The Baxter Treatises, held in Dr Williams's Library, London, are an unrivalled primary source for seventeenth-century history, chiefly, but not exclusively, religious and ecclesiastical history. They consist very largely of the papers of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter (1615–91), with other associated manuscripts. Baxter served as a chaplain in the Parliamentarian army during the Civil Wars, and during the Commonwealth and Protectorate he was a renowned pastor at Kidderminster in Worcestershire. At the Restoration, he was the dominant negotiator on the ‘Presbyterian’ side in the discussions to reach a church settlement, and thereafter the leading nonconformist, rivalled only by the Congregationalist John Owen. In these various roles, he was repeatedly consulted by political and religious leaders, dealing at first hand with Cromwell; Charles II; the Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon; Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury; and John Tillotson, future Archbishop of Canterbury, as he tried repeatedly to secure a more inclusive national church that could accommodate the majority of nonconformist opinion. He developed a distinctive mediating theological and ecclesiastical position that came to be known as ‘Baxterianism’, which had a lasting influence on dissent and, indeed, on latitudinarian or ‘low church’ Anglicanism.

Throughout this extraordinarily industrious career Baxter was also one of the most prolific and successful English writers of the early modern period – or, indeed, of any period. He was the author of some of the seventeenth century's bestsellers, such as the repeatedly reprinted The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), The Reformed Pastor (1656) and the Call to the Unconverted (1658), but in addition, in the course of his fifty-year literary career, he published also four massive folios each of 1,000,000 or so words, many quartos of 500 or more pages, and countless smaller tracts and treatises. In all, somewhere in the region of 140 distinct titles appeared over his name. This was productivity enough for any man, but for Baxter it was only part of his output. He was besides an indefatigable correspondent (some 1,200 letters are extant) and generator of unpublished papers – controversial pieces, ecclesiastical proposals and ecumenical platforms, proposals and models for reform and reconciliation, and tracts responding to particular published works by others and commenting on current affairs.

Bunyan might be thought the most improbable of authors. In a hierarchical age, when cultural patronage was in the hands of the court, the universities, the established church and London social elites, the literary prospects for a poorly educated provincial sectarian preacher might appear dim, and yet this same Bedfordshire tinker, 'of a low and inconsiderable generation' from one of the 'meanest, and most despised of all the families in the Land' (GA, p. 5), wrote nearly sixty works and, with The Pilgrim's Progress, became the century's bestselling writer. While, however, his success was exceptional, the fact of Bunyan's authorship was not quite as improbable as it might seem. His early literary career coincided with, and was shaped by, the unprecedented increase in press activity associated with the gathering momentum of the English Revolution. The political and religious tensions of the first half of the century were accompanied by, and articulated through, a proliferating press whose annual output rose from 625 titles in 1639 to 848 in 1640, over 2,000 in 1641 and over 3,666 in 1642, thereafter to continue at between one and two thousand annually until the Restoration. A unique record of this productivity is preserved in the remarkable collection of broadsides, tracts, pamphlets and books assembled by the bookseller George Thomason, who, between 1640 and 1661, amassed 22,000 publications. Never before had so many people turned to writing, never before had so many seen their thoughts into print and never before had what they printed generated such extensive interest and public debate.

Puritanism was an intrinsically bookish movement. Just as the spread of Protestantism through Europe in the early sixteenth century was greatly facilitated by, if not dependent upon, the resources of the printing press, so the penetration by Puritanism of the nation's religious, political and cultural life was achieved primarily through the printed word. Religious works comprised at least half the 100,000 or so titles that represent the total output of the press from the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 to the end of the seventeenth century. Of these, a very significant proportion - and during periods in the seventeenth century a majority - were Puritan. They included the century's bestsellers which sold in unprecedented numbers: Arthur Dent's fictionalised dialogue The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (1601) went through over thirty editions by 1682; John Ball's Short Catechisme (1615?) nearly sixty editions by 1689; Richard Baxter's 600-page treatise on preparing for The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650) reached its fourteenth edition by 1688 and his evangelistic A Call to the Unconverted (1658) its twenty-eighth edition by 1696; the first part of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) reached its twenty-second edition by the end of the century. Contemporaries recognised the extraordinary asset that had been, as they firmly believed, providentially placed in their hands. 'Printing', wrote Richard Baxter, 'hath been a blessed means of increasing knowledge and religion' for 'the Press hath a louder voice' than that of any single person: 'the Writings of Divines are nothing else but a preaching the Gospel to the eye, as the voice preacheth it to the ear'.

THE “OVER-ORTHODOX DOCTORS”

“No particular Words in the World are Essentials of our Religion.” This startling pronouncement was made by the Puritan divine Richard Baxter during a conference convened in London in late 1654 to define the limits of tolerable religious orthodoxy under the Protectorate. What lay behind these words was a deep-seated suspicion of credal formulae, confessions, and platforms, which to Baxter's mind simply “multiply controversies, and fill the minds of men with scruples, and ensnare their consciences, and engage men in parties against each other to the certain breach of Charity.” Since “the Christian world will never have Concord, but in a few, certain, necessary things,” to insist on subscription to any form of words is a recipe for divisiveness: “The great cause of our uncharitable censures and divisions, hath been our departing from the Antient simplicity of Faith, and also from the sufficiency of the holy Scriptures, to be the Rule and Test of Faith.” “Did the Primitive church require Subscription to all our 39 Articles?” he pointedly asked.

This distrust of credal definitions of orthodoxy was a distinctive feature of Baxter's inclusive churchmanship. Despite his inveterate disputatiousness and a temperament which could be impatient, irritable, and severe, he worked tirelessly throughout his career to counter the ecclesiastical fissiparousness of the seventeenth century. Regarding denominational labels as the product of doctrinal and ecclesiological tribalism, Baxter declined to accept any one for himself: “You could not,” he wrote, “(except a Catholick Christian) have trulier called me, than an Episcopal-Presbyterian-Independent.”

Writing in November 1648, the Puritan minister Richard Baxter exclaimed in dismay that 'Every ignorant, empty braine (which usually hath the highest esteem of it selfe) hath the liberty of the Presse . . . whereby the number of bookes is grown so great that they begin with many to grow contemptible'. By 1653, he had come to fear the 'Luxuriant Fertility, or Licentiousness of the Press of late' as 'a design of the Enemy to bury and overwhelm in a croud . . . Judicious, Pious, Excellent Writings'. Baxter's disquiet was fuelled by his recent experiences as a chaplain to a regiment of the New Model Army. Like the vast majority of those Presbyterian Puritans who sided with Parliament, he was 'unfeignedly for King and Parliament', and was committed to the Civil War aim of bringing the King to a reconciliation with Parliament.

When, in 1645, he joined the Army, he was appalled to find the mood of Cromwell’s forces far more extreme. To him it appeared that those he described as ‘hot-headed Sectaries’ intended no less than ‘to subvert both Church and State’: ‘they took the King for a Tyrant and an Enemy, and really intended absolutely to master him, or ruine him’.3 Baxter’s Puritanism valued order, tradition and authority; the revolutionary and radical wing of the movement, as represented by Levellers, Anabaptists, Ranters and, later, Quakers, disclosed to him a prospect of anarchy. Within the Army itself, these anarchic ideas were spread by word of mouth, through preaching, oral discussion and disputation; but it was the prolific output of the press which spread them through the country at large.

In April 1644 William Cavendish, Marquis (and afterwards Duke) of Newcastle, received from Charles I a letter in which the king, seeking to secure the continuing service of his Captain-General in the north of England, exhorted Newcastle not to be discouraged by the hostile criticism his military failures were attracting. “Remember,” he wrote, “all courage is not in fighting, constancy in a good cause being the chief… ingredient.” To prevent Newcastle's disaffection Charles appealed to the definitive value in loyalist ideology. Their constancy in adversity and steadfast allegiance despite all temptations to desert would be the self-justifying and self-defining themes of many a Royalist memoir written after the Restoration to promote the proper claims of their authors both upon royal gratitude and upon the respect of posterity.

This commitment to the unswerving obedience of subjects was articulated as wholeheartedly by female as by male chroniclers. It was precisely as the “short history… of the actions and sufferings of your most loyal subject” that the Duchess of Newcastle recommended to Charles II her Life of the Duke, and “the truth of your loyal actions and endeavors, for the service of your King and country” which, in her dedicatory epistle to her husband, she proposed “to set forth and declare to after ages” (C, p. xxxv).