ABSTRACT
The Middle English mystics are by now part of the accepted canon of English literature. Benet Canfield whose real name was William Fitch, came from Canfield in Essex, of a family of puritanly inclined, well-to-do landed gentry. He studied law at the Middle Temple and was converted to Catholicism in 1585 by Robert Darbyshire, an old Carthusian priest imprisoned in the Gatehouse. Bacon seems to have returned to Bristol for a short time after its capture by the Parliament in September 1645, but in March 1646 he was examined by the Westminster Assembly and reported as being unfit to officiate the cure of St Andrew’s Wardrobe, and indeed as being unfit ‘for any other ministerial employment in regard of his erroneous and dangerous opinions’. Benjamin Furly was a Quaker of an extraordinary range of interest and lack of orthodoxy.
