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From Eschatology to Arian Heresy: The Case of Francis Kett (d. 1589)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Dewey D. Wallace Jr.
Dewey D. Wallace Jr.
Affiliation:
The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 20006
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Extract

Considerable attention has recently been given to the subject of radical ideas in English religion, especially in the period of the Civil War, as Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution perhaps best illustrates. Nonetheless, much of the story of English radical religion—its sources, milieu, and impact—remains obscure, especially in the Elizabethan period, and the modern investigator is scarcely satisfied with the comment of the seventeenth-century heresiographer, Daniel Featley, who argued, in explaining the rise of heresy, that “it is moste certaine, that where there is a propension in any mans minde to any olde heresie, the malice of the Devil easily supplyeth the want of reading.” Did the radical religious ideas of the Civil War period spring up suddenly out of the tensions of Puritanism or had such ideas long flourished on the margins of the Puritan movement? To what extent were such ideas indebted to continental influences such as the Anabaptists? If indigenous, to what aspect of English religion should one turn for the context and basis of such developments?

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , October 1974 , pp. 459 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1974

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References

1 Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down, Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, 1972).Google Scholar Other examples are Woodhouse, A. S. P., Puritanism and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)Google Scholar, Haller, William, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955)Google Scholar, Wilson, John F., Pulpit in Parliament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, Capp, Bernard S., The Fifth Monarch Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972)Google Scholar, Rogers, P. G., The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, and Lamont, William, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660 (London: Macmillan, 1969).Google ScholarCapp, Bernard S., Godly Rule and English Millenarianism, Past and Present (no. 52, August, 1971), 106–17, is a discussion of some of this literature, especially of Lamont's book.Google Scholar

2 Daniel Featley, Pelagius Redivivus, Or Pelagius Raked Out of the Ashes by Arminius and his Schollers (London. 1626), “Epistle To the Reader” of the “Second Parallel,” sig. Biv.

3 The term “Arian” was used loosely in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century parlance to refer to antitrinitarian heresy. Modern scholars have used it for the subordinationist type of antitrinitarianism which appeared in England in those centuries; see, for example, Colligan, J. Hay, The Arian Movement in England (Manchester: at the University Press, 1913)Google Scholar and Stromberg, Roland N., Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 38–39.Google Scholar Kett's contemporaries applied it to him and to several other earlier and later English heretics with the simple meaning of a denial of the full divinity of Christ, and it is in that sense that it is used here, without any suggestion of precise similarity to the ideas of the ancient heretic Arius. See also Kelley, Maurice, Milton, and the Trinity, , Huntington Library Quarterly XXXIII (August, 1970), 315–320.Google Scholar

4 Emerson, Roger L., Heresy, , the Social Order, and English Deism, Church History XXXVII (December, 1968), 389–403Google Scholar, sees later Deist rationalism as rooted in the ferment of sectarian and heretical ideas of the Civil War era. Christopher Hill, op. cit., 13–14, 73–74, 77–78, 133, 234, 292, has also called attention to ways in which rationalism and radicalism could grow out of bizarre religious ideas, including especially eschatological ones. Recent studies which delve into the earlier English background for mid-Seventeenth-Century eschatological radicalism, such as those by Capp, Bernard S., Rogers, P. G., and Wilson, John F., however, omit Francis Kett altogether. Nor is he included in George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962). He has received some attention from Unitarian chroniclers (see below, footnote no. 12) but without being related to the development of radical eschatology.Google Scholar

5 Alexander Gordon, Kett or Ket, Francis, Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB), XI, pp. 74–75.

6 Francis Kett, The Glorious and beautifull Garland of Mans Glorification, … (London: by Roger Ward, 1585), title page (STC 14945).

7 Alexander Gordon, loc. cit.

8 Storojenko, Nicholas, Life of Greene, translated by E. A. B. Hodgetts, in Grosart, Alexander B., ed., The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, 15 vols. (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1881–1886), I, 259.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 259–60.

10 William Burton, Davids evidence or the Assurance of Gods love (R. Field for T. Cooke, 1592), 138 (STC 4170).

11 Thomas Rogers, The Faith, Doctrine and Religion, professed and protected in the Realme of England … Expressed in [Thirty-Nine] Articles … (by Iohn Legatt, 1607), 9, 14, 19, 23 (STC 21228).

12 Works with a Unitarian denominational interest have usually treated Kett in this fashion, for example, Wallace, Robert, Antitrinitarian Biography …, 3 vols. (London: E. T. Whitfield, 1850), I, 38–39Google Scholar, and Wilbur, Earl Morse, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 176. Among the many antitrinitarians dealt with in G. H. Williams, op. cit., eschatology is seldom noted as a significant factor (for an exception, see p. 656).Google Scholar

13 Burton, loc. cit.

14 Ibid., 137–38.

15 Alexander Gordon, Hamont, Matthew, DNB, VIII, pp. 1137–38.

16 Burton, loc. cit.

17 Ibid., 138.

18 Storojenko, op. cit., 42–45, discusses this and concludes that Kett could not possibly have influenced Greene or Marlowe.

19 Blomefield, Francis, An Essay Towards a topographical history of the county of Norfolk (London: for W. Miller by W. Bulmer and Co., 1805–1810), III, 292–93.Google Scholar

20 Christopher Hill, op. cit., 158–85, discusses the interesting connections between radical religion, “scoffing,” and incipient rationalism among the Ranters. The description of Hamont (Blomefield, loc. cit.) as declaring that “the New Testament and Gospel of Christ, are but mere foolishness, a story of man, or rather a mere fable,” that Christ was a “sinfull man” and “an abominable idoll” and that “all that worship him are abominable idolaters” indicates similarity between Hamont and the later Ranters.

21 Burton, op. cit., 138–39.

22 Strype, John, Annals of the Reformation … (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1824), III, part 2, p. 73.Google Scholar According to Christopher Hill, astrological interest could be related to Familism, op. cit., 148–49, 232; a contemporary of Kett referred to him as “something in astrology,” Grosart, Alexander B., ed., Works of Gabriel Harvey, 3 vols. (for Private Circulation, 1884), II, 169.Google Scholar

23 Ebel, Julia G., The Family of Love: Sources of its History in England, The Huntington Library Quarterly XXX (August, 1967), 337–38.Google Scholar Also for Familism, see Christopher Hill, op. cit., 22–23, 148; George Huntston Williams, op. cit., 477–872, 788–90; Burrage, Champlin, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641), 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), I, 209–14Google Scholar; Dorsten, J. A. Van, The Radical Arts, First Decades of an Elizabethan Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 27–39. Familists were accused of denying the Trinity (and almost all other Christian doctrines), [John Rogers], The Displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked Heretiques, naming themselves the Familie of Love … (London: for George Bishop, 1579), sig. Iviiiv.Google Scholar

24 Ellens, G. F. S., The Ranters Ranting: Reflections on a Ranting Counter Culture, Church History XL (March, 1971), 93.Google Scholar

25 George Huntston Williams, op. cit., 781–82.

26 Francis Blomefield, op. cit., 291–92.

27 This last doctrine of soul-sleep had a long heritage among sixteenth radicals, George Huntston Williams, op. cit., 104–06, 580–92. For the “mortalist” tradition in England, see Burns, Norman T., Christian Mortalism From the Time of Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972) where, although Kett is not mentioned, it is argued that there was a long tradition of mortalism among English radicals.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Ibid., 177, 782. Horst, Irvin B., The Radical Brethren: Anabaptism and the English Reformation to 1558 (Nieuwkoop: B. DeGraf, 1972), 136, however, argues that “Among the Anabaptists anti-trinitarianism was uncommon,” and cites two antitrinitarians active in the reign of Edward VI, neither of whom seems to have been an Anabaptist. He does note, however, (pp. 106–07) that Jean Veron, a Protestant writer of the same time, regarded Kett's rebellion of 1549 as covertly Anabaptist (this Kett was Francis' grandfather), although Horst concludes “we have not found any concrete evidence to indicate that Ket's rebellion was related to Anabaptism in England.” Alexander Gill, in A Treatise concerning the Trinitie of Persons in Unitie of the Deitie, written to Thomas Mannering an Anabaptist, who denyed that Jesus is very God of very God: but Man onely, yet endued with the infinite power of God (London: by Simon Stafford, 1601, STC 11879), connected Anabaptism and antitrinitarianism, as the title indicates.Google Scholar

29 Bernard S. Capp, op. cit., 14, 20, 23–45, describes a broad current of expectation of an imminent kingdom of Christ on earth out of which the Fifth Monarchists came, but makes no mention of Kett among these apocalyptic precursors. Champlin Burrage, op. cit., I, 214–16, identifies as “Legatine Arians, or English Seekers,” the three Legate brothers of the reign of James I on the basis of several contemporary references. One of the brothers was burnt for heresy in 1612. Denying the divinity of Christ, they also denied the existence of a true church as being yet on earth, as apparently Kett also did. See also Alexander Gordon, Legate, Bartholomew, DNB, XI, 846–847. Norman T. Burns, op. cit., 133–134, 145 cites later examples of going to Jerusalem for the millenium.

30 Francis Kett, The Glorious and beautifull Garland of Mans Glorification, sigs. D2r, N4r.

31 Ibid., sig. BIr.

32 Ibid., sigs. BIv, B2r, C4v, DIr.

33 .Ibid., sig. FIr.

34 Ibid., sigs. MIr–v, M2v–M3v, M4r-v.

35 Ibid., sig. O3r.

36 There are varying versions of the order of salvation in Reformed theology, but Election-Vocation-Justification-Sanctification-Glorification is the core of the pattern. Bucer's importance in establishing this theological pattern has been recognized, Stephens, W. P., The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Martin Bucer (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1970), 21–22.Google Scholar Puritan theology emphasized such an order of salvation, but also understood that order experientially: “Election-vocation-justification-sanctification-glorification was more than an abstract formula. It became the pattern of the most profound experience of men through many generations,” Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 93.Google Scholar

37 Francis Kett, op. cit., sigs. BIv, B2v, E4v.

38 Ibid., sigs. L4v, OIr. “God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctifying of the spirite,” “Christe hath called us to holynes,” and “to everlasting glorification” (sig. E3r).

39 Eschatology has, of course, long been recognized as a characteristic Puritan theological interest in the seventeenth century, when it nourished radical expectations of all kinds, but the growth of eschatological speculation among late Elizabethan Puritans has only recently received much attention, for example, in John F. Wilson, op. cit., 214–17.

40 Francis Kett, op. cit., sigs. E4v, F3v, G4v.

41 Ibid., sigs. I3v, G2v.

42 Ibid., sigs. LIr, MIr–v.

43 Ibid., sigs. L4v, MIr, M4r–v.

44 Ibid., sigs. C3r, DIr, G2r, G3v, IIr, MIv, M2v–M3v, M4r–v, NIr–v.

45 Ibid., sigs. K3v–K4r.

46 Ibid., sig. MIv.

47 Alexander Gordon, Wightman, Edward, DNB, XXI, pp. 195–96. Champlin Burrage, op. cit., I, pp. 216–220, classes Wightman with the Legate brothers as a “Legatine Arian” and Seeker, and reprints the account of his heresies.

48 Truth Brought to Light and discovered by Time, or a Discourse and Historicall Narration of the first xiiii yeares of King James Reign (R. Cotes for M. Sparke, 1651), Part IV, 8.