Richard Baxter’s Bucerian “Reformation”

by J. William Black

William Black is Lecturer at The Evangelical Theological College and The Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

At the heart of Richard Baxter’s agenda for pastoral ministry lay his understanding of “reformation.” But as one who viewed himself firmly within the tradition of England’s “godly, learned and faithful” Protestant pastors, Baxter’s rhetoric, at least, was hardly unique. For more than a hundred years, the prospect of further “reformation” informed the strategies and inflamed the rhetoric of committed Protestant ministers preaching in pulpits from Great St. Mary’s in Cambridge to St. Margaret’s in Westminster, and from the pulpits of hundreds if not thousands of more ordinary parish churches throughout the kingdom. Even so, only recently have historians’ own utilization of “reformation” begun to reflect the range and complexities of use discernible in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources. Not surprisingly, “reformation” has become a term that is increasingly problematical for historians attempting to describe England’s transformation from a kingdom of Roman Catholics to one of Protestants. With perspective enhanced by more diverse sources of evidence, the argument viewing England’s reformation as a convoluted process that extended far beyond the successive Tudor settlements of religion in the middle years of the sixteenth-century has found persuasive proponents.[1]

While the present-day controversy continues over a reformational time frame, as well as the vantage from which to judge its relative success or failure,[2] it is helpful to recall that for several generations, many of England’s early Protestants were themselves under no illusions as to the incompleteness of England’s reformation.[3] It was their fundamental unhappiness with Elizabeth’s religion “established by law” and attempts to revise it that polarized the English church, particularly over the issues of ceremonies and government, and established a pattern of confrontation that would dominate the Church of England through James II. While a spectrum of clergy and laity took as the goal of their exertions the task of completing the “reformation,” how reformation was understood changed as the more zealous of England’s Protestants were forced by a succession of frustrations to reevaluate both their means and ends. Moreover, “reformation” itself covered a range of meaning, used often to denote the overall process of religious change from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism, but just as often when speaking of smaller changes, be it community behavior, or with respect to particular tell-tale ceremonies or structures within the Church.

An attempt to chart Tudor and early Stuart concepts of reformation would be to rewrite the story of English Protestantism, which is obviously beyond the scope of this article.[4] Instead, this essay will employ a series of examples to suggest more modestly that, when used to describe the overall process, the meaning of “reformation” constantly shifted, depending at any given time on the particular deficiencies perceived and the goals envisioned by their correction.[5] But more importantly, for our purposes, we will see how the long-buried understanding of reformation advocated by the exiled Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer during his time in England was resurrected nearly a century later by Richard Baxter and to astonishing effect. Under Baxter’s influence during the “godly” Indian Summer of post-Civil War England, English pastoral practice was recon-figured under an overtly Bucerian perspective on reformation. The killing frost of the Restoration, however, put an end both to Baxter’s Kidderminster and Worcestershire Association experiments and, ultimately, to the English puritan hope of finishing the Reformation.

I. Setting the Record Straight

Richard Baxter’s take on England’s “Long Reformation” was that of a pastoral disaster. Baxter was persuaded that the breach between England’s Protestants over the speed and extent of reformation in England was ultimately to blame for those events that led to civil war. Bypassing political explanations, Baxter drew a straight line from the “sad division” between English Protestants during the Marian exile in Frankfort to “those daies of blood that we have seen” and the resulting “great mutations in Church and State.”[6] In an early example of what D. R. Woolf has called an ideological use of history “to explain the disasters of the present in such a way as to cast blame on their opponents,” Baxter uses the conflict between the “Prelates” and the “Puritans” as a prism through which to reinterpret England’s reformation history.[7] This use of history, while becoming standard practice after the civil wars, hardly ever accomplished its author’s intent. As Thomas Fuller noted, “Such as wrote in or since our Civil Wars, are seldome apprehended truely and candidly, save of such of their owne perswasion, whilest others doe not (or what is worse will not) understand them aright.”[8]

But Baxter was also participating in a long line of Christian historiography, articulated most famously by Augustine’s The City of God, which viewed history as reproducing the conflict between godly Abel and corrupt Cain.[9] Early Protestant historians found the Old Testament stories of Israel’s repeated declensions into idolatry and episodes of reformation particularly instructive for their own struggles with the perceived corruptions of Roman Catholicism. Philip Melanchthon used this Old Testament pattern as a means to understand the present in his edition of John Carion’s Chronicles, which also influenced William Harrison’s “Great English Chronology.”[10] Finding this dualism a convenient interpretative tool, Harrison understood reformation in the Old Testament sense of a complete purging from the corrupting practices and idolatries of the surrounding nations, effected only by the obedience of both individuals and community to patterns of true worship and right living laid out in Scripture.[11] Heated by such biblical reflections, Harrison and many of his godly colleagues, as we shall see, became increasingly ambivalent as to which side of the historical division Elizabeth’s Church might fall.[12]

For Baxter, writing in his 1656 Gildas Salvianus; The Reformed Pastor, the Reformation in England was marred from its earliest days by Protestant confusion over the continuing role of ecclesiastical government and ceremonies inherited from the Roman Catholic past. It did not bode well that “so many godly learned men that had forsaken all for the Reformed profession … should…, fall in pieces among themselves, and that about a Liturgy and Ceremonies, so far as to make a division.”[13] After Mary’s death, the “party that was for Prelacy and Ceremonies, prevailed for the countenance of the state, and quickly got the staff into their hands, and many of their Brethren under their feet.” Those not “of their mind and way” and “who desired the Discipline and order of other reformed Churches” were harassed, others were deprived or imprisoned, and all were tarred with “the nick-name of Puritans, as knowing how much names of reproach and scorn could do with the vulgar for the furthering of their cause.”[14]

But the great tragedy of this fraternal persecution for Baxter was that those who scrupled the unreformed ceremonies and government of the Church were “made uncapable of being Preachers of the Gospel in England, till they would change their mind.” Such, for Baxter, was akin to spiritual treason, for the Church was thereby deprived of its most effective pastors, “and that at a time of such necessity … when Popish Priests were newly cast out, and multitudes of Congregations had no Preachers at all.” Baxter views the hostility between the “Prelatical” party and the “Puritans” as continuing without relief through the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, reaching a climax in the “new impositions” under Charles I at the instigation of Archbishop Laud. At this point, even “conformable Puritans began to bear the great reproach (their being few of the Non-conformists left).” The resulting provocations to puritan consciences became intolerable: “Altars must be bowed to,” “All must publish a Book for dancing and sports on the Lords [sic] day” thereby licensing the profaning of the Sabbath, “Lectures were put down, and afternoon Sermons, and expounding the Catechism or Scripture.” Those whose consciences forbade conformity were hauled before church courts “to be presented together with Adultery and such like sins.” Such was the violence against the godly “that many thousand families left the Land… most in the remote American parts.” Baxter concedes that it would hardly be worth complaining had the authorities taken steps to provide “competent men for their places.” “But alas the Churches were pestered with such wretches as are our shame and trouble to this day.” And those who did preach, spent more time preaching against the Puritans than against sin or for salvation. The atmosphere became so poisoned that Baxter reports, “it was become commonly in England a greater reproach to be a man truly living in the fear of God, then [sic] to live in open prophaness, and to rail at godliness.” Preachers with an eye towards preferment “were well ware that the rising way was to preach against the precise Puritans, and not to live precisely themselves.” All of which leads Baxter to the decidedly deuteronomic conclusion concerning the civil wars: “And thus both Ministry and people grew to that sad pass, that it was no wonder if God would bear no longer with the Land.”[15]

Up to this point, however, Baxter was attempting to set the record straight by historicizing the standard godly line that reformation could not proceed until the hindrances of an unreformed diocesan prelacy were removed.[16] But unlike the sixteenth-century Presbyterians and their Long Parliament progeny, Baxter was not against bishops per se, for “it was not all the Prelates of the Church that thus miscarried: we have yet surviving our Usher, our Hall, our Morton, learned, godly and peaceable men.” Baxter even suggests that if more of the bishops had “been such,” the incurable divisions which provoked the civil wars would never have occurred, and the subsequent “great mutations in Church and state” avoided altogether,[17] Nevertheless, Baxter has a point to make with his history, and as Keeble observes of his later Reliquiae, he marshals his evidence “in the service of an interpretation of events. Baxter discerns in the complexities of history a simple and fundamental opposition” between those who live for God and those who do not.[18] Even more intriguing is that Baxter assumes a continuity of reformational intent amongst committed Protestants from Cranmer to himself, a kind of godly solidarity against worldly opposition, with his own experience presented as wholly typical.[19] The cause is that of the gospel, and those who seek its advance will of necessity view reformation as preliminary means to that end. Conversely, those unconcerned with the advance of the gospel will betray their true orientation as its enemies by resisting attempts to reform. Just such a holy war,” adds Keeble, “is discernible in every historical event. Indeed in the fallen world, it is this conflict which constitutes history.”[20] But as we shall see, Baxter’s updated Bible dualism oversimplified the Puritan predicament. By viewing England’s “Long Reformation” as a conflict between “Prelatical” Cain and “Godly” Abel, Baxter was able to gloss the fundamental differences which existed in how even the “Puritans” themselves understood and attempted reformation. What Baxter neglects to point out is that for most of England’s Protestant history, reformation was viewed from a Genevan perspective. Baxter’s own vision, however, predates the zeal of the returning Marian exiles and finds its closest affinities with Reformation Strasbourg.

II. Martin Bucer’s English Reformation

The most sophisticated of the proposals to finish the reformation in England was also one of the first—that of the exiled Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer (1491–1551).[21] Bucer’s name had been connected with the cause of reformation in England from its earliest days, and a 1535 translation of his Das einigerlei Bild (1530) was the first book that openly promoted the case for iconoclasm in English.[22] Forced by Charles V’s Interim to leave Strasbourg in 1549, Bucer had come to England at the invitation of Archbishop Cranmer and was installed as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1550.[23] Bucer’s passionate concern to reform pastoral ministry and institute an effective church discipline permeated the lectures he gave on Ephesians, as well as the sermons he preached at Great St. Mary’s. His critique informed Cranmer’s final revision of the Book of Common Prayer.[24] Moreover, his own experience as a reforming pastor made him sensitive to the practical issues involved in shepherding a newly Protestant parish on the narrow road between Roman Catholic relapse and Anabaptist excess. His published counsel to reformation pastors, Von der Waren Seelsorge (Strasbourg, 1538), was later translated into Latin and was included as De Vera Animarum Cura in his posthumously published collection Scripta Anglicana fere Omnia (Basel, 1577).

For Bucer, the pastor was the key figure if any program for reformation was to be successful. Bucer’s pastoral agenda for reformation was dominated by the goal of facilitating the conversion of the unbelieving majority in his parish. His most significant contribution to the cause of reform in his adopted home came in De Regno Christi (1551), his hastily written and subsequently neglected blueprint for the furthering of reformation in England, which was published as a belated New Year’s gift to Edward VI.[25] Bucer observed that while England’s reformation had been advanced by royal edict and legislated settlement, most people had been minimally exposed to Protestant doctrine and untouched by Protestant discipline, much less converted to evangelical faith.[26] Writing to John Calvin in 1550, Bucer presented a downbeat assessment of the overall status of the English Reformation. With bishops unable “to come to agreement as to Christian doctrine, much less as to discipline,” Bucer reported that the primary hindrance to reformation was the deplorable state of the parish clergy. And with most parishes either “sold to the nobility” or held in absentia by pluralists who appointed poor, ignorant “substitutes” who were “in heart mere papists,” he complained that it was not surprising “how little can be effected for the restoration of the Kingdom of Christ by mere ordinances, and the removal of instruments of superstition.”[27] Directly addressing this deficiency, Bucer argued in De Regno Christi that a reformed ministry was central to the advance of a reformation “by devout persuasion.”[28] Such ministry involved effective evangelical preaching, the right administration of the sacraments, the exercise of church discipline, and the practice of catechizing for confirmation.[29]

Though he had been in England only a short while, Bucer found disturbing parallels between the incomplete course of reformation in England and that of his German homeland. For despite efforts to insure “right preaching” so that “the religion of Christ be rightly established,” neither in Germany or England had the Church “become entirely subject to Christ’s gospel and Kingdom, [or] allowed the Christian religion and the discipline of the churches to be restored throughout.”[30] Instead, the supporters of reformation “seem to have learned only these things of the gospel of Christ: first to reject the tyranny of the Roman Antichrist and the false bishops. Next to throw off the yoke of any kind of discipline.” In a withering critique of the German Reformation intended to prick English consciences as well, Bucer continues,

Thus it was not displeasing to them to hear that we are justified by faith in Christ and not by good works, in which they had no interest. They never seriously considered what was explained to them about the nature and power of true faith in Christ, and how necessary it is to be prolific in good works. A number of them accept some preaching of the gospel only in order that they might confiscate the rich properties of the Church. And so it has happened that in a great many places this entire doctrine of the Kingdom of Christ has been faithfully announced to the people, but I for one cannot say in what churches it has yet been firmly accepted and Christian discipline publicly constituted.[31]

By discipline, Bucer meant an integrated system of pastoral oversight, whose end was a process by which professing Christians whose lives were a scandal to the gospel were either restored to the church through repentance or excluded from the church through their continued impenitence.[32] The key to discipline was Bucer’s insistence that, prerequisite to receiving the privileges of adult membership, every person baptized as an infant must make a profession of faith and of obedience to Christ and the church.[33] This exigency transformed the minister’s role from that of simply a herald of good news to that of a shepherd called to careful oversight of each member of his flock through “teaching and admonishing them not only publicly but also at home and privately.”[34]

Bucer’s reconfiguration of pastoral ministry replaced the inherited sacramental paradigm for parish ministry with one that was primarily evangelistic. While Bucer was in full agreement with using legislative means to rid the land of “Anti-christian” abuses, retool the universities to become Protestant seminaries, and even reform such social concerns as marketing, civil law, and the role of the magistrate in a Christian community, he recognized that these would ultimately be superficial changes apart from widespread individual spiritual transformation.[35] Reformation itself would be facilitated by reformed pastors and would occur as a result of the accumulated conversions within a given parish, as people were then enabled by God’s Spirit to keep God’s law.[36]

III. Reformation by Reaction

Bucer died in Cambridge on February 28, 1551, and Protestant hopes in any case were dashed with the death of Edward VI in 1553 and the subsequent failure of attempts to secure a Protestant succession. However, Mary’s early death in 1558 and the accession of Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth to the throne resurrected Protestant hopes for a completed English reformation. But as Baxter’s narrative points out, the Protestant leaders who had escaped Mary’s persecution by fleeing to continental centers of reformation returned to England already nursing disagreements over what course Elizabeth’s reformation should take. Elizabeth’s compromise settlement and the subsequent dissatisfaction of many who had been influenced by the examples of reformation in cities like Geneva and Zurich served to consign Bucer and his program to the sidelines of debate. Though a Latin edition of De Regno Christi was published in Basel in 1557, there is little evidence of its widespread circulation in the English Protestant community. Moreover, Conrad Hubert’s edition of Bucer’s later works, Scripta Anglicana, did not appear until 1577. By then, Bucer had been further relegated as merely one of many continental authorities cited by the various parties in their attempts to win polemical points.[37]

In the meantime, the issue confronting England’s Protestants had shifted from one of defining and applying reformation to reacting to Elizabeth’s definition and whether or not it was sufficient. Anthony Gilby was a veteran of the “sad division” of 1557 in Frankfort, which found him moving with John Knox and William Whittingham to Geneva after the row in the exiled English congregation over whether the 1552 Book of Common Prayer should be replaced by a reformed order of worship.[38] When he returned to England, Gilby had been astonished that Elizabeth’s 1559 Settlement had retained certain “relics of popery”—ceremonies and clerical dress which were used by Roman Catholics, but which were viewed as matters indifferent with respect to Scripture.[39] Attempts by the bishops to suppress all nonconformity were met by outraged and increasingly radicalized responses among the more earnest Protestants like Gilby:

[our enemies and persecutyrs] can not thinke the worde of God safelye ynough preachid, & horably inough handlyd, without cap, cope, surplis. But that the sacraments the maryinge, the buryinge, the chirchin of wemen, & other church service, as they call it, mus nedes be decored with crossinge, with capping, with surplessing, with knelinge, with preti wafer cakes, and other knackes of popery.[40]

Discomfort over the unreformed “popish” taint contaminating English worship provoked a further conviction that the entire fabric of the Church’s government and ministry was similarly untouched by reform. Archbishop Parker’s crackdown on nonconformity in 1565 pushed Gilby to view the bishops not as friends in the battle for the further reformation of the church but as reformation’s chief impediment. Bitterly addressing the bishops, some of whom had shared the hardships of the Marian exile, Gilby vented:

O beware you, that wilbe Lordes over the flockes, that you be not sore punyshed for your pryd, towardes your brethren, and your cowardlines in gods cause, that for Princes pleasures and pompse liuinges, do turne poperi into policie, and to become our persecutors under the cloke of policie. It were better to lose your liuings, then to displease god on persecutinge of youre brethren, & hinder the course of the worde.[41]

Gilby’s perspective on both the problems facing England’s reformation and the solutions required take us into a different world from that addressed by Martin Bucer only fifteen years earlier. For Gilby, reformation became primarily a crusade to free the English Church of all continuity with its Roman Catholic past and to settle the Church’s worship, government, and ministry on Scriptural foundations. For “if this Poperie continewe, [the bishops] wilbe younge Popes doubtlesse, and poperie it self will growe up again.” “Therefore, let all good men labour all that they can, to plucke up these wicked weedes of Poperie, the remmenauntes of superstition and Idolatrie.”[42] For Gilby, resisting “popery” was a matter of conscience. In the words of his “Souldier of Barwick”: “my harte ariseth in my body, when I see thee and they fellows cloathed like [the Pope’s] Chaplaines, that burned the blessed Bible, and our faythfull fathers, and deare Brethren in our eyes.”[43] Gilby’s program for reformation was correspondingly simple: “This is the summe of the request … of the Godly Ministers of London … that after so long preaching of Christ in London (almost these thirtie yeares) they may put in practise, the doctrine of Christ, and minister his holy sacraments in that sim-plicitie, that Christ and his Apostles hath left them, without the ceremonies and garments abused by the papistes.”[44] With Anthony Gilby, reformation has shifted from Bucer’s emphasis on evangelism and its implications for church forms and structures to a primary emphasis on the purity of the forms and structures themselves.

It was a short step from viewing an unreformed Episcopal government as part of the problem to demanding that the government and ministry of the church as well as its worship undergo reformation. That step was taken in 1570 by Thomas Cartwright in his series of Cambridge lectures on the Acts of the Apostles and again but with popular force with the publication of the anonymous Admonition to Parliament in 1572.[45] Later acknowledged as the work of John Field and Thomas Wilcox, the Admonition exhorted Parliament not only to reject “all popish remnants both in ceremonies and regiment,” but also to establish “those things only which the Lord himself in his Word commandeth because it is not enough to take pains in taking away evil but also to be occupied in placing good in the stead thereof.”[46] The reforming “good” in mind was of course a Presbyterian polity or “discipline,” with Calvin’s Geneva as the model. Like Bucer, the Presbyterians had a program for the further reformation of the Church, though the focus was almost entirely on supplanting episcopacy with presbytery and, Patrick Collinson adds, “pragmatism with dogma.”[47] Furthermore, they “found it hard, if not impossible, to think of reformation in any other terms than as a public act to be imposed on the Commonwealth by law and discipline.”[48] Reformation, therefore, involved exchanging an unscriptural government, discipline, and ceremonies for a system more in line with the teaching of Scripture. As such it involved the legislated resettlement of the Church,[49] as well as, in the meantime, an underground movement to establish a system of pastoral conferences that would provide the framework upon which a presbyterian discipline could be erected when the time was right.[50]

The harsh crackdown on presbyterians led by Archbishop Whitgift effectively crushed the movement, and the cause of further reformation was thereafter unhelpfully connected, in royal and episcopal eyes, with subversive presbyterian agitation. Unsurprisingly, all overt references to the further reformation of the church disappear from the title pages of treatises and sermons from the last half of Elizabeth’s reign into that of James I. Because tampering with the 1559 Settlement was forbidden by Elizabeth and again by James after the 1604 Hampton Court Conference, reforming zeal either spun out in a harried separatism or was redirected towards issues that all parties could agree on, such as the need to amend the clergy or to promote individual godliness.[51]

Following Elizabeth’s death, there was a marked upsurge in published sermons and treatises exhorting clergy to bring their lives and ministries into conformity with the reformed ideal of the preaching pastor. In one of these treatises, the posthumously published Of the Calling of the Ministrie (1605), William Perkins lamented: “In many places of our land, there is by Gods [sic] blessing much teaching, yet there is little reformation, in the lines of the most: but contrariwise, some fall to Atheisme; some to Papisme: some into soule sinnes, not to be named among Christians.” The cause of this declension was not, for Perkins, to be found in the gospel, “nor in our doctrine, nor in the teaching of it,” but rather because too many ministers live unreformed, scandalous lives “in the face of their people.”[52] For Perkins, the need for reformation was just as urgent as it was for Bucer, Gilby, and Presbyterians like Field. But reflecting the late Elizabethan context in which he wrote, the scope of Perkins’s reformation is more confined. He allows that the Elizabethan Church of England could be called “reformed,” and suggests that the glory of such a church is “to haue their doctrine powerfull, & effectuall for the whining of soules.” It was therefore incumbent to insure “that their ministers be godly men, as good Schollers, & their liues inoffensiue as wel as their doctrine sound”; otherwise, “they will find in woefull experience, that they pull downe as much with one hand, as they build vp [sic] with the other.”[53]

Concern for reformation was not the monopoly of an obstreperous minority on the verges of church affairs. As visitation records demonstrate, the ecclesiastical hierarchy was also concerned with many of the same issues that vexed the more zealous “godly” clergy.[54] Church courts were utilized not only to enforce conformity but to uphold standards of public morality. Efforts were made to improve the quality and effectiveness of the clergy.[55] Puritan clergy found the church courts better than nothing as a means of troubling the unrepentant; but they also sought to gain the cooperation of like-minded local magistrates who were in a position to use their authority as a partner in effecting local reformation.[56]

Nevertheless, consistent royal and ecclesiastical policy against the more radical aspects of church reformation forced many concerned clergymen to find a less offensive outlet for their reforming zeal. This redirection of “godly” zeal for reformation is perhaps most transparent in the series of four sermons published by Richard Sibbes in 1629 as part of The Saints [sic] Cordials, and separately in 1637 under the title Josiahs [sic] Reformation.[57] Had such a work appeared in Bucer’s day, the connections with England’s reformation would have been obvious, as Bucer along with Cranmer and others had likened boy-King Edward VI to the Old Testament reforming king Josiah. But even under the watchful eyes of the Bishop of London and soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, no such connotations were intended or taken. Instead, Sibbes presents a guide for a wholly internalized and subjective reformation of the individual heart. When Sibbes calls his hearers to “remove the impediments that hinder” reformation, his concern is not with “popish relics” or hypocritical ministers, but rather “a hard and stony heart, which is opposite to tenderness.” When Sibbes finally addresses the nature of Josiah’s reformation, he chooses his words carefully: “Let us have such a resolution and purpose of reformation as Josiah had; for his prayers were joined with a purpose of reformation, which he… performed in so strict a manner, that there was never such a reformation among all the Kings of Judah as he made.”[58] Sibbes’s conformable conclusions take us far from the clamoring visions of reformation from the preceding century: “Reformation makes all outward things fall into a good rule, but they are to be called only by the authority of the prince, and when a fit time and occasion requires.” And if his readers missed his meaning the first time, he adds even more submissively; “But this must be done by the consent of authority, otherwise it would be an impeachment to government.”[59]

The political realities that forced Sibbes to redefine the locus of reformation inwardly are more widely reflected in the proliferation of published works of “practical godliness.” The intense, predominantly Calvinist spirituality which formed the basis and informed the exhortations of this literature grew out of the preaching ministries of the increasing circle of university-educated clergy, R. T. Kendall’s “affectionate practical” school of “experimental predestinarians.”[60] This “carefully nurtured godly clerical society, rooted in spiritual needs” and “the ability of this community to organise, communicate and foster a sense of embattled minority with a mission to change the spiritual state of the country” reveal Sibbes and his “godly” colleagues to be participants in what Thomas Webster describes as an “early Stuart Puritan movement.” Though surprisingly Webster does not acknowledge early Stuart continuity with Elizabethan puritan concerns for reformation per se, he nonetheless observes that “the means of this movement were different those [sic] of their forebears, concentrating on the particular, both individual and parochial, on producing better ministers through colleges, seminaries and pastoral care, rather than delivering petitions and admonitions to monarch and Parliament.”[61] Thus, the motivating vision of a reformed English Church is the same, even if both means and goals have shifted yet again.

Godly discontent simmered under the Laudian reversion to a sacramentalist perspective on worship and ministry, distaste for Calvinism and intolerance of nonconformity.[62] But an unforeseen conjunction of royal arrogance and political ineptness combined with spectacular ecclesiastical overreaching in Scotland, disastrous military responses, the collapse of royal authority in Scotland and Ireland, and the congealing of fears of a vast popish conspiracy undermining English Protestantism to create the conditions which made reformation, civil war, and indeed revolution possible.[63] If James had been perceived as guiding the Church in the right direction (even if far too slowly for his more “Puritan” subjects), Charles increasingly alarmed them “by frogmarching it away from reformation.”[64] John Morrill speaks of a “coiled spring” of “godly” zeal in 1640, wound tight by Laudian innovation and provocation, and a “willingness to contemplate fundamental change in the English Church which had not been seen since the 1580s and perhaps not even then.”[65] Willingness became opportunity as the Long Parliament capitalized on Charles I’s political weakness and began to dismantle the edifice of Laudian episcopacy.[66] Finishing Elizabeth’s halfway reformation, or even leveling the English Church to its foundations and building anew along biblical lines, seemed suddenly within reach.

The pent-up desire for reformation was reflected, and to a certain degree promoted, by the rhetoric in which the members of the Long Parliament were immersed as they gathered for monthly Fast Day sermons in St. Margaret’s Church.[67] Edmund Calamy (1600–1666), minister of St. Mary Aldermanbury, London, saw direct historical continuity with Elizabethan presbyterian efforts to complete the reformation in his own pulpit manifesto for reformation preached to the gathered members of the House of Commons on December 22, 1641.[68] Calamy preached the imperative of reformation in stark Old Testament terms: “Nationall turning from evill, will divert Nationall judgements, and procure Nationall blessings.”[69] Reflecting continuity with the diverted reformational concerns of Perkins and Sibbes, Calamy also acknowledges that this reformation “must be Personall,” but he picks up the earlier presbyterian demand by also insisting that reformation “must be Nationall.”[70] Personal reformation will occur when the “wicked” majority acknowledge their sins and change their behavior in repentance. This personal “humiliation” provided the necessary foundation on which the institutional reformation of church and society could take place, for “Humiliation without Reformation, is a foundation without a building: Reformation without Humiliation, proves often a building, without a foundation.” Significantly, this metaphor bridges the gap for Calamy between Elizabethan and early Stuart concepts of reformation, for “Both of them together, comprehend the Essentialls of this great duty, which is the very quintessence of Practi-call Divinity.”[71]

For Calamy, the means to procure this reformation is the thoroughly conventional call for Parliament to send “a faithfull and painfull Ministery thorowout [sic] the Kingdome.” Possessed by a conviction in the efficacy of godly preaching to promote “Personall Reformation,” Calamy observes that “those places … where the least Preachers hath beene, are the greatest enemies to Reformation.”[72] But when Calamy turns to specifics for institutional reformation, his concerns are consistent with those of the earliest puritan agitators, and his focus is squarely on the national church: “Many pollutions have crept into our Doctrine, much defilement into our Worship, many illegall innovations have been obtruded upon us.” Moreover, not only are many of the clergy woefully insufficient, but the entire episcopal structure has been tried and found wanting: “the very posts and pillars of this House, many of them are rotten; the stones are loose and uncemented; the House exceedingly divided and distracted with diversity of opinions; the very foundation is ready to shake, and the House to fall down about our ears.” The solution was not to waste time remodeling a structurally flawed house, but to rebuild it “according to the pattern in the Mount.” For Calamy, it would not be enough “to bring us back…, to our first Reformation in King Edwards dayes.” Instead, the time had come “to reform the Reformation it self [sic].”[73]

Calamy’s reformation was interrupted by the onset of civil war and by the army-led revolution which oversaw the regicide and emptied Parliament’s already diluted national Presbyterian Church of any pretense to authority.[74] While Parliament had overseen the dismantling of most of the offending structures and ceremonies of the Laudian Church, the failure to replace episcopacy with an enforceable alternative government brought to a frustrating end the long campaign to oversee a national reformation along presbyterian lines.[75] Without presbyterian structures, a presbyterian-based agenda for national reformation could not be sustained. The resulting vacuum of ecclesiastical authority made the job of godly parish ministers outside the few existing classes very difficult, especially in the face of the rising influence of those with a separatist or sectarian agenda. The fundamental issue of the lack of effective parish discipline remained unaddressed in most parts of the country. This put ministers under great pressure from within their parishes by those who were scandalized by the prospects of sharing communion with unrepentant sinners and grossly ignorant parishioners. Many pastors improvised means to prohibit the scandalous and ignorant from participating in the sacraments, whether by some sort of examination or by suspending communion altogether.[76] Some pastors attempted to appropriate the Separatists’ use of adult membership covenants as a means to differentiate between the godly and profane within the parish. But for the vast majority of parish clergy who were appalled by its implications, the luxury of separation was not an option.[77]

IV. Baxter’s Kidderminster Reformation

In 1647 Richard Baxter returned to Kidderminster after a five-year absence, becoming de facto pastor over St. Mary’s parish just when it was becoming obvious that the long-hoped-for Westminster reforms were fatally stuck in the birth. And yet for Baxter, reformation remained a very live issue. As glimpses of his pastoral practice emerge in his earliest writings, Aphorisms of Justification (1649), The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), and most profoundly in Christian Concord (1653), it becomes increasingly obvious that Baxter was marching to the beat of a different drum. Gone is the emphasis on a legislated religious settlement. Gone is the insistence on discipline through hierarchical church courts. Gone is the insistence on viewing reformation as contingent upon more “godly” preaching. Instead, Baxter’s agenda for reformation was local, pastoral and practical. The thrust was overtly evangelistic.[78] The means were a complex of pastoral tasks designed specifically to give pastors the opportunity to confront each parishioner personally with the claims of the gospel. The goal was a converted parish, which thereby enabled it to become a “godly” or reformed parish.

The fullest exposition of Baxter’s pastor-led reformation is found in his Gildas Salvianus (1656). Arguing that the nation’s religious declivities were a direct result of the “pravity of their Guides,” Baxter posited that reformation would be effectively furthered, not by legislative fiat, but “by endeavouring the Reforming of the Leaders of the Church.”[79] With the long-lived Elizabethan impulse to finish the halfly-done reformation itself at a dead end and but halfly-done, Baxter sought to redirect godly zeal for reformation in a pastoral direction:” Will you shew your faces in a Christian Congregation, as Ministers of the Gospel, and there pray for a Reformation, and … the Conversion and Salvation of your hearen; and the prosperity of the Church: and when you have done, refuse to use the means by which it must be done?”[80] And though the vision for reformation which Baxter articulates is different in emphasis and means from the failed Parliamentary efforts of the 1640s, he cannily maintains the blessing of “antiquity,” the “consent of Reformed Divines,” and the appearance of continuity between Kidderminster and the Westminster Assembly itself,[81] Baxter bolstered his case with a rare citation of the 1644 Directory for the Publique Worship of God:

It is the duty of the Minister not only to teach the people committed to his charge in publike, but Privately and Particularly to admonish, exhort, reprove and comfort them upon all seasonable occasions, so far as his time, strength, and personal safety will permit. He is to admonish them in time of health to prepare for death: And for that purpose, they are often to confer with their Minister about the estate of their souls, &c. Read this over again and consider it.[82]

Baxter’s attraction to such a statement is significant. The fact that such a pastoral direction was published by the Westminster Assembly indicates the survival of a Bucerian pastoral emphasis underneath the rhetoric of the pulpit-centered ideal. However, the fact that such a passage was buried in the direction “Concerning Visitation of the Sicke” demonstrates just how marginal such a pastoral vision had become to the main thrust of puritan reformation. Baxter’s reference to this paragraph points us not so much to the source of his pastoral strategy as to his efforts to legitimize his own approach and to move his readers beyond the ineffective reformational rhetoric of the Long Parliament to consideration of a practical strategy that appeared to be producing real results, in Kidderminster at least.

But Baxter’s program for reformation was not simply puritan pastoral business-as-usual, shorn of its presbyterian pretensions and transposed for play not in the halls of power but in the nation’s parishes. Rather, his agenda was of an altogether different order. Baxter appears to have left the puritans’ Genevan ideal at its Westminster Assembly dead end and returned to England’s reformation foundations to rebuild a pastoral ministry according to Bucer’s pattern found in De Regno Christi and De Vera Animarum Cura. For all his efforts to maintain continuity between Kidderminster and the puritan past represented by the Assembly, Baxter’s starting point was not with the overall Settlement, or with altering doctrine and ceremonies. He began instead with individual pastors, seeking to insure either their conversion or their repentance and thus their reformation into an instrument that God could then use to transform a growing circle of individuals within the parish.[83] Baxter’s Reformed Pastor was thus the key to reformed parishioners, reformed parishes, and ultimately a reformed nation. To put it another way, Baxter argues that it will take a reformation pastor and strategy to bring about the hoped-for personal, parochial, and national reformation.

“To be a Bishop or Pastor,” summarized Baxter, “is … to be the guide of sinners to salvation.”[84] By deliberately equating parish pastors with bishops (and having the freedom for the only time in the Church of England’s history to do so), Baxter gave the impression of agreement with the Assembly on the equality of ministers.[85] But by refusing to freight this equality with the disputed system of Presbyterian courts, Baxter opened the door for effective local parish discipline while allowing for a range of views on the most effective theory of church government. Thus freed from the paralyzing debates which doomed the hoped-for Westminster reformation, Baxter was able to devise an evangelistic emphasis which enabled him to remake the English Protestant pastoral inheritance of preaching, sacraments, catechizing, visitation, and association into a process that actively promoted conversion and parish reformation.

When set side by side, Baxter’s understanding of reformation bears an uncanny correspondence to that advanced by Bucer a hundred years earlier. Moreover, the pastoral strategies which each designed to further their vision of parochial reformation are almost identical. Even so, the case for Baxter’s use of Bucer in devising an alternative strategy for reformation rests solely on these remarkable similarities in their programs, as nowhere in his published works or his private correspondence during the 1640s and 1650s does Baxter mention Bucer in a ministerial context.

Despite the dramatic shift in reformational emphases contained in his work, nowhere does Baxter herald his alternative strategy for reformation as such. In a 1656 letter to Thomas Wadsworth, Baxter allowed himself the boast that “I see hope of successe that convinceth me, we never hitt the way of pulling downe the Kingdome of the Devill till now.”[86] Baxter assumes his perspective on reformation rather than expounds upon it. As a result, there was little in Baxter’s Reformed Pastor that his contemporaries would have perceived as novel or controversial, which is why they, and subsequent generations of admirers and historians, simply assumed that he was another, if more successful, Puritan pastor of the Genevan sort. Even so, conscientious pastors had understood for years, tacitly if not rhetorically, that painful preaching was itself insufficient as an instrument of both conversion and reform.[87] Pastors had long been seeking to supplement their pulpit work with catechizing the young, and some even used catechizing as a means to instruct the more ignorant adults of their parishes,[88] Pastors had also since the 1560s been vexed over the lack of church discipline,[89] and some sought to examine those parishioners who wished to participate in communion. And due to the prevalence of “gross ignorance” and “scandalous livers,” some pastors felt it necessary to suspend communion altogether.[90] Moreover, there were many clergy who understood the evangelistic imperative inherent in their call.[91] Nevertheless, the primary model informing Elizabethan and early Stuart pastoral efforts was the reactionary model of the returning Marian exiles which repeatedly expressed itself in opposition to the perceived insufficiencies of the Church of England’s discipline and ceremonies, and was betrayed as such again in the 1640s as soon as the Long Parliament lifted the lid of official repression.[92] This “Puritan” reformation was informed by the example of Calvin and Beza’s Geneva and sought primarily to break away from all things Roman Catholic, establish godly preachers in the nation’s pulpits, and enforce a more biblical government and discipline through a nationally legislated settlement. The reformation sought by preachers from Anthony Gilby to Edmund Calamy all but ignored the day-to-day labors of the faithful parish shepherd, at least in their published rhetoric.[93] In contrast, the reformation sought by Martin Bucer, and by Richard Baxter after him, saw those day-to-day pastoral duties as the most important part.

It may be that Baxter’s silence about Bucer’s influence was part of an intentional effort to maintain the semblance of continuity between his Puritan predecessors and his own reconfiguration of Puritan ministry that his return to Bucerian priorities necessitated. His disastrous 1649 foray into theological polemic, Aphorisms of Justification, had already made him suspect in the eyes of many English Calvinists.[94] But as we have seen, there survived enough of a Bucerian echo in English pastoral practice, if not rhetoric, to insure that even Calvinists committed to presbyterian reform who were unhappy with Baxter’s theology could still be challenged by his perspective on ministry. Moreover, as we have seen, Baxter’s own historiography glossed over the failure of Puritan reformation and presented a united “Puritan” continuum from Cranmer (and therefore Bucer) to himself, as if the eighty-year diversion of Geneva-induced presbyterian agitation had not existed.[95] Baxter’s choice to focus on the antagonism between the “godly” and the prelates enabled him to avoid mention of the differences between Edwardian and Elizabethan reformational priorities. Ironically, it is possible that Baxter himself may have been unaware of the differences in the way “reformation” was understood in his own efforts to recount its English history.

V. Conclusion

In this article I have sought to provide a context for Richard Baxter’s pastoral ministry within the broader attributes of English Protestant pastoral practice, and I have drawn attention to features of Martin Bucer’s understanding of reformation that seem to anticipate Baxter’s pastoral breakthrough in the 1650s. I have also observed that, during the intervening century, the understanding of reformation was profoundly affected by the experiences of the returning Marian exiles, and their subsequent reaction to the perceived insufficiencies of Elizabeth’s 1559 Settlement. This reaction to Elizabeth’s “halfway reformation” took the discussion about reformation in a direction that was different in both emphasis and means from that which Bucer had previously urged. Influenced in particular by Calvin’s reformation of Geneva, this Elizabethan revision of reformation priorities sought through legislated means to rid the church of the remnants of Roman Catholicism and to replace medieval ecclesiastical structures and discipline with those perceived as more biblical. Moreover, the need to evangelize unreformed parishes was addressed by the demand for more and better preachers, the success of whose labors would lead to conversion to Protestantism and usher in the advance of godliness and true piety. However, the uneven results of Protestant preaching and the ultimate frustration of attempts to enforce the Long Parliament’s legislated reformation made Bucer’s alternative vision of a pastor-led reformation both attractive and feasible to Richard Baxter in the aftermath of England’s civil wars. The fruit of his own attempts to recon-figure his pastoral ministry along Bucerian lines, Richard Baxter’s exhortation to his fellow ministers in his Gildas Salvianus succeeded in reconnecting England’s “Puritan” pastors with their Bucerian heritage.

Notes

1. See Christopher Haigh, “The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation,” in Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (ed. Margo Todd; London: Routledge, 1995), 14–32; Patrick Collinson, “Comment on Eamon Duffy’s Neale Lecture and the Colloquium,” in England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (ed. Nicholas Tyacke; London: UCL Press, 1998), 71–72, 78–84; A. G. Dickens, “The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England 1520–1558,” in Reformation to Revolution, 157–78; Dickens, The English Reformation (1964; 2d ed.; London: B. T. Bedsford, 1989); D.J. Peet, “The Mid-Sixteenth Century Parish Clergy, with Particular Consideration of the Dioceses of Norwich and York” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1980) 84-156; Christopher Haigh’s revisionist, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). For an earlier reading of reformation not so much as from Roman Catholicism as to the fragmentation following the civil wars, see William Haller, “Reformation without Tarrying,” in The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper Brothers, 1938), 173–225.
2. See Nicolas Tyacke’s overview in his “Introduction: re-thinking the ‘English Reformation’” in England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800, 1–32; also Jeremy Gregory, “The Making of a Protestant Nation: ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ in England’s Long Reformation,” in England’s Long Reformation, 307–33.
3. See Collinson’s chapter “ ‘But Halfly Reformed,’” in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement(Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 29–44.
4. Collinson has provided the best overview of the contention between the puritan and conservative wings of the Church of England in the sixteenth century in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Tom Webster has provided a similar survey for the early seventeenth century in his Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
5. This survey assumes that descriptive concepts such as “reformation” carry meaning identifiable from their contexts. Contemporary usage demonstrates a general consensus as to what reformation signified in a given context, and it also demonstrates that meaning developed, though not necessarily progressed (in a Whiggish sense) as circumstances changed. Charting this horizontal development of meaning provides a helpful contrast to what Robert Ashton describes as “the vertical fragmentation of historical studies” by demonstrating the interconnectedness of ideas from one person to another and providing a framework in which to discuss the relative influence of one person’s ideas or meaning on another’s. See Robert Ashton, Reformation and Revolution 1558–1660 (London: Granada, 1984), xv. See also Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931; repr., New York: Norton, 1965); and Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997).
6. Baxter, Gildas Salvianus (1656), 150, 161.
7. D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 247.
8. Thomas Fuller, The Appeal of Iniured Innocence: unto The Religious Learned and Ingenuous Reader (1659), 1. See Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England, 247–50.
9. See Samuel Clarke’s utilization of a Cain versus Abel framework in A Generall Martyrologie (1651), 1. Given Baxter’s friendship with Clarke, it is likely that Baxter was familiar with this particular work and that it was influential in the development of Baxter’s own reading of history.
10. See Philip Melanchthon, The thre bokes of Cronides whych John Carion… gathered (trans. Walter Lynn; London, 1550); William Harrison, “The Great English Chronology,” cited by G.J.R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3–137.
11. See Parry, A Protestant Vision, 16.
12. Ibid., 30-31, 55-56.
13. Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, 149. See Collinson’s discussion of Baxter’s probable source, “The Authorship of A Brieff Discours off the Troubles Begonne at Franckford,” in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 191–212.
14. Baxter; Gildas Salvianus, 150–51.
15. Ibid., 151-52, 156-57, 157-58. See a similar line taken in Stephen Marshall’s Parliamentary Fast Day warnings to the same end in his Reformation and Desolation: or A Sermon tending to the Discovery of the Symptomes of a People to whom God will by no meanes be reconciled (1642). See also R. Paul House, “Old Testament Historians” in Historians of the Christian Tradition: Their Methodology and Influence on Western Thought (ed. M. Bauman and M. I. Klauber; Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman, 1995), 16-27.
16. “Setting the record straight is an important part of Baxter’s business, but only as a means, not an end. He has. … a case to argue” (N. H. Keeble, “The Autobiographer as Apologist: Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696),” Prose Studies 9, no. 2 [1986]: 114). Joan Webber has noted that “what frightens Baxter perhaps most of all is the prospect that slander may be taken for history,” (The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose [Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968], 140). For other studies of Baxter’s use of autobiography, see Margaret Bottrall’s chapter “Richard Baxter” in her Every Man a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth Century Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1958), 111–40; K.J. Weintraub’s The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 242–51; Donald Stauffer, English Biography Before 1700 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), 192–94, as well as a discussion of Baxter’s biographical style in his A Breviate of the Life of Margaret Baxter (1681), 167–69.
17. Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, 161.
18. Keeble, “The Autobiographer as Apologist,” 114.
19. This tendency is more pronounced in Baxter’s later polemical histories such as A Treatise of Episcopacy (1680), Church History of the Government of Bishops (1680), An Apology for the Nonconformist Ministry (1681), The Nonconformists Plea for Peace (1679), The Second Part of the Nonconformists Plea for Peace (1680), A Third Defence of the Cause of Peace (1681), The True History of Councils Enlarged (1682), Cain and AbeI Malignity (1689), The English Nonconformity (1690), and Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). Even so, all of the elements of Baxter’s concern with what Neil Keeble calls “the grand strife” and “personal apologetic” are present in this relatively early accounting of England’s Protestant history See Keeble, Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 117, 149. “His story matters only so far as it illustrates a larger story: personal experience exemplifies general experience” (Keeble, “The Autobiographer as Apologist,” 112). I am grateful to Professor Keeble for his interaction with me on this subject.
20. Keeble, “The Autobiographer as Apologist,” 114.
21. See Constantin Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946); Collinson, “The Reformer and the Archbishop: Martin Bucer and an English Bucerian,” in Godly People (1983), 19–44; Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519 1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: Cape, 1979); H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); D. E Wright, “Martin Bucer and England—and Scotland,” in Martin Bucer and Sixteenth Century Europe (ed. C. Krieger and M. Lienhard; Leiden: Brill, 1993), 2:523–32; Basil Hall, “Martin Bucer in England” in Marlin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community (ed. D. E Wright; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 144–60; Rosemary O’Day, The English Clergy (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), 27.
22. Martin Bucer, A treatise declaryng and shewing…, that pyctures and other ymages … are in no wise to be suffred in… churches [1535]. A Latin translation appeared in England before it was translated into English. See John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of John Foxe (l 853–58; ed. J. Pratt; 4th ed.; The Religious Tract Society, 1877), 4:669. See Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion 1350–1600 (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), 277, 296; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 1:240. For Bucer’s further interaction with English reformers during the Henrician reformation, see Diarmaid McCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 174–84.
23. Bucer was the most prominent of a number of European reformers invited to England by Cranmer to further the work of reforming the English Church. Others include Peter Martyr Ver-migli, John a Lasco, Bernadino Ochino, and Bucer’s colleague in Strasbourg, Paul Fagius. See Basil Hall, “Cranmer, the Eucharist and the Foreign Divines in the Reign of Edward VI,” in Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar (ed. P. Ayris and D. Selwyn; Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1993), 236; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 2,469-71, 481–82; Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England: From Cranmer to Baxter and Fox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 1:106–7.
24. See Bucer, Censura De Caeremoniis Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1551); and E. C. Whitaker’s English translation in Martin Bucer and the Book of Common Prayer (Great Wakering, Essex: Mayher-McCrimmon, 1974). See Bucer’s appendix on the desperate need for well-trained pastors, 148–72.
25. The immediate impact of De Regno Christi was negligible due to Bucer’s death on 28 February 1551 and the death of Edward VI in 1553. It was printed in Basel only in 1557, though it was later included in Scripta Anglicana (1577). See Wilhelm Pauck, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Melanchthon and Bucer (LLC; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 170.
26. Bucer, De Regno Christi in Melanchthon and Bucer, 268.
27. “Cambridge letter of Bucer to Calvin, 1550,” in Puritanism in Tudor England (ed. H. C. Porter; London: Macmillan, 1970), 60–61.
28. Bucer, De Regno Christi in Melanchthon and Bucer, 268, 271. See N. Scott Amos, “‘It is Fallow Ground Here’: Martin Bucer as Critic of the English Reformation,” WTJ 61 (1999): 48-49. Amos assumes that Bucer’s prescription for reformation is a program for more and better preaching. Bucer, as we shall see, certainly wanted more and better preaching, but viewed reformation as the result of a far more extensive pastoral strategy.
29. Bucer, De Regno Christi in Melanchthon and Bucer, 225–47. Part of Bucer’s program also involved a reformed understanding of penance. See his chapter (IX) on “The Ministry of the Discipline of Penance,” 247.
30. Ibid., 211.
31. Ibid., 212-13. Scott Amos rightly questions why, apart from a few references in Christopher Haigh’s English Reformations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) (see 193, for example), Bucer’s critique of England’s reformation was not cited as evidence for the prosecution in works such as J.J. Scarisbrick’s The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), and Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Amos, “Fallow Ground,” 51.
32. For Bucer’s practice of church discipline, see A. N. Burnett, “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation in the thought of Martin Bucer,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 439-56; A. N. Burnett, The Yoke of Christ: Martin Bucer and Church Discipline (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994).
33. Bucer, De Regno Christi, in Melanchthon and Bucer, 211–12.
34. Ibid., 235. See also Bucer, Concerning the True Care of Souls and Genuine Pastoral Ministry and how the latter is to be ordered and carried out in the church of Christ (Peter Beale; Strasbourg, 1538), 40-41. See also De Vera Animarum Cura, in Scripta Anglicana, 293. I am grateful to Dr. Janet Tollington, librarian of Westminster College, Cambridge, for her assistance in locating Beale’s translation. Children and “ignorant Christians” were to be carefully catechized, with an eye towards rehabilitating confirmation as an essential element of discipline. See De Regno Christi Melanchthon and Bucer, 222.
35. Bucer, De Regno Christi, in Melanchthon and Bucer; 273–77, 279–315, 333–84.
36. “[There are] so many who by all possible means which they dare employ either oppose, postpone, or delay this reformation … That is why it is fitting for Your Majesty to be quite seriously concerned about the restoration of [the clergy’s] duty and ministry and to act with a more burning energy toward this very goal, the more the renewal of this office contributes toward the salvation of all and the more its neglect endangers and its dissipation damages everyone’s salvation” (Bucer, De Regno Christi, in Melanchthon and Bucer, 266).
37. The one exception is Thomas Sampson’s attempt in 1573 to undo damage done to the cause of further reformation by the publishing of An admonition to Parliament (1572) by reminding Lord Burleigh that a program for the reform of church and state had been under way in King Edward’s time, a program which Bucer had addressed in his De Regno Christi. Sampson, who had been a fellow at Pembroke Hall when Bucer was in Cambridge, made a digest of Bucer’s book for Burleigh and urged him to consider its potential for the present situation. For Sampson’s letter to Burleigh, see John Strype, Annals of the Reformation (Oxford, 1824), II, i, 392–95. See Collinson, “The Reformer and the Archbishop,” in Godly People, 30–31.
38. Gilby was born in Lincolnshire and attended Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he achieved BA in 1531/2 and MA in 1535. After Mary’s accession, he fled from his living in Leicestershire to Frankfort in 1554. Upon his return to England under Elizabeth he was presented by Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, to Ashby de la Zouch. Gilby died in 1585. See Dictionary of National Biography (ed. Sir L. Stephen and Sir S. Lee; London, 1908-09); Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 33, 72; Collinson, “The Authorship of A Brieff Discours off the Troubles Begonne at Franckford, in Godly People,” 191–212.
39. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 35.
40. Anthony Gilby, To my louynge brethren that is troublyd abowt the popishe apparrell, two short and comfortable Epistles (1566), sig A2v.
41. Ibid., sig B3.
42. Gilby, A Pleasaunt Dialogue… between a Souldier of Barwick, and an English Chaplain (1573), sigs A6-A6v.
43. Ibid., sig C5.
44. Ibid., sig C 1.
45. For Cartwright see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 112–13, 122–25. For the Admonition, see W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, eds., Puritan Manifestoes (London: Church Historical Society, 1907), 5–55; Collinson, “John Field and Elizabethan Puritanism,” in Godly People, 339–41; Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 118–21; D.J. McGinn, The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1949).
46. McGinn, The Admonition Controversy, 373. For John Field and Thomas Wilcox, see Collinson, “John Field and Elizabethan Puritanism,” in Godly People, 335–370; Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 85–6, 116–21.
47. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 105. For the presbyterians’ reforming objectives, see 105–07.
48. Ibid., 131-32.
49. For the efforts of Elizabethan parliaments to further the cause of presbyterian reformation, see Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 269–88, 303–16; J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I & her Parliaments, 1559–1581 (2 vols.; London: Jonathan Cape, 1953–57).
50. See Collinson’s section “Presbytery in Episcopacy,” in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 333–84.
51. See Collinson’s chapter “Underground and Diverted,” in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 432–47.
52. William Perkins, Of the Calling of the Ministerie (1605), 51–52.
53. Ibid., 52-53. Further examples of Perkins’s concern could be multiplied from the published writings of “godly” ministers such as Richard Bernard (1568 1641), Samuel Hieron (1576?-1617), Robert Mandevill (1578-1618), and Samuel Crooke (1575-1649). For Bernard, the vicar of Work-sop, Nottinghamshire from 1601-1613, and afterwards the rector of Batcombe, Somersetshire, see The Faithful Shepheard ( 1607) and Two Twinnes ( 1613). For Hieron, vicar of Madbury, Devonshire, see The Preachers Plea (1604), Aarons Bells A-sounding (1623), and The Spirituall Fishing (l 618). For Mandevill, vicar of Holme, Cumberland, see Timothies Taske (1619). For Crooke, the rector of Wrington, Somerset, see Three Sermons… viz. The Ministeriall Husbandry (1615).
54. See, for example, Bishop John Williams’s articles for Lincoln Diocese in 1635, in particular his concern with Sabbath breakers, 5.(30.), 5.(31 .), and 5.(32.), in Kenneth Fincham, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1998), 2:101–02. See also Archdeacon Theophilus Aylmer’s 1625 visitation articles for London Archdeaconry, particularly his concern that ministers not lead scandalous lives and also for the disciplining of “common swearers, drunkards, blasphemers, simoniacall persons, or usurers…, witches, coniurers, southsayers, charmers, fornicators, adulterers, incestuous persons, brawlers, common slaunderers of their neighbours, raylers, scolds, filthy and lascivious talkers, sowers of discord betwixt neighbours,” (Canons 71–75 [6], 109 [20], 14, 17). Fincham states that “The fact that many sets [of visitation articles from 160342] underwent constant revisions suggests that they were valued as a means to exercise ecclesiastical justice and to recommend good practice and pastoral aspirations,” (xxviii). See also Kenneth Fhlcham, Prelate as Pastor.” The Episcopate of James I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 129.
55. Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580 1680 (London, 1982), 208.
56. See Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston’s partnership with Samuel Fairclough in Kedington, Suffolk, in Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (1683), 161-63B, 169. For a full discussion of the Fairclough account, see nay unpublished thesis, “Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor” (University of Cambridge, 1999), 190–219. See also John White’s cooperative relationship with magistrates in Dorchester in David Underdown’s Fire from Heaven: The Life of an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London: Harper-Collins, 1992), 128–30; Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680, 208.
57. Richard Sibbes, The Works of Richard Sibbes (ed. A. Grosart; 1862–64; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1983), vi, 28. For Sibbes, master of St. Catherine’s College in Cambridge and preacher at Gray’s Inn in London, see M.-E.-Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press:, 2000), and “Richard Sibbes and the ‘Truly Evangelical Church of England,’” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1991).
58. Sibbes, “The Art of Mourning,” in Josiahs Reformation, The Works of Richard Sibbes, 6:67, 75.
59. Sibbes, “The Saints Refreshing,” in ibid., 6:90.
60. See R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 6–9; J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1990), 49–77; Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
61. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England, 338.
62. See Nicholas Tyacke, The Fortunes of English Puritanism 1603–1640 (Friends of Dr. Williams’s Library, 44th Annual Lecture; London: Dr. Williams’s Library, 1990); Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,” in Reformation to Revolution (ed. M. Todd; London: Routledge, 1995), 53–70; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
63. John Morrill, “The Nature of the English Revolution,” in The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993), 5–25; Morrill, “The Coming of War,” in Reformation to Revolution, 143–54.
64. John Morrill, “The Causes of Britain’s Civil Wars,” in The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 270.
65. Ibid., 270.
66. John Graham wryly observes that “Back in the 1640s… the unity which all reformers valued was to be more precisely described in terms of a common enemy than it was in terms of a common aspiration.” J. K. Graham, “Searches for the New Jerusalem: The History and Mystery of Reformation in Mid-Seventeenth Century England” in Religion, Resistance, and Civil War (ed. G. J. Schochet; Washington, D.C.: The Folger Institute, 1990), 37.
67. See Stephen Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword: The political theology of the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1993). Baskerville’s attempt to isolate a puritan “political theology” of revolution wholly misses the point of the many “preachers” he cites as evidence. No mainstream puritans had as the goal of their preaching the kind of “revolution” which Baskerville describes. The term “revolutionary Puritan” (1:209–11) unhelpfully conflates the godly preachers of the 1630s and 1640s with the radical sectarians of the middle to late 1640s whose control of the army and of the rump transformed the intended reformation into a more inclusive political and institutional revolution. The failure to distinguish between the competing factions among the godly wrongly tars puritanism with a political radicalism its leaders would have repudiated. Baskerville confuses the Puritans’ passionate desire for reformation, pursued through political and religious means, with the intentional attempt to overturn the foundations of English society—monarchy, law and church—the thought of which was abhorrent to puritans, both episcopal and presbyterian alike. Moreover, Baskerville presents a range of “Puritan preachers” like Perkins, Sibbes, Calamy, Marshall, and Owen without regard to their own contexts as though they shared the same perspective and could therefore speak with the same voice. This failure to appreciate the spectrum of “Puritan” positions and agendas, even among the “preachers” who regularly addressed the Long Parliament in the 1640s, casts doubt on the validity of his conclusions. And though he states that he has “no intention of arguing what William Ames called ‘that Machiavellian blasphemy, that religion is nothing but a politic engine’” (7), Baskerville’s approach leads him to see the efforts of the Puritan preachers as but revolutionary politics hypocritically dressed in religious jargon. By minimizing religion and maximizing politics, Baskerville misreads the Puritan raison d’être.
68. Calamy received the BA in 1620 and MA in 1623 from Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He served as chaplain to Nicolas Felton, Bishop of Ely, and became vicar of St. Mary’s in Swaffam Prior, Cambridgeshire in 1626. He resigned the next year to become a lecturer at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, where he remained for ten years. From 1637 39, he served as rector at Rochford, Essex. In October 1639 he was elected to the perpetual curacy of St. Mary Aldermanbury in London and became one of the leading figures in the attack on Episcopacy. See E. C. Vernon’s “The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1999), especially his first chapter, “‘Calamy, and the Junto that meet at his house’: Puritan Networks, the London Clergy and the Outbreak of the English Civil War,” 26–71; W. S. Barker, Puritan Profiles (Fearne: Mentor, 1996), 207–18; Dictionary of National Biography; Samuel Palmer, The Nonconformist’s Memorial (3 vols.; London, 1802), l:76–80; A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 97; Richard L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels: Seven Nonconformists in Stuart England (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985), 10.
69. Edmund Calamy, Englands Looking-Glasse, Presented in a Sermon Preached before … Commons … December 22, 1641 (1642), 22–23.
70. Ibid., 39, 44-45.
71. Ibid., 26.
72. Ibid., 56-57.
73. Ibid., 46. Calamy pursues a similar theme in another Fast Day sermon preached two months later, Gods True Mercy to England… In a Sermon Preached before… Commons Feb.23.1641 [2] (1642), 50.
74. Of forty English counties (plus London), only sixteen plans for the implementation of Parliament’s presbyterian settlement were produced. In the end, only London, Lancashire, and Essex established functional classical systems and provincial synods, while of the rest, only Suffolk, Middlesex, Shropshire, Somerset, Cheshire, and Surrey (and later, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire) made any attempt to erect a Presbyterian system of the parliamentary model. Counties where plans were produced but were either never approved by Parliament or implemented include Westmorland, Durham, Northumberland, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Yorkshire. See E. C. Vernon, “The Sion College Conclave”; Morrill, “The Church in England 1642 9, ” in The Nature of the English Revolution, 156–57; see Bolam and Goring’s description of the reactions against Parliamentary Presbyterianism in “Presbyterians in the Parish Church: English Presbyterian Beginning,” in C. G. Bolam et al., The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London: Allen & Unwin 1968), 41–45. See also Morrill, “The Impact of Puritanism,” in The Impact of the English Civil War (ed. John Morrill; London; Colms & Brown, 1991), 63; Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603 1714 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1961), 129; Anthony Fletcher, “Oliver Cromwell and the godly nation,” in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (ed. John Morrill; London: Longman, 1990), 216–28. See also Ann Hughes, Godly Reformation and its Opponents in Warwickshire, 1640–1662 (Stratford-upon-Avon: The Dugdale Society, 1993), 1–8; W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church During the Civil War and Under the Commonwealth 1640–1660, (London, 1900), 2:1–174.
75. See Derek Hirst, “The Failure of National Reformation in the 1650s,” in Religion, Resistance, and Civil War, 51–61.
76. Ibid., 54.
77. See Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin (edited by Alan MacFarlane; Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 4/25/1647 (92), 6/20/1647 and 6/21/1647 (97), and 2/23/1651 (235–36). Though Josselin does not mention a covenant per se, he did organize a meeting where he “invited divers” to “tast their spirits in reference to discipline.” See 6/20/1647 (97). See also Alan MacFarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: A Seventeenth Century Clergyman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 24. On church covenants among separatists, see Geoffrey Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 43–69 (on separation), 75–81 (on covenants), 131–139 (on distinguishing between the prophane and the godly).
78. R. S. Paul describes Baxter’s controlling pastoral agenda as “the missionary imperative,” R. S. Paul, “Ecclesiology in Richard Baxter’s Autobiography,” in From Faith to Faith: Essays in Honor of Donald G. Müller on his Seventieth Birthday (ed. D.Y. Hadidian; Pittsburgh, Pa.: Pickwick Press, 1979), 383.
79. Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, sig A5.
80. Ibid., sigs (a7)v-(a8).
81. Ibid., sig (a7).
82. Ibid., sig (a7)-(a7)v. See A Directory for the Publique Worship of God Through out the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1644), (Bromcote; Nottinghamshire, 1980), 26.
83. Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, sig A5.
84. Ibid., 248.
85. See Jus divinum ministerii evangelici (1654), which Baxter cites with approval in Gildas Salvianus, sig (d2)v. See also Baxter’s later defense of this view in his Whether Parish Congregations Be True Christian Churches, and the Capable Consenting Incumbents, be truly their Pastors, or Bishops over their Flocks (1684).
86. Dr. Williams’s Library, London, Manuscript 59, Baxter Letters ii, 249. See also N. H. Keeble and G. E Nuttall, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), #290. See also William Lamont, “[Review ot] Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter,” in Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society 5, no. 1 (1992): 56-58.
87. See William Harrison’s The Difference of Hearers (1614), sig A4v-A5; see also George Carhon’s description of Bernard Gilpin’s ministry in The Life of Bernard Gilpin (1629), 19–27.
88. See Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
89. There was also concern among Roman Catholic clergy over clerical and lay discipline prior to the beginnings of the English reformation. See Peter Heath, The English Parish Clergy Prior to the Reformation (London: Routledge, 1969), 105–34.
90. See Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England, 119–21; Stephen Mayor, The Lord’s Supper in Early English Dissent (London: Epworth Press, 1972). Early in his ministry, Baxter himself scrupled serving communion to an unworthy congregation, see Aphorisms of justification (1649), 251.
91. See Simon Harward, Two Godlie and learned Sermons, preached at Manchester in Lancashire (1582), CVI-CVI(b).
92. Jacqueline Eales makes a similar argument in ‘% Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (ed. C. Durston and J. Eales; London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 184–92. Though it was a road that ultimately (and for most puritans, regrettably) led to “revolution,” it was a road originally intended by those pushing events in Parliament in the early 1640s to lead to reformation.
93. Of all the sixteenth and seventeenth century treatises and sermons on pastoral ministry, only George Herbert’s A Priest to the Temple (1652) gives sustained attention to those aspects of pastoral ministry which occupied most of a parish minister’s time and attention. See J. W. Black, “Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor,” 45–48.
94. See, for example, Christopher Cartwright’s animadversions against Baxter’s Aphorisms of Justification preserved in Baxter’s A Treatise of Justifying Righteousness (1676). Baxter’s account of their exchange is found on sigs A2-A5. See also John Troughton’s later critique of Baxter’s “Arminianism” in his Lutherus Redivivus: or The Protestant Doctrine of Justification by Faith onely, Vindicated (1677), sigs A2v-A3, 6–7.
95. In fact, his only comment during his Kidderminster years on the impact of the Assembly’s failed reformation is found in a personal aside buried in his “Explication” in Christian Concord (1653): “We in this county did seek for authority from the Parliament some years ago for the establishing of the Presbyterian Government; and all our endeavours were frustrate” (31).