Two Puritans
Richard (1615-91)—evangelist, pastor, and tireless writer of devotional and controversial theology—and Margaret (1636-81), his wife, were Puritans. That means they were gloomy, censorious English Pharisees who wore black clothes and steeple hats, condemned all cheerfulness, hated the British monarchy, and wanted the Church of England and its Book of Common Prayer abolished—right?
Wrong—off track at every point! Start again.
Richard and Margaret came of land-owning families. Adult members of these families were called gentlemen and gentlewomen; they formed England’s aristocracy, as distinct from the laborers, tradesmen, and professionals (lawyers, physicians, clergy, and educators). Richard’s father, Richard Baxter senior, was a very minor gentleman with a small, debt-laden estate at Eaton Constantine in Shropshire. Margaret’s father, Francis Charlton, Esquire, was a more significant gentleman, a leading justice of the peace and a wealthy man. Margaret grew up in Apley Castle, less than four miles from Eaton Constantine. One of the traumas of her childhood was the demolition of the castle by Royalist troops in 1644 during the Civil War.1
Richard first met Margaret when she came to Kidderminster (in Worcestershire, next county to Shropshire) to be with her godly mother, now Mrs. Hanmer. Having been widowed a second time, Margaret’s mother had moved there to receive the benefit of Richard’s magnificent ministry. Kidderminster was an artisan community of some eighteen hundred adults, with weaving as its cottage industry. Half the town crowded into church every Sunday, and many hundreds had professed conversion.
Margaret was a frivolous, worldly minded teenager when she arrived, and at first she disliked both the town and the piety of its inhabitants. But a sermon series on conversion that Baxter preached in 1657 set her seeking a change of heart and a total commitment to devoted, penitent, Christ-centered worship and service of God. In due course she found herself assured of her sincerity in this commitment, and thus of her new birth, pardon for sin, and title to glory. Eagerly she took her place among Baxter’s working-class converts. But then she sickened, and for months seemed to be mortally ill with lung problems that nothing would relieve. Special intercession with fasting for her life by Baxter and his inner circle of prayer warriors resulted, however, in a sudden cure “as it were by nothing”—a healing that today would be called miraculous, one of several such in Kidderminster in Baxter’s time.2
Mrs. Hanmer’s home was a large, war-damaged house alongside the churchyard, where she “lived as a blessing amongst the honest poor weavers . . . whose company for their piety she chose before all the vanities of the world.”3 It is clear that Pastor Richard was often in her home, and Margaret, who found it difficult to discuss her spiritual problems with her mother, depended heavily on him for what we would call spiritual direction. One thing led to another, and when in April 1660, right after the day of thanksgiving for Margaret’s healing,4 he left for London for an indefinite period to play his part in the forthcoming restoration of the Church of England,5 she found herself wanting to follow him. Soon her mother and she had relocated in London where Mrs. Hanmer died of fever in 1661.
Baxter omitted from his memoir of Margaret “the occasions and inducements of our marriage,”6 but it is not hard to put two and two together. By the end of 1661 Baxter, who had always urged that the combined claims of marriage and parish were more than any clergyman could really meet, knew that his Kidderminster ministry was over, that there was no prospect of future parochial ministry for him,7 and thus that his case for clerical celibacy no longer applied to himself. Facing a future in which he expected writing to be his main ministry, he needed a home and someone to look after both him and it—for, by his own admission, he knew little of matters domestic and did not want to be bothered with them.
Meantime, now that her mother was dead, Margaret was alone in the world, and it seems clear that she knew she wanted to be Baxter’s wife, just as more than a century before, Katherine von Bora had wanted to be Luther’s. It is a natural guess that Mrs. Hanmer let it be known that she would like such a marriage to happen. Who knows what she said to Baxter when he was with her in what from the start she expected to be her last illness? At all events, an official license was issued on April 29, 1662, and the ceremony took place on September 10, after “many changes . . . stoppages . . . and long delays.”8 Then followed nineteen years of happy life together, till Margaret died.
And what about their Puritanism? Both were confessedly Puritans to their fingertips. The Puritanism of history was not the barbarous, sourpuss mentality of time-honored caricature, still less the heretical Manicheism (denial of the goodness and worth of created things and everyday pleasures) with which some scholars have identified it. It was, rather, a holistic renewal movement within English-speaking Protestantism that aimed to bring all life—personal, ecclesiastical, political, social, commercial, family life, business life, professional life—under the didactic authority and the purging and regenerating power of God in the Gospel to the fullest extent possible. This meant praying and campaigning for thorough personal conversion, consecration, repentance, self-knowledge, and self-discipline; for more truth and life in the preaching, worship, fellowship, pastoral care, and disciplinary practice of the churches; for dignity, equity, and high moral standards in society; for philanthropy, generosity, and a Good Samaritan spirit in face of the needs of others; and for the honoring of God in home life through shared prayer and learning of God’s truth, maintaining decency, order, and love, and practicing “family government” (a Puritan tag phrase) according to the Scriptures.
The “heart-work” that was central to Puritan piety—self-examination, self-condemnation, self-motivation, self-dedication, and the continual focusing of faith, hope, and love on the Lord Jesus Christ— had nothing morbid or self-absorbed about it; it was simply the inner reality of disciplined devotion. As Baxter himself never tired of urging, cheerfulness and joy—set in a frame of faith, humility, watchfulness, and obedience (“duties”)—are of the essence of the true Christian life. This was the Puritanism that Richard and Margaret sought to live out.9
Puritan Marriage
The Puritans called for the sanctifying of all relationships as an integral part of one’s service to God. The rule for sanctifying anything was Scripture. What was the Puritan ideal for holy wedlock? “The serious divine Richard Baxter is united in marriage to a young Puritan lady of aristocratic birth, a woman of fine mind, deep spiritual experience and kindred Puritan sympathy.”10 What did they understand themselves to be taking on?
The question is not hard to answer, for the evidence is plentiful and homogeneous.11 Abundant printed treatises and wedding sermons all tell the same story. The Puritans do not appear as post-Christian moderns whose thinking stops short at physical attraction, sexual satisfaction, and parental fulfillment (cuddles, orgasms, and babies, to put it bluntly). Nor do they appear as Victorian sentimentalists, dwelling entirely on the beauty of rose-colored rapport between souls, with bodies right out of the picture. W. J. Wilkinson sounds very Victorian when he writes of Richard and Margaret as “two souls who love God and love each other with that sublime, spiritual beauty in which souls are wed, which gives orientation to life and is eternal,”12 and quotes Browning to ram the idea home.
To be sure, there is real truth in the Victorian vision, just as there is real truth in the physicality of the modern conception, but neither perspective is theological enough to find the Puritan wavelength.
Nor, again, do the Puritans appear as eighteenth-century evangelicals, ruthlessly denying that the “foolish passion which the world calls love” should influence the godly man’s choice of a wife.13 “I know you must have love to those that you match with,” writes Baxter, and his only proviso is that it must be “rational” love that discerns “worth and fitness” in its object, as distinct from “blind . . . lust or fancy.”14
So how, in positive terms, did the Puritans conceive of marriage? They saw it as a gift, a calling, a task, and a lifelong discipline, and programmed themselves for it accordingly. What this meant is well shown us in Richard’s own monumental Christian Directory, to which we now turn.
First published as a three-inch-thick folio in 1673, this work is rather more than a million words long. Its title page reads: A Christian Directory: or A Sum of Practical Theology, and Cases of Conscience. Directing Christians How to Use their Knowledge and Faith; How to Improve All Helps and Means, and to Perform All Duties; How to Overcome Temptations, and to Escape or Mortify Every Sin. In Four Parts. I. Christian Ethics (or Private Duties). II. Christian Economics (or Family Duties). III. Christian Ecclesiastics (or Church Duties). IV. Christian Politics (or Duties to Our Rulers and Neighbors). (Remember that in the days before dust jackets and blurbs, title pages had to be fulsome, since it was only there that a prospective buyer could find information as to what was in the book.)
Richard’s magnum opus should be better known than it is, for it is truly a landmark, a full-scale compendium of Puritan moral and practical theology in all its many-sided devotional, pastoral, life-embracing, and community-building strength. Part II of this magisterial distillation of Puritan wisdom is subtitled “The Family Directory, Containing Directions for the True Practice of All Duties Belonging to Family Relations, with the Appurtenances.”15 Here Richard discusses, among other things, first, how a man should determine before God whether and whom to marry, and, second, the “duties” (mutual obligations) of husband and wife within the marriage relationship. These sections are of special interest, not only because Baxter is here creaming off the wisdom of a century of Puritan discussion as tested and verified in a busy fifteen-year pastorate, but because he wrote them in 1664-65, two or three years into his own marriage, the experience of which was bound to color his thinking. What, now, does he have to say?
“Marriage,” declares the Westminster Confession, XXI:2, “was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the church with a holy seed, and for preventing of uncleanness.” Baxter assumes this throughout. Who then should marry? Minors for whom marriages were arranged by their parents;16 persons with incontinent hearts, as directed in 1 Corinthians 7:9;17 and any in whose case it appears “that in a married state, one may be most serviceable to God and the public good.”18 But go into it with your eyes open! “Rush not into a state of life, the inconveniences of which you never thought on.”19 Baxter lists twenty “inconveniences,” of which the most striking are these:
• Marriage ordinarily plungeth men into excess of worldly cares. . . .
• Your wants in a married state are hardlier supplied, than in a single life. . . . You will be often at your wit’s end, taking thought for the future. . . .
• Your wants in a married state are far hardlier borne than in a single state. It is far easier to bear personal wants ourselves, than to see the wants of wife and children: affection will make their sufferings pinch you. . . . But especially the discontent and impatiences of your family will more discontent you than all their wants. . . .
• By that time wife and children are provided for, and all their importunate desires satisfied, there is nothing considerable left for pious or charitable uses. Lamentable experience pro-claimeth this. . . .
• And it is no small patience which the natural imbecility [weakness] of the female sex requireth you to prepare. . . . Women are commonly of potent fantasies, and tender, passionate, impatient spirits, easily cast into anger, or jealousy, or discontent. . . . They are betwixt a man and a child. . . . And the more you love them, the more grievous it will be to see them still [constantly] in discontents . . . .
• And there is such a meeting of faults and imperfections on both sides, that maketh it much the harder to bear the infirmities of others aright. . . . Our corruption is such, that though our intent be to help one another in our duties, yet we are apter far to stir up one another’s distempers. . . .
• There is so great a diversity of temperaments and degrees of understanding, that there are scarce any two persons in the world, but there is some unsuitableness between them. . . . Some crossness there will be of opinion, or disposition, or interest, or will, by nature, or by custom and education, which will stir up frequent discontents. . . .
• And the more they [husband and wife] love each other, the more they participate in each other’s griefs. . . .
• And if love make you dear to one another, your parting at death will be the more grievous. And when you first come together, you know that such a parting you must have; through all the course of your lives you may foresee it.20
If, having weighed all this, you are still clear that you should marry, choose a God-fearing person of a temperament compatible with your own lest you “have a domestic war instead of love,” advises Baxter. Look for “a competency of wit; for no one can live lovingly and comfortably with a fool,” and also for “a power to be silent, as well as to speak; for a babbling tongue is a continual vexation.”21 Richard’s feet were always on the ground, and the wisdom of what he says here is obvious.
The mutual duties of husband and wife are listed as love; cohabitation (“a sober and modest conjunction for procreation: avoiding lasciviousness, unseasonableness, and whatever tendeth to corrupt the mind, and make it vain and filthy, and hinder it from holy employment”22); fidelity; delight in each other; the practice of quietness and peace (“Agree together beforehand, that when one is in the diseased, angry fit, the other shall silently and gently bear, till it be past and you are come to yourselves again. Be not angry both at once”23 ); spiritual support; care for each other’s health and good name; and help in all relevant forms.24 Elsewhere Richard boils the matter down with beautiful simplicity in question and answer, as follows:
I pray you, next tell me my duty to my wife and hers to me.
The common duty of husband and wife is,
1. Entirely to love each other . . . and avoid all things that tend to quench their love.
2. To dwell together, and enjoy each other, and faithfully join as helpers in the education of their children, the government of the family, and the management of their worldly business.
3. Especially to be helpers of each other’s salvation: to stir up each other to faith, love, and obedience, and good works: to warn and help each other against sin, and all temptations; to join in God’s worship in the family, and in private: to prepare each other for the approach of death, and comfort each other in the hopes of life eternal.
4. To avoid all dissensions, and to bear with those infirmities in each other which you cannot cure: to assuage, and not provoke, unruly passions; and, in lawful things, to please each other.
5. To keep conjugal chastity and fidelity, and to avoid all unseemly and immodest carriage [conduct] with another, which may stir up jealousy; and yet to avoid all jealousy which is unjust.
6. To help one another to bear their burdens (and not by impatience to make them greater). In poverty, crosses, sickness, dangers, to comfort and support each other. And to be delightful companions in holy love, and heavenly hopes and duties, when all other outward comforts fail.25
Such was the vision for marriage with which Richard and Margaret were armed when they covenanted together to be man and wife. As with so much else in historic Puritanism, one cannot but be struck by the mature, thoughtful, farseeing, fact-facing realism of the whole approach, and recognize the contrast with the starry-eyed, shortsighted, self-absorbed goofiness—there really is no other word for it—that marks so many dating and mating couples today. If all spouse-hunting young people were counseled in Baxterian terms regarding marriage, some marriages would never happen, and much of the misery of present-day marriage breakdown would be avoided.
Richard and Margaret themselves, as we shall see, were what we would call “difficult” people, individual to the point of stubbornness, temperamentally at opposite extremes, and with a twenty-year age gap between them. Moreover, they were both frequently ill and were living through a nightmarishly difficult time for persons of their convictions. For Richard, who was officially regarded as the leader and pacesetter of the Nonconformists, legal harassment, spying, and personal sniping were constant, making it an invidious thing to be his wife. Yet cheerful patience, fostered by constant mutual encouragement drawn from the Word of God, sustained them throughout, and their relationship prospered and blossomed. They demonstrated not only the grace of God but also the realistic wisdom of the down-to-earth ideal of marriage by which they lived.
To be sure, the Puritans knew all about falling in love. “Marriage love is often a secret work of God,” wrote Daniel Rogers, “pitching the heart of one party upon another for no known cause; and therefore when this strong lodestone attracts each to the other, no further questions need to be made but such a man and such a woman’s match were made in heaven, and God has brought them together.”26 But the Puritan emphasis was that, whether or not this delirious “pitching of the heart” is an element in the married couple’s present experience, sustained practical friendship and mutual help is in every case a matter of divine command.
So Puritan teachers often said that in choosing a spouse, one should look, not necessarily for one whom one does love, here and now, in the heart-pitched sense (such a person, if found, might still not be a suitable candidate for a life partnership), but for one whom one can love with steady affection on a permanent basis. Once more Richard brings all this down to earth, stressing that what makes for God-honoring marriage is not euphoria but character, consideration, and commitment—in other words, personal formation, reflection, and resolution.
If God calls you to a married life, expect . . . trouble . . . and make particular preparation for each temptation, cross and duty which you must expect. Think not that you are entering into a state of mere [pure and unmixed] delight, lest it prove but a fool’s paradise to you. See that you be furnished with marriage strength and patience, for the duties and sufferings of a married state, before you venture on it. Especially, 1. Be well provided against temptations to a worldly mind and life. . . . 2. See that you be well provided with conjugal affections. . . . 3. See that you be well provided with marriage prudence and understanding, that you may be able to instruct and edify your families. . . . [Extended families with servants was the seventeenth-century norm.] 4. See that you be provided with resolvedness and constancy. . . . Levity and mutability are no fit preparative for a state that only death can change. 5. See that you are well provided with a diligence answerable to the greatness of your undertaken duties. . . . 6. See that you are well provided with marriage patience; to bear with the infirmities of others, and undergo the daily crosses of your life. . . . To marry without all this preparation, is as foolish as to go to sea without the necessary preparations for your voyage, or to go to war without armour or ammunition, or to go to work without tools or strength, or to go to buy meat in the market when you have no money.27
Marriage preparation today often means no more than suggestions about managing money, handling disagreements, making love, and acting right at the ceremony. Marriage preparation for Richard was a personal spiritual discipline requiring prayerful self-scrutiny in light of all that God wants done and all that may go wrong. The difference is striking and bears a good deal of thinking about. In this, as in other matters, modern Christianity is simply not serious and thorough in the Puritan way.
The understanding of marriage involvement in terms of which Richard and Margaret took their vows is now clear. What is not yet clear is how, relationally speaking, they came to their certainty that marriage was right for them. That is what we must look at next.
Love Story
Three fine Baxter scholars of an earlier day28 found in Richard’s memoir a love story—“exquisite,” “incomparable,” “beautiful,” as they describe it.29 The story told not only of the bereaved husband’s love for his wife of almost twenty years, and of their shared love for their God and Savior and for the people they sought to serve, but also of their own heart-pitched love that drew them directly in a unique way to each other. The scholars found this by reading between the lines of Margaret’s private papers and Richard’s pastoral letters, printed in chapters 3 and 4 of his Breviate. Their discernment was, I think, on target, and I suspect it was just what Richard had intended. This is why.
Richard, as N. H. Keeble notes in his ground-breaking study of Baxter as a literary man, joins in his memoir of Margaret the qualities both of standard Puritan biography, narrating someone’s spiritual experience to illustrate universal truths about God’s grace to sinners, and of standard modern biography, narrating someone’s life experience to highlight that person’s three-dimensional individuality. In this, claims Keeble, Richard was “ahead of the taste of his time.”30 However, since he was writing both as Margaret’s pastor and as her husband and was aiming to edify specifically members of Margaret’s family, who had known her personally, as well as thoughtful readers (“considering men”)31 who had not, he could hardly have written in any other way. But he had a flair for characterizing others and an interest in doing so, which sets him in a class by himself among his Puritan peers.
This interest produced a disagreement of which Richard tells us in some paragraphs (that I edited out) of his address “To the Reader.”32 He had wanted to preface the reprint of his funeral sermon for Mary Hanmer, which Margaret’s will had mandated, with memoirs not only of Margaret herself but also of three other godly and, to Baxter, dear and admirable people: Mary Hanmer; Mary Baxter, née Huncks, his own stepmother (whom he confusingly calls his mother-in-law), who had lived in his home for more than a decade and had recently died at age ninety-one; and Jane Matthews, his former housekeeper at Kidderminster, who had died in her mid-seventies a few weeks before. He had actually written these memoirs; but then “wise friends” (unidentified), to whom presumably he showed them, persuaded him that the three additional lives would not be of public interest and that publishing them would be an error of judgment caused by “love, grief, and nearness. . . . Affection makes us think our own or our friends’ affairs to be such as the world should be affected with: I perceive this weakness and submit.”33 By suppressing and, as it seems, destroying these memoirs, he may well have avoided some malicious mockery; but in light of his fascinating skill as a biographer, the loss is ours.
For similar reasons he left out of his memoir of Margaret “the occasions and inducements of our marriage.”34 As he explains:
The unsuitableness of our age [he forty-seven, she twenty-six— twenty-one years’ difference], and my former known purposes against . . . the conveniency of ministers’ marriage, who have no sort of necessity, made our marriage the matter of much public talk and wonder. And the true opening of her case and mine, and the many strange occurrences which brought it to pass, would take away the wonder of her friends and mine that knew us. . . . Yet wise friends, by whom I am advised, think it better to omit such personal particularities at least at this time.35
Tantalizing! But Richard is not above dropping hints. He does this by the documents he prints in chapters 3 and 4 of the Breviate, which deal with the growth of Margaret’s soul under his evangelistic instruction and pastoral care. Covering this ground, as he saw it, was the necessary preliminary to his main agenda, namely celebration of the partnership of Margaret and himself through nineteen years of marriage. He put his narrative together, as he tells us, “under the power of melting grief, and therefore perhaps with the less prudent judgment . . . for passionate weakness poureth out all, which greater prudence may conceal.”36 But he kept a firm grip on its structure, and evidently he saw that to deflect satirical sniping and mockery regarding the marriage, he must show that the couple were persons totally committed to seek the wisdom, will, and glory of God in their lives. So that is what he does, and the hints are in the documents that he cites for the purpose.
Chapter 3 begins with the agenda for thanks and petition that Margaret drafted for the prayer warriors’ guidance on their day of thanksgiving for her recovery. Then come two private documents “which I saw not till she was dead”37 —a renewal of her covenant with God and a midnight meditation, both written on the thanksgiving day itself. (To write, as it were, letters of commitment to God and of admonition to oneself was a very Puritan thing to do.) There follows a transcribed letter from Pastor Richard, urging her to share her soul-troubles with her mother and Christian friends, and not to distrust Christ; and two more papers recording Margaret’s resolves as the day of thanksgiving approached. The second ended with a resolve “to go to London as soon as I can after the day of thanksgiving.”38 Why? “This following fragment of hers hints something of it [her reason],” writes Richard (he knew!), and he cites a reflection on the fact that the means of grace that she once had are hers no longer.39 Her midnight meditation, written a few days later, was explicit about this, so clearly it was much on her mind:
I have now cause of sorrow for parting with my dear friend, my father, my pastor. He is by Providence called away, and going on a long journey. . . . I have cause to be humbled that I have been so unprofitable under mercies and means of grace; it may grieve me, now he is gone, that there is so little that came from him left upon my soul.40
Plainly her purpose in going to London was to link up with Richard’s ministry once more.
In chapter 4 Richard cites Margaret’s transcribings of his own stern admonitions not to let her heart be captured by any “creature” and not to come to London. Then he adds Margaret’s closing address to herself, in which she seeks to take to heart what her pastor has told her:
The best creature-affections have a mixture of some creature-imperfections, and therefore need some gall to wean us from the faulty part. God must be known to be God, our rest, and therefore the best creature to be but a creature! O miserable world (how long must I continue in it? and why is this wretched heart so loath to leave it?) where we can have no fire without smoke, and our dearest friends must be our greatest grief; and when we begin in hope and love and joy, before we are aware, we fall into an answerable measure of distress. Learn by experience, when any condition is inordinately or excessively sweet to thee, to say, From hence must be my sorrow. (O how true!)41
What all this shows, as Lloyd-Thomas says, is that “consciously or unconsciously—try as she may to conceal it from him and even from herself—she is already passionately in love with Baxter.” He, the brilliant minister whom her masterful mother valued so highly, has become her substitute father (she had long been fatherless) and her dearest friend. It is to him, rather than anyone else, that she wants to talk about her spiritual condition, and from him, rather than anyone else, that she wants to learn the wisdom of God. He is the man in her life, the “creature” who cannot be enjoyed without sorrow, the person whose prospective absence brings grief like a bereavement because already she loves him so much.
But she has no hope of [her love’s] earthly fulfilment; he had never given her such encouragement; so far as words of religious counsel could, he has given her every discouragement. She must therefore school herself to break this wild infatuation, and look up to the heavenly life where there are no frustrations, where there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, but they are as the angels. . . . What else can she have meant when she wrote in her privacy: “When the Lord shall take our carcases from the grave, and make us shine as the sun in glory; then, then shall friends meet and never part, and remember their sad and weary nights and days no more! Then may we love freely!”42
Did Richard realize at that time what Margaret was feeling? Almost certainly, yes. Shrewd pastors know what is in the wind and what may develop when young women become exclusively dependent on them for spiritual counsel, and they shape their pastoral care accordingly, keeping their distance in order to ensure, so far as they can, that the feelings they discern will not get out of hand. Richard was a shrewd pastor, and that is just what he seems to be doing. He writes Margaret pastoral letters, though she lives only a few yards from the church and from his own lodgings.43 The letters consistently have a cool, clinical, almost schoolmasterly tone; and they contain explicit warnings against loving any fellow creature too much.
How hard it is to keep our hearts from going too far even in honest affections toward the creature, while we are so backward to love God, who should have all the heart and soul and might. Too strong love to any, though it be good in the kind, may be sinful and hurtful in the degree. It will turn too many of your thoughts from God, and they will be too often running after the beloved creature. . . . It will increase your sufferings by involving you in all the dangers and troubles of those whom you over-love.44
I will pray that no creature may seem greater, better, or more regardable or necessary to you than it is; . . . that they [creatures] never be over-loved, over-feared, over-trusted, or their thoughts too much regarded.45
As Lloyd-Thomas notes, this is hardly the “natural language” of one “who is merely trying to keep the daughter of a parishioner from being over-fondly attached to her mother or too concerned about her brother’s attitude.”46 Pastor Richard is clearly trying to redirect what we would call the erotic affection toward himself that Margaret’s manner has begun to reveal.
In fact, Richard’s interest in this young convert and his pastoral care for her had been more than ordinary from the start—partly, no doubt, because of her mother’s committed support of his ministry, but partly too, one imagines, because he saw what influence her intelligence, intensity, and social standing would give her in the parish once she was joyfully anchored in Christ. Pastors trying to help people in deep soul-trouble are sometimes obliged to take risks, and Richard took one: He versified her problems and his answers to them and unquestionably gave her copies of the result. This didactic device was, of course, not far from the time-honored practice of wooers writing love poems to their ladies, and must have made Margaret feel she was important to Richard, even if the importance was professedly pastoral and evangelistic rather than amorous and adoring.
The evidence here, which earlier students of our love story seem not to have fully weighed, is in a small book with a large title: Poetical Fragments. Heart-Imployment [sic] with God and Itself. The Concordant Discord of a Broken healed Heart. Sorrowing-rejoycing [sic] fearing-hoping, dying-living. Written Partly for himself, and partly for near Friends in Sickness, and other deep Affliction . . . Published for the use of the Afflicted. “The Epistle to the Reader” is dated August 7, 1681, just over two weeks from July 23, the date of the comparable epistle in the memoir, and in it Richard explains why, against the advice of his “wise friends,” he is giving this material to the world.
As they [the poems] were mostly written in various passions, so passion has now thrust them out into the world. God having taken away the dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrows and sufferings long ago gave being to some of these poems (for reasons which the world is not concerned to know) so my grief for her removal, and the revived sense of former things, has prevailed with me to be passionate in the open sight of all.
I confess that passion is often such a hindrance of judgment, that a man should be very suspicious of himself till it be laid [i.e., calmed]: but I am assured that God made it not in vain. . . . God usually beginneth . . . the conversion of sinners, by the awakening of their useful passions, their fear, their grief, repentance, desire, etc. . . . Lay by all the passionate part of love and joy, and it will be hard to have any pleasant thoughts of heaven. . . .
I will do my wise friends, whose counsel I have much followed, that right [due courtesy] as to acquit them from all the guilt of the publication of these fragments. Some of them say, that such work is below me; and those that I think speak wiselier say, I am below such work. These I unfeignedly believe. . . . That I am not excellent, I am satisfied [convinced]. But . . . a fiddler may serve at a country wedding. . . .
All that I have to say for these fragments is . . . [that their] being suited to afflicted, sick, dying, troubled, sad and doubting persons, the number of such is so great in these calamitous times, as may render them useful to more than I desire.47
Some of the poems, writes Baxter, “need an exposition, which I must not give the world”48 (his wise friends, no doubt, had persuaded him of this), and under these circumstances our conclusions must be tentative. But it looks as if Margaret’s “sorrows and sufferings . . . gave being” to at least the following:
(7) “Self-Denial. A dialogue between the flesh and the spirit” (240 lines; dated October 29, 1659, when Margaret lay ill).
(8) “The Prayer of the Sick, in a case like Hezekiah’s [facing death, praying for life: 2 Kings 20]” (144 lines; undated, but apparently from the same period).
(9) “The Covenant and Confidence of Faith” (64 lines, closing with the statement: “This covenant my dear wife in her former sickness [1659?] subscribed with a cheerful mind”).
(12) “The Lamentation for sin afflicting the sinner; especially by the grievous suffering of friends. With the relief of the self-condemning soul” (429 lines, 343 being a dialogue between Jesus and the lamenter, meeting every point in the lament and bringing assurance, or rather reassurance, of his redeeming love and of the lamenter’s present and future salvation; dated January 18, 1661, at the beginning and January 26 at the end, the month in which Margaret’s much-loved mother was dying).49
In that age in which verse was an ordinary gentleman’s hobby, one can imagine Pastor Richard showing Margaret these poems and asking her to note that they express and resolve precisely her own inner conflicts and uncertainties, pointing out to her the path of peace—as indeed they do. To show this in detail is not possible here, but I reprint two of these poems at the end of the memoir (page 135) so that readers may match them with what chapters 3 and 4 show of Margaret’s inner turmoil in 1659-60 and draw their own conclusions.50
This is how the matter appears to me: Margaret had sought conversion in the sense in which Richard’s 1657 sermons had described it:51 that is, as a regenerating work of God the Holy Spirit imparting to mind, heart, and life a new, humble, prayerful, radically God-centered and Christ-focused orientation, thus reversing the natural godlessness of our fallen existence. As an unconverted life is under God’s judicial sentence of death and hell, so conversion conveys divine promises of pardon, peace, and protection. Margaret’s quest for conversion, pursued by self-examination, self-humbling, prayerful penitence, and attempts at a sincere and wholehearted covenanting commitment to Christ, led, probably early in 1659, to a sense of assurance whereby she found herself convinced that God had pardoned and accepted her, that she was indeed a new creature in Christ, and that she had been instated as an heir of heaven’s glory.
This was the usual, and surely scriptural, form of Puritan conversion. But for some time after assurance dawned, anything unto- ward—illness, disappointment, trouble coming to those she loved and had prayed for, or whatever—threw her into turmoil lest, after all, she was a self-deceived hypocrite and the untoward event was God telling her so. So she needed constant help to humble herself afresh, renew her covenant with God in Christ, strengthen her grip on God’s promises, grasp more firmly that trouble is part of the divine plan for our lives, and get back to praising and hoping as habits of the heart to be maintained through thick and thin. Richard’s letters and poems, and the one-on-one admonitions that undoubtedly accompanied them, were all designed to give her self-understanding and help at this point. The Lord blessed, and by the time of their marriage the lessons had been well learned.
Meanwhile, a final question: Did Richard intend his readers to pick up all these hints I have highlighted about Margaret’s feelings for him and his ministry to her as to someone special during 1659-60, when he was still wholeheartedly committed to clerical bachelorhood? The best guess is that he did not care one way or the other. For him the important thing was to share what might help others; that purpose was both his guiding star and the boundary of his concern. We honor his and Margaret’s memory best by keeping that purpose in view as now we proceed.
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter
The marriage of Richard and Margaret was a very happy one.
When we were married, her sadness and melancholy vanished: counsel did something to it, and contentment something; and being taken up with our household affairs did somewhat. And we lived in inviolated love and mutual complacency sensible of the benefit of mutual help. These near nineteen years I know not that we had any breach in the point of love, or point of interest, save only that she somewhat grudged that I had persuaded her for my quietness to surrender so much of her estate, as disabled her from helping others so much as she earnestly desired.52
It might have seemed that the odds were against such happiness. There was a twenty-one-year age gap between them; Margaret, a convert of three years or so, was marrying a veteran clergyman who had been ordained when she was only two years old. They were both of fragile health, though in different ways. Margaret was a martyr to migraines and chest congestion, and Richard was a veritable museum of diseases, which meant that he lived in some degree of pain most of the time. He was forthright and hasty and could be strident; she was gentle and circumspect and could not bear an angry voice. Also, they were differently conditioned by their social backgrounds, with consequences that might easily have been explosive. “I had been bred among plain, lower-class people, and I thought that so much washing of stairs and rooms, to keep them as clean as their trenchers and dishes, and so much ado about cleanliness and trifles, was a sinful eccentricity and expense of servants’ time, who might that while have been reading some good book. But she that was otherwise bred had somewhat other thoughts.”53
There was more. They had to move house several times, and wherever Richard was and whatever he was doing, he was the object of continual spying and sniping. He was the tall poppy among Puritan Nonconformists, and devotees of restored Anglicanism were determined to find ways of cutting him down. Then, too, Richard was a public man, a preacher and a tireless writer, constantly in the home but not available to Margaret. It cannot have been easy for her even though, as was usual with aristocratic ladies, she had a companion of her own sex in their home for much of the time.
Moreover, neither of them had a really easy temperament. Margaret was highly strung and a bundle of fears inside, which she made worse by bottling them up. Richard was hasty and frequently offhand, as persons who live in pain often are, and was inclined to be downcast and irritable when things did not go his way. He is talking from experience when he declares: “The pleasing of a wife is usually no easy task. There is an unsuitableness in the best and wisest and most alike. Faces are not so unlike as the apprehensions of the mind.
They that agree in religion, in love and interest, yet may have differ- ent apprehensions about occasional occurrences, persons, things, words, etc. That will seem the best way to one that seems the worst to the other. And passions are apt to succeed and serve these differences. Very good people are hard to be pleased. My own dear wife had high desires of my doing and speaking better than I did, but my badness made it hard for me to do better.”54 Again: “My dear wife did look for more good in me than she found, especially lately in my weakness and decay. We are all like pictures that must not be looked on too near. They that come near us find more faults and badness in us than others at a distance know.”55 Yet, despite their real limitations of temperament and character, they achieved a marvelously happy and fruitful partnership.
Richard’s admiration for Margaret was unbounded. She was “a woman of extraordinary acuteness of wit, solidity and judgment, incredible prudence and sagacity and sincere devotedness to God, and unusual strict obedience to him . . . who . . . heaped on me . . . many and great obligations to love and tenderness.”56
She was very desirous that we should all have lived in a constancy of devotion and a blameless innocency. And in this respect she was the meetest helper that I could have had in the world . . . for I was apt to be over-careless in my speech and too backward to my duty, and she was always endeavoring to bring me to greater wariness and strictness in both. If I spoke rashly or sharply, it offended her; if I behaved (as I was apt) with too much neglect of ceremony, or humble compliment to any, she would modestly tell me of it; if my very looks seemed not pleasant, she would have me amend them (which my weak pained state of body undisposed me to do); if I forgot any week to catechize my servants and familiarly instruct them personally (besides my ordinary family duties [i.e., household prayers twice daily]), she was troubled at my remissness.57
He did not think her flawless—just a wonderful partner; and no doubt she had similar thoughts to the end of her days about him.
They had many things, of course, going for them. They were one in faith, in hope of glory, in their approach to the tasks of marriage, and in their commitment to a rejoicing lifestyle.
After all the doubts of her sincerity and salvation and all the fears and sadness thereupon, which cast her into melancholy,58 she so far overcame them all, that for near these nineteen years that I have lived with her, I think I never heard her thrice speak a doubting word of her salvation, but oft of her hopeful persuasions that we should live together in heaven; it being my judgment and constant practice to make those that I teach understand that the gospel is glad tidings of great joy; and that holiness lies especially in delighting in God, his Word and works, and in his joyful praise and hopes of glory, and in longing for and seeking the heavenly Jerusalem, and in living as fruitfully to the church and others as we can do in the world; and that this must be wrought by the most believing apprehensions of God’s goodness as equal to his greatness, and of his great love to mankind manifested in our redemption, and by believing the grace and riches of Christ and the comforting office of the Holy Ghost, and studying daily God’s promises and mercies and our everlasting joys; and that religion consists in doing God’s commanding will and quietly and joyfully trusting in his promising and disposing will; and that fear and sorrow are but to remove impediments and further all this.
And this doctrine by degrees she drunk in and so fully consented to that (though timorousness was her disease), her judgment was quieted and settled therein.59
They sang together. “It is not the least comfort that I had in the converse of my late dear wife, that our first in the morning, and last in bed at night was a psalm of praise.”60 Though they discovered over and over again that marriage brings trouble, shared joy was the dominant tone of their relationship throughout.
Though wise, winning, patient, self-possessed, brave, and generous to a fault, Margaret had her vulnerabilities. For her constant scheming to enable her husband to preach while others schemed to silence him, and for the many charitable initiatives she took as she went along, she can hardly be overpraised. Yet she could be obsessive and overoptimistic about her projects and then prostrated with disappointment when things did not turn out as she had hoped. She could be “righteous overmuch,” in the sense of concentrating so intensely on one duty that she would forget other, greater duties. She was culpably slow to talk to others about spiritual matters. “I scarce ever met with a person that was abler to speak long, for matter and good language, even about religious things,” writes Richard; “ . . . and yet she could not do it herself for fear of seeming to be guilty of ostentation. In good company she would speak little of that which she most desired to hear. When I was at any time from home, she would not pray in the family. . . . Most of the open speaking part of religion she omitted, through a diseased enmity to ostentation and hypocrisy.”61
She was obsessive about her health, too, spending much of her adult life in fear of mental collapse,62 starving herself for years for fear that overeating would bring on cancer,63 and thereby as it seems undermining her own constitution. “Her understanding,” writes Richard, “ . . . was higher and clearer than other people’s, but, like the treble strings of a lute, strained up to the highest, sweet, but in continual danger.”64 She “proved her sincerity by her costliest obedience. It cost her . . . somewhat of her trouble of body and mind; for her knife was too keen and cut the sheath. Her desires were more earnestly set on doing good than her tender mind and head could well bear.”65
But she gave Richard magnificent support all along the line. Though, as she told him, she wished he would write less and do it more carefully,66 she never complained at the endless hours he spent pen-pushing, nor at the wretched circumstances of their life during the hard winter of 1669-70, when “the coal smoke so filled the room that we were all day sat in, that it was as a cloud, and we were even suffocated with the stink. And she had ever a great constriction of the lungs that could not bear smoke or closeness.”67 On the occasion when Baxter’s home preaching landed him in Clerkenwell jail with a six-month sentence, she “cheerfully went with me into prison; she brought her best bed thither . . . . I think she scarce ever had a pleas- anter time in her life.”68 “This history (and my great experience),” he writes, “saith that there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, Proverbs 18:24.”69 From his story one sees entirely what he means.
As for Richard himself, it is clear that the blend of theological sternness, pastoral tenderness, husbandly humility, and personal realism in his memoir reflects the way his life with Margaret was actually lived. In writing the memoir, he has nothing to prove and nothing to hide, since he does not think he is long for this world. There is poignant dignity in his closing paragraph:
In our greatest straits and sufferings, let us comfort one another with these words: That we shall for ever be with the Lord. Had I been [able] to possess the company of my friends in this life only, how short would our comfortable converse have been! But now I shall live with them in the heavenly city of God for ever. And they, being there of the same mind with my forgiving God and Savior, will forgive all my failings, neglects, and injuries, as God forgiveth them and me. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; and he hath taken away but that upon my desert, which he had given me undeservedly near nineteen years. . . . I am waiting to be next. The door is open. Death will quickly draw the veil and make us see how near we were to God and one another, and did not sufficiently know it. Farewell vain world, and welcome true everlasting life.70
“We meet two exceptional and exemplary Christians in this book,” writes N. H. Keeble; “we also meet, as we rarely do in seventeenth-century biographies, two very human characters.”71 That is true, and that is why we resonate so deeply with Richard as he celebrates his nineteen years of great gladness with a great Puritan lady. It is now time to let him tell us the story in his own words.