“It is a sign he is a branch cut off and
withered who careth little for any but himself” (292).
Richard Baxter, How to
Do Good to Many
“And let all men take
their common and special opportunities to do good: time will not stay;
yourselves, your wives, your children, your servants, your neighbours, are
posting to another world; speak now what you would have them hear; do them now
all the good you can. It must be now or never; there is no returning from the
dead to warn them” (323-34).
Given the
extraordinary literary output by Richard Baxter, it is hard not to agree with Richard
Schlatter that figures like Baxter have been largely overlooked by historians
both left and right. Baxter was a prodigious writer turning out more than 130
books. So many books that it is difficult to count. Many of the books are folios
with over 1 million words in length.
While prominent
figures like Baxter have largely been forgotten, the same cannot be said about
the English revolution. The last two decades have seen a never-ending stream of
literature. The revolution still
provokes significant interest and controversy. The purpose of this little
review is to try and place Baxter within the context of the English revolution
and to a certain extent, rescue him from the condescension of history.
While many significant
figures of the revolution have sketchy biographies, this cannot be said of
Baxter, who was born in 1615. From an early age, Baxter began to see things in
class terms describing his father as “a mean Freeholder”. Like many families at
the beginning of the revolution, Baxter’s family life was tough, and the family
was “entangled by debts”. However, his poverty did not stop Baxter from
thinking that ‘Godly People were the
best’.
Baxter was heavily influenced
by his family’s acceptance of Puritanism. Baxter was later to recognise his
father as the “Instrument of my first Convictions, and Approbation of a Holy
Life’. In class terms, Baxter was part of a growing and influential lower
middle class who would clash so spectacularly with the King and Aristocracy in
the English revolution.
Like other
middle-class people around him, Baxter had the drive to try and achieve ‘Academick
Glory’, and ‘wanting Academical Honours’. This he did not achieve through
university but by becoming self-taught. Baxter “became one of the most learned of
seventeenth-century divines.” Baxter puts this down to God. His praise of God
is a running theme throughout his writings and is central to the book How to Do
Good to Many: The Public Good Is the Christian’s Life. The book is a guide for
the middle class on how to do good. There is nothing controversial in the book;
much Baxter’s political and social outlook is missing. This is a little strange
given that Baxter was profoundly moved by the massive social, political and
religious upheavals brought about by the English revolution.
While Baxter’s work is
cloaked in religious trappings, once you break open the shell of religiosity,
it is clear to anyone that a study of his political and philosophical writings
play an essential part in our understanding of the events of the 17th-century
English revolution.
From a political
standpoint, Baxter was on the right-wing of the Presbyterians. He kept his
distance from Oliver Cromwell and other leaders of the revolution. To use a
modern term, Baxter took a typical centrist position also attacking anyone
associated with the left-wing of the revolution, including Independents such as
Hugh Peters. The “sectaries” like Thomas
Rainborow and any Leveller, in general, were “tools of Anabaptists’,. Anyone
who sought to widen the franchise was seen as Anabaptists by Baxter.
Early on in his life,
Baxter took up an extreme and class position on the poor. He did not believe that
men “from the Dung-cart (could) to make us laws, and from the Ale-house and the
May-pole to dispose of our religion, lives, and estates. When a pack of the
rabble are got together, the multitude of the needy and the dissolute prodigals
if they were ungoverned, would tear out the throats of the more wealthy and
industrious…. And turn all into a constant war”.
It would be easy to
dismiss Baxter’s writing on the poor as an exception, but in reality, they partly
expressed a real fear amongst the ruling class that the revolution would lead
to a wider franchise and more importantly a revolution against property. which
to a certain extent happened.
If you strip away all
the religious superstructure at the base of Baxter’s writings are hatred of the
masses. His Holy Commonwealth, which is probably his most famous book is a
manifesto against a more comprehensive democracy except for the chosen few
namely people like him. Baxter‘s hostility to
the poor was expressed most vehemently in his opposition to the Leveller’s.
When
Baxter was in the New Model Army as an army Chaplin, he opposed the Levellers in debate accusing them publishing “wild
pamphlets” as “changeable as the moon “and advocating “a heretical democracy”. The
irony of this being that Baxter’s books themselves were burnt and he was
labelled as a subversive like the Levellers he criticised.
Printing
Revolution
You could say that
this book by Baxter is the product of two print revolutions. One took place in the seventeenth Century the other in the twenty-first century. Baxter’s original book was part of an
influential print culture that exploded during the English revolution. As Joad
Raymond writes ” The publication of one of the first popular printed works,
Mercurius Gallobeligicus, in 1594 ushered in a new era of the printed word to
England in the form of pamphlets and newsbooks. These works quickly gained
popularity by the middle of the seventeenth century, amplifying communication
among all levels of society”. Given
Baxter’s prodigious output it has been said that he “was the first author of a
string of best-sellers in British literary history”.
This book is also
part of another print revolution no less important. The print revolution in the twenty-first century has seen the rise of books printed by their author or
publisher. This particular edition was initially printed in the United States,
but my copy says it was printed in the United Kingdom by Amazon. In some cases,
it is difficult to tell the origin of the country a book is printed in since
ships outfitted with printing presses now print vasts quantities and deliver
them to any country in the world.
One of the most
interesting parts of the book is Baxters appeal to merchants to behave
themselves as good Christians. As Christopher hill recounts in his book The
English Revolution 1640 “The political theorist, Hobbes, describes how the
Presbyterian merchant class of the city of London was the first centre of
sedition, trying to build a state-governed like the republics of Holland and
Venice, by merchants for their interests. (The comparison with the bourgeois
republics is constantly recurring in Parliamentarian writings.) Mrs Hutchinson,
the wife of one of Cromwell’s colonels, said all were described as Puritans who
“crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the encroaching priests, the
thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry . . . whoever could endure a
sermon, modest habit or conversation, or anything good.”
As was said at the
beginning of this review, Baxter is an overlooked writer but along with Thoms Hobbes
and James Harrington is
a crucial figure if one wants to understand the nature of the English
revolution. Baxter’s writings give us a more in-depth insight into culture and
politics during the civil war.
According to one
writer “The largest single group among Baxter's correspondence consists of some
seventy men who became nonconformist ministers at the Restoration, but the
interest of the letters is not confined to the history of nonconformity,
ecclesiastical affairs, or theological controversy. Baxter was an acute
enquirer into matters arcane and mundane, inveterately interested in both
public affairs and individuals' experience, encyclopedically industrious in
establishing the grounds for the opinions which, for over half a century, he
freely discussed in letters with persons of every walk of life, from peers, the
gentry, and members of the professions, to merchants, apprentices, farmers, and
seamen. The result is not merely a rich historical archive: the range of this
correspondence, the vitality of its engagement with a great variety of topics,
the immediacy of its expression, and the unpredictability’s of its mood and
tone make this collection a record of felt experience unique among early
epistolary archives”.
To a certain extent Baxter
was sensitive enough to recognise the social currents that brought people of
diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king. Baxter used the only
tool available to him. He “ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical
precedent for some theory to explain what they were doing”.
Baxter chose the
parliamentary side because he felt that “for the debauched rabble through the
land emboldened by his (the kings) gentry and seconded by the common soldiers
of his army, took all that were called Puritans for their enemies”.
While it is correct
to place Baxter’s writings alongside that of Hobbes and Harrington Schlatter believes that Baxter’s opposition to
Hobbes and Harrington were that they believed in a secular state, but Baxter
did not.
Having said that Baxter
closely followed the writings of Hobbes and Harrington declaring "I must begin at the bottom and touch
these Praecognita which the politicians doth presuppose because I have to do
with some that will deny as much, as shame will suffer them to deny."
Baxter was heavily
critical of Hobbes whose “mistake” according to one writer “was that in his
doctrine of "absolute impious Monarchy' he gives priority to man by making
sovereign the will of man rather than the will of God. Baxter deplored any
attempt to draw criteria for right and wrong from man's As for Harrington; his
great fallacy consisted in denying God's sovereignty by making "God the
Proposer, and the people the Resolvers or Confirmers of all their laws."
If his [Harrington's] doctrine be true, the Law of nature is no Law, till men
consent to it. At least where the Major Vote can carry it, Atheism, Idolatry,
Murder, Theft, Whoredome, etc., are no sins against God. Yea no man sinneth
against God but he that consenteth to his Laws. The people have greater
authority or Government than Gods in Baxter's view, such conceptions of
politics and its practice as those of Hobbes and Harrington is suited to atheists
and heathen”.
While being critical
his writings bore similarities to both Hobbes and Harrington.According to
Geoffrey Nuttall "in politics as well as an ecclesiastical position as
continually taking a 'moderate' position which from both sides would bring him
charges of betrayal or insincerity."
To the consternation
of many revisionist historians, a case can be made that the English revolution
was fought along class lines. As Baxter himself put it at the time: “A very
great part of the knights and gentlemen of England . . . adhered to the King .
. . And most of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of
the people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry and were for
the King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the smaller part
(as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part
of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in
those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such
manufactures…Freeholders and tradesmen are the strength of religion and
civility in the land, and gentlemen and beggars and servile tenants are the
strength of iniquity”.
Conclusion
To conclude Schlatter
offers some advice on how we should understand Richard Baxter's place in the
English revolution “students of Baxter must look backwards, for he stands near
the end of a tradition which, although someone is always trying to revive it as
a weapon in the never-ending war on liberty and democracy has been long been
dead. To understand Baxter’s politics we must reflect on that long political
tradition which achieved its first and most magnificent expression in the City
of God, which flourished in the Middle Ages and Reformation, and died in the
Age of Reason”.
Comment by C Thompson
Dear Keith,
I read your most recent post
on the works of Richard Baxter and their significance with interest. I am
afraid I do not think your interpretation is correct. Because Baxter like many
of his contemporaries recognised that there were economic and social
distinctions in English society does not mean that they were class-based or
that they supported an interpretation of the events of the 1640s as an example
of class conflict in the Marxist sense.
The use of terms like "lower
middle class" is anachronistic and the view of the capacity of those at
the lower end of the social scale to take political decisions was not just a
reflection of upper class prejudices. I am hard-pressed to think of any early
modern historians nowadays who would use such terms. There was, moreover, no
real prospect at any stage of small groups like the Diggers, still less the
Levellers, overthrowing the economic and social order. In any case, the complex
mechanisms for conciliation and negotiation between different individuals,
social groups and localities have yet to be fully explored. Baxter cannot be
re-moulded in this procrustean sense.
With good wishes,
Christopher
