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The English Conventicle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Patrick Collinson
Patrick Collinson*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Extract

In the midst of the nervous excitement of the autumn of 1640 a Londoner called Roger Quatermayne, a puritan and, as we might say, barrackroom lawyer, was investigated by Archbishop Laud and other Privy Councillors for the offence of holding religious meetings in circumstances which were politically as well as ecclesiastically suspect, since it was thought that Quatermayne and his friends had made treasonable contact with the Scottish army, then at war with its king and in occupation of English soil. Quatermayne, charged with holding a conventicle, asked the archbishop to inform him ‘what a Conventicle is.’ Laud replied: ‘Why, this is a Conventicle, … when ten or twelve or more or lesse meet together to pray, reade, preach, expound, this is a conventicle.’ Laud’s definition may appear uncontroversial, particularly if to his ‘ten or twelve or more or less’ is added the formula of the 1664 Conventicle Act, ‘over and above those of the same Household’. But Quatermayne objected: ‘My Lord, I do not so understand it.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 23: Voluntary Religion , 1986 , pp. 223 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1986

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References

1 Quatermayne, Roger, Quatermayns conquest over Canterburies court (London 1641) pp. 28–31. See Tolmie, Murray, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate Churches of London 1616-1649 (Cambridge 1977) pp. 30–1.Google Scholar

2 16 Car. II C.4.

3 Guildhall Library MS 7411/2 fol 42r. I owe this reference to Dr O.P. Grell.

4 Baxter, Richard, The saints everlasting rest (London 1650) pp. 290–1 Google Scholar. I owe this reference to Dr Eamon Duffy.

5 Quatermayne, Quatermayns conquest pp. 28-9.

6 Richard Leake, Foure sermons (London 1599) p. 8.

7 Quatermayne, Quatermayns conquest p. 29.

8 Cawdrey, Robert, A table alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English wordes (London 1604).Google Scholar

9 Holdsworth, W.S., A History of English Law (3 ed London 1923) 3 p. 204.Google Scholar

10 The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls I 1581-1589, ed S.A.H. Burne, William Salt Socy (Kendal 1931) pp. xxxvi, 145, 153, 155.

11 Sharpe, J.A., ‘Crime and Delinquency in an Essex Parish 1600-1640’, in Crime in England 1550-1800 ed Cockburn, J.S. (London 1977) pp. 106–7.Google Scholar

12 For Perne’s mistake, see Inner Temple Library MS Petyt 538.47 vols 492-3; for mine, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London 1967) p. 379, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London 1983) p. 10. The record is put straight by Felicity Heal, ‘The Family of Love and the Diocese of Ely’ SCH 9 pp. 217-18; see also pp. 191-208 above.

13 The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640-1687, ed Roger Hayden, Bristol Record Society’s Pubns 27 (Bristol 1974).

14 I have followed William Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown (5 ed 1771), Sir Matthew Hale, Pleas of the Crown (1707) and Holdsworth, History of English Law with some guidance from Dr John Stevenson.

15 Lambarde, William, Eirenarcha: or of the office of the Iustice of Peace (London 1592) p. 197. Cf Lambarde, William, The duties of constables (London 1604) pp. 49–50, Dalton, Michael, The countrey Iustice (London 1619) p. 341.Google Scholar

16 Balmford, James in A short and plaine dialogue concerning the unlawfulnesse of playing at cards or tables, or any other game consisting in chance (London 1593)Google Scholar argues that these games ‘must needes be somwhat evill, because they somewhat depend upon chance.’ To win money at play was a kind of theft. (Sigs A4v-6).

17 Hawkins, Pleas of the Crown p. 157.

18 John Udall, Two sermons of obedience to the gospell (London 1596) Sig I iiiij; A Seconde Parte of a Register ed A. Peel (Cambridge 1915) 1 p. 231; Quatermayne, Quatermayns conquest p. 27.

19 Compare the argument of ‘Magistracy and Ministry’ in my The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society 1559-1625; (Oxford 1982) pp. 141-88.

20 Bodleian Library Ms Tanner 65 no 35 fols 67-76; Winthrop quoted in D.G. Allen, In English Ways: the Movement and the Transformation of English Local Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill 1981) p. 181.

21 Holdsworth, History of English Law 8 p. 327.

22 Hawkins, Pleas of the Crown pp. 155-8; Hale, Pleas of the Crown p. 137; Holdsworth, History of English Law 8 pp. 324-7.

23 Lambarde, Eirenarcha pp. 177-8.

24 35 Eliz. I c.1.

25 Burn, Richard, Ecclesiastical Law (London 1781) 2 p. 159.Google Scholar

26 Neale, J.E., Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1584-1601 (London 1957) pp. 280–97.Google Scholar

27 Collinson, , Elizabethan Puritan Movement pp. 437–8; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London 1971) pp. 483–5.Google Scholar

28 Holdsworth, , History of English Law 6 p. 198; Elizabethan Episcopal Administration ed W.P.M. Kennedy Alcuin Club Collections 27 (London 1925) 3 p. 350.Google Scholar

29 16 Car. II c. 4; 22 Car. II c. 1. It would be useful to trace the origin of this phrase. See Bishop Aylmer’s visitation articles for London diocese of 1586: ‘Whether any schoolmasters under pretence of catechising their scholars … do keep lectures, readings, or expositions in their houses …?’ (Elizabethan Episcopal Administration 3 p. 205).

30 Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 1136 p. 145. I am grateful to Mr Anthony Fletcher for supplying the reference and to Dr Kenneth Fincham for securing a transcript of Sir Thomas Schlater’s ‘Doubts in the Act for Conventicles’.

31 ‘Sir Roger Bradshaigh’s Letter-Book’ (absit author) Transactions of the Historic Society for Lancashire and Cheshire 63 (1912) pp. 120-73; William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (2nd ed Cambridge 1961) pp. 22-3.

32 The Life of Adam Martindale Written by Himself ed R. Parkinson, Chetham Society 4 (Manchester 1845) PP. 145,194-5.

33 The Diary of the Rev. Henry Newcome ed T. Heywood, Chetham Society 17 (Manchester 1849) p. 126n.

34 The Autobiography of Henry Newcome M.A. ed R. Parkinson Chetham Society 26 (Manchester 1852) 1 pp. 27, 34, 94; Diary of Henry Newcome, passim; Records of a Church of Christ p. 85; The Rev. Oliver Heywood B.A. 1630-1702; His Autobiography, Diaries (etc.) ed J. Horsfall Turner (Brighouse) (1882) 1 p. 20.

35 Collinson, Godly People pp. 486-7, 521 n98, 538-9.

36 Hill, Christopher, ‘From Lollards to Levellers’, in Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton ed Maurice Cornforth (London 1978) pp. 49–67.Google Scholar In a later essay ‘A Bourgeois Revolution?’, Dr Hill appears to hold a more open mind on ‘whether or not there was a continuity underground from Lollards via Anabaptists and Familists to the sectaries of the 1640s.’ (Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 ed J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton 1980) p. 114). Dr Hill’s readers will detect in what follows critical refractions not only of this argument but of his brilliant essays ‘The Spiritualization of the Household’ and ‘Individuals and Communities’ in his Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1964).

37 Hudson, Anne, ‘The Examination of Lollards’, BIHR 46 (1973) pp. 145–59; Thompson, J.A.F., The Later Lollards (Oxford 1965) p. 229.Google Scholar

38 Hudson, Anne ed, Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge 1978); Hudson, Anne ed, English Wyliffite Sermons, (Oxford 1983); Hudson, Anne, Lollards and their Books (London 1985). Compare Margaret Aston’s ‘cultural’ rather than textual approach in various essays in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London 1984).Google Scholar

39 But note also the contemporary term ‘Lollardorum familia’; Hudson, Selections p.9

40 Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428-31 ed Norman P. Tanner, Camden 4 ser 20 (1977) p. 140.

41 Thompson, Later Lollards pp. 5, 72, 81, 241.

42 Cameron, Euan, The Reformation of the Heretics: the Waldenses of the Alps, 1480-1580 (Oxford 1984) p. 261.Google Scholar

43 See above, pp. 131-53.

44 Fines, John, ‘Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, 1511-12’ JEH 13 (1962) p. 162; The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe ed S.R. Cattley (London 1837) 4 p. 558.Google Scholar

45 Ibid. pp. 224-5.

46 Hudson, Selections pp. 116-17.

47 Heresy Trials p. 140. Cf. Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heretics, The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 6 eds T.M.C. Lawler, G. Marc’hadour & R.C. Marius (New Haven 1981) p. 240.

48 Wrightson, K.E., ‘The Puritan Reformation of Manners, With Special Reference to the Counties of Lancashire and Essex, 1640-1660’, (Cambridge Ph.D. thesis 1974) p. 38.Google Scholar

49 Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library MS Z.4.4 fols 67v-9r Other exam ples will be found in Miles Huggarde, The displaying of the Protestantes (London 1556) fols 121-5 (Marian); Sir Julius Caesar to Lord Burghley, 18 May 1584, BL MS Lansdowne 157 no 74 fol 186 (Elizabethan); the High Commission case of James and Elizabeth Andrews of Cambridge, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 65 no 35 fols 67-76 (Caroline).

50 William Wilkinson, A confutation of certaine articles delivered unto the Family of Love (London 1579) Sigs iiii, Air.

51 Cameron, Reformation of the Heretics pp. 68-9.

52 Acts and Monuments of Foxe 6 (London 1838) p. 677.

53 BL MS Harleian MS 419 fols 117-22. Compare William Perkins’s list of ‘common opinions’ (old-fashioned and popish) which his late Elizabethan catechism was designed to replace with acceptable and godly opinions. (The foundation of Christian religion (London 1641), Preface ‘to all ignorant people’.)

54 I owe this point to Dr Susan Brigden.

55 See my ‘The Godly: Aspects of Popular Protestantism’ in Godly People pp. 1-17. The locus classicus for this type of religious culture is Sir Julius Caesar’s description of a ‘conventicle’ in the Essex parish of Aythorp Roding, BL MS Lansdowne 157 no 74 fol 186.

56 The Diary of Lady Margaret Hohy 1599-1605 ed Dorothy M. Meads (London 1930).

57 Collings, John, A memorial for posteritie (London 1647) p. 21.Google Scholar

58 The argument of Master Nicholas Fuller in the case of Thomas Lord and Maunsell, his clients (London 1607) p. 1.

59 Udall, Two sermons, Sig I iiiij.

60 See the narratives of Thomas Newcome, Adam Martindale and Oliver Heywood, cited elsewhere in this essay.

61 Quoted, Cragg, G.R., Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 1660-1688 (Cambridge 1957) p. 140.Google Scholar

62 Oliver Heywood’s Life of John Angier of Denton ed E. Axon, Chetham Society n.s. 97 (Manchester 1937) p. 85.

63 But see Oliver Heywood’s vignette of his brother-in-law Thomas Crampton, ‘a man of stupendious memory, that I have heard him repeat a sermon almost verbatim, memoriter …’ (Oliver Heywood 1 p. 36).

64 Rogers, John, Obel or Beth-sbemesh (London 1653) p. 421 Google Scholar. Oliver Heywood’s mother related to him ‘many passages’ of sermons she had heard preached before she was married. (Oliver Heywood 1 p. 53).

65 Jensen, Peter F., ‘The Life of Faith in the Teaching of Elizabethan Protestants’ (Oxford D.Phil, thesis 1979) p. 182.Google Scholar

66 Dickens, A.G. gives examples in ‘Heresy and the Origins of English Pro testantism’ in Dickens, Reformation Studies (London 1982) pp. 378–9 Google Scholar. See two collections of scandalous and heretical sayings culled from sermons in PRO S P 1/113 fols 106-9, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E.V fol 397.

67 In the title of his study of the Waldenses of the Alps, already cited.

68 The heart opened by Christ (London 1654) pp. 1-2. ‘Forms of Religion without Life do not profit’, We read in The invisible power of God known in weakness with a Christian testimony of the experience and sufferings of Edward Brush aged ninety-one years (London 1695) p. 6.

69 Diary of Henry Newcome pp. 14, 36, 41, 83; Oliver Heywood 1 p. 199. Cf. Humphrey Mills’s recollection of Richard Sibbes’s ‘sweet soul-melting Gospel-sermons.’ (Rogers, Obel p. 410).

70 Collinson, , Religion of Protestants pp. 248–9.Google Scholar

71 Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library MS Z.4.4 fol 208. For Turner, see Acheson, R.J., ‘Sion’s Saint: John Turner of Sutton Valence,’ Archaeologia Cantiana 99 (1983) pp. 183–97.Google Scholar

72 The defensive phrase was used of meetings gathered in the Wealden town of Cranbrook in the mid-1570s by John Strowd. (Collinson, Godly People p. 418).

73 Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin Written by Himself ed William Orme (London 1823) pp. 11-14.

74 Records of a Church of Christ pp. 82, 85-6, 97.

75 Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library MS X.9.1, fol 5. I owe this reference to Dr. R.J. Acheson.

76 Records of a Church of Christ pp. 88-9.

77 tBrowne, John, History of Congregationalism and the Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk (London 1877) pp. 393–5; Nuttall, G.F., Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640-1660 (Oxford 1957) pp. 27–9, 52. Katherine Chidley was the author of The iustification of the Independent Churches of Christ (London 1641)Google Scholar.

78 collinson, , ‘Cranbrook and the Fletchers: Popular and Unpopular Religion in the Kentish Weald’, in Godly People pp. 427–8.Google Scholar

79 Nuttall, G.F., ‘Dissenting Churches in Kent before 1700’ JEH 14 (1963) pp. 175–89.Google Scholar

80 most recently, White, B.R., The English Separatist Tradition: from the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford 1971) and Watts, Michael R., The Dis senters: from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford 1978). For a fuller exploration and exposition of the contentious issues hinted at in this paragraph, see my essay ‘Towards a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition’, in Godly People pp. 527–62.Google Scholar

81 See examples in Acts and Monuments of Foxe (London 1839) 8 p. 330, 499. It was not some Lollard hedge-priest but Bishop William Barlow who in November 1536 preached that ‘where so ever ii or iii simple persons as ii coblers or wevers were in company and elected in the name of God, that ther was the trewe Churches of God.’ (BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E.V fol 415).

82 Acts and Monuments of Foxe 8 pp. 118, 728.

83 References to Newcome, Martindale and Heywood earlier in this essay; add The Note Book of the Rev. Thomas Jolly … Extracts from the Church Book of Altham and Wymondhouses, ed Henry Fishwick, Chetham Society n.s. 33 (Manchester 1895) pp. 120-1.

84 Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward ed M.M. Knappen (Chicago 1933); Heywood’s Life of Angier.

85 Autobiography of Newcome I p. 14.

86 The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-1683 ed Alan Macfarlane, Records of Social and Economic History 3 (Oxford 1976). See also Alan Macfarlane, The Famil Life of Ralph Josselin A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge 1970).

87 Diary of Josselin p. 1; Autobiography of Newcome p. 7. And cf. Heywood: ‘When I was a little child I delighted in imitating preachers and acting that part among my playfellows.’ (Oliver Heywood 1 p. 157).

88 Abbott, W.C., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (Cambridge Mass 1947) 3 p. 62.Google Scholar

89 Bernard, Richard, The ready way to good works (London 1635) pp. 281, 311.Google Scholar

90 Richard Rogers, Seaven treatises (London 1605) fol 478’. Rogers insisted that their meetings were not conventicles ‘for the disturbance of the state of the Church and peace thereof.’

91 Heywood Oliver 1 p. 42. See my ‘The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke’, in Godly People pp. 273–87 Google Scholar. I hope to write more extensively elsewhere on the implications of women’s ‘soul troubles’.

92 Life of Martindale pp. 61, 66-7.

93 Collinson, Patrick, ‘“A Magazine of Religious Patterns” An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in Godly People pp. 499–525.Google Scholar

94 Bradshaw, William, The unreasonahlenesse of the separation (London 1614) Preface. See also Bernard, Richard, Christian advertisements and counsels of peace: also disswasions from the Separatists schisme, commonly called Brownisme (London 1608), Plaine evidences (London 1610); Henoch Clapham, The syn against the Holy Ghost (Amsterdam 1598), Antidotan: or a soveraigne remedie against schisme and heresie (London 1600), Errour on the right hand, through a preposterous zeale (London 1608); Darrell, John, A treatise of the Church, written against them of the separation, commonly called Brownists (London 1617); Fairlambe, Peter, The recantation of a Brownist (London 1606); Jacob, Henry, A defence of the churches and ministery of Englande (Middleburg 1599), A declaration and plaine opening of certaine points (Middelburg 1611); Paget, John, An arrow against the separation of the Brownists (London 1618 Google Scholar). Particular interest attaches to the writings of the reverted Separatists, Clapham, Fairlambe and White, and to the polemics of Bernard, Bradshaw and Darrell, who had all spent time on the Separatist frontier. Jacob was a complexio oppositorum. But see the pronouncement in A declaration and plaine opening p. 5: ‘Howsoever, as to the point of separation, for my part I never was, nor am separated from all publike communion with the congregations of England.’

95 Clarke, Samue, The lives of sundry eminent persons in this latter age (London 1683) p. 170; Clarke, Samuel, A general martyrologie (London 1677) pp. 120, 126, 56–7; Clarke, Samuel, The Lives of two and twenty English divines (London 1660) p. 73.Google Scholar

96 Quoted, Stephen Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground Studies in British History and Culture 6 (Hamden Conn. 1978) p. 27.

97 Certaine observations of that reverend religious and faithfull servant of God and glorious martyr of Jesus Christ, M. Randal Bate (Amsterdam 1624?) pp. 177, 183-9. For Bate, see Foster, Notes, p. 89 n37.

98 Quatermayne, Quatermayns conquest p. 18.

99 Jeremy Corderoy, Warning for worldlings (London 1608) Sig A 10.

100 Collinson, Religion of Protestants p. 277.

101 Corderoy, Jeremy, A short dialogue wherein is proved that no man can he saved without good works (Oxford 1604)Google Scholar, Epistle.

102 Darrell, Treatise of the Church pp. 28-9.

103 Or so I would argue. But strictly speaking, the Separatist platform was laid by Henry Barrow in the form of a quadrilateral, of which the second plank was ‘the profane and ungodlie people receved into and retayned in the bozom and bodie of ther churches.’ (Henry Barrow, ‘Foure Causes of Separation’, in The Writings of Henry Barrow 1587-1590 ed Leland H. Carlson, Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts 3 (London 1962) p. 54).

104 Bernard, , Christian advertisements p. 86; Bredwell, Stephen, The rasing of the foundation of Brownisme (London 1588) p. 20. See also Alison, Richard, Aplaine confutation of a treatise of Brownisme (London 1590): ‘In the visible Church of God there will be tares, yea untili the harvest: chaffe among the wheat, goates among the sheep, hypocrites among the true professors: nay to go further, Antichrist for a time sitting in the temple of God, and other monstrous men abiding in the Church, turning the grace of God into wantonnesse.’ (pp. 12–13)Google Scholar

105 Ainsworth, Henry, The communion of saints (Amsterdam 1607) p. 137.Google Scholar

106 Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library MS X.II.16 fol 103v.

107 Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626-1633 ed George H. Williams et al., Harvard Theological Studies 28 (Cambridge Mass. 1975) 110-11; Bernard, Christian advertisements p. 108; Lancelot Dawes, Two sermons preached at the Assise holden at Carlisle (Oxford 1614) pp. 33-5, 38; Richard Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience (Cambridge 1608) p. 95; William Crashawe, The sermon preached at the Crosse Feb. xiiij 1607 (1608).

108 Bredwell, The rasing of the foundations p. 39.

109 Wrightson, ‘The Puritan Reformation of Manners’ pp. 24-5.

110 Life of Martindale pp. 133, 79, 122.

111 Ibid. p. 129.

112 Note Book of Thomas Jolly pp. 120-1, 128, 133-4; Wrightson, ‘The Puritan Reformation of Manners’ p. 281.

113 Diary of Josselin pp. 31, 33, 77-9, 81.

114 Ibid. pp. 77, 230, 516, 83.

115 Ibid. pp. 102, 105, 124, 126, 132, 235, 137-8.

116 Ibid. pp. 197, 127, 140, 134-5, 204-5, 210.

117 Ibid. pp. 235, 238, 244, 313.

118 Ibid. pp. 376-7.

119 Wrightson, “The Puritan Reformation of Manners’ p. 273.

120 Diary of Josselin pp. 492, 505.

121 lbid. pp. 516, 546, 553, 574, 621.

122 Autobiography of Newcome ed Richard Parkinson, Chetham Society 27 (Manchester 1862) 2 p. 257.

123 Life of Martindale p. 173.