Faithful Accounts?: The Hampton Court Conference and The King James Bible in Early Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Histories

Abstract

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, English Dissenters composed several histories in order to vindicate the theological standards of Protestant nonconformity, to agitate for the civil liberties denied Dissenters by the Test and Corporation Acts, and to fashion new identities for the latest generation of Dissenters which was suffering defections to the Anglican Church. Interestingly, the 1611 translation received remarkably little notice in the three most notable histories from the three Dissenting traditions. Following Edmund Calamy's Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's Narrative (1702), arguably the most noteworthy Dissenting histories of the era were A Vindication of the Dissenters (1717 and 1718) by the presbyterian James Peirce, The History of the Puritans published in the 1730s by the Independent minister Daniel Neal (1678-1743), and The History of the English Baptists (1738-1740) written by the Baptist mathematician Thomas Crosby (c.1685-1752). This article summarizes the depictions of James I, the Hampton Court conference, and the resulting translation in the histories and the article contends that the treatments of the conference and translation serve as windows to the overarching arguments of the histories.