As for those titles of Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyterians, or the like, I conclude that they came neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but rather from hell and Babylon, for they naturally tend to division.
BUNYAN1
DISSENT is a creation of the restoration. There had been opposition to the state church long before 1640. The title of Bruce McFarlane’s book, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity,2 indicates some real continuity from the Lollards to the nonconformist churches. The crucial distinction between ‘the Church’ and ‘the churches’ arose at the Reformation, when the Bible was put into English. There were fierce controversies over whether ecclesia should be translated ‘the Church’ or ‘the congregation’. The sects asserted for their congregations the democratic rights that the traditional village community was losing.
What was new about dissent after 1660 was its self-consciousness and its national organization. Before 1640 there had been underground separatist congregations, living precariously and illegally; and ‘Puritan’ groups within the state church. During the 1650s many who were to be extruded from the church in 1660–2 remained contentedly within it, including the Bedford congregation. Quakers were most decisively opposed on principle to any state church. But after the restoration those who could not accept membership of the restored episcopal church, and those who were expelled from it, had gradually to come to terms with a new situation. It faced the clergy first, but as the Clarendon Code directed persecution against all those who attended ‘conventicles’, the laity too had to take decisions.
During the freedom of organization and speculation which had prevailed in the revolutionary decades, groups of men and women had rejected the idea that there should be in each parish an authorized (ordained) interpreter of the Scriptures, appointed from above, and preferably educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Instead they favoured spontaneously organized discussion groups, each congregation electing its own preacher. Discussion was encouraged, and such organization as there may have been was democratic. Winstanley went further than most when he proposed that in his ideal community one of the few offences liable to the death sentence should be preaching for hire. Very slowly this changed as congregations stabilized under a single charismatic preacher. But still he was expected to work to earn his living six days a week and/or to depend on the voluntary contributions of his flock.
Further changes came with persecution and illegality after 1660. For all dissenting congregations discipline, definition of church membership, excommunication of unsatisfactory members, became necessary. Even Quakers began to acquire the characteristics of an organized church, to the fury of some of their original adherents. For a brief period after 1672 nonconformist congregations were legalized, but only under the aegis of a state-licensed minister. After 1689 this system became permanent. The free, fluid groups of the revolutionary decades had turned into permanent congregations linked together in sects. How did a learned dissenting minister, educated at a dissenting academy, differ from the university-educated parson of the parish? There was loss as well as gain in this transformation, a reversion to some of the characteristics of the old parish churches. Goodman Bunyan, the very type of mechanic preacher, became ‘Bishop Bunyan’.
There were political changes too. In the 1640s and 1650s many of the middling sort, previously excluded from politics, had been active both in county committees and in running their congregations. At the restoration many former Puritan clergy—including those who became ‘Latitudinarians’—chose to be incorporated in the state church. Since exclusion from the church meant for laymen exclusion from central and local government, dissent soon lost its gentry adherents; they could carry out the social and political functions traditionally expected of them only if they were members of the state church. Some gentlemen continued to patronize dissenters after 1660, but only for one generation. Their heirs had to conform if they were not to become social pariahs. Dissent was a manifestation of the increasing polarization of society in the later seventeenth century.3 This must have fortified Bunyan’s awareness of class distinctions. His is the realism of the defeated. The saints could no longer hope, as they had done since the Reformation, that godly rule might be introduced by Parliament. Like Bunyan’s conversion, Emanuel’s victory had to come from outside.
After 1660 the reunited gentry recovered and reinforced their political power through the church. JPs tightened their control over the appointment of lower officials like constables. Successive conventicle acts harassed laymen of the middling sort as well as ministers. Informers—necessary in the absence of a police force or an effective local bureaucracy—were used to circumvent sympathy with the victims of persecution.
But this was not a restoration of the Laudian church. Indeed, taking the long view, one of the most significant consequences of the English Revolution was the failure to reconstruct the totalitarian state-ecclesiastical which had collapsed in 1640, when religious toleration established itself de facto. The early Baptists John Smyth and Thomas Helwys had insisted that all men had a right to choose how they would worship. The Leveller draft constitution, the Agreement of the People, made this one of five inalienable rights of citizens, with which not even the sovereign Parliament could interfere. Oliver Cromwell in 1654 was I think the first spokesman for an English government to assert that ‘liberty of conscience is a natural right’, fundamental to the constitution of the Protectorate. Monmouth’s Declaration in 1685 promised this liberty to all protestant Englishmen.4
The effective establishment of this right in the 1640s involved a profound change in the nature of the English state. The church’s attempt after 1660 to recapture its monopoly position failed. Nonconformists were too numerous; some became so rich that it was politically unwise to provoke them too far. The Church of England itself had to adapt to an increasingly commercial society. Church courts no longer prosecuted those who traded on holy days; the end of the oath ex officio meant that church courts had to depend on the voluntary confessions of offenders, and so lost much of their power. Excommunication ceased to be a serious sentence. Failure to restore the High Commission Court ensured that ecclesiastical censures could be enforced only with the cooperation of JPs. The secularism to which the Revolution had given free rein reinforced the long-standing erastianism of the Parliamentarian gentry, which had defeated Laudians and Presbyterians alike.
The church no longer looked to the monarchy as its staunchest defender. The Laudians had enjoyed the personal support of Charles I, and were in return the most devoted servants of royal policy; in 1688 the Seven Bishops were the first to take an open stand against James II. Power had moved from crown to Parliament, and the church’s loyalty moved with it. The final adjustment after 1688 was slow and painful for many churchmen, but the Non-Jurors were as ephemeral as the dissenting gentry had been after 1660. The grudging Toleration Act of 1689 avoided statements of principle and refused political rights to nonconformists whilst conceding the right to worship on pragmatic grounds. But Locke, on the basis of Leveller ideas, produced a theoretical defence of religious toleration as a natural right.
The change from monopoly to pluralism in religion was made necessary by the dogged resistance of Quakers and men like Bunyan to enforced conformity. They drew their own lines between good and evil, what their consciences could and could not accept; and they succeeded in denying the state the right to decide for them. Dissenters did not speak of ‘the state’; they saw local gentlemen and local ecclesiastical officials telling them what to think and how to behave. If they theorized at all, they saw the institutionalized power of evil, of Antichrist. But by their success in preventing the re-establishment of a single persecuting church they transformed the nature of the state. The Church of England remained a highly privileged institution; but its clergy lost their power to monopolize the interpretation of God’s Word, as well as effective control of the censorship.
Unlike Levellers, Cromwell, and Locke, Bunyan contributed nothing to the theory of toleration, proclaimed no principles of natural right. But Mr. Valiant-for-the-truth’s ‘right / To be a pilgrim’ amounted to claiming a right to join the congregation of his choice. For Bunyan there was only one true church, and its members had the divine right to worship as they believed God wished, a right which overrode any other considerations. Bunyan was not interested in the rights of any but the members of this true church, who must always be a minority until Christ’s reign begins. Dissenters could agree only on dissent. But the obstinate determination of Bunyan and thousands of other English men and women, with many of whom Bunyan profoundly disagreed, made the traditional monopoly state church unworkable. In The Pilgrim’s Progress entering a church is shown as a matter of choice; and persecution as the weapon of Antichrist.
There was nothing inevitable about the solution of 1689. For some time after 1660 many dissenters had waited in hope of a change for the better. Fortune’s wheel had spun many times during the preceding twenty years. Some clergy who conformed—like Ralph Josselin—still refused to accept many ceremonies: lay men and women no doubt had similar reservations. Some looked hopefully to the more tolerant Charles II, then perhaps more nervously to James II. Their attitudes were affected by the fading of millenarian expectations. In the 1640s and 1650s most congregations had seen their religious duties as including reform of the state as well as of the church; the leading spokesmen for radical ideas had been sectaries, associated first with Levellers, then with republicans and Fifth Monarchists. The organized Quakers put forward radical programmes in the 1650s, calling for ‘a new earth as well as for a new heaven’.5
The idea that religion could be separated from politics was novel in 1660. After that date sectaries became dissenters, half in and half out of the English state: political decisions were forced on them rather than sought after. But the absence of King Jesus and the presence of King Charles (and still more of the Cavalier Parliament) forced a considerable rethinking. Dissenters had to organize themselves in separatist congregations, and to link up nationally in ways hitherto unprecedented, accepting that they were no part of the national church and that they were often compelled to meet in conditions of illegality. It was impossible for dissenters as such to take part in the legal political activity to which they had become accustomed. Even after 1689 they remained second-class citizens.
This transformed the nature of congregations. In the 1640s and early 1650s sectarian organization rarely extended beyond the individual church: links between congregations were unstable and not institutionalized. When historians speak of ‘Baptists’ and ‘Quakers’ as though there were such entities, they are imposing retrospectively an order which did not exist. Baptists disagreed on sprinkling as against total immersion, on open or closed communion, on the acceptability or not of tithes. Among Quakers there was only rudimentary organization before the restoration. Nayler went his own way in defiance of Fox, Burrough pursued policies of which Fox disapproved. Before 1661 there were some pacifist Quakers, but they did not include Fox or Burrough: the peace principle was novel in 1661, and was certainly not immediately accepted by all Friends. Ranters had even less organization: there was a ‘Ranter milieu’ and some loose Ranter discussion and drinking groups. But there was no Ranter sect, and the groups dissolved and re-formed. This is the source of the view that the Ranters did not exist, which Professor J.C. Davis has endeavoured to prove.6
After 1660 tighter organization and discipline were forced on the congregations in order to survive. There were struggles within and between sects over conditions for church membership. Time and energy were consumed in discussing the conduct befitting a church member, in visiting and correcting backsliders, etc. Congregations necessarily became increasingly inturned. They ceased to make statements on politics, ceased to electioneer. Political activity could only take the form of illegal plotting: Greaves has shown how much of this there was in the years 1660–3, involving Presbyterians and Congregationalists as well as Baptists and Quakers.7 But gradually stabilization of the regime reduced even millenarians to reliance on a miracle of divine intervention. Either Christ’s kingdom was not of this world; or, if it was to come on earth, it would come when God willed it and created the necessary conditions, not when the saints willed it. The latter could only stand fast, maintain the faith, hold together God’s servants as they waited and prayed and hoped—as Samson did in Milton’s play. Bunyan, like Milton, preserved a passive millenarianism. Some Anglicans, including bishops and Isaac Newton, retained an academic interest in dating the Second Coming; but as a fighting creed millenarianism died when Venner’s failures in 1657 and 1661 were followed by the year 1666, which produced national catastrophes but not the end of the world.
As Ashcraft has shown, revolutionary politics survived the defeat of millenarian expectations. It was now a more secular campaign, turning on bills to exclude James Duke of York from the throne, on plots to assassinate Charles II and his brother, and culminating in Monmouth’s invasion. But all these activities started from fear of and hostility towards Catholicism, which was held to be the inevitable precursor of absolutism in the state; and this anti-catholicism drew on deep popular feelings which were not held only by dissenters. So in the 1680s dissenters could not abandon politics, however much they might wish to. Charles and James politicized the issue of religious toleration, inevitably the first demand of all nonconformists. Many of Bunyan’s friends and associates were to some degree aware of and favourable towards the revolutionary underground and the émigrés in the Netherlands. In 1687 dissenters were forced to take political decisions: to accept toleration for themselves was one thing, but they soon found that the price demanded was support for repeal of the Test Act, which might open the way to the establishment of Catholic absolutism. It was impossible to ignore James’s policies, which were blatant where Charles’s had been ambiguous: inaction now would have political consequences no less than action.
Nineteenth-century denominational historians (and even some modern historians) have read back into the years before 1689 the ideas and practices of eighteenth-century dissent. Continuity can indeed be traced between some of the religious groups of the revolutionary decades and later dissenting sects. It is perhaps clearest in the case of the Muggletonians, who abjured political activity from the start, and the Quakers. But those ‘Congregationalist’ and ‘Baptist’ groups which can be regarded as ancestors of the later sects had more in common with one another, and perhaps with Ranters, particularly in their radical politics, than they had with the sects which later looked back to them. Throughout the years 1660–89 the sects remained ambivalent towards politics. Only after 1689, after the defeat of the radical Whig programme, did dissent create for itself an identity that accepted political and social inferiority as a condition of spiritual purity. The congregations, now mostly abandoned by the gentry, were domesticated as they fitted into the revised version of the old world. In the process both the congregations and the old world underwent significant changes. Religious pluralism, consumers’ choice, replaced monopoly; but the range of choice was far more restricted than it had been in the 1640s and 1650s.
The later seventeenth century sees the end of predestinarian theology as the major intellectual force it had been for the preceding century and a half. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there had been controversies about grace, about predestination and free will, all over Europe, in Roman Catholic countries no less than in protestant.8 By the end of the century these had ceased to be matters of urgent intellectual concern, not because solutions had been found but because they no longer seemed so immediately relevant. Why not? And why did predestinarian theology still attract the middling and lower sort who came to form the strength of dissent?
If the association of theories of predestination with social and economic insecurity has any validity,9 then we note that the lines of social division had come to be drawn differently in England by the later seventeenth century. The great economic divide had left some of the middling sort, and its intellectuals, more prosperous, more secure, safely incorporated within the post-restoration establishment in church and state. The tensions and anxieties now affected a more articulate middling and lower middling sort on the margin, together with those below them: the ‘meaner sort’ were everywhere reported to form the strength of dissenting congregations. For such people the Calvinist discipline and self-discipline retained its attractions, and the eternal decrees still offered gratifying consolations for those able to see themselves as the elect and their rulers and worldly betters as the reprobate. It was Presbyterians, largely drawn from a higher social group, who were to abandon Calvinism in the eighteenth century.
The predestinarian theology had appealed especially to those excluded from active participation in politics. But the gathered churches were always a minority. Over time the failure of the visible elect to live up to expectations must have done a great deal to undermine theories of predestination. If the godly could not fall from grace, they must be even fewer than men like Bunyan had expected. The way was opened to a world in which the protestant ethic, with its emphasis on effort and will-power, survived without the predestinarian theology which had originally accompanied it. The Pilgrim’s Progress may have helped in this transition, since its predestinarianism can be ignored.
We should therefore distinguish sharply between the heroic Puritanism of the mid-seventeenth century, on the one hand, and eighteenth-century dissent. The latter had its own virtues, but they are no longer heroic. Donald Davie has criticized me, no doubt rightly, for speaking uncharitably of ‘sterile controversies’ and ‘spiritual desolation’ in early eighteenth-century nonconformity. But there is a descent from Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress to the literature of eighteenth-century dissent. Davie praises the poems of Isaac Watts, which have indeed been seriously underestimated. But not even Watts can compare with Milton and Bunyan. There is nothing like them until Blake; and Blake was influenced not by mainline dissent but by Milton and by surviving Ranter and Muggletonian groups. ‘What they express is socio-political resentment and aspiration thinly cloaked in religious terminology,’ says Donald Davie of Ranters and Muggletonians; ‘their ideas are beneath contempt.’10 That seems to me as ‘uncharitable’ as anything I say about eighteenth-century dissent; and also to underestimate the ‘socio-political resentment and aspiration’ in Milton and Bunyan, though I would use less pejorative words to describe it.
In his prefatory note to the reader of Mr. Badman, Bunyan had seen as a ‘prophecy of the last times’ that ‘professing men … shall be many of them base.’ The last times did not come, and the godly had to adapt to a society where careers were open to the talents, and so where there could be no safeguards against the sinfulness of the majority of mankind. The godly became capitalists no less than reprobates, Mr. Badman pointed out. The real tragedy of post-revolutionary dissent was that Emanuel could put no trust in his saints. Bunyan and Milton were among the last to cherish the millenarian hope, against hope. It revived with Blake, who looked back to Milton and compared himself to Bunyan.11
In the period before 1640, historians have tended to assume, the thinking of the gentry, of the ‘county community’, is what matters. But in the revolutionary decades the social context widened. Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and The Humble Representation of the Desires of the Soldiers and Officers in the Regiment of Horse for the County of Northumberland, published in December 1648, foreshadowed the activities of the Diggers in Surrey in 1649. Local theological controversies got into print.12 As we have seen, Bunyan’s The Holy War is closely involved with the politics of Bedford corporation.
Bunyan is the first major English writer who was neither London based nor university educated. A Shakespeare, a Marvell, a Traherne, drew on his experience in the countryside of Warwickshire, Yorkshire, and Herefordshire; but they wrote for London and mainly in London. George Herbert had been Public Orator at Cambridge and a courtier before retiring to Bemerton; Vaughan, Herrick, Sir Thomas Browne, often thought of as regional writers, had all been educated at a university. Gerrard Winstanley perhaps comes nearest to anticipating Bunyan, with whom his prose bears comparison; but he cannot approach him in imaginative scope. Langland was London based. Bunyan the itinerant had linked town and country, Bedford and Elstow. In his later years, after The Pilgrim’s Progress, he visited London frequently as a preacher in demand. But Bedford remained his home; the army had been his school, and prison his university.
Sectaries were meanwhile organizing themselves nationally. Excluded from politics and the universities, they nevertheless gained an identity as sects, and a greater identity as dissent. Their academies lacked social cachet, but they came to give a better, more modern, education than Oxford or Cambridge. Finally abandoning revolutionary politics, dissent nevertheless remained a force, albeit a minor one, in politics. Bunyan endowed it with a literature, which remained constantly in demand. In the more peaceful and comfortable eighteenth-century world, where the values of the Latitudinarians seemed to have triumphed, Bunyan’s Pilgrim testified to the dissenting inheritance of compassion, of moral integrity, of struggle.13
Bunyan then succeeded to a radical tradition going back to the Lollards, which had no use for clericalism or ceremonial: it doesn’t matter whether we pray sitting or lying or walking. The beauty of holiness consists not in incense or stained glass or deferential bowing, but in flowers helping one another to grow: and all flowers in the garden are equal. Bunyan also inherited the protestant conviction that our works cannot save us. We have sold our birthright, we can see dirt in our own tears and filthiness in the bottom of our prayers. But we dare not despair. Grace extended to such muck-heaps of sin as we are entails an overwhelming moral obligation to self-denial, to doing what good we can in however small a way. Bunyan was to die prematurely in consequence of getting soaked in a forty-mile journey on horse-back to reconcile a believer and his father: for ‘the soul of religion is in the practic part’. Ultimately the monolithic church-state yielded place to religious pluralism; the sphere of religion was separated from day-to-day politics, became private. When public issues arose which called out moral imperatives—factory reform, slavery—we speak of the nonconformist conscience.