The godly lives of Samuel Clarke and the 'national church' in the 1650s

The godly lives of Samuel Clarke have traditionally been consulted by historians of early Stuart puritanism for biographical information, particularly anecdotal information, about many of the most famous puritan divines of the age. But, in fact, the lives, and the martyrologies and ecclesiastical histories in which they were contained, were a product of the events of the English civil war and revolution; and more particularly of the disastrous defeat suffered at the end of the 1640s and early 1650s by the Presbyterians at the hands of the Independents and the sects. The first versions of Clarke's collection of lives, which were published between 1650 and 1652, represented a response to that crisis. This article sets out to explain how and why that was, and, having set the lives in that context, and explained the precise apologetic, polemical and edificational purposes they were designed to serve, it concludes by explaining what light such a contextual reading of Clarke's text might shed on the dynamics of the 1650s and the fate therein of the 'national church'.