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John Griffith: Baptist prisoner of conscience: Baptists in late seventeenth-century England experienced persecution, just as Baptists had done since their beginning in 1609.

Article Excerpt
Several English laws made the practice of any faith except that of the Church of England (the Anglican Church) dangerous. Since 1534, the Act of Supremacy demanded that English citizens declare that the king was not only "the only Supreme Governor of this realm, and all other [of] His Highness's dominions and countries," but also "in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes." Moreover, the act required citizens to swear their loyalty to the king and "his heirs and lawful successors." (1) The Oath of Allegiance, first enacted in 1606, required citizens to swear their allegiance to the king, not the pope. After the rule of Oliver Cromwell from 1649 to 1660, during which the Anglican Church lost its favored status, Parliament reestablished Anglicanism as the state religion by passing a series of statutes from 1661 to 1665 called the Clarendon Code. Named for Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, an advisor to King Charles II, these statutes required public officials to be communicants of the Anglican Church, forced ministers to conduct services according to Anglican tenets, limited the number of people who could attend private meetings, and barred expelled ministers from traveling within five miles of their former parishes. (2)

Baptists near London who ran afoul of English law often found themselves tried at the Old Bailey Courthouse and imprisoned across the street in England's most infamous prison, Newgate. Built in the twelfth century, Newgate was notorious for its wretched conditions. One historian of the prison noted that it "must have been an abode of sorrow, suffering, and unspeakable woe, a kind of terrestrial inferno, to enter which was to abandon every hope.... The conditions of the prisoners in Newgate was long most deplorable. They were but scantily supplied with the commonest necessaries of life. Light scarcely penetrated their dark and loathsome dungeons; no breath of fresh air sweetened the fetid atmosphere they breathed; that they enjoyed the luxury of water was due to the munificence of a Lord Mayor." (3)

The Imprisonments of John Griffith

John Griffith (c. 1622-1700) was one of several Baptists who graced the wretched confines of Newgate. In 1661, shortly after publishing "A Complaint of the Oppressed, against the Oppressor," Griffith, a General Baptist minister, was arrested for preaching unlawfully and sent to Newgate, where he spent seventeen months. (4) Prison, however, was "no unpleasant thing," he wrote during his stay in Newgate,

If Christ be there, that only blessed...

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