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From the first appearance of the English Baptist congregations in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, Baptists were poor, persecuted, despised dissenters who were considered outside the mainstream of English church life. Early on, many of them fled the country, while others met in clandestine conventicles to worship, pray, and teach their beliefs. With intensified persecution in the 1620’s the major leaders and preachers were imprisoned and ridiculed. All of that began to change in the 1630’s. With more converts and even some members with wealth and social standing, Baptists grew bold and published their opinions more widely and engaged in public discussions, sometimes formal debates, to argue their doctrinal positions. Among all of the public activities perhaps none was more significant than the great debate in Southwark which was publicized then and since as a turning point for the struggling sect called Baptists.

The circumstance was this: two prominent English churchmen squared off against each other in what was to become one of the most celebrated religious debates of the seventeenth century. In a large hall (perhaps the famous Guild Hall) in Southwark, the two men presented their respective cases for the nature of the true church: passionately an Anglican denounced the practices of the sly opponent, and boldly the Baptist retorted the premises of logic and tradition. The occasion was a public disputation outside London: the protagonists were Daniel Featley, D.D., and William Kiffin; the date was October 17, 1642.

In an age already characterized by great social and political upheaval (not to speak of the changes wrought in the Church of England), the pot was yet boiling. Earlier in that year Oliver Cromwell had forced the Stuart Dynasty to flee London, and he assumed control of their ecclesiastical machinery. His success was due largely to the cooperation of an army that was predominantly Independent and of Baptistic sentiments in particular. Much to the surprise of the Free Churchmen, however, the Presbyterian hegemony turned about-face and practiced restrictions on the sects and slandered the teachings of Baptists, Seekers, Diggers, Quakers and Fifth Monarchists alike.

The response of these groups was to publish a spate of pamphlets and air their grievances in public debates that would draw wider attention to their presumed legitimacy. It is hard to realize in the twentieth century that very many persons would read the turgid argumentation in the tracts, much less pay attention to public quarrels between religionists. Yet debates were spectacles not unlike the public hangings and military parades common to London Society in the early seventeenth century: they were amusing, entertaining, and, many times, educational. If the great debate at Southwark is a fit example, the sects gained many new converts from the credibility gained in public disputation. The defenders of orthodoxy thus played right into the hands of their opponents by agreeing to debate.

The choice of Southwark is worth noting. The first haven for the persecuted Nonconformists had been the rural countryside in England and Wales. Next when Archbishops Abbot and Laud stepped up persecution, several congregations fled to the Low Countries. That alternative proving to be unpalatable, the dissenters cautiously returned to England and, following the lead of Henry Jacob in 1616, many settled in Southwark, just across the Thames from London proper. The borough was a pocket of lower-class artisans, laborers, and ne’er-do-wells. The area boasted several prisons and theatres; not to be forgotten were the official residences of many leading church officials. (Noteworthy for the colonies, several New England divines hailed from the “Southside,” including John Norton and John Davenport; Lewis du Moulin, son of the French reformer and refugee, preached at a Southwark church.) If there was anywhere in Greater London where outspoken dissenters were relatively secure, it was in Southwark, sheerly because of the numbers of dissenters there.

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