Abstract
Anglican and Quaker origins gave Plymouth Brethren some oecumenical openness (epitomized in an early tract by SPT) but also anti-clerical other-worldliness. The personal rivalry of Newton and Darby as leaders resulted in tension and disagreement especially over prophecy and dispensationalism with divisions and separation extending to Brethren in London, and SPT (a loyal supporter of Newton) was drawn into the dispute, both in Plymouth and London. In London, SPT shared his enthusiasm for Welsh culture and Brethren ideals with John Eliot Howard and John Pughe which in turn led to contact with the Welsh bard Eben Fardd who made available to SPT preaching facilities in North Wales and with whom SPT maintained a Welsh correspondence for many years.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
S.P. Tregelles, Three Letters to the Author of ‘A Retrospect of Events That Have Taken Place Among the Brethren’. [1849] 2nd ed. (London: Houlston and Sons, 1894) [Tregelles, Three Letters ], 4.
- 2.
For an account of early developments in Plymouth, in the most recent and comprehensive history of the (Plymouth) Brethren, see Grass, Gathering, 32–39. Cf. Stunt, From Awakening, 291–96.
- 3.
For the Quaker element in the Plymouth congregation, see Stunt, Elusive Quest, 36–37.
- 4.
Howard, Crisp, Visitation, 140–44; Kingsbridge and Salcombe, 42–43.
- 5.
Prideaux, In Memoriam, 14–15, where the author (Frederick Prideaux’s widow) recalled Sarah Hingston, the maternal grandmother of SPT’s wife [i.e. Walter Prideaux’s mother-in-law], ‘a vigorous and decided old lady of the Quaker type, though she had left the Society of Friends some years before and like many members of your Uncle’s family and of mine was associated with the Plymouth Brethren ’. Frederick, who was tutored by Newton (see above Chapter 3) was Walter’s fourth son, and therefore SPT’s cousin as well as his brother-in-law. For the Soltau family’s connection with Newton, see Stunt, ‘The Soltau Family of London and Plymouth’ in Elusive Quest, 170.
- 6.
See Harold H. Rowdon, The Origins of the Brethren, 1825–1850 (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1967), 288–89; F. Roy Coad, A History of the Brethren Movement: Its Origins, Its Worldwide Development and Its Significance for the Present Day (Exeter: Paternoster, 1968), 100–101. To demonstrate the practical outworking of this œcumenical ideal , one of the leading early Brethren could insist: ‘Though the fullest devotedness and separation from the world are enjoined as a privilege and duty, yet gladly would we have admitted [to the Lord’s Table] the late emperor of Russia before he died, as we would the archbishop Fenelon, without obliging or calling upon either to give up their thrones’. P.F. Hall, To the Christians who Heard … Mr Venn’s Sermon, Preached at Hereford, December 9th, 1838 (Leominster: Chilcott, 1839), 21. I am indebted to Herr Michael Schneider for this reference.
- 7.
SPT’s ‘The Blood of the Lamb and the Union of Saints’ was originally published in The Inquirer (London: Central Tract Depôt), 3 (January 1840), 1–10.
- 8.
The evils of what they called ‘indiscriminate communion’ and the ‘promiscuous use of the burial service’ were rehearsed at length in pamphlets by several of the early Brethren, for example, Henry Borlase, Charles Brenton, John Darby, and Benjamin Newton.
- 9.
J.N. D[arby], Letters, 3 vols. (Kingston on Thames: Stowe Hill Bible and Tract Depot, n.d.), 3: 230 (13 April 1832).
- 10.
Cf. Habakkuk ii.14.
- 11.
Cf. Stunt, Elusive Quest, 138–40. ‘Lambert and Agier were the writers Mr. J.N. Darby studied earnestly before he left the Church of England. I remember his speaking much about them in 1835’ (S.P. Tregelles to B.W. Newton, 29 January 1857, Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [7]). This is one of SPT’s many letters preserved in the Fry Collection, and now located in the Christian Brethren Archive of the John Rylands University Library, Manchester.
- 12.
These undated letters together with Newton’s replies were formerly part of the Fry Collection but are now in the possession of Mr. Tom Chantry who has published them on his website at http://www.brethrenarchive.org/manuscripts/letters-of-jn-darby [accessed June 2019].
- 13.
Among these were Henry W. Soltau, James E. Batten, William B. Dyer, and Joseph Clulow, who all publicly supported Newton, as late as 25 December 1846, in their Remonstrance Addressed to the Saints at Rawstorne Street, London, Respecting Their Late Act of Excluding Mr. Newton, from the Lord’s Table, and Protest Against It (Plymouth, 1846).
- 14.
The details are judiciously evaluated in Jonathan D. Burnham, A Story of Conflict: The Controversial Relationship Between Benjamin Wills Newton and John Nelson Darby (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2004), 149–203; cf. Rowdon, Origins, 236–61. I am well aware that, in this chapter, my account of developments at Plymouth is grossly simplified but my outline is intended to provide a meaningful context for the development of Prideaux Tregelles during these years. For fuller details the reader should consult the works by Rowdon and Burnham.
- 15.
Anonymous, A Retrospect of Events That Have Taken Place Amongst the Brethren (London: Benjamin L. Green, 1849) [Anonymous, Retrospect of Events]. The title page has an epigraph taken from Virgil’s Georgics:
Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent…
(‘This turmoil of spirit and these great contests will be calmed by throwing a pinch of dust on them’.) Would that the sentiment had proved to be the case!
- 16.
Tregelles, Three Letters . See page 1 for SPT’s respect for the author of A Retrospect. In his account, Tregelles is commendably frank about the irregularity of his own time in Plymouth, see pp. 4–5, 9, 21, 22, 25n. etc. Although Tregelles’s support for Newton has almost inevitably resulted in critics finding him to be doctrinally guilty by association, there have been very few who questioned the reliability of his account. They may have ignored the facts that SPT adduced but they rarely challenged his accuracy.
- 17.
Tregelles , Three Letters, 8. I have put this episode in its wider social context in ‘Elitist Leadership and Congregational Participation among Early Plymouth Brethren’ in Stunt, Elusive Quest, 200–202. Some fifteen years later, Tregelles described the pattern of ministry at Plymouth in the early days as ‘modified Presbyterianism;’ see ‘IV. The Brethren’s pathway of error in doctrine’ (North Malvern, 3 September 1863) in Tregelles: Five Letters, 16. In fact, the phrase ‘modified Presbyterian Church’ was used by the Brethren’s anonymous critic in 1849 (Anonymous, Retrospect of Events, 15) to describe the Plymouth assembly under Newton’s leadership. According to my reading of their subsequent replies, neither Darby nor Wigram ever denied SPT’s claim that there had been a time when they sanctioned Newton’s conduct.
- 18.
See Tregelles , Three Letters, 21–22. A month before his own departure for Italy in 1845, Tregelles had unequivocally shown his support for Newton in a pamphlet opposed to the consequences of dispensationalism, insisting that ‘the essential blessings of the redeemed’ are held as a common portion of ‘that communion of saints which unites those past, present and future’. On Eternal Life and Those Who Receive It, signed S.P.T., September 17, 1845 (n.p., n.d.), 8 [only known copy in the British Library].
- 19.
The letter was addressed to Henry Gough (dated Plymouth 16 December 1846) and appeared in print as a Letter [from] Mr. Tregelles to Mr. Gough Relative to the Exclusion of Mr. Newton from the Lord’s Table in Rawstorne Street, London, published by request [of William Blake, John Scoble, and Frederick Prideaux] (London: I.K. Campbell, 1847). Having attended the Rawstorne Street assembly he was in a position to recall the assembly’s earlier practice. The only copy (known to me) of this pamphlet is in Manchester/JRUL/CBA 13813. The extracts cited below are from pp. 13–14.
- 20.
The letter is quoted fully in W.B. Neatby, A History of the Plymouth Brethren, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 128–29, n. 1. In the same note Neatby describes SPT’s letter as ‘an interesting relic of a great scholar and true-hearted Christian man’ and adds that ‘Darby and Wigram were very angry with Tregelles for his tract on their singular proceedings’ but assured his readers that SPT’s ‘character stands far above the reach of their intemperate imputations’.
- 21.
In a statement made in 1863, by Prideaux Tregelles and W.G. Haydon (elders of the church,) we learn that the Evangelical Protestant Church in Compton Street was established on 14 December 1847 when many Christians in Plymouth had ‘found themselves in peculiar circumstances;’ see ‘Evangelical Protestant Church, Compton Street Chapel, Plymouth’, Confession of Faith and Other Papers Connected with the Settlement of the Rev. William Elliott as Pastor; Addressed to the Pastors of Christ’s Churches (London: Houlston and Wright, 1863) [Compton St Chapel, Confession], 19–20. See also the copy of B.W. Newton’s letter to Dr. Luigi De Sanctis, 5 April 1864, Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 (66). For subsequent developments, see below Chapter 12, p. 6ff.
- 22.
See ‘Pughe, John (Ioan ab Hu Feddyg)’ in DWB. For fuller details, see John H. Cule, ‘John Pughe, 1814–1874: A Scholar Surgeon’s Operation on the Imperforate Anus in 1854,’ Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 37 (October 1965), 247–57. The article contains a photograph of John Pughe and is available [20 March 2017] online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2311899/pdf/annrcse00219-0060.pdf.
- 23.
For J. E. Howard and the origins of the Brethren at Brook Street Chapel, Tottenham, see Gerald T. West, From Friends to Brethren: The Howards of Tottenham, Quakers, Brethren and Evangelicals [Studies in Brethren History, Subsidia] (Troon: BAHN, 2016), 234–41. For his enthusiasm for ‘Wild Wales’, see West, op.cit., 8. Cf. Stunt, Elusive Quest, 49–51, 260.
- 24.
J.E. Howard, ‘The Druids and their Religion,’ Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 14 (1881): 87–130.
- 25.
John Pughe [tr.], John Williams Ab Ithel [ed.], The Physicians of Myddvai; Meddygon Myddfai (Llandovery: D.J. Roderic, 1860). His younger brother, David William Pughe [Dafydd ap Hu Feddyg] (1821–1862) who was also a surgeon, shared his antiquarian interests and published several works concerning the castles of North Wales; see DWB s.n. John Pughe.
- 26.
For Eben Fardd, see ‘Thomas, Ebenezer [Eben Fardd]’ in the DWB. John Pughe himself had adopted his own Bardic title of Ioan ab Hu Feddyg [John Pugh, Physician] and so admired Eben Fardd that, when the poet died, it was Pughe who wrote a biographical introduction to his final collection of poetry: Ioan ab Hu Feddyg, ‘Nodion a hynodion Eben Fardd: In Memorium [sic],’ in Eben Fardd, Cyff Beuno : sef awdl ar adgyweiriad eglwys Clynnog Fawr, yng nghyd a nodiadau hynafol, achyddiaeth y plwyf, rhestr o’r beirdd a’r llenorion (Tremadog: R.I. Jones, 1863), vi–xxiv.
- 27.
Extracts from Fardd’s Diary quoted in E.G. Millward, ‘Eben Fardd a Samuel Prideaux Tregelles,’ National Library of Wales Journal 7 (Winter 1952): 344.
- 28.
Ibid., 344. For Sir Edward Denny there is very little information available apart from the hagiographically inclined H. Pickering [ed.], Chief Men Among the Brethren, 2nd ed. (London: Pickering and Inglis [1931]), 44–46. For the interesting circumstances that led to his evangelical conversion, see [Edward Denny], Some of the Firstfruits of the Harvest by one who has sown in tears (n.p. [1861]), 3–9.
- 29.
Ieuan Gwynedd Jones [ed.], The Religious Census of 1851: A Calendar of the Returns Relating to Wales, Vol. ii (North Wales, CA: University of Wales, 1981).
- 30.
Fardd, Cyff Beuno, xxiii.
- 31.
From the Cwrt Mawr collection MS 73, letter 83, cited in Millward, Fardd a Tregelles, 345.
- 32.
This was SPT’s edition of Gesenius’s Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, with Additions and Corrections from the Author’s Thesaurus and Other Works (London: Bagster 1847). See below Chapter 9, Footnote 22–24.
- 33.
Millward, Fardd a Tregelles, 346, part of which is quoted (without acknowledgement) in G.H. Fromow [ed.], Teachers of the Faith and the Future: The Life and Works of B.W. Newton and Dr. S.P. Tregelles (London: Sovereign Grace Advent Testimony, n.d.), 31.
- 34.
‘Llythyrau Dr. Tregelles at Eben Fardd’, Y Traethodydd 29 (July 1884): 286–87.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stunt, T.C.F. (2020). Brethren in Plymouth and Wales. In: The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32266-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32266-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32265-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32266-3
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)