140 Religion
enthusiasts, but not their sacramental piety, still less their emphasis on rule
by bishops, except as a convenient means of governing the church. They
favoured 'comprehension' of dissenters, the dilution of Anglican practice
to re-admit the nonconformist godly to the fold, but not the toleration of
dissent. Hale's friends among this group were its most distinguished
spokesmen: John Wilkins (1614-72), the Bishop of Chester, Wilkins' son-
in-law, the future Archbishop Tillotson (1630-94), and Edward Stillingfleet
(1635-99).
4
Each of these could be quoted out of context to suggest an
almost deist attitude, a Christianity divorced from dogma and hardly more
than ethical in content. They nonetheless believed their faith to be at least
continuous with the historic mainstream of Protestant English
belief.
Hale
offers a case study in an almost unaccountable transition.
Hale's education, it is clear, was puritan by any contemporary stan-
dards. It displeased the bigoted Tory mind of Anthony a Wood, and
embarrassed the frankly Whiggish Gilbert Burnet. He was brought up,
Wood noted with distaste, 'under severe puritans and under a puritanical
discipline'.
5
His guardian Anthony Kingscot revealed the nature of his
influence (also, admittedly, its limitations) by a denunciation of his son,
who had joined 'the Popish army [that is the royalists], the enemies of God,
his Church and this nation'.
6
According to Burnet, who spoke with almost
tortured indirectness: 'being inclined to the way of those then called
puritans, [he] put [Hale] to some schools that were taught by those of that
party'.
7
Wood's bluntness has the relish of prejudice confirmed: Hale was
entrusted to the 'scandalous vicar', a Mr Staunton, instead of Wotton's
public grammar school.
8
He proceeded to Magdalen Hall, where his tutor
was one Obadiah Sedgwick (P160O-58), then at the start of a career as a
leading 'presbyterian' divine.
9
Sedgwick became the chaplain to England's
leading general of the time, the very devoutly puritan Lord Vere.
10
Hale
4
Burnet, Life, 74. Burnet also mentions Thomas Barlow (1607—91), the Bishop of Lincoln,
probably on the strength of a letter now at Lambeth (Lambeth 3513, 128).
5
Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3rd edn, 1813, vol. Ill p. 1091.
6
H. P. R. Finberg, Gloucestershire studies, Leicester 1957, p. 164.
7
Burnet, Life, 5.
8
Wood, Athenae, III, 1091.
9
Sedgwick was prominent enough for an unusually venomous article in Wood's high
Anglican reference work Athenae Oxonienses. He preached a number of sermons to the
Long Parliament, including two calls for religious persecution {An ark against a deluge,
1644;
The nature and danger of heresies, 1647), which stamp him in a broad sense as
'presbyterian'. His theologically substantial works, which were posthumously printed,
have no particular similarity to Hale's. For a marked difference see his idiosyncratic
discussion {The bowels of tender mercy sealed, 1661, pp. 170-3) of the covenant of
works.
10
Burnet, Life, 5, 9. For Vere's religion, see Keith L. Sprunger, The learned Doctor William
Ames: Dutch backgrounds of English and American puritanism, Urbana 1972, pp. 30-2.