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Updated: June 2, 2025
Pearson and Bull, Lake and Kettlewell, Bentley, Fleetwood, Worthington, Sherlock, Steele and Addison, Bunyan and Doddridge theologians and scholars, Broad Churchmen and Nonjurors, preachers and essayists, Churchmen and Nonconformists expressed themselves far more unreservedly than is at all usual in our age, even among those who, in theory, interpret Scripture in the same sense.
Two other nonjurors deserve special mention, less on account of their abilities and learning, than on account of their rare integrity, and of their not less rare candour. These were John Kettlewell, Rector of Coleshill, and John Fitzwilliam, Canon of Windsor.
Kettlewell was one of the most active members of his party: he declined no drudgery in the common cause, provided only that it were such drudgery as did not misbecome an honest man; and he defended his opinions in several tracts, which give a much higher notion of his sincerity than of his judgment or acuteness, Fitzwilliam thought that he had done enough in quitting his pleasant dwelling and garden under the shadow of Saint George's Chapel, and in betaking himself with his books to a small lodging in an attic.
About the middle of June David and his uncle went, as usual, to Kettlewell and Masholme, in Yorkshire, for the purpose of bringing home from thence some of that hardier breed of sheep which was required for the moorland, a Scotch breed brought down yearly to the Yorkshire markets by the Lowland farmers beyond the border.
Its comfortable little inns make Kettlewell a very fine centre for rambles in the wild dales that run up towards the head of Wharfedale. Buckden is a small village situated at the junction of the road from Aysgarth, and it has the beautiful scenery of Langstrothdale Chase stretching away to the west.
Kettlewell, that holy man who is now with God. There can be no doubt he well merited the admiration of his friends. Perhaps the most beautiful element in his character was his perfect guilelessness and transparent truth.
A good man like Kettlewell might well be 'scandalised with such fulsome panegyrics; it grieved him to the soul to see flattery taken sanctuary in the pulpit. They had become an odious system, an ordinary funeral luxury, often handsomely paid for, which even the poor were ambitious to purchase.
But, though Kettlewell tried to convince his countrymen that monarchical government had been ordained by God, not as a means of making them happy here, but as a cross which it was their duty to take up and bear in the hope of being recompensed for their sufferings hereafter, and though Hickes assured them that there was not a single Compounder in the whole Theban legion, very few churchmen were inclined to run the risk of the gallows merely for the purpose of reestablishing the High Commission and the Dispensing Power.
Kettlewell saw at once that this argument wounded High Churchmen in the very point where they were most sensitive, and for the future preferred to speak of non-resistance as characteristically 'a Doctrine of the Cross. The epithet was quickly adopted, and no doubt was frequently a source of consolation to Nonjurors.
Kettlewell, High Churchman and Nonjuror, readily acknowledged that 'where our ignorance of any of Christ's laws is joined with an honest heart, and remains after our sincere industry to know the truth, we may take comfort to ourselves that it is involuntary and innocent. In this he agreed with his Low Church contemporary, Chillingworth, who said that 'To ask pardon of simple and involuntary errors is tacitly to imply that God is angry with us for them, and that were to impute to Him this strange tyranny of requiring brick where He gives no straw; of expecting to gather where He strewed not; of being offended with us for not doing what He knows we cannot do. Tillotson always speaks guardedly on the subject.
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