Monument To William Jenkyn, South Enclosure

635-1/0/10280 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Monument to William Jenkyn, South encl osure

GV II Chest tomb, probably late C17, with later headstone

LOCATION: 532763.2, 182237.5

MATERIALS: Portland stone

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of a low but massive stone chest, entirely devoid of ornament or any legible inscription. At its head is a plain upright slab with a shaped top.

HISTORY: William Jenkyn (c.1613-85) was a leading member of the Presbyterian faction within English Puritanism during and after the Civil War. The son of a Puritan clergyman of Sudbury, Suffolk, he was educated at St John's College, Cambridge and afterwards preached at churches in Colchester and London, becoming vicar of Christ Church, Newgate Street in 1643. Like other Presbyterians at the time of the Civil War, he advocated religious reintegration with Scotland and a negotiated settlement between Parliament and the Crown, and opposed the establishment of the New Model Army and the Commonwealth. In 1651 he was arrested for complicity in a plot to restore the exiled Charles II, and forced to sign a recantation of his views. Although he was rehabilitated under the Protectorate and during the Restoration, to the point of becoming one of the first Dissenting preachers licensed under the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, he remained a controversial figure, openly critical of the Government and the Church of England. He was arrested again in 1684 and imprisoned in Newgate Gaol, where he died four months later, widely regarded by his fellow Presbyterians as a martyr to the cause.

Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary, and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-5.

SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902). A W Light, Bunhill Fields (London, 1915). EC Vernon, entry on Jenkyn in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (retrieved on 9 June 2009).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to William Jenkyn is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It commemorates a leading English Presbyterian who played a prominent role in the sectarian controversies of the C17; * It is one of the earliest surviving tombs within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the south enclosure.