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| Richard Baxter |
In his book, Richard Baxter and Puritan Politics
Richard Schlatter shows that figures like Baxter have been significantly
overlooked by historians of both left and right persuasions. Schlatter is
correct when saying that the English Civil War was one of a half dozen creative
periods of world history. While figures such as Baxter have faded into the
background, the Civil War still provokes great interest. The purpose of this
short article is to go some way to redress this imbalance.
Richard Baxter was born in 1615 in the village of
Rowton, Shropshire. Baxter described his father as "a mean Freeholder".
Baxter's early family life was hard, and the family struggled with debt.
Although much of this was brought on by a family trait of addiction to gambling.
Despite this wild beginning, the family soon began to
adopt the Puritan lifestyle and philosophical outlook. Baxter later
acknowledged his fathers as the "Instrument of my first Convictions, and
Approbation of a Holy Life'. Baxter was in many ways a representative of the
archetypal lower-middle-class layer that saw Puritanism as both a moral and
philosophical outlook. His father also bred into his son that hostility to
Puritanism stems from "mere Malice' and that 'Godly People were the best'.
Baxter's own 'vehement desires' had been to proceed
from school to university to achieve 'Academick Glory', and throughout his life,
he regretted his lack of university education and pointed to his 'wanting
Academical Honours' as a mark of his insufficiency as a minister.
Despite his lowly academic status, how does one
account for the fact that Baxter "became one of the most learned of
seventeenth-century divines." Baxter himself probably puts this down to
his devotion to God. But while not downplaying the fact that Baxter was
undoubtedly a gifted speaker and writer Baxter was also moved by the massive
social, political and religious upheavals brought about by the English
revolution.
While much of Baxter's thought was cloaked in
religious trappings, his political and philosophical writings should be studied
today because they play an important part in our understanding of the events of
the 17th-century English revolution.
Baxter even early on in his life, engendered dislike
and hatred from many sides of the class struggle. One example came in 1642 when
a churchwarden tried to impose a parliamentary order for the demolition of any
outstanding images of the persons of the Trinity or the Virgin Mary. Baxter was
held by many accountable for this order and was targeted by 'a Crew of the
drunken riotous Party of the Town'. Baxter clearly feared for his life at this
time. The tensions and hostilities surrounding the outbreak of civil war
further heightened feelings: 'a violent Country Gentleman' passing Baxter in
the street' stopt and said, There goeth a Traitor'.
Baxter politically was on the right-wing of the
Presbyterians. He never gave his full backing to Cromwell and never really
adhered to his ideas about the war and later the Commonwealth. One thing is
also certain is that he was hostile to left-wing independents such as Hugh
Peters. He reserved his anger for "sectaries" such as Thomas
Rainborow. As for the Levellers and Diggers, he saw them as nothing more than "tools
of Anabaptists', in fact, anyone who sought to enfranchise a wider selection of
the population were labelled Anabaptists.
Baxter was a prodigious writer turning out more than
130 books (the exact figure depends upon how works published in a variety of
forms are counted), several of them folios over 1 million words in length. The civil war produced an outpouring of writing that
had never been seen previously in England and would match any contemporary
event. According to Christopher Hill "People especially Puritans began to
utilise the press more often than not secretly to forward their thoughts and
views on the nature of religion politics and philosophy. It has been said with
his volume of work Baxter "was the first author of a string of
best-sellers in British literary history". 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."
Baxter claimed no credit for his letter writing.
Again he put his thoughts down to a gift from God. He was, however, a
compulsive letter writer. His 1200 letters were sent to over 350 people.
This amount of letter writing bears testimony to not only Baxter's love of life
but give us a deeper insight into the 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, encyclopaedically 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".
Would it be correct to say that Baxter's writing
represented a definite strand within Puritan philosophy?. No not really, In
most doctrinal disputes he sought a middle position. Another writer suggested, "that
his affinities with the Cambridge Platonists have placed Baxter as a precursor
for the rationalism which was to lead to John Locke and the deists".
While people took sides in the war for different
reasons, Baxter would have preferred to remain neutral, and it was touch and go
which side he would support as he felt comfortable with both.
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". Baxter blamed the King for the
war and was disturbed by the fact that it could in his words disturb the rabble
into a riot.
Some of his writings as regards the poor have the
whiff of fascism about it. He did not believe that men "from the Dung-cart
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 as an
exception but in reality, they expressed a real fear amongst the propertied
elite that the revolution would lead to a wider enfranchisement and a rebellion
against the property.
If you strip away all the religious trappings Baxter's
writings are imbued with this hatred of the masses. His Holy Commonwealth which
is probably his most famous book is a manifesto against wider democracy except
for the chosen few namely people like him. Baxter's hostility to the working
masses was expressed most vehemently in his opposition to the Leveller's. In
fact a study of people like Baxter shows eloquently the social and political
forces that were reigned against the Levellers.
During his time in the New Model Army as an army
Chaplin, he took on the Levellers in debate. He accused the Levellers of
publishing large numbers of wild pamphlets as "changeable as the moon "and
advocating "a heretical democracy".Despite Baxter's hostility to the
Levellers Baxter's books themselves were burnt and he was labelled a
subversive.
While some writers have compared Baxter's writings to
that of Hobbes and Harrington according to Schlatter Baxter's opposition to Hobbes
and Harrington were that they believed in a secular state but Baxter did not.
Baxter followed the writings of Hobbes and Harrington very closely, Baxter
declares: "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." Harrington, Hobbes and to a
lesser extent Baxter writings expressed the sentiment that at the heart of the
civil war was the unresolved nature of democracy. Like Baxter perhaps the
majority of puritans including the leadership of the revolution were extremely
hostile to a wider enfranchisement of the population.
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 the 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 Baxter was critical of both Hobbes and
Harrington much of his philosophical writings bore similarities to them both.
Politically speaking he took a moderate position constantly seeking not to
alienate the political establishment of his day of which he did not succeed.
According to Geoffrey Nuttall who summarised Baxter's political position by
pointing to the fact that "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."
In many ways, Baxter work was physical proof that
despite recent revisionist historian's denial that the Civil war was very much
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".
How to understand Baxter, Schlatter offers some
advice "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 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".
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