The Godly Ministry of Oliver Heywood (1630-1702): His Experience and Significance

Oliver Heywood (1630-1702) lived through a period of fluctuating religious persecution and toleration after the Restoration in 1660. As a moderate Presbyterian minister, he provoked local opposition from some of his congregation in Coley near Halifax and was suspended from office in 1662, before being formally ejected under the Act of Uniformity later that year. However, supported by his lay hearers, a group of sympathetic gentry families and an informal network of like-minded Nonconformist clergy, he continued to preach and minister across a broad area of Yorkshire and Lancashire for the next thirty years. He experienced bouts of fierce persecution, harassment and imprisonment under the penal acts, which he survived through sustained and, at times, dramatic acts of resistance. Heywood’s archive consists of a wealth of first-person primary sources, including an autobiographical work, diaries and reflections in the tradition of Puritan self-scrutiny, together with published treatises, sermons and letters. Using this material and applying a microhistorical perspective to his accounts of specific events, alongside contextual, literary and quantative analysis, this thesis takes a thematic approach to analysing Heywood’s experience and establishing his significance. It considers the areas of life-writing, community, patronage, itinerancy and his published oeuvre to argue that Heywood deserves greater recognition from historians of post-Restoration religion. This derives from a number of reasons: his substantial literary output, his success in sustaining Presbyterianism under challenging circumstances and his influence and legacy over a wide area of Northern England. Thus, this thesis aims to establish Heywood’s importance in two related fields of scholarship: Puritan life-writing and the social dynamics of seventeenth-century Protestant Dissent.