KIFFIN, William, Sylvester Hassell “Great as was the authority (or influence, rather) of Bunyan with the Baptists,” says Macaulay, “that of William Kiffin was greater. Kiffin was the first man among them in wealth and station.” He was born in 1616, and died in 1701. He was an industrious, honest, skillful and successful merchant of London, and had great influence at the courts of Charles II. and James II., and took pleasure in using his wealth and influence for the relief and protection of his poor, persecuted brethren, like Mordecai at the Court of Ahasherus. He was himself arrested many times, and imprisoned once. He was for five years a member and minister in an Independent Church, and then joined the first Particular Baptist formed in England, of which Mr. Spilsbury was pastor. Two years afterwards he and those of his brethren who thought it improper to allow ministers that had not been immersed to preach to them, withdrew in 1640 and formed another church, which met in Devonshire Square; and of this church Mr. Kiffin was pastor sixty-one years, until his death, being aided in his long pastorate, at different times, by three assistant pastors. He kept aloof from politics, and always tried to obey the powers that be, and he submitted with unmurmuring resignation to the most painful dispensations of Providence. “He left behind him a character of rare excellence, tried alike by the fire of prosperity and adversity in the most eventful times.” The only work he ever published was a defense of Close Communion.” (Hassell’s History ppg 531, 532)
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One of his [William Kiffin’s] sons was poisoned in Venice by a Catholic priest for denouncing his religion. And two of his grandsons, the pious William and Benjamin Hewling, under the pretense of complicity in Monmouth’s rebellion, were sent to the gallows by the infamous Judge Jeffries, and hanged amid the lamentations of the spectators, including even the soldiers on guard. Chief Justice George Jeffries, whose name is “a synonym for a monster of bloodthirsty cruelty, blasphemous rage, and brutish intemperance,’ whose yell on the bench sounded, it was said, like the thunder of the judgment day, and who was the fit tool of the bigoted and unfeeling Catholic King, James II., in his notorious circuit of 1685, sentenced 320 prisoners to be hanged, 841 to be sold into slavery beyond the sea, and a still larger number to be whipped and imprisoned. The sufferers were, for the most part, says Macaulay, blameless and pious, and regarded as martyrs to the truth of the Protestant religion.” (Hassell’s History ppg 532, 533)