Henry Jessey was born on 1603 in
West Rowton,
Yorkshire. 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. and then visited
New England. He was vicar of
Aughton, East Riding of Yorkshire from 1633; He was then supported by
Sir Matthew Boynton, who found him places to preach. The church faced hostility from the authorities, and migrated to
Southwark where Jessey became a preacher at
St George the Martyr Church and then under Cromwell, it is claimed, rector. 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. Henry Jessey also observed
the seventh-day Sabbath, although he was somewhat reluctant to promulgate his views on the subject. However, in 1647 he argued that the seventh-day was "[Christ's] Sabbath which he blessed and sanctified. It has been suggested that he may have authored the anonymous "Moralitie of the Fourth Commandment" (1652). In his posthumous work, Miscellanea Sacra, or Diverse Necessary Truths (1665) Jessey asserted that believing Christians "should have respect to all the Ten Commandments of the Law." Jessey's biographer records that he kept the Sabbath in his own chamber, with only four or five more of the same mind after being convinced that the seventh day should be kept by Christians evangelically. Jessey's itinerary throughout western England contributed to the beginnings of several Sabbatarian groups. The church developed within the
Particular Baptists: There have been some questions raised about the documentary evidence, the Stinton Repository attributed to
Benjamin Stinton. In 1650, Jessey wrote
The Glory of Iehudah and Israel in which he extolled the nobility of the Jews and proposed the reconciliation of Christianity and Judaism. He then played a moderating role among the political millenarians in the two years before the Whitehall Conference. Jessey was buried in the
New Churchyard, Bethlem, London, on the 8 September 1663. ==The Whitehall Conference==