Introduction

Summary

At its core, this book centres on the story and scaffold performances of John Barker, the puritan vicar of Pytchley, and his two accomplices – Beatrice, the minister's niece by marriage, and Ursula, their maid servant – in the committal and then the cover-up of the crime of infanticide. The book owes its origin to the remarkable researches of John Fielding, who first found a manuscript separate describing the scaffold performances of Barker and his partners in crime. Fielding made passing use of the separate in his outstanding Birmingham Ph.D. thesis of 1989, and very generously passed on a copy of it to Peter Lake, who in the mid-1990s used it as the foundation of an article largely comprised of an analysis of puritan sermons preached by Joseph Bentham and Robert Bolton during the 1630s at the Kettering combination lecture. The material proved outstandingly rich; preached by leading moderate puritan divines before a selfselecting audience, the sermons allow us to eavesdrop on the Northamptonshire godly community talking to itself about some of the pressing problems, key doctrinal cruxes, and most urgent casuistical issues of the increasingly stressful and contested period of Charles I's personal rule.

Barker's domestic tragedy – an adulterous affair that spun out of control into pregnancy and then infanticide – was precisely the sort of scandal upon which the early modern pamphlet press and popular stage fed. Under normal circumstances it would have very likely attracted considerable public attention. Because of Barker's identity as a godly preaching minister, it took on a considerably heightened, both religious and political, significance, especially in the charged atmosphere of Northamptonshire, in the later 1630s. Barker's crime and fate was a gift for the enemies of the godly and to counteract just such a virulently anti-puritan use of the tragedy the Northamptonshire puritans quickly circulated a manuscript account of the affair, which centred not so much on the crime as on Barker's performance of a good death on the scaffold, which occurred before an audience of thousands in Northampton on 14 July 1637.