Joshua Sprigge

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Sprigg [Sprigge], Joshua (bap. 1618, d. 1684), Independent minister, was baptized at Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 19 April 1618. His father had been servant to William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and was later steward of New College, Oxford.

During the early 1640s Sprigg was an active preacher and religious controversialist. In most of his preaching he stuck to purely religious themes, disclosing himself as an advanced Calvinist of millenarian tendencies, stressing human sinfulness and the centrality of Christ, whose second coming he interpreted alternatively as an inward experience of each individual and as a literal event in ‘these last dayes’ when Christ and man would be ‘returned into a unity of Concord and agreement’ (Sprigge, Christus redivivus, 59, 27). A strong advocate of religious toleration, he was almost certainly the author of The ancient bounds, or, Liberty of conscience, tenderly stated, modestly asserted, and mildly vindicated (1645). In his early sermons Sprigg revealed his animosity to the bishops, rejoicing that they had been ‘made Cyphers, instead of making the Parliament so’ (Sprigge, Solace for Saints, 28). He also deplored the quarrels over church government that had rocked the Westminster assembly of divines: ‘And now is all that truth we expected come to a new forme of government, whether Presbyteriall or Congregational? … Is this the shaking of heaven and earth, to shake men out of an Episcopal prelacy into a Presbyteriall?’ (Sprigge, A Testimony to an Approaching Glory, sig. B5r). In 1648 and 1649, because ‘The world hath been witnesse of many hard speeches against me’, including the accusation that he denied the divinity of Christ, he decided to publish collections of his sermons so that the world could judge for itself.

One cause of Sprigg's unpopularity in London was undoubtedly his outspoken advocacy of Sir Thomas Fairfax's New Model Army at a time when the City fathers, inspired by Thomas Edwards and other presbyterian clergy, were denouncing it as a breeding-ground of sectarian heresy. He had been hired by Fairfax to be a chaplain and member of the secretariat of the new army. At the beginning of 1647 he published Anglia rediviva, a day-by-day account of the army's successes during the first fifteen months of its existence. In it he provided an unabashedly providential interpretation of the New Model's unbroken string of victories.

Mindful of his obligations to his patron Saye, Sprigg also was careful to weave into his account a lengthy justification of Saye's son, Nathaniel Fiennes, who had been court-martialled for his surrender of Bristol in 1643. The apology for Fiennes was so comprehensive that it prompted Clement Walker to refer sardonically to the author as ‘Sprigg alias Nathaniel Fines in his legend or romance of this army’ (Walker, 1.32). Although the book relies heavily on the pamphlets and newsbooks of the period it is occasionally enlivened by Sprigg's eyewitness accounts, and the whole is shot through with his overarching vision of the New Model Army's providential role in the war against the king.

In December 1648 Sprigg intervened in the debate in the council of officers at Whitehall over the adoption of the Leveller-inspired Agreement of the People. While he approved the effort to ‘promote the spirituall liberties of the saints’ by restraining the power of the magistrate over religion, he thought that devising a constitution for England at that moment was a waste of time; they ought rather to wait upon God who was about to ‘bringe forth a New Heaven and a New Earth’ (Firth, 2.85, 87).

A few weeks later Sprigg incurred the displeasure of the army high command by his forthright opposition to the execution of the king. On Sunday 21 January 1649 he preached to the members of the court of high commission on the text ‘He that sheds blood, by man shall his blood be shed’. Barely three days before Charles went to the scaffold he wrote that ‘the end of the Lord's judging is purifying not destroying’; ‘To execute the King for what he did in prosecution of the War … is to shed the blood of War in Peace’ (Certaine Weighty Considerations, 1649, sigs. B1r, B2v).


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