1. In December 1646, Robert Baillie, a Church of Scotland minister and supporter of Presbyterianism troubled by the profusion of religious sects that had sprouted up to tempt the godly in an evil world, penned the preface to his book Anabaptism, the true fountaine of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme, and the most of the other errours, which ... doe trouble the Church of England (London, 1647). Despite the problematic nature of anti-heretical writing generally, Baillie’s concerns alert us to the significance that certain contemporary hostile observers attached to what they derogatorily termed Anabaptism—a term too often used loosely, which implied that adherents had rejected their first baptism as illegitimate, and invoking the spectre of the Anabaptists of Münster, who in 1534 had seized this town in Westphalia proclaiming it the New Jerusalem, forcefully establishing polygamy and abolishing private ownership of money. Theologically radical and but for whom there would probably have been neither Diggers nor Ranters, until the emergence of the Quakers the Baptists were one of the largest Protestant nonconformist movements in revolutionary England. Thus it has been estimated that during the mid-1640s there were nearly forty organised Baptist groups in England, including at least ten churches in London, with perhaps a few more dispersed around the country for which no evidence survives. By 1660 there were possibly as many as 250 Baptist churches in England and Wales with a combined total membership, despite marked variations in the size of congregations, generously reckoned at 25,000 people – that is about 0.47% of the population. The picture, however, was more fluid than these figures suggest. Congregations were voluntary associations, a gathered church of believers joined in fellowship as members of one body, who advocated either the mainstream principle of ‘closed communion’ (membership restricted to those who as adults had undergone believer’s baptism) or the hybrid of ‘mixed communion’ (open to Baptists and non-Baptist separatists alike). Some congregations fragmented, others were probably short-lived; membership also fluctuated, swelling with conversions made by emissaries who obeyed the biblical injunction to go teach and baptize all nations, but dwindling when people either fell away from the faith or were excommunicated. Moreover, though Baptists agreed that there was no scriptural justification for infant baptism, they were divided on a number of important theological issues: whether Christ died for the sins of all mankind or only the elect were to be saved by God’s free grace and mercy, whether baptism should be for believers only, whether baptism should be administered by sprinkling or full immersion, whether church discipline should be imposed upon members, and whether it was necessary to lay hands upon elders at their ordination and anoint the sick with oil. The most serious cause of schism among Baptists was undoubtedly their disagreement over soteriology (the doctrine of salvation). On the one hand were followers of Calvinist doctrine who believed in the ‘particular Election and Reprobation’ of individuals (Particular Baptists), and on the other were essentially maintainers of core Arminian or Remonstrant tenets who, while accepting particular election and denying free will, nevertheless taught the ‘universal love of God to all’ and therefore the possibility of universal redemption (General Baptists). Only in retrospect, however, as Baptists set about carefully shaping and writing their history—one thinks particularly of Thomas Crosby’s pioneering The History of the English Baptists, from the Reformation to the Beginning of the reign of King George I (1738–40)—did these denominational divisions assume a greater degree of clarity and cohesion then they had possessed at their tangled inception.
2. Notwithstanding the difficult, largely fragmentary not to mention scattered source material, Stephen Wright1 has succeeded in undermining the foundations of part of traditional Baptist historiography with its overly neat splits and categories. Yet his book begins not during the reign of Edward VI, when as one historian2 has argued there may have been ‘Anabaptist’ activities in south-eastern England, but with the accession of James I. Furthermore, Wright is in agreement with those scholars ‘who have found the roots of the English Baptists in the puritan and separatist traditions’ (p. 7) rather than in the Netherlands. In the apparent absence of institutional continuities between the Reformation and early Stuart period (Wright knows of no English anabaptist congregations during the last quarter of the sixteenth century), he turns in his first chapter to John Smyth—best known for his controversial decision to rebaptise himself in 1609—theological controversies and, among other things, the English Baptists’ relationship with the Dutch Mennonites. There follow chapters on the Baptists in England from 1611 to 1638 (with a particular focus on Thomas Helwys, who ‘diverged’ from Smyth ‘on questions of ecclesiology’, and John Murton), the restoration of immersion and Baptist alignments between 1638 and 1644, internal discussions and external alignments from 1642 to 1645, the Baptists and politics during the period 1645 to 1647, and an examination of the role that Baptists played in the army as preachers, soldiers and officers together with their involvement in politics and the Leveller movement during the English Revolution. Despite the acknowledged major omission of the Clarke manuscripts at Worcester College, Oxford which would have provided crucial evidence for the last chapter, this is on the whole a very well researched book drawing on an impressively wide range of manuscript and printed sources. Wright is at his most persuasive in arguing that one ‘Jan Batten of Leyden’ may have been the leading English Baptist, Timothy Batte (pp. 85–89); in presenting evidence ‘both for links between the [Thomas] Lambe and [John] Spilsbury groups, and against links between either of those groups and the [Richard] Blunt-[Samuel] Blakelocke churches’ (pp. 94–95); in suggesting that ‘there is no evidence of contacts between either Edward Barber or Thomas Lambe, and other churches identifiable (earlier or later) with the General Baptist tradition’ (p. 109); and most importantly that denominational alignments did not harden until arguably October 1644 with the publication of The Confession of Faith, a document issued by seven London churches unambiguously affirming their belief in particular election and thus justifiably designated Particular Baptists by historians. Unusually though still plausibly Wright goes further, maintaining that the ‘fluid and provisional alignments’ that had existed prior to the seven London Particular Baptist churches’ Confession had been ‘based upon divisions not over theology but (in large part) over the proper means of church formation’ (p. 110).
3. All the same this is not an easy book, not even for the specialist audience to whom it is directed. Wright assumes a great deal of prior knowledge and does not always write concisely or clearly. Hence the explanations he offers of some tricky theological disputes and problematic sources (notably transcripts of manuscripts made in 1711–12 by Benjamin Stinton) tend unfortunately to be convoluted and, one suspects, confusing for those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the subject. This may also explain why in organising his material he has chosen to include five appendices, the most useful of which discusses Baptist groups in early 1645. These caveats aside, Wright’s study is a significant contribution to several key debates in early Baptist historiography. Like older yet still valuable studies such as Murray Tolmie’s The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977) and B.R. White’s The English Baptists of the 17th Century (Didcot, 1996), one hopes that beyond the confines of this unfashionable corner of Protestant nonconformist studies Wright’s arguments reach the far wider audience that they deserve—particularly among scholars of English religious and political radicalism.