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In a Tradition of Learned Ministry: Wesley's ‘Foxe’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2008

DEVORAH GREENBERG
DEVORAH GREENBERG
Affiliation:
4720 Nanaimo Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5N 5J8; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This examination of John Wesley's emendation and elaboration of John Foxe's Acts and monuments, shows how Wesley constructed Foxe's text and himself within a tradition of learned English ministry. Offering an expanded vision of the role and function of the popularly styled Book of Martyrs, this article combines readings of Wesley's journals and secondary analyses to permit insights into Wesley's relationship with the established Church of England, his intentions in taking up Foxe's text and his conceptions of hierarchy, pastoral duty and ministry. It contradicts scholarly expectation of anti-Catholic impulses behind Foxeian publications and their effects, and encourages a more nuanced appreciation of the contemporary application of the terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘papist’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 227 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 ‘Foxe’, i.e. in quotation marks, signals a reflexive subject as described in Devorah Greenberg, ‘Reflexive Foxe: the Book of Martyrs transformed, “Foxe” reinterpreted, sixteenth through twenty-first centuries’, unpubl. PhD diss. Simon Fraser University 2002, and ‘“Foxe” as a methodological response to epistemic challenges: the Book of Martyrs transported’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe at home and abroad, Aldershot 2004, 237–56. The publication history of Foxe's Acts and monuments (first edn, London 1563) includes hundreds of editions based with varying degrees of textual exactitude on the original. Sheffield University's Foxe Project has developed an on-line Acts and monuments which reproduces bks 10–12 of the first four editions and offers interpretive essays on this new critical edition. Research also continues into later and abridged editions, such as that of John Wesley, which contribute to the construction of ‘Foxe’. See www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe for the variorum edition.

2 Richey, Russell E., ‘Book review: Journals and diaries, vi’, Church History lxvi (1997), 839–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; English, John C., ‘John Wesley and the rights of conscience’, Journal of Church and State xxxvii (1995), 349–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For arguments for more nuanced readings of the terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘papist’, and the counterintuitive effects of Catholic baiting see Devorah Greenberg, ‘Eighteenth-century “Foxe”: history, historiography and historical consciousness’, www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe/apparatus.

4 Gerald Newman, Rise of English nationalism: a cultural history, New York 1987; Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, New Haven–London 1992.

5 Matthew Taylor, Bloody tribunal or An antidote against popery, London [1700], p. iii; Anon., The book of martyrs, London 1764; Thomas Bray, Papal usurpation and persecution, London 1712, p. viii.

6 ‘I have used “Catholicism” and “Popery,” “Papist” and “Catholic” as interchangeable’: Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in eighteenth-century England, Manchester 1993, 1 n. 1. In a review of Haydon's book, Stephen Taylor recognises this practice and comments that ‘Haydon, like contemporaries [eighteenth-century], uses the two terms interchangeably’: ‘Book review: Anti-Catholicism in eighteenth-century England: a political and social study’, this Journal xlvi (1995), 342–4 at p. 342.

7 Bray, Papal usurpation, p. viii. This may be an example of what Ricky Sherova Marcuse called the ‘exceptionality function’ which excuses specific examples from negatively generalised types in the interests, perhaps, of social order and conviviality: ‘Oh, I don't think of you as blank’: ‘Unlearning Racism Workshop’, Vancouver, BC, November 1989. 171.

8 John Milner [F. W. Blagdon], The book of martyrs, or, a Christian martyrology, Liverpool 1807, i, pp. vi–vii, viii–ix. I would like to thank Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch for guidance in developing this argument. See Greenberg, ‘Reflexive Foxe’, ch. v, which contributes to an article in process, ‘Tolerance and martyrology: “for a mere difference of opinion”’. Evidence indicates that editors were driven by a need for unanimity and contributed their martyrologies, as a credible genre of history, to defend a strong state Church and English liberties, while promoting global Christianity in support of missions.

9 ‘Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 42.

10 John Wesley, Journals and diaries, ed. W. Reginald Ward, Nashville 1991, iii. 168. For ‘Papist’/gentlemen' see iii. 168; ‘rabble-rout’, iii. 249; ‘hired’, iii. 13, 24 and passim; ‘Protestants’, iii. 64; mob cry, ‘Now hey for the Romans!’, iii. 336. Also, quoting Martin Dunsford, anti-Methodists are described as ‘idle disorderly persons of the lowest class, encouraged by the ignorant and bigotted of the higher rank’: iii. 403.

11 Haydon comments that ‘parallels may be drawn between the ill treatment and perceptions of Catholics, Dissenters, and Methodists in Stuart and Georgian times’: Anti-Catholicism, 248. Characterised as a kind of symbolic enemy, Wesley described an argument between himself and an alderman who accused Methodists of ‘taking people from their work’ and of being ‘the cause of all the evil that is fallen upon the nation’. ‘It has been observed that there has been always such a people before any great evil fell on the land’: Wesley's journal, iii. 119–20, entry for 22 Apr. 1746. See also Henry Rack, Reasonable enthusiast: John Wesley and the rise of Methodism, London 1989, 270–80.

12 John Wesley, ‘Acts and monuments of the Christian martyrs’, in The Christian library (1750), 2nd edn, London 1819, iii. 262. Due to the fragility of the eighteenth-century edition, the second edition of Wesley's Christian library has been used as the primary text in this analysis. I would like to thank Linda McCurdy (Director, Special Collections Library, Duke University), for her assistance in confirming that the broad content and randomly checked texts coincide in the two editions.

13 Samuel Clarke, ‘Supplement to Fox's Acts and monuments of the Christian martyrs’, ibid. iii. 289–427. Samuel Clarke (1599–1683) was a Nonconformist cleric and author of several Lives of eminent divines and many martyrologies modelled on ‘Foxe’. His best-known work is England's remembrancer … narratives of deliverances, London 1657 and several reprints.

14 Clarke, ‘Supplement’, 14.

15 Ibid. 33–5. For the ‘peur of 1745’ and popular sentiments see Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 131–61, and pp. 9–13 for ‘hidden Catholics’.

16 Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 253.

17 John Wesley, ‘To the reader’, Christian library, ii. 2. Manfred Marquardt offers a solid analysis of Wesley's practical Christianity in John Wesley's social ethics: praxis and principles, trans. John E. Steely and W. Stephen Gunter, Nashville 1992.

18 Wesley, Christian library, ii. 25.

19 Wesley's journals, iii. 373.

20 Wesley comments (ibid. iii. 318) that ‘In many of these instances [of reported miracles] I see great superstition as well as strong faith. But the “times of ignorance God does wink at still, and bless the faith, notwithstanding the superstition”’.

21 Christian library, ii. 72.

22 Wesley's decision to include Anne Boleyn and Anne Askew, but not, for example, Katherine Parr (particularly as the stories of Askew and Parr were so closely intertwined) is among oddities in the text that merit further study, as does his rigorous exclusion of the common women whom Foxe had included. Among the pre-Marian common men that Wesley includes are Badby (ibid. i. 117), Browne (i. 195), Firth and Hewet (i. 347), Porter (ii. 399), and Testwood, Filmer and Pearson (i. 401). Hatches, Archer, Hawkins and Bond, Wrigham, Landsale and Silkeb are named as accompanying Mrs Smith. Of the Marian martyrs only Tomkins (ii. 74), Hunter (ii. 77), Haukes (ii. 95) and White (ii. 88) appear. Each one is a fair representation of the story offered by John Foxe. The section on foreign martyrs and other witnesses not yet accounted for includes Luther, Voes and Esch, a variety of scattered nationals, and the histories of Merindol, Cabriers and of the Waldenseans (i. 202–337).

23 Colet (ibid. ii. 201); Bilney (ii. 339); Bainham (ii. 345); Frith (ii. 347); Benet (ii. 350); Tyndale (ii. 356); Lambert, (ii. 364).

24 Barnes (ibid. ii. 387); Garrett (ii. 392); Rogers (iii. 6); Saunders (iii. 9); Hooper (iii.15); Taylor (iii. 28); Farrar (iii. 86); Bradford (iii. 113); Glover (iii. 139); Ridley (iii. 153); Latimer (iii. 172–3); Philpot (iii. 192); Cranmer (iii. 233).

25 Cromwell (ibid. ii. 371); Porter (iii. 400); Hunter (iii. 343); White (ii. 401); Haukes (ii. 415).

26 John Wesley has been the subject of numerous studies. In considering his abridgement of Foxe's text, I have drawn upon some of their conclusions without directly entering into the various scholarly debates. The analysis which follows is based upon Wesley's reading of ‘Foxe’ in the Christian library, his journals and letters for the years when he was working on the text (1743–54) and some secondary literature.

27 For a list of his selections see the National union catalogue, pre-1956 imprints, London 1968–81, s.v. Wesley, John, Christian library.

28 John Wesley, untitled preface to Hall's Meditations, Christian library, iv, at p. i.

29 See Wesley's journal, iii. 163, entry for 19 Mar. 1747, where he describes Elizabethan Puritans as ‘venerable’ yet concludes that they were weak. For a valuable analysis of Wesley's connection to ‘Puritans’ and the appearance of dissent in the Christian library see Robert C. Monk, John Wesley: his Puritan heritage, New York 1966, 41, 49–59. Monk finds a ‘striking similarity’ between Wesley and the Puritans (where Puritan means ‘practical application of the gospel’), and argues that Wesley was heavily dependent on Samuel Clarke for ‘most of the lives he included in the Library’, although he deviated from Clarke's text in order to give space to the ‘most eminent men of the Church of England’.

30 See David Daniell, ‘Tyndale and Foxe’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe: an historical perspective, Aldershot 1999, 15–28, and William Tyndale: a biography, New Haven 2001.

31 Wesley, Christian library, ii. 5. Norman Wood explains Tudor control of education and the Puritan minister/teachers whose example might also have influenced Wesley's tradition of ministry: The Reformation and English society, London 1931, 305–41.

32 Wesley, Christian library, ii. 16. Both Simeon Foxe's assertion that Foxe had no assistants and the messages that Wesley takes from it are examples of ‘Foxe’ mythologised.

33 Hayes, Thomas W., ‘Gerrard Winstanley and Foxe's Book of Martyrs’, Notes and Queries ii (1977), 209–12Google Scholar, directed my attention to Winstanley's Breaking of the day of God, London 1684.

34 William Lamont, Godly rule: politics and religion, London 1969, 33.

35 Patrick Collinson, English Puritan movement, Berkeley 1967, 20.

36 Wesley was here writing in response to a public letter maligning Methodists: Wesley's journal, iii. 13.

37 Rack, Reasonable enthusiast, 307, 293 (Rack's italics). Edmund Grindal (1519–83), bishop of London (1563), archbishop of York (1570) and archbishop of Canterbury (1576 until his death) was one of the Marian exiles. While on the continent he conceived the project for an English ‘Book of martyrs’ and guided a ‘committee’ to realise it: Devorah Greenberg, ‘Community of the text: producing the first and second editions of Acts and monuments’, Sixteenth Century Journal xxxvi (2005), 673–93. As archbishop, Grindal was among the first to propose that it was not necessary to insist on clerical conformity to adiaphora, or ‘things indifferent’.

38 Wesley, Christian library, iii. 30.

39 Wesley's journal, iii. 109. Wesley's editor adds (iii. 112 n. 17) that ‘the view that Bishops and presbyters were essentially of one order remained with JW for life’.

40 Ibid. iii. 397.

41 Wesley, Christian library, iii. 15.

42 Ibid. ii. 189.

43 Wesley's journal, iii. 22. John Spurr concludes that ‘a puritan pattern does not necessarily mean a dissident pattern’: ‘The moral revolution of 1688’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Church of England,1689–1833, Cambridge 1993, 128 n. 4.

44 Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor, Church of England, introduction at p. 18.

45 Henry Rack concludes that ‘Wesley seems to have adopted his father's Hanoverian Toryism rather than his mother's religious Jacobitism. His primary concern for religion and his scriptural loyalty to the powers that be led him to transfer the old “passive obedience” to the Hanoverians’: Reasonable enthusiast, 373.

46 Mervyn James, Society, politics, and culture: studies in early modern England, Cambridge 1986, 179–220. For the offer to control the mob see Wesley's journal, iii. 242–3, 90.

47 Wesley's journal, iii. 245. See also Rack, Reasonable enthusiast, 204, 209, 210.

48 Wesley's journal, iii. 386, 399 and passim.

49 E. P. Thompson, Making of the English working class (1963), London 1980, 40. Robert Wearmouth convincingly argues that a later result of Wesley's work was to encourage labour activism because ‘having learned to value their talents and exercise their rights in the Methodist community, it was not easy for some of them to remain quiescent … In chapel life they learned to speak’. That did not, however, compensate for a countervailing training in acceptance which led working men to stand ‘in solemn and sullen silence’ while their ‘young and weeping infants were cast into the streets’, and ‘to vacate their homes and jobs for blacklegs’. Wearmouth commends their tranquillity, concluding that ‘it was inevitable that the miners should be beaten’. The influence of Methodism, in any case, is probably an inadequate explanation for working-class behaviour. See Robert Wearmouth, Methodism and the working class movements of England, 1800–1850 (1937), London 1972, 206, 216, 228–31. For scriptural instruction at Kingswood see Earl Kent Brown, Women of Mr. Wesley's Methodism, New York–Toronto 1983, 51.

50 ‘I will either kill or cure’, said Wesley, who rarely said things he did not mean. ‘I will have one or the other, a Christian school or none at all’: Wesley's journal, iii. 86. On this see also Thompson, Making of the working class, 412–13. Among seventeenth-century contributors to ‘Foxe’, Joseph Cotton (unknown dates) and Ellis Hookes (unknown dates) each published several variations of Foxe's text, Cotton from a more paternalistic congregationalist position, Hookes speaking more for the Quakers and active resistance: Greenberg ‘Reflexive Foxe’, ch. iii.

51 Rack, Reasonable enthusiast, 435–6. E. P. Thompson comments that ‘Methodist ministers defended their flocks [from populist literature]: the evidence was abundant that unmonitored literacy was the “snare of the devil”’: Making of the working class, 811.

52 It was a bad idea, Wesley thought, to mix the disorderly with the elect because ‘evil communication corrupts good manners’: Wesley's journal, iii. 43. Wesley struggles here with a different form of the problem of separation outlined by Patrick Collinson in ‘The cohabitation of the faithful with the unfaithful’, in Ole Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England, Oxford 1991, 51–76, esp. pp. 59–65. See also Wesley's journal: taking another's flock (iii. 6, 37, 42, 268); regulates societies (iii. 182, 193, 202–3); ‘purges’ society (iii. 34); names a man who disagrees with him ‘a poor sinner’ (iii. 5); ‘tears up by the roots’ from within ‘his’ society a popular explanation of justification with which he does not agree (iii. 167); Christians should aim to be ‘humble and teachable’ (iii. 201).

53 Paul Wesley Chilcote, John Wesley and the women preachers of early Methodism, London 1991, 42; Earl Kent Brown refers to the process of Wesley's acceptance as ‘evolving’ in Women, p. xii.

54 See Brown, Women, 26, 92, and Wesley's journal, iii. 128.

55 Wearmouth, Methodism, 20.

56 Wesley's journal, iii. 167; Rack, Reasonable enthusiast, 189.

57 Wesley's journal, iii. 162. In the journals for the years 1743–54 there is no evidence of Wesley using Foxe's text in his instruction, though this does not necessarily mean he did not do so in other years.

58 Chilcote, Wesley and the women preachers, 223.

59 Wesley, Christian library, iii. 51.

60 John Foxe, Acts and monuments, London 1570, 1693–4; Acts and monuments, ed. Josiah Pratt, New York 1965, vi. 677.

61 Wesley, Christian library, iii. 174.

62 Ibid. iii. 50. Among Christian duties as they appear in his journal, Wesley includes preaching (iii. 56–7 and passim); relieving the sick and imprisoned (iii. 58, 125, 150, 204, 216, 253–60); education (iii. 162); accepting poverty (iii. 127); speaking one's conscience (iii. 57, 66–8, 91, 95); promoting one to ‘think and let think’ (iii. 66); and not ‘yield faith or obedience to any man’ (iii. 122).