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William Bradshaw, Antichrist and the Community of the Godly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Peter Lake
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Extract

Hatred of popery was hardly a puritan monopoly in late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century England. The conviction that the pope was Antichrist was something of a commonplace amongst Protestant Englishmen. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the terms in which the identification was established and asserted. The supposed link between such concerns and a ‘millenarian’ radicalism has quite rightly been challenged, most notably by Dr Bauckham. It remains true, of course, that sensitivity towards the extent and nature of the popish threat was a hallmark of puritanism. The consequences of this, however, were ambiguous. The conviction of the reality and pervasiveness of the popish threat undoubtedly prompted much of the puritan critique of the established Church. Certainly, the rhetoric of Antichrist played a crucial role in puritan denunciations of the corruptions of the English Church. But such denunciations drew much of their polemical force from the fact that the premise on which they were based – the antichristian nature of popery – was generally accepted by English Protestants. For the whole strength of the puritans’ case rested on their ability to present their position as but the logical extension to the area of church polity and ceremony of positions readily accepted in the realm of doctrine. Even the most committed Presbyterians accepted that the doctrine of the established Church was unequivocally Protestant. For the immediate polemical purposes of Presbyterians this provided a powerful argument for a parallel and equally thorough reformation of church polity and discipline. Taking a longer perspective and in the face of the threat from Rome, such considerations served to underline the ties of common interest and identity that bound puritans to the national Church.

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Articles
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 1985 , pp. 570 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

I would like to thank Professor John Bossy and Dr Ann Hughes for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.

1 Hill, C., Antichrist in Seventeenth-century England, Oxford 1971Google Scholar.

2 Christiansen, P., Reformers and Babylon, Toronto 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bauckham, R. J., Tudor Apocalypse, Abingdon 1978Google Scholar.

3 Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, passim.

4 For an expansion of these remarks, see chapter 4 of my book Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, Cambridge 1982Google Scholar.

5 For an analysis of these divergent views of the implications of the antichristian nature of popery, see my ‘The significance of the Elizabethan identification of the pope as Antichrist’, this JOURNAL, xxxi (1980), 161–78Google Scholar.

6 Bradshaw was a product of Cambridge puritanism. He went up to Emmanuel in 1589, where he swiftly established himself as a favoured pupil of the master of the college, Laurence Chaderton. It was Chaderton who procured Bradshaw a fellowship at Sidney Sussex and who presided over the early part of Bradshaw's career as a minister. However, Bradshaw's opinions on the liturgy and polity of the Church were more radical than those of his mentor and he was deprived for his failure to conform. After a spell in exile in the Low Countries Bradshaw ended his days as a private chaplain to Alexander Redich. Bradshaw was the author of a series of pamphlet attacks on the state of the English Church, of which perhaps the most famous was his English Puritanism of 1605. On Bradshaw's early career see Lake, Moderate Puritans, 39–40. On his mature opinions see ibid., chap. 11.

7 Both Fulke and Whitaker were university divines and during the 1580s both became masters of Cambridge Colleges – Fulke of Pembroke and Whitaker of St John's. They were probably the leading anti-papal writers of their day and both produced voluminous tomes addressed to the leading proponents of the Catholic cause. For Fulke see Dr Bauckham's unpublished 1973 Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, ‘The career and theology of Dr William Fulke, 1537–89’. For Whitaker, see Lake, Moderate Puritans, chaps. 6 and 8.

8 W. Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, London 1620, 8.

9 Ibid., 65–6, where Bradshaw accused the papists of holding beliefs not validated by the Apostles.

10 Ibid., 15–16.

11 Ibid., 17–18.

12 Ibid., 133.

13 Ibid., 3–4.

14 For this paragraph see ibid., 87–92.

15 Ibid., 98–100.

16 Ibid., 109–10.

17 Ibid., 108–9. Thus, the final defeat of Antichrist could provide no pretext for complacency or quietism before the threat presented to the godly by popery. For further discussion of this point, see Lake, ‘Identification of the Pope as Antichrist”.

18 Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition, 115–16.

19 Ibid., 114.

20 Ibid., 110–11.

21 Ibid., 135–6.

22 Ibid., 130–1.

23 Ibid., 130.

24 For this tension between fear and confidence in puritan attitudes to Antichrist, see Lake, ‘Identification of the pope as Antichrist’.

25 Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition, 142–3.

26 Ibid., 138. Such an attitude was typical of the puritan response to conformist and papist allegations of the antinomian consequences of their insistence on the doctrines of election and assurance.

27 Ibid., 139.

28 Ibid, 108.

29 Ibid, 141.

30 Ibid, 186f.

31 Ibid, 152–3.

32 Presumably such a judgement would not have extended to a bishop like Overton of Coventry and Lichfield who gave Bradshaw, the notorious puritan, a licence to preach. Lake, Moderate Puritans, 262–3.

33 Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition, 104.

34 For this vie w see Miller, Perry, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, Gloucester, Mass. 1965Google Scholar, chap. 4. But see also Collinson, P., ‘Towards a broader understanding of the dissenting tradition’, in Cole, R. and Moody, M. E. (eds.), The Dissenting Tradition, Ohio 1975Google Scholar, and Lake, Moderate Puritans, chap. 11.

35 Bradshaw, , The Unreasonablenesse of the Separation, Dort 1614Google Scholar, passim. For an analysis of Bradshaw's rejection of separation, see Lake, Moderate Puritans, 272–6.

36 I owe this point to a seminar paper given by Professor Collinson at the Institute of Historical Research in February 1982. On the role of membership of a gathered church in achieving soteriological assurance for the anxious puritan professor, see Stephen Brachlow, ‘John Robinson and the lure of separatism in pre-revolutionary England’, in Church History, 1 (1981), 288–301. See also Dr Brachlow's unpublished 1979 Oxford D.Phil, thesis, ‘Puritan theology and radical churchmen in pre-revolutionary England’.

37 See, for instance, Michael Walzer's reference to the work of William Haller, particularly The Rise of Puritanism, New York 1939Google Scholar, in Dr Walzer's Revolution of the Saints, New York 1974, 327Google Scholar.

38 Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition, 172.

39 Ibid., 199–200.

40 Ibid., 202.

41 Ibid., 202.

42 Ibid., 203–4

43 Ibid., 205–6.

44 On popular Anglicanism in a slightly later period, see Morrill, J. S., ‘The Church in England, 1642–9’, in Morrill, J. S. (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War, London 1982, 89–114Google Scholar. The term’ parish Anglicanism’ is a neologism coined by Dr C. A. Haigh in a recent seminar paper at the Institute of Historical Research.

45 Bradshaw, A Preparation to the Receiving of Christ's Body and Blood, London 1617, 5–6.

46 Ibid, 1.

47 Ibid, 17–18.

48 Ibid, 30.

49 In terms of formal theology there was little difference between many of Bradshaw's statements and the Catholic position. The distinction between an outward sign and an inward grace went back to Augustine and was common Catholic doctrine. The same could be said of the idea of receiving unworthily. If theologians were being compared, the argument would centre, not so much on the inward/outward dichotomy, as on the substantiality or otherwise of the grace conveyed by the sacrament. I owe this point to the kindness of Professor Bossy. However, our concern here is not with formal doctine, but with the comparison of the assumptions and religious practice in Catholic attitudes to the mass identified by Professor Bossy and the very different attitudes and assumptions inscribed in Bradshaw's work on the sacrament.

50 Bradshaw, A Preparation, 45–6.

51 Reasons for ‘unworthy receiving’, ibid., 44f. This is paralleled by Professor Bossy's description of the’ internalisation ofsin’ taking place in Counter-Reformation Catholicism. See his article, ‘The social history of confession in the age of the Reformation’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xxv (1975), 21–38Google Scholar.

52 Tests for true receiving, ibid., 60–3.

53 Ibid., 92.

54 Bossy, J., ‘Blood and baptism; kinship, community and Christianity in western Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries’, Studies in Church History, x (1973), 129–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Professor Bossy's review article ‘Holiness and society’, Past and Present, lxxv (1977), 119–37Google Scholar, and his ‘Social history of confession’.

55 The above paragraph is based on Professor Bossy's article ‘The Counter-Reformation and the people of Catholic Europe’, Past and Present, xlvii (1970), 51–70Google Scholar.

56 See, for instance, Burke, U. P., Popular Culture in Early Modem Europe, London 1978Google Scholar, chap. 8.

57 Bossy, ‘People of Catholic Europe’, 69–70.

58 Collinson, P., ‘Towards a broader understanding of the dissenting tradition’, in Cole, R. and Moody, M. E. (eds.), The Dissenting Tradition, Ohio 1975, 25Google Scholar.

59 P. Collinson, ‘The Godly; aspects of popular Protestantism in Elizabethan England’, paper privately circulated at the Past and Present Conference, 1966.

60 On this issue, see Collinson, P., The Religion of Protestants, Oxford 1982Google Scholar, chaps. 5 and 6.

61 Wrightson, K., ‘Two concepts of order’, in Brewer, J. and Styles, J. (eds.), An Ungovernable People; the British and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, London 1980Google Scholar.

62 Wrightson, K.Poverty and Piety in an English Village; Terling, 1525–1700, London 1979Google Scholar.

63 Collinson, , ‘Dissenting tradition’; also Professor Collinson's ‘Cranbrook and the Fletchers’, in Brooks, P. N. (ed.), Reformation Principle and Practice, London 1980Google Scholar.

64 See Collinson, ‘Fletchers’, 191f, for a discussion of a rift amongst the godly group in Cranbrook, split by the rivalry between the local minister, the evangelical protestant, Richard Fletcher, and a more radical puritan interloper, John Strowd.

65 Clark, P., English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution; religion, politics and society in Kent, 1500–1640, Hassocks 1977Google Scholar, chap. 5.

66 Collinson, ‘Dissenting tradition’, 22.