The “Afterlife” of an English Calvinist Conformist

Abstract Chapter 7 analyzes the reception of Featley through the lens of his post-1660 biographers and seeks to contribute to this debate and to inject further complexity into our understanding of Featley. It examines how these authors, particularly John Featley (Daniel Featley’s nephew), depicted him retrospectively in their biographical accounts. In this way, it explores the methodological dilemma of how to evaluate and utilize contrasting narratives that shed light on how competing parallel narratives served to bolster each opposing camp during the English Civil War. Most importantly, it examines how one of these “afterlives” “died” by 1660 while the other lived on through Featley’s post-Restoration biographers. This explains how later biographers were able to shape the ecclesiastical landscape of the post-Restoration Church by selectively utilizing these royalist narratives of interregnum events. In this way, it demonstrates how post-Restoration biographical accounts tell us as much—if not more—about the theological positions and concerns of the biographers and post-Restoration religious politics as about their biographical subjects.