“LORD HAVE MERCY UPON us.” Kyrie eleison. Since the early centuries of Christianity, worshippers have spoken and sung these Greek words in their liturgies. Familiar from their repetition in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, the words assumed a very different meaning when Robert Cushman tacked them on a church door.
Cushman was baptized in 1578 in the Kentish village of Rolvenden, about thirty miles southwest of Canterbury. Cushman’s father was a farmer who left each of his sons ten pounds upon his 1586 death. His mother remarried the next year, buried her second husband two years later, and married for the third time in 1593.1
When he came of age, Cushman moved to Canterbury. In 1597, he became an apprentice to a grocer named George Masters. For several centuries, grocers had belonged to guilds, which protected their right to sell spices, confections, and sometimes medicines and tobacco. Cushman’s inheritance provided the premium that persuaded Masters to engage him. In Canterbury, Masters had the exclusive right to make and sell tallow candles. “It is a nauseous greasy business,” cautioned a mid-eighteenth-century manual on apprenticeships. Still, at least in Canterbury, completing an apprenticeship meant an opportunity to become a “freeman,” someone with the right to practice a trade and participate in a community’s civic life. Cushman could look forward to a future as a respectable tradesman.2
Outside of Cushman’s christening, the deaths of his parents (his mother died in 1601), and the start of his apprenticeship, nothing is known about Cushman’s life to this point. Men like Cushman usually appear in the historical record only if they got into trouble. Cushman did so in the fall of 1603, when he and several other young men wrote and posted “libels” on the doors of Canterbury churches. Their message was simple: “Lord have mercy upon us.” The implication was that God needed to save his people from a corrupt church. A few years later, Cushman concluded that the Church of England was beyond rescue. The church-door libels were the first step that took Cushman to the Dutch Republic and then to Plymouth Colony.
Robert Cushman wasn’t alone. In 1620, most of the adult passengers on the Mayflower—at least, those who were not servants—were separatists, men and women who had rejected the Church of England. Their stories began with small acts of puritan protest that eventually led them out of church and country.
Almost a century before the Mayflower, the English Reformation had begun with a messy double divorce: that of a king from his wife, and of a church from Rome. King Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. She had failed to bear him a son, and he was in love with another woman. Pope Clement VII rebuffed the king’s request. With the support of English courts and lawmakers, Henry cast off Catherine and married Anne Boleyn. In 1534, Parliament declared Henry “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.”
The long reign of Elizabeth, who became queen in 1558 after the death of her Catholic half sister Mary, gradually made England a resolutely Protestant country. At the same time, there were large numbers of Protestants unsatisfied with the extent of reform. With more than a hint of self-righteousness, these individuals often referred to themselves as the “godly.” Their opponents derided them as “precisians” or “puritans.” “The hotter sort of Protestants are called puritans,” explained Percival Wiburn, himself a rather fiery minister. While puritans were hot about many different things, most rejected vestments (the robe, white linen surplice, and other priestly garments), the sign of the cross, and saints’ days.3 They associated such practices with the Catholic Church and contended that the Bible did not authorize them. Puritans were leery of prayer books altogether, believing that ministers should instead preach and pray according to their learning and the promptings of God’s Spirit. Many puritans, finally, favored what became known as Presbyterianism. They wanted to replace England’s bishops and church courts with an ecclesiastical government more akin to that of Geneva or Scotland, in which consistories and synods—comprised of ministers and elders—exercised discipline.
Around the turn of the seventeenth century, puritan became a common epithet in England. “A puritan,” went one of many insults, “is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.” Neighbors who wanted to enjoy church fairs or a Sunday afternoon at a tavern resented godly attempts to do away with traditional forms of merriment. Playwrights such as Ben Jonson mercilessly skewered puritans as both busybodies and hypocrites. On the page and on the stage, puritans said grace until their food was ice cold, indulged until they became fat and flatulent, and used their conventicles as cover for orgies.4
Despite their differences, nearly all Protestants remained loyal to a single national church to which all men and women belonged and whose ministers baptized all children. Puritans insisted that they had no intention of abandoning the church that had nurtured their own faith. Even if they found certain ceremonies and practices abhorrent, even as they formed their own networks of preachers and clandestine gatherings, most of the godly waited and worked for the further reformation of England’s church.
A small number of puritans, however, gave up. If other zealous reformers were the hotter sort of Protestant, separatists were the hottest. They wanted to tear down the Church of England and start from scratch. And they would not wait. Their Christian liberty hinged on their willingness to make an immediate separation.
Rooted in the writings of the Apostle Paul, the idea of liberty was central to the thought of the Protestant reformers. For Paul, Christians were freed from sin, Satan, and death not through obedience to the law but by their faith in God’s gracious gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. When certain church leaders insisted that non-Jewish men who converted to Christianity be circumcised, Paul objected. “Stand fast therefore,” he wrote, “in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1). In a very different context, Martin Luther argued that “a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” Luther maintained that a Christian needed “no works to make him righteous and save him.” Christians could not earn their salvation through scrupulous fidelity to the law or any other ecclesiastical requirements. It was God’s gift, received through faith. John Calvin fully agreed with his Wittenberg counterpart that Christian freedom was “a thing of prime necessity,” a foundation of the Protestant insistence that God justified human beings on the basis of their faith in Christ.5
For Luther and Calvin, as for Paul, Christian liberty was not an individual freedom to do what one wished. Rather, liberty undergirded the cohesion of the community. “Use not your liberty as an occasion unto the flesh,” Paul warned, “but by love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). Luther emphasized that Christians were freed precisely so that they could follow the law that had previously condemned them. “A Christian,” he wrote, “is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Freedom and subjection went hand in hand. Nor was Christian liberty the license to follow one’s personal convictions when it came to religious belief and practice. Instead, the conscience should remain—in Luther’s words—“captive to the Word of God.” Formerly bound to Satan, individuals whom God had liberated were now bound to Christ, and to the teachings of their church. As the historian Steven Ozment explains, Protestants had only “the right to dissent from Rome and to agree with Wittenberg,” or with Geneva if they followed Calvin.6
All puritans contended that the work of liberating England’s church from the yoke of Antichrist remained very incomplete. While English separatists echoed other puritans on most matters of doctrine and ceremony, they articulated some distinctive ideas about Christian liberty and they advanced them with urgency. For separatists, the idea of an inclusive, national church was a scandal. Bishops and monarchs had herded the wicked and the righteous alike into an impure institution. Separatists taught that church membership should be a voluntary act by which Christians covenanted with each other to follow the dictates of the Bible. Furthermore, once they formed their own congregations, Christians possessed the freedom to elect their own officers and to exercise church discipline. Without these liberties, Christians remained in bondage, whether to monarchs, magistrates, bishops, or synods. The Pilgrims would take this particular version of Christian liberty to New England.
Separatists had advanced these arguments for decades and had little to show for it except a stable of martyrs.7 In or around 1581, the ministers Robert Browne and Robert Harrison concluded that the Church of England was beyond reformation and formed their own independent and illegal congregation in Norwich. While Browne took pains to stress that he fully supported the queen’s civil power, he denied that she or any other political leaders held authority over the church. “To compel religion,” Browne insisted, “to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties belongeth not to them.” Christ was the church’s only king and head. As far as the queen and her bishops were concerned, this was a simple case of sedition. Browne and Harrison wisely moved with their followers to Middelburg in the Netherlands, but before their emigration, Browne had preached to groups of like-minded men and women in the Suffolk market town of Bury St. Edmunds. On the basis of a June 1583 royal proclamation, the authorities burned books written by Browne and Harrison and hanged two Bury men—a tailor and a shoemaker—who defended the condemned writings. Although Browne later returned to England and its national church, English separatists became known as “Brownists.”8
A few years later, the authorities raided a separatist congregation in London and arrested twenty-one men and women. More than a dozen separatist prisoners died in jail, but the ministers John Greenwood and Henry Barrow lived long enough to write lengthy defenses of their principles. For Greenwood and Barrow, the Bible identified the true church as “the city, house, temple, and mountain of the eternal God.” It was an enclosed vineyard or garden, an “orchard of pomegranates,” the bride of Christ, the society with which God covenanted to give his peace, love, salvation, presence, power, and protection. A properly organized congregation was something “ravishing” for Christians to behold. There was a spiritual fire at the heart of separatism, coupled with a belief that men and women could find assurance of their salvation within true churches.9
Like other separatists before them, Barrow and Greenwood taught that godly men and women should withdraw from England’s false, Antichristian church and form their own congregations in which they had the right to govern themselves. Christ’s apostles had established churches based on this principle, but the people had “neglected their duty, and gave up their Christian liberty,” first to groups of elders and then to bishops. “Christ hath given full power and liberty to all and every one of his servants,” insisted Barrow. The laity should not, indeed lawfully could not, surrender that liberty to anyone. The admission of members, the election of officers, and the exercise of discipline rested with the congregation as a whole, or at least with its adult male members.10
In April 1593, authorities hanged Barrow and Greenwood, convicted for publishing seditious writings. Two days after Barrow and Greenwood went to the gallows, Parliament passed a statute against attendance at “any unlawful assemblies, conventicles, or meetings under color or pretense of any exercise of religion, contrary to her Majesty’s said laws and statutes.” The penalty was imprisonment until offenders “shall conform and yield themselves to come to some church, chapel, or usual place of common prayer, and hear divine service.” Obstinate nonconformists risked banishment. While the law could apply to a variety of dissidents, its framers intended to use it to stamp out Brownism.11 Under the leadership of new pastor Francis Johnson, the remainder of the London separatist congregation took refuge in Amsterdam. After other groups of English separatists came to the city, members of Johnson’s congregation referred to themselves as the “Ancient Church” to distinguish themselves from more recent arrivals.
Puritans were a much-lampooned minority in late Elizabethan England, but they were a large minority with majority aspirations. By contrast, separatists were a tiny remnant, despised by conformists and puritans alike. As far as many church and government officials were concerned, separatists sought not liberty but license, a throwing off of all restraints. Even radical puritans were unstinting in their criticism of those who chose to leave the church, partly because antagonistic bishops tarred puritans with the brush of Brownism and partly because separatists accused everyone else of being in bed with Antichrist. For Catholics, separatists were the predictable fruit of Protestant schism. No one liked them. “I had as lief [rather] be a Brownist as a politician,” quips Sir Andrew in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Nonetheless, fierce persecution and nearly universal condemnation could never quite extinguish separatism. There was, after all, a thin line between the more radical expressions of puritanism and outright separatism. Those who preached against the corruption of the Church of England almost inevitably convinced a few in their midst—and sometimes themselves—that they had no choice but to separate from it.
In March 1603, Queen Elizabeth died after reigning for nearly half a century. When James VI of Scotland assumed England’s throne, puritans hurried to recruit the new king to the cause of further reformation. James, who understood his kingdoms as bastions of Reformed Protestantism, told church leaders to improve the quality of parish preaching, and he authorized what became the most influential English translation of the Bible. At the same time, the king was entirely unsympathetic to puritanism, because he associated both it and Scottish Presbyterianism with limits on royal prerogatives. Like his predecessors, James placed a supreme value on his own supremacy.
James invited several puritan ministers—moderate reformers, not radicals—to Hampton Court and promptly dismissed most of their concerns as both petty and seditious. The king bristled at any proposals that would weaken the authority of bishops, which James connected to his own power. “No bishop, no king,” he maintained. At the end of the conference’s second day, the exasperated monarch had heard enough. “If this be all … they have to say,” he warned, “I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse.” James was tickled with his performance. “I have peppered them … soundly,” he wrote a member of his Privy Council. Those who refused “the airy sign of the cross after baptism,” the king added, “should no longer have their purses stuffed.”12
Scores of ministers soon had lighter purses. In the spring of 1604, Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London, prepared a new set of canons, or church laws. Ministers would have to subscribe, to declare their heartfelt acceptance of England’s ecclesiastical government and ceremonies. The canons required them to affirm the king’s supreme spiritual authority, the Book of Common Prayer, the sign of the cross, and the surplice. A sizeable faction of the House of Commons understood Bancroft’s canons as one of several royal affronts to parliamentary liberties. While disclaiming any sort of “Puritan or Brownist spirit,” a parliamentary committee denied the king’s “absolute power” to make laws concerning the Church of England. James ratified the new canons anyway. Bancroft became archbishop of Canterbury. Ministers who refused to subscribe lost their positions, and the ecclesiastical campaign nudged a few radical puritans right out of the church. Pockets of separatism reemerged.13
One of those pockets was in Canterbury. Ecclesiastical officials regarded the church-door libels as a serious offense and sought advice from Lambeth Palace. A letter signed by Richard Bancroft instructed them to find the “lewd [wicked] seditious persons”: the makers, publishers, and “dealers” of the libels. The Court of the High Commission should imprison those responsible. If they refused to provide testimony under oath, the commissioners should jail them until their tongues loosened.14
Robert Cushman, the apprentice grocer, talked, though he avoided saying a great deal. His master’s son said more. Peter Masters testified that he had seen Cushman write one of the libels and that Cushman had given him several of them. He, Peter, had then given them to someone else to be put on the church doors. George Masters told the court that he regarded Cushman as a “lewd fellow” for getting his son involved. The court confined Cushman in the city’s Westgate prison for a night. George Masters paid a fine of twenty pounds.15
At the same time, the churchwardens of St. Andrew’s parish in Canterbury cited Cushman and another servant named Thomas Hunt for refusing to come to services. They claimed that they stayed away because they could not be “edified” in their church. Presumably their parish minister did not preach sermons, or at least he did not meet their standards. Cushman refused repeated summons from the archdeaconry court, which then excommunicated him in January 1604. He received absolution but did not perform the required public penance, and was excommunicated again later that year. In June 1605, he again asked for and received absolution. He still refused to publicly acknowledge his guilt, and the court eventually dismissed the matter.16
Cushman had received a large portion of mercy. His punishments had been light, and while George Masters must not have been pleased about the twenty-pound fine, the affair did not interrupt Cushman’s apprenticeship. He became a freeman in 1605. Cushman then married Sara Reader, a sister of two of his fellow libelers. The next year, the couple had their first child baptized in their parish church. Despite their discontents with the Church of England, the Cushmans had not yet broken from it. They grudgingly conformed.
Robert Cushman soon put his respectable future in doubt once more, this time through his association with a theologically adventurous weaver named Gilbert Gore. In 1606, Canterbury church officials accused Gore of heresy. According to the records of the case, Gore denied “the true and comfortable article of justification by faith in Christ Jesus … suggesting that a true and lively faith doth help no more in the justifying of elect sinners than, hope, love and obedience do.” Gore’s accusers charged that the weaver “set up a false Christ which should be a justifier of unbelievers while they are unbelievers.” Under considerable pressure, Gore confessed and recanted.17
Why did Gilbert Gore take issue with justification by faith, a core tenet of Protestantism? Gore wanted to emphasize that humans in no way earned their salvation. Whether Lutheran or Reformed, Protestant theologians shared this concern and described faith itself as God’s gracious gift. “The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such,” the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles maintained, “that he cannot turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good works, to faith.” Gore was unusual, though, in fully severing faith from justification. For most Protestant theologians, faith was something fundamentally different than hope, love, and obedience. Faith was the instrument by which God saved his elect. Gore disagreed. He contended that God saved the elect purely on the basis of Christ’s righteousness, which God imputed to those he had elected to save.18
In the decades ahead, a number of radical Protestants—often termed “antinomians” by historians—espoused views similar to those of Gilbert Gore. For example, in 1631 authorities in Ipswich accused several men of teaching “that all the elect were justified and made the sons of God by the work of Christ, before they have any faith to believe it.” According to historian David Como, the notion was “common currency” among London antinomians. Church officials reacted sharply against such teachings, believing that they took away any incentive for men and women to inculcate faith and righteousness. Whether they were hot or only warm Protestants, English ministers understood their task as convicting men and women of their sinfulness, thus laying the groundwork for them to come to faith in Christ’s gracious sacrifice on their behalf. What Gore taught threatened this entire system.19
Gore caused further alarm because he won others to his point of view in Canterbury and surrounding villages. His circle included a shoemaker, a blacksmith, a mercer, a hemp dresser, a tailor, several women, and Robert Cushman, who was identified to church officials by his new brother-in-law Thomas Reader. Several of those sympathetic to Gore had been involved in the 1603 libels case.20
Gore, meanwhile, promised to confess his errors in church, but when the minister began to read the liturgy, he turned his back “in the most contemptuous manner and went out of the church.” At one point, Gore fled Canterbury, then returned. He was excommunicated in 1607.21
Thomas Wilson, rector of Canterbury’s St. George the Martyr church, led the ecclesiastical response against Gore. Wilson was not an anti-puritan like Richard Bancroft. Cushman later described him as a “lover of goodness and good men,” but Wilson did not count Gore among the latter. According to Cushman’s account, Wilson caused Gore to be imprisoned for a year, threatened to burn him at the stake, and finally banished him from the city, “and all for a trivial controversy.” Wilson did not consider the matter trivial. In fact, he wrote a long dialogue on the subject of justification in which one character (Philautus, meaning a lover of himself, from 2 Timothy 3:2) articulates Gilbert Gore’s alleged heresy. For Wilson, Gore was among those “libertines and carnal gospellers, which turn the grace of God into wantonness, and think they may sin more freely the more grace doth abound.” In other words, the weaver’s doctrines encouraged licentiousness.22
Robert and Sara Cushman soon left both Canterbury and the Church of England. It is unclear exactly what pushed them from discontent into outright separatism, but it seems that Wilson’s treatment of Gilbert Gore contributed to the decision. Cushman became convinced that “it is a sequestration, and not a reformation that will heal us, help us, and give us a right church estate for to join unto.” Unable to openly pursue that “sequestration” in England, the Cushmans went to Holland.23
Other men and women from Kent followed a similar path. Around the year 1600, a Canterbury tailor named James Chilton moved his rapidly growing family to the port town of Sandwich. Nine years later, Mrs. Chilton (forename unknown) and several other Sandwich residents attended the private, nonchurch burial of a child. Church officials stated that the child was “strongly suspected not to [have] died an ordinary death,” but it is most likely that Mrs. Chilton and the others simply objected to Church of England burial customs.24
Many puritans criticized the way that the Church of England conducted baptisms, marriages, and burials. They objected to the sign of the cross at baptisms, the use of rings at weddings, and the “heathenish pomp and customs” that accompanied burials. The separatist Henry Barrow did not think burials should involve clergy or any religious ceremony at all. There should be no “pulpit orations” or the placing of linen crosses on the corpse. No “earth to earth, ashes to ashes,” words that came from the Book of Common Prayer rather than from the Bible. Church burials, Barrow alleged, were unheard of “until popery began.” Likewise, the Sandwich dissenters denounced church burials as “popish ceremonies.” Some puritan ministers agreed and omitted liturgy and other rituals from burials, but very few of even the most radical lay puritans would go so far as to bury corpses on their own. Church officials severely punished those who did so. Mrs. Chilton was excommunicated in June 1609.25
Moses Fletcher also was excommunicated for attending the private burial. Fletcher was a poor man whom the church and town helped in several ways. The church gave the Fletcher family relief money and made him a sexton; the town appointed him its beadle of vagrants. Despite the assistance, Fletcher rejected the church. He must have been quickly absolved, because he was excommunicated again a few months later, this time for burying his own daughter privately during “sermon time.” Shortly thereafter, Fletcher was excommunicated for a third and final time.26
By the end of the decade, there were an estimated thirty separatists in Sandwich, under the leadership of “professed Brownist” Richard Masterson. In Sandwich, Canterbury, and other pockets of Kent, women and men refused to attend parish services. Some left their children unbaptized. A few would not marry or bury as church and state required. Moreover, there were individuals in Kent who, like Gilbert Gore and Robert Cushman, dabbled in ideas the authorities deemed heretical. Especially in coastal ports such as Sandwich, it was easy for religious dissidents to move back and forth between England and the Low Countries. The Fletchers, the Chiltons, and Richard Masterson all moved to Leiden, joined by families from other parts of England.
Joan Ashmore was a young servant to a young gentleman. She worked as a housekeeper at Broxtowe Hall, the home of Thomas Helwys. Edmund Helwys, Thomas’s father, was a minor member of the Nottinghamshire gentry. He owned some land on which the family and its tenants raised crops and sheep, and he obtained a lease for Broxtowe Hall. When Edmund Helwys died in 1590, Thomas inherited the bulk of the estate, including the lease to Broxtowe. The younger Helwys trained as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn in London, then returned home.27
From this point forward, Thomas Helwys lurched from one controversy to another. In 1593, Helwys agreed to sell his interest in Broxtowe Hall and at least some of his farmland to Robert Beresford and Ralph Waddington. According to Beresford, the deal included his sheep and crops as well. The sale soon ran aground. Beresford alleged that Helwys had overstated the number of years remaining on his lease, that some of the land actually belonged to the parish, and that Helwys refused to honor the agreement regarding the sheep and crops. Beresford and Waddington sued. They had given Helwys an advance payment and had sold other properties in order to have the funds on hand to complete the purchase.
Beresford made additional allegations that raised eyebrows. He asserted that Helwys had deeded his property to his housekeeper Joan Ashmore, whose “evil counsel and persuasions” seduced the young gentleman. Whether Helwys was duped or duplicitous or both, Beresford amended his suit to include Joan Ashmore as well. The resolution of the case is unknown.28
At roughly the same time, Thomas Helwys faced a complaint from his own sister. Edmund Helwys had left his daughter Anne her mother’s jewels and clothes, a horse, a treasured psalm book, some furniture, and his “best cheese.” The bequest amounted to more than sixty pounds. Anne Helwys, now Anne Green, asserted that her brother had refused to either give her the items or pay her for them. Perhaps he and Joan had eaten the cheese.29
Regardless of whether he had conspired with her to shield his property, Thomas Helwys decided that he wanted Joan Ashmore as more than his housekeeper. In May 1596, churchwardens reported the couple on suspicion of fornication. The evidence was obvious. Joan was pregnant. She gave birth to a son in September.30
The truth was rather less scandalous than the accusation suggested. Thomas and Joan had married in the parish church of Bilborough. Why, then, were they accused of fornication? The most likely explanation relates to the date of their wedding. The Church of England, like the pre-Reformation church, forbade marriage at certain times of the year. One hundred and forty-four days were off-limits, to be precise. Thomas and Joan Helwys married during Advent, on December 3. “Advent marriage doth deny,” reminded a popular verse, “But Hilary [January 13] gives thee liberty.” It was not that one could not wed during Advent. One could, but one needed to purchase a license from one’s bishop. Many puritans objected to the marriage date restrictions and regarded the sale of licenses as ecclesiastical extortion.31
Because the Helwyses chose not to be extorted, ecclesiastical busybodies harassed them for years. In 1598, the churchwardens presented them again, this time “for living together, as man and wife, who are not known … to be married.” Fifteen years later, church officials were still searching for their marriage license. By that point, Thomas and Joan Helwys had long since left the Church of England.32
In the village of Scrooby, only forty miles to the north of Broxtowe Hall, a group of men and women engaged in other types of puritan nonconformity. Their leader was William Brewster, who lived in a manor house owned by the archbishop of York. Brewster had inherited his father’s position as postmaster and with it his residence in the archbishop’s house. The Great North Road, carrying mail and travelers between London and Scotland, intersected Scrooby and ran right by the manor house.33
Not content to watch the world pass through Scrooby, Brewster went out into it. After studying for a year or so at Cambridge, he became secretary to William Davison, sent by the crown to the Low Countries to negotiate English support for the Dutch Protestant fight against Spanish Catholic rule. Brewster accompanied Davison to cities such as The Hague, Flushing, and Leiden. When Davison returned from abroad, he joined the Privy Council and played a role in the transmission of the warrant that ordered the death of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth wanted to avoid responsibility for her cousin’s execution and settled on Davison as a scapegoat. He escaped serious punishment, but his career was over.34
Brewster came back to Scrooby with a great deal of knowledge about everything from foreign relations to court intrigues. Once home, though, Brewster settled down. He married. William and Mary Brewster named their children Patience, Fear, Love, and Wrestling. The names advertised the family’s puritan piety.
In 1598, the Brewsters, along with a dozen or so other adults, were reported by their parish churchwarden for “resorting to other churches in service and sermon time.” Brewster defended himself before the archdeacon’s court by saying that Scrooby shared a preacher with another parish, which he visited on alternate Sundays. It was a polite way of excusing the offense. In all likelihood, Brewster traveled more widely to listen to godly preaching. Brewster also was accused of “repeating sermons publicly in the [Scrooby] church without authority.” In Canterbury, Robert Cushman was excommunicated after suggesting that he could not receive edification in his own parish, but the Scrooby dissidents avoided severe punishment. Brewster continued to live in the archbishop’s manor house. “Gadding” about to hear sermons was a characteristically puritan habit, but it was not an especially serious act of nonconformity.35
The formation of new separatist congregations occurred when several deposed ministers intersected with these lay dissenters. John Smyth studied at Cambridge, was ordained as a minister, and then held a fellowship at Christ’s College until his 1598 marriage.36 Thereafter, Smyth gained employment in Lincoln as a lecturer, a sort of preacher-at-large for the city. Smyth was contentious, however, and he lost his position for what his opponents described vaguely as “enormous [irregular] doctrine and undue teaching of matters of religion.” Several years later, Smyth published a tract in which he expressed wariness about the use of set prayers in worship. After his dismissal in Lincoln, Smyth returned to his native Nottinghamshire village of Sturton-le-Steeple and preached irregularly there and elsewhere. A churchwarden in the nearby village of North Clifton described him in July 1603 as “a painful [painstaking] preacher of God’s word.” Perhaps too painful. With an eye to Smyth’s prior indiscretions, John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, revoked his preaching license. Smyth moved to Gainsborough, across the River Trent in Lincolnshire. The silenced minister felt the need to dispel rumors of Brownism. “I am far from the opinion of them which separate from our church,” he wrote in a 1605 tract. Not that far, it turned out.37
John Robinson was also from Sturton-le-Steeple.38 From 1598 until 1604, he was a fellow at Cambridge’s Corpus Christi College, and he preached in Norwich, including at St. Giles’s Hospital. In 1604, Robinson married Bridget White. Although details on this period of Robinson’s life are sparse, it seems that his puritan leanings prevented him from obtaining a parish. Like John Smyth, Robinson moved back to Nottinghamshire. As a shepherd without a flock, the restive minister stirred up trouble. That June, seventeen men and women were reported for skipping their own parish services to hear Robinson preach at Sturton.39
In 1605, as church authorities increased pressure on puritan ministers to conform, two other Nottinghamshire ministers lost their positions. Richard Clyfton, who had refused to wear the surplice for around fifteen years, was deposed from his position in Babworth after a hearing before the archbishop of York, Matthew Hutton. That same month, Richard Bernard was suspended as vicar at nearby Worksop.40
In 1606, Bernard, Smyth, and Thomas Helwys—and possibly John Robinson—traveled to the Coventry home of Isabel Bowes, a wealthy patroness of puritanism. Others who came to the conference included the puritan luminaries John Dod and Arthur Hildersham. Those in attendance discussed how they should respond to the fact that King James had not reformed the church in accordance with their ideals. Was the Church of England still a true church? If not, should Christians leave it and form their own churches? Most of those in attendance rejected separation, which they believed would encourage their ecclesiastical opponents and give comfort to Catholics.41
Bernard, however, was done with moderation and patience. He gathered around a hundred women and men from Worksop and surrounding parishes. They covenanted with each other and celebrated the Lord’s Supper. According to John Robinson, Bernard and his followers promised to live righteously and to keep away from “wicked or dumb [nonpreaching] ministers.”42
Smyth vacillated. He later wrote that he “doubted nine months” whether to embrace “the separation.” Perhaps because of his inner turmoil, Smyth became gravely ill. During his sickness, he stayed with Thomas and Joan Helwys, who nursed him back to health at their own expense. By then, Smyth was ready to separate, as were the Helwyses.43
At this time, William Bradford was a young man living in Austerfield, a few miles north of Scrooby. Bradford’s parents had died when he was a child. From the age of around seven, he lived with two of his uncles. The Bradfords were farmers. William probably had little formal schooling, but he was precocious and keenly interested in religious matters from an early age. Richard Clyfton befriended the orphan, and as Bradford approached adulthood he met with Brewster and the other dissidents at Scrooby.
In his history, Bradford wrote that “as the Lord’s free people,” the separatists “joined themselves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate.” They promised that they would “walk in all [God’s] ways, made known, or to be made known unto them … whatsoever it should cost them.” In this covenant, church members declared themselves both free and bound: free from ecclesiastical tyranny and human corruptions of true worship, bound to each other. With this step, they recovered their Christian liberty.
The separatists formed “two distinct bodies or churches,” partly because of the ten miles between Scrooby and Gainsborough. Smyth led the Gainsborough group. Clyfton led those who met with William Brewster at the Scrooby manor house. Thus, the Scrooby separatists used a residence owned by the archbishop of York to plot the Church of England’s demise. Robinson continued to itinerate without a license, visiting parish churches and private homes at the invitation of like-minded ministers and laypeople.44
As the Scrooby and Gainsborough separatists worked to attract others to their principles, the authorities took notice. Tobie Matthew, who became archbishop of York in April 1606, was sympathetic to puritan nonconformists but not to separatists. Matthew convinced Richard Bernard to repent of separatism and restored him to his position at Worksop. Soon after he moved back into the vicarage, Bernard wrote The Separatists Schisme, a sharp attack on his former friends. A disgusted John Smyth responded that Bernard was “as changeable as the moon.”45 Smyth and Robinson considered Bernard an apostate, akin to Robert Browne.
In September 1607, Matthew stopped in the village of Bawtry (between Brewster’s Scrooby and Bradford’s Austerfield) and preached a sermon, “Contra Brownists.” The Brownists in question apparently took this as a signal to leave. They would follow the example of other religious dissidents and go to the Low Countries where, as Bradford put it, “they heard was freedom of religion for all men.” One sizeable group went to the Lincolnshire town of Boston, on the River Witham, where they planned to board a ship that would take them into exile.46
It was illegal to leave the country without permission, even if enforcement was often loose. While many individuals moved back and forth between England and Holland, the flight of a large number of people was risky. In this case, the shipmaster betrayed them. Customs officers seized their belongings, and the authorities imprisoned a number of the men, including William Brewster. Also, officials charged fifteen men—including Brewster, Clyfton, Gervase Nevyle, and Thomas Helwys—with avoiding parish services and attending “unlawful assemblies [and] conventicles.” The charges alleged that the men were “malicious” and in “contempt” of the king. Still, the hand of the law was light. Bradford recalled that the magistrates “used them courteously, and shewed them what favor they could.”47
Bradford’s assertion that he and his fellow separatists left England because they “were hunted and persecuted on every side” and “watched night and day” is an exaggeration. Unlike the separatists inspired by Robert Browne, John Greenwood, and Henry Barrow, the Scrooby and Gainsborough separatists did not suffer severe persecution. Archbishop Matthew did not imprison Robinson, Smyth, or Clyfton. Robinson was still preaching in churches as late as March 1608.48
Still, the screws slowly tightened. Two months after his arrest in Boston, Gervase Nevyle—a Nottinghamshire gentleman—was brought before the archbishop’s High Commission. The court required individuals to swear an ex officio oath, agreeing to answer any questions, even if those answers amounted to self-incrimination. Moreover, the court was not obliged to inform individuals what crimes they were suspected of having committed. The separatist Henry Barrow had denounced the Court of High Commission as “the very throne of the beast, utterly commingling, confounding, and subverting … the whole liberty of Christians.” It symbolized the tyranny of bishops over true churches and true Christians. A number of legal thinkers also argued against the legality of the High Commission, asserting that Parliament had never empowered it to imprison defendants and that the ex officio oath trampled on the traditional English liberties enshrined in Magna Carta.49
In the presence of Archbishop Matthew, the court arraigned Nevyle as “one of the sects of Barrowists, or Brownists.” Nevyle refused to take the oath, and he enjoyed needling his interrogators. He would answer—without an oath—questions from the other commissioners, but he refused to talk with Matthew at all, “protesting very presumptuously and insolently in the presence of God against his authority (and as he termed it) his ANTICHRISTIAN HIERARCHY.” The archbishop remanded him to the prison at York Castle. Nevyle was probably fortunate that his words did not cost him more dearly.50
The archbishop’s pursuivant next pursued Brewster, who twice failed to appear in court as required. Each time, he incurred a fine of twenty pounds. Thomas and Joan Helwys also felt the archbishop’s legal pincers. In March 1608, Joan Helwys and two men were arrested, refused to take the oath, and joined Nevyle in York Castle. Joan was released, only to be reported in April—along with her husband—for having skipped church and Communion for half a year.51
The crackdown showed no sign of abating. Brewster was not wealthy enough to pay a twenty-pound fine every few months. As Bradford stated, “They could not long continue in any peaceable condition.” It was time for a second attempt to flee England.52
“It was Mr. [Thomas] Helwys,” John Robinson wrote a few years later, “who above all … furthered this passage … if any brought oars, he brought sails.” Robinson spoke metaphorically, but Helwys actually did bring oars and sails. This time, the departure point was a secluded location on the south bank of the Humber Estuary. Helwys hired a keel, a flat-bottom barge with a sail. He told its master, Henry Spencer, that he needed to transport some goods belonging to his wealthy uncle, Sir Gervase Helwys. If Spencer didn’t know it from the start, he soon figured out that his cargo would consist of men, women, and children. Helwys had him sail the keel up the River Trent to Gainsborough, where fifteen individuals—mostly women and children—climbed aboard. The keel made other stops, and soon carried around eighty persons. Spencer then steered his vessel back toward Hull, where the muddy and shallow Humber collides with tidal waters that rush in from the North Sea.53
The group spent the night of May 11 and the next morning huddled in a “sheepcote” near the small harbor of Stallingborough, where a stream emptied into the Humber. The marshy shoreline, with its many quiet inlets, was a good place to hide. Other men and women, including Thomas and Joan Helwys, traveled by land to join the group at Stallingborough.
In the mid-afternoon of May 12, a Dutch hoy arrived. The keel had become mired near the creek, so around fifteen of the men clambered into a “cockboat,” and two oarsmen rowed them to the hoy. Before the rowboat could bring a second group, a party of armed men appeared in the hills. “Sacramente,” the Dutch captain swore. His crew pulled anchor and put out the sails.54
Having been desperate to leave, the men aboard the hoy now longed to return to their wives and children. “It drew tears from their eyes,” wrote Bradford, “and anything they had they would have given to have been ashore again.”
Instead, they remained at sea for two weeks, blown to the coast of Norway and nearly sunk by a violent storm. Like the Apostle Paul aboard a ship bound for Rome, Bradford and his companions went days without seeing the sun, moon, or stars. In Bradford’s account, the sailors gave up, while the faithful men aboard the hoy pleaded with God to spare them. “Lord thou canst save,” they cried out as the seawater lashed their faces. “Upon which the ship did not only recover,” Bradford wrote, “but shortly after the violence of the storm began to abate.” The god of early seventeenth-century England was often fearsome. He punished the land with plagues. He unleashed mighty storms against the godly and ungodly. At the same time, Bradford believed that God listened to the cries of his faithful. He did not always end their afflictions, but when the storms relented, the separatists attributed it to God’s mercy.55
Of those left behind at Stallingborough, some men fled, and the troops rounded up the women and children. Helwys refused to talk. Henry Spencer and his servant testified about what they had done, but they had nothing to say about the motivation behind the undertaking. The authorities let them go. The Helwyses ignored summonses from the High Commission that summer. Gervase Nevyle and his two fellow prisoners languished in York Castle for another year. The Privy Council then banished them.56
As individuals and families gathered the means, they found passage out of England. In the Low Countries, they restored kinship and congregational ties. Others, from places such as Canterbury and Sandwich, joined them. It was the first step in the transplantation of churches that would eventually reach across the Atlantic.