William Bagshawe and the Derbyshire Puritans

By Crawford Gribben

In 1702, William Bagshawe, the “Apostle of the Peak,” one of the most significant of the English Puritan pastors, was looking back on a long life of Christian usefulness. [1] One of the fruits of this meditation was his extended recollection of the men who had done most to influence his life and career, “some of those who have been Workers together with God, in...the High Peak in Derbyshire.” [2] The title page of this book, De Spiritualibus Pecci (1702), indicated its historical contents and its concern to be immediately relevant to its readers. Its motto text was “2 Cor. 6. 1. We then as Workers together with him, beseech you also, that ye receive not the Grace of God in vain.” This choice of text indicates that Bagshawe understood the task of the historian to have contemporary spiritual significance, but also that those who would listen to and benefit from the historian’s accounts of the gracious activity of God in the High Peak could nevertheless receive these accounts “in vain.”

I want to emphasize that I share that sense of purpose. My task fits within Bagshawe’s paradigm of the proper reading of history, a paradigm which is also outlined in Zechariah 1:1-6. I want to encourage you to remember your fathers and the “prophets” sent to them by the Lord. I want to encourage you to remember that your fathers, by and large, failed to pay attention to the words of God’s messengers, including the words of William Bagshawe. I want to encourage you to remember the motto that will one day be stamped over all human history: “Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers?” (Zech. 1:5-6). And I want to do all that as I describe for you the life and career of the “Apostle of the Peak.”

I want to first say a word about books. William Bagshawe has not received a great deal of historical attention. He has been the subject of two biographies, written almost 300 years apart, by John Ashe (1704) and John M. Brentnall (1970). Ashe’s biography is the major source upon which all subsequent accounts of Bagshawe’s life have been based. Brentnall noted in addition that he had access to unpublished manuscripts, sermon notes, biblical commentaries, and life writings then owned by Major F. E. G. Bagshawe of Ford Hall. [3] I should explain that I have not had access to those records, but I have been able to read one book that Brentnall noted as being “lost”— Living Water: Or Waters for a Thirsty Soul (1653). [4] This book dates from the period of Bagshawe’s ministry in Glossop and gives us a good indication of the style and content of his preaching in the parish church during the 1650s, the Cromwellian period. Living Water was also by far the earliest of Bagshawe’s publications in a literary career which would stretch for almost fifty years.

So let’s think now about the life and ministry of the “Apostle of the Peak.” William Bagshawe was born in January 1628 in Litton Hall and was baptized two days later at Tideswell. The family was prosperous and owned extensive property in the parishes of Glossop and Chapel-en-le-Frith, including several lead mines which became the basis of their later fortune. Bagshawe lived in Litton Hall for the first fifteen years of his life, but it was not a life of selfish acquisition. His father had been orphaned in his youth, and his experiences of deprivation had encouraged him to care deeply about the fortunes of the miners employed in his works, as Bagshawe’s first biographer recorded: “The Rememberance of his early afflictions, and a thankful Sense of God towards him, fill’d his Soul with such a Tenderness for the Fatherless and the Widows, that he wou’d always heartily espouse and assert their righteous, but oppressed Cause.” [5] Thus, in 1634, when King Charles I imposed a special tax called “Ship Money” on the locality, a tax which many working men found particularly unjust, Bagshawe’s father led the local resistance — to the brink of a riot. Bagshawe’s father was arrested and imprisoned in Derby for an unknown duration. William, his son, would have been only six years old.

But when William Bagshawe came to write his recollections of his childhood, it was not his family’s wealth or his father’s political concerns upon which he focused. Instead, he emphasized his spiritual history: “Poor I,” as he often referred to himself, “can readily own it as a Favor from God, that I was brought forth, (and very much brought up) in the High-Peak.” [6] He was a local boy, and could hardly be blamed for believing that the geographical features of the area had their own unique charms: “Though the Peak...be accounted a less fertil part of the Countrey, if not of the Land, yet...more Authors than one or two have taken and given notice of some Wonders in it,” he explained. “And blessed be God! there have been in it Wonders of Grace, and not of Nature only.” [7]

But this had not always been the case. Bagshawe’s spiritual history of the High Peak noted the difficulties of an earlier age, when “preaching was a more rare Commodity than now it is in other parts of England.” [8] “Mine Ears have heard my Father (and others of his time) tell, that...the Word of the Lord (as opened and applied in Sermons) was, as to the rarity of it, precious, and there was in the Peak less open vision.” But it was in that situation that local believers took initiatives in developing a gospel work: “the truly noble Lady Bowes maintained several worthy Preachers, and sent ’em thither,” Bagshawe explained, into some of the most challenging parts of the district. [9]

Bagshawe himself appears to have benefitted enormously from some of the gospel workers who were active in the area. He left little record of his own early spiritual experiences, but his biographers agree that he came to saving faith — or, as one biographer put it, “received a deep Tincture of Religion”— under the ministry of a minister and school master who were “godly conformists”— that is, Puritans or evangelicals who were active in the ministry of the Church of England. [10] It was through their influence that Bagshawe enjoyed the “privilege” of an “early conversion to God.” [11]

Bagshawe was not the only one to benefit from the ministry of these godly conformists. In his later writing, he was especially concerned to relate the spiritual history of what he called “my beloved Glossop.” [12] In the northeast of the county, during the period of Bagshawe’s youth, Glossop was enjoying the ministry of Robert Cryer, who, Bagshawe explained, “had been a Labourer indeed, more than twenty Years, spending and being spent in a diligent Instruction, of an exemplary Conversation, before the beloved People there...he was the Man, by whose hands the Lord laid, if not the first (the fairest) Foundation for a Successor to build on.” [13] Cryer seems to have been a model minister. He took every opportunity he could, Bagshawe explained: “he was loath, when an Assembly was before him, to dismiss it till he had spoken a word from (and for) God in (and to) it.” [14] “He was a careful and compassionate Visiter of the Sick,” Bagshawe continued, though it was his dealings with the sick that became his undoing: “upon visiting one that was visited with the Fever, he himself was seized with that Distemper, which proved to be the Messenger of death to him.” [15] And yet, Bagshawe recalled, Cryer was also an unusual minister. His preaching had been “somewhat singular”: [16]

He not seldom spoke in a sort of Metre, I believe that after some time he could not avoid (tho’ I cannot say) (or think) that he did at any time affect this Mode, seeing his ordinary discourse had a strain (or Vein) of this nature. I beg leave to relate one Passage, as he was in bearing Witness against Sin, particularly that too common Sin of excessive Drinking, the words that come next fell from him,—

They go from one, to two;
from two to four,
and from four,
to fourteen and more. [17]

It was a curious pulpit habit — but not one which appeared to hinder Robert Cryer’s spiritual usefulness. Bagshawe drew upon his eccentricity to observe that God was prepared to use men with only moderate preaching abilities: “the ablest Preachers are not always the most effectual Prevailers. The most skilful Seeds-men have not alwayes the largest crops...though our Saviour Christ spoke as never man spoke, yet there were far more converted by the Ministry of the Apostles than by Christ himself.” [18] Whatever Cryer’s pulpit habits, however, it was clear that his ministry sustained a clear evange­listic edge in an age in which preaching was an unusual pursuit for a clergyman.

Perhaps it was the example of Robert Cryer that encouraged Bagshawe to believe that God could use men like him in the work of gospel ministry. His father was keen that Bagshawe should enter the family business and act as a custodian of the family fortune, just as he had earlier done, and there were “several Attempts to have fix’d him in other Employments.” [19] But Bagshawe felt compelled to prepare for a life of Christian ministry, and it was to that end that he entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1643, in one of the most tumultuous years of English history.

England, in 1643, was in the grip of civil war, and to go up to Cambridge was to identify very publicly with the revolutionary side in that conflict. The town’s MP was Oliver Cromwell, after all, and the area was identified as a Parliamentary stronghold. It was most likely while he was studying in Cambridge that Bagshawe signed the Solemn League and Covenant — a religious and political statement that was required of public figures of all kinds, as well as ordinary people in religious and educational callings, which agreed that the Scottish army would come to the aid of the English Parliament if Parliament would agree to remodel the English church “according to the example of the best Reformed churches.” The covenant meant very different things to different people, and it could not sustain the initial unity it created. But in the mid-1640s, the covenant lay behind the drafting of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the most important statement of Reformed orthodoxy in the seventeenth century, a statement of theological convictions which in its various adaptations came to undergird Puritanism in mid-century and far beyond. Many — including Bagshawe — believed that the covenant required the reformation of the national church along strictly Presbyterian lines.

In Cambridge, Bagshawe studied with and listened to the preaching of the “burning and shining Lights” of English Puritanism. [20] Their teaching provided students with a firm foundation of doctrinal orthodoxy, from which Bagshawe appears never to have departed. He “retain’d to the last many Notions he had learnt from those eminent Divines,” his first biographer recorded. [21] And those “notions” would have been consonant with those of the Westminster Confession. We know that because one of Bagshawe’s lecturers was John Arrowsmith, a theologian who became the Regius Professor of Divinity in 1644, and who was also a member of the Westminster Assembly. Bagshawe’s biographers emphasize the extent to which he prized the notes he took in lectures and his continually meditating upon them in the later stages of his life.

But Bagshawe could not study forever in the seclusion of the university. He left Cambridge in 1646 and returned to his home county of Derbyshire. He was now a probationer, someone who had trained for and been set aside for the gospel ministry, but who had not yet received a call to a local congregation. And congregations appeared reluctant to call him; he was, after all, only eighteen years old. But Bagshawe was given preaching opportunities and began his career in the pulpit in the chapel at Warmhill, in his native parish of Tideswell, where he spent three months as a probationary minister. Thereafter he moved to Attercliffe, two miles outside Sheffield, where he was employed to assist James Fisher, the minister of St. Peter’s, while also serving as chaplain for and boarding with the family of Colonel John Bright. [22] There it was Bagshawe’s good fortune to inherit a pulpit whose ministry anticipated his own. The church in Attercliffe had been led by Stanley Gower, who, like Bagshawe’s tutor in Cambridge, was a member of the Westminster Assembly and a sponsor of John Owen’s Death of Death. But the Attercliffe church had been “vacant” since 1642, and had depended for weekly preaching on the abilities of local elders. It was Bagshawe’s duty to reorganize the church as best he could. But he did so even as he served in the household of Colonel Bright, leading morning and evening prayers and catechizing the children and servants. We have some records from this period of Bagshawe’s table talk, and it is astonishing to see the theological maturity and appropriately stated biblical convictions of this lad in his later teens.

Others must have noticed his gifts. After just under three years in Attercliffe, while still in his very early 20s, Bagshawe was examined in proper Presbyterian fashion and ordained into the gospel ministry in Chesterfield on January 1, 1651. He would have been very strictly examined. The elders would have questioned his adherence to the Solemn League and Covenant, the evidences of his education, and would have tested his godly character. Their decision to ordain him signaled their approval of his life and doctrine. Bagshawe remained in Attercliffe for six months after his ordination, until a momentous day when he received a call from a church on the “remotest Corner of his native County.” [23] Bagshawe had also been making calls of his own. On June 11, 1651, he married Agnes Barker, whom he had met through the church in Attercliffe. Two weeks later, he was installed as minister in Glossop.

These new arrangements — settled within a fortnight of each other — would do much to determine the future shape of Bagshawe’s life and Christian ministry. His new parish was “one of the most extensive in the north of England. The people under Bagshawe’s charge lived as far apart as Salter’s Bridge, near the Yorkshire border, and Marple Bridge, on the Cheshire boundary, while from north to south the parish extended from Woodhead to Chapel-en-le-Frith. All told, the area embraced by the parish boundary was approximately fifty thousand acres.” [24] The parish contained several congregations, with chapels in Charlesworth, Mellor, and Hayfield, and it was Bagshawe’s responsibility to look after them all. It was a daunting task for someone with his relatively limited experience.

But, as at Attercliffe, Bagshawe was fortunate to enter into the labors of godly men who had gone before him in Glossop. This was especially the case with Robert Cryer, whose ministry had done so much to establish biblical Christianity in the town. But Cryer’s ministry had been followed by that of several other incumbents — their ministries were so short that Bagshawe could not even remember their names — and they had done little to maintain Cryer’s emphases. By 1651, the parish was not in a healthy spiritual state. Bagshawe noted that believers were dismissed in the town as “a Set (or Sect) of silly Persons; a sort of some weak-headed, feeble-minded Men and Women, that understand not what is their real and main Interest, according to a modern Phrase (I doubt) they are Phanaticks...the very Off-scowering of the Earth...unfit to live and breathe in the common Air.” [25] Believers in Glossop were being despised by their neighbors. Many of the townspeople appeared to understand little of the basic truths of the Christian religion, so Bagshawe began to preach on the fundamental doctrines of the faith. [26]

Bagshawe remained in Glossop for around eleven years and was remembered as being “very diligent and faithful in fulfilling all the Parts of his Ministry…. His Conversation was with such Meekness, inoffensiveness, and undissembled Affection, as gain’d him an universal Esteem.” [27] Something of the flavor of that ministry can be gained from the contents of his earliest publication, Living Water: Or Waters for a Thirsty Soul (1653). This book, which Bagshawe dedicated to Colonel John Bright, in whose home he had resided in Attercliffe, recorded a series of sermons preached on Revelation 21:6. Bagshawe realized how dangerous it was to preach on an apocalyptic passage in the immediate aftermath of civil war, regicide, and constitutional revolution, when passages like this had been used so fancifully to support all kinds of radical agendas. Instead, he took care to distinguish his approach to apocalyptic interpretation from that of the political and religious radicals, but argued that it was “safe to say that those (who yet are no Millenaries)...may hope for the enjoyment of special and evident manifestations of God to his people in the state of grace, though the compleat and full discovery be reserved for the state of glory.” [28] And in Living Water, Bagshawe set out the basic truths of Christianity.

First, Bagshawe insisted, “all men be lost in Adam, yet they are not all lost irrecoverably.” [29] He took a very biblical view of the terrible condition in which the people of Glossop found themselves. He spoke freely about the reality of sin and the lost condition of those townspeople who had no saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. They had broken God’s law, and they deserved the punishment of eternal death. But their position was not irrecoverable. Bagshawe also argued that “you who are dead, may be alive; you who are lost, may be found. There’s ground of hope for such souls, if we look, 1. To the spring of this water of life, viz., God’s eternall love.” [30] It was only God’s mercy that could make any difference to these lost sinners, and so it was that Bagshawe delighted in preaching about God’s love. It is, he said, “the attribute which God most delights to magnifie…. God is not only loving, but love it self. And (one observes) that though we cannot say so of Gods power, or of other Attributes, yet of his love, of this Attribute; he hath extended it to the utmost. Greater love hath none.” [31] It was significant, he argued, that “God is nowhere called the Father of Judgements,” though he is called the “Father of mercies.” [32] Mercy and love were linked in that God’s love was being extended to those who did nothing to deserve it — those who had nothing to recommend themselves even to a God who was full of love and kindness. For this God of love brought new life to the spiritually dead.

Bagshawe’s descriptions of that new life drew upon the world he saw around him in the High Peak. He recognized that there was often an awareness of God even among those who lived as his enemies: “there are some remains of light, some glimmerings of man since the Fall...there is some twilight in the Sons of Adam,” he explained. [33] He noted that “our Naturall estate is a Winter state, dead and fruitless, but when the Sun of Righteousness darts forth the warmth of his grace, the roots in our hearts are loosened, the fruits of holiness in our lives are produced.” [34] All this was possible, he continued, because Christ brought “his alsufficiency to our all-necessity: we cannot want that which Christ cannot supply, not beg that which Christ cannot bestow.” [35] And Bagshawe was urgent in his appeals for sinners to come to Christ for salvation. He begged his listeners to believe the things he told them from the Bible. They could be saved from their lost condition, but only if they came to Christ for salvation: “We may come, it is our privilege; we must come, it is our duty.” [36]

Bagshawe was equally urgent in his exhortation of Christians. He called believers to a normal Christian life. He urged them to be single-minded in their pursuit of heaven. “Too many never set forth in earnest for Heaven, because they are loth to leave the earth behinde them,” he noted. [37] The high degree of sanctification he expected of Christians in Glossop called for significant sacrifice, but he was unembarrassed to ask for it. The Christian life required total commitment. Preaching on the parable of Jesus, he explained that “most would sell some; many would sell much,” but “the wise Merchant sold all.” [38] The Christians in Glossop were therefore to be ruthless in rooting out of their lives whatever grieved the Spirit. “Christ died that he might destroy the works of the devil, and shall we build what he destroyed?” he enquired. [39] And he encouraged believers to take this action knowing that they were working in accordance with God’s Word and in cooperation with His Spirit: “Christ redeemed men not onely from sins Condemning, but also from sins Commanding power,” he stated. [40] “Christs love was a Purging as well as a Pardoning love, Renewing as well as Redeeming,” he continued. [41] Therefore, “the Spirit comes to them as a Reformer, for whom the Son came as a Redeemer.” [42]

It was on that basis that Bagshawe urged the Christians in Glossop to let the Word of Christ dwell in them richly: “Exercise thy self unto Meditation. Though the Water of life descend plentifully into the publique Ordinances, yet it is but usually like a landflood, some flashes whereof are upon...the soul for the present, whiles for want of Meditation it soaks not into the heart for suture.” [43] Christians had to take time to let the Word do its work. Furthermore, he insisted that the believers should also be “diligent in the use of secret prayer. When thou prayest (though not always) enter into thy closet. Self-love & the wind of spiritual pride may carry men to pray with others; but that wind doth not usually arise from this point of the compasse, which carries men constantly to pray alone. The more secresie, usually the more sincerity.” [44] The Christians in the church in Glossop were to be active in living for God.

Like many other Puritans, Bagshawe linked his exhortations to Christian living to promises as to the benefits that strict kind of lifestyle would bring. A life of holiness would bring enormous benefits, he continued, and a principle benefit was the enjoyment of assurance of salvation. Believers in Glossop in the mid-seventeenth century probably struggled with the question of assurance of salvation more than modern Christians do today. Bagshawe wisely and biblically encouraged believers to expect a level of assurance commensurate with their pursuit of the life of holiness: “the waters of our sanctification, and the waters of our consolation are usually at the same ebbe. Though the smallest waters of grace will carry thee to Heaven, yet they will not carry thee comfortably through earth.” [45] It was a timely reminder — a reminder that any individual who has given up on the pursuit of holiness can have no assurance that he or she is in fact saved by grace or bound for heaven.

Thus Bagshawe urged the people of Glossop to pursue diligence and discipline in the Christian life, and drove home the need for personal and family piety. He realized the busyness of the lives of so many of his parishioners, but insisted that things below should not take up too much of our time. He wrote: “Earth should not justle Heaven. There is a time for every thing (saith the Wise man) yet ’tis to bee feared, that many who finde a time for other things, scarce ever finde a time for prayer…. I might here seasonably advise men to beware lest earthly employments should occasion their neglect of, or in a family, or closet prayers; and especially in reference to morning exercises.” [46] And yet the duties of the day still had to be fulfilled. Bagshawe had very specific advice for those who sought to balance their duties to their Savior and to their employer: get out of bed earlier; use time more efficiently; and work much, much harder. [47]

It seems that Bagshawe was following his own advice, for these were years of enormous activity. His ministry in Glossop appears to have been blessed with a large number of conversions. As a true spiritual father, he appears to have loved his people as much as he was loved by them, and his first biographer records that “no Offers of greater Preferment cou’d draw him away” from the congregation that met in the parish church. [48] But Bagshawe had wider concerns as well, and was also active in the affairs of the churches of the district. While he lived in Glossop, he attended the meetings of the Lancashire Presbyterian ministers, which met in Manchester, and took an active role in the production of their polemical publications. [49] He also attended the meetings of Presbyterian ministers which met in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. [50] And he took care to continue correspondence with other ministers throughout the country. [51]

These were also years of family joys and sorrows. William and Agnes recorded the birth of a stillborn child in 1653, as well as the safe deliveries of two sons, John in 1654 and Samuel in 1656. [52] So the 1650s continued with Bagshawe busy in his preaching in Glossop and the chapels associated with the parish, busy in the life of the Presbyterian churches throughout the north-western counties, and busy at home with Agnes and his happily expanding family.

But then sadness struck. Bagshawe was to be parted from his people — and not by his choice or theirs. In the late summer of 1662, two years after the end of the Cromwellian revolution and the restoration of the English monarchy and its religious and political establishment, on that “fatal Bartholomew Day,” those ministers who refused to conduct worship according to the new standards of the Church of England were expelled from their pulpits and driven into dissent. [53] Bagshawe was one of the thousands of preachers who preferred to maintain a good conscience, with all of the social and political uncertainties that would attend it, than to embrace in a pragmatic and opportunistic manner a career in the new Church of England.

For Bagshawe, the issue was quite simple — it boiled down to whether anyone other than Jesus Christ could rule in His church. The debates were not merely about whether pastors and their people liked the newly imposed set forms of prayer, or the more elaborate liturgy, or the more sumptuous variety of worship. The issue was whether anyone other than Jesus Christ could command the consciences of His people. Bagshawe understood quite clearly that this right was reserved for Jesus Christ, and argued that case on the basis of Deuteronomy 12:32 and 1 Corinthians 11:2. [54] The implications of his argument were simple. It meant that Christians should only employ in their worship those elements which had been clearly commanded by Jesus Christ — singing, praying, preaching, giving, and the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But the new rites of the Church of England added all kinds of other elements of worship. The king, Charles II, may have believed he had the power to authorize these new rituals. But Bagshawe was quite clear that his claiming of that right was identifying his power as antichristian. [55]

So Bagshawe, together with thousands of Puritan pastors, was expelled from the national church and driven into dissent. Up and down the land, congregations were broken up and pastors were driven into silence. Many of these believers and pastors suffered immeasurably, such as the Covenanters in Scotland, many of whose leaders suffered horrific deaths and many of whose members were shipped abroad into slavery in the Caribbean; or the Baptists in England, with leaders like John Bunyan who spent more than a decade in prison. But things were different in the remote High Peak. Bagshawe’s “sufferings were few and inconsiderable compar’d with those of many of his ejected Brethren,” his earliest biographer recorded. [56]

“When he was turned out of his Benefice, he felt not the straits of an indigent condition, but had a good estate of his own, and an Heart to honour God with it.” [57]

Unlike many believers, Bagshawe enjoyed the relative security of earthly wealth, but like many believers, he used whatever wealth he had to advance the glory of God. Leaving Glossop, no doubt with a broken heart, Bagshawe returned with his family to his father’s new home, Ford Hall, near Chapel-en-le-Frith. [58] His ejection from the parish church must have been devastating. How could he have responded to the sudden forced ending of a long ministry which had borne such good fruit? How did he explain to his young sons, then only eight and six years old, that it was now a crime for them to worship God in the only manner which they had known? But God was working amid all that tragedy and heartbreak to begin a new movement of grace in which Bagshawe’s ministry would be extended far beyond what he might have imagined as the preacher in Glossop parish church. In the providence of God, Brentnall has noted, “Bagshawe’s ejection from Glossop marks the beginning of a ministry which for its integrity, tenacity and usefulness has rarely been surpassed in the history of English pastoral work.” [59]

Bagshawe was ejected in August 1662, and returning to Ford, attended Sunday worship every morning and evening in the parish church of Chapel-en-le-Frith. But he also immediately set about an itinerant ministry that would range across the High Peak region and would be maintained until his death forty years later. He let nothing — not even the law — separate him from his former parishioners. Brentnall concludes: “Apart from occasional trips to Manchester, where he engaged in informal discussion with other ejected ministers respecting the lamentable change in the destiny of the Church, Bagshawe never left his ‘beloved people.’” [60] But now his ministry was beginning to extend far beyond them.

It is clear that Bagshawe loved his people. Later in life, he wrote very movingly of the believers for whom he had maintained such devoted pastoral care. Their number included the socially elevated, like Sir John Gell and his wife, Lady Catherine. “The Lord only knew, (though his Servants guessed at it) how sweet and satiating the Communion was, which she had with the Lord in secret, where the choicest books were read, and meditated on,” Bagshawe remembered. “Might she not say, she was never less alone, then when alone?” [61] The Gells were “a Blessed Couple; and did as did Zechariah and Elizabeth, walk Hand in Hand in heavens way.” [62] Other of Bagshawe’s parishioners were of more humble circumstances, like Francis Gee, whose “House in Kyndar, was to me and divars (who loved the Truth) a little Sanctuary,” Bagshawe reported, “when his Infirmities detain’d him, and some Laws gave some of us less Liberty, in greater Sanctuaries; whose Dear Wife Sarah, was a hearty Friend to all that loved the Truth for the Truths sake.” [63] Preaching wherever he could find a venue, in stately house or cottage, Bagshawe loved and was loved by the very rich and the very poor.

Bagshawe was preaching everywhere, and gathering believers into little groups for the purposes of fellowship wherever he could. But these new conditions called for new forms of church organization. Presbyterianism, with its complex system of church courts, was no longer possible in a climate where secrecy was everything. The legal environment which made it illegal to worship as dissenters made it impossible to maintain a Presbyterian system. Out of the ruins of High Peak Presbyterianism there emerged a “loosely-organised nonconformity.” [64] Bagshawe was a principal leader, of course, and he engaged in extensive tours of secret preaching to sustain these scattered groups of Christians. The chapel in Charlesworth became a focus for these secret gatherings during this period. But other opportunities presented themselves which saw Bagshawe move far beyond the series of chapels in which he had ministered for the previous decade. At “Gospel Brow,” now on Owlgreave Farm, near Chapel-en-le-Frith, Bagshawe would preach under a tree to large crowds of local farm workers. In Bradwell, in 1662, the immediate impact of Bagshawe’s preaching resulted in the erection of a chapel building in a village which had never had any support for dissenting worship.

The impact of that secret preaching was even felt in Marple Bridge, a village which Bagshawe had unsuccessfully attempted to evangelize during his ministry in Glossop. The townspeople really only became receptive to the gospel after 1662. Perhaps they understood the importance of the message when they saw Bagshawe running the terrible risk of imprisonment to bring it to them.

The opportunities immediately following the great ejection of 1662 were brought to a sudden end with the First Conventicle Act (1664). The Act punished anyone over the age of sixteen attending a service of divine worship that was not conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer. The Act was followed by the Five Mile Act (1665), which forbade ejected ministers from living within five miles of any corporation town — and therefore well out of reach of the dissenting community which might remain within them. These harsh measures were designed to isolate dissenting communities from their leaders, evidently in the hope that these communities would settle down and conform to the Church of England. If that was the goal of the framers of the legislation, it failed to account for the dissenters in the High Peak. Bagshawe knew that each of his older preaching venues were within five miles of corporation towns, Chapel-en-le-Frith or Tideswell — so he found new places to preach outside their five mile boundaries. And he was extremely active in these new endeavors. He preached every Sunday night to one of his congregations; he visited homes during the week; and he spent every Thursday night with two other local ministers, John Jones of Charlesworth and Robert Porter of Pentrich. These men certainly felt the lash of the law. John Jones, for example, had gathered his congregation in his home in Charlesworth, but was discovered and was imprisoned in Chester on account of his illegal preaching. Bagshawe not only paid his fine, he also preached in his place. Brentnall imagines the scene:

After nightfall, when the howling of the wind over Charlesworth Hill and the bleating of sheep were the only sounds which broke the stillness of the scene, men and women would furtively leave their cottages in the hamlet below and ascend the hill to the ancient stone chapel. There they would await the arrival of the minister after a hazardous ten-mile journey across the moors from Ford. Numerous were the occasions when the singing of psalms and the gracious promises of the Gospel mingled with the voice of nature outside. Frequent, too, were the emergencies when the most athletic men of the village, strategically posted around the foot of the hill with lanterns, burst in on the services to give warnings of the approach of the constable’s lackeys, enabling Bagshawe to escape into the darkness. [65]

Throughout the period, Bagshawe was never convicted of illegal preaching.

These were difficult years, preaching on the edge of legality and with the constant threat of betrayal, conviction, and imprisonment. Bagshawe certainly knew what it was to be the target of informers, but also witnessed remarkable divine interposition. Ashe wrote, “Two Informers that once came to disturb him, ingeniously acknowledged, that his very Countenance struck a Terror into them; and one of them before he died, sent often to beg his Prayers and Pardon.” [66] But Bagshawe pressed on with his mission.

These were also years of significant advance for the gospel. When Bagshawe was denied the opportunity of preaching in the established chapels he sought out other opportunities of taking the gospel to those places where it had never borne fruit. Tintwhistle was one of several communities that had its first encounter with the gospel through Bagshawe’s preaching the 1660s. The undertaking was significant: “The whole valley was, in the mid-seventeenth century, thickly studded with farmsteads. Bridle bridges were few and roads non-existent. Sheep-walks and footpaths provided the main routes from one farm to another. A dense undergrowth of bushes and trees extended over almost the entire area from Mottram to Woodhead, a distance of ten miles. The local inhabitants maintained their existence in virtual independence of the outside world, growing their own food and weaving their own clothing. Few places in England were so remote from the national scene.” [67] Bagshawe first preached there in 1668:he visited every farm and cottage, speaking to the inhabitants about the gospel, and saw such success that he gathered a church in a barn. These difficult years were years of extraordinary expansion. Throughout the 1660s, Bagshawe’s illegal preaching ministry was the means by which a dozen new congregations were formed in the High Peak. [68]

But this period of extraordinary expansion came to a sudden end with the imposition of the Second Conventicle Act (1670). The Act was much harsher than the earlier version, and imposed massive financial penalties on anyone caught attending or hosting a religious meeting conducted on any lines other than those of the Church of England. Bagshawe understood the danger this represented to the ordinary people who were attending his meetings, and turned instead to support their faith through the production of helpful literature.

The first fruit of his new occupation was Principiis Obsta, The Readie Way to Prevent Sin (1671), an extended exposition of two texts, Proverbs 30:32 (“if thou hast done foolishly in lifting up thyself, or if thou hast thought evil, lay thine hand upon thy mouth”) and Matthew 12:36 (“But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment”). These sermons were quite different from those recorded in his Glossop ministry in Living Water. The earlier sermons were more evidently evangelistic, while the sermons recorded in Principiis Obsta, The Readie Way to Prevent Sin focused quite specifically on the needs of believers. And he was only too aware of the problems of sustaining a godly thought life in the midst of persecution. Bagshawe’s exposition began as might be expected: “The worst of other sins are the issues of thought-sins. When evil thoughts have proceeded out of the heart, then from them do proceed murders, adulteries, yea, and blasphemies.” [69] But he went on to apply this observation in insightful ways. He was particularly concerned that believers should concentrate in worship: “Have not the services which we have performed to God been attended with much distraction? Have we not sung one thing, and thought another thing?” [70] It was a point worth making; even as believers gathered for worship in secret, they should not let the conditions of their meeting or the terrible dangers of discovery tempt their minds to wander from the greatest of all human occupations. But Bagshawe pressed the point even further. What about sins of thought against the persecutors? “Are we all clean from seditious thoughts against our Rulers, when they have (as we judged) held an hard hand over us?” [71] His discussion was particularly searching, for Bagshawe was only too aware of the ease with which sins of thought could be indulged: “Thought-sins may be speedily and frequently repeated. He that never hath his hand in his Neighbours blood, may hate him, and so murder him many times over.” [72] Christians should take care how they used their minds: “It may not prove so easie as most imagine to obtain the pardon of thought-sins.” [73] And “dare you give way to those thoughts, against which the wrath of God is revealed?” [74]

Bagshawe was also concerned that believers should be holy in their speech. It was not that Christians should never be jolly: “I am clear that it is for the honour of Christianity, when Christians are not morose and austere, but of affable inviting obliging carriage.” [75] Nevertheless, he insisted, Christians should never forget that they will be held to account for every word they utter. And “if that word that startled them do not stir us, we may fear it is because our hearts are more hard, or less under a firm belief of the future state, that state to come, which shall begin, but shall never end.” [76] Words were to be used wisely: “We should learn of our blessed Master to raise heavenly conference out of earthly occasions.” [77] And we should listen to our own words, and the words of others, to ascertain our spiritual condition: “Words are truly said to be to the heart, what an Index is to a Book, they shew the principal things that are contained in it.” [78]

This was the kind of preaching Bagshawe hoped would help the believers as they continued to meet in secret despite the intentions of a brutal and repressive government. But the High Peak Christians were allowed another brief glimpse of liberty with the Royal Declaration of Indulgence in March of 1672, when Charles II suspended the penal laws against protestant nonconformists. Fifty-four Presbyterian chapels were licensed in Derbyshire alone. Bagshawe seized the opportunity. He returned to his old round of public preaching. Brentnall writes: “Fortnightly engagements were commenced at Saddleworth, Charlesworth, Malcoff, Hucklow, Bradwell, Ashford, Middleton, Chelmorton, Bank End, Marple Bridge, Edale, and other centres of Nonconformity in the north-west of the county. At [Dinting] he preached at the newly licensed home of William Garlicke, and on three Sundays of each month he ministered in the rapidly expanding congregation of Dissenters at Chapel-en-le-Frith.” [79] He also returned to Glossop, preaching a monthly sermon on the Lord’s Day and a monthly lecture on a week day. People “flock’d to his Sermons, as Doves to the Windows,” according to his first biographer. The other Sundays Bagshawe filled with visits to “several other places,” including a fortnightly visit to Ashford. [80]

But these conditions were rapidly reversed when Parliament, fearing that the King secretly intended to extend toleration to Roman Catholics, suspended the Indulgence and imposed the first Test Act in 1673. The Act restricted public office to adherents of the Church of England, but it also served to unnerve dissenters, who could clearly see the direction of government policy. Bagshawe continued this pattern of preaching after the Indulgence had been called in, but “privately, and with great Care, prudently changing the Place almost every Lord’s-Day, that he might not expose his Hearers to the Lash of the severe Laws in force against him.” [81] “The comparative freedom of the previous year was now exchanged for fifteen years of strenuous, wary living for Bagshawe and his scattered congregations…. During the day the artisans, cobblers, miners and shopkeepers who had received their spiritual and moral liberty through the preaching of the Word of God, worked at their respective occupations, but as soon as night shrouded the surrounding hills they would steal along the narrow country lanes and slip into some rough stone cottage, there to read the Scriptures, and pray.” [82] Bagshawe returned to writing, publishing the first volume of a massive project entitled The Riches of Grace Displayed in 1674.

The liberty of dissenters was “enlarged” after the discovery of the Popish Plot in 1678 only to be withdrawn again towards the end of the reign of Charles II in the early 1680s. These were unsettling times, as believers sought to make full use of their liberties even as they realized that those liberties could be rapidly removed, and that those who had taken greatest advantage for the spreading of the gospel during times when liberty was offered would be all too exposed when that liberty was lost. But some dissenters were tempted not only to have hard thoughts about their persecuting rulers, but to actively seek to remove them. Bagshawe dismissed those who sought by revolutionary methods to enlarge the rights of England’s substantial dissenting population, and his first biographer records that Bagshawe had “an ill Opinion” of the attempt by the Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II, to depose his Catholic uncle, James II, in 1685. [83] Bagshawe understood that there were times when Christians simply had to suffer.

But they were suffering as their enemies were appearing to prosper. It was in this period that a Jesuit seminary was organized at Spinkhill, near Sheffield, still a center of Catholic education. Highly trained Catholic missionaries were beginning to circulate among the people Bagshawe had evangelized. Others were being harassed by Quakers, who were disturbing the secret meetings for worship and reporting them to the authorities. With threats like these, it was essential that the High Peak Puritans should be grounded in their faith.

Bagshawe therefore developed new methods of Bible teaching in addition to the preaching for which his ministry had become well known. First, in public worship, like other dissenters in the period, he began to offer brief but not insubstantial comments on the biblical passages he read during divine worship. [84] Bagshawe shared this method with other dissenting pastors in the northwest. Matthew Henry, for example, collected his public comments on Bible readings in his famous commentary. But while Henry used his comments to range throughout the body of divinity, Bagshawe used them to concentrate the minds of his listeners upon the most significant dangers that they faced, intending to “confirm his Hearers in the Protestant Religion, and to arm them against Popery.” [85] Secondly, in the privacy of his own home, Bagshawe organized an annual conference for young men. These conferences were designed to offer basic training for those young men who might be interested in entering the Christian ministry. These were often remarkable occasions. [86] Bagshawe set aside three weeks every summer for these conferences, which rotated around other venues, including Charlesworth. [87]

And his writing continued. Bagshawe published the second part of The Riches of Grace Displayed in 1685. It was a good example of his doctrinal concern, expressing the old orthodoxy, but also calling believers to embrace their “grand Duty, Love to God. Should not their Love to Him be without end, whose Love to them was before times beginning?” [88] But Bagshawe was careful to balance God’s love for His people against God’s hatred of sin. He hoped, he wrote, “that they who make light of sin (which alas! most do!) would open their eyes (O that God would open ’em) that they might see God’s anger smoaking against it, as an evil and bitter thing; and that every Sinner must inevitably have dyed for ever, if the Lord of Life had not in Mans nature dyed, (and suffer’d beyond what can be thought) for it.” [89]

But the condition of believers altered again in 1687, when James II issued his new Declaration of Indulgence. The High Peak dissenters found themselves with opportunities far in excess of their ability to meet them. The Christians needed more leaders, more preachers, more evangelists of the type that Bagshawe had modeled. “Presbyterianism...was clearly impossible to apply, owing to the shortage of trained ministers and the enforced autonomy of each local worshipping group. Bagshawe sought to remedy these defects by making his home a kind of Presbyterian Academy. Early in 1688, he invited Samuel Ogden, the highly respected High Master of Wirksworth Grammar School, to take up residence at Ford Hall and to bring with him a number of young ministerial candidates. Ogden accepted the invitation, boarded the students nearby for convenience, and shared with Bagshawe the task of preparing them for ordination.” [90] It must have been an exceptional experience for these young men from the High Peak with aspirations after Christian ministry: to be tutored by the best-known and best-loved pastor in the county; to be tutored amid the grandeur of his country home; and to be tutored in the elements that had made his ministry so successful.

Despite its extraordinary success, Bagshawe’s ministry does appear quite ordinary. It was conservative, emphasizing the value of orthodoxy, as Bagshawe’s first biographer recalled: “He had (to use his own Worlds) a special Eye for the Footsteps of Christ’s Flock, and would not willingly turn aside either to new Opinions or new Expressions...not departing from the doctrine of the Thirty Nine Articles, and of the Reformed Churches.” [91] Ashe’s reference was to the terms of indulgence, which required preachers to sign up to major sections of the Anglican articles of faith, but also hinted that Bagshawe kept another eye on the theology of the earlier century which he had learned in Cambridge, which had been codified in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and which he preached until the day of his death. But this orthodox preaching was anything but scholastic. “The great truths and Precepts of the Gospel were the Subjects he chose to insist upon,” in his preaching, in his house-to-house visitation, and in his catechizing of the children of his congregations. [92] It was a polemical ministry: “He was not asham’d of those Doctrines of the Gospel, that in a loose and skeptical Age are most vehemently decry’d, nor wanting in his Endeavours to suppress growing Immorality and Prophaness.” [93] But it was also a ministry that emphasized spirituality. Bagshawe’s “Love to God & Christ was a bright and constant Flame. His Desires after nearer Communion with him were very earnest, and all the Means appointed for maintaining and improving it highly priz’d.” [94] Bagshawe emphasized this theme in his public preaching, and in the manner of his leading family worship: “The Word of Christ dwelt richly in him; he continually consulted and advis’d with it and serious and profitable Remarks of those Parts of it that he [read] in private, or at Family-Worship.” [95] And it was an expectant ministry: “he would sometimes express his hope, that a Time was coming when Practical Religion wou’d be in greater esteem, tho’ he might not live to see it.”

Bagshawe did live to see the Glorious Revolution, the ending of the Stuart dynasty and the beginnings of that official toleration that English dissenters have enjoyed to the present day, in 1688 –1689. Despite his experience — which had seen every opening for freedom rapidly close — Bagshawe sprang back into action, obtaining licenses for the meeting places where his congregations had gathered briefly in 1672, and returned to a life of itinerant preaching. He appears to have abandoned the strict ecclesiology of his youth, and worked hard for cooperation between Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1691, when London ministers proposed the union of the denominations. [96] Bagshawe signed the statement of the “United Brethren” alongside Matthew Henry, his ministerial colleague in Chester. [97] It seems that pastoral emphases of his care for his people had overtaken any concern to see them organized according to the Presbyterian pattern. It was enough that they were evangelical dissenters, worshipping according to the Word of God.

Almost forty years after the ejection and the ending of his pastorate in the parish church in Glossop, Bagshawe threw himself again into itinerant ministry: “he was constantly at work at home or abroad, till his growing Infirmities constrain’d him to shorten his Journeys and lessen his Labours. He was confin’d first to his own publick Meeting-Place, and the last Winter to his Dwelling House,” but managed to preach every Lord’s Day without fail until his eventual death in 1702. [98] His last sermon was on Romans 8:31 (“If God be for us, who can be against us?”). And it seems Bagshawe knew even as he concluded the sermon that he was concluding a lifetime of preaching ministry. “After this he grew every Day weaker, and the next Lord’s-Day he was confin’d to his Bed.” [99]

As Bagshawe lay dying, his thoughts turned to two great themes that had dominated his preaching career. The first, he declared, was the doctrine of imputed righteousness, the foundation of the Reformed theology of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone. The second, he continued, was his decision not to conform to the new Church of England upon its organization in 1662. “He declared his Satisfaction in his Non-Conformity, and blessed God who had kept him from acting against his Conscience in that Affair.” [100] He “had the privilege of an easy death.” [101] On April 1, 1702, his spirit returned to God who made it (Eccl. 12:7), and on April 4, 1702, his friends laid his body in the chancel of the parish church in Chapel-en-le-Frith. “He Liv’d to Die, and Died that he might Live.” [102]

So what can we learn from the life and career of the “Apostle of the Peak”? Bagshawe’s reflections on life and death help us to consider the direction and purpose of our lives. That was the purpose of biography, Bagshawe believed: “The honouring of the Dead, shall be a Blessing to the Living, they (being dead) yet speak, and bespeak imitation.” [103] Bagshawe believed that “People should prize the Lives and Labours, and take to Heart the Death of the faithful Preachers.” [104] But he did not expect that death would be the end of their ministry. As he himself put it, “when Preachers die, may their Doctrines live in many.” [105] He hoped that “when we have buried our precious Ministers, their Instructions may live in us, and to Eternity may live with us.”106 He knew that men would be remembered when their memorial stones had disappeared — and that this was especially true of the righteous. “Would Absolom’s Pillar answer his Expectations? Will stately Buildings (and Tombs) attain the best end? Is it not Righteousness which exalteth (as a Nation so) particular Persons in it?” [107] But Bagshawe also knew that all biography serves another purpose. All biographies end in death — with one exception. Bagshawe wrote that the death of the servants of Jesus Christ served merely to reinforce the fact that “the great Pastor (and Shepherd) dies not, but lives for ever.” [108] And that is the key to our understanding Bagshawe’s life. For he knew, when all is said and done, that he achieved nothing but by the grace of God. That’s why he began his history of God’s work in the High Peak by quoting “2 Cor. 6. 1. We then as Workers together with him, beseech you also, that ye receive not the Grace of God in vain.”

Bagshawe was a worker together with God. God was active in his activity. It was Jesus Christ who planted the congregations to whom Bagshawe preached. In fact, it was Jesus Christ who was preaching to those congregations through Bagshawe’s faithful ministry. And the danger that faced the inhabitants of the High Peak in the middle and later parts of the seventeenth century are the same dangers that face us today. The danger is not just that we disregard those who are the workers together with God today; it is also that we will “receive the grace of God in vain”— that we will hear the gospel, but never believe it, and instead commit ourselves to hell. Do not receive the grace of God in vain, Bagshawe is still urging us. This lies in the passage of Scripture with which we began: “Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers?” (Zech. 1:5 – 6). William Bagshawe, being dead, yet speaks: do not receive the grace of God in vain.

Notes

1. This lecture was originally given in Charlesworth Particular Baptist Chapel, Derbyshire, England, in November 2009.
2. William Bagshawe, De Spiritualibus Pecci (London, 1702), title page.
3. John M. Brentnall, William Bagshawe: The Apostle of the Peak (London: Banner of Truth, 1970), ix.
4. Ibid., 120.
5. John Ashe, A Short Account of the Life & Character of the Reverend Mr. William Bagshawe (London, 1704), 2.
6. Bagshawe, De Spiritualibus Pecci, 4.
7. Ibid., 4.
8. Ibid., 5.
9. Ibid., 6.
10. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 2.
11. Ibid., 21.
12. Bagshawe, De Spiritualibus Pecci, 15.
13. Ibid., 18 –19
14.  Ibid., 19.
15. Ibid., 20.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 21.
18. Bagshawe, Living Water, 156 –57.
19. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 2.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 3.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 4.
24. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 23.
25. Bagshawe, De Spiritualibus Pecci, 35.
26. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 24.
27. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 4.
28. Bagshawe, Living Water, 5.
29. Ibid., 18.
30. Ibid., 19.
31. Ibid., 104.
32. Ibid., 189.
33. Ibid., 148.
34. Ibid., 86-87.
35. Ibid., 22.
36. Ibid., 24 – 25.
37. Ibid., 32– 33.
38. Ibid., 92.
39. Ibid., 135.
40. Ibid., 135 –36.
41. Ibid., 137– 38.
42. Ibid., 140.
43. Ibid., 175.
44. Ibid., 176.
45. Ibid., 65.
46. Ibid., 162 – 63.
47. Ibid., 165 – 67.
48. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 4.
49. Ibid., 19.
50. Ibid., 19.
51. Ibid., 20.
52. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 28, 31.
53. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 4.
54. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 38.
55. Ibid., 40.
56. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 30.
57. Ibid., 29.
58. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 42.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 43.
61. Bagshawe, De Spiritualibus Pecci, 58 –59.
62. Ibid., 59.
63. Ibid., 93.
64. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 43.
65. Ibid., 50.
66. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 31.
67. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 50 – 51.
68. Ibid., 53.
69. Bagshawe, Principiis Obsta, “The ready way to prevent sin,” 11.
70. Ibid., 19.
71. Ibid., 20.
72. Ibid., 31.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., 44.
75. Bagshawe, Principiis Obsta, “A Bridle for the Tongue,” 9.
76. Ibid., 3.
77. Ibid., 8.
78. Ibid., 13.
79. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 58.
80. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 6.
81. Ibid.
82. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 61.
83. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 7.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 76 –77.
87. Ibid., 78.
88. Bagshawe, The Riches of Grace Displayed: The Second Part, 20.
89. Ibid., 30.
90. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 82.
91. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 13.
92. Ibid., 13 –15.
93. Ibid., 23.
94. Ibid., 22.
95. Ibid.
96. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, 89.
97. Ibid.
98. Ashe, A Short Account of...William Bagshawe, 8.
99. Ibid., 9.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., 32.
102. Bagshawe, De Spiritualibus Pecci, 88.
103. Ibid., 81.
104. Ibid., 67.
105. Ibid., 56.
106. Ibid., 102.
107. Ibid., 82.
108. Ibid., 68.