Samuel Chidley

Samuel Chidley was an English Puritan activist and controversialist. A radical separatist in London before and during the English Civil War, he became a leading Leveller, a treasurer of the movement. A public servant and land speculator under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, he became rich and campaigned for social, moral and financial reform. He was ruined by the Restoration and returned to live in relative poverty in his native Shrewsbury.

Origins and early life

Samuel Chidley was the first surviving son of
The Burgess Roll records Samuel himself as being four years of age. Assuming this is correct, he was about two years old when his christening was recorded in the parish register of St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury on 13 April 1618: Here his father is called "Daniell Chedler:" although earlier documents record the surname with numerous spellings, Katherine and Samuel consistently used the form Chidley in their signatures and title pages. It has been suggested that the naming of Samuel was a deliberate allusion to the Biblical story of Hannah, who in dedicated her first child, Samuel, to God and refused the traditional purification ritual until the child was weaned. This suggests that Samuel was intended from the outset as the child who would be dedicated to God's work.
Daniel and Katherine Chidley were denounced as separatists by the Puritan public preacher of Shrewsbury, Julines Herring, and this separatism may account for their reluctance to have their children baptised at their parish church. However, by 1629 St Chad's had baptised a further seven Chidley children and buried one, Daniel, who died in infancy. The second Daniel's baptism was recorded on 12 February 1626, and after this birth, at least, Katherine refused to undergo the Churching of women, although this may not have been the first time, and she was not unique. She and six other women were cited for refusing to take part later in the year during an episcopal visitation. This was part of protracted hostilities between the High Church incumbent, Peter Studley, and his Puritan parishioners in which both the separatists and the moderate Presbyterians around Herring were accused of absenting themselves from the Eucharist and setting up conventicles.

Separation and advancement in London

The decision of the Chidley's to move to London has been attributed to both religious persecution. and a desire for relative anonymity. In 1630 Daniel Chidley, described as the Elder, together with John Dupper or Duppa and Thomas Dye, helped to form a separatist church in London. Frequently referred to by historians as the Duppa church, this splinter group rejected the baptism of Anglican parish churches and on these grounds broke away from an Independent church led by John Lothropp. The initiative seems originally to have stemmed from Duppa's demand that Lothropp's church, in renewing its covenant, should "Detest & Protest against y^e Parish Churches." The splinter group were lucky to avoid the wave of arrests that struck the more visible parent body in 1632. Samuel Chidley lived with his parents as an adult in London, and with his mother until at least 1652. He seems to have been active with his parents in their separatist group, supporting John Lilburne from the 1630s, during the period of Thorough, the attempt by Charles I to practise absolute monarchy. David Brown, a veteran of the group led by Duppa and the Chidleys reminisced about tearing a surplice as a deliberate act of iconoclasm one St Luke's Day at Greenwich, a place made notorious in their eyes for the Catholic chapel that Queen Henrietta Maria had installed in her house there.
The Chidleys seem also to have been very open to the economic opportunities afforded by the capital. Daniel became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers in 1632. Samuel, was admitted to the company as an apprentice in 1634.
The Chidleys' anonymity was decisively ended with the collapse of Thorough and the king's reluctant decision to call Parliaments. The Scottish Covenanters had defeated the king in the Bishops' Wars and when Parliament entered into negotiations for an alliance, pressed for a Presbyterian reformation of the Church of England. At this juncture, Thomas Edwards, an irascible English Presbyterian controversialist, published Reasons Against the Independent Government of Particular Congregations, an attack on the Congregational polity. In October 1641, Katherine Chidley issued a counterblast: The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ. Being an Answer to Mr. Edwards his Booke. The Biblical texts she placed on the title page both attested her preference for thinking through the experience of the Judges and the early Israelite monarchy, tending to confirm the significance of Samuel's name., allowed her to take on the role of David, while allowed her to be Jael.
Samuel had begun his pamphleting career by 1643/4, when he released A Christian plea for Christians baptisme, a defence of infant baptism against the Particular Baptist Andrew Ritor's A Treatise of the Vanity of Childish Baptism, which had also strongly upheld baptism by immersion.

The high places

Samuel Chidley acted as spokesman for his church repeatedly in the 1640s, invariably on a variation of Duppa's founding principle of "Detest & Protest against y^e Parish Churches." The first recorded instance seems to have been in June 1645, when he, together with two other members, John Duppa and David Brown, took part in a conference with Henry Burton of St Matthew Friday Street. At the time, they were calling their group the Separation. The key tenet they wished to defend in the debate was that the former parish churches were to be shunned and demolished as were the "high places" of the Ancient Canaanite religion by the kings of Judah. Brown helpfully included a list of what the Separation regarded as relevant texts in his report of the conference, including, an account of Asa's destruction of the Canaanite shrines. The separatist position was in direct contradiction to the concluding statement of the Directory for Public Worship, adopted by an act of parliament in January 1645 to replace the Book of Common Prayer.
Thomas Edwards, in the first part of Gangraena, related an incident two months later in which Katherine Chidley debated at Stepney Meeting House with the moderate Independent William Greenhill, noting the Chidleys' distinctive avoidance of places previously dedicated to Saints and Angels, which they regarded as sites of idolatry.
Samuel Chidley emerged as his mother's key assistant in her evangelism, helping her to plant new separatist churches. One of these was at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk and its covenant of 1646 has survived. It was affirmed in the names of eight adults and six children, with both Katherine and Samuel Chidley signing as witnesses. The covenant was radically separatist and strongly reflects the Chidleys' preoccupation with boycotting the old parish churches. Its members were "conuinced in conscience of the evill of y^e Church of England, and of all other states w^ch are contrary to Christs institution." They declared themselves "fully separated" not only from Anglicans but also those who had dealings with them, as well as the "high places" they had used for worship. Beside their signatures, Samuel and Katherine Chidley described themselves as "members of the Church of God in London."
Edwards specifically mentioned the Suffolk mission in the third part of Gangraena:
Edwards alleged that the Chidleys worked together "one inditing, the other writing," and that they had issued a polemical pamphlet against him from Bury. He was certain that their work in Suffolk was part of a wider pattern of planting such congregations.
The theme of the high places dominated all of Samuel Chidley's contributions to his own church's mission in this period. Although explicitly directed against the Anglican and former Catholic places of worship, it was used exclusively in debates with other Independent churches which the members of the Separation or Church of God in London regarded as insufficiently rigorous and from which they wished to distinguish themselves. This became increasingly important as the attempt to impose a Presbyterian polity, which had so concerned all Independents, foundered in the face of opposition from within army. The Presbyterian structures that had been built fell into neglect after 1648, mainly because the Second English Civil War, stemming from the king's conspiracy to have himself restored by a Scottish invasion, finally discredited the Presbyterian system and its Parliamentarian supporters and brought effective toleration for the Independents.
In August 1648 Samuel Chidley debated with John Goodwin, the minister of St. Stephen Coleman Street, who had attempted a compromise between a gathered church and a parish church: he used St Stephen's as a teaching and preaching base in this most turbulent and lively part of the capital, while administering communion only to the select group, not necessarily from the area, approved by himself and his elders. Differences between Chidley and Goodwin initially centred on the domestic problems of the Goodsones: the husband, William Goodsone, an officer in the navy, attended Chidley's Separation, while his wife worshipped at St Stephen's, as Chidley outlined in a letter to Goodwin. It seems likely the two churches were close and to some extent competitors for local support. According to Brown's report, which was bundled with his notes on the earlier conference with Burton, the discussion began with Goodwin making the eirenic gambit:
This was contested by Chidley who took the rigorist position:
William Goodsone himself said that he could not be in communion with Goodwin's church "because Mr. Goodwins Peoples practice was to preach and heare in the Parrish-Churches of England, and to Worship in the Idolls Temples, and to Baptize the Children of unbelievers, and such like." Almost immediately the debate moved on to the question of the high places, the separatists' distinctive theme, and did not stray from it until the end.