Thomas Cawton the Elder
1605–1659
St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange; exiled to Rotterdam after Love plot.
Biography
Of Queens' College Cambridge, then a long London ministry — first at Wivenhoe (Essex) and then St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange in London from 1644, succeeding Stephen Marshall there. A steady Presbyterian at the Assembly, he attended through the main sessions and was active in the London ministerial association. He was implicated in the 1651 Love plot — arrested with Case and Jenkin, briefly imprisoned in the Tower — and then fled to Rotterdam (1652) where he ministered to the English exile Reformed congregation. He died at Rotterdam in 1659. His son's biography The Life and Death of Mr Thomas Cawton (1662) is a small classic of seventeenth-century English religious life-writing.
Principal works
- The Life and Death of Mr Thomas Cawton (1662, biography by his son)
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.