Translated by Wordport from Xywrite-IV (Dos) Document {Conv1

JOHN WHITE REVISITED

By David Underdown

Since I wrote about John White in Fire From Heaven I have continued my wanderings as an historian, though naturally I have regretted that they are no longer centred in Dorset. In the course of the journey I went completely off my old seventeenth-century map and wrote a book on eighteenth-century cricket, which was a welcome change from the familiar heavy terrain of politics and religion in the Stuart period in which I had previously dwelt. But it’s always interesting to return from one’s travels to look at subjects that loomed so large in earlier days, and to see how different they seem in the light of further experience, and of what has been written by others in the meantime. I am grateful for the opportunity to do that. There has been a continuing, intimidating, torrent of books and articles on the broader subject of Puritanism in the years since Fire From Heaven came out. When I was writing that book some of the trendier members of the historical profession were trying to jettison the terms ‘Puritan’ and ‘Puritanism’ altogether, but a look at any list of recent publications suggests that they didn’t have much success. The sceptics did make one useful contribution, though, in requiring us to be careful about defining those terms before we use them, and I’ll have more to say about that later when I look at the question of in what sense of the word John White was a Puritan. Anyway, there has been no shortage of new writing for anyone who has wanted to pursue the general subject during the past fifteen years

This paper comprises the text of a lecture given on 23 June 2006 at St. Peter’s Church, Dorchester, Dorset, by Professor David Underdown of Yale University, to mark the 400th anniversary of the appointment of John White as Rector of Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s Churches Dorchester. © David Underdown 2006. It is reproduced on the John White pages of the Parish of Dorchester website by kind permission. 2 or so. On White himself there has been relatively little: the inadequate entry in the old Dictionary of National Biography life has been updated by Professor Rory Cornwall in the splendid new, expanded edition of that great reference work, and there’s another short summary of his career in a brand-new two-volume encyclopedia on Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America, edited by Francis Bremer and Tom Webster. * * * So how has all this recent writing changed the way I think about our Dorchester Patriarch? Not very much, I am bound to say - which may be a relief to some of you, who will be saying ‘That was a nice short talk, now we can all have a drink and go home’. But sorry, there is more to say, if only because there were a couple of aspects of White’s career that I touched on only briefly in my book. One of these was his connection with colonization, which anyone returning to the seventeenth century is bound to have to think about, if only because England’s place in what has come to be called ‘Atlantic history’ has been such a popular topic recently. It’s not quite clear to me why this has happened, though it’s true that our country’s history, like our politics, has constantly been the subject of a tug-of-war between our European and transatlantic connections, and when British policies have been going in one direction, however misguidedly some may think, I suppose it’s only natural that our history should be bending that way too. When I was writing Fire From Heaven I felt that I could give the Massachusetts project fairly limited attention because it had been done in such detail in that old, but still valuable, biography of White by Frances Rose-Troup, published in 1930. More recently I have several times been reminded how important this aspect of Dorchester history is to Americans, having several times attended conferences of a society composed entirely of descendants of settlers who went over in the Mary and John in 1630 and founded Dorchester, Massachusetts.

3 Rose-Troup’s book is still the best guide to White’s achievements in the founding of the Dorchester Company, and to its efforts before it was absorbed by the better-known Massachusetts Bay Company. She showed that White was almost certainly the author of several of the key documents relating to early Massachusetts - the ‘General Observations for the Plantation of New England’, the ‘Planters’ Plea’ and others, and that although he was never quite pushed into emigrating, he was still an important figure in early Massachusetts history. If I was writing about this again I think I should stress two things even more strongly than I did before. One would be White’s insistence that any new colony should avoid the total separation from the Church of England that had happened with the Pilgrims at Plymouth and some of the settlers at Salem. The other would be the importance of the wise counsel that he gave to John Winthrop at Boston in later years. His words to Winthrop in 1636 have plenty of relevance to our own time. Warning the governor against allowing profiteering in the markets, White commented that although some would say that ‘all manner of restraint is prejudicial to liberty’ he still wondered what benefit for the public there was in ‘making half a dozen rich by pinching more than so many thousands.’ We know something about the relations between the old Dorchester and the new American one - and about the history of many of the colonists as the settlements expanded westward, especially to Windsor, Connecticut. I only wish we knew more. There must have been letters between friends and relatives separated by 3,000 miles of the Atlantic - these were, after all, mostly literate people. Historians often make mental wish-lists of records that they would most like to find - if only. . . - and mine would certainly include the letters that must have passed between Hannah Gifford, the marvellous primary-school teacher in old Dorchester and her siblings in New England. Such a find would add a depth to

4 our imaginative grasp of the Puritan migration that even the best modern research methods still cannot achieve. * * * Returning from the colonial world to England and our own Dorchester, it’s worth spending a little time reflecting on the enormous importance of the events that occurred during the Patriarch’s years here. The appearance of the King James Bible in 1611 - though the Holy Trinity churchwardens’ accounts reveal that this particular parish only acquired one ten years later. The Synod of Dort in 1618, which confronted the differences within the European Calvinist churches (including the Church of England) and condemned the teachings of the Armenians that were to become so contentious during the reign of Charles I. The outbreak of the Thirty Years War in the same year, a war followed with such breathless apprehension in England, until the victories of King Gustavus of Sweden seemed to bring providential salvation for the Protestant cause. The two periods of crisis in England itself - one during the 1620s which led to the Puritan migration I have just been talking about, and the other beginning in the following decade and culminating in the civil wars. As I pointed out in Fire From Heaven, many people - John White among them - felt that they were living ‘at one of the great turning- points, perhaps the greatest turning-point, of history; at the final stage of the eternal conflict between light and darkness, between good and evil, between Christ and Antichrist.’ We may think - and rightly - that we live in terrifyingly unsettling times, but the men and women of John White’s days must have found their world equally unstable, equally frightening. Somehow John White had to guide his own way, and more important from his point of view, his people’s way, through these years of contention and catastrophe. That for the most part he succeeded in doing so is evident in his own reflections at the end of his life, that he could look back with ‘much comfort’ on

5 his achievements in Dorchester, and equally evident in the general consensus of later historians about his success as a pastor to his flock. I say ‘for the most part’ because White was a human being, with his own share of imperfections, and there are some things in his life which I suspect he might have wanted to do differently. To me, his most serious lapse was his failure to stay with his flock when the royalist armies approached in 1643. There are some obvious excuses: he may not even have been in Dorchester at the time; he had important work to do in London as one of the key figures in the reform of the national church; and anyway, the town was clearly not defensible; he was getting old and what could he have done to protect his people against the voracious Cavaliers? After the civil war he gave the townsmen the lame excuse that ‘although your Teachers have been driven into corners, yet they have been preserved for your farther service, and are now restored to you in safety.’ But when all is said, the flight of the ministers, and of a good proportion of the corporation, dealt a shattering blow to the cause of godly reformation. Some of them took with them whatever valuable possessions they could cart away. Not White, though; we know that his most treasured possessions, his books, were left in Dorchester and destroyed by the Cavaliers. Still, the leaders had proclaimed that the parliamentary cause was God’s cause and had vowed to ‘live and die’ in its defence. When the crisis came they simply fled. Things could never be the same again. Some of the most exciting elements of the great campaign for reformation and for improving the lives of the godly poor continued and were indeed expanded after the leaders came back at the end of the civil war. But it was a fragile recovery, and the steady erosion of the reform programme after 1660 comes as no surprise. What, I wonder, would have happened if White and the other ministers has decided to stick it out and accept the hardships of royalist occupation and probable persecution in 1643?

6 Be that as it may, White’s achievements were still remarkable enough. He turned a west-country town of no particular religious colouration into what I would argue was the most Puritan town in England, one which in spite of its leaders’ recent betrayal retained much of that character in the 1650s. No one could have reformed violent, rebellious people like the Pounceys, yet as far as we can tell (absent the ecclesiastical court records from Blandford) they still attended church, and it looks as if White tried to reach at least the younger members of that turbulent family through catechizing. Statistics suggest remarkably high attendance at communion services and a dramatic decline in premarital sex (unless the good people of Dorchester suddenly adopted methods of birth-control unpracticed in most other places in that period). As the anecdotes in Fire From Heaven repeatedly show, many of Dorchester’s lower orders were still attached to a lively traditional culture marked by excessive drinking, resistance to authority, and the celebration of ancient festive rituals. There were people who clearly thought that they were being unfairly targeted in a repressive campaign to enforce Puritan morality, and we can find plenty of complaints against the enforcers of that campaign such as the beadle and the constables. Yet it is striking how rarely the complaints were directed at White himself, though there are hints that William Benn, the parson at All Saints, was less popular. The campaign for moral reformation was a mixture of successes and failures, and some of the differences can be explained in class terms: reformation was certainly more effective among the middling and upper sorts in the town than among the marginal and unprivileged. Other parts of it were unmitigated successes, both during and after John White’s lifetime. The vast increase in ministers’ salaries that followed the purchase of Seaton Parsonage made it possible to attract new clergy who reduced the burden on White, and although this was frittered away by the risky investment in Fordington after the civil war, this cannot

7 be blamed on him. The regular provision of support for charitable purposes made possible by the establishment of the municipal brewery was another achievement for which White and his lay allies in the Corporation deserve most of the credit. Without the Brewhouse’s profits there would have been nothing like the money needed to support the new Hospital, Hannah Gifford’s school, or the municipal health service of which we can see preliminary traces during White’s lifetime but which came into its own only after the war. After the 1613 fire White’s preaching directly inspired the remarkable outpouring of charitable giving for the victims of plague and fire in Dorchester, but also in other places, of which I think I offered sufficient evidence in the book. It still astounds me when I think about how far it exceeded what was given for such causes in other places. Before I encountered the Dorchester records I still accepted the old stereotype of the Puritan - the individualist who believed that there was, to quote a recent Prime Minister, ‘no such thing as society’, and that poverty was simply the result of idleness or other moral failings. I quickly learned that at any rate in early Stuart Dorchester this was not the case, that at its best the Puritan godliness had a vision of community which required charity and generosity to the victims of misfortune, and that it could be achieved by the kind of leadership that White provided. * * * So was John White a Puritan? Before we can answer this, we first have to clear away some of the difficulties that bedevil a proper understanding of the term, First of all, we should always remember that throughout the seventeenth century the labels ‘Puritan’ and ‘Puritanism’ were terms of abuse adopted by their enemies: the people we called Puritans preferred to call themselves ‘the godly’, or ‘the people of God.’ It isn’t that long ago that someone published a book covering the period before 1640, with the title Anglican and Puritan: A Study of their Differences. No reputable historian today would accept this antithesis. Before the

8 civil war mainstream Puritans were Anglicans, that is to say members of the Church of England as by law established. There were Puritan Anglicans and there were non-Puritan Anglicans. Sometimes the Puritan Anglicans got into trouble for being excessively scrupulous about ceremonies which they regarded as survivals from the days of Popery - as in the vestiarian controversy early in Elizabeth’s reign, again during the crackdown by Archbishop Whitgift a couple of decades later, and several times during the reign of James I. And there was a constant, partly-submerged, drumbeat of discontent among some of them about the powers of the bishops. But only after 1625, during the reign of Charles I, did life become almost impossibly difficult for these Puritan Anglicans, when the ‘Religion of Protestants’ (as Patrick Collinson called it in an important book published in the 1980s) begin to break down. More and more ‘Armenian’ bishops were promoted, and their efforts to impose their version of conformity became more and more heavy-handed. Armenians, you will recall, were the people who wanted to water down Calvinist teachings and in particular the doctrine of predestination, and whose views had been been condemned as heretical at the Synod of Dort in 1618. Led by Archbishop William Laud, and with strong support from King Charles, bishops of this stripe began the program of introducing into the liturgy some of the rituals which Puritans regarded as ‘idolatry’ - vestiges of Roman worship apparently cleansed from the Church of England under Elizabeth. It’s no accident that the Puritan migration to New England began in earnest in 1630, when Laud was becoming Charles I’s most influential advisor. One final general point about Puritanism before we return to John White. Although mainstream Puritans were members of the Church of England, there were also people who shared some of their outlook but wished to get out of the church altogether. The right term for them is ‘separatists’, because they rejected the notion of a church universal automatically encompassing all Christians, in favour

9 of local churches in which membership was a matter of choice. The obvious example is the Pilgrims at the Plymouth colony, though as I mentioned earlier, there were also Puritans in Massachusetts who moved away from even nominal allegiance to the Church of England once they were safely on the other side of the Atlantic. However, Winthrop’s community never allowed for true separation, and people who went too far in that direction eventually found themselves kicked out of Massachusetts, often ending up in the much more tolerant colony of Rhode Island. I mentioned earlier that John White rejected separation, and was always insistent that the settlers at both the American Dorchester and Boston should avoid it. Until the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 White was a conforming member of the Church of England. He wore the surplice (which some of the more extreme Puritan clergy refused to do), was never convincingly charged with refusing to use the other ceremonies that were in dispute, and saw the Church as the church of all, sinners as well as saints, with its central ritual of communion open all if they came to it in a suitably penitent frame of mind - though he also believed in predestination, which made it pretty difficult to obtain salvation if you had been marked down for damnation. What we know of his preaching, for example in the famous 1633 Assize sermon, always emphasized the duty of obedience to the lawful authority of kings, magistrates, and parents, particularly fathers. For that important sermon he had chosen as his text Proverbs chapter 24, verse 21: ‘My son, fear thou the Lord and the King, and meddle not with them that are given to change.’ Even though he abandoned episcopacy during the Civil War, White continued to denounce the ‘dangerous heresies’ and ‘unheard -of blasphemies’ of the more extreme separatists. In a revealing comment, he noted that such errors were likely to be particularly attractive to ‘silly women’. A patriarch indeed. His

10 view of recent church history puts him squarely in the mainstream. Queen Elizabeth’s accession had freed the English church from the ‘yoke of Antichrist’ - by Antichrist, of course, he meant the Pope and the Roman church. He always emphasized the role of the godly magistrate, under which title he included above all the godly monarch, in providing leadership in church as well as state. I wonder whether it was from Mr White or the churchwardens that the initiative came for reviving the tradition of ringing the church bells on November 17th, Elizabeth’s Accession Day, which became customary in the 1630s when Puritan Anglicanism was under attack from the Laudians. Whoever was responsible, I am certain that White approved of it. I am not sure that I could have put even more stress on all this than I actually did in Fire From Heaven, but if I had to do it again I should certainly try. None of it is particularly surprising when we come to think about it. White was a member of the establishment, educated at Winchester and New College, and his friends included ‘godly’ bishops, like Arthur Lake, Bishop of Bath and Wells in the early 1620s, and famous clerics like Thomas Fuller, author of ‘England’s Worthies’. In Dorset he was on friendly terms with a whole array of Puritan gentry families: the Trenchards at Wolveton, the Strodes at Parnham, the Brownes at Frampton, and of course Denzil Hollies, son of the Earl of Clare, who reclines in classical effigy at the back of this church. In spite of his sympathy for the plight of the poor, John White was neither a political nor a social revolutionary. God had set kings on their thrones and magistrates in their offices, and it was ‘not in the power of men to pluck them down at their pleasure.’ This does not mean that he was not a Puritan, To regard Puritans as fundamentally opposed to the supremacy of the Church of England is to accept at face value the Laudian definition of Anglicanism and to ignore or reject the Puritans’ definition. Moderate Puritans like White believed that theirs, not Laud’s, was the true ‘religion of Protestants’, and I am inclined to

11 think that if there had been anything like modern public opinion polls in the seventeenth century they would have disclosed that this was the position of a majority of the English people. In 1641 Parliament called on the entire (male) population of the country to take the Protestation, an oath to uphold the lawful rights of both King and Parliament. It also contained a provision requiring them to defend ‘the true reformed Protestant religion expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all Popery and popish innovation.’ This language repeatedly surfaces during the civil war in the propaganda of moderates on both sides, and it perfectly expresses John White’s position. The only bit of decoding we need to do is to translate ‘popish innovation’ into ‘Laudian rituals’. In the mind-set of the moderates, it was the Laudians, not the Puritans, who were the innovators. There are, of course, some problems here. Although White was a dutiful subject of the king and a conforming minister of the Church of England, he also knew that Queen Elizabeth had never completed the ‘perfecting of the work’ of godly reformation by the elimination of the residual elements of popery. And there were limits to his obedience when he was confronted with what he regarded as the unlawful commands of authority during the years of Laud’s ascendancy. Magistrates were required to uphold God’s laws, and if they failed to do so the godly must peacefully disobey and accept the punitive consequences. The most striking examples of White’s consistency on this point are his positions on the Book of Sports in 1633, and on the issue of railing in the communion table a few years later. The Book of Sports was a royal proclamation defining what pastimes could be permitted after church on the Sabbath. Originally issued by James I in 1617, the revised version of 1633 differed only in that it now had to be publicly read out by the clergy at the end of divine service. The ‘morris book’ it was sometimes called because it permitted the heathenish practice of morris dancing,

12 and it also allowed dancing round the maypole, which could lead to who-knows- what goings on. The proclamation was bound to stick in the throats of fundamentalist sabbatarians like White, and he steadfastly refused to read the offensive document. He was saved by his churchwardens, who managed to have it read out by a visiting minister after a week-day service at which they and the parish clerk made up the entire congregation. White professed to be enraged by the subterfuge, but I notice that he did not report it either to the Bishop or to Laud’s Vicar-General, who was conducting a visitation in Dorset at that very time. The other issue, the railing in of the communion table - to turn it into a Popish altar, Puritans complained - seemed threatening in the later 1630s, but at that time, and indeed throughout the whole decade, White was lucky in that successive bishops of Bristol (in which diocese Dorchester of course lay) were moderates attached to the ‘religion of Protestants’ rather than Laudian firebrands, and they certainly did not want to drive White into emigrating to Massachusetts. It might have been a different story if Dorchester had been in the diocese of Bath and Wells, where Bishop Piers was one of Laud’s most determined supporters. In his preaching on these matters White steered a careful middle course, avoiding provocative calls to resistance on one side, and to shameful submission to ungodly commands on the other. Once again I think this position was typical of many moderate Puritans in the 1630s. It was wrong to actively resist the King’s authority; but it was also wrong to obey royal commands to perform ungodly acts like tolerating dancing on the Sabbath. The duty of obedience could always be trumped by the duty to obey God’s will. But as I have already mentioned, the refusal to obey must not be accompanied by the even greater sin of active resistance. White was not the only minister to run into trouble when he tried to draw this fuzzy line between obedience and disobedience. His repeated calls for loyalty to the monarch must have been hypocritical, one of his enemies charged

13 after the civil war when he dug up White’s old 1633 Assize Sermon. This of course brings up the question of how we evaluate White’s wartime switch from his earlier loyalty to the King and his acceptance of bishops, to the rejection of both when he sided with Parliament in the war. On the issue of monarchical authority, the answer is easy, because until 1648 parliamentarians always insisted (honestly in some cases, dishonestly in others) that they were not fighting against the King, but simply to rescue him from the evil, popishly-affected councillors who surrounded him. The Royalists’ password was always ‘For the King’; that of the Parliamentarians ‘For King and Parliament’. I see no reason to suppose that John White adopted this position dishonestly. The change in his position on episcopacy is more difficult, and I plead guilty to not having discussed it convincingly in the book. But I don’t think anyone has really explained why so many people who had previously accepted episcopacy in principle, while at the same time disliking the Laudian hierarchy, suddenly, in the course of 1641 and 1642, went over to the policy of ‘Root and Branch’ reform of the Church, which meant doing away with bishops altogether. There were still supporters of moderate episcopacy in Parliament during the civil war, but most of their colleagues seem to have quickly decided that this position was a non-starter. White was still a supporter of reformed, non-Laudian episcopacy in 1641. He was one of a seven-man committee who on 23 January 1641 presented the so-called ‘Ministers’ Petition’ to the House of Commons. Claiming the signatures of seven hundred ministers from all parts of the country, the petition asked for a ban on offensive Laudian innovations like altar rails, but accepted the retention of bishops, while calling for their exclusion from the House of Lords. Two months later he was appointed to a Committee on Innovations which met in the ‘Jerusalem chamber’ at Westminster, and whose members included a number of moderate bishops, including Archbishop Williams (no, not the one you are thinking of) and

14 Archbishop Ussher of biblical chronology fame. Once again the intention was clearly to reach a compromise on both episcopacy and liturgical matters. This position is clearly reflected in the anonymous letter from Dorchester that I quoted in Fire From Heaven, whose author insisted that the town had ‘never kicked against the holy office of a bishop,’ and now wanted only ‘a pious reformation, not confusion, in the church’. Such moderation disappeared as the awful prospect of civil war approached. Many MPs, and also many of the clergy, decided that compromise was impossible and that the only choice was between Laudian bishops (if the King won) and none at all (if Parliament was successful). John White was one of the many who confronted this dilemma and made the second choice. He would have done so, I suspect, because he undoubtedly shared the prevailing belief that Charles I’s entourage was hopelessly infiltrated by Roman Catholics, and that a royalist victory would leave Laudian bishops with more power than ever. But the truth is that we really don’t know what he was thinking, because the Patriarch virtually disappears from the historical record between March 1641, when he took part in the Jerusalem chamber discussions, and 6 July 1643, when he attended the newly assembled Westminster Assembly (summoned by Parliament to draw up a new church settlement ). Was he in Dorchester when the country drifted into civil war? Did he witness the horrifying events on that August day when the unrepentant Catholic priest, Father Green, was hanged, drawn and quartered on Gallows Hill? At least one of the local clergy would have been there to administer the last rites to the condemned felons who got ‘ordinary’ hangings, and we know that Sir Thomas Trenchard’s chaplain was there, because he is reported to have kept interrupting Father Green’s final speech on the scaffold. Alas, none of the sources for this grisly scene say anything about White’s presence - or absence. White is occasionally named by royalist propagandists as one of the Dorchester clergy

15 whose preaching helped to inflame the parliamentarian zeal of the townspeople, but I should not want to accept this as irrefutable evidence that he was there at any particular time. As I mentioned earlier, I think it is very likely that White was in London when Dorchester surrendered to the royalists on 3 August 1643. The prominent role that he took in the Westminster Assembly shows how important a figure he was nationally. He was one of two representatives of the Dorset clergy, and he was quickly appointed one of the two Assessors - in effect deputy-chairmen - of the Assembly, and took a regular part in its deliberations in spite of his increasing frailty (seventy really did count as old age in those days) and painful attacks of gout. He was chairman of the committee negotiating with Parliament’s Scottish allies over the Covenant, which promised the introduction of some form of Presbyterianism in England, and he attended other important committees when gout permitted. He was a moderating voice during the bitter debates in the Assembly between Presbyterians and Independents - Congregationalists - over the future of the Church, though it is clear which side he was on. As his attitude to New England separatists had shown, he wanted to preserve a national church, which the existence of independent congregations would undermine. And in spite of his preference for good-tempered moderation, he certainly did not believe in religious toleration, regarding extreme positions like denial of the Trinity as blasphemy which should be suppressed. The Westminster Assembly took some important steps towards a Presbyterian settlement. It drew up the ‘Westminster Confession’ and the Directory for Worship, which was supposed to be used in all parish churches instead of the traditional Book of Common Prayer, though it’s not at all clear how effectively this was enforced. But the Assembly’s relationship with Parliament quickly deteriorated to the point where the Commons voted it guilty of breach of

16 privilege for insisting on what it claimed was the divine right of the clergy to excommunicate sinners. This, a majority of MPs felt, was a defiance of Parliament’s right to determine matters of religion. White’s importance is shown by the fact that he was chosen by the Assembly to present their petition to the House of Commons claiming this absolute right of excommunication. There is some evidence, as we should expect, that he would have liked to reconcile the Assembly and parliamentary positions, but in the end his loyalties lay with the clergy. There are still problems, but the brief survey I have just undertaken shows that at some stage in the civil war - certainly by the summer of 1643, White had moved from his moderate episcopalian position to one that supported moderate presbyterianism. Revolutionary situations always push centrists to choose one side or the other, and we n ow know enough a bout the large numbers of people who would have preferred neutrality to recognise that during the civil war many outward supporters of both King and Parliament still, in their heart of hearts, believed in the authority of both. White’s position on the church, I suspect, may have been a bit more complicated. The Christian’s ultimate obligation, he undoubtedly believed, was to serve God and advance His kingdom. If that could be done in a system that retained moderate bishops, so much the better. But amid the violence of civil war such a system was not an option, whereas a presbyterian system increasingly was. Presbyterianism was the best way of maintaining godliness in a national church to which everyone by definition belonged; it was the best way of avoiding the dangers of separation and the blasphemies of the sects; and it had the added advantage of keeping us close to our awkward brethren the Scots. * * *

17 Reflecting on the whole of John White’s career, in Dorchester and beyond it, I am continually struck by what a remarkable man he was. He had a powerful intellect, which enabled him to shine in the company of distinguished scholars, which is what many of his colleagues in the Westminster Assembly undoubtedly were. His reputation in official circles is indicated by Lord Saye’s attempt to lure him away from Dorchester after the civil war to become warden of Winchester College, which the Patriarch eventually declined. But his establishment outlook did not prevent him from reaching out to the ordinary folk of his parishes in his pastoral work, in his weekly lectures on the Bible, and his straightforward translations of the Psalms. The Psalms were for congregational singing in which everyone would take part, for which there is obviously something to be said - though for me it does not excuse the Puritans’ tin ear for the wonderful choral music of the time from the cathedrals and other ‘places where they sing.’ How can they not have appreciated the glories of Orlando Gibbons and other great Anglican composers? It’s often hard to understand the culture wars of a distant period. End of digression, and back to John White. The reforms which he set in motion in Dorchester reveal a generosity of spirit which I suspect not all the town’s other leaders shared. But White was a man of his time. He believed, as all propertied people did, that idleness was a sin, and that the poor should be made to work. The new Hospital was designed to teach the children habits of work and obedience, as well as godliness, and the local employers certainly kept an eye on what skills were being taught to their potential labour force. It may not seem such a good idea to us to break up families and stick the children in an institution, however godly, just because they were poor. On the other hand, while we may find the doings of unregenerate sinners like members of the Pouncey family interesting and amusing, I should not have envied the lot of a wife or a child in the household of one of these violent thugs. John White was a man of his time - and

18 of his class - but I am still struck by his compassion for the victims of misfortune, expressed in his many charitable appeals for remote places afflicted by plague and fire. In the last years of his life White wrote a treatise on bible-study, The Way to the Tree of Life. In the dedicatory letter, addressed to the Mayor and Corporation of Dorchester, he consoled them for the town’s sufferings during the recent civil war. But he also looked back to an earlier disaster, the great fire of 1613, and recalled how the challenge had been met, not only by the small number of wealthy ‘well-affected persons’ who had underwritten the new Hospital, but also by the whole town’s willingness to pour out its charity to the poor and afflicted. Even in the dark days of 1647, he urged them, it could be done again. So, to a certain extent it was in the 1650s, though it’s my feeling that the ordinary townspeople never really recovered their faith in the reformers after the wartime betrayal. White and his allies left Dorchester with more provision for the poor (even the ungodly poor), the sick, the elderly, and for the children who would have had no avenues for education without the Trinity school and later, the Hospital school. There were of course strong elements of social control in the whole programme of godly reformation, and it quickly began to wither when the political winds changed after 1660, But John White left Dorchester a better place than he found it. I like it that at the end of his life he looked back to the ‘Fire From Heaven’ of 1613. Thank you for inviting me to revisit him in the place he served so well.