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‘To let the memory of these men dye is injurious to posterity’:1 Edmund Calamy’s Account of the ejected ministers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

David L. Wykes
David L. Wykes*
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Extract

Edmund Calamy is celebrated as the biographer of Restoration Nonconformity. His account of the sufferings of the ministers ejected from their livings following the Restoration religious settlement is well known to historians of Dissent. As a biographer he was responsible for rescuing many details and even the names of ejected ministers which would otherwise have been lost. His account remains therefore the pre-eminent source for the study of the early history of Nonconformity. In addition to the biographical details about individual ministers, he included much incidental information on the organization and structure of early Dissent. Nevertheless, the significance of his work went beyond the biographical accounts. Modern religious Dissent dates from the Restoration of Charles II and the passing of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which saw about 2,000 ministers, preachers, and teachers suffer the loss of their livelihoods for their refusal to conform. The Great Ejection was, however, more than just an historical event. As A. G. Matthews, the compiler of the outstanding revision of Calamy’s list of ejected ministers, wrote:

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 33: The Church Retrospective , 1997 , pp. 379 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1997

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Footnotes

1

CalamyE., An Account of the Ministers … who were Ejected or Silenced after the Restoration in 1660 (London, 1713) [hereafter Account], p. iv.

References

2 Matthews, A. G., ed., Calamy Revised: Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced, 1660–2 (Oxford, 1934)Google Scholar [hereafter Cal. Rev.], p. xvi.

3 Watts, M., The Dissenters: I, From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar, ch. 3; White, B., The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1983), ch. 3 Google Scholar.

4 Richardson, R. C., The Debate on the English Revolution (London, 1977), pp. 35–7 Google Scholar.

5 G. F. Nuttall, ‘The MS of Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)’JHH, 6 (1955), p. 76; Keeble, N. H., Richard Baxter, Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982), pp. 145–6 Google Scholar. For evidence of Baxter’s affection for Sylvester, see Reliquia; Baxteriance: or Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times, ed. M. Sylvester (London, 1696) [hereafter Rel. Baxt.], Part 3, p. 96, § 206: ‘Mr Silvester … a Man of excellent meekness, temper, sound, and peaceable Principles, godly Life, and great ability in the ministerial work’.

6 Rel. Baxt., preface, § VIII.

7 Calamy, Edmund, An Historical Account of My Own Life, ed. Rutt, J. T., 2 vols (London, 1830), 1, p. 377 Google Scholar.

8 N. Keeble, preface to The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, ed. J. M. Lloyd Thomas (rev. edn, London, 1974), p. v; Cal. Rev., p. xvii.

9 Calamy, Historical Account, 1, pp. 377–8.

10 Calamy to Ralph Thoresby, Leeds, 17 Jan. 1701/2, printed in W. T. Lancaster, ed., Letters addressed to Ralph Thoresby, Publications of the Thoresby Society, 21 (1912), p. 113.

11 Calamy, Historical Account, 1, p. 455.

12 E. Calamy, An Abridgment of Mr Baxter’s History of his Life and Times (London, 1702) [hereafter Abridgment], preface, unnumbered first page.

13 Lamont, W. M., Richard Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979), pp. 23–4, 79–82 Google Scholar, 87–90, 92–3, 106, 112, 289–96. For other references to Calamy’s editorial changes, see Nuttall, ‘MS of Reliquiae Baxterianae’, pp. 76–9; Keeble, Richard Baxter, p. 147.

14 There is evidence of Calamy’s anxiety to finish the volume before the rising of Parliament in May 1702: see Edmund Calamy, Hoxton, to Ralph Thoresby, 2 June 1702, in [J. Hunter], ed., Letters of Eminent Men, addressed to Ralph Thoresby, 2 vols (London, 1832), 1, pp. 417–18. The volume was clearly in preparation before William III’s death: Calamy was collecting material on ejected ministers in December 1701; see J. H. Turner, ed., The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A., 1630–1702; His Autobiography, Diaries…, 4 vols (Bingley, 1885), 4, pp. 289, 290, 291.

15 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Hist. c. 237, fol. 64r, Calamy, Hoxton, to [Ralph Thoresby, Leeds], 29 Jan. 1701/2. The recipient of the letter is identified from internal evidence.

16 See Account; Calamy, E., A Continuation of the Account of the Ministers … who were Ejected and Silenced (London, 1727)Google Scholar. Calamy increased the size of the ninth chapter from just over 300 pages in the Abridgment to over 850 pages in the Account, including the index, with the addition of another 1000 pages in the Continuation.

17 P. Collinson, ‘“A magazine of religious patterns”: an Erasmian topic transposed in English Protestantism’, SCH, 14 (1977), pp. 223–49. I am grateful to the Revd Dr G. F. Nuttall for this point, and for his more general comments on the paper.

18 Abridgment, Preface, unnumbered fourth and fifth pages.

19 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS J. Walker, c. 2, fol. 21 lv, Joshua Reynolds, Christ Church, Oxford, to Walker, Exeter, 23 Jan. 1704/5.

20 Account, p. xxvi.

21 Rel. Baxt., pt 3, p. 91, § 202; Abridgment, p. 342; Account, p. 769; Cal. Rev., p. 354.

22 Rel. Baxt., pt 3, p. 97, § 208; Abridgment, p. 303; Cal. Rev., pp. 279–80.

23 Rel. Baxt., pt 3, p. 92, § 202; Abridgment, p. 344; Cal. Rev., pp. 26, 66.

24 Cal. Rev., p. xlii.

25 Cal. Rev., pp. xlviii-xlix. Cf. A. Gordon, ‘Calamy as a biographer’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society, 6 (1914), pp. 233–4.

26 Abridgment, p. 496.

27 Calamy, Historical Account, 1, p. 442.

28 An Abridgement of Mr Baxter’s History of his life and times, 2nd edn (London, 1713), Preface; Cai. Rev., pp. xviii-xix.

29 Philalethes [Isaac Sharpe], Animadversions on some Passages of Mr Edmund Calamy’s Abridgment of Mr Richard Baxter’s History (London, 1704), p. 7, Preface sig. A2; Seditious Preachers, Ungodly Teachers (London, 1709), Preface, sig. A2.

30 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS J. Walker, c. 1, fol. 21 lv, Stamford Wallace, Chilcomb by Winchester, to Robert Clavel, Walker’s London publisher and agent, 30 May 1705; MS J. Walker, e. 6, ‘Adversaria Calamistica’, notes and materials for Walker’s proposed examination of Calamy’s ninth chapter, fols 73v, 209–42; MS J. Walker, e.12, ‘Materialls & Collections for the remaining parts of the work’, fol. 58; A. G. Matthews, ed., Walker Revised; Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy (Oxford, 1948), p. ix. See also the MS J. Walker, c. 1, fol. 225r, Thomas Rowell, Rector of Great Cressingham, Norfolk, to Clavell, 24 April 1705.

31 [Charles Leslie], A Case of Present Concern [London, 1703], p. 2; the second edition published as A Vindication of the Royal Martyr King Charles I (London and Westminster, 1704). Cf. T. Long, a Review of Mr Richard Baxter’s Life (London, 1697), p. 190; idem, A Rebuke to Mr Edmund Calamy (London, 1704), p. 7; [Mary Astell], Moderation Truly Stated (London, 1704), p. 64; T. Carte, The Irish Massacre set in a Clear Light (London, [1714], 2nd edn 1715), preface, sig. A2, pp. 4–5, 22.

32 John Ollyffe, A Defence of Ministerial Conformity (London, 1702), sig. A3, pp. 43–5, 99; Benjamin Hoadly, The Reasonableness of Conformity (London, 1703).

33 Matthews, Walker Revised, pp. x-xiii.

34 Calamy, Historical Account, 1, p. 455; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS J. Walker, c. 1, fol. 86r, John Wilson, Ely, to Dr Charles Goodall, 4 July 1704.

35 A. Brocket, ed., The Exeter Assembly, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, ns 6 (1963), p. 58.

36 E. Calamy, A Defence of Moderate Non-Conformity, 3 vols (London, 1703–5); London, Dr Williams’s Library, MS OD68, Presbyterian Fund Board minutes, vol. 2, 5 Feb. 1694/5 – 4 June 1722, p. 75 (5 Feb. 1699/1700), H. McLachlan, Thomas Dixon, M.A., M.D., and the Whitehaven-Bolton Academy, 1708–29’, in H. McLachlan, Essays and Addresses (Manchester, 1950), p. 133; Calamy, Historical Account, 2, pp. 31–4; Nottingham, Nottingham Subscription Library, ‘Some Remarkable Passages in my life’ by William Bilby [Copy at Dr Williams’s Library, MS 12.68], Cap. 13 and Appendix, ‘Hist. Chronol. Geography’, No.21.

37 BL, Add MS 42849, Henry Papers, fol. 42r, George Illidge, Chearbruck, 17 Aug. 1726; V. S. Doe, ed., The Diary of James Clegg, Derbyshire Record Society, 2 (1978), p. 41 (8 Sept. 1728). See also J. Hunter, ed., Diary of Ralph Thoresby, 2 vols (London, 1832), 2, pp. 183, 190 (13 Feb., 16 May 1713); J. Orton, Memoirs of… Philip Doddridge (Shrewsbury, 1766), pp. 89–97.

38 Samuel Palmer, The Nonconformist’s Memorial (London, 1775; 1777–8; 2nd edn 1802). Elizabeth Gaskell has Mr Hale in North and South quoting John Oldfield’s personal testimony from Calamy to explain why he was giving up his Anglican ministry. Interestingly, her source was Theophilus Lindsey’s Apology … on resigning the vicarage of Catterick (2nd edn, London, 1774), see A. Easson, ‘Mr Hale’s doubts in North and South’, Review of English Studies, 31 (1980), pp. 33–5.

39 Neal, D., The History of the Puritans, 4 vols (London, 1732-8)Google Scholar.