John Field

Writer

  • Born: c. 1545
  • Birthplace: England
  • Died: March 1, 1588

Biography

John Field was born in 1544 or 1545. No record survives of his parentage, but he was supported at Oxford University by the Clothworkers’ Company, which suggests his father may have been a cloth worker. He most probably is the John Field who attended Christ Church College, obtaining his B.A. in 1564, and his M.A. in 1567, and the John Field who was ordained on March 25,1566, although the commonness of the name makes it impossible to be absolutely sure.

Field entered the clergy at the height of a fierce ideological conflict within the Church of England, which manifested itself in the refusal of Puritans to wear traditional vestments, and Field immediately became an outspoken supporter of the Puritan cause. He returned briefly to Oxford before going to London to become part of a group of rebel clergymen preaching at Holy Trinity Minories. He became curate of St. Giles Cripplegate in 1569, but his licence to preach was soon suspended. By 1570, he was married and living in a house in Grub Street near that of his friend, Puritan leader John Foxe.

Suspending his licence did not prevent Field from becoming one of the leading radical objectors to the Elizabethan church, which he attacked vitriolically in the outspoken View of Popish Abuses yet Remaining in the English Church, published in 1572. He was an incessant agitator, subversively organizing meetings for the clergy in collaboration with Thomas Wilcox that were effectively Calvinist seminars. He and Wilcox were imprisoned in Newgate after publishing An Admonition to the Parliament, at which point Foxe and other Puritan leaders, including Thomas Cartwright, began to distance themselves from Field.

Field was released from jail after the intervention of the Earls of Leicester and Warwick. Field vanished for a while, but was back in London by 1577, and Leicester obtained a new licence for him in 1579. Field became a lecturer at St. Mary Aldermary in 1581, but lost his licence again in 1585. In the interim he had become one of the leaders of the Presbyterian Classical Movement, organized in secret within the Church of England in 1580. In1584, he helped draft the Book of Discipline, the movement’s effective manifesto.

Field died in March, 1588, at St. Giles Cripplegate, where he was buried. He was survived by his wife, Joan, and their seven children. Given that he was an outspoken critic of the Elizabethan theater and other violations of the Sabbath, he would probably have been disappointed by the fact that his son Nathan, who was a mere infant when his father died, eventually became a notable Jacobean actor and playwright. The Classical Movement collapsed in 1591, but its influence was far from negligible. Although more moderate Puritans, like Foxe and Cartwright, were eventually to reap more historical credit than Field or Wilcox, Field’s organizational zeal was a great asset to their cause, and there is an undeniable logical truth in the view, which Field would undoubtedly have taken, that there should be no such thing as a moderate Puritan.