BOOK II.

THE PURITAN MIGRATION.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

_RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM._

I.

[Sidenote: Love of display in Elizabeth's time.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

[Sidenote: Machyn's Diary, 324, note.]

Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated

the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth.

The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence

was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses.

Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a

show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every

available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast

farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might

rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that

of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of

dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat

feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six

thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined

to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house

filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or

yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their

attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. High sheriffs and

other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in

livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends

to lend state to their office. Edward VI set out upon a progress in

1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen

and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but

a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat

up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well

known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in

the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon.

She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men

and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was

truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the

world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

[Sidenote: The age of the drama.]

A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The

best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from

the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often

put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that

he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age

dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by

sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by

the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.

[Sidenote: Display in dress.]

[Sidenote: Peckard's Life of Ferrar.]

[Sidenote: Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, _passim_.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James

than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself

by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from

his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his

appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. It was thus

that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal

in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to

have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Men of the lowest ranks,

desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in

buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women

suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn

themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance

was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display

in people of lower rank. Even the severe Puritan moralists did not

object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of

it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with

difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To

refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty

rank.

II.

[Sidenote: Observance of ceremonies.]

[Sidenote: Compare _supra_, p. 41.]

[Sidenote: Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54.]

[Sidenote: De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix.]

Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of

decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and

the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe

proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this

exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American

history. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the

"starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be

taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving

immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the

little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag

themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and

unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by

timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a

sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor,

delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself

in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and

desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving

company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting

in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days

later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates.

There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail

in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the

governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on

American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent

prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner

of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As

he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off

its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the

colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the

tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over

the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as

were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at

Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen,

and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of

showy red cloaks. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green

velvet. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church,

and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to

worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord

over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men

in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again

aboard the ship where he dwelt.

[Sidenote: Formality at Plymouth.]

[Sidenote: De Rasieres's letter, 2d N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii, 352.]

Even at a later date in the rather hungry little Pilgrim colony at

Plymouth almost as much ceremony was observed, though the people were

extreme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on Sunday morning the

men came to Captain Standish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing

a musket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three abreast, led by

a sergeant. In the rear walked the governor, in a long robe. On his

right was Elder Brewster, wearing a cloak. On the governor's left was

Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak and side arms, and

carried a small cane as a sort of baton of authority perhaps. Thus

"they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."

[Sidenote: Puritanism an outgrowth of the time.]

It was only in an age such as this that resistance to the celebration

of rites and the observance of forms could be made a capital article

of faith by the Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of a

surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on certain occasions, was a

matter for scruple and violent debate, for the grave consideration of

the lawgiver and magistrate, and for severe penalties.

III.

[Sidenote: Origin of the Puritan movement.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist., book v, sec. iv, 27, 28.]

[Sidenote: 1536.]

In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI there were those who

objected to "the vestments," and one may even find what were afterward

called Puritan opinions condemned among current errors in the

twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII; but Puritanism--as a party protest

against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship--had its origin in

the persecution of Queen Mary's time. The English Protestants who

fled from that fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cities

of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva were

the places to which these English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and

Strasburg became cities of refuge for many of those who were to become

leaders of the Anglican or Conservative party, while others who tended

to what were afterward called Puritan views went sooner or later to

Geneva, where Calvin was the dominant influence.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1553.]

[Sidenote: The English exiles.]

In the cities in which they found safety the exiles organized English

churches. More remarkable religious communities were never gathered

into single congregations. Five bishops and five deans of the English

Church, and more than fifty eminent doctors of divinity, with younger

men who were destined to play a leading part in the future, were

comprised in these little churches. Such communities soon became

centers of animated discussion and debate.

[Sidenote: Outbreak of dissension.]

During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism

had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of

religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates

of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity;

but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they

found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with

leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal

thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up

swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in

Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely

conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be

pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt

bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English

church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon

torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John

Knox--the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish

reformation.

[Sidenote: Character of the debates at Frankfort.]

This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they

were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels

odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence--the

little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such

debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even

in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these

squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude.

Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the

fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the

church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties

that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify

profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the

United States.

[Sidenote: The rise of the two great parties.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, resulting now in the

exiling from the city of one beaten minority and now in the departure

of another, and in the driving away of one leading disputant after

another, there appeared at length the features of the two great

parties of English Protestantism face to face for the first time. One

of these parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the

Protestant conscience could be made to bear, insisted upon the

superior authority of the clergy, and sought to disturb as little as

possible the ancient order of the English church. On the other hand,

in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort contentions, the

tendency of the ultra wing of the Protestants to the notion of a local

and independent church and to a democratic church government was

already apparent. Even the peculiarity of two ministers presiding over

one church, which was cherished later in New England, appeared among

the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this time.

[Sidenote: A purified ritual.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

While attempting to mediate between the parties at Frankfort, Calvin

expressed his preference for a ritual of greater purity than that

established by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. Extreme

Protestants rallied round this ideal of a liturgy purified of human

tradition. It was some years later, after the Frankfort church had

been dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, that this party

came to be known by the name of Puritan--that is, a party not so much

bent on purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant worship from

mediaeval forms.

[Sidenote: Return of the exilies, 1558.]

After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth the English

Protestants returned to their own country. The two great parties that

were to divide the English church had already begun to crystallize.

Those who had settled at Strasburg and Zurich came back hoping to

re-establish the Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the

Prayer Book of Edward VI. Those who returned from Basel and Geneva had

caught the spirit of the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the

reformation to a more logical extreme; while the Frankfort church, or

what remained of it, had been storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of

congregational independence in church government.

[Sidenote: Results.]

The petty squabbles of the English exiles, transplanted to England,

grew into bitter feuds and brought forth persecutions and political

struggles. The settlement of New England, the battles of Marston Moor

and Naseby, the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, the

growth of non-conformity, the modification of the English Constitution

and of all English life, were germinally present in the differences

between the exiles at Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles

of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Horne at Frankfort-on-the-Main about

gowns and litanies and the authority of the priest. It is not often

that a great historical movement can be traced through a single rill

to its rise at the fountain head.

IV.

[Sidenote: The Puritan debate.]

[Sidenote: Certayne Qvestions concerning silk or vvool in the high

priest's ephod, 1605.]

The theological debates that fill so large a place in the history of

the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe were mainly

concerned with speculative dogmas. However futile controversies may

seem that seek to reduce to formulas the relations between God and

man, they have at least a topical dignity. But the debates about

ceremonies and vestments which the exiles brought back to England from

the Continent, and which held first place there during the reign of

Elizabeth and James, were bitter without being serious. A

life-and-death struggle concerning the wearing of "white surplices" or

the making of the sign of the cross in baptism can not but seem

frivolous to the modern mind. Learned scholars like Broughton and

Ainsworth thought it not beneath them to write tractates discussing

the material of which the ephod of a Jewish high priest was made. It

was learnedly demonstrated that the ephod was of silk, and there were

sober essays on the linsey-woolsey side of that controversy. To the

fine-spun mind of that time the character of the Jewish ephod was

thought to settle the propriety of the Christian surplice. To the

modern reader the whole debate about vestments and liturgies would be

amusing if it were not so tedious. It is necessary to steady one's

judgment of that age by remembering that deeper things sometimes lay

concealed under these disputes regarding the contemptible mint and

cumin of ecclesiasticism. Puritanism at its rise was an effort to

escape from formalism, the outgrowth of an aspiration for greater

spirituality in worship; but it gradually passed into an opposite

formalism as rigid as that from which it had escaped.

[Sidenote: Uniformity not possible.]

It was in vain that Elizabeth tried to compel uniformity. The

difference between the radical and the conservative is constitutional,

and is manifest in every period of agitation. Neither the mediation of

moderate men nor the compulsion of authority can bring these two

sempiternal divisions of the human race into agreement. The

conservative English churchman limited his Protestantism to the

rejection of the pope's authority, and to certain moderate reforms in

church government and ritual. He shuddered with alarm at every

proposal to reconstruct religious institutions which were moss-grown

with ancient sentiment. The extreme Puritan, on the other hand, went

about his work in the spirit of a Jehu. He saved all his reverence for

the precepts of the Bible, now becoming common in the vulgar tongue.

He applied biblical phraseology to the affairs of life in a way that

would have been impossible had he possessed any sense of humor. He

felt himself impelled by the call of God to carry out in England the

changes that had taken place in the Calvinistic churches of the

Continent, and to go even further. He would have no surplices, no sign

of the cross, no liturgy, no church holy days. Away with these rags

of Antichrist, was his cry. Let us get back to the simplicity of the

primitive ages. The Anglican, on the other hand, felt himself an

Englishman above all, and without a stately liturgy, great bishops in

square caps and lawn sleeves, Christmas feasts, solemn Good Fridays,

and joyous Easters, there would have remained for him no merry

England.

V.

[Sidenote: Growth of party spirit.]

The party line between Anglican and Puritan was not at once sharply

drawn. It was only after debates growing ever more acrimonious, after

persecutions and numberless exasperations, that the parties in the

Church of England fell into well-defined and hostile camps. If there

had been some relaxation of the requirements of uniformity, if a

conciliatory policy had been pursued by the government, the ultimate

division might have been postponed until party spirit had cooled; but

in that day blows took the place of words, and words had the force of

blows. The queen herself could write to a bishop who scrupled to do

what she desired, "By God, I will unfrock you!" and moderation in

debate was not to be expected from lesser folk.

[Sidenote: Puritanism the party of opposition.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

When the reformer has warmed to his work he looks about him for new

abuses to fall upon. The dominant discontent of any age is prone to

spread its wings over other grievances, and feebler movements seek

shelter from the strong. Puritanism no doubt gathered momentum from

the widespread agrarian and industrial disturbance in this and the

preceding reigns. The profit from sheep-raising had induced many manor

lords to inclose the wastes on which the peasants had pastured their

cattle for ages. The humble copy-hold tenant, having no longer grass

for his cows or mast for his pigs, was driven to distress by

agricultural progress. In some cases even the common fields,

cultivated in allotments from ancient times by the members of the

village communities, first as serfs and later as tenants, were turned

into sheepwalks, and hamlets of tenants' cottages were torn down to

make room for more profitable occupants of the soil. The worst

offenders were the greedy courtiers who had secured the estates of the

English monasteries. Workmen ruined by the dissolution of the guilds

were added to the ranks of the unhappy. All the discontent begotten of

these transitions from mediaeval life tended to strengthen the leading

opposition--and that leading opposition was Puritanism.

VI.

[Sidenote: Widening the field of protest.]

Puritanism also progressively widened its field of protest. Beliefs

that Protestants rejected were symbolized by the vestments of bishop

and clergy. Advanced Protestants insisted that the shadows should be

banished with the substance, that the symbol should disappear with the

dogma. We have seen that in Frankfort the inchoate Puritan party

wished to abolish the litany and purge the service book of all the

remains of the old religion. This controversy raged in England, and

the Puritan side did not at first lack support even among the bishops.

But Elizabeth, the real founder of Anglicanism, molded the church to

her will, putting down Catholics and Puritans with a hard hand. The

more advanced of the party came at length to believe that all

"stinted" prayers "read out of a book" were contrary to the purity and

simplicity of Christian worship. The hostility of the bishops to that

which the Puritans believed to be the cause of God no doubt helped to

convince the persecuted party that the episcopal office itself was

contrary to Scripture.

[Sidenote: Puritanism becomes dogmatic.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

Most of the Puritans of Elizabeth's time, under the lead of the great

Cartwright, became Presbyterian in theory and sought to assimilate the

Church of England to the Calvinistic churches of the Continent,

holding that theirs was the very order prescribed by the apostles.

Another but much smaller division of the Puritans tended toward

independency, finding in the New Testament a system different from

that of Cartwright. Both the Presbyterians and those who held to local

church government wished to see their own system established by law.

Neither faction thought of tolerating Anglican practices if the

Anglicans could be put down. The notion of a state church with

prescribed forms of worship enforced by law was too deeply imbedded in

the English mind to be easily got rid of, and the spirit of

persecution pervaded every party, Catholic or Protestant. Every one

was sure that divine authority was on his side, and that human

authority ought to be.

VII.

[Sidenote: Anglicanism becomes dogmatic.]

A corresponding change began to take place in the Episcopal party. The

earlier defenders of Elizabeth's establishment argued, somewhat as

Hooker did later, that the "practice of the apostles" was not an

"invariable rule or law to succeeding ages, because they acted

according to the circumstances of the church in its infant and

persecuted state." Episcopal government they held to be allowable, and

maintained the attitude of prudent men who justify their compromise

with history and the exigency of the time, and advocate, above all,

submission to civil authority. But the tendency of party division is

to push both sides to more positive ground. There arose in the last

years of Elizabeth a school of High-churchmen led by Bancroft,

afterward primate, who turned away from Hooker's moderation and

assumed a more aggressive attitude. Like the Presbyterians and the

Independents and the Catholics, these in turn maintained that their

favorite system of church economy was warranted by divine authority,

and that all others were excluded.

[Sidenote: Failure of Elizabeth's policy.]

When the High-church leaders had reached the dogmatic assertion of

apostolic succession and a divinely appointed episcopal form of

government as essentials of a Christian church, the fissure between

the two ecclesiastical parties in England was complete. Each had

settled itself upon a supposed divine authority; each regarded the

other as teaching a theory contrary to the divine plan. Elizabeth's

policy of repression had produced a certain organic uniformity, but

the civil war of the seventeenth century was its ultimate result.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Bitterness of the debate.]

The controversy between the two Protestant parties naturally grew more

bitter as time went on. The silencing of ministers, the Fleet Prison,

the inquisitorial Ecclesiastical Commission, and other such

unanswerable arguments did not sweeten the temper of the Puritans. The

bitterness of the controversy reached its greatest intensity in 1588,

when there appeared a succession of anonymous tracts, most of them

signed Martin Marprelate. They seem to have been written mainly by the

same hand, but their authorship has been a matter of debate to this

day.

[Sidenote: The Marprelate tracts.]

[Sidenote: 1588.]

[Sidenote: The Marprelate tracts in Lenox Library.]

The sensation produced by these violent assaults is hardly conceivable

now. There were no newspapers then, and there was but little popular

literature. Here were little books printed no one knew where, written by

no one knew whom, concerning a religious controversy of universal

interest. They were couched in the phrase of the street, in the very

slang and cant of the populace, and were violent and abusive, sometimes

descending to sheer blackguardism. Marprelate went gunning for large

game; his deadliest abuse he let fly as from a blunderbuss at the very

heads of the English church. The Dean of Salisbury he calls "Doctor of

Diviltrie and Deane of Sarum." It was the first time in the history of

polemics that any one had addressed a high dignitary of the church with

such irreverent titles as "You grosse beaste!" "You block, you!"

Sometimes Martin bends his knees with mock reverence, as when he calls

the clergy "right poysond, persecuting and terrible priests." He blurts

out epithets against "the sinful, the unlawful, the broken, the

unnatural, false, and bastardly governours of the church; to wit,

archbishops and bishops"; and addresses them as "you enemies to the

state, you traytors to God and his worde, you Mar-prince, Mar-land,

Mar-magestrate, Mar-church, and Mar-commonwealth." The spice of the

books, that which gave them their popularity, was doubtless their

rollicking impudence. "Wo--ho, now, Brother London!" he cries to the

Bishop of London. "Go to, you Asse!" is a kind of kennel eloquence

relished by the populace. Martin seems even to giggle and sneer and hiss

in type in such expressions as "tse, tse, tse."

[Sidenote: An Admonition to the People of England, p. 25.]

The little books went everywhere. The Bishop of Winchester sadly

confessed that these "slanderous pamphlets, freshe from the presse,"

were "in men's hands and bosoms commonly." The queen and courtiers

read them, and students had nothing better to laugh at. Who will not

stop in the street to hear one clown rail cleverly at another? But to

see the bishops collectively and the primate and others severally put

into a pillory and pelted in this daring fashion by a man who knew

that his life would pay the forfeit for his libel if he could by any

means be discovered, was livelier sport than bull-baiting.

[Sidenote: Nugae Antiquae, ii, 89, 90.]

Dr. Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, replied to the first pamphlet

somewhat ponderously, as became a bishop who feels that the

proprieties forbid his being too interesting. Marprelate wanted

nothing better than a bishop for an antagonist; and while the whole

constabulary force of the kingdom was hunting him for his life, the

nimble Martin was chuckling over the excitement made by a new tract of

his, headed with the well-known street cry of a tub-mender, which

played derisively on Bishop Cooper's name, "Hay any worke for Cooper?"

This tract professed to be "printed in Europe not farre from some of

the Bounsing priestes." In this paper Martin shows to what depth a

religious debate in Elizabeth's time could descend; he stoops to make

the bishop ridiculous by twitting him with the infidelity of his wife,

a scandal which the unfortunate prelate had treated with "Socratical

and philosophical patience."

[Sidenote: Lenox Collection, N. Y. Pub. Library.]

[Sidenote: Comp. Bacon's An Advertisement touching Controversies,

etc.]

There were not wanting many imitators of Martin's grossness on the

other side of the controversy, who were just as libelous but for the

most part less clever. One of the tracts in reply was called An Almond

for a Parrat. The author says he had heard that Martin was dead, or,

as he expressed it, "that your grout-headed holinesse had turned uppe

your heeles like a tired jade in a medow and snorted out your

sorrowefull soule, like a mesled hogge on a mucke-hille." This is

beastly without being vivacious. While the press and the stage were

occupied with coarse retorts on Martinism, there appeared tracts in

favor of peace. There are other evidences of the existence of a

moderate party that lamented the excesses of both sides in this

debate.

IX.

[Sidenote: Advance of Puritan opinions.]

Puritanism was evolutionary from the beginning. Its earlier disputes

about vestments and litanies grew by degrees to a rejection of all

liturgies as idolatrous. Even the reading of the Bible as a part of

the service came at last to be reprehended by extremists, and the

repetition of the Lord's Prayer was thought dangerously liturgical.

The advanced Puritans sought to exclude from Christian worship

everything pleasing to the aesthetic sense, confounding bareness with

simplicity. Compromises continued to be made inside the church, but in

the ultimate ideal of Puritan worship there remained, besides the

sermon, nothing but long extemporary prayers and the singing by the

untrained voices of the congregation of literal versions of the Hebrew

Psalms--doggerel verse in cobblestone meters.

X.

[Sidenote: Opposition to May-poles.]

[Sidenote: 1549.]

[Sidenote: Rushworth, Pt. III, vol. ii, 749. A. D. 1644.]

In its early stages Puritanism was a crusade against idolatry, and

drew its inspiration in this, as in nearly everything else, from the

Old Testament. To the word "idolatry" it gave an inclusiveness not

found in the Jewish Scriptures, and puzzling to a mind accustomed to

modern ways of thinking. There was hardly any set observance of the

church in which constructive idolatry did not lie concealed. All holy

days except Sunday were abhorred as things that bore the mark of the

Beast. Even in the reign of Edward VI, long before the name of

Puritanism was known, the May-poles round which English people made

merry once a year were denounced as idols in a sermon preached at

Paul's Cross by Sir Stephen--the "Sir" being a polite prefix to a

clergyman's name. This Stephen, curate of St. Catherine Cree, was a

forerunner of Puritanism, who sometimes defiantly preached from an elm

tree in the chuchyard and read the service standing on a tomb on the

north side of the church. He wanted the saintly names of churches and

the heathen names of days of the week changed, so keen was his scent

for idolatry. The parish of St. Andrew Undershaft had received its

distinctive name from a very tall May-pole that overtopped the church

steeple. This pole was erected annually, and it rested from one May to

another on hooks under the eaves of a row of houses and stalls. In the

newborn Protestant zeal against idols Sir Stephen denounced

especially the lofty shaft of St. Andrew. The people in their rage

took it from the hooks and sawed it in pieces, and its sections were

appropriated by the several householders who had given it shelter and

who presently heaped its parts upon one great bonfire. Puritanism kept

up its Don Quixote battle against May-poles until there was hardly one

standing to seduce the people to idolatry. When the Puritan party came

into power, nearly a hundred years after the days of Sir Stephen of

St. Catherine Cree, one of its earliest laws ordered that all

May-poles--"an heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and

wickedness"--be taken down.

XI.

[Sidenote: Austerity in morals.]

From denouncing constructive idolatry in organ music, litanies, and

May-poles, the transition to attack on the more real and substantial

evils in ordinary conduct was inevitable. History has many examples of

this pervasiveness of scrupulosity. The Puritan conscience had been

let loose to tear in pieces the remnants of old superstitions. It was

certain to break over into the field of conduct. Having set out to

reform the church, it took the world by the way.

[Sidenote: Pickering's ed., p. 172.]

As early as 1583 Philip Stubbes, a Puritan lawyer, issued his hot

little book, The Anatomie of Abuses. It deals with the immoralities

and extravagances of the time. Stubbes repeats the early Puritan

objection to the May-pole: it is a "stinckyng idol," he declares,

which the people bring from the woods, "followyng it with greate

devotion." And when they have set it up they "leape and daunce aboute

it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles." But

Stubbes takes a step forward and objects to the all-night May frolics

on account of their immorality. He says, "I have heard it credibly

reported by men of great gravitie, credite and reputation, that of

fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woods over

night, there have scarcely the third parte of them returned home

againe undefiled." As men of "great gravitie, credite and reputation"

were not likely to know the facts in this case, some of the immorality

with which Stubbes charges the young people may have been as fanciful

as the heathenism attributed to them. Imputed unrighteousness was a

part of the Puritan system. He denounces the wild excesses in dress

and the other follies of the time with a lack of a sense of proportion

which already foreshadows later Puritanism.

This secondary development of Puritanism by which its energies were

turned toward the regulation of conduct, as the disputes of the

Reformation period lost their violence, gave to the name Puritan a new

and higher sense. It is a phase of its history more important than all

its primary contentions over gowns and liturgies and hierarchies, or

its later debates about the five points of Calvinism and a sabbatical

Sunday. One may easily forget its austerity and extravagance, for by

the reform of manners this movement made the English race its debtor.

In no succeeding reaction have English morals reverted to the

ante-Puritan level. It is only by the religious ferments infused

successively by new sects and movements, of preaching friars,

Lollards, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Salvationists, that the great

unleavened mass of men is rendered gradually less sodden.

XII.

[Sidenote: Puritan decline.]

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 115.]

[Sidenote: Rogers's Pref. to the 39 Articles.]

The last years of Elizabeth's long reign were years of apparent

Puritan decline. The old bugbear of popery was receding into the past,

and a new generation had come on the stage that had no memory of the

struggles of the reigns of Henry and Edward and Mary. The danger from

the Armada had brought English patriotism to the point of fusion. Even

the persecuted Catholics rallied to the support of the queen against

Philip. The government of Elizabeth rose to the zenith of its

popularity on the overthrow of the Armada. It was just at this

inopportune moment, when the nation had come to feel that the England

of Elizabeth was the greatest England the ages had known, that there

came forth from a small coterie of the oppressed ultra-Puritans the

Martin Marprelate tracts. However effective these may have been at

first in making the bishops ridiculous, there followed a swift

reaction. The Puritans were dubbed Martinists, and henceforth had to

bear the odium of the boisterous vulgarity and libelous exaggeration

of the Marprelate lampoons. The queen's government, stronger now than

ever in the affection of the people, put in force severe

ecclesiastical measures against nonconformists in the church, and sent

Brownists, or Separatists, to die by the score in loathsome prisons.

Half a dozen of their leaders were dispatched by the shorter road of

the gallows. The long reign of the queen had by this time discouraged

those who hoped for a change of policy at her death. Hooker's

masterful and delightful prose, informed by a spirit of winning

moderation, was arrayed on the side of the Anglicans by the

publication of parts of his Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594 and 1597.

But Puritanism suffered most from the persistence of Archbishop

Whitgift and others in efforts to suppress all nonconformity in the

church. These champions of Anglicanism, in the swaggering words of one

of them, "defended the prelacy, stood for the power of the state, put

the new doctors to the foil, profligated the elders, set upon the

presbytery, and so battered the new discipline as hitherto they could

never nor hereafter shall ever fortify and repair the decay thereof."

The presbyteries which Cartwright and his friends had formed within

the Church of England were swept out utterly by the archbishop's

broom. The Puritan movement which had begun almost simultaneously with

Elizabeth's reign seemed to be doomed to languish and die with the old

queen who had been its resolute and lifelong antagonist.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Seeking a positive ground.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

For the first thirty years or more of its existence Puritanism was

mainly a bundle of negations, and no bundle of mere negations is a

sufficient reason for maintaining a party. No vestments, no

ceremonies, no bishops, were effective cries in the hot Reformation

period. But the new generation had ceased to abhor these left-overs of

Romanism. Bishops, gowns, prayer books, had become Protestant to most

of the people by association. To find additional reasons for differing

from Anglican opponents was a party necessity. The new debates which

sprang up in the last years of the sixteenth century were not

deliberately planned by the Puritans, as some of their opponents

asserted. They came by a process of evolution. But a period of

temporary decline in a movement of this sort hastens its natural

unfolding. The leaders are forced to seek the advantage of such new

issues as offer when the old ones fail. In the last years of

Elizabeth, Puritanism was molting, not dying.

XIV.

[Sidenote: The Puritan Sabbath.]

The great reformers of the sixteenth century had sought to strip from

the Christianity of their time what they deemed the second-hand

garments of Judaism. Along with the theory of a priesthood they

declared also against a doctrine known in the church at least from the

fifth century, that the fourth commandment enforced on Christians the

keeping sacred in some sense of Sundays and other church holy days.

Luther maintained that a commandment to keep the Sabbath "literally

understood does not apply to Christians, for it is entirely outward,

like other ordinances of the Old Testament." He thought a festival day

important for rest and for attending religious worship; but with

characteristic oppugnancy he says: "If anywhere the day is made holy

for the mere day's sake, ... then I order you to dance on it, and

feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on

Christian liberty." The Augsburg Confession makes a similar statement

of the Protestant position. Calvin considered the fourth commandment

binding on Christians only in a sense mystical and highly Calvinistic.

It signified that "we should rest from our own works" under the

Christian dispensation. He even suggested that some other day of the

week might be chosen as a day of rest and worship at Geneva for an

exhibition of Christian liberty in this regard. His practice was

conformed to his theory. It is incidentally related that when John

Knox once visited the Genevan reformer on Sunday, he found him playing

at bowls. Knox was not more a sabbatarian than Calvin.

XV.

[Sidenote: Rise of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Compare Marsden's Early Puritans (1850) page 242, where

Becon's Catechism and Coverdale are quoted.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Social Hist. of the Southern Counties, p. 239.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

Writers on this subject have generally agreed in dating the rise of

the Puritan Sabbath from the appearance, in 1595, of Dr. Bownd's book

on The Sabbath of the Old and of the New Testament. But the doctrine

of the strict keeping of Sunday may be traced farther back. In truth,

the difference between the English and the Continental Sunday dates

from the Reformation. The protests of Luther and Calvin go to show

that Sunday had in the church before the Reformation, theoretically if

not in practice, the sanctity of a church feast. The English

Reformation was conservative, like all other English revolutions.

English reformers retained the Catholic Sunday, as they did the

vestments and national hierarchy of the old church. Thomas Hancock has

been styled "the Luther of the southwest of England." He was the great

preacher of Poole in the days of Edward VI. That he, like other

English reformers, did not agree with Luther in rejecting the

obligation to rest on Sunday is shown by the record, for the voice of

Poole was the voice of Hancock. About 1550 the juries in the Admiralty

Court of Poole were charged to inquire into Sunday fishing; and so

advanced was the premature Puritanism of Edward's time that even the

leaving of nets in the sea over Sunday was to be investigated. Here

was a strictness unknown in Catholic times.

XVI.

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 16.]

[Sidenote: Early English Text Society Reprint, 106, 107, 108.]

The word Sabbath does not occur in these early entries. But in the

troubles among the Marian exiles at Frankfort, where so many other

traits of Puritanism first came above the horizon, it is significant

that one finds Sunday called the Sabbath. Sabbath as applied to Sunday

occurs first in literature, perhaps, in 1573, and then it is

considered necessary to explain it. Bullein's Dialogue against the

Fever Pestilence, a work of considerable popularity, first appeared as

early as 1564. In the edition of 1573 there was inserted a new passage

not found in the earlier issue. Mendax is relating incredible tales of

travel in lands unknown, after the manner of David Ingram and other

returned adventurers. Up to this point all is pure lying merely for

the fun of the thing, or perhaps to ridicule the exaggerations of

travelers. But the interpolated passage is not of a piece with the old

garment into which it is patched. It is less grotesque and humorous,

and it smacks of incipient Puritanism in several flavors. It treats

first of all of the "Kepyng of the Saboth Daie," "whiche is the

seventh daie, that is sondaie," in the imaginary city of "Nodnol," an

anagram of London. The gates are shut, and nobody is allowed to "goe,

neither ride forth of the Citie duryng that daie, except it be after

the euenyng praier; then to walke honestlie into the sweete fieldes,

and at every gate in the time of service there are warders." "What so

ever hee be he muste kepe hollie the Sabboth daie, and come to the

churche both man, woman, young and olde." "There were no people

walking abroad in the service tyme; no, not a Dogge or catte in the

streate, neither any Taverne doore open that daie, nor wine bibbyng

in them, but onely almose, fasting and praier." This is perhaps the

oldest extant statement of an early Puritan ideal of Sabbath-keeping.

XVII.

[Sidenote: Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, _sub anno_.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 238, 239.]

[Sidenote: 1583.]

[Sidenote: 1588.]

Scruples regarding recreations on Sunday come distinctly into view in

the title of a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1576. In 1580 the

magistrates of London secured from the queen a prohibition of the

performance of plays within the limits of the city on Sundays. In

other municipalities--Brighton, Yarmouth, and Lyme--ordinances were

made about this time against such offenses as the prosecution on

Sunday of the herring fisheries, cloth working, and other labors, and

even against the Sunday practice of archery, formerly thought a

patriotic exercise. There are other evidences of a movement,

especially in the south of England, in favor of a stricter Sabbath in

these and the following years. Stubbes does not fail to denounce

"heathnicall exercises upon the Sabbaoth day, which the Lorde would

have consecrated to holy uses." The Puritan mode of Sabbath-keeping

already existed among the chosen few. "The Sabboth daie of some is

well observed," says Stubbes, "namely, in hearing the blessed worde of

God read, preached, and interpreted; in private and publique praiers;

in reading of godly psalmes; in celebrating the sacraments; and in

collecting for the poore and indigent, which are the true uses and

endes whereto the Sabbaoth was ordained." He records the opposite

belief of his opponents that Sunday was ordained "onely to use what

kinde of exercises they thinke good themselves." In practice this was

the rule of the English people at large. These opposite opinions come

into view when Martin Marprelate a few years later berates the Bishop

of London for playing at bowls on Sunday.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Bownd on the Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: 1595.]

[Sidenote: 1592.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and the New Testament,

which, if we may believe its opponents, was nearly ten years "in the

hammering," was the outcome of a sentiment already rising among the

Puritans, and not wholly confined to that party. It was preceded by a

little work of Richard Greenham which seems to have been circulated

for some years in manuscript after a fashion of that time, and to have

had at first more influence on practice than Bownd's formal treatise.

Greenham was Bownd's stepfather, and his work was the parent of

Bownd's, which is distinctly more extreme. But Dr. Bownd's book is

none the less memorable as a point of departure, because in it the

opinions on this subject which have since prevailed so generally in

all English-speaking lands "were for the first time broadly and

prominently asserted in Christendom"; at least, they were here first

systematically propounded and defended. Bownd held that the fourth

commandment is partly moral, in the phrase of the casuists. He

shifted the obligation to the first day of the week by arguments now

familiar, and he laid down rules for the observance of the day. Honest

recreations and lawful delights he flatly forbids on Sundays, but he

rather obsequiously makes some allowance for the "feasts of noblemen

and great personages on this day." People of rank do not wholly escape

him, however, for he points a moral with the story of a nobleman whose

child was born with a face like that of a dog, because the father had

hunted on the Lord's Day. He allows the ringing of only one bell to

call the people to church on Sunday. Chimes were quite too pleasing to

accord with a severe Sabbath.

XIX.

[Sidenote: Spread of Bownd's opinions.]

[Sidenote: Cartwright's Admonition to Parliament, 1572.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 37, 38.]

Such rigor fell in with the passion of that age for formal observance

and with the exigent temper of the Puritans by whom Bownd's views were

rapidly and universally accepted. The stricter divines might well be

glad of a new lever for reforming the old English Sunday, which was

devoted, out of service time, to outdoor games, to the brutally cruel

sports of bull and bear baiting, to merry morris-dances, in which the

performers were gayly decked and hung with jingling bells in different

keys, as well as to coarse farces called interludes, which were played

on stages under booths and sometimes in the churches. As an austere

reaction against frivolity, Puritanism pushed Sabbath-keeping to its

extreme, reprobating even the most innocent and domestic recreations,

and changing a day of rest and refreshment into one of alternate

periods of application to religious devotion and of scrupulous

vacuity. Bownd's rather ultra propositions were carried yet further

when reproduced by high-strung preachers. It is said that some of

these declared that the ringing of more than one bell to call people

to church on the Sabbath was as great a sin as murder, adultery, or

parricide. The lack of a sense of proportion is the specific

distinction of the zealot and the polemic. This lack was not peculiar

to the Puritans, however. Joseph Hall, afterward a well-known bishop,

could address men so worthy as John Robinson and his colleague in such

words as these: "Your souls shall find too late ... that even

whoredoms and murders shall abide an easier answer than separation."

Perhaps one may rather say that a lack of the sense of proportion in

morals was a trait of that age, an age of zealots and polemics.

XX.

[Sidenote: Prevalence of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist. of Britain, book ix, sect. viii, 20,

21.]

In such a time Dr. Bownd's book easily captivated the religious

public, and there arose a passion for a stricter Sabbath. According to

Fuller, the Lord's Day, especially in towns, "began to be precisely

kept, people becoming a law to themselves, forbearing such sports as

yet by statute permitted; yea, many rejoicing at their own restraint

herein. On this day the stoutest fencer laid down the buckler; the

most skillful archer unbent the bow, counting all shooting beside the

mark; May-games and morris-dancers grew out of request; and good

reason that bells should be silenced from jingling about men's legs,

if their very ringing in steeples were adjudged unlawful." Some

learned scholars were impressed by Bownd's argument, and others who

did not agree with his conclusions thought it best not to gainsay

them, "because they tended to the manifest advance of religion." And

indeed the new zeal for Sabbath-keeping must have incidentally

promoted morals and good order in so licentious an age.

[Sidenote: Opposition to Bownd.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Church History, book ix, sect. viii, 21.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

But a violent opposition quickly arose. Some opposed the book as

"galling men's necks with a Jewish yoke against the liberty of

Christians," and many of the clergy of the new high-church type

resented the doctrine of a Christian Sabbath, asserting that it put

"an unequal lustre on the Sunday on set purpose to eclipse all other

holy days to the derogation of the authority of the church." There

were those who asserted that the "brethren," as they styled them, had

brought forth Bownd's book, intending by this "attack from an odd

corner" to retrieve lost ground. The manifest advantage to Puritanism

from the shifting of the ground of debate, aroused Archbishop

Whitgift. In 1599 he made the tactical mistake of ordering the book

called in, and in 1600 Chief-Justice Popham forbade the reprinting of

it. The price of the work was doubled at once, and it was everywhere

sought for, books being "more called on when called in," as Fuller

says. When it could not be had in print, it was transcribed by

enthusiastic admirers and circulated "from friend to friend" in

manuscript. As soon as Whitgift's "head was laid," a new and enlarged

edition was published.

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

[Sidenote: 1611.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

The theory of a Sunday-Sabbath, which from the first was not confined

to the Puritans, permeated English and American thought and life. But

from that time forward the Puritans made rigid Sabbath-keeping the

very mark and password of the faithful. From England the theory spread

northward to Scotland, where it found a congenial soil. The strict

observance of Sunday was embodied in those Laws, Divine, Moral, and

Martial, under which Sir Thomas Dale oppressed Virginia, years before

the earliest Puritan migration carried it to the coast of New England.

On that coast Bownd's Sabbath took on its deepest hue, becoming at

last as grievous an evil, perhaps, as the frivolity it had supplanted.

XXI.

[Sidenote: Effect on Puritanism.]

The Puritans protesting against Hebraism in vestments, in priesthood,

in liturgy, and in festivals, fell headlong into the Pharisaism of the

rigid Sabbath. History records many similar phenomena. To escape from

the spirit of one's age is difficult for an individual, impossible

perhaps for a sect or party. Nevertheless, the Sabbath agitation had

given a new impulse to the Puritan movement--had, indeed, given it a

positive party cry, and had furnished it with a visible badge of

superior sanctity.

[Sidenote: The new Puritanism.]

The Calvinistic controversy which broke out almost simultaneously

with that about the Sabbath and prevailed throughout the reign of

James I, added yet one more issue, by making Puritanism the party of

a stern and conservative orthodoxy, as opposed to the newer

Arminianism which spread so quickly among the High-Church clergy.

From all these fresh developments Puritanism gained in power and

compactness, if it lost something of simplicity and spirituality.

Standing for ultra-Protestantism, for good morals, for an ascetic

Sabbath, for a high dogmatic orthodoxy, Puritanism could not but win

the allegiance of the mass of the English people, and especially of

the middle class. It was this new, compact, austere, dogmatic,

self-confident Puritanism, when it had become a political as well as

a religious movement, that obliterated Laud and Charles and set up

the Commonwealth. And in studying the evolution of this later

Puritanism we have been present at the shaping of New England in Old

England.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 99.]

Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was appointed Sheriff

for Surrey and Sussex before they were disjoyned. He had 116 servants

in liverys, every one livery'd in greene sattin doublets. Divers

gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garbe and

habit, which at that time (when 30 or 40 was the usual retinue of a

High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great matter.... He could not refuse the

civility of his friends and relations who voluntarily came themselves,

or sent in their servants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir

George Yeardley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the

king had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia,

"which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down the

streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair

liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. 110,

Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving men is

sharply called in question in a tract entitled Cyuile and Vncyuile

Life, 1579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of a serving

man's position, while its decline is confessed in A Health to the

Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both of these tracts are

reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe Library, 1868. The

serving man was not a menial. He rendered personal services to his

master or to guests, he could carve on occasion, and as a successor to

the military retainers of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any

of his master's quarrels; but his principal use was to lend dignity to

the mansion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation

during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first Jamestown

emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have seen.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 100.]

The Anatomie of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes, 1583, Pickering's reprint,

pages 16, 17: "It is lawfull for the nobilitie, the gentrie and

magisterie to weare riche attire, euery one in their callyng. The

nobility and gentrie to innoble, garnish, and set forth birthes,

dignities, and estates. The magisterie to dignifie their callynges....

But now there is suche a confuse mingle mangle of apparell, and suche

preposterous excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it

out in what apparell he lusteth himself, or can get by any kinde of

meanes. So that it is very hard to know who is noble, who is

worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shal haue those

which are neither of the nobilitie, gentilitie nor yeomanrie ... go

daiely in silkes, veluettes, satens, damaskes, taffaties and suche

like; notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birthe, meane by

estate, and seruile by callyng. And this I compte a greate confusion,

and a generall disorder in a Christian common wealth."

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 106.]

A Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 1564, is the

primary authority. It is almost beyond doubt that Whittingham, Dean of

Durham, a participant in the troubles, wrote the book. The Frankfort

struggles have been discussed recently in Mr. Hinds's The Making of

the England of Elizabeth, but, like all writers on the subject, Hinds

is obliged to depend almost solely on Whittingham's account. The

several volumes of letters from the archives of Zurich, published by

the Parker Society, give a good insight into the forces at work in the

English Reformation. See, for example, in the volume entitled Original

Letters, 1537-1558, that of Thomas Sampson to Calvin, dated

Strasburgh, February 23, 1555, which shows the Puritan movement half

fledged at this early date when Calvin's authoritative advice is

invoked. "The flame is lighted up with increased vehemence amongst us

English. For a strong controversy has arisen, while some desire the

book of reformation of the Church of England to be set aside

altogether, others only deem some things in it objectionable, such as

kneeling at the Lord's Supper, the linen surplice, and other matters

of this kind; but the rest of it, namely, the prayers, scripture

lessons and the form of the administration of baptism and the Lord's

Supper they wish to be retained."

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 106.]

There are many and conflicting accounts of the origin of the name. In

the Narragansett Club Publications, ii, 197-199, there is an

interesting statement of some of these by the editor of Cotton's

Answer to Roger Williams, in a note.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 111.]

That the Puritans early made common cause with the suffering tenantry

is not a matter of conjecture. Philip Stubbes, in 1583, in the

Anatomie of Abuses, pp. 126, 127, writes: "They take in and inclose

commons, moores, heathes, and other common pastures, where out the

poore commonaltie, were wont to haue all their forrage and feedyng for

their cattell, and (whiche is more) corne for themselves to liue vpon;

all which are now in most places taken from them, by these greedie

puttockes to the great impouerishyng and vtter beggeryng of many

whole townes and parishes.... For these inclosures bee the causes why

riche men eate vpp poore men, as beastes dooe eate grasse." One might

cite recent economic writers on the effect of inclosures, but the

conservative laments of the antiquary Aubrey, in his Introduction to

the Survey of Wiltshire, written about 1663, give us a nearer and more

picturesque, if less philosophical, view. He says: "Destroying of

Manours began Temp. Hen. VIII., but now common; whereby the mean

People live lawless, no body to govern them, they care for no body,

having no Dependance on any Body. By this Method, and by the Selling

of the Church-Lands, is the Ballance of the Government quite alter'd

and put into the Hands of the common People." Writing from what he had

heard from his grandfather, he says: "Anciently the Leghs i. e.

Pastures were noble large Grounds.... So likewise in his Remembrance

was all between Kington St. Michael and Dracot-Ferne common Fields.

Then were a world of labouring People maintained by the Plough....

There were no Rates for the Poor in my Grandfather's Days ... the

Church-ale at Whitsuntide did the Business.... Since the Reformation

and Inclosures aforesaid these Parts have swarm'd with poor People.

The Parish of Caln pays to the Poor 500L _per annum_.... Inclosures

are for the private, not for the publick Good. For a Shepherd and his

Dog, or a Milk-Maid, can manage Meadow-Land, that upon arable,

employ'd the Hands of several Scores of Labourers." Miscellanies on

Several Curious Subjects, now first published, etc., 1723, pp. 30-33.

It will fall within the province of another volume of this series to

treat of the systems of landholding brought from England, and I shall

not go further into the subject of inclosures here. A portion of the

agricultural population seemed superfluous in consequence of

inclosures, and colonization was promoted as a means of ridding the

country of the excess of its population.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 112.]

In the matter of Church government Puritanism passed through three

different periods. In the reign of Elizabeth the Church-Puritan was

mainly Presbyterian under Cartwright's lead. But there was even then a

current that set toward Independency. Separatism was the outward

manifestation of this tendency, and according to Ralegh's estimate,

cited in the text, there were about twenty thousand declared

Separatists in England in 1593. After the suppression of the

presbyteries within the Church in the last years of Elizabeth, and the

crushing out of the Separatists by rigorous persecutions, questions

of the particular form of Church government fell into abeyance among

the Puritans for about forty years. "Indiscriminate anti-prelacy was

the prevailing mood of the English people," says Masson, "and the

distinction between Presbyterianism and Independency was yet caviare

to the general." Life of Milton, ii, 590. Richard Baxter, the Puritan

divine (as quoted by Masson), confesses in 1641 that until that year

he had never thought what Presbytery or Independency was, or ever

spoke with a man who seemed to know it. See also Hanbury's Memorials,

ii, 69. Writers on this period do not seem to recognize the fact that

the two views were in some rivalry among the early Puritans, and that

the theory of the independence of the local church seems to have been

at least foreshadowed in the opinions at Frankfort. But there was a

long generation in which these differences among the Puritans were

forgotten in their life-and-death conflict with the Episcopal party.

Then, as Puritanism came into power, the example of other Protestant

European countries drew England toward Presbyterianism, while the

voice of New England came from over the sea pleading for

Congregationalism.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 123.]

A letter of Sandys, afterward Archbishop of York, to Bullinger, quoted

by Marsden, Early Puritans, 57, shows that though Puritanism by 1573

had become something other than it was at Frankfort, it was still

mainly negative. Sandys writes: "New orators are rising up from among

us; foolish young men who despise authority and admit of no superior.

They are seeking the complete overthrow and uprooting of the whole of

our ecclesiastical polity; and striving to shape out for us I know not

what new platform of a church." He gives a summary under nine heads.

The assertion that each parish should have its own "presbytery" and

choose its own minister, and that the judicial laws of Moses were

binding, are the only positive ones. No authority of the magistrate in

ecclesiastical matters, no government of the Church except by

ministers, elders, and deacons, the taking away of all titles,

dignities, lands, and revenues of bishops, etc., from the Church, the

allowing of no ministers but actual pastors, the refusal of baptism to

the children of papists, fill the rest of this summary. One misses

from this skeleton the insistence on Sabbath-keeping, church-going,

"ordinances," and ascetic austerity in morals that afterward became

distinctive traits of the party.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 125.]

Augustine and other early doctors of the Church held to a

Sunday-Sabbath in the fifth century, basing it largely on grounds

that now seem mystical. Compare Coxe on Sabbath Laws and Sabbath

Duties, 284, note, and Cook's Historical and General View of

Christianity, ii, 301, cited by Coxe. The question was variously

treated during the middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas and other schoolmen

taking the prevalent modern view that the fourth commandment was

partly moral and partly ceremonial. There is a curious story, for

which I do not know the original authority, of Eustachius, Abbot of

Hay, in the thirteenth century, who on his return from the Holy Land

preached from city to city against buying and selling on Sundays and

saints' days. He had with him a copy of a document dropped from heaven

and found on the altar of St. Simon, on Mount Golgotha. This paper

threatened that if the command were disobeyed it should rain stones

and wood and hot water in the night, and, as if such showers were not

enough, wild beasts were to devour the Sabbath-breakers. That there

was a difference of opinion in that age is shown by the fact that

Roger Bacon, later in the thirteenth century, thought it worth while

to assert that Christians should work and hold fairs on Sunday, while

Saturday was the proper day for rest. He showed no document from

heaven, but, like a true philosopher of that time, the learned friar

appealed to arguments drawn from astrology. Hearne's Remains, ii, 177,

cites Mirandula. Legislation by Parliament regarding Sunday observance

was rare before the Reformation. A statute of 28 Edward III

incidentally excepts Sunday from the days on which wool may be shorn,

and one of 27 Henry VI forbids the keeping of fairs and markets on

Sundays, Good Fridays, and principal festivals except four Sundays in

harvest. In 4 Edward IV a statute was passed forbidding the sale of

shoes on Sundays and certain festivals.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 125.]

In the "Injunctions by King Edward VI," 1547, Bishop Sparrow's

Collection, edition of 1671, p. 8, there is a remarkable statement of

what may be called the Edwardean view of Sunday as distinguished from

the opinions and practice that had come down from times preceding the

Reformation: "God is more offended than pleased, more dishonoured than

honoured upon the holy-day because of idleness, pride, drunkenness,"

etc. The religious and moral duties to which the "holy-day," as it is

called, should be strictly devoted are there specified. But, true to

the position of compromise, halfwayness, and one might add paradox,

which the English Reformation took from the beginning, there is added

in the same paragraph the following: "Yet notwithstanding all Parsons,

Vicars, and Curates, shall teach and declare unto their Parishioners,

that they may with a safe and quiet conscience, in the time of

Harvest, labour upon the holy and festival days and save that thing

which God hath sent. And if for any scrupulosity, or grudge of

conscience, men should superstitiously abstain from working upon those

days, that then they should grievously offend and displease God." See

also "Thacte made for thabrogacion of certayne holy-dayes," in the

reign of Henry VIII, 1536, in the same black-letter collection, p.

167. In this act "Sabboth-day" occurs, but apparently with reference

to the Jewish Sabbath only. "Sonday" is used for Sunday.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 129.]

Dr. Bownd's Sabathum Veteris et Novi Testamenti is exceedingly rare.

There is a copy in the Prince Collection of the Boston Public Library.

It is the only one in this country, so far as I can learn. I am under

obligations in several matters to Cox's Literature of the Sabbath

Question, to the same author's Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, and to

Hessey's Bampton Lectures for 1860.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 131.]

It is Thomas Rogers, the earliest opponent of the doctrine of Greenham

and Bownd, who sees a deep-laid plot in the publication of their

books. "What the brethren wanted in strength they had in wiliness," he

says. "For while these worthies of our church were employing their

engines and forces partly in defending the present government

ecclesiastical, partly in assaulting the presbytery and new

discipline, even at that very instant the brethren ... abandoned quite

the bulwarks which they had raised and gave out were impregnable:

suffering us to beat them down, without any or very small resistance,

and yet not careless of affairs, left not the wars for all that, but

from an odd corner, and after a new fashion which we little thought of

(such was their cunning), set upon us afresh again by dispersing in

printed books (which for ten years' space before they had been in

hammering among themselves to make them complete) their Sabbath

speculations and presbyterian (that is more than kingly or popely)

directions for the observance of the Lord's Day." Preface to

Thirty-nine Articles, paragraph 20. He also says, with some wit, "They

set up a new idol, their Saint Sabbath."

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 132.]

The doctrine of a strict Sabbath appears to have made no impression in

Scotland until the seventeenth century was well advanced. In the

printed Burgh Records of Aberdeen from 1570 to 1625 there is no

sabbatarian legislation in the proper sense; but there are efforts to

compel the people to suspend buying and selling fish and flesh in the

market, the playing of outdoor games and ninepins, and the selling of

liquors during sermon time only. Take as an example the following

ordinance--as curious for its language as its subject--dated 4th

October, 1598, twenty-four years after Knox's death:

"Item, The prouest, bailleis, and counsall ratefeis and approves the

statute maid obefoir, bering that na mercatt, nather of fische nor

flesche salbe on the Sabboth day in tyme cumming, in tyme of sermone,

vnder the pane of confiscatioun of the same; and lykvayes ratefeis the

statute maid aganis the playeris in the linkis, and at the kyillis,

during the time of the sermones; ... and that na tavernar sell nor

went any wyne nor aill in tyme cumming in tyme of sermone, ather on

the Sabboth day or vlk dayes, under the pane of ane vnlaw of fourtie

s., to be vpliftit of the contravenar als oft as they be convict."

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 132.]

New England Puritanism took a position more ultra even than that of

Bownd. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, Mass., developed from some

Sermons on the Subject a work with the title, Theses Sabbaticae, or the

Doctrine of the Sabbath. After a considerable circulation in

manuscript among New England students of divinity, it was printed at

London in 1650 by request of all the elders of New England. From the

time of Augustine the prevailing theory of advocates of a

Sunday-Sabbath has been that the fourth commandment is partly moral,

partly ceremonial; but Shepard, who does not stick at small logical or

historical difficulties, will have it wholly moral, by which means he

avoids any option regarding the day. The rest of the Sabbath,

according to this authoritative New England treatise, is to be as

strict as it ever was under Jewish law, and is to be rigidly enforced

on the unwilling by parents and magistrates. In the spirit of a

thoroughpaced literalist Shepard argues through fifty pages that the

Sabbath begins in the evening. He admits that only "servile labour" is

forbidden, but he reasons that as "sports and pastimes" are ordained

"to whet on worldly labour," they therefore partake of its servile

character and are not tolerable on the Sabbath. It appears from his

preface that there were Puritans in his time who denied the sabbatical

character of Sunday and spiritualized the commandment.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

_SEPARATISM AND THE SCROOBY CHURCH._

I.

[Sidenote: Importance of the Separatists.]

To the great brotherhood of Puritans who formed a party within the

church there was added a little fringe of Separatists or "Brownists,"

as they were commonly called, who did not stop with rejecting certain

traits of the Anglican service, but spurned the church itself. Upon

these ultraists fell the merciless hand of persecution. They were

imprisoned, hanged, exiled. They were mostly humble people, and were

never numerous; but by their superior boldness in speech and writing,

by their attempts to realize actual church organizations on apostolic

models, they rendered themselves considerable if not formidable. From

this advance guard and forlorn hope of Puritanism, inured to hardship

and the battle front, came at length the little band of New England

pioneers who made a way into the wilderness over the dead bodies of

half their company. The example of these contemned Brownists led to

the Puritan settlement of New England. Their type of ecclesiastical

organization ultimately dominated the Congregationalism of New England

and the nonconformity of the mother country. For these reasons, if

for no other, Brownism, however obscure it may have been, is not a

negligible element in history.

II.

[Sidenote: Nonconformity in the Church.]

The great body of the Puritans seem to have agreed with Bishop Hall

that it was "better to swallow a ceremony than to rend a church," and

they agreed with him in regarding Separatism as criminal. They were,

indeed, too intent on reforming the Church of England to think of

leaving it. They made no scruple of defying ecclesiastical regulations

when they could, but in the moral code of that day schism was the

deadliest of sins.

[Sidenote: Scrambler, Bishop of Peterborough, to Burghley, 13th April,

1573, in Wright's Elizabeth and her Times.]

[Sidenote: Rogers's Preface to Articles. Parker Soc. ed., p. 10.]

In the early part of Elizabeth's reign, before the beginning of the

rule of Whitgift and the High Commission Courts, Puritan divines

slighted or omitted the liturgy in many parishes. This became more

common after the rise of Cartwright and the Presbyterian movement,

about 1570. For example, in the town of Overston, in 1573, there was

no divine service according to the Book of Common Prayer, "but

insteade thereof two sermons be preached" by men whom the bishop had

refused to license. The village of Whiston was also a place of Puritan

assemblage, "where it is their joye," writes the Bishop of

Peterborough, "to have manie owte of divers parishes, principallie

owte of Northampton towne and Overston aforesaid, with other townes

thereaboute, there to receive the sacramentes with preachers and

ministers to their owne liking, and contrarie to the forme prescribed

by the publique order of the realme." Thomas Rogers says, "The

brethren (for so did they style them-selves) would neither pray, nor

say service, nor baptize, nor celebrate the Lord's Supper, nor marry,

nor bury, nor do any other ecclesiastical duty according to law."

At this time some of the Puritan divines held high positions in the

church. Whittingham, who had been on the Puritan side of the quarrels

in Frankfort, and who had received only a Genevan ordination,

succeeded in holding his deanery of Durham until his death, in 1579.

In 1563 Dr. Turner was sneering at bishops as "white coats" and

"tippett gentlemen," while himself Dean of Durham.

[Sidenote: The Semi-Separatists.]

[Sidenote: Bancroft in Barlowe's Svmme and Svbstance.]

[Sidenote: Heresiography, p. 82.]

But Elizabeth after a while filled the bishoprics with men to her

liking, whose heavy hands made the lot of Puritans in the church

harder and harder. Many ministers were silenced, but there were many

who, by evasion or by straining their consciences, held their

benefices. Some Puritan clergymen, when they were to preach, preferred

"to walk in the church-yard until sermon time rather than to be

present at public prayer." Some Puritan laymen had their own way of

conforming to the church. "There is a sort of Semi-Separatist," says

Pagitt, as late as 1646, "that will heare our Sermons but not our

Common-prayers; and of these you may see every Sunday in our streets

sitting and standing about our doores; who, when Prayers are done,

rush into our Churches to hear our Sermons."

III.

[Sidenote: Causes of Separatism.]

[Sidenote: Thomas Scott in Pagitt, 80.]

[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantation, p. 8.]

The growth of Separatist churches was due to two causes. An almost

incredible reverence for the letter of the Scriptures had taken the

place of older superstitions. There was a strong tendency to revert to

the stern spirit of the Old Testament and to adopt the external forms

of the New. Religious idealists saw a striking contrast between the

discipline of the primitive and almost isolated bands of enthusiastic

believers in the apostolic time and the all-inclusive parishes of the

hierarchical state church. And in that age of externalism the

difference in organic form between the Anglican church and the little

synagogues of Christian seceders founded by Paul in the Levant weighed

heavily upon the minds of earnest people. It did not occur to them

that this primitive organization was probably brought over from the

neighboring Jewish congregations from which the converts had

withdrawn, and that there might not be any obligation to imitate it

under different skies and in a remote age. The Separatist was an

idealist. "He lives by the aire," said an opponent, "and there he

builds Castles and Churches; none on earth will please him; ... he

must finde out Sir Thomas More's Utopia, or rather Plato's Community,

and bee an Elder there." But Separatism was undoubtedly promoted by

persecution. Bradford says that the sufferings inflicted on them by

the bishops helped some of the Puritans "to see further into things by

the light of the word of God. How not only these base and beggerly

ceremonies were unlawfull, but also that the lordly and tiranous power

of the prelats ought not to be submitted unto." Drawn thus by the

letter of the biblical record, while stung by cruel oppression and

galled by the opposition of the constituted authorities to what they

deemed the truth divine, it is not strange that religious enthusiasts

began to long for societies organized like those of the apostolic age,

from which the profane should be excluded by a strict discipline.

IV.

[Sidenote: Robert Browne and Brownism.]

[Sidenote: 1581 to 1586.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

The beginning of Separatism has been commonly attributed to Robert

Browne, a contentious and able advocate of Separatist doctrines. After

a brief and erratic career as an advocate of these opinions, and after

suffering the penalty of his zeal and proving the sincerity of his

belief in thirty-two different prisons, in some of which he could not

see his hand at noonday, Browne at length began to waver--now inclined

to return to the church, now recoiling toward dissent. Worn out in

nerves by controversy and persecution, this eccentric man was so

alarmed by a solemn sentence of excommunication from a bishop, that he

repented and made peace with the English church. He accepted a

benefice, but employed a curate to preach for him. Browne lingered on

to an unhonored age, imperious and contentious, not able to live with

his wife, and held in no reverence by churchmen, while he was despised

by Separatists. He died at eighty, in Northampton jail, to which he

had been carried on a feather bed laid in a cart. The old man had been

committed to prison this thirty-third time in his life for striking a

constable who sought to collect a rate.

[Sidenote: Rise of Separatism.]

[Sidenote: Barclay's Inner Life, pp. 13, 53.]

[Sidenote: Dialogue of 1593 quo. by Waddington.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Dialogue.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

[Sidenote: Josias Nichols, The Plea for the Innocent, 1602, in

Hanbury, i. 3.]

[Sidenote: Stephen Breadwell, 1588, in Dexter, 255.]

Separatism in some form existed before Browne's zeal made it a thorn

in the side of the bishops. Something like a separation existed in

1567. In 1571 there was an independent church of which we know little

but the pastor's name. Bradford even dates independency back to the

reign of Mary. In truth, the rise of this sect, from which came the

earliest New England colony, appears to be lost in obscurity.

Significant movements are usually cradled in rustic mangers, to which

no learned magi think it worth their while to journey. The beginning

of Separatism was probably in the little conventicles held by devout

Puritans who, in the words of one of their own writers, "met together

to sing a psalm or to talk of God's word." But Browne, so far as we

know, was one of the earliest to organize independent churches, with

officers named and classified after those of the petty hierarchies of

the early Christian congregations, or rather according to such

deductions regarding them as he was able to make from the Epistles of

Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to Browne's activity, was

not founded by him. Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery

career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five years when he began

to vacillate. A great part of this time was spent in exile, much of it

in prison, and very little of it about London. But before 1587 London

seems to have been the center of the Separatists, from which they had

"sparsed their companies into severall partes of the Realme."

[Sidenote: H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, 255-257.]

It seems that their rise in London came from the devout meetings of

those who had begun to repudiate the Church of England as

antichristian. Without any officers or organization apparently, these

people, when we first get sight of them, were wont to assemble in the

summer time in the fields about London, sitting down upon a bank while

the Bible was expounded now by one and now by another of the company.

In the winter it was their custom to spend the whole Sunday together

from five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in company and paying

for it by a collection. They responded in prayer only by spontaneous

groans or sobs, much after the fashion of the early Quakers,

Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later time. If one of their

members returned to a parish assembly, they pronounced him an apostate

and solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he should repent.

V.

[Sidenote: Barrowism.]

When they began to organize themselves formally into a church the

London Separatists in their turn resorted to the apostolic epistles.

These had already been treated like the magician's bottle that is made

to yield white wine or red at pleasure. From them whatsoever form of

discipline was desired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had been

derived, and now a still different discipline was deduced, a mean

betwixt Presbyterian and Brownist theories. This is known now as

Barrowism. It was the form of church government brought by the

Pilgrims to Plymouth, and substantially that which prevailed in New

England throughout the seventeenth century.

[Illustration: The cradle of the Pilgrims.]

[Sidenote: Separatists in Amsterdam, 1593.]

The London Separatists suffered miserably from persecution. Many of

them languished and died in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their

leaders, were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated to Amsterdam,

while the rest maintained a furtive church in London. Those in

Amsterdam, having no lingering abuses of the English church to reform,

set every man's conscience to watch his neighbor's conduct. Having

seceded from the communion of the Church of England on account of

scandals, they were scandalized with the least variation from their

rigorous standard by any of their own church members, and they were

soon torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this vicariousness

of conscience. The innocent vanity of the pastor's wife who could

never forego a "toppish" hat and high-heeled shoes was the principal

stumbling-block.

Though Separatism had been almost extirpated from England by the close

of Elizabeth's reign, there remained even yet one vigorous society in

the north which was destined to exert a remarkable influence on the

course of history.

VI.

[Sidenote: The cradle of the Pilgrims.]

On the southern margin of Yorkshire the traveler alights to-day at the

station of Bawtry. It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn.

More than a mile to the southward, in Nottinghamshire, lies the

pleasant but commonplace village of Scrooby. About a mile to the north

of Bawtry is Austerfield, a hamlet of brick cottages crowded together

along the road. It has a picturesque little church built in the middle

ages, the walls of which are three feet thick. This church will seat

something more than a hundred people nowadays by the aid of a rather

modern extension. In the seventeenth century it was smaller, and there

was no ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the roof while

shuddering with cold in the grottolike interior. The country around is

level and unpicturesque.

[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, 24, 25.]

But one is here in the cradle of great religious movements. In Scrooby

and in Austerfield were born the Pilgrims who made the first

successful settlement in New England. A little to the east lies

Gainsborough, from which migrated to Holland in 1606 the saintly

Separatist John Smyth, who gave form to a great Baptist movement of

modern times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in Lincolnshire,

lies Epworth, the nest from which the Wesleys issued more than a

hundred years later to spread Methodism over the world. Religious zeal

seems to have characterized the people of this region even before the

Reformation, for the country round about Scrooby was occupied at that

time by an unusual number of religious houses.

The little Austerfield church and the old church at Scrooby are the

only picturesque or romantic elements of the environment, and on these

churches the Pilgrims turned their backs as though they had been

temples of Baal. In the single street of Austerfield the traveler

meets the cottagers of to-day, and essays to talk with them. They are

heavy and somewhat stolid, like most other rustic people in the north

country, and an accent to which their ears are not accustomed amuses

and puzzles them. No tradition of the Pilgrims lingers among them.

They have never heard that anybody ever went out of Austerfield to do

anything historical. They listen with a bovine surprise if you speak

to them of this exodus, and they refer you to the old clerk of the

parish, who will know about it. The venerable clerk is a striking

figure, not unlike that parish clerk painted by Gainsborough. This

oracle of the hamlet knows that Americans come here as on a

pilgrimage, and he tells you that one of them, a descendant of

Governor Bradford, offered a considerable sum for the disused stone

font at which Bradford the Pilgrim was baptized. But the traveler

turns away at length from the rustic folk of Austerfield and the

beer-drinkers over their mugs in the inn at Bawtry, and the villagers

at Scrooby, benumbed by that sense of utter common-placeness which is

left on the mind of a stranger by such an agricultural community. The

Pilgrims, then, concerning whom poems have been written, and in whose

honor orations without number have been made, were just common country

folk like these, trudging through wheat fields and along the muddy

clay highways of the days of Elizabeth and James. They were just such

men as these and they were not. They were such as these would be if

they were vivified by enthusiasm. We may laugh at superfluous scruples

in rustic minds, but none will smile at brave and stubborn loyalty to

an idea when it produces such steadfast courage as that of the

Pilgrims.

[Sidenote: Magnalia, Book II, chap. i, p. 2.]

And yet, when the traveler has resumed his journey, and recalls

Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield, the stolid men and gossiping

women, the narrow pursuits of the plowman and the reaper, and

remembers the flat, naked, and depressing landscape, he is beset by

the old skepticism about the coming of anything good out of Nazareth.

Nor is he helped by remembering that at the time of Bradford's

christening at the old stone font the inhabitants of Austerfield are

said to have been "a most ignorant and licentious people," and that

earlier in that same century John Leland speaks of "the meane townlet

of Scrooby."

VIII.

[Sidenote: Elder Brewster.]

But Leland's description of the village suggests the influence that

caused Scrooby and the wheat fields thereabout to send forth, in the

beginning of the seventeenth century and of a new reign, men capable

of courage and fortitude sufficient to make them memorable, and to

make these three townlets places of pilgrimage in following centuries.

[Sidenote: Itinerary, i, 36, in Hunter's Founders, p. 20.]

[Sidenote: Bradford, 410.]

[Sidenote: _Supra_, Book I, chap. ii, iii.]

[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantations, 411.]

"In the meane townlet of Scrooby, I marked two things"--it is Leland

who writes--"the parish church not big but very well builded; the

second was a great manor-place, standing within a moat, and longing to

the Archbishop of York." This large old manor-place he describes with

its outer and inner court. In this manor-place, about half a century

after Leland saw it, there lived William Brewster. He was a man of

education, who had been for a short time in residence at Cambridge; he

had served as one of the under secretaries of state for years; had

been trusted beyond all others by Secretary Davison, his patron; and,

when Elizabeth disgraced Davison, in order to avoid responsibility for

the death of Mary of Scotland, Brewster had been the one friend who

clung to the fallen secretary as long as there was opportunity to do

him service. Making no further effort to establish himself at court,

Brewster went after a while "to live in the country in good esteeme

amongst his freinds and the good gentle-men of those parts, espetially

the godly and religious." His abode after his retirement was the old

manor-place now destroyed, but then the most conspicuous building at

Scrooby. It belonged in his time to Sir Samuel Sandys, the elder

brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, whose work as the master spirit in the

later history of the Virginia Company has already been recounted. At

Scrooby Brewster succeeded his father in the office of "Post," an

office that obliged him to receive and deliver letters for a wide

district of country, to keep relays of horses for travelers by post on

the great route to the north, and to furnish inn accommodations. In

the master of the post at Scrooby we have the first of those

influences that lifted a group of people from this rustic region into

historic importance. He had been acquainted with the great world, and

had borne a responsible if not a conspicuous part in delicate

diplomatic affairs in the Netherlands. At court, as at Scrooby, he was

a Puritan, and now in his retirement his energies were devoted to the

promotion of religion. He secured earnest ministers for many of the

neighboring parishes. But that which he builded the authorities tore

down. Whitgift was archbishop, and the High Commission Courts were

proceeding against Puritans with the energy of the Spanish

Inquisition. "The godly preachers" about him were silenced. The

people who followed them were proscribed, and all the pains and

expense of Brewster and his Puritan friends in establishing religion

as they understood it were likely to be rendered futile by the

governors of the church. "He and many more of those times begane to

looke further into things," says Bradford. Persecution begot

Separatism. The theory was the result of conditions, as new theories

are wont to be.

IX.

[Sidenote: The Scrooby Church.]

[Sidenote: Magnalia, Book ii, c. i, 2.]

Here, as elsewhere, the secession appears to have begun with meetings

for devotion. By this supposition we may reconcile two dates which

have been supposed to conflict, conjecturing that in 1602, when

Brewster had lived about fifteen years in the old manor-house, his

neighbors, who did not care to attend the ministry of ignorant and

licentious priests, began to spend whole Sundays together, now in one

place and now in another, but most frequently in the old manor-house

builded within a moat, and reached by ascending a flight of stone

steps. Here, Brewster's hospitality was dispensed to them freely. They

may or may not have been members of the Separatist church at

Gainsborough, as some have supposed. It was not until 1606 that these

people formed the fully organized Separatist church of Scrooby. It was

organized after the Barrowist pattern that had originated in

London--it was after a divine pattern, according to their belief.

Brewster, the nucleus of the church, became their ruling elder.

[Sidenote: The ruling elder.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Plimoth Plantation, 408-414.]

[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders, _passim_.]

[Sidenote: Winsor's Elder William Brewster, a pamphlet.]

[Sidenote: F. B. Dexter in Narrative and Crit. Hist., iii, 257-282.]

It was in these all-day meetings at the old manor-house that the

Separatist rustics of Scrooby were molded for suffering and endeavor.

The humble, modest, and conscientious Brewster was the king-post of

the new church--the first and longest enduring of the influences that

shaped the character of these people in England, Holland, and America.

Brewster could probably have returned to the court under other

auspices after Davison's fall, but as master of the post at Scrooby,

then as a teacher and as founder of a printing office of prohibited

English books in Leyden, and finally as a settler in the wilderness,

inuring his soft hands to rude toils, until he died in his cabin an

octogenarian, he led a life strangely different from that of a

courtier. But no career possible to him at court could have been so

useful or so long remembered.

X.

[Sidenote: John Robinson.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

But Brewster was not the master spirit. About the time the Separatists

of Scrooby completed their church organization, in 1606, there came to

it John Robinson. He had been a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge,

and a beneficed clergyman of Puritan views. He, too, had been slowly

propelled to Separatist opinion by persecution. For fourteen years

before the final migration he led the Pilgrims at Scrooby and Leyden.

Wise man of affairs, he directed his people even in their hard

struggle for bread in a foreign country. He was one of the few men, in

that age of debate about husks and shells, who penetrated to those

teachings concerning character and conduct which are the vital and

imperishable elements of religion. Even when assailed most roughly in

debate he was magnanimous and forbearing. He avoided the bigotry and

bitterness of the early Brownists, and outgrew as years went on the

narrowness of rigid Separatism. He lived on the best terms with the

Dutch and French churches. He opposed rather the substantial abuses

than the ceremonies of the Church of England, and as life advanced he

came to extend a hearty fellowship and communion to good men in that

church. Had it been his lot to remain in the national church and rise,

as did his opponent, Joseph Hall, to the pedestal of a bishopric or to

other dignity, he would have been one of the most illustrious divines

of the age--wanting something of the statesmanly breadth of Hooker,

but quite outspreading and overtopping the Whitgifts, Bancrofts, and

perhaps even the Halls. Robert Baillie, who could say many hard things

against Separatists, is forced to confess that "Robinson was a man of

excellent parts, and the most learned, polished, and modest spirit

that ever separated from the Church of England"; and long after his

death the Dutch theologian Hornbeeck recalls again and again his

integrity, learning, and modesty.

Shall we say that when subjected to this great man's influence the

rustics of Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield were clowns no longer?

Perhaps we shall be truer to the probabilities of human nature if we

conclude that Robinson was able to mold a few of the best of them to

great uses, and that these became the significant digits which gave

value to the ciphers.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 146.]

The eccentricities, moral and mental, of Browne were a constant

resource of those who sought to involve all Separatists in his

disgrace. Odium has always been a more effective weapon than argument

in a theological controversy. Browne's enemies alleged that even while

on the gridiron of persecution his conduct had not been free from

moral obliquity. I have not been able to see Bernard's charges on this

score, but John Robinson, in his Justification, etc. (1610), parries

the thrust in these words: "Now as touching Browne, it is true as Mr.

B[ernard] affirmeth, that as he forsook the Lord so the Lord forsook

him in his way; ... as for the wicked things (which Mr. B. affirmeth)

_he did in the way_ it may well be as he sayeth, ... as the more like

he was to returne to his proper centre the Church of England, where he

should be sure to find companie ynough in any wickednesse." Edition of

1639, p. 50. One of the most learned accounts of Browne is to be found

in H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, the lecture on Robert Browne. It

is always easy to admire Dr. Dexter's erudition, but not so easy to

assent to his conclusions. See also Pagitt's Heresiography, p. 56 and

_passim_; Fuller's Church History, ix, vi, 1-7; and Hanbury's

Memorials, p. 18 and following.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 146.]

John Robinson, in Justification of Separation from the Church of

England, p. 50, edition of 1639, says: "It is true that Boulton was

(though not the first in that way) an elder of a Separatist church in

the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's dayes, and falling from his holy

profession recanted the same at Paul's Crosse and afterwards hung

himself as Judas did." Compare Cotton's The Way of the Congregationall

Churches Cleared, p. 4, and various intimations in Hanbury's

Memorials, which imply the existence of Independent congregations in

London and elsewhere in the early years of Elizabeth's reign. But

Hanbury's handling of the valuable material he collected with

commendable assiduity is sometimes so clumsy that the reader is

obliged to grope for facts bearing upon most important questions. One

gets from Hanbury's notes and some older publications a vague notion

that the Flemish Protestants, recently settled in England in great

numbers, exerted an influence in favor of Independency. Robert Browne

began his secession in Norwich, a place where the people from the Low

Countries were nearly half the population, and Browne was even said to

have labored among the Dutch first. Fuller, ix, sec. vi, 2.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 156.]

Robinson's character may be judged from his works. His good qualities

are very apparent in the wise and tender letters addressed to the

Pilgrims when they were leaving England and after their arrival at

Plymouth, which will be found in Bradford's Plimoth Plantations, 63,

64, 163. See Bradford's character of him, ibid., 17-19. See also

Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 473-482. Ainsworth's tribute is in

Hanbury's Memorials, 95. See also Winslow's Brief Narration in Young's

Chronicles, 379. George Sumner, in 3d Massachusetts Historical

Collections, ix, has a paper giving the result of his investigations

in Leyden. He quotes Hornbeeck as saying, twenty-eight years after

Robinson's death, that he was the best of all the exiles as well as

the most upright, learned, and most modest. Hornbeeck's words are:

"Optimus inter illos." "Vir supra reliquos probus atque eruditus."

"Doctissimi ac modestissimi omnium separatistorum."