English Dissenters

• 1. Introduction

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  English Dissenters were Protestants who broke from the Church of England across three centuries, from the 1500s through the 1800s. Their central complaint was simple: the established church had not gone far enough in purging itself of Roman Catholic influence. But what followed from that complaint was anything but simple. Some went into exile. Some founded new colonies across the Atlantic. Some were arrested. Some cursed their enemies publicly. And some, like the Diggers, stopped talking about theology altogether and started seizing land.

  The questions worth asking are not just who these people were, but what drove ordinary Protestants to keep splitting, arguing, and refusing to conform. King James I had a phrase for what was at stake: "no bishop, no king." When Oliver Cromwell abolished both the episcopacy and the monarchy upon founding the Commonwealth, he showed exactly how dangerous those four words were. After the monarchy was restored in 1660, the Act of Uniformity followed in 1662, requiring Anglican ordination for every member of the clergy. Many ministers refused. That refusal gave birth to the formal category of Nonconformist. But by then, the landscape of English religious dissent was already a thicket of competing visions, strange prophets, agrarian communists, and mystics reading German philosophy in secret. The Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Quakers, and the Methodists all grew from this soil, and all four remain major Christian denominations today.

• 2. Seeds of Separation

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  By 1580, Robert Browne had become a leader in the movement for a congregational form of church organisation. He attempted to set up a separate Congregational Church in Norwich, Norfolk, was arrested, and was released only on the advice of William Cecil, his kinsman. Browne and his companions then moved to Middelburg in the Netherlands in 1581. He returned to England in 1585 and rejoined the Church of England, eventually serving as a schoolmaster and parish priest. His movement outlasted his own defection from it: the Brownists went on to found the Plymouth Colony in the New World.

  Henry Barrowe, whose followers were called Barrowists, took the argument further. He held that the whole order of the established church was polluted by the remnants of Roman Catholicism, and that separation from it was not optional but essential to pure worship. He defended the right and duty of the church to carry out necessary reforms without waiting for permission from any civil authority. The logic was uncompromising: a corrupt institution cannot reform itself by degrees.

  Puritanism, though it operated inside the Church of England rather than outside it, grew from the same soil. According to Thomas Fuller's Church History, the term "Puritan" dates back to 1564. Archbishop Matthew Parker used both "puritan" and "precisian" to mean a kind of stickler. Puritanism in its organised form began shortly after Queen Elizabeth I's accession in 1558, when some Marian exiles among the clergy returned from the continent and began pushing for a wider Protestant Reformation from within. Their successors eventually crossed the Atlantic, shaping the religious character of the early American colonies.

• 3. The Interregnum's Ferment

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  Between 1649 and 1660, with the monarchy abolished and Cromwell governing the Commonwealth, religious experimentation expanded in ways that had been impossible before. Dozens of sects competed for followers, and the boundaries between theology, politics, and social reform blurred entirely.

  Gerrard Winstanley founded the Diggers in 1649, calling them True Levellers. The original name came from their belief in economic equality based on a specific passage in the Book of Acts. They attempted to reform the existing social order by levelling real property and establishing small egalitarian rural communities. Their agrarian communism made them one of the most radical groups of the era.

  The Muggletonians began in 1651 when two London tailors announced they were the last prophets foretold in the Book of Revelation. Named after Lodowicke Muggleton, the movement grew out of the Ranters and in direct opposition to the Quakers. Muggletonians held that God takes no notice of everyday events on Earth and will not intervene until the end of the world. They avoided all worship and preaching, meeting only for discussion and socialising. Members attained public notoriety by cursing those who reviled their faith.

  The Fifth Monarchists, active from 1649 to 1661, drew their name from a prophecy in the Book of Daniel: four ancient monarchies would precede the return of Christ. They also pointed to the year 1666 and its relationship to the biblical Number of the Beast as a sign that earthly rule by human beings was nearing its end. Their combination of apocalyptic expectation and political activism made them one of the more volatile groups of the Interregnum.

  The Ranters disturbed the authorities for different reasons. Their central belief was pantheistic: God is essentially present in every creature. From that premise they denied the authority of the church, of scripture, and of the established ministry. They drew on the 14th-century Brethren of the Free Spirit, reviving beliefs of amoralism and the ideal of surpassing the human condition to become godlike. Because they believed God resided in all living things, they rejected the very notion of obedience, which made them a direct threat to government stability.

• 4. Mystics and Seekers

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  Jakob Böhme, a German mystic and theosopher who claimed divine revelation, had his works appear in England in the 1640s. His writings primarily concerned sin, evil, and redemption. English Behmenists developed from readers of his texts, and some eventually merged with the Quakers. Böhme accepted the Lutheran view that humanity had fallen from divine grace, but he broke with Lutheran orthodoxy by rejecting both sola fide and the concept of sola gratia.

  The Philadelphian Society organised around John Pordage, an Anglican priest from Bradfield, Berkshire, who had been ejected from his parish in 1655 for holding differing views and was then reinstated in 1660 during the English Restoration. Pordage was drawn to Böhme's ideas. His group represented a kind of learned mysticism that sat uneasily between the established church and outright separation.

  The Seekers occupied a different position. They did not constitute a distinct religion or sect but formed a loose religious society. They considered all existing churches and denominations to be in error and believed that only a new church established directly by Christ upon his return could possess genuine grace. Their meetings were held in silence; they had no clergy, no hierarchy, and no programmed services. They waited in quiet for inspiration from God. Many Seekers later became Quakers after hearing the preaching of George Fox and early Friends.

  George Fox, often regarded as the father of Quakerism, attributed the name "Quaker" to a judge in 1650 who called them that "because I bid them tremble before the Lord." Fox taught that apart from Christ himself, there was "none upon the earth" that could cure unbelief and sinfulness. He also taught the doctrine of perfection: spiritual intimacy with God entailing an ability to resist sin and temptation. The Quakers' unprogrammed worship, in which the congregation waited in silence for the Holy Spirit before speaking, carried the Seekers' practice directly into an enduring institution.

• 5. Secret Sects and Heresy

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  The Familia Caritatis, known in England as the Familists, began on the continent in the 16th century around the Dutch mystic Hendrik Niclaes. Members believed Niclaes was the only person who truly knew how to achieve a state of perfection. His texts attracted followers in Germany, France, and England. The group was considered heretical in 16th-century England for beliefs that included the idea that a time existed before Adam and Eve, that Heaven and Hell were both present on Earth, and that nature rather than God directed all things.

  The Familists were deliberately secretive. They wished death upon those outside the Family of Love. Remarriage after a spouse's death was permitted only between members of the same Familist congregation. They tended to maintain membership in an established church specifically to avoid suspicion. They continued to exist until the middle of the 17th century, when they were absorbed into the Quaker movement.

  The Grindletonians occupied an even more obscure corner of dissent. In a sermon preached at St Paul's Cross on the 11th of February 1627 and published under the title "The White Wolfe," Stephen Denison, minister of St Katharine Cree in London, charged the Grindletonian Familists with holding nine points of antinomian tendency. Those same nine charges were repeated by Ephraim Pagit in 1645 and Alexander Ross in 1655. In 1635, John Webster, curate at Kildwick in North Yorkshire, was charged before a church court with being a Grindletonian. Simultaneously, in New England, John Winthrop suspected that Anne Hutchinson was one. The last known Grindletonian died in the 1680s.

  Sabbatarianism entered England partly through Dutch Anabaptist influence and generated its own debates about the correct day of rest. Seventh-day Sabbatarianism in England is associated with John Traske (1585-1636), Theophilus Brabourne, and Dorothy Traske (c. 1585-1645), who played a major role in keeping early Traskite congregations growing.

• 6. Levellers and Natural Rights

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  The Levellers moved dissent from theology directly into political theory. Active during the English Civil War, they argued for popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law, and religious tolerance. Their concept of natural rights was the philosophical centre of their programme. Those rights, they argued, had been violated by the king's side in the civil wars.

  At the Putney Debates in 1647, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough defended natural rights as derived from the law of God expressed in the Bible. That argument placed religious authority at the foundation of what would later become secular political philosophy. The Levellers did not simply want a different church; they wanted a different kind of state.

  The Levellers' insistence on popular sovereignty ran directly counter to what King James I had meant by "no bishop, no king." James's phrase had been a warning that the hierarchies of church and state were mutually dependent. The Levellers were prepared to dismantle both. Cromwell used their energy during the Civil War but suppressed the movement once the Commonwealth was established. The tension between religious dissent and political radicalism never fully resolved. It would surface again in the Rational Dissenters of the 18th century, who opposed the financial ties between the established church and the government and grounded their arguments in both scripture and the newly emerging discipline of science.

• 7. Wesley, Swedenborg, and New Directions

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  John Wesley was an Anglican priest when he started the Methodist movement. He taught two works of grace: the New Birth, in which individuals repent and embrace Jesus as saviour, and entire sanctification, in which the believer is made perfect in love and original sin is uprooted. Wesley held that entire sanctification could be bestowed instantaneously, "though it may be approached by slow and gradual steps." Early Methodists were known for careful lifestyle practice: wearing plain dress, fasting on Fridays, devout observance of the Lord's Day, and abstinence from alcohol.

  Methodism originally operated within the Church of England. Several Methodist ministers, including Wesley's brother Charles Wesley, remained in that church even after the eventual schism. The break came in stages: in the 1780s linked to complications tied to the American Revolution in the United States, and in 1795 in Great Britain following John Wesley's death. Popular Methodists such as George Whitefield were accused during the 18th century of blind enthusiasm, a charge against which they defended themselves by distinguishing fanaticism from what they called "religion of the heart."

  The Swedenborgian church originated in London in 1780, built around groups reading Emanuel Swedenborg. Its membership was composed largely of Methodists, Baptists, and Anglicans. Some left their existing churches to form the General Conference of the New Jerusalem. Others, such as Anglican John Clowes and Thomas Hartley, argued for remaining within their existing traditions. Swedenborg himself had not called for a new organisation; he wanted theological reform from within. At the end of his life, he faced a rare Swedish heresy inquiry by the Swedish Lutheran Consistory. He died before it concluded, and the Consistory shelved the inquiry without reaching a decision. The Plymouth Brethren, another dissenting tradition that continues today, originated in Dublin in 1827.