It’s a gloriously starry night. The moon lights up the countryside in an eerie silver light, revealing tree lines, gorges and valleys. Perched on the side of a craggy moor, inside the ruins of an ancient chapel, a group of peasants, men and women, huddle around a number of small lanterns. Lookouts are posted. All around there is an air of nervous expectation.

Suddenly a hushed whisper passes through the group: ‘Hark! yon comes the preacher!’

All faces turn towards the escarpment. A dark figure with a stately bearing strides towards them, leading a horse behind him. He greets the waiting group warmly and calls out the number of a Psalm and together they worship.

The preacher was the nonconformist William Bagshawe (or how I imagine him anyway!). It was the 1660s, 70s and 80s in the peaklands of rural Derbyshire, also known as the Peak District. These were not days when the true worship of God was in its silver slippers. It wasn’t by choice that this small band of believers met under cover of night on a hill. Far from it.

After the restoration of the monarchy and Charles II to the throne, over 2,000 ministers were chucked out of the Church of England (the so-called ‘Great Ejection’) for refusing to conform solely to a revised Book of Common Prayer. Dissent was banned. A period known as the ‘Great Persecution’ began. From 1664, draconian penalties were imposed on those found attending illicit religious gatherings (known as ‘conventicles’). For repeat offences, forfeiture of all possessions or fines of up to £100 (equivalent to £20,000 in today’s money), imprisonment and exile. Worse still, informers were massively incentivised—they got to keep a substantial cut of the money—splitting whole families and communities apart.

Although it helped to propagate English nonconformity, the effects were disastrous; in some senses, the church in this country didn’t really recover until the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. However, the story in the Peak District was somewhat different. The natural geography of the region meant that enforcing the law was difficult and God used the preaching of men like William Bagshawe to powerful effect. Bagshawe may be lesser-known to much of the country but locally he was celebrated for many years afterwards as the ‘apostle of the Peak’.

Bagshawe the philanthropist

If you were transported back in time to the seventeenth century, one of the things that might strike you most (apart from the lack of decent sanitation and modern plumbing!) is the social hierarchy. People, including Christians, thought it was inherent to the natural order of things for class divides to exist between common folk and their ‘betters’, the gentrified classes. Amidst the ideological and political revolutions of the mid-1600s, many groups aspired to a more egalitarian society—such as my co-blogger Michael’s heroes, John Lilburne and the ‘Levellers’ (as good a band name as any!), or the more radical, proto-Communistic ‘Diggers’—yet they never realised these aspirations.

William Bagshawe the Puritan (1628-1702) was born of a prominent land-owning family in Derbyshire, studied at Cambridge and was ordained for the ministry in the Church of England, yet he had a heart for the poor folk around him in a way that many of his contemporaries didn’t; he cared less about political ways and means, more about preaching the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. An anecdote from his biography nicely illustrates his heart:

While heading for an appointed conventicle meeting, [Bagshawe] passed the cottage of a poor shoemaker, busy at his bench. On being invited by the preacher to accompany him, the man replied: ‘Ah’ve no time to spare. Ah’ve a wife and family t’keep.’

At this Bagshawe inquired of him how much he could earn in an hour and a half. Having ascertained the amount, he gave the sum to the man, who thereupon accompanied him to the meeting. The next time Bagshawe was to preach there, he passed the cottage without calling. He had not proceeded far when the cobbler came running after him. Expressing surprise at seeing him, Bagshawe shrewdly asked if he could spare the time, seeing he had a wife and family to keep.

In his provincial dialect, the man replied: ‘Thah’ll none pay mi’ any more. Ah’ll none stay be’ind agen. Twa’ th’ best money ah ever addled’ [handled]. Evidently the shoemaker had received a change of heart at the first meeting and was now anxious to feed on the sincere milk of the Word!

On his preaching tours, Bagshawe gained a reputation for giving away all that he had with him, supporting many poor families, widows and orphans out of his own pocket as well as enabling many into education and employment. In his view, the drive to proclaim the truths of the Gospel must come with a social conscience (e.g., James 1:27). But this social conscience must not be without a gentle but firm zeal against ‘open wickedness’ like ‘idleness, filthy language, swearing and drunkenness’.

Whilst some in our day may dismiss him as paternalistic, a contemporary says that ‘the hearts of the poor were made glad by him’. The word ‘philanthropist’ is derived from Greek that literally means a ‘lover of men’, and that’s what Bagshawe was: someone who exemplified ‘the beauty of practical godliness’.

Bagshawe the preacher

Like many Puritans of his day, Bagshawe’s preaching was simple, lively, Gospel-centric and compelling: ‘He spoke like a man who felt what he said, and had a powerful sense upon his own mind of those things which he urged on others’.

Of course, the power wasn’t his own. He was a man marked by prayer. Each morning he would rise, whilst his wife and the rest of his family slept, to spend an hour at the throne of grace, praying ‘with holy fervour’ for his own flock, person-by-person, and the wider church. Then, fully charged, Bagshawe would set out to see how many people he could share the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ with:

O may free grace fill all your hearts! May it run and be glorified in all your houses. May your beds, boards, shops, fields, savour of your profiting by the doctrine of it.

As is always the case with preachers during revivals, the Gospel was his focus. He declared that Christ’s cross ‘was the pulpit from whence the loudest sermon of love was preached’. So he would implore his hearers to ‘embrace the Lord Jesus and the grace which is in and through Him’.

In his second letter to his young protégé Timothy, the Apostle Paul writes (2 Timothy 4:1-2, emphasis added):

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. 

And Bagshawe did exactly that—in season—until 1662 as vicar of Glossop in the High Peak (between Manchester and Sheffield), then—out of season—travelling around as a renegade preacher.

Bagshawe the rebel

Being a rebel didn’t come naturally to a moderate like Bagshawe, but when forced to decide between compromising his faith or leaving his cosy vicarate, there were no two ways about it, and he chose to roam the hills as a nonconformist.

He had no objections to the Book of Common Prayer in itself, but in enforcing strict adherence and prohibiting the slightest deviation from it, the 1662 Act of Uniformity was going beyond the authority of Scripture itself on matters like enforcing episcopacy (rule by bishops rather than elders of equal standing) and banning spontaneous, extempore prayer. Whilst many good men assented, Bagshawe and many others with him, after much heartache and deliberation, chose instead to conform to Christ.

Many tears were shed when Bagshawe delivered his final sermon to his congregation, handed over the keys to his living and left. He could have easily retired at this point to his family’s estate and just lived a quiet life, perhaps busying himself in some literary endeavours. But Bagshawe could not stop preaching. He had the call of a pastor: ‘Christ alone had commissioned him to take up the care of souls; Christ alone could discharge him’.

The two periods from 1662-1672 and then 1673-1688 may have been called the ‘Great Persecution’, but diamonds are made under pressure, and this was a time of great revival.

Bagshawe started small, meeting in kitchens and sitting rooms, but before long, seeing so many places without a Gospel witness, he set out on horseback and preached wherever people would hear him. A favourite spot was under an old tree known as ‘Gospel Brow’ near Chapel-en-le-Frith.

Countryside around Chapel-en-le-Frith (Flickr / The Brit_2, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Apart from a brief reprieve in 1672-3 (the ‘Declaration of Indulgence’), persecution generally worsened year-on-year. In 1665, the ‘Five Mile Act’ meant that all dissenting ministers must swear allegiance to Charles II as head of the Church; failure to comply was met with heavy fines and all nonconformists were banned from going five miles within any town or city centre. Now Bagshawe had nothing against Charles II as king per se, but affirming him in place of Christ as head of the Church was unconscionable.

So he was pushed into even more remote and rural parts of the Peaks. They met at night, far from any human habitation. Bagshawe wasn’t as bothered about being caught and fined himself, but for his poor listeners, the fines could be devastating.

They never caught him. He was able to preach over a thousand times in barns, under trees, in copses, quarries and on hilltops all across the Peak District. Once a couple of informers broke in on a meeting, but apparently the ‘awe-inspiring look Bagshawe gave them’ so struck them with terror that they ‘fled in panic’.

If their secret meetings were nerve-wracking, then they were also spiritually invigorating. A friend of Bagshawe’s claimed that:

The presence of God and His blessing is more abundantly experienced in our select assemblies than in the public parochial congregations.

So he continued for the next quarter of a century until the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, the coming of William of Orange and the ‘Act of Toleration’ for all Protestant nonconformists. All this time, Bagshawe never felt sufficient for the task given him, yet instead he found ‘all sufficiency’ in the ‘divine grace’ of the ‘infinitely glorious God’.

For the sake of the kingdom

Bagshawe was an extremely gifted and learned man who wrote many books yet his main priority of preaching ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’ (Ephesians 3:8) in a straightforward manner stands for all time.

He shows us the importance of a social conscience which—even with the safety net of the modern-day welfare state—is something the church today must not neglect.

Bagshawe’s resolution to submit to the ruling authorities only insofar as his conscience would permit is particularly inspirational for our own times. We ought never to take our relative freedom of religion and liberty of conscience for granted. Many in this country have fought and died for the right to worship God freely. But neither should we oppose the ruling authorities without a solid biblical rationale. 

Come what may, Christ will build His church, we can have no doubt about that. Bagshawe stands with millions of others who have given up so much for the sake of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Whilst Bagshawe wasn’t perfect and may have had regrets in many things, he would not have regretted that.

Source: John Brentnall, William Bagshawe: The Apostle of the Peak (Banner of Truth, 1970).