| CHAPTER III
Defying the threat of stake and scaffold
Despite the terrifying dangers facing
many,
and the martyrdom of some, England's religious rebels
insist on following the dictates of conscience.
A citation before
the bishops' Court of High Commission on Dec. 1, 1607, against
William Brewster, at a time when the Pilgrims were trying
to flee to Holland, charged him with being "disobedient in
matters of religion" and "a Brownist"--also known as a Barrowist
or Separatist.
How did it happen that such accusations arose against a prominent
resident of a remote, sparsely settled farming community of
north-central England? And what were the circumstances surrounding
these charges--circumstances so terrifying that they would
impel plain-living, peaceful farm folk to break with their
past and seek an uncertain future in a foreign land?
In later years Bradford, instructing young Pilgrims about
their forefathers' history, said that when the Pilgrims were
trying to flee Scrooby, they knew "certainly of six that were
publicly executed besides such as died in prisons."
Bradford was referring to the dreadful and tragic way the
Brownist dissenters were treated during Queen Elizabeth's
drive to enforce conformity.
The queen's instinctive aversion to all dissent makes it
readily understandable that she, as supreme head of both
church and state, would be angered by the Brownists' religious
convictions.
They believed the Bible taught that civil authority
possessed no authority over religion. This was the incipient
doctrine of separation of church and state, and to Queen
Elizabeth it constituted sedition tantamount to rebellion.
[This doctrine of Separation of church and state was a doctrine
of the Separatists, designed in order to allow church and
religious freedom to survive in a hostile political environment.
It's original intent, as you can see, was not so Christianity
and the very name of Jesus Christ could be suppressed in
our public schools and government buildings--such as is
the case in our public schools and government buildings
across America! Our Supreme Court is responsible for the
gross misinterpretation of this holy doctrine designed so
Christianity could thrive in our land.]
The Brownist movement was a precurser of the Congregational
Church that later developed in early New England.
It's beginnings were marked by pain and persecution, as illustrated
by what happened, first in the London area and later in the
Scrooby area, to those extreme Puritans who espoused the teachings
of Rev. Robert Browne.
Rev. Browne was a member of a wealthy Midlands family. His
father was a knight, and he was related to Queen Elizabeth's
closest advisor, Lord Burghley. The clergyman was trained
at Cambridge, served as chaplain to the duke of Norfolk and
taught in Southwark, on the south bank of the river Thames.
Later, he returned to Cambridge to spend more time in religious
study.
In 1580, Rev. Browne took up his reformist ministry at Norwich,
the shire town of Norfolk County and center of Puritan belief.
In fact, Norwich--with its large population of Dutch refugees,
come there to escape the persecution of Spain's Philip II--was
second only to London as a growing Puritan stronghold. Rev.
Browne had been attracted to Norwich because he had heard
that the people there were "very forward" in religion. However,
this did not spare him the official wrath of the bishop of
the area. The clergyman was jailed a few times for his nonconformity.
In 1582, at 32 years of age, he fled with his flock across
the North Sea to tolerant and friendly Middelburg in Zeeland,
the part of Holland that is nearest to England's East Anglia.
There, he did something he had been unable to do in England:
He published five books defining his faith and justifying
separation from England's state church. "Magistrates,"
he postulated, "have no ecclesiastical authority." True Christians,
he said, must separate themselves from a state church that
fails to exclude the irreligious. [This belief follows
the spiritual intent of apostle Paul's instruction to the
Corinthian church to expel a habitual sinner who was sleeping
with his mother.] Once separated, he believed, they would
achieve a "genuine and perfect church" when they "united by
a public covenant with each other and with God." Church
authority, he maintained, rests on its members' interpretation
of the Bible.
After two years in Zeeland, Rev. Browne's congregation feel
apart, victim of a lack of organization and its members' criticisms
of one another. The clergyman departed for Scotland.
A few years later, on his return to England, Rev. Browne recanted.
(His recantation was the reason the title "Brownist" carried
an extra measure of opprobrium.) He was thereupon re-admitted
to the state church and given a parish.
But his recantation was far from the end of Brownism. Indeed,
the bishops soon provided the Brownist cause with a broad
popular appeal by creating martyrs.
These included the six cited by Bradford--some of whom had
studied with Brewster at Cambridge--whose public executions
were so well known to the Pilgrims, as well as others who
died in the prisons of that harsh era.
That the Pilgrims were so keenly aware of the savage behavior
of the authorities strongly underscores how unshakable was
their resolution to ignore threatened punishment and persist
in preparations to flee from England.
The first two martyrs were common men, much like the Pilgrims.
In the heart of East Anglia is Bury St. Edmunds. There, the
two men--a shoemaker named John Copping and a tailor named
Elias Thacker--had endured seven years of being in and out
of prison for their nonconformity. Finally, after they had
been found guilty of "dispersing of Browne's books" in England,
the books were burned in front of the scaffold and the men
were hanged.
The hangings represented an irony. They were carried out close
by the old abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, where the barons of
England drew up the petition for freedoms that led to the
Magna Charta.
The bishops did not get all of Rev. Browne's books. But they
did get the Star Chamber to buttress their control of printing
by establishing, with still more dreadful penalties, new regulations
governing the licensing of presses and printing. This in turn
helped the bishops take action against two more nonconformists,
both of them noted men--Henry Barrowe, a lawyer of London's
Gray's Inn, and Rev. John Greenwood.
Barrowe, who had been a libertine as a youth, was a familiar
figure in Queen Elizabeth's court. Then in 1586, possibly
in his capacity as a lawyer, he visited Rev. Greenwood at
the Clink Prison in Southwark, and found himself suddenly
drawn to the clergyman's nonconformist teachings.
The visit brought the lawyer's prompt arrest and subsequent
imprisonment with Rev. Greenwood, where the two discussed
Rev. Browne's books. They also took to putting their views
on scraps of paper, which were smuggled to Holland for printing.
The visit brought the lawyer's prompt arrest and subsequent
imprisonment with Rev. Greenwood, where the two discussed
Rev. Browne's books. They also took to putting their views
on scraps of paper, which were smuggled to Holland for printing.
In addition, the lawyer--who did much more secret writing
than Rev. Greenwood--may have had a part in preparing seven
pamphlets attacking the hierarchy, the first of which appeared
in 1588 and titillated an England already bursting with exuberance
following the defeat of the Spanish Armada. These were the
"Martin Mar-prelate" pamphlets, ridiculing the bishops for
dishonesty and irreligion. The pamphlets served to make the
bishops even more relentless in their efforts to control printing.
Living in Middelburg, Holland, at this time was Rev. Francis
Johnson. He was, like many other key figures in the saga of
Puritanism, a graduate of, and later a tutor at Cambridge.
Rev. Johnson was a pastor of an English church in Middelburg.
There, to please the English Ambassador, he helped to track
down and burn some of the nonconformist treatises prepared
in their London prison by Barrowe and Rev. Greenwood, once
again jailed in London's Fleet Prison for holding illegal
religious gatherings.
Not long after that--in 1592--London's Separatist Ancient
Church of Southwark was formed, with Rev. Johnson as pastor
and Rev. Greenwood, momentarily free on bail, as teacher.
Associated with them, despite having a price on his head,
was Rev. John Penry, one of William Brewster's classmates
at Cambridge.
The authorities moved swiftly. Rev. Johnson and Rev. Greenwood
were arrested while conducting religious services in the Fleet
street lodgings of a London haberdasher. And soon 56 members
of the new church, while holding services in Islington just
north of London's ancient walls, were pounced upon and thrown
into one or another of London's stinking prisons: the Clink,
Fleet and Newgate.
The bishops then proceeded to secure an even stronger law
against nonconformists--an "Act to retain the Queen's subjects
in Obedience"--a law aimed directly at the Brownists and Barrowists.
Anyone over 16 years of age who for a month failed to attend
"the usual place of Common Prayer...to hear Divine Service,"
as established by her majesty's laws, said the act, or who
urged nonattendance by "printing, writing or speeches," could
be imprisoned without bail until he conformed. Moreover, such
dissidents, if not in conformity within three months, had
to leave the realm. And if they returned, they could be put
to death "as in the case of felony, without benefit of clergy."
Barrowe and Rev. Greenwood were next brought into the courtroom
of London's Old Bailey to answer charges of sedition under
the new law. Then, without time for appeal, they were hanged.
A few weeks later Brewster's classmate, Rev. Penry, charged
with printing derisive tracts, was executed on the gallows
at Southwark. And in Norfolk still another nonconformist,
the little-known William Dennis of Thetland, was hanged.
These men, then, were the six "publicly executed" that Bradford
discussed in later years while recounting the shocking perils
the Pilgrims had had to face. Bradford's nephew and secretary,
Nathaniel Morton, in his preface to Bradford's remarks, said
that the cause for which the six perished "was in effect but
what our church and the churches of Christ in New England
do both profess and practice."
Although the number of believers who perished in the ghastly
prisons of those times must have been very large, most of
Rev. Johnson's flock ultimately managed to escape to Holland's
biggest community, Amsterdam. There, in 1597, they were joined
by the clergyman himself, after he had spent additional years
in prison and had endured futile official efforts to deport
him to the New World. Thus the martyrs' Ancient Church of
Southwark was renewed in Amsterdam.
Holland as a possible land of refuge had recurringly been
brought to the attention of the Pilgrims. It was a land already
known to their leader, Brewster. And successive condemnations
of Separatist martyrs during the growth of the Scrooby congregation
had increasingly directed Pilgrim attention to that country
across the North Sea.
At that time, the Pilgrims' pastor, Rev. Richard Clyfton,
was about 54 years old; and their teacher, Rev. John Robinson,
who would later gain renown as "Pastor of the Pilgrims," was
31. Rev. Clyfton, said Bradford--in his only physical description
of a Pilgrim--was a "grave and fatherly old man...having a
great white beard."
Like the Brownist leaders of London, Brewster and the clergymen
involved in the Scrooby area had been ousted or had resigned
from their earlier positions. All three had access to the
illegally printed books of Rev. Browne and Barrowe; all three
had been trained at Cambridge University.
Rev. Clyfton, 13 years Brewster's senior, had become rector
in the hamlet of Babworth, eight miles south of Scrooby, in
1586, two years before the Spanish Armada sailed. He was,
said William Bradford, "a grave and reverend preacher, who,
by his pains and diligence had done much good; and, under
God, had been the means of the conversion of many."
Bradford knew this at firsthand, for
Rev. Clyfton was his teacher. Bradford, as a teenager, had
tramped more than 10 miles, in part along the Great North
Road, to listen to him preach. These trips were from Austerfield,
a hamlet just north of Scrooby where Bradford was born into
a large, prosperous farm family in 1589.
Bradford was only 16 months old when his father died. His
mother remarried, and then, at age 4, Bradford was committed
to the care of his grandfather. By the time Bradford was 7
his grandfather and mother were both dead, and his uncles,
yeomen farmers, took over his care.
When he was 11, Bradford was stricken ill. This kept him from
farm chores and left ample time for this natural scholar to
read the Bible. Soon he was taking those long Sunday walks
along the "Pilgrim Path" to Babworth in order to hear Rev.
Clyfton.
The farming folk of Austerfield for the most part attended
the small, ancient, Norman style church of St. Helena--still
to be seen--where Bradford was baptized. When Bradford became
convinced that he should give up attendance at the church,
he was faced with "the wrath of his uncles," and the "scoff
of his neighbors now turned upon him as one of the Puritans..."
His response shows that Bradford shared the stout resolve
of the early Pilgrims:
"I am not only willing to part with everything in this world
for this cause but I am also thankful that God hath given
me a heart so to do; and will accept me so to suffer for him."
In time, Rev. Clyfton became one of the "good preachers" that
Brewster invited to Scrooby Manor. It's uncertain when the
clergyman gave up his rectorship at Babworth, but he could
well have been at the manor with the orphaned Bradford, taking
part in services and discussions with Brewster, his generous
host. This was some time in the fall of 1606, when Scrooby
Pilgrims "joined themselves by a covenant of the Lord...to
walk in all His ways made known."
His own account, observed Bradford in later years, would show
that this complete separation "cost them something," not just
in a money sense but in their patient suffering as well.
The other dismissed clergyman joining the Scrooby covenant,
Rev. John Robinson, had begun his ministry near Norwich (where
Rev. Browne had preached) in 1600. In 1604, after King James'
crackdown began, Rev. Robinson's nonconformity was no longer
endurable to his bishop and the clergyman was dismissed. (One
crushing consequence of King James' conference at Hampton
Court was that some 300 clergymen all over England were either
deprived of their livings, or else felt compelled to quit
them for conscience' sake.)
Rev. Robinson's wife came of a well-off family in a hamlet
near Gainsborough, a large community on the river Trent in
Lincolnshire, some 10 miles east of Scrooby. The clergyman
withdrew there from Norwich and pursued his religious studies.
The search for the truth, he said, was in his "heart as a
burning fire shut up in my bones."
For a time, the Scrooby nonconformists walked to Gainsborough
to hear the preaching of Rev. John Smyth in the hall of Gainsborough's
ancient manor--a place where Henry VIII once held court after
a stay at Scrooby Manor. (Bradford, who had often heard Rev.
Smyth, said that the clergyman was a "man of able gifts and
a good preacher.")
While Rev. Smyth was a student at Cambridge University, he
had been tutored by Rev. Francis Johnson, before that nonconformist's
fiery preaching led to his being forced out of the university.
Rev. Smyth, after preaching for a time in Lincoln, was plagued
by religious doubts and gave up his pulpit in the state church.
Instead, he gathered a Separatist flock together for worship
in the hall of the old manor in Gainsborough.
In time, the "distance of place" between Gainsborough Manor
and the homes of some of the worshippers, said Bradford, led
to the Gainsborough flock's splitting into "two distinct bodies."
This occurred in 1606, when Scrooby Pilgrims decided to make
their own covenant. Presently, Rev. Smyth and the remainder
of his flock fled from Gainsborough to Holland and formed
the second exiled English church in Amsterdam.
The Scrooby Pilgrims, with hope in England denied them, were
next to flee to Holland.
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