growing emphasis on this alternative solution.Footnote 53
However, there has been no clear analysis of what Owen meant by a ‘universal Reformation’, or, rather, how it would come about. Greaves is warranted in his speculation as to ‘whether Owen was trying to curb militant Whigs or create the impression of innocent piety for the dissidents in his circle’.Footnote 54 But he is not willing to commit to either option and, most importantly, he does not understand Owen’s language as referring to any sort of active resistance by this date; Greaves does not recognise Owen advocating active resistance until the following year, 1682, with the publication of A brief and impartial account of the nature of the Protestant religion. Footnote 55 This latter text certainly made more explicit themes that had previously been expressed in a more guarded manner in An humble testimony and The use of faith. Yet each of these, when placed alongside a sermon preached on 22 December 1680 – and later published as Seasonable words for English Protestants (1690) – suggests that Owen did believe a reformation ‘to avoid destruction’ would come through the work of human actors. That is to say, these texts may indicate that Owen’s language of reformation already encompassed forms of active resistance in 1680, before – and against Greaves’s estimate of – his publication of A brief and impartial account.
In this sermon on Jeremiah 51:5, Owen told his church that they were ‘called this day for to joyne our cries with the nation’, and to seek ‘deliverance from universal destruction’.Footnote 56 Such destruction, he imagined, would come by the hands of Catholics, who, in keeping with a common Protestant interpretation, he identified with Babylon: the biblical description of Babylon in the Old Testament ‘is transferred to the Apostate Church of Rome in the now, and all applied unto it in the Booke of the Revelations’.Footnote 57 He continued that ‘The Holy Ghost in infinite wisdome transferred over the name and State and other things spoken of Babylon from the old to the New.’ Like Babylon, the Catholic Church had left natural (evangelical) worship for image worship and had become a ‘spring of persecution’.Footnote 58 As Israel had suffered from Babylonians, so England would suffer from Catholics. The analogy carried immediate implications for the present:
I have mentioned this, that you may see the interest of England in the text of Scripture, so far as the truth of Religion is owned in this Nation. At the time of this prophesy Israel and Judah were in danger of present destruction and desolation from the old Babylon; And if wee doe not mock God in all we do, wee are under apprehensions that England and the Church of God in England is under danger of the same desolation and destruction from new Babylon upon the same account and principle.Footnote 59
Once the connection was made, Owen turned to what must be done for ‘relief in the papal cause’, asking, ‘Who shall plead for England?’Footnote 60 The question of England’s deliverance remained unresolved, and Owen’s appeal took on a markedly urgent tone:
Wee and our Princes, as Daniel speaks, and our Rulers, and the people, the inhabitants of the Land of all sorts. Who shall plead here for England? Who shall bring forth a sort of persons? Nay it is not so in the Throne, nay it is not so in the City, nay it is not so in the Country, it is not so with the rich, it is not so with the poor. Let any one that can bring in a plea for this poore nation, that we may not conclude the land is filled with sinne against the Holy one of Israel.Footnote 61
But, perhaps, Owen considered, England’s destiny, though bleak, was not yet determined. He asked the church to recall the ‘large and wonderful Discovery of the horrible Plot, of the horrible Popish Plot layd for the Ruine, Destruction, and Desolation of this Nation’. His reflections on the plot here provide insight into the meaning of the passages mentioned in The use of faith and An humble testimony. To Owen, the discovery of the plot was evidence of ‘that Soveraigne Grace and Mercy … our Reliefe’. It demonstrated that God had not forsaken England, for it had come by unconventional means.Footnote 62 It was not discovered, he recounted,
by our Rulers from whom it was hid. It was not discovered by the Severe Judagation and watchfulness of Ministers of the State from foreigne intelligence the usual way of discovering such plots. It was not discovered by persons of Authority and Interest to warrant the Discovery. It was not in a time wherein the Nation was awake and looked about them … But in the deepest security.Footnote 63
The discovery was, for Owen, a work of God, for ‘through the conduct of the holy Providence of God, it hath broke forth to that Discovery’.Footnote 64
Owen’s comments illustrate how he could describe in spiritual terms events that involved, and required, the initiative of human actors seeking to defend the religion of England. To Owen, the discovery of the Popish Plot was a manifestation of sovereign mercy that he thought ought to be obvious to everyone.Footnote 65 Yet this providential deliverance unfolded through the actions of human actors, producing sworn testimony, arrests, prosecutions and executions. While the event had spiritual significance to Owen, it had come to pass by the minds and hands of zealous radicals seeking deliverance from the perceived threat of popery. Therefore, the fact that such an event as this had generated a providential analysis from his pulpit provides an important point of comparison for interpreting his later language of providential deliverance. Reading Owen’s claim in The use of faith – that the destruction of popish anti-Christianism would ‘be brought about by none of those means we see or know of’ – in light of his analysis on the Popish Plot thus gives it a new meaning. The same can be said of his comments in An humble testimony that deliverance would come by way of reformation. Deliverance from judgement, as Owen believed with the discovery of the Popish Plot, occurred in providentially unexpected ways when ‘God hath stirred up some’ men to counter evil ‘designs’. Their actions were protected by ‘the cloathing of the Spirit of God’ and his ‘anointing’.Footnote 66
Concluding analysis
The years 1679–81 represent a period in which Owen became willing to turn from words to action. The discovery of the alleged Popish Plot appears to have intensified Owen’s concern that James’s Catholicism posed a mortal threat to the Protestant settlement. The Whigs in parliament had the same fears, but the Exclusionist Party led by Shaftesbury failed to create any meaningful defence against the possibility of James’s succession so long as Charles was working against them. Owen shared in the disappointment of his friend and member of his church Sir John Hartopp, who was a member of all three Exclusionist parliaments, yet was noticeably inactive in two of the three – and perhaps for this reason Owen may have been disappointed in Hartopp himself. These frustrations had persuaded him that protecting Protestant interests in England could not easily be done through politics. For, as this article has set out, these years mark the story of how Owen – in a context of disappointment and frustration, yet with a brilliant sense of clarity of the danger in which he believed English Protestants lived – moved beyond conventional parliamentary opposition and towards associations with increasingly radical anti-Catholic networks.
With the struggles of the exclusionists in parliament, Owen felt an intensifying pressure to protect Protestant Christianity, but there was question about how successful he could be with his pen and from the pulpit. Some cast doubt upon his loyalty to Dissenters, suggesting that he may have been bought by the royal family, while others believed his work against Catholics had been pursued for personal gain.Footnote 67 The surviving evidence, however, points in a different direction – suggesting that Owen’s anti-Catholic commitments extended beyond the realm of public controversy. It was in this context that Owen and several figures within and connected to his congregation appear in evidence relating to anti-Catholic conspiratorial networks.
Within these radical networks, the surviving evidence suggests forms of involvement that ranged from indirect association to more direct participation. Owen had offered his home to be used for a meeting in which he, his brother and Ferguson would discuss the election of one of his church members, Samuel Shute, to an office that could plausibly impact the outcome of a plot to prevent James from ascending the throne. Taken together, the reports make it difficult to dismiss the possibility that Owen’s engagement extended beyond passive observation. Other reports detailed that Owen was aware of, and ‘very much for’, a plan involving the son of one of his church members to raise up a secret army to kill members of the royal family. And he was in a position of influence. The French ambassador to England remembered Owen as the ‘patriarch of the sectaries’, who was associated with Algernon Sidney in a group of former revolutionaries, ‘independents and republicans’, who ‘were in the past wars and would like to make another’.Footnote 68
Owen’s preaching and writing during this period suggest that he was preparing Dissenters for an extraordinary crisis rather than merely offering spiritual consolation amid persecution and impending judgement. Until now, readers have generally interpreted Owen in the years 1679–81 as endorsing a strictly spiritual resistance to temptation. However, as this article has shown, the context of his proximity to radical anti-Catholic networks helps illuminate his language of judgement when set alongside his broader commentary on recent political events. That language was not unrelated to the anti-Catholic activism with which he was associated and may have carried implications that contemporaries within those circles would have readily understood. Read in this context, Owen’s warnings about the sudden arrival of divine judgement acquire a significance beyond their conventional spiritual interpretation. Likewise, his descriptions of providential deliverance and the destruction of Rome appear less abstract when set alongside his conviction that God often accomplished his purposes through unexpected human instruments and events, even when those events entailed violence carried out in the name of Protestant preservation.
Some scholars, however, may wonder why Owen was never charged if he was involved in conspiracy and advocated active resistance to the extent that the evidence examined here suggests. Granted, the fact that Owen died of natural causes in August 1683, several months after he was interrogated and released with no charge, taken by itself does seem to suggest innocence. But, for Owen, death could not have come soon enough. The question of his innocence must be considered in light of the information available to the authorities in the summer of 1683. Much of the testimony discussed in this article had not yet been gathered and connected to Owen at the time of his interrogation. Critical details concerning his meetings with Henry Owen and Robert Ferguson, reports linking him to anti-Catholic plotting, and later testimony regarding his sympathies towards violent resistance movements only emerged months after his death.Footnote 69 Nor should the question be approached as though seventeenth-century authorities operated according to modern evidentiary expectations. The same political culture that accepted the testimony underlying prosecution connected with the Popish Plot would likely have regarded at least some of the reports discussed here as worthy of further investigation had they been available earlier. Thus, scholars must consider how the last months of Owen’s life – and, indeed, his legacy – would be different had the depth of his involvement been known sooner. Situating Owen in his proper context, as this article has aimed to do, provides a framework for exploring what that true legacy is and for interpreting all the remaining evidence against him that would gradually appear after Rye House. Taken together, the evidence examined here suggests that Owen’s activity in 1679–81 deserves a more central place in accounts of late Stuart Protestant resistance. Rather than standing in the margins of the political crises that preceded the revolution of 1688, Owen appears increasingly connected to the networks, assumptions and forms of activism from which later revolutionary movements emerged.Footnote 70
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