Chapter II

King James' harsh crusade against dissent

Religious noncomformity--one result of the
Bible's becoming available in English--angers
a succession of British monarchs.

Had King James I, when he came from his Scottish kingdom to assume the British crown, fulfilled the ardent expectations of religious reformers in his new kingdom, the Pilgrims--and eventually the Puritans--would not have felt obliged to flee from once "Merry Olde England."

The king had been reared in the reform Presbyterian faith of Scotland, a church governed by its elders and synod and not by a hierarchy of archbishops and bishops.

Knowing that, the Pilgrims and Puritans felt a surge of hope that, after his arrival, English subjects would soon be able to live the way that they believed the Bible instructed them to live.

In Holland, the era of religious freedom had already arrived--a fact that must have been known to Brewster despite his youthfulness when he arrived there on diplomatic duties.

It was in 1576, just a decade before Brewster's trip, that William the Silent, "Father of the Dutch Republic," while leading the long struggle against both the tyranny of Phillip II of Spain and the practices of the Spanish Inquisition, got the embattled provinces of Holland to proclaim religious toleration.

But King James, who believed that he ruled his kingdoms by "divine right," was emphatically no disciple of toleration.

His concept of rule by divine right would be the curse of the Stuart kings. His inflexible adherence to autocracy above obedience to law--and the fact that he impressed his position's validity upon his royal descendants--would twice plunge the nation into civil war, lead his only surviving son to execution on the block and force his last grandson to flee the country.

As James was on his way from Scotland to London in 1603, he was presented with the Millenary Petition--so named because it was purportedly signed by 1000 Puritan clergy, though the actual number was somewhat less. The petition asked that he, as head of the English state church, institute reforms, end abuses by the bishops, and bring doctrine, ritual and clerical attire into conformity with the Bible. Thus did these dissident clergy seek to win James' attention before he came under the influence of the church hierarchy in London.

The following January, the king presided at the famous conference of Hampton Court. But he foreordained the outcome by including among the conferees the archbishop of Canterbury, several bishops, deans, archdeacons and the royal chaplain--18 in all dedicated to hierarchy in London.

King James' Presbyterian upbringing was thus of no help to the Puritan reformers. "A Scottish presbytery (church ruling body)," the king told them, "agreeth with the monarchy as god and the Devil. Then Jack and Tom, Will and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my Council and all our proceedings." And often, in his drooling manner, he would spout his longstanding philosophy that the hierarchy was the best possible bulwark for the crown, saying: "No bishop, no king."

In the presence of the king the members of the hierarchy acted in a most fawning manner. The archbishop assured him that "His Majesty spake by the special assistance of God's spirit." The bishop of London, down on his knees before the sovereign, said that "his heart melted within him with joy." No hope survived in any of this for the Puritan conferees. Lest there be any uncertainty, King James, in a final dismissal of their appeal to end abuses, announced:

"I will have one doctrine and one discipline, one religion in substance and ceremony...If this be all that they have to say, I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse. If any would not be quiet, and show his obedience, he were worthy to be hanged."

The king, a pedantic character who fancied his own pompous commentaries on matters of religious dispute, did accede to one Puritan request. Rev. John Rainolds, an expert on the Greek and Hebrew tongues and president of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge, asked King James to approve preparation of a new translation of the Bible. The following year Rev. Rainolds was named translator. And by 1611, having worked with the assistance of many other scholars, Rev. Rainolds was able to give the world one of the greatest literacy monuments of the age of Shakespeare. [It is purported that Shakespeare himself assisted in translating the Psalms.] It was named--only because of its being dedicated to the sovereign--the King James Bible.

The king's insistence at the Hampton Court conference on strictly enforcing religious conformity reflected the same course pursued by his Tudor predecessors when confronted with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation had begun in 1517, when a former Augustine monk named Martin Luther nailed to a church door at Wurtenberg, in Saxony, his 95 theses denouncing ecclesiastical abuses--a deed for which he was excommunicated by the great Renaissance Pope, Leo X.

The concern with religious matters was fully evident in Henry VIII, who denounced Luther so consummately that the Pope honored the young king as "Defender of the Faith."

The king was truly opposed to nonconformity--by anyone other than himself. He held steadfast in that position when, in a turnaround in the year 1535, he had Parliament proclaim him instead of Pope supreme head of the English church. The step followed the Pope's refusal to recognize King Henry's divorce from his Spanish queen, Katherine--a divorce the monarch sought so as to marry one of the queen's young maids of honor, Anne Boleyn.

This impasse brought the Reformation in England. Yet unlike the Reformation in the rest of western Europe--where there were fundamental changes in church ritual and dogma, which in turn led to devastating wars between the faiths--King Henry's action was more political and nationalistic than religious. Aside from eliminating the authority of the Pope the king left the English church pretty much alone, limiting his actions against it to the plundering of monasteries for the benefit of his own and his partner's purses.

Ironically, the king made an unintended contribution to the growth of nonconformity when, thinking to gain popular support, he ordered English translations of the Bible placed in every church. To the Pilgrims, the Bible--or Scripture, as they called it--was the cornerstone of theology, the "Word of God."

It was this religious conviction that provided their overwhelming motivation to emigrate to the New World--a dedication that would eventually attract others to New England, thus assuring it's enduring colonization.

TO UNDERSTAND THE PILGRIMS' DEDICATION requires some knowledge of the painful history of how the Bible--printed in their own English tongue--finally became available to them; and of how the Reformation developed in England during the reigns of the Tudor monarchs who immediately preceded James 1.

Not until shortly before the Pilgrims emerged on history's stage had the Bible been available in any language other than the Latin of the Vulgate, as translated by St. Jerome in the fourth century. The Vulgate powerfully helped to shape civilization for centuries and was the foremost book of the Middle Ages, when Latin was still the tongue of the educated classes.

As soon as the Vulgate was translated into European languages, however, it became accessible to a greater number of people. This was a development that many civil and ecclesiastical authorities--including Henry VIII in his later years--sought to suppress. Thus the lot of the Bible's translators was a far-from-peaceful one. They faced terrifying punishments: torture, the rack, denunciation as heretics, excommunication, mutilation, and burning at the stake. [The coming of the Bible translations into the local languages of the French people in Europe was a direct result of Peter de Waldo in the 1400's. This Sabbatarian Christian started the ball rolling, and the Waldensians were hunted down and killed through several Inquisitions by the Pope's of the time. Estimates of 2 million French believers died in these Inquisitions. I believe one of the pope's was named Pope Innocent.]

Punishment pursued them even in death. The first complete English translation of the Bible was made in the late fourteenth century by John Wycliffe, Oxford scholar and royal chaplain. After he died, his body was ordered exhumed and burned, with his ashes being cast into the river. And Wycliffe's translation, completed before the appearance of the printing press, was only in manuscript; as a consequence, except through the preaching of his followers, it reached comparatively few souls.

William Tyndale, who did a translation in the early part of Henry VIII's reign, had to flee London for the Continent because there was "no place in all England" safe for this Oxford scholar-reformer. He joined Luther in Wittenberg. When he published his English translation of the Bible in 1525 and sent it back to England, many copies (available because printing had arrived by then) were seized and burned. Subsequently, Henry VIII's agents tracked Tyndale down. He was tried for heresy and sent to jail, where he was strangled. His body was burned.

The Bible that Henry VIII later had distributed was called the "Great Bible" or the "Chain Bible," the latter because copies were secured by chains. It's translator, Miles Coverdale, had gone abroad and helped Tyndale with his work. The first copies of the Coverdale Bible cautiously bore neither the name of the printer nor the place of printing, but did include, diplomatically, a dedication to Henry VIII. In later years Coverdale, who did not escape imprisonment either, helped prepare the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Pilgrims favorite.

Puritanical reformers, with the Bible's depiction of church life in the days of the apostles as their model, were active in Henry VIII's reign. But it was during the reigns of King Henry's children--Edward, Mary and Elizabeth--that the Puritan faith began to attract significant numbers of adherents and to assume a growing role in the national life of England.

The reigns of King Edward and Queen Mary were short: but they were marked by episodes of religious persecution so shocking, as William Bradford observed, that the persecution of ancient times "by heathen and their emperors was not greater than [that] of the Christians one against other..."

Edward VI, only 10 years old when he succeeded his father in 1547, died at age 16 without ever actually having ruled the country. During King Edward's reign, however, his archbishop of Cantebury, Thomas Cranmer--source of the suggestion that Henry VIII renounce the Pope in order to legitimize his divorce--strongly advanced the Reformation.

Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII's dvorced first wife and herself a Catholic, reasserted the supremacy of the Pope. She also married Europe's foremost supporter of the papacy, Philip II of Spain, and sent English troops to fight in his wars against France.

During Queen Mary's imposition of the Counter Reformation in England, some of the leading reformers of King Edward's reign were charged with heresy, and many fires were kindled at the stake in Oxford.

Thus, in the fall of 1555 two former royal chaplains and bishops, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, were burned at the same time, with Latimer calmly telling Ridley, "We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in all England as I trust shall never to put out." At the beginning of the next year the Puritan Bishop John Hooper and the displaced Archbishop Cranmer, both adjudged heretics, followed one another into the flames at Oxford, swelling the gruesome toll recorded in Foxes Book of Martyrs.

Meanwhile, hundreds of reform clergy were expelled from their posts, or fled to the Reformation centers of Europe, especially to Geneva, where their Puritanism was intensified by the preaching and teaching of French reformer John Calvin.

Queen Mary became sickly and in 1558 she died, after little more than five years on the throne. Her half-sister Elizabeth's accession brought the Puritan reformers back to England. But she had a surprise--an unhappy surprise--in store for them.

As the offspring of Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn following his dispute with Rome, Queen Elizabeth did have herself made supreme head of the state church. But she had a personal taste for images, ceremonies and vestments spurned by the Puritans as not part of Scripture. Furthermore, she insisted on conformity and on the use of a Book of Common Prayer. The High Court of Commission was created by the queen as an instrument through which the bishops could enforce her royal will.

As Queen Elizabeth's reign progressed her demands for uniformity grew. Fires were kindled again for heretics at the Smithfield marketplace just outside the old walls of London. The horrors of prison and banishment accompanied the ghastly work of stake and gibbet. Absence from the state church could be punished by a devastating fine. Printing, still in rudimentary process, was muzzled--restricted to London and the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge. Moreover, nothing could be published without approval from the archbishop of Canterbury or the bishop of London.

Preaching, called "prophesying" in those days, was a hallmark of the Puritan service. It was also anathema to Queen Elizabeth. She made this emphatically clear on an Ash Wednesday visit to London's St. Paul's Cathedral. The dean turned to talking against images. Suddenly he heard a raised voice saying, "Leave that alone!" Uncertain of the source, the dean resumed until he heard the queen, absolute ruler of the realm, angrily declare to him: "To your text! Mr. Dean, to your text! Leave that; we have heard enough of that. To your subject!" And she thereupon left the cathedral.

THE QUEEN DID FACE SOMETHING MORE VITAL to her than enforcing conformity: the aggression of Spain's Philip II. He tried to win Queen Elizabeth's hand, and failing, married a French princess. Next he laid claim to Portugal. After he assumed that throne there were only two European nations between him and world domination, Holland and England.

King Philip had long fought the Dutch. His commanders in Holland, the duke of Alba, once boasted of executing 18,000 Dutch "heretics and traitors." Queen Elizabeth, though in a half-hearted way because she despised rebellious subjects, had helped the Dutch wage their battle for freedom against Philip. Thus, to the Spanish king, getting control of England seemed essential if the Dutch were to be finally subdued.

In 1585, some three years before he sent his formidable armada to attack England, the Spanish king launched a war of nerves. He began seizing all English sailors and ships in his ports. Then, rumors reached England that the world's leading power was preparing an invincible fleet.

Queen Elizabeth, aware of the rumors, had ordered the execution of Mary Queen of Scots because Mary had allegedly been conspiring to aid King Philip in his plans to invade England, and assassinate its queen. The threats against Elizabeth could have been real. King Philip had already proven his willingness to resort to assassination. In 1581, he publicly offered ennoblement and a huge bounty to anyone who would rid him of William the Silent, leader of the Dutch fight for freedom. Three years later, William was murdered in his palace-stronghold at Delft by the king's agent. And indeed, the king was preparing a long list of English statesmen to be hanged after his conquest of England. [The Germans during WWII had prepared a similar list.]

But King Philip's plans for world conquest, which eventually impoverished Spain, went awry.

In 1588, the mighty Spanish Armada--with its 130 ships, many of them towering fortresses, the biggest then on the seven seas, and its thousands of sailors and soldiers--was put to rout in the English Channel. It was as much a victim of a fierce gale and King Philip's mismanagement as of British pluck and fast maneuvering by the British seadogs. [Read "The Armada" by Mattingly.]

England expressed its jubilation in an outburst of enthusiasms: Shakespeare's theater, widespread exploration, empire-building in the New World, seafarers turned adventurers bringing riches to the British Isles.

The lives of the Puritans who would be fleeing from Scrooby less than two decades later were also heavily influenced by Queen Elizabeth's spectacular victory. For the queen, publicly idolized and feeling more secure on the throne, was now more resolute than ever in her efforts to enforce religious conformity.

Thus the Pilgrims, to who the Bible was the very cornerstone of theology, inherited a doleful legacy of civil and ecclesiastical repression.