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Puritan Self-fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Margo Todd
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Extract

14 June 1595. My negligence is not calling upon God before I went to the chapel, and the little desire I had there to call on God, and my drowsiness in God's service. My sins even through the whole day, being Sunday: (1) my negligence aforesaid, (2) my hearing of the sermon without that sense which I should have had, (2) [sic] in not praying God to bless it to me afterward, (3) in not talking of good things at dinner being the posteriorums day, (4) in the immoderate use of God's creatures, (5) in sleeping immediately after dinner, (6) in not preparing me to sermon til it tolled, (7) in sluggish hearing of God's word, and that for my great dinner, (8) in hearing another sermon sluggishly, (9) in returning home and omitting our repetition of sermons, by reason that my countryman Eubank was with me, (11) [sic] in not exhorting him to any good thing, (12) in not going to evening prayers, (13) in supping liberally, never remembering our poor brethren, (14) in not taking order to give the poor women somewhat at 7 o'clock, (15) my dulness in stirring of my brother to Christian meditations, (16) my want of affections in hearing the sermons repeated, (17), my sluggishness in prayer, and thus sin I daily against thee, O Lord.

On such diary entries as this one of Samuel Ward's, historians have built an edifice called “puritanism.” It is rigid, narrow, and quaintly absurd in design. It is the sort of structure on which twentieth-century people can look down with complacency from the heights of their own intellectual towers. It makes one glad to have escaped the confining corridors of faith and piety by rendering them dark, small, and rather shabby.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 236 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1992

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References

1 The quote is from Sidney Sussex College Library, Cambridge, MS 45, fol. 18v–19. In this and all quotes from the diary, spelling and punctuation have been modernized.

2 The most recent example of a historian misusing Ward's diary in this way is Trevor-Roper's, H. R.Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar, in which the author repeatedly refers to Ward as “our old plum-guzzling friend” on the basis of Ward's journal confessions about overindulging in fruit. Needless to say, puritans in general come off badly in Trevor-Roper's work. In all fairness to current scholarship, however, it must be said that not all historians treat puritans so. The work of Peter Lake. Patrick Collinson. and others has provided us with a more balanced view. See, e.g., Lake's, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and his Anglicans and Puritans?. (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Collinson's, Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967)Google Scholar and his Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; and Eales, Jacqueline, Puritans and Roundheads (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar. The stereotype does persist, though. See, e.g., Whitney R. D. Jones's treatment of William Turner's narrow “puritan moralizing” in his recent biography of Turner, , William Turner: Tudor Naturalist, Physician and Divine (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

3 Knappen, M. M., Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries (Chicago, 1933)Google Scholar. Interestingly, the two manuscript transcriptions of the diary that are kept with it in the muniments room of Sidney Sussex, one done in 1879 by one J. Rickards, a fellow of the college, he other commissioned by the master and fellows in 1913 andproduced by Alfred Rogers, of the University Library, also omit the other half of the diary (fols. 1–15, 49–60, and the last five folios, written back to front).

4 Most of the papers have been collected at Sidney. The sixty or so notebooks, sermons, commonplace books, and miscellaneous fragments there have been classified in my “Samuel Ward Papers in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8 (1985): 582–92Google Scholar. Numerous letters are also found in the Bodleian Library's Tanner Manuscripts.

5 The prescription of self-examination by Renaissance humanists as by zealous protestants in the sixteenth century made a self-conscious fashioning of one's identity, generally in the guise of conversion, a characteristic requirement of puritans. See, among other prescriptive literature in thisvein, Dent, Arthur, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (London, 1601)Google Scholar. On the tradition of self-examination in the sixteenth century, see Todd, Margo, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 30–31, 192–95Google Scholar, esp. 194, n.53.

6 On Ward's puritanism, see Todd, Margo, “‘An Act of Discretion’: Evangelical Conformity and the Puritan Dons,” Albion 18 (1986): 581–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980). pp. 1–2Google Scholar. See also Delany, Paul, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Zimmermann, T. Price, “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Molho, A. and Tedeschi, J. (Dekalb, Ill., 1971), pp. 119–40Google Scholar. Ultimately, Greenblatt denies any real individual autonomy in self-fashioning; see esp. his epilogue.

8 Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

9 Ward (1572–1643) matriculated pensioner at Christ's in 1589, took his B.A. in 1593 and his M.A. in 1596, and in 1599 moved to Emmanuel as a fellow of the college. In 1599 he became a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, where he remained(as master from 1610) for the rest of his life. He was made bachelor of divinity in 1603 and doctor of divinity in 1610. See the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) entry for Ward; Venn, John and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantagrigienses (Cambridge, 1922), pt. 1, 4: 334Google Scholar; and Peile, John, Biographical Register of Christ's College, 1505–1905 (Cambridge, 1910), 1: 195Google Scholar.

10 Given the frequency of references in this paper to Ward's diary, folio numbers in Sidney MS 45 are indicated in parentheses in the text rather than in notes.

11 Continuing foliation from the front, this section comprises fols. 91v–95v.

12 Knappen tentatively dates the lists 1596.

13 Handwriting and some internal evidence suggest dating in the 1590s.

14 Porter, H. C., Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958) pp. 323–413Google Scholar; Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, chap. 3; Lake, Moderate Puritans, passim.

15 Lake, , Moderate Puritans, p. 8Google Scholar, has justly called Emmanuel “the paradigm of a puritan institution.”

16 Beyond Thomas Fuller's brief description in The History of the Worthies of England, ed. Nichols, James (London, 1811), 1: 333–34Google Scholar, there is almost no extant information about Ward's family background. We do not know whether his family was of the godly sort. We do know that he was not the only member of his family sent to Cambridge: the diary mentions a cousin, Thomas (33), and a brother, Henry (23, 58v); the latter matriculated Christ's College in 1593.

17 Collinson, , Elizabethan Puritan Movement (n. 2 above), pp. 125, 431Google Scholar. On Chaderton in Elizabethan Cambridge, see Lake, Moderate Puritans (n. 2 above), chaps. 1 and 3.

18 Sidney Sussex MS Ward O.8 is a collection of Ward's sermons all structured much like Chaderton's lectures: the text is dissected and analyzed phrase by phrase, then interpreted in context, then applied to the lives of contemporary auditors in a section generally called “use.” This three-part structure characterizes many puritan sermons of the period and reflects the success with which university puritans taught homiletics, by example as well as formally. Sidney Sussex MS Ward E also contains notes on sermons by Chaderton and by William Perkins (e.g., fols. 11–11v from the back).

19 This moderation and Ward's willingness to compromise on “ceremonial” issues are discussed in the context of Ward's correspondence with William Bedell in Todd. “Act of Discretion” (n. 6 above).

20 Perkins even lent Ward money; see fol. 46.

21 Ward began collecting Perkins's works as an undergraduate; they are recorded among his book loans in Sidney Sussex Ward MS A, fols. 1v, 5, 84. He later called Perkins's death a “blow given unto the gospel of Christ” (British Library MS Harleian 7038, fol. 348).

22 It was Perkins who urged Ward to study divinity rather than mathematics and to identify the ministry as hisvocation (46v), despite a speech impediment that Ward feared would hinder his effectiveness as a preacher; Cambridge University Library MS Mm 2. 23, fols. 161–162v.

23 He similarly preached to himself as he took notes on Chaderton's lectures: Note the shift from third- to first-person pronouns in the midst of a list of “uses” in his notes on Chaderton's 1591 lecture, fol. 7v. Ward identified with both preacher and congregation.

24 The general confession that he constructed for himself likewise repents “giving no brotherly admonition, gentle exhortations, holy example of life” (58v).

25 The importance of Augustine to Ward is apparent in the frequency of citations to him in both his published works and his later manuscripts. See esp. his Gratia Discriminans (Cambridge, 1626)Google Scholar, Praelectiones de Peccato Originali in Opera Nonnutla, ed. Ward, Seth (London, 1658)Google Scholar, Dissertatio de Efficacia Baptismi (London, 1649)Google Scholar, and Sidney Sussex Ward MSS C, D, K, L.8, M.4, 0.8.g, 0.9, 0.13, Q, and S.

26 Romans 7:25: “So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (Revised Standard Version).

27 Ward repents overeating plums (26, 26v, 27v, 28, 29, 29v, 30), cherries (25v), pears (28v, 34), and fruit generally (28v, 29v, 33, 34, 34v, 35).

28 The influence of Augustine's Confessions, and in particular his pear-stealing escapade, isvisible in other puritans, too: e.g., Richard Baxter confessed that he was in his youth “much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples and pears …. I have oft gone into other men's orchards and stolen their fruit, when I had enough at home” (The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, ed. Keeble, N. H.. abridged by Thomas, J. M. Lloyd [London, 1931]. p. 5)Google Scholar.

29 Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Pusey, Edward (New York, 1961). bk. 2. p. 32Google Scholar; the theft is recorded on pp. 30–31.

30 On occasion he tried to make deals with God in the midst of his illness: “Remember thy promise how when thou art not well, how if God restore thee to health, thou wilt [bel’ careful to perform all Christian duties. Remember this” (fol. 17).

31 When puritans were accused of causing schism, they were to recall that Christ's teaching divided the Jews of his own day, but “he was not the cause [of schism], because his doctrine was true” (fol. 2).

32 Greenblatt (n. 7 above), pp. 1, 9.

33 Ibid., p. 76.

34 The dream entry is recorded in a different ink from entries around it, suggesting that Ward may have recorded it in the middle of the night—so great was his anxiety over sins of the heart.

35 “Hereby I bewrayed my great corruption, where I might run to doubt whether ever I had any true taste of God's spirit” (fol. 24).

36 He left blank the space under the heading “We are also to pray for, abroad” (58).

37 Greenblatt, pp. 9, 85, 88.

38 By contrast, he exclaimed on June 5, 1598, “Remember the difference of the death of the godly and the wicked, how the godly dying leaveth a good report behind him, as D. Whitak[er]” (36). On Whitaker, the puritan master of Saint John's, see Lake, Moderate Puritans (n. 2 above), chap. 6.

39 This would be one of their many objections to Arminians later: cf. the exaltation of the church calendar in the work of Ward's later enemy Cosin, John, A Collection of Private Devotions, ed. Stanwood, P. G. (1627: reprint, Oxford, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Examples of the New England puritan narrative include Thomas Shepard's autobiography, edited by McGiffert, Michael as God's Plot (Amherst, Mass., 1972)Google Scholar; The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske, ed. Pope, Robert (Boston, 1974)Google Scholar; Clap's, Roger memoirs in Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, ed. Young, A. (Boston, 1846), pp. 343–67Google Scholar; and, of course, The Life and Letters of John Winthrop, ed. Winthrop, R. C., 2d ed., 2vols. (Boston, 1869)Google Scholar. See also Shea, Daniel, Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton, N.J., 1968)Google Scholar; and Caldwell, Patricia, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

41 He outlines an order of confession of sins in particular categories, a requirement of contrition, a description of prayer for pardon, and an order for amendment of life (58).

42 Examples of this sort can be found in his notes on Chaderton's sermons as well (e.g., the list at the top of 7v). Emphasis is mine.

43 Greenblatt (n. 7 above), p. 9.

44 Ibid., pp. 9,57.

45 He boasted of excellence, e.g., in geometry (22v, 23v), in Greek (19), and in philosophy (24v, 26, 29); of spiritual accomplishments (34v); of keeping exalted company (e.g., 31v, 32v). For other expressions of penitence for pride, see fols. 16v, 18v, 33, 56.

46 For example, see 21v, 25, 30, 31v. Ward was in his own estimation overly concerned with securing a fellowship at Emmanuel. The goal was surely an understandable and laudable ambition for a puritan, but for him the ambition itself, with its attendant sins of boasting and flattery of potential patrons (30, 21v), inhibited his spiritual development.

47 Greenblatt, p. 9.

48 Jerome Beale, master of Pembroke, whom Ward had previously complained of for his “impetuousness andviolence” (37). Ward apparently felt pressured by Vice-chancellor Henry Butts to sign a testimonial that he later wishedvery much to repudiate in light of his dishonesty.

49 Greenblatt. p. 256.