Richard Baxter

Biography

Richard Baxter is the great chronicler of the English Civil War — a Puritan minister who served as army chaplain and then spent decades writing his 'Reliquiae Baxterianae' (published posthumously 1696), the most vivid and thoughtful firsthand account of what it felt like to live through the upheaval. He was not a typical Puritan: too moderate to please the radicals, too nonconformist to please the Royalists, he was imprisoned after the Restoration and hounded for years. His account of the war's causes, its conduct, and its consequences has a psychological depth absent from most contemporary records — he was interested in why people believed what they believed, and in the human cost of dogmatic certainty. His pastoral work in Kidderminster, where he served before and after the war, helped shape the tradition of English nonconformity that would eventually produce Methodism and the free churches.