My lack of recent posting is largely explained by research for a project on the Particular (ie Reformed) Baptist founders of my church, which is celebrating its official 370th anniversary next Sunday, from when its records began, though it is probably closer to 378 years old. Two of the main founders, William Allen and John Vernon, have a bigger documentary footprint than I’d realised, and were somewhat significant figures in the Parliamentary army during Britain’s Civil War. Allen became Cromwell’s Adjutant-General in Ireland, and Vernon his Quartermaster-General.
My research has taken an unexpected track, in that I’m coming round to the idea that the most useful lesson to be gained from it is that a single non-biblical doctrine can have catastrophic effects not only for one church, but for a nation. You must understand that what follows is grossly simplified, for the purposes of a blog.
The mainstream Puritans, despite their Blackadder stereotyping nowadays, were simply the English manifestation of the Reformation. Because their main influence was the Geneva of John Calvin and others, the majority who could not live with the halfway house of Archbishop Laud’s Anglicanism became proponents of Presbyterianism, doctrine being decided by councils of equal pastors, rather than hierarchical bishops under the king. These predominated in the House of Commons. A large minority, including Britain’s arguably greatest theologian John Owen, and many in the entrepreneurial class, concluded that each congregation should be autonomous, the members electing their leaders and hammering out doctrinal issues (which did not preclude wider consultation). They began to form separate churches, one of the earliest being in Southwark (William Allen’s home) in 1616. Come the Civil War, Independents dominated in the army.
Some of these London Independents, or Congregationalists, came to the conclusion that Scripture teaches believers’ baptism, although in every other respect they followed Reformed teaching, and they separated amicably from the Independents. They were happy to be a minority, and were possibly the most tolerant of the Non-conformist denominations, happily worshipping in Independent or Presbyterian churches when no Baptist assembly was available, and being ideologically committed to complete religious freedom from early on, as a 1648 pamphlet from the aforementioned John Vernon demonstrates.
That is why so many Particular Baptists were quick to join the Parliamentary side in the Civil War (whose causes, still controversial, I won’t go into here). Allen was captured in battle just three months after war broke out, and Vernon was, by 1644, writing a pocket-guide for cavalrymen.
And they took their faith with them. Allen is credited not only with founding my own church in Kilmington, East Devon, together with daughter-churches in Lyme Regis, Honiton, and further afield, but with the formation of Dorchester Baptist church, while he was briefly stationed in the town. Vernon, in particular, was also responsible for Baptist Church planting in Ireland, and both were active in forging fraternal links between the churches.
Our ancient Church Book shows a typically Puritan spirituality: great stress on knowing and trusting the Bible, on personal conviction of sin and conversion as a strong experience, on godly behaviour (and strong church discipline). Doctrinally there was not much to distinguish them from Reformed believers today, though Puritanism was, perhaps, excessively introspective about one’s spiritual state. Perhaps surprisingly, although attributing much temptation to the direct action of Satan, they seem not to have caught too much of the seventeenth-century disease of superstition: one of the first entries in the Church Book is about a Chard man accusing certain church members of witchcraft. The elders’ response is to ask him for his evidence, and no more is heard about it. No Baptists were burned in the making of this Assembly!
There was one “indifferent” doctrine, though, not part of Baptist theology as such, that caused Allen and Vernon real trouble, and because they were influential, bigger trouble elsewhere. Understandably, the Reformers saw the return of biblical Christianity as a release from “Babylonian bondage,” and tended to believe that this liberation would spread round the world, resulting in a golden age for the Church. A good number optimistically saw this potential triumph as the trigger for Christ’s return.
For many on the the Parliamentary side in the Civil War this hope took on a more concrete form: they were fighting for the Cause of making England the first nation to remove the tyranny of corrupt kings and bishops, and be ruled benevolently by a godly Parliament of equals. Surely that made Christ’s return imminent – and after all, the year 1666 was not far off, somehow combining the mark of the beast with the millennium of Revelation. Given the horrors of war, the radical act of regicide, and the social and religious breakdown after years of conflict, such hopes became a ruling passion, and this seems to have been so for Allen and Vernon, and many others in the army.
The idea began to focus on the eschatological prophecies in the book of Daniel, in which four evil kingdoms represented by beasts will be finally swept aside by the eternal kingdom of Christ, thereby inaugurating a fifth and final monarchy. Charles Stuart represented the last of the fourth, Roman, empire, and the coming republic would be the vessel into which King Jesus would come to rule. They therefore became “Fifth Monarchy Men.” Fifth Monarchism was not a denomination or a sect, but a position that might be held by people in any denomination, in much the same way that the Charismatic Movement intrudes into churches of all kinds from the Catholic to the Pentecostal.
With hindsight the viability of the teaching is doubtful. For a start it was parochial, for England, and even Protestant-influenced Western Europe, are not the whole world. It was questionable to equate the Stuarts with Daniel’s fourth beast, and unscriptural to believe that a human war rather than Christ himself would destroy it. Additionally, it quickly proved utopian in its hopes for a godly kingdom, as Parliament became bogged down in political and theological infighting, and the ascendant Cromwell felt compelled to take over state power himself.
To many, and particular the minority Baptists with Fifth Monarchist leanings, this was more than a betrayal, but a very denial of the Kingship of Christ, given what spiritual expectations they had of the “Great Cause.” Cromwell had been offered the crown, but though he rejected that title, as Lord Protector he was king in all but name, and therefore to the Fifth Monarchists no better than the king who had been executed. Allen, always one to speak his mind, actually had a stand-up row with Cromwell about it, and whilst the Protectorate was still a novelty wrote pamphlets and preached against it. This in itself is not unreasonable – these were the men who had ousted one government by force of arms, and who were close to the heart of the political scene as longstanding associates of Cromwell himself. Who else should speak truth to power?
The result, though, was that Cromwell saw them as potential organisers of a coup. From that time on Allen was followed, even being arrested in bed in Devon. He protested his innocence forthrightly, and successfully, returning later that year to his role in Ireland. All the evidence is that, although Allen and Vernon remained outspokenly unhappy with the political situation, they and other Baptists (like Thomas Patient, the chaplain of the army in Dublin) had no intention whatsoever of turning honest political dissent into insurrection. But there were Fifth Monarchists with fewer scruples, and so to Cromwell all Baptists became objects of deep suspicion and even, against his principles of tolerance, of suppression.
My research suggests that the prominence of my own two “heroes” in far-off, and therefore dangerous, Ireland played a major role in the Protector’s negative attitude towards Baptists. He was quite aware that once a political belief becomes closely linked with religious doctrine in the minds of highly-committed believers, the consequences are unpredictable and dangerous. Eventually Allen and Vernon resigned their commissions, concluding that the Protectorate was a done deal, and that their immediate hopes were dashed. Leaving the army also demonstrated that they were not about to engineer a military coup, but that did not stop Cromwell’s spies suspecting them of sedition in meetings of the Western Baptist Association in Dorchester.
The trouble is that Fifth Monarchism still formed a significant part of Allen and Vernon’s belief system, and that of the church they had founded in Kilmington. To them, Cromwell was impeding the Kingdom of Christ, and could no longer be supported. Had they examined their doctrine and jettisoned it as scripturally unsupported, as the venerable London Baptist William Kiffin did, not just Allen and Vernon, but Baptists generally, might have prospered more under the Commonwealth. As it was, after Cromwell’s death Allen and Vernon were re-appointed, Allen being promoted to Colonel – only to be sacked after Allen voiced Fifth Monarchist ideas in a pamphlet.
But it got worse than that. After the Restoration, one of the radical Fifth Monarchy Men, Thomas Venner, who was neither a soldier nor a Baptist, staged a futile rebellion, and was hanged, drawn and quartered for his efforts. He failed, unlike Vernon and Allen, to see the difference between sensing biblical prophecy fulfilled in one’s time, and trying to force God’s hand in fulfilling it. Five months later Allen and Vernon were arrested, imprisoned, and then exiled on security of £1,000 each. And that is how they ended their lives.
The new regime, quite apart from any vengeful spirit against the Parliamentary Non-conformists, now had good reason, as well as a good excuse, to suspect all the “sectaries” of being a threat to the regime. Charles II had been crowned amid promises of religious tolerance, but after this the “Clarendon Code” brought in truly persecutory measures, well known to anyone who did Tudors and Stuarts in school history. It was not until 1871 that Non-conformists were even admitted to universities, which alone has coloured the demographic and intellectual shape of British Christianity to this day.
I’m a great believer in the “treasures in jars of clay” concept. Any hero, and in particular any hero of the Christian faith, can be found to have major shortcomings. The foolish “Woke” love to define people of the past simplistically by their weaknesses: Luther was crude and antisemitic, Whitefield and George Washington approved of slavery, and so on. As I have researched, I have gained increasing admiration for the two main subjects of my study, the soldier-church-planters William Allen and John Vernon. Their work has resulted in a church that stayed faithful to biblical faith for 378 years, and is going strong today.
But not only did that church have to go through severe persecutions, including jail and confiscation of property, partly as a result of what turned out to be a demonstrably false doctrine of the imminence of Christ’s return, but they had to unlearn false teaching they had stressed too much, which must have added to their sense of discouragement. By the power of God, thankfully they did so.
Fifth Monarchism is not a temptation today (though in America beware of the Seven Mountain Dominionism being peddled by the New Apostolic Reformation). But I can think of fashionable teachings that seem to have crept into the thinking of otherwise sound Christians, and have even become dominant themes in their thinking, in much the same way that Fifth Monarchism crept into the Particular Baptist mindset. Without a crystal ball it’s not easy to see if any of these ideas might give governments an excuse to clamp down on religious freedom – so far the authorities seem happy to censure genuinely biblical teaching. But since small errors have a way of evolving into big errors, we ought to learn not to give them the least house-room, even when embraced by those we admire.
