John Sadler (1615-1674)

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John Sadler (of Warmwell) (1615 – 1674) was an English lawyer, academic, Member of Parliament, Hebraist, Neoplatonist[1] and millennarian 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]

Contents

[edit] In politics

He was nominated for Cambridge for the 1653 Barebones Parliament[3]. In 1659, for the Third Protectorate Parliament, he was MP for Yarmouth, in the Isle of Wight.

Ernestine van der Wall writes[4]:

“ 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[5].

He was town clerk of London from 1649[2]. He was removed on the Restoration, under the pretext that he had signed the death warrant of Christopher Love[6].

[edit] Political thought

He wrote The Rights of the Kingdom (1649), a founding document[7] of British Israelitism. Tudor Parfitt[8] 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[9] “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.[10] ”

[edit] Hartlib circle

He was a philosemite[11], on friendly terms with Menasseh ben Israel[12], and 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[13].

[edit] Family

He married Jane, daughter of the Dorset MP John Trenchard[14]. His sister Ann married John Harvard.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ John T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy (1998), p. 59.
  2. ^ a b Concise Dictionary of National Biography.
  3. ^ List of members nominated for Parliament of 1653 | British History Online
  4. ^ PDF, p. 51.
  5. ^ Mary Cotterell, Interregnum Law Reform: The Hale Commission of 1652, The English Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 329 (Oct., 1968), pp. 689-704.
  6. ^ Reginald R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom, Volume II, p. 383. Gutenberg text
  7. ^ British Israelitism
  8. ^ The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (2002), p. 42.
  9. ^ The Politics of the Ancient Constitution, p. 98.
  10. ^ Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (1967), PDF. See also Francis Dunham Wormuth, The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism (1949), Ch. VIII, online text.
  11. ^ PDF, p. 4.
  12. ^ van de Wall, p. 53.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ Weymouth, Dorset History & Heritage - Warmwell Village & Parish inc Warmwell House