Editing and Introduction by Fallon Miller, Jordan Rodgers, Kaci Otwell, and Sara Jones
Fallon Miller, Jordan Rodgers, Kaci Otwell, and Sara Jones are undergraduate students at the University of Central Arkansas
Love’s Name Lives is a publication of letters in regards to Christopher Love’s execution, published by his wife, Mary Love. They consist of letters between Mrs. Love, the English Parliament, and Christopher Love himself. There are also letters from Mr. Jaquel, a witness against Mr. Love, and from other ministers to Mr. Love. They were published to show that Mr. Love was of good character and that the charges and his execution were unjust.
At this time, England was being ruled as a Commonwealth after the previous monarch, Charles II, was banished (Eaton). Christopher Love was conspiring with the Royalists to put him back into power.
This text shows the perseverance of the couple through their letters, and the hope and comfort that they found in their faith. Even though Mr. Love was faced with execution, he did not despair and instead looked towards his fate. Mrs. Love, even through her grief, offered comfort to her husband. Another theme was Mary Love’s perseverance. She sent many letters to Parliament begging for the delay of her husband’s execution, or for them to change his sentence. She did what she could with her limited influence and ended up giving him another month to live.
Mary Love (fl. 1618-d. 1651) was the daughter of Matthew Stone and her mothers whereabouts are unknown. However, it is noted that her mother died when she was young. Mary became ward to John Warner (Mayor of London) and that is when she met her soon to be husband Christopher Love who was employed as a Warners chaplain in 1639. In 1642 Christopher left to serve as a Parliamentary chaplain, and when he returned in 1645 he married Mary. They had a total of 5 children but only two survived, their last child dying six months after Christopher’s execution. August 22 1651, Christopher Love was executed for treason for conspiring with Royalists to restore the King, Charles II, to the throne. That was when Mary started up a petition to save her husband and convince the press to free him. She sent messages to Cromwell Scotland and in total cost her £100 (equivalent to 3,903.33 today in America) to try and save him. Not long after Christopher’s execution, Mary published her petitions to the public including the letter she and her husband wrote back and forth to each other (Eaton). Even though her petition didn’t save her husband, she was very successful in getting her message out to the public. Her work looks into how gendered language could be arranged in petitions to show how powerless voices can be achieved.
Editorial Note
The first thing we decided to to do when starting to edit this text was take out the letters from Mr. Love’s friends. We wanted to keep the focus on the letters between Mr. and Mrs. Love and the letters in which Mrs. Love attempts to get her husband freed. We left in the latter because it gives relevant information about Mr. Love, the situation, and their relationship. We also left in parts of the “to the reader” note that were relevant to the letters that we left in, giving background information about the characters and situation, and took out the parts that were not relevant to the letters left in, parts that were about the other letters or where we felt that the author was rambling. We then worked to modernize the spelling. Our spelling changes were small; for example, we changed “publick” to “public” and “dye” to “die.” Along with that, we modernized the grammar; for example, we changed “pasted” to “passed.” We modernized these things in order to make it easier for our audience, high school students, to read these letters without confusion, allowing them to get the full experience of reading this text. We then changed the formatting by taking out gaps, making indentation consistent, and reorganized the letters to have them in chronological order. This served the same purpose as modernizing spelling and grammar. We then glossed words that would likely be unfamiliar to high school students and added in footnotes to explain the biblical references that may not be known to most.
Works Cited
“Christopher Love (1618-1651).” Post Reformation Digital Library. https://www.prdl.org/author_view.php?a_id=1415&s=0&limit=50. Accessed 3 December 2025.
Eaton, Scott. “A Poor Hand-Maid’s Tale: Love, Petitioning and Print in Seventeenth-Century England.” The Many-Headed Monster. 16 February 2021. https://manyheadedmons ter.com/2021/02/16/a-poor-hand-maids-tale-love-petitioning-and-print-in-seventeenth-century-england/#:~:text=On%2022%20August%201651%20Christopher,other%20before%20he%20was%20executed.King James Bible. https://thekingsbible.com/Bible/46/7. Accessed 3 December 2025.