Hanserd Knollys and Mystical Babylon Unveiled: Contemporary Perspectives and New Observations on Early English Baptist Apocalypticism: Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist Pastor, Hanserd Knollys, Was Born Around 1599 in Lincolnshire, England (Biography‪)‬

The son of an Anglican rector, (1) Knollys pursued a career in the Church of England until his Puritan-influenced disagreements with Anglicanism led him to abandon the Church entirely. (2) Following a short and harrowing stay in Puritan New England, he adopted Baptist views; a perspective that, along with other dissenters in seventeenth-century England, relegated him to a life of relative marginalization and periodic persecution. (3) Knollys became a leader among the Particular Baptists in London during an interval of rapid growth between 1645 and 1689. (4) His signature was on the London Confession of Faith of 1646 and the Second London Confession of Faith of 1677. (5) He also attended the general assembly of English Particular Baptist churches in September 1689, at which more than one hundred churches were represented and over one hundred and fifty messengers were in attendance. (6)