Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Katherine Chidley (d. c.1653), Leveller activist and religious polemicist, advocated toleration for the Independent churches. No records survive of her life before 1616 when she gave birth to her first child, Samuel; she and her husband, Daniel Chidley, a tailor, had seven more children and participated in the Shrewsbury conventicle in Shropshire. After childbirth, she refused to be churched, a practice she later denounced in her first tract; in 1629 both she and her husband were brought to the consistory court for being absent from church. The Chidley family relocated to London by the end of the 1620s and became involved with Leveller activism and separatist congregations. In 1641 Chidley published The justification of the Independant churches of Christ , a comprehensive treatise presenting scriptural justification for Independent congregations in explicit response to anti-tolerationist Thomas Edwards's Reasons against the independant government of particular congregations (1641). Quoting 2 Corinthians 6.14–18, Chidley contends that separatist congregations obeyed God by leaving the Church of England to establish their own gatherings: ‘God hath commanded all his people to separate themselves from all Idolatry and false worshipping and false worshippers (and therefore it is no Schisme) except you will make God the Author of Schisme.’ Refuting Edwards's assertion that allowing ... log in or subscribe to read full text