John Biddle

John Biddle (born 1615, Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, England—died September 22, 1662, London) was a controversial lay theologian who was repeatedly imprisoned for his anti-Trinitarian views and who became known as the father of English Unitarianism.

Biddle was educated at the grammar school of his native town in Gloucestershire and at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, being subsequently appointed to the mastership of the free school in Gloucester. His reputation as a heretic in Anglican eyes originated with his manuscript of about 1644, Twelve Arguments Drawn out of Scripture, Wherein the Commonly Received Opinion Touching the Deity of the Holy Spirit Is Clearly and Fully Refuted, which was given to magistrates by a treacherous friend.

In 1645 Biddle was summoned before the parliamentary committee, then sitting at Gloucester, and committed to prison. He was released on bail in 1647, but the publication of his manuscript the same year brought another parliamentary inquiry. Biddle was once again taken into custody, and his Twelve Arguments was seized and burned. Two additional tracts were subsequently suppressed for attacking the doctrine that the three persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—were coequal. Biddle chose to elevate the Father and to consider the other two persons as subordinate to him. Under pressure from the Westminster Assembly, originally convened to reform the Church of England, Parliament in 1648 made this heresy a cause for the death penalty, but influential friends made it possible for Biddle to live in Staffordshire under surveillance until 1652, when he was again imprisoned.

Freed in the same year under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, Biddle and his adherents, called Biddellians, or Unitarians, began to meet regularly for Sunday worship. For the resemblance of their views to those of the Italian anti-Trinitarian Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), they were also known as Socinians. Soon after Biddle’s translation of a biography by S. Przypkowski (Life of Socinus, 1653) and publication of his own Two-Fold Catechism (1654), Biddle was summoned before Parliament in December 1654 and imprisoned; his Catechism was burned by the common hangman. When Parliament was dissolved the next month, Biddle was free briefly but was then rearrested and tried for heresy. Reluctant to see him executed, Cromwell rescued Biddle and sent him to one of the Scilly Isles in October 1655. In 1658 some of Biddle’s friends sought and obtained his release, and he retired to the country to teach. On his return to London as a preacher in 1662, he was again arrested and fined £100. Unable to pay, he was immediately confined to prison, where he died.