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PREACHERS AND HEARERS IN REVOLUTIONARY LONDON: CONTEXTUALISING PARLIAMENTARY FAST SERMONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Ann Hughes
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Abstract

Studies of preaching in England during the 1640s and 1650 have focused on the high-profile sermons, preached before the parliament on fast days and other special days of thanksgiving, relying in particular on analysis of preachers’ texts as published in print. This paper explores ways of placing the fast sermons in broader contexts, drawing on the lively scholarship on early modern sermons that presents them as events as well as texts, dynamic encounters between preachers and hearers. This paper thus explores the responses of conscientious hearers to sermons in London in the 1640s and 1650s, through a variety of notes kept by pious Puritans, broadly sympathetic to the parliament's cause, including the artisan Nehemiah Wallington, John and Katherine Gell from the provincial gentry and John Harper, a city fishmonger. For these hearers, sermon note-taking had enduring purposes, for reflection, meditation and discussion, sometimes across generations; recording the immediate political context or the polemical arguments of the fast sermons was not necessarily their priority. Hearers’ notebooks place the fast sermons within a broader context of attendance at more ‘routine’ pastoral and didactic preaching in London parishes, revealing also that a preacher like Stephen Marshall, best known for his dynamic sermons before the parliament, spent most of his time on less controversial series of sermons on central issues of Protestant faith. Note-taking practices suggest that too sharp a contrast between polemical and routine preaching would be misleading; the fast sermons could be apprehended in a variety of ways by conscientious Puritan hearers, while sermons with a more pastoral focus nonetheless exhibited clear signs of the tensions and dilemmas provoked by the religious conflicts of the period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 24 , December 2014 , pp. 57 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2014 

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References

1 The Downfall of the Ark, or the Morning-Exercise at an End (1661).

2 The text is: ‘Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof because they came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty.’ Downs, Jordan S., ‘The Curse of Meroz and the English Civil War’, Historical Journal, 57 (2014), 343–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed or, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons (1642), 3–4, 48, 53.

4 Bradstreet, Anne, ‘A Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning their Present Troubles. Anno 1642’, in Kissing the Rod, ed. Greer, Germaineet al. (1988), 132Google Scholar.

5 Durston, Christopher, ‘“For the Better Humiliation of the People”: Public Days of Fasting and Thanksgiving during the English Revolution’, Seventeenth Century, 7, 2 (1992), 129–49Google Scholar, provides an essential analysis, now extended by the fundamental research of the Durham project, ‘British State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings, 1540s to 1940’. See National Prayers. Special Worship since the Reformation, i: Special Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings in the British Isles 1533–1688, ed. Natalie Mears, Alasdair Raffe, Stephen Taylor and Philip Williamson (with Lucy Bates), Church of England Record Society, 20 (2013), for the texts of ordinances and orders for fasts and thanksgivings. I regret that I have not yet been able to take account of the research of Dr Lucy Bates, ‘Nationwide Fast and Thanksgiving Days in England, 1640–1660’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Durham University, 2012).

6 Moderate Intelligencer, 19–26 Apr. 1649, quoted in Durston, ‘“For the Better Humiliation of the People”’, 142.

7 Durston, ‘“For the Better Humiliation of the People”’.

8 Stephen Marshall, A Sacred Record to be Made of God's Mercies to Zion (1645), British Library (BL) E. 288 (36).

9 Wilson, John, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars 1640–1648 (Princeton, 1969), 109–14Google Scholar; Tom Webster, ‘Marshall, Stephen (1594/5? – d. 1655), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).

10 H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’, in his Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (1967), 294–344, at 298 and 324. The metaphor is from hunting, and Meroz Cursed is discussed at 307–8.

11 Amongst many examples: Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, MA, 1965Google Scholar; New York, 1974, pbk), 293–9; Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament; Christianson, Paul, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephen Baskerville, Not Peace but a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (1993); Christopher Hill, ‘Fast Sermons and Politics’, in his The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993; 1994 pbk), 79–108. A very recent essay, Foxley, Rachel, ‘Oliver Cromwell on Religion and Resistance’, in England's Wars of Religion Revisited, ed. Prior, Charles W. A. and Burgess, Glenn (Farnham, 2011), 209–30Google Scholar, discusses Meroz Cursed specifically at 210–11.

12 Burgess, Glenn, ‘Was the English Civil War a War of Religion?’, Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ), 61 (1998), 173–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vallance, Edward, ‘Preaching to the Converted: Religious Justifications for the English Civil War’, HLQ, 65 (2002), 395–419Google Scholar.

13 Guibbory, Achsah, Christian Identity, Jews and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2010), 10, 111 and 89–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 The most comprehensive study of the fast sermons, by John Wilson, has ‘Puritanism during the Civil Wars’ as its sub-title and uses the printed texts as a way of discussing the changing career structures and religious outlooks of the preachers, as emblematic of broader religious change.

15 Charles Herle, A Payre of Compasses for Church and State (1642), BL E. 130 (3).

16 Durston concluded that the authorities failed to ‘enforce conformity to their godly ideals’ with the ‘great mass’ of the English people repudiating this culture of preaching and fasting: ‘“For the Better Humiliation of the People”’, 145–6. A more qualified judgement on the successes and failures of godly reform and Puritan preaching is Capp, Bernard, England's Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 William Walwyn, Walwyn's Just Defence (1649), 8–9, recounting events from the mid- 1640s. Walwyn claimed it was more characteristic of his critics amongst John Goodwin's congregation to move from preacher to preacher: ‘passing to and fro from place to place on the Lords, and Fasts dayes, 4 and 6 of a company spying, watching,and censuring of doctrines’.

18 BL Add. MS 40,883, fo. 102v. This was a common experience for Wallington who had hoped at the April fast that Ashe would not turn up, but ultimately benefited from his sermon: ibid., fo. 92v; The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654. A Selection, ed. David Booy (Aldershot, 2007), 189–90.

19 John Bryan, A Discovery of the Probable Sin (1646), Preface, 3, 13.

20 Francis Roberts, A Broken Spirit, God's Sacrifices. Or the Gratefulnesse of a Broken Spirit unto God (1646), 34. We should not automatically assume that provincial preaching was less committed than that delivered in London.

21 Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells. National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 13Google Scholar. There is brief discussion of the fast sermons at 45–8.

22 John Strickland, Gods Work of Mercy in Sions Misery (1644), listed sermons preached from 17 Nov. 1640 to 27 Dec. 1643, advertising the ‘Catalogue’ on the title page; Thomas Case, God's Rising, His Enemies Scattered (1644), like Strickland printed for Luke Fawne, extended the list to Apr. 1644. John Whincop, God's Call to Weeping and Mourning (1645), was preached before the Commons on 29 Jan. 1644/5 and published shortly afterwards; a second edition (1646), printed for Nathaniel Webb and William Grantham, included ‘A Continuation of the Catalogue’ of sermons before the Commons and the Lords from 29 Jan. 1644/4 to 31 Dec. 1645. The Commons’ Catalogue is described as ‘the fourth volume’ and the continuations are placed before ‘A Catalogue of All the Sermons Preached upon the Dayes of Publike Thanksgiving before Both or Either Houses of Parliament’, 7 Sept. 1640 to 12 Mar. 1645/6. There is no catalogue in the first edition. Thomas Horton, Sinne's Discovery and Revenge (1646), preached before the Lords on 30 Dec. 1646 and printed for Samuel Gellibrand, included a brief list of ‘The Names of the Preachers before the Parliament: Anno 1646’ with the texts of their sermons but no dates (p. 40), while William Goode, Jacob Raised or the Means of Making a Nation Happy (1646), also preached before the Lords on 30 Dec., and printed for Nathaniel Webb and William Grantham, had ‘A Continuation of the Catalogue of Sermons Preached upon the Dayes of Publique Humiliation’ before the Lords and the Commons, Jan. 1645/6 to Dec. 1646, with a note ‘Reader Be pleased to take notice, Those whose Texts are not quoted are not yet printed’; followed by ‘A Continuation of the Sermons preached upon the Dayes of Publique Thanksgiving’ before both or either of the Houses of Parliament, Apr.–Nov. 1646 (after p. 29). Cf. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, 237–8.

23 An exception is Cornelius Burges, Two Sermons Preached to the Honourable House of Commons (1645) which included a sermon preached 30 Mar. 1642 but not preached until paired with one on a similar theme from 30 Mar. 1645.

24 Bibliotheca Jacombiana (1687), 90; Catalogus Variorum & Insignium Librorum…Thomas Manton (1678), 49–50.

25 BL, E. 130 (3), E. 103 (1).

26 John Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm’, 6–10, and Blatchly, John, ‘Dowsing's Collection of Parliamentary Sermons’, 327–33, both in The Journal of William Dowsing, ed. Cooper, T. (Woodbridge, 2001)Google Scholar.

27 Green, Ian M., Continuity and Change in Protestant Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England (Friends of Dr Williams's Library, 60th lecture, 2009)Google Scholar; Morissey, Mary, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, Historical Journal, 42, 4 (1999), 1111–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1112, for ‘events and texts’; idem, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford, 2011); Hunt, Arnold, The Art of Hearing. English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), 396, 5Google Scholar. For the latest scholarship on early modern preaching, see The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford, 2011).

28 For brief exceptions see Rigney, James, ‘“To Lye upon a Stationers Stall, like a Piece of Coarse Flesh in a Shambles”: The Sermon, Print and the English Civil War’, in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750, ed. Ferrell, Lori Anne and McCullough, Peter (Manchester, 2000), 188–207Google Scholar; Tom Webster, ‘Preaching and Parliament, 1640–1659’, in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. McCullough, Adlington and Rhatigan; Green, Continuity and Change; and John Spurr's The Laity and Preaching in Post-Reformation England (Friends of Dr Williams's Library 66th lecture, 2013), consider the civil war period within their broader studies.

29 Spurr, Laity and Preaching, 10.

30 The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie (3 vols., The Bannatyne Club, 1841–2), ii, 123.

31 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 139–40, for the mid-seventeenth-century testimony of Ludovic Huygens.

32 Spurr, Laity and Preaching, 22–4, 28–31; Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), 358.

33 Valuable accounts of note-taking include Blair, Ann, ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, Critical Inquiry, 31, 1 (2004), 85–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sullivan, Ceri, ‘The Art of Listening in the Seventeenth Century’, Modern Philology, 104 (2006), 34–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, Art of Hearing, 94–115; John Craig, ‘Sermon Reception’, in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. McCullough, Adlington and Rhatigan, 178–97; Green, Continuity and Change, 19–25; Morissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons; Spurr, Laity and Preaching.

34 Paul Seaver, Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (1985), 200–2; The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654. A Selection, ed. David Booy (Aldershot, 2007).

35 Lindley, Keith, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 197n, 229–30, 375Google Scholar.

36 Bodleian Library, Oxford (Bodl.), MS Eng c 2693, discussed also by Spurr, Laity and Preaching, 18–19.

37 William Andrew s Clark Memorial Library MS B8535 M3.

38 Woodhead, J. R., The Rulers of London 1660–1689 (London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 1965), 84Google Scholar.

39 BL Add. MS 18,781–2.

40 William Lamont, ‘Gell (nee Packer), Katherine (bap. 1624, d. 1671’, ODNB; for their political sympathies, see, for example, Derbyshire Record Office (DRO), Papers of the Gells of Hopton, D258/10/9/9, a letter written by Katherine's mother Phyllis Packer on the plight of the MPs secluded at Pride's Purge. Some sixty volumes of sermon notes are in DRO D3287/boxes 24 and 25. D3287/24/1 is Katherine Gell's book; /25/5, 19 are John's.

41 Bodl. MS Eng c 2693, 157; BL Add. MS 40,883, fo. 165r (and see Notebooks, ed. Booy, 207). In fact, Wallington left three pages of very coherent notes with numbered points and scriptural references, and the broken scraps were perhaps written notes rather than memories.

42 Endorsement on notes from Richard Culverwell's sermon on the Protestation: Clark MS B8535 M3, second sequence, 113.

43 Spurr, Laity and Preaching, 32; cf. Green, Change and Continuity. An earlier version of Marshall's ‘Meroz Cursed’, preached in Dec. 1641 at St Sepulchre's London, for example, was ‘published in one sheet of paper (not by the Author) but by a lover of the truth, for their good especially that are not able to buy bigger books’: Meroz Curse (1641), title page. When Simeon Ashe heard a shorthand note-taker was planning to publish a sermon delivered on the day of Charles I's attempt to arrest the five members, he decided to cooperate in its publication, clarifying and amplifying arguments and scriptural references: Ashe, A Supporter for the Sinking Heart in Times of Distresse (1642), A2r–v.

44 Spurr, Laity and Preaching, 18–19; Bodl. MS Eng c 2693, 4, 75, 834–7; Smyth, Adam, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), 123–58Google Scholar, on commonplacing as the appropriation of ‘public texts’ including sermons, for personal purposes.

45 Clark MS B8535 M3, second sequence, 151.

46 DRO D3287/47/7, 89–91.

47 DRO D258/38/1.

48 ‘An Extract of the Passages of my Life or the Booke of all my Writting Books’ (Folger Shakespeare Library MS v.a. 436), quoted in Notebooks, ed. Booy, 10.

49 BL Add. MS 40,883, fo. 167v; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 359.

50 Notebooks, ed. Booy, 47.

51 Harper organised his notebook in distinct sections, some separately paginated. From the front, it begins with notes on a series of sermons by Richard Culverwell on the Lord's Prayer (1626–7) followed by a further Culverwell series on the Sacraments (1628–9); notes on sixteen occasional sermons heard between May 1641 and Feb. 1657, including one recorded from memory in Oct. 1656; Culverwell's sermons on the Creed (beginning in 1630); Benjamin Needler on ‘severall heads of Divinity’ beginning in Aug. 1655 and ending with his farewell sermon in Aug. 1662; and sermons by Needler's successor Charles Burke between 1662 and 1665. Another set of ‘occasional sermons’, from Aug. 1657 to May 1661, is written from the back of the volume: Clark MS B8535 M3. For a fuller account of Harper's notes, especially of the Culverwell sermons of the 1620s and early 1630s, see my ‘A Moderate Puritan Preacher Negotiates Religious Change’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (2014), 761–79.

52 Walter Yonge is a partial exception, to be discussed below. The royalist historian William Dugdale's notes on the dramatic preaching of the fifth monarchist Christopher Feake in Aug. and Sept. 1653 offer another contrast. Dugdale's notes (without critical comment) concentrated on Feake's denunciations of earthly monarchy, suggesting a more directly political (and historical) motivation for note-taking: Merivale Hall, Dugdale MS HT 10/44.

53 Cf. Ian Green, ‘Preaching in the Parishes’, in Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. McCullough, Adlington and Rhatigan, 137–54, at 150–1.

54 Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble, and Geoffrey F. Nuttall (2 vols., Oxford, 1991), i, 185–6, July 1655. Included in the Gell Papers are full, fair copy notes from unpublished Marshall fast sermons that are perhaps taken from the minister's notes lent to John and Katherine Gell: DRO D258/34/14/1 (May 1646).

55 DRO D3287/25/19.

56 DRO D3287/box 25/5.

57 D3287/box 24/1.

58 D3287/box 25/5, fos. 111v–115v.

59 Clark MS B8535 M3, second sequence, 156–8, examples include: ‘unlesse you be justified and sanctified, all your services are abominable to God, your prayers are as the howlings of doggs’; ‘If I could see the feilds empty one the Lords day, and his saboth day better kept; If I could see all the truly godly agree in doctrine, and united in love; If I could see the tavernes and alehowses lesse frequented, and the Churches more.’

60 Clark MS B8535 M3, second sequence, 142–6: ‘The present businesse of the Treaty is the occasion of our meeting this day, by fasting and prayer to implore of God his blessing upon, and a good successe to it. I know many are aweary of war, and many afraid of making an unsound peace.’

61 BL Add. MS 18,781, fos. 134v, 28r. BL Add. MS 18,782 has Jenkins's regular sermons noted from the front, and fast sermons, also mainly at Christ Church from the back.

62 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 95–9; Spurr, Laity and Preaching, 12–13. Yonge, for example, took about 2,250 words of a sermon preached by Walter Bridges at the fast day 22 Feb. 1642/3, although he had not caught the preacher's name: BL Add. MS 18,781, fos. 10r–16r. The printed sermon, Joabs Counsell and King Davids Seasonable Hearing It (1643), is broadly similar although the notes stress more stridently the necessity for the king to heed good counsel. Thomason received his copy on 9 Mar. so there was, as usual, little opportunity for revision. Harper's notebook includes 1,500 words of notes on a sermon preached by Henry Hibbert at St Pauls on 29 May 1661 in celebration of Charles II's restoration, and his birthday: Clark MS B8535 M3, unpaginated section written from the back. It was published as Regina Dierum or the Joyful Day (1661). Again, the two versions correspond closely in structure and message.

63 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 146–9, 155, 159–61, 352; Morissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 48–66; Spurr, Laity and Preaching, 26–7, are representative of subtle, wide-ranging scholarship. By the mid-seventeenth century, the prejudice against printed sermons had largely evaporated and hearing, reading and writing were seen as different valuable ways of apprehending sermons. Printed versions of sermons, as Hunt has explained, often presented illusions of immediacy and orality.

64 The Strong Helper or The Interest and Power of the Prayers of the Destitute for the Building up of Sion (1645), 4, 53; DRO D3287/25/19, fos. 97v–102r.

65 Thomas Case, The Morning Exercise or Some Short Notes Taken out of the Morning Sermons…Preached in St Giles in the Fields…May 1655 (1655); Nehemiah Wallington, ‘A Record of Marcys Continued or yet God Is Good to Israel’, Tatton Park MS 68.20, quoted from Notebooks, ed. Booy, 19–21; Vernon, Elliot, ‘A Ministry of the Gospel: The Presbyterians during the English Revolution’, in Religion in Revolutionary England, ed. Durston, Christopher and Maltby, Judith (Manchester, 2006), 115–36, at 121–2Google Scholar.

66 Folger MS v. a. 436, quoted from Notebooks, ed. Booy, 298–9.

67 [John Price], The Pulpit Incendiary (1648); it was this sermon gadding and hostile note-taking that Walwyn denounced in Walwyn's Just Defence.

68 The Pulpit Incendiary Anatomized (1648), 3–4, 8.

69 Michael Mullett, ‘Case, Thomas (bap. 1598, d. 1682)’, ODNB; Case, Morning Exercise, 86. For the Easter Spital sermons where a sermon preached at Paul's Cross on Good Friday and three sermons in Easter week at St Mary's Spital were commented on in a final sermon, see Morissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 21–2.

70 Case, Morning Exercise, A2r, 54–5.

71 Clark MS B8535 M3, unpaginated section, written from the end; from the morning lecture preached on Saturday 15 Jan. by Mr Cooper. The previous day's lecture was on damnable heresies.