John Spurr

The Odious Name of Puritan

Words, especially nicknames or terms of abuse, have a life of their own. They can come into vogue for a hundred trivial reasons — as a result of lazy thinking or because of their sound (consider Lollard or Quaker or Moonie) — and they can fall out of fashion just as quickly. The name ‘puritan’ had just such a wayward and irresponsible life in seventeenth-century England, and although its story is instructive, we should not mistake the name for the thing: investigating the label ‘puritan’ is only the beginning of our search for the puritans. As we shall see, this was a fluid term with several connotations which may explain its wide dissemination, its ambiguity, and its longevity. It was a term deliberately cultivated to stigmatize its targets as busybodies, hypocrites or political deviants, or sometimes all three together.

Jacobean Puritans, 1603–25

The accession in March 1603 of James I, a Scots Calvinist, seemed to hold out a new promise for the puritans — here was another godly ruler like Edward VI who would give them the impartial hearing they sought. The puritan brotherhood swung into action to bombard the king with petitions. The first and most famous of these, the Millenary Petition, was presented to James on his way south. The petitioners presented themselves ‘neither as factious men affecting a popular parity in the church, nor as schismatics aiming at the dissolution of the state ecclesiastical’, but faithful ministers ‘all groaning as under a common burden of human rites and ceremonies’. They sought the reformation of worship, the improvement of ministers, the enhancement of their incomes, and the administration of discipline and excommunication ‘according to Christ’s own institution; or, at the least, that enormities may be redressed’.1 In conscious imitation of the tactics of the 1580s, puritan petitions were hawked around the counties for signatures and while some of these skirted around the issue of church government, others were explicitly Presbyterian, asking for church government according to the bible and the example of other reformed churches. The new king took exception to the menacing tone of some petitions, but he seemed happy enough to call a clerical conference.

Puritans Before the Civil War, 1618–37

The 1620s are often compared to the 1930s in their influence on a generation. English protestants faced acute issues of political and religious conscience and grew increasingly apprehensive about the security of the protestant religion at home and in Europe. The pressure of events forced doctrinal differences into the open, the heat of debate forced individuals to take sides, and many who had been merely protestant at the beginning of the decade would see themselves, and be seen by others, as puritans before its close. The catalyst for these changes in England was James I’s dealings with other countries: his policy in his other kingdom, Scotland; his involvement in the politics of the Netherlands; and, most importantly, his stance towards the wars which spread across Europe after 1618.

The Origins of Puritans 1558–1603

Puritans of the sixteenth century were evangelicals, eager to bring to their neighbours the good news of justification by faith alone and predestination to election. The transforming effect of the bible on their own lives fuelled their concern with church reform or their detestation of ‘popery’, the anti-religion. The puritans were convinced that the Elizabethan church could and must go faster in evangelizing the nation; they were the vanguard of the official efforts to spread protestantism. And so they must be seen against the background of official efforts to spread the gospel among a people who were either bewildered by the decades of rapid change since Henry VIII’s Reformation or steadfast in their attachment to the old religion of Rome. Frequently the two evangelizing efforts converged and sometimes they merged; after all, the leaders of the Elizabethan church and the puritan clergy were out of the same mould. But the puritans were usually one step ahead of the official campaign, exhorting, cajoling and criticizing — at one moment urging the church on and despairing of it in the next.

Puritans and the Promise

Puritan religion was the product of theological ideas and spiritual experience. Although it seems alien to many of us today, there is no reason to shy away from puritan theology. Theology connects an objective account of how God operates with the Christian’s own subjective experience of God’s dealing with them. Theology is created in an engagement between divine revelation, principally the bible, and the human mind; its terms are usually, but not always, formulated by highly trained clerical experts; but, like any other language, it constantly changes and develops as it is used. The users of theology are not simply the theologians who debate the more technical points, but also, and far more importantly, the ordinary believers, whose worship, piety and spiritual aspirations are expressed in and by theology and theological categories. These lay users can mould theology by their response. As they question what they are taught or go off the orthodox rails, they prompt the theologians to further explanation and refinement. In seventeenth-century England this process of challenge and response was all the more pronounced because the laity constantly had the raw material, the bible, in their minds and mouths.

Puritans and the Civil War, 1637–49

On 30 June 1637, as punishment for his alleged part in publishing an anti-Laudian tract, William Prynne’s ears were mutilated and ‘S. L.’ for ‘seditious libeller’ was carved across his cheeks. At his trial the judge denounced him for plotting with the pamphleteers Burton and Bastwick ‘to set up the puritan or separatist faction’. Although no radical, Prynne’s experience convinced him that the bishops were a dangerous breed, an opinion shared by many of the godly who looked on at his sufferings with horror. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick, ‘those three renowned soldiers and servants of Christ’, ‘were remembered with tears’ at various ‘assemblies of private Christians to seek God by prayer and fasting upon extraordinary occasions’.1

Puritans and the Word

In one of the instructive dialogues of which puritan preachers were so fond, Obadiah Sedgwick asked a doubter why he did not believe. The reply was ‘if I had assurance that God were my God, and Christ were my Christ, and the promises were mine, I would’. Sedgwick explained that assurance was the fruit of faith, but that God’s word was its basis: ‘experiences are good encouragements to the future acts of faith, but the word of God is still the ground of faith.’1 The word of God — and the promise of salvation — was contained in the bible. And the bible was the puritan’s constant companion: the godly should ‘evermore be musing, reading, hearing and talking of God’s word’, advised Richard Greenham.2 If we are to understand the puritans it is essential to comprehend the place of the bible in their lives.

Puritans in Power 1649–62

For puritans the 1650s were a decade of high hopes, great fears and deep disappointments. ‘We are not soldiers of fortune, we are not merely the servants of men’, declared the New Model Army; ‘we have not only proclaimed Jesus Christ, the king of saints, to be our king by profession, but desire to submit to him on his own terms, and to admit him to the exercise of his royal authority in our hearts, and to follow him whithersoever he goeth, he having of his own good will entered into a covenant of grace with his poor saints.’1 Those who were for establishing King Jesus were aware of the enormity of their task, their lack of numbers and the strength of the opposition. Preaching an assize sermon at York, John Shaw claimed that the light of truth was spreading in America, New England, Wales and the north, ‘and if it be said, so do profaneness and heresies spread, I answer, it was always so in times of reformation, till things could be settled, Satan more struggles’.2 Baxter recognized ‘that sects have most abounded when the gospel hath most prospered’.3 John Pyne counselled submission to God ‘who hitherto hath protected his people, though but a very small remnant comparatively with the multitude of enemies’ surrounding them.4 Many puritans, however, were more disheartened by the profanity and heresy sweeping the land.

Puritans from Uniformity to Toleration, 1662–89

At first sight puritans should be easier to identify and trace after 1662 since they were now legally defined and systematically recorded as dissenters. But this is to make the false assumption that puritans and dissenters were the same thing. Far from it. In a situation reminiscent of the early seventeenth century, there were once again puritans inside and outside the Church of England. An arbitrary line drawn across the spectrum of English religious life had severed a broad-based parish puritanism leaving half of the ministers and their followers within the restored church and half outside. To further complicate matters there were many puritans among the ranks of dissent, but not all dissenters can legitimately be classified as puritans. As we have seen, the turmoil of the 1640s and 1650s threw up many non-puritan religious groups. On closer examination it becomes apparent that puritans did not sit easily within the category of dissent or within the religious situation of Charles II’s reign. Puritans did not relish being lumped together with Quakers and Baptists: ‘it is a palpable injury to burden us with the various parties with whom we are now herded by our ejection in the general state of dissenters’.1 The author of this complaint saw himself as a ‘nonconformist’ — a subtle but significant distinction. For, while their adversaries labelled them all as dissenters, those, mainly the Presbyterians, who could not bring themselves to conform to the church as it now stood, but who hoped that things might change, preferred to describe themselves as nonconformists; on the other hand those who had willingly separated from the state church, the Independents, Baptists and Quakers, were proud to adopt the label of dissenter.

The Puritan Life

A godly life was the expression of holiness. As earlier chapters have emphasized, it was an indispensable part of being a puritan that one’s life displayed the fruits of a saving faith, and that this life was open to the scrutiny and admiration of other godly individuals, that it was a constant reproach to the profane, and a living tribute to God. But such a life was not possible independently of the brethren. Chapter 3 set out what it was to be a ‘visible saint’ — the gadding after sermons, the exercise of spiritual gifts in ‘conference’ with other saints or in the ‘closet duties’ of prayer and self-examination — and discussed the ‘community of saints’, the brotherhood of the spirit which sustained the godly few in the face of popular hostility or apathy. Individual puritans, I suggest, could hardly have existed in isolation from the puritan community and its life. But what was the relationship between the puritan and his or her brethren?