‘White’s Disciple’: John Sergeant and Blackloism

Abstract

‘Charges that he [John Sergeant] was a disciple of Blacklow [Thomas White] … rest on … unsatisfactory evidence.’ Godfrey Anstruther’s conclusion has not, so far as I know, been directly challenged; so this note aims belatedly to offer some evidence in support of Sergeant’s close Blackloist connections.John Sergeant (1623–1707) is now usually remembered as the leading Catholic protagonist in the ‘Rule of Faith’ debates, though he has also been presented as an informer at the time of the so-called Popish Plot, and as a far from negligible philosopher. It will be argued here that, in both theology and philosophy, he was essentially a follower of Thomas White (1593–1676), leader of the influential faction of English Catholics who derived from his best-knownaliastheir title of ‘Blackloists’; for Sergeant himself, in the words of Bishop Richard Russell quoted in the title, ‘everywhere proclaimed himself White’s disciple’.