Civil War Colonel Turned Minister of Clare — Defender of 'That Christ That Died at Jerusalem'
“I desire I may be faithful to the end, that I may enjoy that at the hand of the Lord, for which I received the Truth.” — Giles Barnardiston
Born 'about the year 1624' at Clare in Suffolk, 'the place of his nativity'; his parents were persons of repute who sent him through the common schools and six years at the university to prepare for the ministry, an office he declined.
At the breaking out of the war between Charles I and the Parliament he obtained a colonel's commission and gained a reputation for skill in tactics, but 'became disgusted with violence and bloodshed', threw up his commission and retired to Wormingford Lodge in Essex. The corpus gives no year for his commission.
George Fox the younger, then at Colchester, came with George Wetherly to his house and preached Christ the Light of the world, which he 'received and embraced'; on the 6th of the tenth month 1662 a troop of horse rode with drawn swords among the Friends meeting in the street, and he 'undauntedly hazarded his life in the hottest times of this persecution'.
Returned to Clare in 1669 and attended Haverhill meeting, where under the Conventicle Act informers had goods valued at two hundred and sixty-one pounds distrained from twelve Friends, of whom he was one, and the meeting-house was shut for six months in winter.
Signed the testimony issued from Ellis Hooks' chamber in London on the 12th of the fourth month 1677 against John Wilkinson and John Story; John Whiting records that with his countryman William Bennet he came to Bristol 'about the year 1677'.
Answered Jeffery Bullock's pamphlet 'Anti-christ's transformations within' after Haverhill monthly meeting disowned Bullock for denying the Christ who died at Jerusalem; a separatist letter from Chippingham dated the 4th of the tenth month 1679 complains that 'Barnardiston and others have been here'. His signature stands first on the testimony against Bullock.
After the Bristol visit 'he suffered imprisonment in London in the course of the ensuing three years, the time of his commitment not being known'.
On his release he went to Chelmsford in Essex and fell ill; his sickness was short, 'in which he said the Lord was his portion', and he 'departed on the 11th of the eleventh month, 1680, aged about fifty-six years'.
Whitehead's 'testimony concerning that faithful man of God, and servant of Jesus Christ, Giles Barnardiston' closes the memoir, recalling 'the sweet society we have often had together, since the Lord brought him into a living sense of his goodness'.
Bangs, 'having been with him in his travels', testified that his ministry 'was very effectual for the gathering of many from darkness to light' and that 'his countenance was grave and weighty, his carriage comely'.
The account compiled for the Friends' Library, volume 4 (1840), from the testimonies of John Furly, John Cornwell, John Wilsford, Benjamin Bangs, Samuel Cater, John Whiting and George Whitehead, with the Haverhill meeting's declaration against Jeffery Bullock and Bullock's recantation of 1686.
His printed answer to Bullock's 'Anti-christ's transformations within', quoted at length in the memoir and named by Bullock himself as 'Giles Barnardiston's answer to my first book'; the memoir does not preserve its title page.