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.