John Sadler (town clerk)

John Sadler (of Warmwell, Dorset) (18 August 1615 – April 1674) was an English lawyer, academic, Member of Parliament, Town Clerk of London, Hebraist, Neoplatonist[1] and millenarian thinker, private secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and member of the Parliamentarian Council of State. He was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge from 1650 to 1660.[2]

John Sadler, of Warmwell
Born1615
England
Died1674
England
NationalityEnglish
Other namesJohn Sadler, town clerk of London
Occupation(s)Lawyer, public official
Known forEnglish lawyer, Member of Parliament, Town Clerk of London, Hebraist, Neoplatonist, academic

Sadler was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.[3]

Family

He married Jane, daughter of the Dorset MP John Trenchard.[4] His sister Ann married John Harvard.

In politics

He was nominated for Cambridgeshire for the 1653 Barebone's Parliament.[5] In 1659, for the Third Protectorate Parliament, he was MP for Yarmouth, in the Isle of Wight.

Ernestine van der Wall writes:[6]

John Sadler (1615–1674) was a well-known London lawyer and constitutional theorist, and a good friend of Oliver Cromwell, at one time serving as his personal secretary. During the 1650s he held several offices, being secretary to the Council of State and a member of the Committee for the Advancement of Learning and the Committee for Lunatics.

The Hale Commission on law reform, headed from 1652 by Sir Matthew Hale, had Sadler as a leading lawyer, together with William Steele and John Fountain.[7]

He was Town Clerk of London from 3 July 1649 (elected) to 18 September 1660.[2] He was removed on the Restoration, under the pretext that he had signed the death warrant of Christopher Love.[8] He was suspended 4 September 1660, then the suspension was removed on 6 September 1660 and finally he was "declared incapable of office" on 18 September 1660.[9]

Political thought

He wrote The Rights of the Kingdom (1649), a founding document[10] of British Israelitism. Tudor Parfitt[11] calls it "one of the first invented expressions of an invented Israelite genealogy for the British". This was not, however, its overt purpose. Glen Burgess calls it[12] "an historical defence of the regicide". Maurice Vile writes

Sadler's view of the executive function was, as we have seen, not our modern one, but in other respects his grasp of the principles of the doctrine of the separation of powers was clear.[13]

Hartlib circle
Main article: Hartlib Circle

Sadler was a philosemite,[14] on friendly terms with Menasseh Ben Israel.[15] He believed that readmission would allow for the Jews to be converted to Christianity, which would hasten the new millennium (which he conceived as being a time of "more justice and more mercy" rather than being visited by Christ's "bodily presence").[16] He was also an associate of Samuel Hartlib and John Dury. This interest was not clearly separated from the line taken by Sadler in The Rights of the Kingdom.[17]

References
  1. John T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy (1998), p. 59.
  2. Concise Dictionary of National Biography.
  3. "Sadler, John (SDLR630J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  4. Weymouth, Dorset History & Heritage – Warmwell Village & Parish inc Warmwell House
  5. List of members nominated for Parliament of 1653 | British History Online
  6. PDF Archived 18 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine, p. 51.
  7. Mary Cotterell, "Interregnum Law Reform: The Hale Commission of 1652", The English Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 329 (Oct. 1968), pp. 689–704.
  8. Reginald R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom, Volume II, p. 383. Gutenberg text
  9. Libraries, Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery, "The Town Clerk" – Page 72, from the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London, 40 Northampton Road, London EC 1R 0HB – www.cityoflondon.gov.uk – www.lma.gov.uk
  10. British Israelitism
  11. The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (2002), p. 42.
  12. The Politics of the Ancient Constitution, p. 98.
  13. Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (1967), PDF Archived 19 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine. See also Francis Dunham Wormuth, The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism (1949), Ch. VIII.
  14. Coulton, Barbara (2001). Cromwell and the ‘readmission’ of the Jews to England, 1656. Journal of the Cromwell Association.
  15. Roth, Cecil. Life of Menasseh Ben Israel. Philadelphia. 1934. p.191.
  16. Scult, Mel (1978). Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties: A Study of the Efforts to Convert the Jews in Britain, Up to the Mid Nineteenth Century. Brill Archive. pps.26.
  17. The year 1649 then shows Durie, Worsley, Sadler, Jessey, Moriaen, Boreel and Menasseh all dealing with the question whether the lost tribes were living in America[...]. van der Wall, p. 55.

See also
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