The Silencing of Paul Baynes and Thomas Taylor, Puritan Lecturers at Cambridge

Abstract

PAUL BAYNES and Thomas Taylor were fellows of Christ's College, Cambridge and held puritan lectureships at churches in the town—Baynes at St Andrew the Great (following the premature death of William Perkins in 1602) and Taylor at Holy Trinity. Both men were silenced during the drive towards clerical conformity by the early Jacobean episcopate in the years after the abortive Hampton Court Conference. Yet confusion and error persist in historical accounts of the episode, which is unravelled here. The biographical record prefixed to Taylor's collected works in 1653 states that he was silenced twice—for a sermon at Great St Mary's in Cambridge and at a visitation by Samuel Harsnett (master of Pembroke College and future archbishop of York): He was from the first opposed under the Notion of Puritanisme, which by the prophane world was every where spoken against. He was silenced, and threat’ned to be degraded for his Sermon at St Maries in Cambridge; his Text was in the fifth of Canticles the seventh verse: The watchmen that went about the City found me, they smote me; the Keepers of the walls took away my vaile from me. The point he insisted upon was, that in all times ever some that should be the preservers of the Church, were the persecutors of it. … He was silenced by Doctor Harsnet at a Visitation, when Master Baines was also silenced; but he was content to suffer, rather then the truth should suffer.1 He was for some time silenced, and threatened to be degraded, for a sermon which he preached in St Mary's church, Cambridge, from Canticles, v. 7. … How long he remained under the unjust censure, we have not been able to learn. In the year 1606, he was again silenced by Bishop Harsnet, for nonconformity.4