Henry Jessey

Life

Jessey attended the University of Cambridge from 1618–24; he was at St. John's College, Cambridge in 1622, B. A. (1623). He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1627. He was vicar of Assington, or simply resident in the family of Brampton Gurdon and then visited New England. He was vicar of Aughton, East Riding of Yorkshire from 1633; but was deprived of his living in 1634. He was then supported by Sir Matthew Boynton, who found him places to preach.

Henry Jacob had formed a non-separatist independent faction of former Church of England members. They were Calvinist in theological practise. Contemporary scholars refer to them as: Independents, Brownist, semi-Separatist, or Puritans. John Lothropp picked up Jacob's London congregation after his death; Jessey took over, from 1637.

The church faced hostility from the authorities, and migrated to Southwark. He travelled in November 1639 to set up with William Wroth, an Independent church at Llanfaches, Monmouthshire. He was imprisoned, with members of his congregation, in August 1641. He became a Baptist in 1645, under the influence of Hanserd Knollys.

The church developed within the Particular Baptists:

Led by Henry Jacob of the Brownists from Zealand, these Particular Baptists in 1633 started a new church under John Spilsbury. Five years later William Kiffin and others of Jacob's church at Southwark joined Spilsbury and divided equally in two parts under Praise-God Barebone and Henry Jessey. From Jessey's church, Hanserd Knollys in 1644 began his own congregation. These Particulars had no communication with the General Baptists.

There have been some questions raised about the documentary evidence, the Stinton Repository attributed to Bernard Stinton.

The following summary indicates briefly what the Stinton Repository relates. In 1616 Henry Jacob organized at Southwark the oldest Independent church in England and served as pastor until 1622. He thereupon resigned and traveled to Virginia where he died in 1624. John Lathrop succeeded Jacob as pastor in 1625, but he was imprisoned in 1632. After his release, he and thirty members fled to New England. Two ministers, Praise-God Barebone and Henry Jessey, stayed behind with the majority of the congregation. In 1637 Jessey succeeded Lathrop as pastor. Having accepted believer's baptism, he was eventually baptized by Hanserd Knollys.

In 1650, Jessey wrote The Glory of Iehudah and Israel in which he extolled the nobility of the Jews and proposed the reconciliation of Christianity and Judaism. He then played a moderating role among the political millenarians in the two years before the Whitehall Conference.

The Whitehall Conference

He wrote an account of the 1655 conference at Whitehall, at which Manasseh ben Israel put a case to the Parliamentary government of Oliver Cromwell, to lift the restrictions on Jews living in England. He was in correspondence with Manasseh, was an enthusiastic student of Hebrew and Aramaic and philo-Semite. In lobbying for the rights of the Jews to official readmission to the country, and in high expectations from this, Jessey was an associate of John Dury and Nathaniel Holmes. In 1658 Jessey composed a work entitled An Information Concerning the Present State of the Jewish Nation in Europe and Judea. He both advocated the conversion of the Jews and treating them with kindness, and believed God’s special concern for them. The pamphlet also expresses concern for the trials of the Jews in Palestine, specifically the suffering from the lack of donations following the Khmelnytsky Uprising which had led to a decrease in the Jewish population in Eastern Europe and a subsequent loss of donations. As well as raising money for the impoverished Jews of Palestine, Jessey was also well acquainted with two of the key figures disseminating information throughout Europe about the Jewish millenarian prophet Sabbatai Zevi.