1646.
The chaplain of Fairfax was Joshua Sprigg, an Independent minister, already mentioned. Breathing the spirit then prevalent in the camp, he advocated the toleration of extreme opinions; but does not appear himself to have been a man of extravagant views. His history of the army is creditable to his intelligence and judgment; and, though tinctured with the peculiar rhetoric of the day, it is singularly free from all fanaticism. Another Independent Divine holding a chaplaincy under General Fairfax was the celebrated John Owen. The General had his head quarters for a time at Coggeshall, where Owen officiated as vicar, and in 1648 he preached before his Excellency and the Committee two sermons, which are published.[570] They commemorate the surrender of Colchester, and the deliverance at Rumford; and with an oratorical flourish, which has been severely criticised,—but which really means nothing more than that Providence had given success to the arms of the Parliament—the preacher speaks of the God of Marston Moor. The accommodation of the passage in Habakkuk—"God came from Naseby, and the Holy One from the West; His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of His praise," is less defensible—though the excitement of the moment, the flush of victory, and the aspect of a military audience, may be allowed to mitigate our censure of Owen's want of taste on the occasion;—and taste is hardly to be looked for in a military preacher, amidst the throes of a revolution full of fire and blood. The martial zeal appearing in some parts of these discourses is only a specimen of what blazed up much more fiercely in the addresses of other ministers who fulfilled their vocation in garrisons and tented fields. What must some of the sermons have been, where there was not Owen's learning, judgment, and devoutness to check the orator! And let us not here omit to remark, that Owen was true to the principle which was the guiding star of the new army, and insisted strongly in these sermons upon the iniquity of persecuting men for religion. In this respect there were few, if any, of the religious teachers popular amongst Cromwell's troops, who did not sympathize with the Coggeshall Divine.
Religion in the Camp.
It is useless to pick out the names of chaplains now unknown. Many of them, no doubt, if we were fully acquainted with their history, would be found more respectable and worthy men than were others whom we see thrown conspicuously on the surface, to attain by no means an enviable notoriety. Hugh Peters is chief of this class. He certainly must have been a man of considerable ability to have gained the influence which he possessed; and in earlier life he could have been no worse than a coarse but energetic preacher, followed by crowds of the common people. Escaping to Rotterdam to avoid persecution, he became colleague with the learned Dr. William Ames in the pastorate of an Independent Church.[571] The man bore a good reputation then, and, it is said, procured £30,000 for the relief of the Irish poor. He also visited New England, and for a long time after his return did not give up the idea of going back to America. In Sprigg's "History of the Army," Peters, who early became a military chaplain, is introduced repeatedly as a messenger to Parliament with tidings of victory, for which he received handsome rewards. A chaplain might have been better employed than in conveying messages of this nature, yet such an occupation was not so unsuitable to his sacred character as some other employments in which he was engaged; for it is related of him that he acted as a recruiting officer in market towns, entered into treaty with Royalist commanders for the surrender of garrisons, and even acted as a general of brigade against the Irish rebels.[572]
1646.
Another individual, less known to posterity, who combined the offices of chaplain and captain, was Thomas Palmer, of Nottingham, the account of whom by Lucy Hutchinson gives us an insight into a kind of character then very common. He had a bold, ready, earnest way of preaching, and lived holily and regularly as to outward conversation, whereby he obtained a great reputation, which swelled his vainglorious, covetous, contentious, and ambitious spirit. He had insinuated himself so far as to make these godly men desire him for their captain, which he had more vehement longing after than they, yet would have it believed that the honour was rather forced upon him. Being at that time in the castle with his family, he came to the governor and his wife, telling them that these honest people pressed him very much to be their captain, and desiring advice on the subject. They freely told him, that, as he held a charge of another kind, they thought it not fit for him to engage in this new one, and that he might equally advance the public service and satisfy the men who made the request by marching with them simply in the character of chaplain. He went away, she said, confused, observing that he would endeavour to persuade them to be content; but afterwards he informed her that they would not be otherwise satisfied, and so he was forced to accept the commission.[573]
Allowing for the lady's prejudices, her story of Palmer may be admitted in the main; and we may add that, in another part of her narrative, she mentions four hundred people, whereof "more than half were high malignants, who enlisted under one Mr. Coates, a minister and a godly man."
Religion in the Camp.
John Saltmarsh, another of the army chaplains, was a somewhat different character. He must have been a man of irreproachable spirit, for, according to a report preserved by Anthony Wood, "he always preached the bonds of love and peace, praying that that might be the cord to unite Christians in unity." "He meddled not in the pulpit with Presbytery and Independency," but only "laboured to draw the soul from sin to Christ."[574] Yet strange stories are told of him. He had visions just before his death. He visited Windsor Castle, where he refused to take off his hat to Fairfax and Cromwell, because, he said, the Lord was angry with them for committing the saints to prison. After administering reproof which was equally distinguished by faithfulness and fanaticism, he took his leave, remarking that he had finished his errand and must depart never to see the army any more. Returning home, cheerful and in health, to his wife at Ilford, he told her he had finished his course and must go to his Father; and then lying down immediately afterwards upon his bed, he died quietly the next day. These facts taken together indicate a disturbed condition of the brain just as the soul was about to shake off its mortal coil. But on turning to Saltmarsh's "Sparkles of Glory, or Some Beams of the Morning Star," the only book which we have read of his, we notice in it some of the clearest expositions of religious liberty which can be found in the literature of those times. The spirit of the treatise is singularly beautiful, and the teaching of such a man must have been of a healing tendency. It is very true he undervalued the baptism of water, and depreciated all outward ceremonies—in fact, entertained many opinions in common with Quakers; but he had an intense craving after spiritual unity, believing that he found God in lower as well as in higher things, in purer as well as in more corrupt administrations, and expressing "his tenderness and respect towards Episcopalians at home and abroad, though he did not approve of their forms." A mystical element pervades his books, strongly reminding us of John Tauler; and that person is to be pitied who can read the writings of such men without deriving interest and edification. Each exhibits an imaginative mind, striving eagerly to catch glimpses of the infinite and eternal, united to a tremulously sensitive heart, which reacts on the intellect and electrically touches it, so as to make every idea quiver with emotion. There was an abundance of mysticism in the Parliamentary camp; it might and did run into phantasies; but beneath much of what some keen men of the world would ridicule as jargon and absurdity, there may be felt the pulsations of the old patriarch's desire, "O that I knew where I might find Him!"
1646.