1. In classic expressions, Torbet, Robert G. celebrates Baptists' “consistent witness to the principle of religious liberty”Google Scholar and “the complete separation of church and state,” and Tony, Peck insists that “the freedom to believe and practice religion has been a core conviction for Baptists from the beginning”Google Scholar and that “from the beginning Baptists conceived of a multi-faith society.” A History of the Baptists, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, Penn.: Judson, 1963), 488Google Scholar; Peck, , “Grace and Law: Baptists and Religious Freedom,” Baptist Quarterly 39 (04, 2002): 315, 324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

I thank Richard Cogley and Michael Winship for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

2. William Henry, Brackney, The Baptists (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 87Google Scholar. This view echoes, for instance, through countless articles in Baptist History and Heritage and is embedded in standard American Baptist works of reference. See, for example, Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, 2 vols. (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman, 1958), 2:1153Google Scholar; Brackney, William H., ed., Historical Dictionary of the Baptists (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1999), 344.Google Scholar

3. Samuel, Richardson, The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion (London, 1647)Google Scholar, repr. in Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution 1614–1661, ed. Edward Bean, Underhill (New York: B. Franklin., 1846; reprint 1966), 235Google Scholar. Secularized reconceptions of government appear, for example, in Thomas, Helwys, A Shorte Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity (Amsterdam?: n.p., 1612), 33, 38Google Scholar; The Confession of Faith, Of those CHURCHES … Commonly (though Falsly) Called ANABAPTISTS (London, 1644), reprint in Baptist Confessions of Faith, ed. Lumpkin, William L. (Chicago: Judson, 1959), 169Google Scholar. Before 1640 only a handful of General Baptists espoused toleration of Catholics and non-Christians. John, Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow, U. K.: Longman, 2000), 55, 114Google Scholar. The “distinctive Baptist doctrine of religious toleration” was worked out in a series of early General Baptist pamphlets in the 1610s. Timothy, George, “Between Pacifism and Coercion: The English Baptist Doctrine of Religious Toleration,“ Mennonite Quarterly Review 58 (01 1987): 37, and see 34–47.Google Scholar

4. For example, A Declaration by Congregational Societies in, and about the City of London; as well [as] … Anabaptists (London: Matthew Simons, 1647), 6–7Google Scholar; A Brief Confession or Declaration of Faith: Set forth by Many of Us, Who Are (Falsely) Called Ana-Baptists (London: F[rancis] S[mith], 1660), 10.Google Scholar

5. Coffey, , Persecution and Toleration, chap. 1Google Scholar. See also Lamont, William S., “Pamphleteering, the Protestant Consensus and the English Revolution,” in Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays in History and Literature, ed. Richardson, R. C. and Ridden, G. M. (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1986), 78–79, 81–87Google Scholar; and Davis, J. C., “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 45 (09 1992): 515–23, 529Google Scholar. In mid-seventeenth-century England, leading Particular or Calvinist Baptists like John Tombes, Thomas Collier, Henry Danvers, and John Vernon either excluded certain groups from toleration or abridged their tolerationist convictions in the 1650s by endorsing hopes for a millennial hegemony of the saints. John, Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution,” The Historical Journal 41 (1998): 964, 966, 967, 978–80Google Scholar. A Baptist broadsheet of 1659 signed by leading London Particular Baptists (including Henry Jessey, William Kiffin, Hanserd Knollys, and other known associates of J. Clarke) specifically excluded Catholics, blasphemers, and “those that worship a false God” from toleration. A Declaration of Several of the People Called Anabaptists (London: Livewell Chapman, 1659)Google Scholar. The tract is unsigned but the authors are identified in Robert Hubberthorne, An Answer to a Declaration Put Forth by … Anabaptists (London: Thomas Simmons, 1659), title page.Google Scholar

6. McLoughlin, William G., New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:xviGoogle Scholar. For variations on the theme of limited toleration, see ibid., 60, 63, 89, and 2:1228.

7. John, Clarke, Ill Newes from New-England: Or, A Narative of New-Englands Persecution (London: Henry Hills, 1652) [hereafter cited as IN].Google Scholar

8. John Russell, Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Providence: A. C. Greene, 1856–1865), 2:5.Google Scholar

9. Torbet, , History of the Baptists, 489Google Scholar; Brackney, , The Baptists, 93–95, 142–43Google Scholar; Gaustad, Edwin S., “John Clarke: ‘Good Newes from Rhode Island,’” Baptist History and Heritage 24 (10 1989): 24, 26Google Scholar. Brackney and Gaustad cite McLoughlin's work but take no account of his critical revisions. Brackney, , The Baptists, 299, 314Google Scholar; Gaustad, , “John Clarke,“ 26Google Scholar. For other descriptions of Clarke as unqualifiedly tolerationist, see Anson Phelps, Stokes and Leo, Pfeffer, Church and State in the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 16–18Google Scholar; Nobles, Bryant R., “John Clarke's Political Theory,” Foundations 13 (07–09 1970): 221–36Google Scholar; George, Selement, “John Clarke and the Struggle for Separation of Church and State,” Foundations 15 (03 1972): 111–24Google Scholar; Wood, James E. Jr., “Religious Liberty and Public Affairs in Historical Perspective,” Baptist History and Heritage 9 (07 1974): 158Google Scholar; Estep, William R., Revolution within the Revolution: The First Amendment in Historical Context, 1612–1789 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), 86–92Google Scholar; Coffey, , “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited,” 967.Google Scholar

10. IN, 113, 6. For more on “the nature of the conscience of man,” see ibid., 101 (the quote), 102, 104.

11. IN, 5, and see 110, 112. Accordingly, intrusion upon religious affairs left a government “open to the vengeance of God.” ibid., 112.

12. IN., 108 [outward forcing], 113 [hypocrites; and see 103–5], 112.

13. IN., 112–13.

14. Bartlett, , ed., Records of Rhode Island, 2:5Google Scholar; IN, 106, and see 13. The charter's language of “full libertie in religious concernements” was Clarke's, adopted from an appeal to the king in early 1662. Bartlett, , ed., Records of Rhode Island, 1:492.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., 97, 7 (repeated at 15, 81, and 107, echoing 2 Timothy 2:25–26). Clarke represented a forty-three-page segment of Ill Newes as a summary of the views of Obadiah Holmes and John Crandall, his associates in the Lynn incident, as well as his own. Possibly Holmes and Crandall co-authored the segment or parts of it. ibid., 70–113. Clarke also included in Ill Newes a letter from Holmes “whose heading [showed] … that Holmes, Crandall and Clarke considered themselves ‘members of the same body’” with John Spilsbury, William Kiffin, and other Particular Baptist leaders in London.” White, , ed., “Early Baptist Letters,” 142; IN, 45–46.Google Scholar

16. IN, 18, 91, and see 41, 108. In ibid., 64, “evill World” is contrasted to “the good World … yet to come.“

17. For Baptists in the Monarchist movement, see Capp, , The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism [hereafter cited as FMM], (London: Faber, 1972), 172Google Scholar; Bell, Mark R., Apocalypse How? Baptist Movements During the English Revolution (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000), 164–72Google Scholar. Probably a majority of Monarchist Baptists were Particulars. Bell, , Apocalypse How?, 167, n. 5; and see Capp, FMM, 179.Google Scholar

18. The monarchies scheme from Daniel 2:39–40 and 44 was an eschatological common-place, which, in light of the threatened failure of the puritan revolution at midcentury, Fifth Monarchists highlighted and radicalized.

19. When Monarchists turned against the government after the establishment of Crom-well's Protectorate late in 1653, mainline Baptists began to distance themselves from the movement. Clarke followed suit. Bell, , Apocalypse How?, 173–200Google Scholar; James, Sydney V., John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island 1638–1750 (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 53, 57.Google Scholar

20. LaFantasie, 302. For Clarke and Jessey's church, see James, , John Clarke, 54Google Scholar, and the sources cited in note 41. For Jessey's Monarchist views and involvements, see White, B. R., “Henry Jessey, a Pastor in Politics,” Baptist Quarterly 25 (07 1973): 98–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A “pocket” of Monarchists operated in his and several other Baptist congregations. Bell, , Apocalypse How?, 169, and see 164–72Google Scholar. Four years before Clarke's arrival in London, Jessey had ventured an explicitly millennial reading of Daniel 2. The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (London: Matthew Simmons, 1647)Google Scholar, sig. A4. In a preface to a Monarchist tract published In the year of Clarke's arrival in London, he forecast “GREAT CHANGES” including the destruction of Antichrist, the conversion of the Jews, and the elevation of the saints “probably before 1658” and “thence … the THOUSAND years of Christs REIGN.” Preface to Mary, Cary, The Little Horns Doom and Downfall (London: Printed for the author, 1651), sig. a5.Google Scholar

21. Clarke, IN, 4, 21. For the “brightness” motif (2 Thess. 2:8), see Theodore Dwight, Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 207, 232, 243, 273Google Scholar. The “brightness of his coming” was used in an explicitly millennial sense in the Monarchist manifesto Clarke signed in 1654. A Declaration of Several of the Churches of Christ, and Godly People … Concerning the Kingly Interest of Christ (London: Livewell Chapman, 1654), 7 [hereafter DSCC]. The fullest account of the Fifth Monarchy movement is Capp, FMM.Google Scholar

22. Clarke, IN, 79, 98, and see 36. The five-monarchy scheme came to prominence in the rush of millennial enthusiasm that followed the regicide on Jan. 30, 1649, and was featured in a proto-Monarchist petition of Feb. 19, 1650. For the “first Fifth Monarchist petition,” see Capp, FMM, 52; and the reprint in Woodhouse, A. S. P., ed., Puritanism and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 241–24Google Scholar. Since the Monarchist movement began to take shape in late 1651 with a meeting at Allhallows the Great, London, where Jessey and other Monarchist leaders were weekday lecturers, it seems unlikely that Clarke, who quickly became well connected in the small world of the London radical puritan community and almost certainly with Jessey and his church, highlighted the five-monarchy scheme in IN of 1652 without qualifying comments if his own conception was at variance with theirs. Capp, FMM, 58.

23. Much of the tract's eschatological content is in the segment in which Clarke summarized the views of his associates in the Lynn incident as well as his own. IN, 70–113.

Richard Cogley finds Ill Newes informed by Joseph Mede's thesis that the Last Judgment begins at the same time as the millennium and runs for the duration of it, but acknowledges that the evidence is ambiguous. Personal communication to the author, Sept. 6, 2002. Clarke's repeated prediction that Christ would “come in flaming fire to render vengeance” upon opponents, and his invocation of the “brightness of his coming” may here refer to the traditional coming to perform the Last Judgment. In one passage he seems to envision the Last Judgment as a discrete event immediately following Christ's coming, not as the protracted process Mede depicted. In another he described the saints' “inheritance” as “reserved in heaven.” He also sought to persuade Parliament that pursuit of the “peace, liberty, and prosperity of a civil State” is the biblically certified “administration of Christ's power on earth” and offered no glimpses of a revolutionary theocracy. The ambiguity of his eschatology as of 1652 may also reflect hesitant transition from the traditional radical puritan and separatist concept of God's penultimate Kingdom as the earthly church. IN, 13, 70, 4, and see 6, 8, 19–21, 36, 41, 79, 89, 91, and 98–99. For the millennialization of the kingdom, see Murray, Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 85–89.Google Scholar

The account of “Clarke's Eschatology” in Louis Franklin, Asher, John Clarke (1609–1676): Pioneer in American Medicine, Democratic Ideals, and Champion of Religious Liberty (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Dorrance, 2002), 108–9Google Scholar, conflates the views of Clarke and Obadiah Holmes, ibid., 108–9, 117's views cited at 109, nn. 62–63, 67 is from Holmes's testimony “Of My Faith,” reprinted in Gaustad, Edwin S., ed., Baptist Piety: The Last Will and Testimony of Obadiah Holmes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian University Press, 1978), 85–91.Google Scholar

24. Greaves, Richard L., “A Colonial Fifth Monarchist?: John Clarke of Rhode Island,” Rhode Island History 40 (1981): 43–44Google Scholar; James, , John Clarke, 45Google Scholar; White, B. R., ed., “Early Baptist Letters (I): Two Letters from John Clarke to Robert Bennett, 1655, 1658,” Baptist Quarterly 27 (October 1977): 144Google Scholar. Bennett, a Particular Baptist, knew Henry Jessey and John Pendarves, another Particular Baptist and theorist of the Fifth Monarchy, and was friends with other revolutionary figures who had ties to Clarke. Greaves, Richard L. and Robert, Zaller, ed., Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (London: Harvester, 1982–1984), 1:57Google Scholar; Greaves, , “A Colonial Fifth Monarchist?,“ 43–44Google Scholar. The manifesto of 1654 was A Declaration of Several … Churches of Christ. Pendarves's funeral was held at Abingdon, Berks., and the ensuing protest was published as The Complaining Testimony of Some … of Sions Children (London: Livewell Chapman, 1656)Google Scholar. According to Complaining Testimony, sig. A2, all signers had attended the meeting. Clarke was identified as “Minister of the Baptized Church at Worcester-house in London,” in Thomas, Tillam, The LASHER proved LYAR (London: n.p., 1657), 2Google Scholar. Capp, FMM, 244, 277–78, notes both the appeal to Clarke by the militant Monarchists in John Simpson's church after Simpson turned against them, and Carew's Baptist conversion. Taking a position shared by all Fifth Monarchy proponents, in 1657 Clarke also joined other “Anabaptist ministers in London” in petitioning Oliver Cromwell to refuse Parliament's offer of kingship. “Address of the Anabaptized Ministers in London“ (1657), printed in Original Letters and Papers … Addressed to Oliver Cromwell, ed. John, Nickolls (London: W. Bowyer, 1743), 142–43Google Scholar. By the end of the decade Monarchist hopes had been dashed, and Clarke ceased active support. Whitley, W. T., “The English Career of John Clarke, Rhode Island,” Baptist Quarterly 1 (1922–1923): 371–72Google Scholar; Greaves, , “A Colonial Fifth Monarchist?,” 45.Google Scholar

As Greaves and James acknowledge, other men named John Clarke appear in contemporary records; but there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Rhode Islander was the one associated with the actions reported above. Whitley, , “The English Career of John Clarke,” 369–70Google Scholar; White, , ed., “Early Baptist Letters,” 142Google Scholar; Capp, FMM, 246; “A Colonial Fifth Monarchist?,” 43–44; James, , John Clarke, 53.Google Scholar

25. White, , ed, Early Baptist Letters, 146Google Scholar. For Clarke's arrest in 1658, see Capp, FMM, 121, 246. Asher suggests that the Clarke arrested in 1658 was a London rugmaker, but his argument is inconclusive. Asher, , John Clarke, 74–75 and 80Google Scholar, n. 18. Clarke's defense before Massachusetts authorities in 1651 resembled that of the man arrested in London in 1658; and the John Belcher who was arrested with him later moved to Newport and joined Clarke's church. James, , John Clarke, 53Google Scholar; Capp, FMM, 121; A Narrative Wherein Is [Shown] the Sufferings of John Canne, Wentworth Day, John Clarke [et al]… Calld Fifth Monarchy Men (London: n.p., 1658), 15Google Scholar; Whitley, , “The English Career of John Clarke,” 370, 372Google Scholar. Again in 1661 Clarke was imprisoned briefly. Capp, FMM, 45.

26. Timothy, George, “Between Pacifism and Coercion: The English Baptist Doctrine of Religious Toleration,” Mennonite Quartely Review 58 (01 1987): 48Google Scholar. See also Coffey, , “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited,” 980.Google Scholar

27. John Spilsbury, for example, founder of the first Particular Baptist church in London (in 1638, possibly earlier), author of the first treatise by a Particular advocating believer's baptism with immersion, and a leading Baptist authority in London during Clarke's sojourn there, predicted a millennial future based on “the instituted Order and Administration of Christ's Testament” according to biblical “order, and rules.” This could only mean Baptist order and rules. John, Spilsbury, Gods Ordinance, the Saints Priviledge (London: M. Simmons, 1646), 26–27Google Scholar. The treatise on baptism defined adult baptism and Baptist polity as mandated by “the rule and order of Christ.” S[pilsbury], Treatise Concerning the Lawfull Subiect of Baptisme (London: n.p., 1643), 33.Google Scholar

28. Clarke invoked elements of this construct in IN, 4, 8, 41, 63–64, 78, 109, 111. He claimed that the segment 70–113 in ibid, reported also the views of Holmes and Crandall.

29. Henry, Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church (n. p., 1590), 250, and see 4–5, 47, 188Google Scholar. For the Antichrist legend and the beasts of the Apocalypse, see Richard, Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Oxford: n.p., n. d.), 92–93, 100–104.Google Scholar

30. Stephen, Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 94–101, 111–12. Brachlow also notes inchoate millennial themes.Google Scholar

31. Most Particular Baptist churches in London in the mid-century decades derived not from the Separatist-General Baptist line but from the semi-separatist Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church, from which the first distinctively Baptist congregation hived off ca. 1638 and others in later years. The Beast complex, joined to a strong separatist impulse, was integral to Particular teaching from the start. See, for example, S[pilsbury], Lawfull Subiect of Baptisme, sig. A3, 36; Christopher, Blackwood, Apostolicall Baptisme (London: n.p., 1646), 1–2Google Scholar; Richard, Lawrence, The Antichristian Presbyter: or, Antichrist Transformed (London: n.p., 1647), sig. A3, 2–7Google Scholar. See also the discussion in Bell, Mark R., Apocalypse How?, 29–31, 105–7Google Scholar. The complex was standard fare, for example, in the theology of John Pendarves, a leading theorist of the Fifth Monarchy among Particular Baptists, and in a Monarchist manifesto Clarke signed in 1654. Pendarves, , Arrows against Babylon (London: Livewell Chapman, 1656), 1–2Google Scholar; Pendarves, , The Fear of God (London: Livewell Chapman, 1657), 4; DSCC, 7.Google Scholar

32. In Holmes's flogging by Bay authorities Clarke saw an act of the “Beast that … spake like a Dragon” of Revelation 13. The “scarlot-coloured beast” of Revelation 17 appears as a persecuting force in a section of Ill Newes recording the “Testimony” of Clarke's two associates in the Lynn affair as well as his own. IN, 63 (and see 64), 109, and see 111. That persecution was a mark of the Beast was a tolerationist commonplace in the period. For a Particular Baptist example, see Christopher, Blackwood, The Storming of Antichrist (London: n.p., 1644), 14.Google Scholar

33. Clarke, IN, 42. For the imagery, see Revelation 12 and 20.

34. IN, 13. A large majority of Protestant writers of the era anticipated the coming of Christ to exact bloody vengeance upon the Beast and Antichrist. For a Particular Baptist example, see Henry, Lawrence, Of Our Communion and Wane with Angels (London: Giles Calvert, 1646)Google Scholar. Published near the end of the First Civil War, the tract envisioned the triumphant outcome of the future eschatological battle in which the saints “shall stand with [Christ], glorying … to see your enemies dead before you,” sharing “the pleasure of revenge … [and] the shouting of a conqueror,” 115–16. Lawrence was to become probably the most politically powerful Baptist in English history, appointed Lord President of the Council of State in 1654.

35. For a sampler of Particular Baptist war theology, see John, Spencer, The Spirituall Warfare (London: n.p., 1642)Google Scholar; Thomas, Collier, A Vindication of the Army-Remonstrance … [an] Answer to Mr Sedgwicks Book, Intituled, Justice upon the Army-Remonstrance (London: G. Calvert, 1648)Google Scholar; Samuel, Richardson, An Answer to the London Ministers Letter … To His Excellency (London: I. C., 1649)Google Scholar, preface “To the Generall, and His Excellent Counsels of Warre,” sigs. A2–A3; “Address from the Baptized Churches in Northumberland, &c, to the Lord Protector [1655; signed by Thomas Tillam and eight other Particulars],” in Original Letters and Papers, ed. Nickolls; William, Allen, A Word to the Army, Touching their Sin and Dutie (London: Livewell Chapman, 1660).Google Scholar

36. IN, 3–9. Both DCCS, 9, and the “Addresse of the Anabaptist Ministers,” in Original Letters and Papers, ed. Nickolls, 142, approved the regicide. In the Separatist-Baptist perspective that Clarke shared, Antichrist in his English guise inspired the project of a coercive national presbyterian church formulated by the Westminster Assembly of 1643–49 and partially implemented by Parliament. In Ill Newes Clarke argued that the presbyterians' “visible way of worship … was [not] appointed by Christ, nor yet practised by [the apostolic] church,” and in the letter of 1658 he rejoiced that “presbyters” could not regain advantage under present conditions. IN, 19; White, , “Early Baptist Letters,” 146.Google Scholar

37. DSCC, 8–10, quoting with approval an army declaration. Like Jessey, Clarke did not associate himself with the Monarchist extremists who attempted armed insurrections in 1657 and 1661. DSCC specifically disavowed revolutionary plotting or action, as did a later tract probably authored by Clarke that repudiated Thomas Venner's uprising of 1661. DSCC, 12; The Plotters Unmasked, Murderers No Saints (London: n.p., 1661), 1–4Google Scholar. For Clarke's probable authorship of Plotters Unmasked, see Greaves, , “A Colonial Fifth Monarchist?,” 45Google Scholar; James, , John Clarke, 53.Google Scholar

38. White, , ed., “Early Baptist Letters,” 144Google Scholar; “Addresse of the Anabaptist Ministers,” in Original Letters and Papers, ed. Nickolls, 142. Several Monarchists proposed an English military invasion of Europe to foment a “world-wide revolution” in preparation for the millennium. Capp, FMM, 53, 151–54.

39. Ibid., 4, 8, 9. Other prominent Particulars also urged magistrates actively to promote evangelism. See, for example, A Declaration by Congregational Societies in and about the City of London, 8; Thomas, Collier, A General Epistle to the Universall Church (London: Giles Calvert, 1649), 88Google Scholar; Hanserd, Knollys, An Exposition of the First Chapter of the Song of Solomon (London: W. Godbid, 1656), 40Google Scholar; John, Pendarves, The Fear of God, 9, 13Google Scholar; John, Tombes, A Serious Consideration of the Oath of the Kings Supremacy (London: H. Hills, 1660), 17, 19–21.Google Scholar

In reply to Ill Newes, Thomas Cobbet, Congregational minister of Lynn, Massachusetts, charged that Clarke's appeal to the English government against the Bay estab- lishment was a performative contradiction: “He would, if he could, whet the sword of the Parliament, and Councel of State, [against the Bay establishment] for acting according to our consciences, in matters respecting God's worship and Truth, contrary to his [Clarke's] own principles. The Civil Magistrates Power in Matters of Religion (London: W. Wilson, 1653), 26.Google Scholar

40. Clarke, for example, shared the common Particular Baptist belief that Christ at his coming will “put an end to all Gospel Ordinances, and immediately manifest himself.“ Thomas, Tillam, The Temple of Lively Stones (London: Published for the author, 1660), 396Google Scholar. See also Henry, Lawrence, Of Baptisme ([Rotterdam]: n.p., 1646), 387Google Scholar; Daniel, King, A Way to Sion Sought Out, and Found, 2nd ed. (London: Christopher Higgins, 1656), 191Google Scholar; and IN, 25, 85. Similarly, the humility and suffering that counted as badges of honor in the first domain would be transformed into righteous domination in the second. See below, n. 48.

41. IN, 8, 106. To the category of tares Clarke assigned “erronious, hereticall, and antichristian” persons, including “Hereticks, Schismaticks, Apostats, [and] Blasphemers.” ibid., 8, 106. It is not clear whether he intended to exclude Turks, Jews, and other non-Christian believers from toleration, as McLoughlin argues in New England Dissent, 1:98, n. 16. The parable is in Matthew 13:24–30.

42. IN, 8, 6. Tellingly, three of four specific tolerationist requests to Parliament that Clarke included in IN favored the saints, ibid., 8–9.

43. IN, 8 (and see 106), 112–13, 25. For Particular Baptist emphasis upon the endpoint, “till the harvest,” see, for example, Blackwood, , Storming of Antichrist, 41Google Scholar; John, Vernon, The Swords Abuse Asserted (London: J. Harris, 1648), 7Google Scholar. The great majority of Baptist and other puritan tolerationists in the period “still worshipped a God of wrath whose tolerance of unbelief would one day run out.” Coffey, , “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited,” 983Google Scholar. In “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom,” 523, n. 94, Davis suggests that “toleration” in the English Revolution was “always perceived as a [temporary] second best to the ultimate unity of Christ's will.“

44. See Blair, Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate,” in Persecution and Toleration, ed. Sheils, W. J. ([Oxford]: B. Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical Historical Society., 1984), 200–210Google Scholar; and Coffey, , “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited,” 961–62, and the sources cited there.Google Scholar

45. IN, 4, and see 8–9. Although General Baptists pioneered the office, after ca. 1644 the end-times “messenger” or missionary became a standard figure in Particular Baptist polity. See, for example, White, B. R., ed., Association Records of the Particular Baptists of England, Wales and Ireland to 1660, 4 vols. (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1971), 2:56Google Scholar. In late 1652 Clarke applauded the evangelical “enlargement of the Kingdom” of Christ and seems to have served as an itinerant debater in the Particular Baptist cause. Clarke to William Hubbard, 11 October 1652, in Isaac Backus, A History of New England, with Particular Reference to … Baptists, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Newtown, Mass.: Backus Historical Society, 1871), 1:497–98Google Scholar; Nathaniel Briscoe to L. S., 7 September 1652, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846), 1:32–34, in reference to “Mr. Clark, chirurgeon.“Google Scholar

46. See n. 43. Clarke's predestinarian views are reflected in IN, 112; White, ed.,“Early Baptist Letters,” 145. In an unpublished, undated doctrinal summary, he affirmed “the special decree of God concerning angels and men … called predestination,” in Backus, , History of New England, 1:206.Google Scholar

47. IN, 100, 4, 7, 20. With other predestinarians, Clarke believed that the response of the elect and non-elect to evangelism was at once voluntary and determined. The Spirit, acting as Christ's “vice-roy here on earth,” exerts irresistible power “in and over the spirits and consciences” of the elect, extending to “all the inward and hidden motions and actings” of their minds, by way of “convincing, converting, and transforming“ them, ibid., 6–7, and see 102: “the Lord hath reserved this great work of ordering the understanding, and conscience … by way of constraint … in his own hand, and in the hand of the Spirit.“

For Particular Baptist variations upon Christ's use of the spiritual sword or “battle-Axe” to “spiritually slay and destroy all his enemies,” see Thomas, Collier, The Glory of Christ and Ruine of Antichrist (London: n.p., 1647), 47, and see 37, 44Google Scholar; Hanserd, Knollys, An Exposition of the First Chapter of the Song of Solomon, 43–45.Google Scholar

48. IN, 101, and see 4, 15, 18, 45, 64. Davis, , “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom,” 530Google Scholar, and Coffey, , “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited,” 978–79Google Scholar, recognize that radical Protestant and Fifth Monarchist theory ultimately swallowed pluralism in “millennial holism.” The quote is in Coffey, ibid., 978.

49. DSCC, 17; Capp, FMM, 14, and see 141–42. The manifesto of 1654 assailed Cromwell's dissolution of the Barebones Parliament in 1653, “for that [the members] would rule as Saints, (or part of the Fifth Monarchy, for Christ),” declared a “period to the Worldly … Laws of men,” and insisted that “the World must be governed according to the Word.“ DSCC, 4, 16–17. For these motifs in the wider Monarchist movement, see Capp, FMM, 137–39, 162–66, 230. For a Particular Baptist Monarchist brief for rule by biblical law, see John, Pendarves, The Fear of God, 9Google Scholar. Clarke attended his funeral in 1656. Complaining Testimony, sig. A2. In the founding pact of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1638, Clarke with the other settlers initially agreed to govern by the standard of Christ “the King of Kings … and [the] absolute lawes … in his holy word.” John Russell, Bartlett, Records of Rhode Island, 1:52.Google Scholar

50. DSCC, 16–17; Tillinghast, , Generation-work: The Second Part (London: Livewell Chapman, 1655)Google Scholar; bound with the author's Generation-work (London, 1655) but sep. pagin., 125–26; Aspinwall, , Fifth Monarchy, 5Google Scholar. For a Particular Baptist expression of the millennial rule of the saints, see Thomas, Collier, A Discovery of the New Creation (London: Giles Calvert, 1649), 20–21Google Scholar. With John Spilsbury, Particular Baptists agreed that in the coming kingdom Christ would place “all, both persons, states, and powers, … under subjection; who also shall acknowledge him to be the Lord.” Gods Ordinance, the Saints Priviledge, 25. Yet there were variations on the subject of the status of the non-elect. Thomas Tillam allowed that some of Satan's “vassals” would remain in Jesus' kingdom but in firm subjection to the saints. Thomas Collier foresaw that the millennial evangelism soon to sweep the earth would partially tame the unregenerate and make them “serve the [ruling] saints” in the kingdom. Yet Thomas Killcop taught that Christ's enemies would be destroyed at Christ's coming to initiate his kingdom. Tillam, , The Two Witnesses (London: Giles Calvert, 1651), 161Google Scholar; Collier, , New Creation, 8, 12Google Scholar; Collier, , Marrow, 32Google Scholar; Killcop, , Ancient and Durable Gospel (London: Giles Calvert, 1648), 59Google Scholar. Aspinwall was a returned Massachusettsan who, like Clarke, had associated himself with the Antinomian party in 1636–38. Banished by the General Court, he joined Clarke as a founder of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where both signed the town compact of 1638. Greaves, and Zaller, , ed., Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals, 1:25–26.Google Scholar

51. Even Roger Williams, whose millennial vision centered upon an apostolic and separatist church and not a political kingdom, concurred in hope for Christ's arrival “to burne up millions of ignorant and disobedient” and frame a super-totalitarian world. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 134Google Scholar, and see 77, 219. His millennium too was a religious monopoly with “all the Nations of the Earth subdue[d] to the obedience of the [radical puritan] gospel.” ibid., 3:141, and see 4:279.

52. Davis, , “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom,” 523Google Scholar, n. 94; and see McLoughlin, William R., Soul Liberty: The Baptists' Struggle in New England, 1630–1833 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991), 14.Google Scholar

53. IN, 19, 90–91. McLoughlin argued that Clarke urged toleration upon the Bay colony “because he believed that the Baptist position was the only correct one and that in any free encounter with them, the Puritan churches would be vanquished and disappear.“ McLoughlin, , New England Dissent, 1:98Google Scholar. Clarke belonged to the majority of Baptist tolerationists in the seventeenth century who assumed that free religious debate would allow their exclusive “sectarian” truth to “win out over all opposition.” George, , “Between Pacifism and Coercion,” 45–46.Google Scholar

54. John, Tombes, The Examen of the Sermon of Mr Stephen Marshall, About Infant-Baptisme (London: George Whitington, 1645), 31Google Scholar. See also Blackwood, , Storming of Antichrist, 29–30.Google Scholar

55. Collier, , A General Epistle to the Universall Church, 86 f.Google Scholar; and see Blackwood, , Apostolicall Baptisme, 83.Google Scholar

56. Goold, for example, held that “the mode and subject of baptism was a minor and ‘non-essential’ matter about which good Puritans might differ without splitting the churches.” McLoughlin, , Soul Liberty, 3.Google Scholar

57. IN, 35. For the proposed debate, see James, , John Clarke, 47Google Scholar. For Clarke's desire to face Cotton, see IN, 38. Clarke recognized some non-Baptists as saints, but of an inferior order. In IN he argued that only Baptist beliefs and rites were biblically correct, and clearly biblical teaching as Baptists understood it was the “knowledge” soon to engulf the world. With closed-communion Baptists, he insisted that only through adult baptism by dipping could believers be effectually “planted” into Christ's death, burial, and resurrection and be qualified to join a church. Through end-times evangelism, further-more, “that which is of God” from a Baptist standpoint “shall … encrease and be propagated, and that which is not of God shall fall, decay, and come to nothing“; soon the Baptist understanding of the “testimony, that Jesus is the Christ” will emerge as “the only prevailing, and victorious truth in all the world.” IN, 14 (and see 82–89), 8–9, 18. For the decidedly Baptist construal of “Christ” in this context, see IN, 36–37, 70–87. By these measures, only Baptists could be full-orbed saints. Bay congregationals, with their “unchristian, ye[a] Antichristian” use of force against religious dissenters and their “false, and evil” liturgy, which is “not the order of… Christ,” obviously were not saints in good standing but agents of “disorder, … and Babel.” ibid., 16, 11. They, in turn, understood Clarke to mean that their colony's “Churches [are] no Churches, and … all [their] other Ordinances, and Ministers, [are] a Nullity,” 32. Yet in IN Clarke addressed Bay authorities as “Honored Friends” whom he respected for “evils reformed,” named the devil “your adversary and mine,” and urged them hopefully to “break off your sins by repentance.” IN, 19, 16. For a time in the mid-1650s he belonged to Jessey's open-communion church, not all of whose members were Baptist. DSCC, appended signatures, sig. D. A petition he signed in 1657 spoke for “God's people in general, though of different apprehensions.” Addresse of the Anabaptist Ministers, 142. In 1656 he professed “unfeigned love” for Henry Vane and John Carew, both Independents (Carew became a Baptist in 1658). White, , “Early Baptist Letters,” 143–44Google Scholar. Possibly his association with open-communion Baptists (like Jessey) and non-Baptist Monarchists in the 1650s broadened his conception of sainthood.

58. IN, 40–41, 17, 35

59. Gaustad, , “John Clarke,” 24, 26. Gaustad presumably means American spokesman.Google Scholar

60. IN, 13. Several of Clarke's Particular Baptist and tolerationist contemporaries affirmed the magistrate's duty to suppress blasphemy. See, for example, Christopher, Blackwood, The Storming of Antichrist, 23Google Scholar [Blackwood expressed doubt about this position in Apostolicall Baptisme, 82 f.]; “Address from the Baptized Churches in Northumberland, &c, to the Lord Protector [1655; signed by Thomas Tillam and eight other Particulars],” in Original Letters and Papers, ed. Nickolls, 134; Thomas, Collier, The Decision and Clearing of the Great Point Now in Controversie, About the Interest of Christ and the Civil Magistrate (London: Printed for G. C, 1659), 15 f.Google Scholar; John, Tombes, Supplement to the Serious Consideration of the Oath of the Kings Supremacy (London: Henry Hills, 1660), 29, 32.Google Scholar

61. IN, 27.