4 - The paradoxes of dissent? Vavasor Powell and Benjamin Keach

Summary

‘Let us go home and pray, and say Lord wilt Thou have Oliver Cromwell or Jesus Christ to reign over us?’

This was the question that the Welsh Fifth Monarchist, Vavasor Powell, raised in Blackfriars on 19 December 1653, just after the establishment of the Protectorate. It is the quintessence of 1650s religious and political radicalism, encapsulating a vision of the future in which all existing temporal authority would be swept away by the literal coming of Christ. It is not a bland millenarianism, but one that sought to prepare the way for Christ's return at a precise point in human history. Commenting on a gathering on the day before, addressed by Powell and his fellow Fifth Monarchist Christopher Feake, led Thomas Carlyle into paroxysms that are striking even within his exuberant prose:

this Feak-Powel Meeting was unusually large; the Feak-Powel inner-man unusually charged. Elements of soot and fire really copious; fuliginous-flamy in a very high degree! … Does the reader bethink him of those old Leveller Corporals at Burford, and Diggers at St. George's Hill five years ago; of Quakerisms, Calvinistic Sansculottisms, and one of the strangest Spiritual Developments ever seen in any country? The reader sees here one foul chimney on fire, the Feak-Powel chimney in Blackfriars.

Nobody writes like Carlyle any more, but the characterisation of Powell has proved tenacious. On one level, this contains an essential truth: Powell did assert a profoundly radical political position, and while he articulated it in a particular historical moment it had a general applicability (Jesus Christ's name, rather than Oliver Cromwell's, is the non-transferable one in his formulation). But the characterisation is also partial. One of the purposes of this chapter is to illuminate the more quotidian pastoral concerns that motivated Powell – concerns that were apparent across the divide of 1660. In particular, it traces his attempts to make the fruits of Reformed theology available to a broad audience through print. It then examines a further author, the Particular Baptist Benjamin Keach, who continued this process through the production of extensive poetic works. The effect of this analysis is, thus, to show how dissenters could provide materials that had the potential to shape a wider, popular theological culture, and how they positioned themselves in relation to the existing literary culture.