Peter Heylin, D.D., 1600–1662, a learned divine of the English Church, educated at Oxford, who took part with the royalists, was deprived by the republicans, and again reinstated in his ecclesiastical dignities on the restoration of the Stuarts. His writings are very numerous, and are mostly historical and polemical. Thirty-seven of his publications are enumerated. The following are some of them: “History of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland,” fol.; “History of the Reformation Church of England,” fol.; “History of the Presbyterians,” fol.; “Life and Death of Archbishop Laud,” fol., etc.

Personal

  He was a person endowed with singular gifts, of a sharp and pregnant wit, solid and clear judgment. In his younger years he was accounted an excellent poet, but very conceited and pragmatical, in his elder, a better historian, a noted preacher, and a ready or extemporanean speaker.

Life of Laud, 1644

  Laud’s Life has been described by Peter Heylin, D.D.; the man known usually in Presbyterian Polemics by the name of “Lying Peter.” He is an alert, logical, metaphorical, most swift, ingenious man; alive every inch of him, Episcopal to the very finger-ends. This present writer has read the old dim folio, every word of it, with faithful industry, with truest wish to understand. A hope did dawn on him that he of all Adam’s posterity would be the last that undertook such a trouble: some one of Adam’s sons was fated to be the last; why not he? It had been too sad a task otherwise. For if the truth must be told, this unfortunate last reader found that properly he did not “understand” it in the least, that though the thing lay plain, patent as the turnpike highway, no man would ever more understand it. For the mournful truth is, that the human brain in this stage of its progress, refuses any longer to concern itself with Peter Heylin. The result was, no increase of knowledge at all. Read him not, O reader of this nineteenth century, let no pedant persuade you to read him. Spectres and air-phantoms of altars in the East, half-paces, communion-rails, shovel-hatteries, and mummeries and genuflexions; I for one, O Peter, have forever lost the talent of taking any interest in them, this way or that. As good to say it free out. My sight strains itself looking at them; discerns them to be verily phantoms, air-woven, brain-woven; disowned by Nature, noxious to health and life,—dreary as an aged cobweb full of dust and dead flies. Peter, my friend, it is enough to sit two centuries as an incubus upon the human soul; thou wouldst not continue it into the third century? Thou art requested in terms of civility to disappear. Incubuses have one duty to do: withdraw. Were Peter’s Book well burnt and not a copy of it left, this therefore were the balance of accounts: human knowledge where it was, and two weeks of time and misery saved to many men. On these terms, this last reader will not grudge having read.

  We must pay our tribute, however, to the contemporary historian, to the vivid, amusing, clever Heylin. Heylin was one of those persons whom Laud picked up in the course of his administration (as he did many others), and set to work in the Church cause. He wrote books and pamphlets when Laud wanted them, and supplied the Archbishop with university and clerical information. It was Laud’s character to be most good-natured and familiar with his subordinates—with any who worked under him, and did what he told them; and Heylin thoroughly enjoyed and relished his good graces. There is an amusing under-stream of self-congratulation throughout his biography, at his participation of the great man’s patronage. He seems to have been occasionally told secrets and let behind the scenes—a matter of great pride to him. He communicates the information, with a kind of sly, invisible smirk in the background, and a nudge under the table to the reader—to remind him of the Archbishop’s cleverness, not forgetting the biographer’s. The former would not have been particularly obliged, on one or two occasions, for the candid display of his strategies, and bits of necessary statecraft, in his devoted admirer’s pages.

General

  (1) I knew him a man of able parts and learning; God sanctify both to his Glory and the Church’s good! (2) Of an eager spirit, with him of whom it was said, Quicguid voluit, valde voluit. (3) Of a tart and smart style, endeavouring to down with all which stood betwixt him and his opinion. (4) Not over dutiful in his language to the Fathers of the Church (what then may children expect of him?), if contrary in judgment to him. Lastly, and chiefly: One, the edge of whose keenness is not taken off by the death of his adversary; witness his writing against the Archbishops of York and Armagh [who both died in 1656]. The fable tells me that the tanner was the worst of all masters to his cattle, as who would not only load them soundly whilst living, but tan their hides when dead; and none could blame one if unwilling to exasperate such a pen, which, if surviving, would prosecute his adversary into his grave. The premises made me, though not servilely fearful (which, praise God, I am not of any writer) yet generally cautious not to give him any personal provocation, knowing that though both our pens were long, the world was wide enough for them without crossing each other.

  His knowledge in history and divinity was extensive; but he wrote with more ease than elegance; and his memory, which was very extraordinary, was better than his judgment. He is not free from the leaven and acrimony of party-prejudice. The generality of his writings are in no great esteem at present; but his “Help to History,” which is a work of great utility, deserves particular commendation.

  Heylin, in his history of the Puritans and the Presbyterians, blackens them for political devils. He is the Spagnolet of history, delighting himself with horrors at which the painter himself must have started. He tells of their “oppositions” to monarchical and episcopal government; their “innovations” in the church; and their “embroilments” of the kingdoms. The sword rages in their hands; treason, sacrilege, plunder; while “more of the blood of Englishmen had poured like water within the space of four years, than had been shed in the civil wars of York and Lancaster, in four centuries!”

  A party writer, to be read with caution. He perverts and misrepresents.

  As an historian, he displays too much of the spirits of a partisan and bigot, and stands among the defenders of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny. His works, though now almost forgotten, were much read in the seventeenth century, and portions of them may still be perused with pleasure.

  Heylyn was a man of undoubted sincerity, of quick and active, if somewhat superficial, intellect, and of a temper which found satisfaction only in controversy. If, in his triumph, he often pressed the advantage hard against his antagonists, he accepted, with undaunted spirit, the fate of the conquered, and throughout his life he neither gave nor asked for quarter. His memory was enormous, and his learning various, although ill digested: and while he grasped clearly and tenaciously the principles of Laud’s policy, and frequently had the best of his antagonists in arguments, he was without judgment, imagination, or any sense of proportion. He did not altogether lack wit, but his sarcasm is rough and boisterous rather than keen…. Like all his contemporaries, Heylyn always avoids a slipshod style: and we are never allowed to forget that he belonged to a school which followed, as closely as it might, the classical models, and aimed at least, if it did not always succeed in its aim, at giving to history a worthy and dignified literary dress.