Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context

David Finnegan, Ariel Hessayon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754669050
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317002499
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The essays in this collection explore a number of significant questions regarding the terms 'radical' and 'radicalism' in early modern English contexts. They investigate whether we can speak of a radical tradition, and whether radicalism was a local, national or transnational phenomenon. In so doing this volume examines the exchange of ideas and texts in the history of supposedly radical events, ideologies and movements (or moments). Once at the cutting edge of academic debate radicalism had, until very recently, fallen prey to historiographical trends as scholars increasingly turned their attention to more mainstream experiences or reactionary forces. While acknowledging the importance of those perspectives, Varieties of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English radicalism in context offers a reconsideration of the place of radicalism within the early modern period. It sets out to examine the subject in original and exciting ways by adopting distinctively new and broader perspectives. Among the crucial issues addressed are problems of definition and how meanings can evolve; context; print culture; language and interpretative techniques; literary forms and rhetorical strategies that conveyed, or deliberately disguised, subversive meanings; and the existence of a single, continuous English radical tradition. Taken together the essays in this collection offer a timely reassessment of the subject, reflecting the latest research on the theme of seventeenth-century English radicalism as well as offering some indications of the phenomenon's transnational contexts. Indeed, there is a sense here of the complexity and variety of the subject although much work still remains to be done on radicals and radicalism - both in early modern England and especially beyond.

Chapter 1 The Beauty of Holiness and the Poetics of Antinomianism: Richard Crashaw, John Saltmarsh and the Language of Religious Radicalism in the 1640s*

^* This chapter was delivered as a paper at two conferences in the summer of 2006: ‘Rediscovering Radicalism in the British Isles, 1500–1800’, Goldsmiths, University of London, and ‘Religious Heterodoxy in Seventeenth-Century England’, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge. I am grateful to Ariel Hessayon and William Poole, respectively, for inviting me, and to the audiences for their comments, in particular Anne Dunan-Page, Peter Lake, Anthony Milton, Joad Raymond and Nigel Smith.

Nicholas McDowell

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548395-2

This essay was inspired by a couple of unexpected conjunctions between two of the most infamous religious radicals of the 1640s, Abiezer Coppe (1619–72) and John Saltmarsh (d. 1647), and the Laudian, finally Catholic, poet Richard Crashaw (1612/13–47). The first conjunction occurs in the diary of Thomas Dugard (bap. 1608, d. 1683), the headmaster of Warwick School in the 1630s. Dugard’s star pupil was Coppe, who was to become in 1649 the most notorious of the so-called ‘Ranters’, alleged to subvert the divine economy of sin, heaven and hell through the committing of acts commonly thought to be sinful to demonstrate their release from moral and religious law. In his entries for 1634, Dugard records the fifteen-year-old Coppe coming round to his house after dinner for extra lessons in Latin and Greek. Among the texts that Coppe read to Dugard was Crashaw’s Epigrammata sacrorum liber (1634).¹ This collection of neo-Latin devotional verse was mostly written by Crashaw to fulfil the conditions of his scholarship at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was given the unusual honour, for a single-authored volume, of publication by the University Press. Dugard’s diary for the period 1632–42 leaves an account of the Puritan circle in which Dugard mixed, revolving around Lord Brooke’s hospitality at Warwick Castle. As Ann Hughes has shown, Dugard’s diary reveals him to have been part of a ‘“Parliamentary-Puritan connection”, a broad circle of the godly that comprised minor provincial figures and prominent national politicians, and which helped to create the challenge to Charles I’s personal rule’.² However, Dugard’s zealous anti-Laudianism evidently did not stop him from enjoying Crashaw’s epigrams and using them as a study in neo-Latin eloquence, despite the intense and sensuous liturgical imagery that characterises many of the poems and Crashaw’s praise, in the prose address to the reader that prefaces the Epigrammata, of the Jesuit writers who have provided him with a model of sacred eloquence.

¹ BL, Add. MS 23,146, fol. 33v. ² Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 1630s: A “Parliamentary-Puritan” Connexion?’, HJ, 29 (1986): p. 784.

The second conjunction is to be found in the tracts collected by the London bookseller George Thomason (1602–66). In volume 1152 of the tracts, the second (1648) edition of Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple, a vernacular collection which includes free translations of many of the Latin epigrams, is collected beside the first (1645) edition of Free-Grace, or the Flowings of Christ’s Blood Freely to Sinners by the New Model Army chaplain John Saltmarsh. Now this may simply be a random pairing by Thomason, about whose organising habits we still know little.³ On the other hand, a few months before the Crashaw volume appeared, Samuel Rutherford (1600–61), the Presbyterian Professor of Divinity at St Andrew’s, had responded in some detail to the theological arguments of Free-Grace, citing Saltmarsh as the leading English ‘antinomian’ – by which Rutherford meant someone who believes ‘the Saints are perfect, and their works perfect’ in this life, and consequently have no need of obedience and repentance. Rutherford warned that the ‘Antinomians and Anabaptists now in England joyne hands with Pelagians, Jesuits, and Arminians’ for they are all ‘enemies to the grace of God’.⁴ For Rutherford, ‘antinomian’ and Arminian theologies were two sides of the same coin and both heretical inversions of true Calvinist doctrine. In 1648, Rutherford stepped up his attack on Saltmarsh in the vitriolic A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist opening the secrets of Familisme and Antinomianisme, in the Antichristian Doctrine of John Saltmarsh, and William Dell, the present Preachers of the Army now in England. In fact by 1648 Saltmarsh was no longer a ‘present preacher in the Army’ – he had died a memorable death in December 1647 after travelling, though seriously ill, to tell Fairfax and Cromwell that God was angry with them for imprisoning the Levellers.⁵

³ Jason McElligott points out how little we know about how Thomason read or regarded the publications he collected in Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 36. ⁴ Samuel Rutherford, Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (London, 1647), ‘To the Reader’, sigs. A3r, A4v–B1r. ⁵ See Wonderfull predictions declared in a message, as from the Lord, to his Excellency Sr. Thomas Fairfax and the Councell of his Army. By John Saltmarsh preacher of the Gospell. His severall speeches, and the manner of his death. December 29. 1647 (London, 1647); Englands Friend Raised from the Grave …. Being the true copies of three letters written by Mr. John Saltmarsh, a little before his death (London, 1649); also Roger Pooley’s entry for Saltmarsh in the ODNB.

Might Thomason’s binding of Free-Grace and Steps to the Temple be more than coincidence? Might it indicate his recognition of the linguistic and theological similarities between Saltmarsh’s prose and Crashaw’s poetry? In terms of theology, there is a shared emphasis on Christ crucified and the assurance of salvation in the writings of the ‘antinomian’ Saltmarsh and the Laudian, Catholic-leaning Crashaw. More intriguingly, the rhetorical resources which Saltmarsh used to express this assurance of salvation also originated in the neo-Latin poetics practised in Caroline Cambridge. Reading Saltmarsh alongside Crashaw will reveal how the experience of writing neo-Latin devotional verse in Cambridge in the 1630s provided Saltmarsh with a language to express a tolerationist, antinomian theology in the 1640s, just as it provided Crashaw with a poetics for a Laudian, Anglo-Catholic theology.⁶ As the young Coppe’s reading of Crashaw’s Latin verse indicates, the assumption that the language of English radical religion in the 1640s was a language of popular biblical apocalypticism which ‘had nothing to do with Renaissance Latinity’ needs revision.⁷ We need rather to place radical ideas and texts in the context of a continuous interaction between humanist and vernacular, ‘elite’ and ‘popular’, traditions, rather than automatically equating radical culture with popular culture.⁸ Glenn Burgess has recently argued that early modern radicalism should not be approached as a ‘phenomenon with a continuous existence’ but as one ‘forged, and forged repeatedly, from the discursive and cultural materials – e.g. the languages – that lay to hand’. These languages may be as likely to reinforce as subvert pre-war orthodoxies and to be found in the mainstream political, religious and intellectual culture as in its margins.⁹ The language of neo-Latin poetics which was part of the orthodox education of both Crashaw and Saltmarsh in Caroline Cambridge was also part of the ‘cultural and discursive material’ from which Saltmarsh forged his radical theology amidst the unprecedented religious innovation of the Civil Wars. And Coppe’s teenage lessons in Crashavian eloquence may even tell us something about the origins of his ecstatic ‘Ranter’ prose.

⁶ As Rutherford’s usage suggests, the term ‘antinomian’ was essentially one of abuse, and was linked by those who used it with immoral and libertine behaviour, whereas the claim to define properly the ‘free grace’ of God, as Saltmarsh does in Free-Grace, was one made by all sides in the disputes of the mid-seventeenth century; see M. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–41 (Princeton, NJ, 2002), p. 1. At the same time it is not quite true, as is often claimed, that the term ‘antinomian’ was never accepted as self-descriptive. The Leveller leader William Walwyn writes in his Just Defence (1649): ‘I, through God’s goodnesse, had long before been established in that part of doctrine (called then, Antinomian) of free justification by Christ alone; and so my heart was at much more ease and freedom, then others, who were entangled with those yokes of bondage, unto which Sermons and Doctrines mixt of Law and Gospel, do subject distressed consciences’, see J.R. McMichael and B. Taft (eds), The Writings of William Walwyn (Athens, GA, 1989), pp. 395–6. ‘Antinomian’ is used as a label by David R. Como in his study of the pre-war origins of religious radicalism, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004), although he is careful to emphasise the difficulty of defining the term. In this essay I will refer to Saltmarsh’s ‘antinomian’ theology to underline the radical implications of his ideas as they were received by more orthodox Calvinist contemporaries. ⁷ R. Pooley, English Prose of the Seventeenth Century, 1590–1700 (London and New York, 1992), p. 164. ⁸ This is the central argument of N. McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003). See also N. McDowell, ‘Writing the Literary and Cultural History of Radicalism in the English Revolution’, in M. Caricchio and G. Tarantino (eds), Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent Historiographical Trends of the British Studies (17th–18th Centuries) (2006–2007): 1–4 http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/mcdowell.html. ⁹ Burgess, ‘Radicalism and the English revolution’, p. 68.

Crashaw’s verse is best known for its use of sensuous and erotic imagery to convey the loving relationship between Christ and man. The physicality of the descriptions of Christ’s crucifixion is conventionally associated with a continental ‘baroque’ poetics that Crashaw derived from his reading of Jesuit and Counter-Reformation writers. This interpretation fits neatly, perhaps too neatly, with Crashaw’s later conversion to Catholicism after he left for the Continent when Cambridge was occupied by the Parliamentary Army in 1643.¹⁰ A fine example of Crashaw’s extravagant, some have said grotesque, play with the spiritual significance of the physical ravages suffered by Christ’s body is ‘On the Wou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reappraising Early Modern Radicals and Radicalisms
• 1 The Beauty of Holiness and the Poetics of Antinomianism: Richard Crashaw, John Saltmarsh and the Language of Religious Radicalism in the 1640s
• 2 Radicalism Relocated: Royalist Politics and Pamphleteering of the Late 1640s
• 3 News from the New Jerusalem: Giles Calvert and the Radical Experience
• 4 Gerrard Winstanley, Radical Reformer
• 5 The Poetics of Biblical Prophecy: Abiezer Coppe’s Late Converted Midrash
• 6 Empire-Building: The English Republic, Scotland and Ireland
• 7 Seventeenth-Century Italy and English Radical Movements
• 8 A Radical Review of the Cambridge Platonists
• 9 Radical Revelation? Apocalyptic Ideas in Late Seventeenth-Century England
• 10 Mapping Friendship and Dissent: The Letters from Joseph Boyse to Ralph Thoresby, 1680–1710
• 11 The Books and Times of Anthony Collins (1676–1729), Free-thinker, Radical Reader and Independent Whig
• 12 William Hone (1780–1842), Print-Culture, and the Nature of Radicalism
• Index