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Altogether, the Three Parts of Edwards's Gangraena are a curious Presbyterian repertory of facts and scandals respecting the English Independents and Sectaries in and shortly after the year of Marston Moor. The impression which they leave of Mr. We name him now, however, not on account of his "Letters," but on account of two publications of his dealing expressly with this subject.
Baillie, on rumour, reports him as a Socinian; and Edwards, who came into conflict with him in due time, and devotes many consecutive pages of Billingsgate to him in the Second Part of his Gangraena, tells us that he held "many wicked opinions," being "an Hermaphrodite and a compound of an Arminian, Socinian, Libertine, Anabaptist, & c."
Edwards of the Gangraena, once far from a nobody in London, but who will now, through Milton's mention of him, be "Shallow Edwards" to the world's end. In Milton's draft of the Sonnet he was "hair-brained Edwards;" but "hair-brained" was erased, and "shallow" substituted. The "Scotch What d'ye call" has cost the commentators more trouble.
Attaway is from Edwards's Gangraena, Part II. pp. 31, 32, 113- 115; Fresh Discovery, appended to Second Part of Gangraena, p. 9; and Third Part of Gangraena, pp. 25-27 and 188. All this on the faith of Mr. Edwards's statements in the Gangraena. But really one should not judge of even a poor enthusiastic woman, dead two hundred years ago, on that sole authority.
He had returned or been ejected from America, and was making himself notorious in London. This will explain Baillie's allusion to Gorton in connexion with Milton's Divorce Doctrine. Strange that Gorton should be cited as holding a milder form of the heresy than Milton's! Mr. Edwards on Milton. Of course, Milton got into the Gangraena.
Attaway, among others, had got hold of Milton's Divorce Treatise, and had been reading it. "Two gentlemen of the Inns of Court, civil and well-disposed men," who had gone "out of novelty" to hear her, afterwards told Gangraena Edwards of some "discourse they had had with her."
The clergyman dispatched an account of his adversary's conduct to the Reverend Master Edwards, to be inserted in the next edition of Gangraena, as a pestilent heretic; and Tomkins recommended the parson to his master, Desborough, as a good subject on whom to impose a round fine, for vexing the private spirit; assuring him, at the same time, that though the minister might seem poor, yet if a few troopers were quartered on him till the fine was paid, every rich shopkeeper's wife in the borough would rob the till, rather than go without the mammon of unrighteousness with which to redeem their priest from sufferance; holding, according to his expression, with Laban, "You have taken from me my gods, and what have I more?"
There can be little doubt now, I think, that I have detected the real "What d'ye call" in Gillespie's fellow- Commissioner from Scotland, our good friend Baillie, whose Dissuasive, with its reference to Milton as one of the heretics of the time, had just preceded Edwards's Gangraena. I am sorry for this, but it cannot be helped.
I. pp. 215-382; Ivimey's Baptists, I. 113 et seq.; Featley's Dippers Dipt, and Animadversions on the Anabaptists' Confession; Gangraena passim; Baillie's Dissuasive, Part II. p. 47 et seq.; Neal's Puritans, III. 147-152, with Toulmin's Supplement to that Vol., 517-530.
Perhaps his most horrible story is that of some soldiers taking a horse into a village church in Hunts and baptizing him in all due form at the font, giving him the name of Esau because he was hairy. The story, with a certificate of its truth by seven of the villagers, will be found in Gangraena, Part III. 17, 18.
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