William Dell
William Dell (died 1669) was an English clergyman, Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge from 1649 to 1660, and prominent radical Parliamentarian.
He was an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, taking an M.A. in 1631[1].
His 1646 sermon to Parliament was too extreme, and the House of Commons reprimanded him[2] It attacked the Westminster Assembly[3] Nonetheless his appointment at Caius was at the behest of the Rump Parliament. Thomas Harrison’s proposal to have him preach again, in 1653, was defeated[4] He criticized those on the Parliamentarian side who had done well out of the war[5] He backed the Quaker John Crook as MP in 1653[6]
He was a supported of Oliver Cromwell. In 1657, however, he with Colonel Okey campaigned against the proposal to make Cromwell king[7].
He was a friend and supporter of John Bunyan, whom he invited to preach in Caius[8]He was attacked as a libertine[9]
He argued for major institutional change. He attacked academic education frontally[10]. He proposed a secular and decentralized university system[11]. He was strongly against the Aristotelian tradition persisting in the universities, and discounted all classical learning[12]; and held broad anti-intellectual views[13]. He doubted the basis for a national Church, and had egalitarian views on the suitable composition of the bishops[14]
He was deprived of his living of Yelden in 1662[15]. A 1667 pamphlet of his, The Increase of Popery in England, was suppressed and appeared only in 1681[16]; Hill calls this anti-Catholic attack ‘partly a political gambit’[17]
Notes
- ^ Concise Dictionary of National Biography
- ^ Hugh Trevor-Roper, p. 325.
- ^ Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, p. 83.
- ^ Trevor-Roper, p. 343; Hill, English Bible p. 83.
- ^ Hill, Milton, pp.195-6.
- ^ Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church (1988), p. 80.
- ^ Hill, Bunyan, p. 93.
- ^ In 1659; Hill, Bunyan, p. 138.
- ^ Hill, English Bible p. 182: Samuel Rutherford spoke of both Hendrik Niclaes and William Dell as libertines. Also Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 109.
- ^ Antichrist chose his ministers only out of the universities. Quoted in Hill, English Bible, p. 199; also pp. 320, 380.
- ^ Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (2000), p. 366; Hill, Milton, p. 149.
- ^ Hill, Bunyan, p. 140: A chorus of radical voices — Cobbler How, Walwyn, Winstanley, Dell, John Webster, Thomas Tany, John Reeve, Edward Burrough, George Fox — had joined in denouncing the universities’ presumption that classical learning was a necessary part of the training of a preacher.
- ^ Rejection of human learning was to be found in the Familist tradition and Boehme; it was shared by William Dell, Anna Trapnel, John Reeve, Andrew Marvell, Henry Stubbe, John and Samuel Pordage among many others. Hill, Milton, pp. 423-4.
- ^ Hill, Bunyan, p. 119.
- ^ CNDB
- ^ Hill, Milton, p. 219.
- ^ Hill, Milton, p. 220.