1: Neal, IV. 135-137 and 101-2; Burnet (ed. 1823) I. 110; Baxter, 172-178 and 206; Thomason Catalogue, Nov. 25, 1656 (date of publication of Usher's Reduction); Wood's Fasti, I. 446.
(3) Anti-Trinitarians. The crucial test of Cromwell's Toleration policy as regarded this class of heretics, and indeed as regarded all heresies of the higher order, was the case of poor Mr. John Biddle. The dissolution of the late Parliament had been so far fortunate for him that the prosecution begun against him by that Parliament under the old Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 had been stopped and he had been set at liberty (March 1655). But it was only to get into fresh trouble. The orthodox in London were determined that he should not be at large, and it was reported to the Council on the 3rd of July that on the preceding Thursday, June 28, "in the new meeting-house at Paul's, commonly called Captain Chillingdon's church meeting-place, John Biddle did then and there, in presence of about 500 persons, maintain, some hours together, in a dispute, that Jesus Christ was not the Almighty or most High God, and hath undertaken to proceed in the game dispute the next Thursday." Cromwell himself was present at this meeting of the Council, with Lawrence, Lambert, the Earl of Mulgrave, Skippon, Rous, Sydenham, Pickering, Montague, Fiennes, Viscount Lisle, Wolseley, and Strickland. What were they to do? They ordered the Lord Mayor to stop the intended meeting, and all such meetings in future, and to arrest Biddle if necessary; and they referred the affair for farther enquiry to Skippon and Rous. The affair, it seems, could not possibly be hushed up; Biddle was committed to Poultry Compter, and then to Newgate, and his trial came on at the Old Bailey, again under the Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648. Having, with difficulty, been allowed counsel, he put in legal objections, and the trial was adjourned till next term. Meanwhile London was greatly agitated. The Presbyterians and the orthodox generally were eager for Biddle's conviction; but a very considerable number of persons, including not only Biddle's own followers and free-thinkers of other sorts, but also some Independent and Baptist ministers, whose orthodoxy was beyond suspicion, bestirred themselves in his behalf. Pamphlets appeared in that interest, one entitled The Spirit of Persecution again broken loose against Mr. John Biddle, and a numerously signed petition was addressed to Cromwell, requesting his merciful interference. The Petition, as we learn from Mercurius Politicus, was very badly managed. "The persons who presented a petition some few days since to his Highness on the behalf of Biddle," says that paper under date Sept. 28, "came this day in expectation of an answer. They had access, and divers godly ministers were present. And, the Petition being read in the hearing of divers of those under whose countenance it was presented, many of them disowned it, as being altered both in the matter and title of it since they signed it, and so looked upon it as a forged thing, wherein both his Highness and they were greatly abused, and desired that the original which they signed might be produced; which Mr. Ives and some others of the contrivers and presenters of it were not able to do, nor had they anything to say in excuse of so foul a miscarriage. Whereupon they were dismissed, his Highness having opened to them the evil of such a practice [tampering with petitions after they had been signed], as also how inconsistent it was for them, who professed to be members of the Churches of Christ and to worship him with the worship due to God, to give any countenance to one who reproached themselves and all the Christian Churches in the world as being guilty of idolatry: showing that, if it be true which Mr. Biddle holds, to wit that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is but a creature, then all those who worship him with the worship due to God are idolaters. His Highness showed moreover that the maintainers of this opinion of Mr. Biddle's are guilty of great blasphemy against Christ, who is God equal with the Father; and he referred it to them to consider whether any who loved the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity could give any countenance to such a person as he is." But, while the petitioners were thus dismissed with a severe lecture, Cromwell had made up his mind to save Mr. Biddle. On the 5th of October it was resolved by the Council that he should be removed to the Isle of Scilly and there shut up; and Cromwell's warrant to that effect was at once issued. In no other way could the trial have been quashed, and it was the kindest thing that could have been done for Biddle in the circumstances. He lived comfortably enough in his seclusion in the distant Island for the next two years and a half, receiving an allowance of a hundred crowns per annum from Cromwell, and employing his leisure in the deep study of the Apocalypse and the preparation of a treatise against the Doctrine of the Fifth Monarchy.1
1: Council Order Books, July 3 and Oct. 5, 1655; Merc. Pol. Sept. 27-Oct. 4, 1655; Wood's Ath. III. 599-601; Thomason Catalogue (Tracts for and against Biddle).
(4) The Quakers. There was immense difficulty with this new sect—from the fact, as has been already explained, that they had not settled down into mere local groups of individuals, asking toleration for themselves, but were still in open war with all other sects, all other forms of ministry, and prosecuting the war everywhere by itinerant propagandism. George Fox himself and the best of his followers seem by this time indeed to have given up the method of actually interrupting the regular service in the steeple-houses in order to preach Quakerism; but they were constantly tending to the steeple-houses for the purpose of prophesying there, as was the custom in country-places, after the regular service was over. Thus, as well as by their conflicts with parsons of every sect wherever they met them, and their rebukings of iniquity on highways and in market-places, not to speak of their obstinate refusals to pay tithes in their own parishes, they were continually getting into the hands of justices of the peace and the assize-judges. Take as one example of their treatment in superior courts the appearance of William Dewsbury and other Quakers before Judge Atkins at Northampton after they had been half a year in Northampton jail.—Seeing them at the bar with their hats on, the Judge told the jailor he had a good mind to fine him ten pounds for bringing prisoners into the Court in that fashion, and ordered the hats to be removed by the jailor's man. Then, after some preliminary parley, "What is thy name?" said the Judge to Dewsbury, who had made himself spokesman for all. "Unknown to the World," said Dewsbury. "Let us hear what that name is that the World knows not," said the Judge goodhumouredly. "It is," quoth Dewsbury, "known in the light, and none can know it but he that hath it; but the name the world knows me by is William Dewsbury." Then to the question of the Judge, "What countryman art thou?" the reply was, "Of the Land of Canaan." The Judge remarked that Canaan was far off. "Nay," answered Dewsbury, "for all that dwell in God are in the holy city, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from Heaven, where the soul is in rest, and enjoys the love of God in Jesus Christ, in whom the union is with the Father of Light." The Judge admitted that to be very true, but asked Dewsbury whether, being an Englishman, he was ashamed of that more prosaic fact. "Nay," said Dewsbury, "I am free to declare that my natural birth was in Yorkshire, nine miles from York towards Hull." The Judge then said, "You pretend to be extraordinary men, and to have an extraordinary knowledge of God." Dewsbury replied, "We witness the work of regeneration to be an extraordinary work, wrought in us by the Spirit of God." The conversation then turned on their preaching itinerancy, and abstinence from all ordinary callings, the Judge remarking that even the Apostles had worked with their hands. Dewsbury admitted that some of the Apostles had been fishermen, and Paul a tent-maker, but asserted that, "when they were called to the ministry of Christ, they left their callings to follow Christ whither he led them by his Spirit," and that he and his fellow-prisoners had but done the same. The end of the colloquy was that the Judge, with every wish to be lenient, could not make up his mind to discharge the prisoners. "I see by your carriage," he said, "that what my brother Hale did at the last assizes, in requiring bond for your good behaviour, he might justly do it, for you are against magistrates and ministers"; and they were remitted to Northampton jail accordingly.—If judges like Hale and Atkins had to act thus, one may imagine how the poor Quakers fared in the hands of inferior and rougher functionaries. Fines and imprisonment for vagrancy, contempt of court, or non-payment of tithes, were the ordinary discipline for all; but there were cases here and there of whipping by the hangman, and other more ferocious cruelties. For among the Quakers themselves there were varieties of milder and wilder, less provoking and more provoking. The Quakerism of men like Fox and Dewsbury was, at worst, but an obdurate and irritating eccentricity, in comparison, for example, with the Quakerism run mad of James Nayler. This enthusiast, once quarter-master in a horse troop under Lambert, and regarded as "a man of excellent natural parts," had for three or four years kept himself within bounds, and been known only as one of the most eminent preachers of the ordinary Gospel of the Quakers and a prolific writer of Quaker tracts. But, having come to London in 1655, he had been unbalanced by the adulation of some Quaker women, with a Martha Simmons for their chief. "Fear and doubting then entered him," say the Quaker records, "so that he came to be clouded in his understanding, bewildered, and at a loss in his judgment, and became estranged from his best friends, because they did not approve his conduct." In other words, he became stark mad, and set up for himself, as "The Everlasting Son, the Prince of Peace, the Fairest among Ten Thousand, the Altogether Lovely." In this capacity he went into the West of England early in 1656, the admiring women following him, and chaunting his praises with every variety of epithet from the Song of Solomon, till he was clapped up in Exeter jail. Nor was Nayler the only madman among the Quakers about this time. A kind of epidemic of madness seems to have broken out in the sect, or among those reputed to belong to it. "One while," says Baxter, "divers of them went naked through divers chief towns and cities of the land, as a prophetical act: some of them have famished and drowned themselves in melancholy;" and he adds, more especially, as his own experience in Kidderminster, "I seldom preached a lecture, but going and coming I was railed at by a Quaker in the market-place in the way, and frequently in the congregation bawled at by the names of Hireling, Deceiver, False Prophet, Dog, and such like language." The Protector's own chapel in Whitehall was not safe. On April 13, 1656, "being the Lord's day," says the Public Intelligencer for that week, "a certain Quaker came into the chapel in sermon time, and in a very audacious manner disturbed the preacher, so that he was fain to be silent a while, till the fellow was taken away. His Highness, being present, did after sermon give order for the sending him to a justice of peace, to be dealt with according to law."—Naturally, the whole sect suffered for these indecencies and extravagances of some of its members, and the very name Quakerism became a synonym for all that was intolerable. The belief had got abroad, moreover, that "subtle and dangerous heads," Jesuits and others, had begun to "creep in among them," to turn Quakerism to political account, and "drive on designs of disturbance." Altogether the Protector and Council were sorely tried. Their policy seems, on the whole, to have been to let Quakerism run its course of public obloquy, and get into jail, or even to the whipping-post ad libitum, for offences against the peace, but at the same time to instruct the Major-Generals privately to be as discreet as possible, making differences between the sorts of Quakers, and especially letting none of them come to harm for their mere beliefs. "Making a difference," as by the injunction in Jude's epistle, was, as we know, Cromwell's own great rule in all cases where complete toleration was impossible, and he does not seem to have been able to do more for the Quakers. He had not, however, forgotten his interview with their chief, and may have been interested in knowing more especially what had become of him.—Fox, after much wandering in the West without serious mishap, had fallen among Philistines in Cornwall early in 1656, and had been arrested, with two companions, for spreading papers and for general vagrancy and contumacy. He had been in Launceston prison for some weeks, when Chief Justice Glynne came to hold the assizes in those parts. There had been the usual encounter between the Judge and the Quakers on the eternal question of the hats. "Where had they hats at all, from Moses to Daniel?" said the Chief Justice, rather rashly, meaning to laugh at the notion that Scripture could be brought to bear on the question in any way whatever. "Thou mayest read in the third of Daniel," said Fox, "that the three children were cast into the fiery furnace, by Nebuchadnezzar's command, with their coats, their hose, and their hats on." Glynne, though he had lost his joke, and though Fox put him further out of temper by distributing among the jurymen a paper against swearing, did not behave badly on the whole, and the issue was the simple recommitment of Fox and his friends to Launceston prison. There, however, as they would not any longer pay the jailor the seven shillings a week he demanded for the board of each, they were put into the most horrible hole in the place and treated abominably. They were in this predicament when Cromwell heard of them. "While G. Fox was still in prison, one of his friends went to Oliver Cromwell, and offered himself, body for body, to lie in prison in his stead, if he would take him and let G. Fox go at liberty. But Cromwell said he could not do it, for it was contrary to law; and, turning to those of his Council, 'Which of you,' quoth he, 'would do as much for me if I were in the same condition?'" An order was sent by Cromwell to the Governor of Pendennis Castle to enquire meantime into the treatment of the Launceston prisoners, and their release followed after a little while. It was noted also, in proof of his personal kindness towards the Quakers, that, though he received letters from some of them violently abusive of himself and his government, he never showed any anger on that account.1
1: Sewel's History of the Quakers (ed. 1834) I. 137-173; Baxter, 77 and 180; Public Intelligencer of April 14-21, 1656; Council Order Book, Feb. 6, 1655-6.
(5)The Jews. A very interesting incident of Cromwell's Protectorate was his attempt to obtain an open toleration for the Jews in England. Since the year 1290, when they had been banished in a body out of the kingdom under Edward I., there had been only isolated and furtive instances of visits to England or residence in England by persons of the proscribed race. Of late, however, a certain Manasseh Ben Israel, an able and earnest Portuguese Jew, settled in Amsterdam as a physician, had conceived the idea that, in the new age of liberty and other great things in England, there might be a permission for the Jews to return and live and trade freely. He had opened negotiations by letter, first with the Rump and then with the Barebones Parliament, but had at length come over to London to deal directly with the Protector. "To his Highness the Lord Protector, &c. the Humble Addresses of Manasseh Ben Israel, Divine and Doctor of Physic, in behalf of the Jewish Nation," were in print on the 5th of November, 1655; and they were formally before the Council on the 13th, his Highness present in person. The petition was for a general protection of such Jews as might come to reside in England, with liberty of trade, freedom for their worship, the possession of a Jewish synagogue and a Jewish cemetery in London, and a revocation of all statutes contrary to such privileges. Cromwell was thoroughly in favour of the proposal and let the fact be known; but, as it was necessary to proceed with caution, the matter was referred to a conference between the Council and twenty-eight persons outside of it, fourteen of whom were clergymen (Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Nye, Cudworth, Hugh Peters, Sterry, &c.), and the rest lawyers (St. John, Glynne, Steele, &c.), or city merchants (Lord Mayor Dethicke, Aldermen Pack and Tichbourne, &c.) There were four meetings of this Conference at Whitehall in December, Cromwell himself taking part. "I never heard a man speak so well," says an auditor of his speech at one of the meetings. On the whole, however, the Conference could not agree with his Highness. Some of the city-men objected, on commercial grounds, to the admission of the Jews; and the clergy were against it almost to a man, partly on the authority of Scripture texts, partly from fear of the effects of the importation into London of the new sect of Judaism. The Conference was discontinued; and, though the good Rabbi lingered on in London till April 1656, nothing could be done. Prejudice in the religious world was too strong. Nevertheless the Protector found means of giving effect to his own views. Not only did he mark his respect for Manasseh Ben Israel by a pension of £100 a year, to be paid him in Amsterdam; he admitted so many Jews, one by one, by private dispensation, that there was soon a little colony of them in London, with a synagogue to suit, and a piece of ground at Stepney leased for a cemetery. In effect, the readmission of the Jews into England dates from Cromwell's Protectorate.1
1: Merc. Pol. Nov. 1-8, 1655; Council Order Book, Nov. 13; Godwin, IV. 243-251; Carlyle, III. 136, note. Prynne opposed the Readmission of the Jews in a pamphlet, in two parts, called A Short Demurrer to the Jews' long discontinued Remitter (March 1656); and Durie published, in the form of a letter to Hartlib, A Case of Conscience: whether it be lawful to admit Jews into a Christian Commonwealth (June 27, 1656). I have not seen Durie's letter; but Mr. Crossley (Worthington's Diary, I. 83, note) reports it as moderately favourable to the Jewish claim. The letter is dated, he says, from Cassel, Jan. 8, 1655-6.
Although making no great pretensions to learning himself, Cromwell seems to have taken especial pleasure in that part of his powers and privileges which gave him an influence on the literature and education of the country. Here, in fact, he but carried out in a special department that general notion of the Civil Magistrate's powers and duties which had led him to declare himself so strongly for the preservation and extension of an Established Church. The more thorough-going champions of Voluntaryism in that day, Anabaptists and others, had begun, as we have seen, to agitate not only for the abolition of a national Church or State-paid clergy of any kind, but also for the abolition of the Universities, the public schools, and all endowments for science or learning. But, if Cromwell had so signally disowned and condemned the system of sheer Voluntaryism in Religion, it was not to be expected that the more peculiar and exceptional Voluntaryism which challenged even State Endowments for education should find any countenance from his Protectorate. Nor did it.
The two English Universities had been sufficiently Puritanized long before Cromwell's accession to the supreme power—Cambridge in 1644-5, under the Chancellorship of the Earl of Manchester (III. 92-6), and Oxford in 1647-8, under the Chancellorship of the Earl of Pembroke (IV. 51-52). The Earl of Manchester, who had been living in complete retirement from public affairs since the establishment of the Commonwealth, still retained the nominal dignity of the Cambridge Chancellorship; but Cromwell had already for five years been Chancellor of the University of Oxford himself, having been elected to the office in January 1650-1, after the Earl of Pembroke's death. His interest in University matters had been naturally sustained by this official connexion with Oxford, and had shown itself in various ways before his Protectorate; but his Protectorate added fresh powers to those of his mere Chancellorship for Oxford, and brought his native University of Cambridge also within his grasp. He availed himself of his powers largely and punctually in the affairs of both, and was applauded in both as the steady defender of their honours and privileges.—To rectify what might still be amiss in them, or too much after the mere Presbyterian standard of Puritanism, he had appointed, by ordinance of September 2, 1654, (Vol. IV. p. 565), a new body of Visitors for each, to inquire into abuses, determine disputes, &c. The result was that the two Universities were now in better and quieter working order than they had been since the first stormy interruption of their old routine by the Civil War. Each reckoned a number of really able and efficient men among its heads of colleges, and in its staff of professors and tutors. In Oxford there was Dr. John Owen, head of Christ Church, and all but permanently Vice-Chancellor of the University, with Dr. Thomas Goodwin, Dr. John Wilkins, Dr. Robert Harris, Dr. Thankful Owen, Dr. John Conant, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, and others, as heads of other Colleges, and Dr. Henry Wilkinson, Dr. Lewis Du Moulin, Dr. Pocock, and the mathematicians Dr. Seth Ward and Dr. John Wallis among the Professors. Cambridge boasted of such men as Dr. Ralph Cudworth, Dr. Benjamin Whichcote, Dr. John Worthington, Dr. John Lightfoot, Dr. Lazarus Seaman, Dr. John Arrowsmith, Dr. Anthony Tuckney, Dr. Henry More, and others now less remembered. And under the discipline and teaching of such chiefs there was growing up in both Universities a generation of young men as well grounded in all the older sorts of learning as any generation of their predecessors, with the benefit also of newer lights, as was to be proved by the names and appearances of many of them in English history to the end of the century. Even Clarendon admits as much. It was a wonder to him to find, in the subsequent days of his own Chancellorship of the University of Oxford, that the "several tyrannical governments mutually succeeding each other" through so many previous years had not so affected the place but that it still "yielded a harvest of extraordinary good and sound knowledge in all parts of learning." He attributed this to the inherent virtues of the academic soil itself, which could choke bad seeds, cherish the good, and even defy barrenness by finding its own seeds; but it may be more reasonable to suppose that the superintendence of the Universities under the "tyrannical governments," and especially under Cromwell's as the latest of them, had not been barbaric.—The University Commissioners, it may be added, had authority to inspect Westminster School, Eton, Winchester, and Merchant Taylors'. But, indeed, there seems hardly to have been a foundation for learning anywhere in England that was not, in one way or another, brought under Cromwell's eye. In his inquiries after moneys that might still be recoverable out of the wreck of the old ecclesiastical revenues one can see that, next to the increase and better sustenance of his Established Ministry, additions to the endowed scholastic machinery of the country were always in his mind. It is clear indeed that one of those characteristics of conservatism by which Cromwell intended that his government should be distinguished from the preceding Governments of the Revolution was greater care of the surviving educational institutions of England and Wales, with the resuscitation of some that had fallen into decay. The money-difficulties were great, and less could be accomplished than he desired; but, apart from what may have been done for the refreshment of the older foundations, it is memorable that Cromwell was able to give effect to at least one very considerable design of English University extension. A College in Durham, expressly for the benefit of the North of England, with a Provostship, four Professorships, and tutorships and fellowships to match, was one of the creations of the Protectorate.1
1: Wood's Fasti Oxon. from 1654 onwards; Orme's Life of John Owen, 175-187; Clarendon, 623; Godwin, IV. 102-104 and 595; Neal, IV. 121-123; with references to Worthington's Diary by Crossley, and Cattermole's Literature of the Church of England.