ABSTRACT
There can be few Anglican churchmen who have had their monuments in Westminster Abbey deliberately defaced.1 Peter Heylyn, however, was no ordinary churchman, and both before and after his death he proved himself remarkably adept at making enemies. His historical writings - violent in their attacks on Calvinism and puritanism - stirred up remarkable outrage among some of his readers. Even the proverbi ally moderate Richard Baxter declared that people like Heylyn ‘speak of blood with pleasure, and [are] as thirsty after more or as designing to make Dissenters odious’.2 Samuel Coleridge could only exclaim: ‘Who being a Christian can avoid feeling the worldly harsh unspiritual Spirit of this bitter Factionary! I scarcely know a more unamiable Church man, as a Writer, than Dr Heylyn.’3
