John Sadler (of Warmwell, Dorset) (18 August 1615 – April 1674) was an English lawyer, academic, Member of Parliament, Town Clerk of London, Hebraist, NeoplatonistJohn T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy (1998), p. 59. and millenarian thinker, private secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and member of the Parliamentarian Council of State. He was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge from 1650 to 1660.Concise Dictionary of National Biography.

Sadler was educated at Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge.

Career Politics He was nominated for Cambridgeshire for the 1653 Barebone's Parliament.List of members nominated for Parliament of 1653 | British History Online In 1659, for the Third Protectorate Parliament, he was MP for Yarmouth, in the Isle of Wight.

Ernestine van der Wall writes:PDF , p. 51.

The Hale Commission on law reform, headed from 1652 by Sir Matthew Hale, had Sadler as a leading lawyer, together with William Steele and John Fountain.Mary Cotterell, "Interregnum Law Reform: The Hale Commission of 1652", The English Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 329 (Oct. 1968), pp. 689–704.

He was Town Clerk of London from 3 July 1649 (elected) to 18 September 1660. He was removed on the Restoration, under the pretext that he had signed the death warrant of Christopher Love.Reginald R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom, Volume II, p. 383. Gutenberg text He was suspended 4 September 1660, then the suspension was removed on 6 September 1660 and finally he was "declared incapable of office" on 18 September 1660.Libraries, Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery, "The Town Clerk" – Page 72, from the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London, 40 Northampton Road, London EC 1R 0HB – www.cityoflondon.gov.uk – www.lma.gov.uk

Political thought He wrote The Rights of the Kingdom (1649), a founding document of British Israelism.British Israelitism Tudor Parfitt calls it "one of the first invented expressions of an invented Israelite genealogy for the British".The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (2002), p. 42. This was not, however, its overt purpose. Glen Burgess calls it "an historical defence of the regicide".The Politics of the Ancient Constitution, p. 98. Maurice Vile writes

Hartlib circle

Sadler was a philosemite, on friendly terms with Menasseh Ben Israel.Coulton, Barbara (2001). Cromwell and the ‘readmission’ of the Jews to England, 1656. Journal of the Cromwell Association.Roth, Cecil. Life of Menasseh Ben Israel. Philadelphia. 1934. p.191. He believed that readmission would allow for the Jews to be converted to Christianity, which would hasten the new millennium (which he conceived as being a time of "more justice and more mercy" rather than being visited by Christ's "bodily presence").Scult, Mel (1978). Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties: A Study of the Efforts to Convert the Jews in Britain, Up to the Mid Nineteenth Century. Brill Archive. pps.26. He was also an associate of Samuel Hartlib and John Dury. This interest was not clearly separated from the line taken by Sadler in The Rights of the Kingdom.In 1649, Durie, Benjamin Worsley, Sadler, Henry Jessey, Johann Moriaen, Adam Boreel, and Menasseh all addressed the question of whether the lost tribes were living in America[...]. van der Wall, p. 55.

Personal life He married Jane, daughter of the Dorset MP John Trenchard.Weymouth, Dorset History & Heritage – Warmwell Village & Parish inc Warmwell House

References

See also Ralph Crepyn, town clerk of London John Carpenter, town clerk of London John Monckton (town clerk)