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Arguing for Peace: Giles Firmin on New England and Godly Unity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Richard Baxter admired the qualities Giles Firmin brought to religious controversy: ‘Candor, Ingenuitie, Moderation, Love and Peace’. Firmin, Vicar of Shalford, Essex, 1648–62, argued for peace during the Interregnum, at a time when disputes fractured the churches of his county. Factions of Presbyterians and Independents still fought about the right path to religious reform, in terms dictated by polemic of the 1640s, while sects like the Quakers rattled confidence in a united Church. Firmin devised arguments that crossed party lines, to unite against sectarianism. He wrote from an unusual perspective. He had been to Massachusetts and come home. He had taken part in the colony’s bold experiment in Congregationalist church order, which inspired English Independents, but came back into parish ministry in Essex without repudiating his colonial experience. Modern historians, like seventeenth-century Presbyterians, struggle to explain why New England’s churches claimed unity with England, but acted differently. Firmin’s outlook sets contemporary polemic in a fresh light. Nowadays, he is better known for his anecdotes than for his views, because he scattered his tracts with stories about people he had known in colony and homeland. His opinions tend to escape notice. Yet Firmin used his experience in Old and New England to make a distinctive appeal for unity.
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References
1 Baxter, Richard, Rich. Baxter’s Apology (London, 1654), 1, p. 107.Google Scholar
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4 Giles Firmin, A Serious Question Stated (London, 1651), ‘To the Courteous Reader’; idem, The Answer of Giles Firmin (London, 1689), p. 6. Modern writers tend to classify Firmin as a Presbyterian: see, most recently, Knight, Janice, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)Google Scholar; Bremer, Francis J., Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo- American Puritan Community, 1610-1692 (Boston, Mass., 1994)Google Scholar. He was licensed as a Presbyterian preacher in 1672, but licences often gave inaccurate ascriptions. To borrow a phrase from Nathaniel Ward (DNB), Firmin’s father-in-law, he was not ‘presbyterian nor plebsbyterian but interpendent’: Ward, , The Simple Cobler of Agawam in America (London, 1647)Google Scholar, ed. P. M. Zall (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1969), p. 35. Geoffrey Nuttall describes Firmin as ‘no more a Classical Divine than he was one of the Congregational Brethren; nor yet was he a new-style Episcopalian’: Nuttall, Geoffrey F., ‘The Essex Classes (1648)’, United Reformed Church History Society Journal, 3 (1983), p. 199.Google Scholar
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9 Such as John Wilson, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Stephen Marshall, Daniel Rogers and John Norton, who all figure later in his career. For an excellent discussion of this clerical network, see Webster, Tom, ‘The Godly of Goshen scattered: an Essex clerical conference in the 1620s and its diaspora’ (Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992).Google Scholar
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11 For Ipswich settlers’ origins, see Allen, D. G., In English Ways (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), pp. 269–79 Google Scholar. The ministers of Ipswich, Massachusetts, were Nathaniel Rogers (DNB), son of John Rogers of Dedham, Essex (DNB), and John Norton (DNB), born in Essex but an emigrant from Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire. Nathaniel Ward (see note 4), formerly minister of Stondon Massey, Essex, lived in Ipswich ‘out of office’. Firmin’s marriage to Nathaniel’s daughter, Susanna, made him a kinsman of Nathaniel Rogers in New England, and of Daniel Rogers (DNB) of Wethersfield, Essex, in England. Susanna and Nathaniel followed Firmin to Essex in 1646.
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18 Ann Hughes illuminates the relation between print and pulpit controversies in ‘The pulpit guarded: confrontations between orthodox and radicals in revolutionary England’, in Laurence, Ann, Owens, W. R. and Sim, S., eds,John Bunyan and his England (London, 1990), pp. 31–50.Google Scholar
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22 Firmin’s library was limited by his funds and sympathies, and by information that reached him. He did not own Edwards’ Gangraena; a tract by Cotton on reconciliation seems to have passed him by. Firmin, Giles, A Sober Reply to the Sober Answer of … Mr. Cawdrey (London, 1653), p. 8 Google Scholar; idem, Serious Question Stated, ‘To the Courteous Reader’; Cotton, John, Certain Queries Tending to Accommodation and Communion of Presbyterian and Congregationall Churches (London, 1654).Google Scholar
23 Firmin, Separation Examined, ‘To the … Ministers of London’, and pp. 68, 98; idem, Serious Question Stated, ‘To the Courteous Reader’. Firmin criticized New England’s Essex divines in print only in 1670, though his reservations about what Hooker and Shepard taught on preparation for grace are apparent in 1654: Firmin, The Real Christian (London, 1670); Firmin to Baxter, 24 July 1654, Baxter Calendar, 1, letter 192; Jones, James W., The Shattered Synthesis (New Haven, Conn., 1973), pp. 32–53 Google Scholar; Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts, pp. 164-5.
24 Firmin found ample support for this in the texts cited in note 19. Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar, sheds light on Puritan ingenuity in adapting ideology to circumstance.
25 Firmin, Separation Examined, pp. 82, 20; see also Allin and Shepard, Defence of the Answer, p. 10; on primordial churches in New England, Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, To Live Ancient Lives: the Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1988), pp. 120—50.Google Scholar
26 Firmin, Sober Reply, pp. 7–8, 24; idem. Separation Examined, pp. 81-2; on the Wethersfield covenant, Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), pp. 269–70.Google Scholar
27 Firmin, Sober Reply, ‘To the Courteous Reader’ and pp. 7-8; Marshall, [ed. Firmin], Power of the Civil Magistrate; Firmin, ‘A brief vindication of Mr. Stephen Marshall’, appended to his The Questions Between the Conformist and Nonconformist (London, 1681); idem, Separation Examined, p. 27. Nuttall, ‘The Essex Classes’, p. 199, notes that Firmin was ordained by neighbour ministers, and not by a Presbyterian Classis: the ministers came from different Classis areas, and the Classical structure for the county existed only on paper.
28 Firmin, Serious Question Stated, ‘To the Courteous Reader’; Baxter, Richard, Five Disputations of Church-Government, and Worship (London, 1659), p. 349 Google Scholar; Firmin, , Of Schism (London, 1658), p. 69.Google Scholar
29 Firmin, Sober Reply, pp. 28-9; idem, Separation Examined, p. 63. Firmin remained a church member in Boston long after his move to Ipswich: Pierce, ed., Boston Church Records, p. 41. Foster, Long Argument, pp. 178-9, interprets this practice as lay resistance to clerical control. Another ambiguous area was the authority of clerical meetings: Scholz, Robert F., ‘Clerical consociation in Massachusetts Bay: reassessing the New England Way and its origins’, William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 29 (1972), pp. 391–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 The Agreement of the Associated Ministers of the County of Essex (London, 1658). Firmin described the process that led to the Agreement, and quotes a letter from John Norton commending it, in a tract which challenged John Owen’s ecclesiology: Of Schism, ‘To the … Associated Ministers in the County of Essex’. No record survives of the ministers who subscribed, but their agreed statement was to be ‘proposed’ to their ‘particular congregations’, and ‘to all such in the County that love the Churches Peace’: Agreement, titlepage. County Voluntary Association statements each have their own character; the Essex Agreement reflects Firmin’s concerns.
31 Collinson, Patrick, ‘The English conventicle’, SCH, 23 (1986), p. 256.Google Scholar
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33 Firmin, Serious Question Stated; idem, Separation Examined, p. 45; idem, Sober Reply, pp. 22, 54. The Worcestershire Voluntary Association debated this issue: Baxter, Richard, Certain Disputations of Right to Sacraments (London, 1658), pp. 245–349 Google Scholar. Firmin claimed Stephen Marshall left his parochial charge because he was ‘unsatisfied … to baptize all, yet refuse above halfe the Lords Supper. But now he is out of the snare being onely a lecturer’: Firmin to Baxter, 24 July 1654, Baxter Calendar, 1, letter 192; see also letter 300.
34 Collinson, Patrick, ‘The cohabitation of the faithful with the unfaithful’, in Grell, O. P., Israel, Jonathan I., and Tyacke, Nicholas, eds, From Persecution to Toleration. The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 51–76.Google Scholar
35 Baxter to Firmin, 13 May 1656, Baxter Calendar, 1, letter 306.
36 Firmin, Real Christian, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’; idem. Questions Between the Conformist and Nonconformist, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, and p. 5; Keeble, N. H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester, 1987), p. 39.Google Scholar
37 Firmin, Weighty Questions Discussed, ‘To the Reader’, marginal note. This tract shows Firmin’s support in the 1690s for the short-lived ‘Happy Union’ between Presbyterians and Congregationalists.