Richard Capel
1586–1656
Gloucestershire Puritan; *Tentations* (1633), the canonical Puritan handbook on temptation.
Biography
Of St Alban Hall Oxford, then Eastington and Pitchcombe (Gloucestershire). Capel had been deprived of his Oxford fellowship for refusing the 1604 Subscription, then served as a Gloucestershire country minister for forty years. His Tentations: Their Nature, Danger, Cure (1633) was the standard Puritan treatment of the locus — a casuistical handbook on the nature, danger, and cure of spiritual temptation — and shaped Owen's later treatise. He attended the Westminster Assembly when his health permitted but was already in his late fifties when it opened. Died at Pitchcombe in 1656.
Principal works
- Tentations: Their Nature, Danger, Cure (1633)
English Presbyterian divine
The great majority of the sitting members were English parish ministers of Presbyterian conviction. They formed the drafting core of the Assembly, manning its three standing committees and supplying most of the text of the Confession, the two Catechisms, and the Directory for Public Worship.