William Kiffin

He joined a religious society of apprentices, and became (1638) a member of the separatist congregation gathered in Southwark by Henry Jacob and then ministered to by John Lothrop.

[2] Early in 1641 he was arrested at a Southwark conventicle and committed by Judge Mallet to the White Lion prison, bail being refused.

He joined Hanserd Knollys in a public disputation (1646) at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, with John Bryan, D.D., and Obadiah Grew, D.D.

In January 1649 parliament, in response to a petition from Ipswich, gave him liberty to preach in any part of Suffolk, where he travelled with Thomas Patience, his assistant.

But as early as 1643 Kiffin and Patience ministered to this congregation, which consisted of seceders from Wapping practising close communion.

On 12 July 1655 Kiffin was brought before Christopher Pack, the Lord Mayor, for preaching that infant baptism was unlawful, a heresy visited with severe penalties under the "draconick ordinance" of 1648.

This may account for his arrest, and the seizure of arms at his house in Little Moorfields, shortly before the Restoration, in 1660, by order of Monck, who was quartered near him.

He was arrested on 29 December, and kept in the guard-house at Whitehall, but released on 31 Dec. by Sir Robert Foster, the chief justice, the date and other circumstances proving the letter a forgery.

About 1663 he gave evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, and before the privy council, against granting to the "Hamburg Company" a monopoly of the woollen trade with Holland and Germany.

A year later he was arrested at the instance of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, on suspicion of being concerned in an anabaptist plot against the king's life.

In 1675 he took part in a scheme for ministerial education among baptists; and in the following year went into Wiltshire, to aid in dealing with the Socinian tendencies of Thomas Collier.

On the revocation (1685) of the edict of Nantes, Kiffin maintained at his own expense an exiled Huguenot family of rank.

Both on constitutional and on anti-popish grounds he refused to avail himself of James II's declaration for liberty of conscience (April 1687), and did all in his power to keep his denomination from countenancing it; not a single baptist congregation admitted the dispensing power, though prominent individual baptists did, e.g. Nehemiah Cox.

In August 1687 James sent for Kiffin to court, and told him he had included his name as an alderman for the city of London in his new charter.

He died on 29 Dec. 1701 in his eighty-sixth year, and was buried in Bunhill Fields; the inscription on his tomb is given in John Stow's Survey, ed.

Richard Frost of Dunmow, Essex, a descendant; an engraving is given in Wilson, and reproduced by William Orme and Joseph Ivimey.