Henry Jessey

Henry Jessey or Jacie (West Rowton, Yorkshire, 1603–1663) was one of many English Dissenters. He was a founding member of the Puritan religious sect, the Jacobites. Jessey was considered a Hebrew and a rabbinical scholar.

Life

Jessey attended the University of Cambridge from 1618–24; he was at St. John's College, Cambridge in 1622, B. A. (1623). He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1627. He was vicar of Assington, or simply resident in the family of Brampton Gurdon and then visited New England. He was vicar of Aughton, East Riding of Yorkshire from 1633; but was deprived of his living in 1634. He was then supported by Sir Matthew Boynton, who found him places to preach.

Henry Jacob had formed a non-separatist independent faction of former Church of England members. They were Calvinist in theological practise. Contemporary scholars refer to them as: Independents, Brownist, semi-Separatist, or Puritans. John Lothropp picked up Jacob's London congregation after his death; Jessey took over, from 1637.

The church faced hostility from the authorities, and migrated to Southwark. He travelled in November 1639 to set up with William Wroth, an Independent church at Llanfaches, Monmouthshire. He was imprisoned, with members of his congregation, in August 1641. He became a Baptist in 1645, under the influence of Hanserd Knollys.

The church developed within the Particular Baptists:

There have been some questions raised about the documentary evidence, the Stinton Repository attributed to Bernard Stinton.

The Whitehall Conference

He wrote an account of the 1655 conference at Whitehall, at which Manasseh ben Israel put a case to the Parliamentary government of Oliver Cromwell, to lift the restrictions on Jews living in England. He was in correspondence with Manasseh, was an enthusiastic student of Hebrew and Aramaic and philo-Semite. In lobbying for the rights of the Jews to official readmission to the country, and in high expectations from this, Jessey was an associate of John Dury and Nathaniel Holmes.