I first became aware of William Allen, eventually a Colonel in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, when I was researching my 2019 (privately printed) book commemorating the tenth anniversary of our Baptist chapel’s burning down shortly before I moved to Devon. As Captain Allen, together with his lifelong friend Captain John Vernon, and a couple of other Baptist “other ranks,” he was an early leader, and almost certainly founder, of the Baptist Church, Kilmington, now active and growing with weekly congregations upwards of 150 people.
The early history of the church is particularly transparent, as our existing records began in 1653, the meeting house being built then still exists and is used for services, and the Elizabethan house in Sidbury where Allen and Vernon met their wives, both daughters of a local (Royalist!) gentleman, was until 2021 owned by the same family.
We can piece together Allen’s biography from established documentation and educated speculation. Before the Civil War he was a Warwickshire-born man with a business in Southwark, which happens to be exactly where the Particular (Reformed) Baptists emerged amicably from the Independents, firmly resolved to base their churches only on what Scripture teaches. Judging by the Loughwood Church Book, they did so pretty well, and our present way of doing things, based on the same principles, I find to have been moving steadily towards the 1653 pattern, despite little conscious memory of the history.
These Baptists are best seen as direct theological descendants of the Anglican Puritans (and so were far more irenic towards the established church than some others), and their roots are quite distinct from the General Baptists who owed more to the Dutch Arminians and the radical continental Anabaptists. The story in Southwark is a little convoluted, but the very first specifically Particular Baptist chapel was formed there in 1633, just nine years before Parliament and King Charles began hostilities. I have little doubt Allen became a member.
There’s some remaining documentation of Allen’s early army career, and like a good number of other Baptists he joined the Parliamentary side soon after Civil War broke out. He fought at Naseby, was wounded twice in other battles, was captured and released after surviving decimation by his captors, and became a personal acquaintance of Cromwell. In 1645 we find him despatched with Lord Fairfax’s army to mop up the Royalists in the West, and he was initially stationed in Dorchester, where the local Baptist Church owns him as their founder, or at least the catalyst for their foundation, as a result of his preaching.
This is very likely true, as the pious New Model Army officers often preached on campaign, and were likely to be welcomed in their message. This is because political sympathies were divided on class lines. The gentry and aristocracy naturally supported the Royalist status quo, but the merchants and common people, over-taxed and under-represented both in church and state (so what else is new?), tended to favour Parliament. Even more than now, neutrality was not an option in the culture war. As the Particular Baptists were gospel-centred, biblically literate, relatively unconcerned with social status, and friendly (for the period) towards other denominations, it’s easy to imagine that Allen’s teaching ticked many boxes for the folks in Dorset.
Fairfax’s army then moved on to Axminster and the surrounding villages, making the foundation of a Baptist church in Kilmington around 1646, although undocumented, the likely scenario, and the dynamic William Allen as the likely driving force. By 1653 there were 90 members, plus another 70 from Lyme Regis who had recently left to plant a church closer to home, once more still going strong in 2025.
In 1651, with his wife, John Vernon and his wife, and two more of the soldiers who were leaders of the Kilmington church, Robert Doyly and John Owen, Allen was posted to Dublin as Cromwell’s Adjutant-General of Horse. In an eventful three years, apart from his military work, he helped found and affiliate Baptist churches as far afield as Waterford, helped plan the Ulster settlement (yes, I’m aware that Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland is a still historial powder-keg!), fathered a child but lost his wife, and began to fall out with Cromwell, as the hoped-for Commonwealth began to turn into an autocracy (echoes of Nigel Farage and the Reform party there, perhaps!).
In fact on his return to England he had a fierce argument with Cromwell about it, was tracked and surveilled by the latter’s Intelligence Officer in Devon, and later put under house-arrest on suspicion of treason before being acquitted. But he resigned, only to be reinstated later as Colonel after Cromwell’s death, then was sacked on suspicion of subverting the troops. After the Restoration of Charles II he was arrested, fined and exiled, and is last heard of writing an elegy for the funeral of his friend John Vernon, also exiled, in 1667 (in which, interestingly, the phrase “Job’s comforters” is the first recorded instance in literature!). Fascinating stuff, when you’re a member of the same church he founded, operating on much the same principles he held.
I recently discovered that a book that William Allen wrote in 1658, The Captive Taken from the Strong, has actually been issued in a modern edition, being considered of cultural significance as a prime example of a particular Puritan genre of the time. In fact, the historically minded can read a facsimile online here.
When William and Mary Allen, and John and Anne Vernon, went to Ireland they took with them the deeply troubled younger sister of their wives, Deborah Huish. Through the medical retrospectoscope she had been suffering from severe endogenous, even psychotic, depression from the age of fourteen – in those days, probably the onset of puberty. She herself, and her Baptist friends, saw the affliction in the terms of the time as the direct oppression of the Devil trapping her in her sin. Through modern eyes the worst “sin” she committed was mental, in succumbing to the pathological guilt, the accusatory thoughts (perhaps sometimes audible suggestions to kill herself), the paranoid delusions, and the physical debility that made her unable to eat and, sometimes, almost mute. Given how little we actually know about the causes of psychotic depression, and the patchy response to antidepressants even now, perhaps perhaps her contemporaries were not so far wrong.
Her chronic illness became far worse in Ireland after a dose of smallpox (maybe post-viral depression is a complication of that disease, but it’s hard to know when it’s now extinct). The book is her own testimony, recounted around the time of her Baptism in 1658, of how despite everything she finally began to find hope in Christ that eventually brought her back to the land of the living. Seen as a case-study, the hand of God in this is still evident, despite the different conceptual framework, for the prognosis of psychotic depression with a fourteen year history from adolescence is even now poor, and a good “natural” recovery would be noteworthy.
One feature of this ancient book I appreciated was the honest reporting of the human responses to her plight. Special prayer meetings were held for her by the whole church in Dublin, and a group of people even covenanted to pray and fast until she was delivered – only for everyone to give up eventually, as so many similar ventures are in Charismatic circles today, when things went from bad to worse. Even John Vernon, her official guardian, confesses how he was relieved to be able to hand her back to her family on their return without her having topped herself. William Allen’s introduction also records the depressing effect of her depression on all those around her – something familiar to anyone in a similar situation today.
But what gave me a real sense of fellow-feeling with Allen was to discover that, like me in 2019, he had written his book with his eyes on the public affairs of his broken society as well as the obvious subject. When I was writing about the providential events and faithful people surrounding the apparently catastrophic fire we suffered in 2009, I was also writing Seeing Through Smoke, about the catastrophic state of our nation, and how God’s people should deal with it. It seemed appropriate to make some reference to that as a practical implication of the church’s experience in the other book.
Reading The Captive Taken from the Strong, I was fascinated to see how in his introduction Allen commended Deborah’s experience not only to individuals suffering from despair, and other infirmities, but to the people who, like himself, were deeply disillusioned with the course that England was taking. For Allen, and many of his associates, had adopted the thinking, if not the extremism, of the so-called “Fifth Monarchy” movement. They saw the tragic political upheavals of the Civil War – which remember, were an unprecedented revolution against established royalty 150 years before the French Revolution – as the birth pangs of the eternal Kingdom of Christ replacing the fourth of the evil kingdoms described in the book of Daniel.
They were wrong in the event, of course, but understandably so. From a Puritan point of view, the suppression of what they saw as biblical worship by “an impractical Parliament and a shifty king” was as much of a crisis as many of us see in the collapse of most of what we hold dear in Britain now. Just this week, our own impractical Parliament has approved, at one extreme, backstreet abortion up to birth, and at the other, poorly-controlled euthanasia. Presumably both murderous bills will receive royal assent from another King Charles. Talk of Civil War is becoming commonplace for the first time since the 1640s.
Allen, and most of the New Model Army, saw the inevitable civil strife, once it came, as the opportunity to replace a corrupt monarchy with a republic led by a Parliament of godly men, allowing freedom of conscience and speech, and religious liberty. Once again, history is, if not repeating itself, rhyming absurdly. As a “Postmillennialist” he saw this Establishment of the first truly Christian State as the trigger for Christ’s return, much as I my self have, from a less optimistic viewpoint, seen the current “omnicrisis” as at least the possible trigger for “the end of all things.”
By 1658, the dream was beginning to fall apart. The “godly” Barebones Parliament had become bogged down in political and religious infighting, and into this vacuum Cromwell had, perhaps against his own principles, stepped in as “Lord Protector,” which to Allen was as much as to say another King Charles, as he had told Cromwell to his face. Furthermore, the Baptists began to be as much suppressed by Cromwell and his Presbyterian government as they had been by Charles and his bishops. And remember this was not just a political disappointment, but a dashing of the spiritual hope of Christ’s imminent return.
Bear in mind that, unlike me, Allen was not merely an observer of evil times, but one of the movers of the revolution, who had paid for it in blood and – at the risk of Christian conscience – shed it. It was no small thing to have executed a king, however guilty – only to replace him with another, perhaps even more a candidate for “the man of sin” in 2 Thessalonians. It is a mark of his character that, unlike some with Fifth Monarchy sympathies, he and the Kilmington people refrained from active insurrection, and limited their campaigning to prayer and preaching.
The final lesson I want to draw is that William Allen is a prime example of the cataclysmic disappointment of English Puritan hopes for a revitalised Christianity. Whereas Deborah Huish found a measure of deliverance from the assaults of Satan in her lifetime, Allen’s hopes for a similar phoenix-from-the-ashes answer to the political prayers of Non-conformists were more than dashed. He himself died an exile, and the Restoration ushered in an age in which national morals declined across the board and churches, far from becoming more biblical, became Arian or even Unitarian, at which point the Higher Criticism began to rear its head.
Yet that was not the whole truth. Our local church history shows a fellowship which, whilst buffeted by the social changes and by attacks from outside from the Act of Uniformity to Critical Race Theory, stayed pretty true to the core principles of its Civil War founders over the centuries. And here we are, 380 years later, doing well enough against the newest variants of demonic opposition.
I take that as a white pill, if we should find that whatever hopes we have for the redemption of our corrupted culture come to dust. There is always a bigger picture.
