‘Valiant Deborahs’

Writing in the late 1650s, Susanna Parr recorded that she and other members of her community ‘were told in time of the [civil] Warres, that when the Lord did turne our Captivity, there must be a thorough Reformation, every thing must be brought to the patterne in the Mount’. ¹ In many ways, Parr continued, the Civil War was ‘stiled a Sacramentall warre’, concerned with reforming the practices of the established church: even before the conflict there was a widespread distrust of the power of episcopacy, of scandalous ministers, of unscriptural practices based on popish tradition rather than scripture, and the power the clergy maintained over the everyday lives of men and women. ² Parr’s words show that the 1640s and 1650s were a time of reforming the church so that it was closer to the example of the primitive biblical churches: she alludes to Moses receiving God’s ‘ceremonial law’ on Mount Sinai in Exodus 25:40 which should provide future churches with their ‘pattern’ or example, so ‘nothing shuld be left to mans invention’ (Geneva n. Exodus 25:2). This scriptural example clearly encouraged Parr to think more about ‘purity as to the Ordinances’, and she began to follow the ‘Congregationall way’, where an autonomous congregation would gather separately from the established church and form its own covenant: such organisation promised ‘a greater effusion of the Spirit, more purity and holinesse, more union and communion, more liberty of Conscience, and freedome from that yoke of being servants unto men’ (p. 1). In her rejection of servitude, Parr draws a link between her own oppression by ungodly prelates whom she now thought were not God’s chosen representatives, and the oppression of her community in Exeter, a city that came under siege by Royalists in June 1643 and made it their garrison until 1646. ³ Parr was born into a family with parliamentary and Puritan sympathies: she was related to Exeter’s previous mayor and subsequent justice of the peace, Alderman Ignatius Jourdaine, who was influential in making Exeter a Puritan-governed city. ⁴ During the Royalist siege, it must have seemed to Parr and her fellow Puritans that they were facing a siege bombardment like that of Jerusalem by the Babylonians recorded in Jeremiah, where God would destroy the disobedient dwelling in the city, but would bring out the godly from their captivity as prisoners: ‘I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you’ (Jeremiah 29:14). This punishment was to encourage their reformation, and to allow them to escape their captivity under oppressive kings; by connecting this with the siege of Exeter, Parr links her newly established, reformed congregation with God’s chosen people of Israel.