CHAPTER SIX

Royal Policies, Local Alternatives

JAMES I WAS THE FIRST truly British monarch. When he succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603 and added England, Wales, and Ireland to his native Scotland, the hopeful and the admiring outnumbered the detractors, for the godly knew that in 1592 he had endorsed presbyterianism in Scotland and, more recently, had disparaged Catholicism and Dutch Arminianism.1 Their hopes aroused, a small group of English activists initiated a petition the king received as he made his way to London. The “Millenary Petition,” so named because of the assertion it was endorsed by a thousand ministers, complained of pluralism and nonresidency, singled out bishops as pluralists although otherwise saying nothing about episcopacy, and called for higher standards in admitting men to the work of ministry. It also urged the king to relax the rule about wearing the surplice, ensure that neither women nor men could baptize infants in private, and reform the process of excommunication. As well, the petition recommended “that examination may go before the communion” and a sermon precede it. The most explicitly political request was that no minister be “suspended, silenced, disgraced, [or] imprisoned for men’s traditions.”2

The Millenary Petition signaled the persistence of Puritan sympathies in England despite the damage done to the movement in the 1590s. Locally and in Parliaments of the early seventeenth century, laypeople continued to demand a better quality of minister and defend the practice of nonconformity. The “classis movement” so dear to John Field had vanished, but not an uneasiness with the Book of Common Prayer. Behind the self-professed moderation of the petitioners—we are “neither . . . factious men affecting a popular parity in the Church, nor . . . schismatics, aiming at the dissolution of the state ecclesiastical”—lay forceful complaints about aspects of worship and discipline deemed “simply evill and such as cannot be yielded to without sinne.” In a follow-up petition the king received in late 1605, a group of ministers in the diocese of Lincoln echoed what had been said in the 1560s and 1570s about abolishing “idolatry and superstition.” For this group as for Cartwright’s generation, the second commandment made it imperative to eliminate “not only all Idols but also all the ceremonys & instruments of idolatry,” to the point of “root[ing] out the very memory of them.” Kings as well as leaders of the state church were responsible for sustaining divine law and at fault if it was ignored; in the words of the petition, no monarch could “appoint to the Church, what rites and orders he thinks good, but he is bound to serve them in those rules, which God . . . hath presented.” In another gesture to the past, the petitioners cited Reformed churches on the Continent as exemplary in “both the doctrine and discipline, as it was delivered by our Saviour Christ, and his holy Apostells.”3

Would James acknowledge this argument and undo the compromises of the Elizabethan Settlement? This seemed unlikely given the breakdown in his relationship with the Melvillian party in Scotland. Looking around him from the perspective of London, James realized that each of his three kingdoms (the third being Ireland) had its own version of Protestantism. Scotland’s national church was the outlier, made so by a weak version of episcopacy, the feistiness of the General Assembly, and the persistence of Genevan-style worship. Relishing the royal supremacy he inherited once he arrived in London, James contemplated changes in the kirk that would align it more closely with the Church of England. During his reign as James I and James VI, he went partway down this road, leaving it to Charles I, who came to the throne in 1625, to complete the project of imposing Church of England–style Protestantism on Scotland and Ireland.

It was not to be. When and why this project failed and what happened in the aftermath of its collapse are questions that inform this and the next two chapters (7 and 8). Here, in chapter 6, the story begins with the king’s attempts to bring a measure of peace to the Church of England—peace on his terms, yet a peace that encompassed the less aggressive wing of the Puritan movement. On the other hand, the politics of religion in Scotland darkened once the king decided to alter the pattern of worship practiced by the state church and to do so by royal fiat. After Charles I assumed the throne, he abandoned any pretense of moderation and pursued a program of uniformity aimed at disrupting the connections between British Protestantism and the Reformed international. Suddenly, much more was at stake than the surplice or a few ceremonies.

“All’s well,” declares the captain of the ship of state. James could say these words with conviction a decade or more into his reign as monarch of three countries. “All’s well,” declares a captain unaware of how the ship of state is endangered by his piloting. Charles was that kind of king, someone whose policies contradicted the unspoken rules that enabled uniformity to co-exist with nonconformity.4 By the close of 1640, his version of uniformity was collapsing, overturned in Scotland by a popular uprising and about to be thwarted in England by a new Parliament that met in November 1640. Beforehand, thousands of the godly had voted against Charles’s policies by moving to the New World, some to the Caribbean and the Chesapeake and many others to the region known as New England. The story of these decades begins with what James wanted. Thereafter, this chapter touches on the religious situation in Ireland before turning back to England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, where the British presence in the early seventeenth century encompassed refugee ministers and laypeople, some of them Separatists, some of them not. The story of his son’s program, the insurgency in Scotland, and the exodus to New England follows in chapter 7.

The Royal Program

James arrived in London in 1603 hoping to unite the kingdoms of Scotland and England, a goal he failed to achieve. He also wanted to align the Church of Scotland with the Church of England, a project that would require the consent of the Scottish bishops and a general assembly. This too he failed to achieve.5 Singular to England was a third goal, the taming of nonconformity. Here, James could count on the support of Richard Bancroft, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1604. Bancroft agreed with James that the church should crack down on religious extremists and especially “Puritans,” the name James had used in Basilikon Doron for those in Scotland who challenged his authority over the church and used again in his speech (March 1604) to the first of his English Parliaments. Extrapolating from his experiences in the 1590s, the king believed he could rally most of the clergy in England to his side—and, for that matter, most English Catholics—once he made clear the benefits of conforming. In a proclamation of July 1604, he “admonish[ed]” the clergy in the state church to conform. To Protestants, he reiterated the disdain for “Puritanes and Novelists” he had voiced in 1598; now as in the past, he regarded them as “ever discontented with the present government, & impatient to suffer any superiority, which maketh their sect unable to be suffred in any wel governed Commonwealth.” To Catholics, he offered the assurance that he was not an “enemie” to Rome, but only to its “corruption.” By his own description he was someone “free from persecution, or thralling of my Subiects in matters of Conscience,” meaning, he would let private belief alone. At its most expansive, this politics prompted an invitation to the Pope in Rome to discuss the possibility of reunifying a divided Christendom.6

James also realized that unity among Protestants in England would mean doing more to eliminate “unlearned, un-preaching, scandalous ministers (to quote a Puritan-sponsored petition of 1604). He spoke sympathetically of the financial plight of the clergy and, to the surprise of the leaders of the state church, acknowledged the “many seeming zealous” who questioned some aspects of the Book of Common Prayer. But in October 1603, James endorsed episcopacy as the form of church government most “agreeable to God’s word, and near to the condition of the primitive church.” Hoping to win over the moderate wing of the Puritan movement or, as he put it, willing to listen to those who regarded “some things amiss in ecclesiastical matters,” he invited several of the bishops and four men he regarded as Puritans to meet with him at the royal palace of Hampton Court. There, in January 1604, he declared that his goals were to “settle an uniforme order through the whole Church,” encourage unity, and “amend abuses,” adding that, for “kings to take the first course for the establishing of the church, both in doctrine and policy” was “according to the example of all Christian princes.”7

Except for Laurence Chaderton, the long-time master of Emmanuel College, the three others speaking on behalf of reform were sympathetic to conformity.8 The most vocal was John Rainolds, the master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Aware of the stirrings of Arminianism at Oxford (see chap. 4), he proposed that the Thirty-Nine Articles expand to include the Lambeth Articles of 1595 and that the government suppress “popish opinion,” a code word for the anti-Calvinism that worried him. This proposal went nowhere, as did Rainolds’s objections to kneeling to receive the Eucharist and the sign of the cross in the service of baptism. Nor did James welcome the suggestion that bishops be required to associate themselves with “a Presbiterie of . . . pastors and Ministers of the Churche,” a possibility the king ridiculed; in his words, it “as well agreeth with a Monarchy, as God and the Divell.” On the other hand, he agreed to ask the bishops to improve the workings of the ecclesiastical courts and recommended a few minor corrections in worship, ordering, for example, that private baptisms come under the jurisdiction of clergy. Possibly because he disliked some of the marginal annotations in the Geneva Bible, he welcomed the proposal that the state church undertake a fresh translation of the Bible and spoke of doing more to protect the Sunday Sabbath, but spurned the suggestion that ministers not be required to acknowledge the Book of Common Prayer. A little later, he met with thirty-two ministers of “Puritan” inclinations to hear their concerns about the shortage of well-educated clergy. Afterwards, he urged the bishops to do more by way of planting ministers in unserved regions of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Otherwise, the Hampton Court conference reaffirmed the practices and policies of the state church.9

James had a high view of monarchy and its role in the workings of the state church. In the aftermath of Hampton Court, he cited the “supreme power resting” in his office to preserve the church and pledged to use that “authority” to subdue the “authors of divisions and sects.” Think better of disobeying me, he advised those who had a “zeal of reformation.” In statements to the English Parliament as well as in what he wrote about kingship, he declared that monarchs acquired their authority directly from God, who empowered them to rule both church and state. Never comfortable with Parliament in Scotland or, after 1603, with what its counterpart in England saw as its due in the political process, he advised his son to “hold no Parliaments, but for necessitie of new Lawes, which would be but seldome.” Seldom is the right word, for James did without a new Parliament in England for almost seven years (1614–21) and told the Parliaments of 1610 and 1614 he could impose the subsidies he needed to finance his government.10

Thanks to the nature of the Elizabethan Settlement, James was liberated from the two-kingdoms model of church and state and the principle of minis-terial parity so dear to the Scottish reformers. During the Hampton Court conference, he insisted that parity was incompatible with kingship. “If once you were out,” he reportedly said to the bishops, “and they [i.e., extremist presbyterians] in place, I knowe what would become of my Supremacie. No bishop, no king.” When he was told that the campaign against nonconformists was undermining the spiritual well-being of thousands of people, he “most bitterly inveyed against the puritans” and reminded the Privy Council that “his mother and he from their cradles had bene haunted with a puritan diviell.” Spurning every plea that he ease the punishing of nonconformists, he equated their repudiation of “things indifferent” with a repudiation of his own authority. Such men were no better than “troublesome spirits” or “seditious schismatics.” On the other hand, his appreciation of episcopacy led him to appoint seven bishops to the Privy Council (Elizabeth had appointed only one), and support the Court of High Commission against its common-law critics.11

Perhaps out of deference to James’s professed moderation in affairs of religion, the Parliaments that met infrequently during the early years of his reign limited themselves to questioning the government’s handling of nonconformity, pluralism, nonresidency, and Catholic recusancy. Bills to minimize the impact of the canons of 1604 (see below), which the House of Commons was denouncing as late as 1610, never made their way through the House of Lords. Nor did others aimed at tightening the restrictions on Catholics and protecting the Sunday Sabbath. As had happened during the reign of Elizabeth I, the House of Commons continued to assert a voice in matters of foreign policy and insist on its own privileges, especially freedom of speech. Even though no one introduced bills as daring as those Job Throckmorton had endorsed in the mid-1580s, the king’s pleas for additional revenue were usually deflected, in part because, in the words of a member of the House of Commons in 1614, “If the King may impose by his absolute power then no man [is] certain what he has, for it shall be subject to the King’s pleasure.” In a foretaste of tensions during the reign of Charles, the Parliament of 1610 censored a legal theorist who asserted the king’s supremacy over Parliament.12

Catholics as well as nonconformists could be dangerous, a possibility underscored by a plot in 1605 to blow up the building in which Parliament was about to meet, with James present. Five years later, he was dismayed when a radical Catholic assassinated Henry IV of France, another king who was attempting to ease interconfessional tensions. Yet at neither moment did James endorse the virulent anti-Catholicism favored by some within the House of Commons. He included a Catholic aristocrat among his principal counselors and, in foreign policy, ended the long-standing state of war with Spain (1604–5). Once the Thirty Years War (1618–48) began, he was reluctant to provide soldiers and money to any of the Protestant regimes on the Continent, a policy that irritated many in the House of Commons. Diplomacy was preferable to warfare—the one an inexpensive means of keeping the peace; the other, costly and frustrating.13

Meanwhile, James was supporting a fresh campaign against ministers who continued to avoid some of the ceremonies or refused to wear the surplice. At the earliest Convocation of the new regime (1604), the bishops secured the passage of 141 canons (rules) covering worship, organization, and the behavior of the clergy. The great majority of these rules repeated or were based on existing canons and “advertisements.” Some were mildly reformist in attempting, yet again, to curtail the practices of nonresidency and pluralism. Canon 82, which required “prophesyings” to be licensed by a bishop, indirectly authorized the practice. Several justified the rituals and ceremonies singled out in the Millenary Petition, characterizing them as cleansed of “popish superstition.” A dozen concerned the errors of Separatism. Others required lecturers to wear the surplice and administer the Eucharist twice a year. From Archbishop Bancroft’s point of view, the most important was the thirty-sixth. Based on the Advertisements John Whitgift had issued in 1583, it required clergy to subscribe—that is, to formally acknowledge—the Thirty-Nine Articles, the authority of the monarch in religious affairs, and the validity of the Book of Common Prayer. Anyone who refused to do so was threatened with the penalty of deprivation. Another canon (the second) provided for the excommunication of anyone who questioned the royal supremacy, and the sixth dismissed any argument from conscience against this rule. Within the Convocation, one of the bishops warned that conscience remained an issue for some clergy. Others supported the suggestion that the Convocation acknowledge a limited version of nonconformity. But for Bancroft and James, the time had come to pressure nonconformists to fall in line.14

When the deadline (November 30, 1604) arrived to subscribe and conform, the main response had been a raft of petitions emphasizing the unfortunate consequences of depriving godly ministers and urging something akin to toleration for nonconformity.15 Thereafter, each bishop became responsible for pursuing everyone who defied the canons. Several did so, but when enforcement petered out by 1606, no more than eighty ministers had been deprived. Patronage and local foot-dragging tempered any rigor, as did a long-standing reluctance on the part of some bishops to dismiss the more effective preachers and lecturers in their dioceses. In the northern province of Yorkshire, to which the canons did not apply and where well-trained ministers were in short supply, Matthew Hutton, the archbishop until 1606, did almost nothing to end nonconformity; in his estimation, “Puritans” could be tolerated because “they agree with us in the substance of religion; and . . . love his Majestie.” Or, enforcement faltered because clergy who were temporarily suspended or deprived moved to other dioceses or parishes. Tellingly, some subscribed without intending to conform, or said they would conform but never subscribed.16 In the long run, the canons may have had some real consequences, for subscription to number 36 was required of every new minister in the church. Even so, “moderate” nonconformity remained alive and well, sustained by its patrons and endorsed by many in the House of Commons.

The new canons were irrelevant to the Church of Ireland. Here, in the third of James’s kingdoms, the state church was fragile and its leadership preoccupied with the menace of Catholicism. A reformation imposed during the reign of Henry VIII, a coercive, top-down “political” reformation of the kind Henry had initiated in England, never gained much of a footing among the bulk of the country’s population, the Gaelic-speaking Irish who clung to their traditional faith. So, for the most part, did the Anglo-Irish or “Old English,” whose ancestors had arrived in the country in the twelfth century.17 Expectations that either group would gradually tilt toward Protestantism were thwarted by a religious identity of deep social and political significance. Moreover, the Catholic presence was being reinforced at the turn of the century by missionary priests and an apparatus of bishops and dioceses. Among the Protestant “New English” who arrived as colonists in the sixteenth century, the “godly” were few and far between, a situation that helps to explain the ineffective Protestantism of the clergy, many of them (before 1590) with a background as priests or as members of a family system that included Catholics. From the standpoint of the authorities in London, the remedy was to dispatch more English clergy to Ireland, the downside being the inability of these men to preach in Gaelic. Primers and other basic books in that language were also few and far between.

Only in Dublin, where military officers, merchants, and administrators gathered, did Protestantism acquire much of a presence. Here, the government established Trinity College (1592), the first Protestant college in the country, for the purpose of fashioning a suitable, that is, zealously anti-Catholic, clergy. After William Temple (d. 1627) became provost in 1609, he allowed the college fellows to ignore the surplice. Out of necessity, church leaders continued to recruit ministers from England and Scotland, which is why, after Walter Travers was forced out of his position at the Inns of Court in London, he turned up in Dublin as Provost of Trinity College (1594–98).18

A massive uprising against English rule that erupted in 1595 became a watershed in Irish social, political, and religious history. After it was suppressed and the power of the leading Irish clans severely curtailed, James and his advisors changed course and adopted a policy of creating “plantations” colonized by Protestants drawn from Scotland and England. Soon, these enterprises were attracting thousands of Scots to the region known as Ulster. With the Scots came theological and cultural presbyterianism and ministers who had been formed within that system, the likes of John Ridge, John Livingston, and Robert Blair. Once they arrived, these men encountered fellow Scots who held office as bishops and possibly bent the rules for the newcomers—for example, allowing Blair to preserve the Scottish tradition of receiving the Eucharist seated at a table and Scottish congregations to dispense with set prayers. As well, several of the ministers became involved in sacramental feasts of unusual intensity. To describe the Church of Ireland as leavened with a Puritan spirit may be going too far, but as Charles I and the advocates of a distinctly anti-puritan program would discover in the mid-1630s, many of the newcomers and some of the bishops sympathized with Reformed orthodoxy and put evangelism ahead of conformity.19

Another difference between London-based and local policies concerned Catholicism. The resolute anti-Catholicism of the bishops and especially of James Ussher, who in 1625 became Primate (Archbishop) of the Church of Ireland, put them at odds with the more irenic approach of James and Charles I. In response to James’s attempts to promote the “Spanish match” (Charles marrying a Spanish princess) and its political corollary, an alliance with Catholic Spain, Ussher reiterated the argument that Catholicism bore the mark of the beast. Suspecting that a marriage treaty with the Spanish government would require the government in London to relax the civil penalties imposed on English and Irish Catholics, Ussher insisted that no Catholic could be trusted. “If true religion is already established according to Gods word,” one of Ussher’s colleagues remarked about this time, toleration was unacceptable. When Charles I began to bargain with the local Irish in 1626, the country’s bishops responded by denouncing Catholicism as “superstitious and idolatrous” and any “toleration” of them as a “grievous sin.”20

These sympathies help to explain why, in 1615, the state church created its own articles of theology, a step akin to a declaration of independence—necessarily incomplete—from the Church of England. Who drafted the Articles remains uncertain, although traditionally they are ascribed to Ussher. A well-informed student of early Christianity, his projects included A Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British (1622; expanded in 1631), a highly political interpretation of Irish church history keyed to Ussher’s discovery of Protestant-like practices and doctrines in the earliest years of Irish Christianity, a phase of history that, John Foxe–like, he described as giving way to “corruptions . . . creep[ing] in little by little.” Within court circles in London, it was murmured that he was a “puritan,” perhaps because he was close to ministers such as Ezekiel Culverwell, Richard Sibbes, John Preston (who turned down an appointment as professor of theology at Trinity), and Samuel Ward of Cambridge, or perhaps because he favored Reformed orthodoxy as defined by the Lambeth Articles.21

Ussher really was a “committed anti-Arminian” who made sure that the Irish Articles incorporated the Lambeth Articles virtually word for word. Unlike the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Irish affirmed the perseverance of the saints and their assurance of salvation. On the other hand, the Irish eliminated the argument that baptism was a “sign of regeneration.” Except for references to the pope, who in article 80 was described as the Antichrist, nothing was said about the form of church government aside from the general rule (carried over from article 20 of the Thirty Nine Articles) that no church on earth could “ordaine anything that is contrary to Gods word.” It may be significant that article 36 of the English creed, which specified the role of bishops in ordaining ministers, was omitted and that article 68 recognized as true the “many” churches in which “the word of God is taught” and the sacraments properly administered, a nod in the direction of the Reformed international. In 1631, at a moment when the leadership of the Church of England was disparaging Reformed orthodoxy, Ussher defended the continuities between “the religion professed” by the earliest Christians in Ireland and the creed as “now by public authority maintained” (i.e., the Irish Articles), his way of criticizing the policies of Charles I and William Laud.22

The “Old Non-Conformity”

Canons and the pressure to conform aside, the situation of the godly in early seventeenth-century England seemed promising. More towns were implementing programs of civic godliness, and more people were buying (and presumably reading) printed sermon series and manuals of devotion linked to the practical divinity. Arthur Dent’s Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven and the layman Michael Sparks’s Crumbs of Comfort, the valley of tears, and the Hill of Joy (1623) were steady sellers before 1640, and the “remarkable popularity” of books by the ambiguously Puritan William Perkins was demonstrated in what the university press at Cambridge was publishing. By the 1620s, new writers were emerging alongside older favorites—Robert Bolton for one, John Preston for another.” And, although not specifically the doing of godly writers, editions of the psalms and other parts of the Bible remained popular.23

The thickening presence of godly books and their readers suggests that something akin to a “Puritan” culture had come into being, a culture centered on certain practices and a strong sense among the godly of being different.24 Both figured in the identity of Richard Baxter’s father. In the Shropshire town where Baxter was born in 1615, the people who shouted “puritan” at his father did so because, on Sundays, they were making merry in the streets while he remained indoors reading his Bible. As the high-status Robert Harley indicated in a “Character” of the Puritan he wrote in 1621/22, he and his wife were aware of being different because they combined “discretion with zeal” or picked their way between speaking truth about “idolatry” and subservience to the king. The Harleys teetered on the edge of nonconformity in how they worshipped, but like many others in the early seventeenth century, they focused their religious politics on the plight of Protestants on the Continent, where Catholic forces were gaining ground, and on the situation of English Protestants who were being denied the presence of an evangelical clergy.25

In the years after 1610, people such as the Harleys were also participating in a broader culture they shared with most of their fellow Protestants. Anti-popery was a case in point. Featured in yearly celebrations of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, the rhetoric of anti-popery lay at the heart of English popular Protestantism, winding its way through the lore of portents and surfacing whenever someone complained about the menacing presence of lay Catholics and their priests.26 This worldview was on the upswing in the 1620s in response to Catholic victories in the early stages of the Thirty Years War, one of these the battle of White Mountain (1620) in Bohemia—a defeat experienced with special intensity in England because of its consequences for the king’s son-in-law Frederick, the Elector Palatine, who had accepted the crown of that country but was quickly driven out by Habsburg troops and subsequently driven from the Palatinate.27 As narrative or rhetoric, anti-popery depended on the premise of unending warfare between the Antichrist (understood as the papacy) and the saints—an unusual version of conflict, because the Antichrist was relying on deception and deceit as weapons in a campaign to dismantle a Protestant monarchy and Protestant state church.

As had been true since the middle of the sixteenth century, anti-popery aligned the contemporary situation of Protestants with the struggle against idolatry in ancient Israel, the Babylonian captivity of the children of Israel, and the apocalyptic scenario of the suffering few who fled into the wilderness, Babylon being to Israel what the papacy was to Protestants in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Merely to utter the word “Babylon” or “Beast” or “tyranny” was to evoke the scenario of the end times when true religion would face one more moment of immense struggle. As understood by most English Protestants, this struggle was alarming because the Antichrist was using deception to wend its way into the very heart of state and church. That enemies were not far off but working within the system precipitated spasms of anxiety about who was scheming to betray true religion.28

This anxiety explains the exuberant celebrations that broke out in late 1623 when news arrived of the failure of the “Spanish match.” Ever since rumors of the king’s intentions (1617) began to spread, a sense of alarm dogged his government, and feelings hardened once it was learned that, in his negotiations with the Spanish government, James had been asked to cancel or suspend the laws against Catholics in England as part of a marriage contract. Hoping to forestall this project, Thomas Scott, a former royal chaplain, denounced the marriage in an anonymous pamphlet purporting to reveal the Spanish side of the story—bribes being offered to courtiers close to James alongside other attempts to influence the government. The moderate bishop Joseph Hall was almost as outspoken in a sermon he preached at the opening of the 1624 Con-vocation. Urging the government to “destroy this . . . Monster (Popery, I meane),” he asked James and his advisors to halt their censuring of “puritans.” For Hall, James Ussher, and Archbishop George Abbott, anti-popery signaled the “fundamental agreement” of Puritans and conformists on the Protestant identity of the British state churches.29

Agreement on anti-popery was seconded by agreement on matters of doctrine. Here, the good news was that James I wanted to sustain the connections between the Church of England and the Reformed international. Right doctrine mattered to the king, so much so that he intervened personally to condemn the theological speculations of a Dutch theologian and dispatched a delegation to the Synod of Dordt (1618–19). The good news included his naming of George Abbott (d. 1633) to succeed Bancroft. Abbott and his brother Robert, a fellow bishop who taught at Oxford, were known for being robustly anti-Catholic and supporters of Reformed orthodoxy.30 Some of the bishops James was appointing were critical of that system. Nonetheless, Laurence Chaderton remained the master of Emmanuel College until his death in 1625, Samuel Ward continued to preside over Sidney Sussex until the 1640s, Richard Sibbes, who subscribed to the canons of 1604 after hesitating for a moment, became master of Katharine Hall, Cambridge in 1626, and Preston succeeded Chaderton in 1626.31 Preston’s career was telling. The intellectual flair he displayed in an academic exercise attended by the king gained him the backing of a “Puritan faction” within the aristocracy. Subsequently, he acquired a patron in the Duke of Buckingham, an alliance that led to Preston’s appointment as one of the chaplains to the king’s son Charles and, via an intricate politics, to his post at Emmanuel. All the while, he enjoyed strong connections with bishops such as Ussher as well as with nonconformists such as John Dod.32

When these features move to the center of early Stuart Protestantism, the godly seem much less singular. Yet singular they remained to some of their enemies, who painted them as cranky, hypocritical, and seditious. Not this rhetoric but the practices and values known as “voluntary religion” had a special importance to the godly. The prophesyings that irritated Elizabeth I vanished, but in the late sixteenth century something similar came into being, an exercise known as “lectures by combination,” a weekly or monthly lecture preached by ministers who held regular positions in the state church. Common in market towns in southeastern England and a frequent event in Yorkshire during the years (1606–1628) when Tobie Matthews was Archbishop of the Northern Province, lectures by combination (or “exercises”) emerged as a means of training apprentice ministers and promoting evangelical Protestantism. Worried by the practice, Bancroft and the makers of the canons of 1604 ordered local bishops to regulate these events. Yet they continued to thrive among the godly.33

Another aspect of voluntary religion was the clerical post known as a lectureship. Never uniquely Puritan, it came into being as a means of providing evangelical preachers for towns or parishes without them (see chap. 4). More specific to the godly were other examples of voluntary religion. As Nehemiah Wallington sometimes did in London, like-minded people would travel to another parish to hear the afternoon sermon on Sundays. Other lay Puritans were gathering together in private meetings, a practice noted again and again in the testimonies of laypeople in 1630s new-world Cambridge. In a handful of places laypeople and ministers formed covenanted communities, one of them the doing of Richard Rogers (of Seven Treatises fame), who gathered together those in his parish who “as far exceed the common sort of them that profess the Gospel, as the common professors do exceed them in religion which know not the Gospel.” Some of these temporary communities were akin to a halfway house between conformity and Separatism.34

Always, of course, the godly were associating with each other via an informal sociability of the kind enjoyed by Wallington, the schoolmaster-clergyman Thomas Dugard, and the sometime attorney Robert Woodford. Never much of a traveler outside his own London parish, Wallington participated in a community fashioned around the transmission of news by printed and handwritten letters. Thanks to these, he knew what was happening in faraway New England and not-so-distant Scotland. Advising a correspondent to get “acquainted with those that they call puritans,” he also relied on attending services in other parishes to sustain his sense of fellowship. Dugard, who departed Cambridge for Warwick and a job as master of a local school in 1633, inherited connections with the godly from his family and formed others during his student years at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, a “puritan” college. In his new county, Dugard became close to ministers who shared his understanding of good religion. Dining with Lord Brooke, the principal aristocrat of the region, he met political figures such as John Pym and Richard Knightly, the latter an important patron of nonconforming ministers and, like Pym, a persistent voice in Parliaments of the 1620s on behalf of Reformed-style religion. Thanks to his own services as a supply preacher and willing critic or editor of his friends’ manuscripts, Dugard enjoyed a robust social life virtually untouched by campaigns against nonconformity. In Woodford’s Northampton, the interval between Sunday services became a moment for sociability among ministers and “substantial townsmen” he supplemented by participating in weekday meetings at which “God’s people” shared sermon notes and spiritual counsel. In Northampton as in London and elsewhere, godliness flourished in households, special Sunday services, and informal politics of the kind that involved Lord Brooke.35

Regarding circumstances and ceremonies: had the Puritan movement really weaned itself from Cartwright-style objections to episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer? Abbott was confident it had, a confidence based on the waning of agitation about the bishops and the royal supremacy. He may also have sensed that the sectarian phase of the movement was in retreat. Other evidence supports this reading of the situation: the posthumous reputation of that quintessential moderate William Perkins, Preston’s career within the state church, and the numerous ministers and laypeople who, although privately identifying themselves as “puritans,” wanted nothing to do with the “seditious” Separatists.36 Circumstances such as these have prompted historians of early Stuart Britain to attribute the intensity of religious politics in the 1620s and 1630s not to the heirs of Cartwright and Field but to a radicalized “Anglicanism” fashioned by a small group of bishops and theologians (see chap. 7).

Any reckoning with the temper of the Puritan movement circa 1620 must include what was being said about this period some two decades later. In the mid-1640s, the Puritan wing of English Protestantism experienced a time of crisis when any pretense of unity gave way to factions—Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents, and others—each claiming to represent a perfect reformation (see chap. 8). To moderates, the years before 1640 became a nostalgic alternative to the confusion unfolding around them, an alternative that deserved its own name: the “good old non-conformity,” the “old conformity,” or the “old Puritanism.” This terminology took for granted that the movement had abandoned Separatist-style disdain for the state church and become more accommodating—or better, a movement centered on evangelism and moral reform rather than on contesting the structure of the state church or the royal supremacy.37

The poster child for the old nonconformity may have been Chaderton, the long-serving master of Emmanuel College. In the context of the Hampton Court conference, Chaderton reiterated one premise of this perspective, the importance of pastoral ministry, reasoning in a private note that “We may and ought to use them [the ceremonies] to purchase and procure liberty by preaching the Gospel.”38 With Elizabeth I in mind, the master of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, Samuel Ward, reminded himself in 1597 of this and related arguments as the reasons why he should make peace with the state church, the presence of “notes” that characterized the true church and the enduring Protestantism of the country’s monarch: “the not considering of the great benefites we enjoy under the raigne of ouir Soveraigne, as also here in the University, having the word truly preached and the Sacramentes duely administered.” Walter Bedell, an evangelical bishop in the Church of Ireland who questioned the legitimacy of the surplice, agreed with Ward. Writing him in 1604, Bedell endorsed a policy of “swallow[ing] all inexpediences” so long as “nothing impious be required at our hands.” Bedell also endorsed the “authority of the magistrate” to sustain “canonical obedience.” The aging Walter Travers added his voice to this chorus. Now, instead of criticizing the Book of Common Prayer, he endorsed it as adequately apostolic, doing so in response to Catholic-inflected arguments on behalf of the intercession of the saints as well as to Separatist-style assertions of free-form prayer.39

Chaderton’s friend John Davenport was also negotiating his way through the thickets of religious politics with a certain ease. Davenport drew on the principle of things indifferent in his response (1624) to someone who confronted him about the practice of kneeling to receive the sacrament, the same year in which the vestry of St. Stephens, London, elected him vicar of the church—and, as he pointed out to an aristocratic patron, the votes in his favor were not from “a puritannicall faction.” In his previous post, Davenport had worn the surplice, administered the Eucharist only to those who knelt, and used the Book of Common Prayer “as is appointed by the church.” For him “puritanical” signified being “opposite to the present government,” whereas he had “perswaded many to Conformity.” When the Scottish radical Alexander Leighton (see chap. 7) challenged Davenport to acknowledge that kneeling to receive the sacrament was a practice initiated by the Antichrist, he retorted that the ceremony was not an “essentiall part of Worshi[i]p” and therefore could be “Commanded by Authoritye.” Simultaneously, Davenport was supporting political initiatives that were “puritan” in a broad sense of the term: joining with several other ministers in 1627 in an appeal for donations to provide “reliefe” for refugees from the Palatinate, editing the sermons of Preston after his death in 1628, serving as one of the Feoffees for Impropriations (see chap. 4), and becoming a member of the Massachusetts Bay Company. To these activities he added a plea on behalf of unity among the godly at a moment when state church and kingdom were threatened by “Atheisme, Libertinisme, papisme, and Arminianisme.”40

Davenport’s practice was in keeping with the “old Puritanism.” So was the understanding of ministry promoted by Nicholas Byfield, the devotional writer of such importance to Archibald Johnston. Byfield was willing to speak out against rulers who willfully interfered in religious affairs, but he preferred to emphasize the principle of things indifferent and its practical consequences as defined by the government. In his own ministry, Byfield seems to have spurned nonconformity.41 Voices such as his and Joseph Hall’s weighed on a great many of the men who took up the work of ministry after 1610.

Despite its merits, this commitment to ministry as a means of moral reform and broad-based evangelicalism was dogged by the persistence of objections to the “ceremonies” and high claims for the authority of “conscience.” Chaderton’s fuller reflections on conformity are a case in point. At the close of the Hampton Court conference, he joined the other three Puritan delegates in agreeing “to bee quiet and obedient, now that they knew it to be the Kinges mind, to have it so.” Being quiet and obedient had immediate implications for the college he headed. Its fellows had never worn the surplice during services in the college chapel. Now, with the college master having agreed to accept the rules of the state church, they were told to conform, a requirement Chaderton defended by citing the concept of things indifferent that a Christian magistrate (the king) had endorsed. Weighing the alternatives, he concluded that conformity was better than nonconformity if it kept a valuable minister from being deprived. Alongside these private reflections, however, he added others in which he rejected episcopacy as “no ministrie ordayned by christ” and assailed the sign of the cross in the service of baptism as an “abuse” without warrant in Scripture. Moreover, he wanted local churches to have an important role in the naming of their ministers. Even more telling of his doubts about the state church were his strong words about conscience. Again, he reminded himself in private that no royal command “reacheth . . . to conscience.” Reflections of this kind tilted Chaderton closer to a more emphatic Puritanism defined by its strong objections to the liturgy, the surplice, and episcopacy.42

Conscience was an issue that would not die, its tenderness among the godly kept alive by the imperative (voiced in the First Book of Discipline) that nothing can be “imposed upon the consciences of men, without the expressed commandment of God’s word,” Perkins’s observation that “a subjection of conscience to mens laws, I deny,” and the high-minded protests preserved in A Parte of a Register and the Book of Martyrs. Near the end of the sixteenth century, the tug of war between compromise and conscience had been dramatized in the person of Arthur Hildersham after he was confronted about his nonconformity. Hildersham admitted that he found himself “between two straights [straits],” one of them to “seeke” the approval of his bishop, the other, to “speake plainlie and flatlie.” Pondering these alternatives, he concluded that he must listen to what was “inward . . . whereof God is [the] onely . . . witness,” that is, the workings of his conscience: “I would use some ceremonies, and stay from speaking against some abuses,” he reported, but only “so farre forth as I might not hurte my conscience, or give offence to others.” Aware of how the government was representing nonconformity as “sedition,” Hildersham protested that he was a “loyall subject to the Prince,” adding, however, a citation to Calvin’s assertion that human laws cannot overrule the teachings of conscience. The price he paid for these life rules was high, to be deprived or suspended for long periods of time. Yet he never chose the path of Separatism and, when clergy sought his counsel, may have urged them to remain within the state church.43

A good many young men heeded this advice, but only after tuning out what a handful of the godly were saying about the evils of the state church. For these holdouts, the surplice was most definitely not a thing indifferent and subscription or conformity impossible to accept, given the idolatry that clung to the English liturgy. The premise of three books by William Bradshaw—English Puritanism (1605), A Treatise of the Nature and Use of Things Indifferent (1605), and A Treatise of Divine Worship, seeking to prove the Ceremonies, imposed on the Ministers of the Gospel . . . are in their use unlawful (Amsterdam, 1604)—was the regulative principle, which Greenham had also invoked. For Bradshaw, conscience would not allow him to “subscribe to any thing but to the worde of God, and things manifestlie gathered out of the worde of God.” Nothing with a Catholic past met that test, since any mingling of “the Beast” and true Christianity ended up favoring the Antichrist. Bradshaw implied that godly ministers who came too close to the “Beast” would alienate their parishioners.44 Robert Parker made the same point in An scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in ceremonies: especially in the signe of the crosse (Middleburg, 1607), a pedantic defense of nonconformity no matter what the cost; the alternative, to wear the surplice and practice the sign of the cross, was to side with the devil. William Ames, who joined his friend Parker in the Netherlands after being forced out of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1609, reiterated these objections to “unlawful” ceremonies or practices—the surplice, the sign of the cross in the liturgy of baptism, kneeling to receive the Eucharist—in tracts published in the 1620s and early 1630s. In a preface to Ames’s posthumous A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies in Gods Worship ([Amsterdam], 1633), Thomas Hooker, a former lecturer and nonconformist, rejected out of hand any defense of the ceremonies as matters “indifferent” on the grounds that “no worship . . . is legitimate unless it has God as its author and ordainer.” The real import of conscience was its God-given authority: “he alone is Lord of the conscience.” To these principles Hooker added harsh words about “temporizing” among the would-be godly, or what he characterized as “wink[ing] at the sins of men . . . though with reluctance of conscience.”45

Henry Jacob agreed. One of the organizers of the Millenary Petition and, for other reasons, arrested and imprisoned for nonconformity, Jacob told the bishop of London in or around 1605 that he was not a “schismatic” but merely someone who listened to his conscience: “We have consciences desirous to serve God,” he declared, adding that it pointed him back to the Word as the source of truth and, behind the Word, to Christ, the “sole teacher in all matters of the Church.” Otherwise, corruption would ensue, a corruption visible in the “Ecclesiasticall Traditions or inventions of men” that plagued the Church of England. Radicals such as John Row in Scotland were of the same mind. In Row’s opinion, only those clergy with “sleeping, senseless, seared consciences” put up with the changes James I was introducing in Scotland after 1606, since anyone with a “tender” conscience would regard Catholic-tilting practices as too great a “burden” to bear. Men of this way of thinking were also evoking the imperative of communal edification. Like Cartwright and Travers before them, they believed that a state church burdened with unlawful practices would never be able to edify British Protestants.46

This back- and-forth about conformity and conscience was very real to would-be ministers in the Church of England. John Reyner was one of these young men, a Cambridge graduate appointed to a lectureship circa 1627. Worrying about the right course of action, he shared his anxieties with the veteran minister John Cotton. The sticking point for Reyner was whether he should perform any of the “ceremonies.” Outlining his dilemma, he spoke of wanting to rely on the Bible: “I must search the Scripture for a Ground of doing or refusing them.” He worried that this process would leave him unsettled. “I enter this way with a trembling foote,” he added, asking in the final sentence of his letter that Cotton pray for him. Within the same period (1627–28), Charles Chauncy, an older man who left the comfortable setting of Cambridge University for a parish post, was sharing a similar dilemma with Cotton. Unhappy with some aspects of worship, Chauncy wanted to know if he should accept the canons of 1604 or hold out against them. More letters of this kind reached Cotton, one of them from a Dutch minister who came to London in 1629 to care for a congregation of his countrymen. Realizing that he would be asked to accept the canons, he wrote of being “troubled much” about the contradiction between an oath of this kind and the Third Commandment. Are we “bound in Conscience” not to take such an oath, he asked?47

The man on the receiving end of these letters was no stranger to these questions. Staying on as a fellow of a Cambridge college after finishing his studies, Cotton became a candidate for the post of rector of the town church in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1612. As sometimes happened elsewhere, the town council found itself at an impasse until the mayor broke a deadlock by voting for Cotton. In the aftermath of his ordination at the hands of the local bishop, he presented himself as someone capable of bringing peace to a divided town and parish. In sermons, he lamented “the heat of fallinge out among the brethren” and counseled the more radical to forgo “Offensive carriage.” Prefacing a book by Hildersham, he dismissed Separatism as sinful, an opinion he juxtaposed with the principle that “good Kings” must sustain “the purity of Religion.”48

Even so, unity in Boston remained elusive. Several years after Cotton arrived in the town, a group of zealous townspeople removed the statue of St. Botolph that adorned the spire of the town church. Adding insult to injury, some of them also defaced the iconography of the two maces that town officials carried in processions. Investigators came from London, a conforming minister arrived to restore peace, the church wardens were questioned, and Cotton was called before his bishop, who suspended him for a year (mid-1621 to mid-1622) for nonconformity. In his role as peacemaker Robert Sanderson rebuked both sides, the “popishly-affected . . . that make it their sport upon their Ale-benches to rail and scoff at Puritans; as if it were warrant enough to . . . talk bawdy, swear and stare, or do anything without control, because forsooth they are no Puritans,” and the godly for being too “scrupulous,” as instanced by the practice of “appropriating to themselves the names of Brethren, Professors, Good men. . . as differences betwixt them and those they call Formalists.” Was it not fair to call such people “Puritans,” he asked, given their claim to “have a Brotherhood . . . of their own, freer and purer from Superstition and Idolatry, than others have”?49

The reverberations of this question for Cotton were both personal and professional. At some point in his ministry (the exact date is not known), he encouraged a group of the townspeople to meet on their own while also attending regular services. Meanwhile, he was avoiding some aspects of the liturgy, which explains why he was suspended in 1619 and why John Preston asked James Ussher if Cotton could resume his ministry in Ireland. Earlier, too (1614), he preached about ministry in a way that offended his diocesan bishop.50 Facing the possibility of being suspended anew, Cotton wrote an evasive letter in September 1622 to the bishop-to-be of Lincolnshire, John Williams. Employing the voice of a moderate, Cotton cited his “support” for the Thirty-Nine Articles and his reverence for “all authority, whether ecclesiastical, or civil, or both united in our common head, the most serene prince James.” Adding a dig at Separatism, he backtracked; for the moment he could not “embrace “the ceremonies” with “a confident . . . spirit”—some of the ceremonies, however, not all of them, without saying which ones he rejected. In trouble a little later (January 1625), he described himself as confused about the relationship between conformity and conscience, specifying the requirement that people kneel to receive the Eucharist as something he found hard to accept—as it happened, the same rule that was arousing bitter conflict within the Church of Scotland. Using “doubt” as his shield, Cotton begged Williams for more time to explore the reasons for administering the sacrament in this manner: “I see by often Experience, the shallownesse of mine owne Iudgement.”51

The bishop was forgiving, so much so that Cotton remained the town minister, although he may have delegated the liturgical aspects of each Sunday’s service to a curate. Some twenty years later, accused by a Scottish Presbyterian of having conformed, he denied having done so. Passing by the question of whether he had conformed or not, his effusive professions of loyalty and a self-representation as humble or inadequately informed expose the disarray he was feeling. Could a tender conscience be placated by these evasions, and could bishops, kings, and local conformists find them plausible? In the 1620s, it seemed possible to answer these two questions with a muted yes. A case in point was the lecturer Hugh Peter’s “subscription” in 1627. Called to account in 1626 by the bishop of London for remarks he made about the Catholic wife of Charles I and her “idolatry,” Peter was asked if he “diligently” conformed to the ceremonies, accepted the office of bishop, and would “subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer.” He agreed to do so, although tempering the significance of his “yes” by adding that he would gladly practice whatever in the Book of Common Prayer was “agreeable unto the Word of God.” This was conformity by evasion or outward show, a strategy coinciding with the now-you-see it-now-you-don’t nonconformity that some bishops and local officials were willing to overlook. Others, too, were parties to that strategy—in Cotton’s Boston the church wardens, who refused to report the irregularities they were witnessing, and elsewhere, gentry such as Robert Harley who, in his home parish, protected a rector from being punished for ignoring the surplice and the sign of the cross.52

These case histories complicate the argument for Puritanism as a culture, but not if we allow that term to encompass a recurrent tension between conformity and lawfulness or conscience. To conform was to participate in ceremonies or practices tagged as corrupt or idolatrous, but to heed the demands of conscience was likely to end in schism, which Calvin and the Scottish Puritans had never sanctioned. Between these two extremes, as it were, a spectrum emerged that was framed, at one end, by the daring nonconformity of Henry Jacob (see sec. 3 of this chapter) and, at the other, by the conservatism of John Davenant, who combined Reformed orthodoxy and anti-popery with a willingness to acknowledge a tempered version of episcopacy. Or, a middle ground existed where people such as Davenport, Chaderton, and the Harleys situated themselves, a space also occupied by Stephen Marshall, a minister in the strongly Puritan town of Braintree, Essex, who conformed “some times but not always.”53

As is true of any such middle ground, theirs was precarious. For the moment, it seemed invulnerable to the tirades of Ames, Hooker, and Parker against the ceremonies, but as the career of John Cotton would quickly demonstrate—in 1632–33, he renounced the “old non-conformity” (see chap. 7)—the assumptions on which it rested were about to be overturned by a party of bishops the king was beginning to support. It was also James who reshaped the term “moderate” into a synonym for anti-puritanism. In letters prefacing the Bible of 1611, which the translators dedicated to him, he was extolled for preserving the Church of England from “self-conceited brethren, who run their owne ways” and engage in “bitter censures, and uncharitable imputations,” that is, preserving the state church from those who deserved the epithet of Puritan. In a second preface addressed to the book’s readers, the translators situated the book between Catholics and the “scrupulosity of the Puritanes” who insert “Congregation in stead of Church” in their versions of Scripture. Here, in as in James’s own pronouncements, moderation excluded any serious critique of the state church or royal policies.54

This was not the case in Scotland, however, where James I’s interventions in the life of the state church were arousing a new generation of “fiery and turbulent spirits.”

James I and the Church of Scotland

Two circumstances shaped the religious history of Scotland between 1603 and 1638: the ambition of two British kings to align worship and structure in the Church of Scotland with worship and structure in the Church of England, and the mobilizing of resistance to this program. The king who had praised the kirk in 1592 changed his tune once he began to rule all of Britain. Now it was the Church of England that James VI and I admired and the Church of Scotland that needed amending. For the moment, James revealed his larger program in bits and pieces, professing all the while that he intended no “innovations.” As soon as he departed for London, however, several of the synods in Scotland began to worry about the implications of uniting England and Scotland. For them, the immediate remedy was a special meeting of the General Assembly to sit alongside the session of Parliament (1604) as it debated this possibility. The more daring of the ministers and laypeople wanted such a meeting even if the king said no. Within Parliament itself, a motion was made that the commissioners sent to London to discuss the project of unification preserve “the estate of religion, both of doctrine and discipline” in Scotland.

Once in England, James used various excuses to postpone the General Assembly of 1604 even though he had agreed in 1602 to having annual assemblies; unusually, no assembly had met in 1603. In the short run, he brushed aside the argument that an assembly was needed to advise the Scottish Parliament about the project of unification and, in early 1605, he delayed the next assembly to 1606. When word reached him in June 1605 that, without his consent, delegates from fourteen presbyteries had agreed to meet in Aberdeen, he told the Scottish Privy Council to command them to desist. Holding fast to the principle that general assemblies could decide on their own to convene, the men who gathered in Aberdeen elected a moderator and adjourned sine die, that is, as though intending to reconvene at some future moment. James was not amused. Orders went out to arrest and put on trial for treason several of the more prominent ministers who attended; afterwards, most were banished from Scotland or “warded” to distant parishes.55

Hoping to overcome the recalcitrance of Andrew and James Melville, who attended the Aberdeen assembly, James summoned them and a handful of other ministers to London in 1606, the year in which a new General Assembly reluctantly agreed to re-create something akin to a pre-Reformation version of episcopacy, with bishops returned to their place in Parliament. Parliament followed suit by approving the restoration of bishops with “all their ancient and accustomed honors,” noting in the preface to this act that the king was “absolute prince, judge, and governor over all persons, estates, and causes, both spiritual and temporal.” Anticipating a decision of this kind, the two Melvilles and some thirty other ministers had submitted a “Protestation” centered on the theme of “darkness” descending anew upon the state church, or the reemergence of the Antichrist in the person of the new bishops.56 In London, the king held all the cards, to the point of requiring the two Melvilles and their colleagues to listen to various bishops lecture them on the merits of episcopacy. The price of holding their ground, as Andrew and James did, was never to live in Scotland again; Andrew returned to France after being confined for several years in the Tower of London, and James retired to an English town near the Scottish border, where he died in 1614.57 Another outcome of the protest associated with Aberdeen was a fresh determination on James’s part to forgo annual meetings of the General Assembly, a policy repeated by Charles I. Between 1603 and 1618 it met only six times, and thereafter not until 1638, when it defied the royal supremacy to do so.

The king’s project in 1606 was straightforward: to resolve the ambiguous situation of the Scottish episcopacy and curtail the autonomy of the General Assembly. As he remarked in A Premonition to all Most Mightie Monarches, Kings, Free Princes, and States of Christendome (1609) a text directed mainly against Catholic political theory, he was “ever an enemie to the confused Anaarchie or paritie of the Puritanes,” adding that, in Scotland, he had been “persecuted by Puritans there, not only from my birth onely, but even since foure monthes before my birth.” Separately, he insisted that bishops be recognized as “perpetual moderators” of local synods, a step that eliminated the practice of electing a moderator each time a synod met. Soon he was insisting that bishops also preside over the General Assembly. For him, episcopacy was valuable not only in and of itself but also as a means of buttressing his own claims to authority. Hence the phrase he used in 1604, “no bishop, no king,” and his assertion that presbyterianism “can not agree with a Monarchie.”58

The more James invested his kingship in altering the structure of the state church and, before long, in changing its mode of worship, the more he relied on political tactics at odds with customary practice: ending annual general assemblies, enabling members of the nobility to attend them as voting members even though they had not been selected as such by a presbytery, intervening in the workings of Parliament and political society, appointing bishops to the Council of State and, in 1609, creating a Court of High Commission (similar to the court established in England in 1584) for handling breaches of ecclesiastical law. Tensions persisted within the General Assembly of 1609, but without serious consequences for the king’s program, to which James attached a pleasing show of anti-Catholicism. A year later, he arranged for three of the Scottish bishops to be consecrated by bishops in the Church of England. Parliament having authorized an oath in 1612 requiring ministers in the church to affirm that “the only lawful supreme governor of this realm, as well in matters spiritual and ecclesiastical as in things temporal,” was the king, James could safely ignore the Golden Acts of 1592 and the Second Book of Discipline. Now he had a church with real bishops whose office descended from the early church—real on paper, but still not quite the same as their English counterparts, for most of these men were mindful of anti-Catholic sentiment among the Scottish people. A telling sign of the bishops’ anxieties on this score was Archbishop John Spottiswood’s decision to dress in Scottish fashion when he was in London to attend the coronation of Charles I. For the moment, the Scottish bishops also remained faithful to Reformed orthodoxy and, in their everyday administration of the church, relied on the apparatus of synods and presbyteries.59

After several years of inactivity, James began to unveil the changes in worship he would pursue for another decade and Charles I would impose in the 1630s. As both kings would discover, worship mattered far more to Scottish Protestants than whether their church had bishops or a presbyterian structure. Why true worship, Catholicism, and idolatry remained so closely associated had much to do with what Knox had said in the 1560s about the mass, a message reiterated in the Negative Confession of 1581, which railed against the “bastard sacraments” and “ceremonies” of the “Roman Antichrist.” At that moment in Scottish history, the young king and the political and religious leadership had pledged to resist a Catholicism stigmatized as mere “idolatry and superstition.” Now, however, a king bent on uniformity with England was asking that the Book of Common Order give way to a new “Liturgie . . . and Form of divine Service” aligned in some manner with the Book of Common Prayer.60

The steps James took in this direction included a royal proclamation (1614) ordering clergy to celebrate Holy Communion at Easter. Two years later, he required university chapels to observe four holy days (Easter, Christmas, Ascension, and Whitsunday) the kirk had always avoided. He also asked the General Assembly to prepare a “uniform order of liturgy . . . to be read in all kirks,” a project that remained incomplete until the mid-1630s. (Without controversy, the assembly of 1616 approved a new confession of faith.) In 1617, James came in person to Scotland and instructed the assembly of that year to accept five new practices, all of them regarded by the more ardently presbyterian as “disagreeing in many . . . points from the purity of the word.” These five included feasts and saints days (which, as one of the bishops noted at the time, was something “hitherto we have been frie” from); private services of Holy Communion and baptism, a practice at odds with the rule that these two sacraments must always be preceded by a sermon; the rite of confirmation at the hands of a bishop, which may have been less contentious; and requiring people to kneel when they received the Eucharist, a practice John Knox had opposed as early as 1552 and the Church of Scotland had never practiced.61

This was asking too much of the assembly of 1617, which insisted that changes of this scope required its consent. Privately, a group of ministers forwarded a “Protestation” to the king disputing his interpretation of the royal supremacy. It evoked the ‘puritie” of the church and the “perfection” of the Scottish Reformation. Infuriated by the “disgrace offered unto Us” and reminding the bishops that he had “once fully resolved” never to authorize another assembly, the king told them that he regarded this defiance as a challenge to his “innate power . . . to dispose of things externall in the Church” and would impose the articles if a new “national assembly” did not approve his program.62 Already, the Privy Council had voted (January 1618) in favor of celebrating the new list of holy days. Thanks to the king’s stage-managing of an assembly that met in Perth in August 1618, it endorsed the articles, although a substantial minority of the delegates voted against the five articles after hearing Archbishop Spottiswood apologize for being unable to dissuade the king from introducing “innovations.” The Scottish Parliament followed suit in 1621, again with significant dissent. These victories in hand, the king seems to have assured the Parliament of 1621 that he would go no further. Having gotten what he wanted, he withdrew from any direct involvement in church affairs, although insisting (in the context of resistance to the Articles of Perth) that members of the Privy Council and other officers of state observe the new rules. Thereafter, these were variously honored or, as was said by hardline critics of Perth, “never practiced” in “the most part” of local parishes. Tellingly, the Scottish bishops were reluctant to enforce them.63

Enforced or defied, the Five Articles of Perth became the equivalent of the vestarian controversy in 1560s England, a turning point for ministers and lay-people who found themselves having to decide between obeying Parliament and the king or becoming nonconformists. In 1617, the immediate response had included a flurry of meetings, petitions, and printed pamphlets aimed at thwarting any favorable action at the assembly of 1618. In its aftermath, and especially after 1621, the articles and the assembly were denounced anew alongside the earliest stirrings of nonconformity within the Church of Scotland.64 Robert Blair, who taught at the University of Glasgow, was among the disaffected. Remembering, many years later, a time in his life when he “had not laid to heart the controversy about Church government” or fretted about bishops who “took little upon them,” Blair had been present when some “ancient worthy men” contended that moderators must be elected and condemned the “innovations” introduced at Perth. Then and there, he became politically active. He was joined by two outspoken critics of the articles, the ministers David Calderwood (d. 1650) and John Row (d. 1646), each incensed by what happened at the assemblies of 1617 and 1618 and the actions of Parliament in 1621.65

Of those who fought the good fight, Calderwood was the most intransigent. Deprived of his position as a minister and banished in 1617 for denying that the king could override a general assembly, he poured out his rage in a series of Dutch-printed books that included Perth Assembly: Containing 1 The proceedings thereof; 2 the proofe of the nullitie thereof (Leiden, 1619), a tell-all account of machinations that, from his perspective, nullified the legitimacy of the Five Articles, and A defence of our arguments against kneeling in the act of receiving the sacramental elements of bread and wine (1620). Subsequently, Calderwood oversaw the printing of the two sixteenth-century books of discipline, to which he added extracts from assembly and parliamentary records and a fiercely anti-Catholic preface, to the end of demonstrating that the Articles of Perth contradicted “the Oath of the whole State of the land,” a reference to the Negative Confession of 1581. This same year (1621), an English printer in the Netherlands brought out another forceful critique of James’s policies, The Altar of Damascus; or, The Patern of the English Hierarchie, And Church Policie obtruded upon the Church of Scotland, a text stuffed with references drawn from Theodore Beza, Thomas Cartwright, Henry Barrow, and other hard-core Puritans to simony (the sale of church offices) and parishes deprived of “liberty of election.”66

As had happened during the agitation about the surplice and the ceremonies in Elizabethan England, the radicals blamed the doings at Perth on the bishops. Blair, for one, came to feel that “Prelacy itself was the worst of all corrupt ceremonies.” What Row said in a manuscript history that remained unpublished until the mid-nineteenth-century and Calderwood said in various places echoed Martin Mar-prelate: the Scottish bishops were false shepherds whose craving for power confirmed the apocalyptic message (Rev. 13) that the “beasts” allied with the Antichrist would betray the true church. The two men were just as scathing about the manipulation of assemblies, synods, and conventions. Reminding their readers that assemblies, local kirks, and parliaments in Scotland had once been “free”—general assemblies meeting annually and electing their moderators, and parliaments enjoying open debate from which bishops had been excluded, a privilege James I had overridden—Calderwood and Row underscored the parallels between his policies and the evils of Roman Catholicism. Simultaneously, Calderwood and others around him reemphasized two-kingdoms principles that limited the authority of the monarch over religious affairs. The alternative to the policies of James I and the bishops was simple: to reclaim the “primitive” or apostolic perfection of the Church of Scotland. As well, Calderwood and his allies revisited the argument of things indifferent, which bishops such as David Lindsay were evoking to justify the new rules.67

Here, refreshed in response to new circumstances for a new audience of readers, was the story James Melville had told in his narrative of decline.68 This rhetoric was not heeded by the many ministers and bishops who, after hearing the king distinguish the essentials of doctrine from matters of form and practice, stood by him. In the words of David Lindsay, who became a bishop in the church in 1619, James was “the matchless mirror of all kings, the nursing-father of his church,” a man “so wise . . . so religious, so learned” that he should be obeyed. Reasoning of this kind enabled William Cowper and Patrick Galloway to align themselves with the king. In their judgment, sustaining the king’s authority mattered in a Scotland that had experienced civil war and an abortive attempt (1600) on the king’s life, the so-called Gowrie conspiracy. Tensions may also have been eased by the anti-Catholicism of the bishops and their willingness to retain some aspects of presbyterian-style worship and structure.69 Another means of defending the king was to revisit the history of the Scottish Reformation. As represented by some of the new bishops, the reformers of 1560–61 had never endorsed presbyterianism. According to Cowper, the kirk “had no government but episcopal” during its first twenty years. Hence the legitimacy of the events of 1606 and 1610, which denoted the recovery of an earlier, more moderate reformation that had never rejected the office of bishop, a story from which John Knox was largely absent, given the role he played in the deprivation of Mary Guise. So Archbishop Spottiswood argued in a history of the Church of Scotland he wrote at the behest of James. Earlier, in response to Calderwood, he pointed out that episcopacy was not condemned in the Negative Confession of 1580/81.70 As happened so often among nonconformists in England, the disaffected had to ask themselves whether holding out against king, bishops, and Parliament outweighed the consequences of being suspended or deprived. The numbers are telling: of the fifty-four ministers called before the Court of High Commission in the early 1620s for refusing to accept some of the new practices, most recanted. Others were suspended or, after being deprived, were restored, leaving a mere eight who were permanently dismissed.71 Even so, protest persisted. In one of its versions, people avoided services of Holy Communion if they knew they would be required to kneel. In another, they formed “conventicles” (the name used by the authorities for unauthorized meetings) where they could enjoy the company of like-minded dissidents and, it seems, practice a freer form of prayer.72 Hindsight teaches us that the real import of these years of controversy was the revitalizing of prophetic testimony against Catholic-style corruption and a similar revitalizing of the idea or image of national covenants as an instrument for restoring purity to the state church. When Charles I ascended to the throne (1625), the question that would dominate his reign was not which version of the past he endorsed but whether the one he most certainly opposed would blossom into a forceful reassertion of Scotland’s covenanted perfection.

Puritanism in the Netherlands

The geography of the Puritan movement had encompassed the Netherlands ever since the 1570s, when Cartwright and Walter Travers ministered to a church organized under the auspices of a cloth traders’ company known as the Merchant Adventurers; in 1582 this congregation moved from Antwerp to Middelburg. Robert Browne’s short-lived congregation settled in the same town in 1581, and members of the Francis Johnson–led community known as the “Ancient Church” (the adjective signaled its fidelity to Scripture) made their way to Amsterdam in the 1590s after briefly attempting to relocate to North America. Any Separatist-style communities were outnumbered by those brought into being by the thousands of English and Scottish who staffed military garrisons, worked for trading companies, or were students at a Dutch university. When the time came to recruit chaplains for a garrison or ministers to lead a merchants’ congregation, nonconforming clergy and disaffected Scots were usually available, a group that included Thomas Scott (d. 1628), who fled to the Netherlands after he denounced the Spanish match; there, he was assassinated in 1628. Some of these churches or chaplaincies—twenty-two of them were named in a survey made for the English government in 1633, alongside three Separatist congregations—ordained their own ministers and discarded the Book of Common Prayer or used a Dutch liturgy in translation. For a decade (1622–31) most of them participated in a loosely organized “English” synod, a means of preserving their distance from the Dutch Reformed Church. The English church in Amsterdam (1607), which served that city’s English merchants, was the exception, abetted by the city’s leaders, welcomed by the state church, and becoming part of the local Reformed classis. John Paget, its first minister, though of Puritan sympathies, was critical of Separatism and turned his congregation into a haven for people wearied of the disarray within the Ancient Church of Johnson and Ainsworth.73

It is tempting to describe the practice of these garrison and merchant-centered churches as a significant link between Robert Browne and modern congregationalism. It is just as tempting to expand this genealogy to include the theorizing of a few English ministers who repudiated Separatism but endorsed the concept of self-governing congregations.74 As is true of most denominational genealogies, such projects distort the workings of “Dutch Puritanism.” The categories of Separatist, non-Separatist, semi-Separatist, congregationalist, and presbyterian are ill-suited to the handful of ministers who set aside the project of taking over a state church and situated themselves somewhere between the Separatism of Barrow and Browne and the moderation of a Preston, a space more explicitly congregation-centered than what Cartwright, Travers, and Fulke had sketched, but also a space that implied a certain degree of interchange with the state church.75

Meanwhile, printers in the Netherlands were actively publicizing the worldview and politics of English and Scottish exiles and their Elizabethan forerunners. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch-printed books rehearsed the merits and demerits of Separatism and the quarrels that flared up in local Separatist communities. Of more importance, printers in the Netherlands—a group that included the Separatist John Canne, who took over the church of Ainsworth and Johnson in the early 1620s and operated a press in the late 1630s and early 1640s—were issuing controversial books by more recent dissidents: the first edition in English of Thomas Brightman’s A Revelation of the Revelation (1615), several books by William Bradshaw, William Ames’s A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies, a handful of David Calderwood’s tell-all attacks on the Scottish bishops, three tracts by John Davenport’s critic, Alexander Leighton (1624–25), and Samuel Hieron’s A defence of the ministers reasons, for refusal of subscription to the Book of common prayer (1607–8). Canne, who returned to England by 1640, where he moved in Baptist circles and eventually became a Fifth Monarchist (see chap. 8), survived the attempts of the English government to shut him down and, with the support of the Dutch printer Jan Stam, published some of the most outspoken critiques of the policies of Charles I, including Leighton’s Sions Plea against the Prelacie (1629) and others written by Henry Burton and William Prynne (see chap. 7). Separatist-owned presses also reached back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-centuries, printing or reprinting texts by Cartwright, Travers, Robert Harrison, Laurence Chaderton, and John Spring’s True, Modest, and Just Defence (1618) in support of the Lincolnshire petition of 1604. Far from being forgotten, the rhetoric and principles of the Elizabethan movement remained an important resource for these displaced English and Scottish. Only in minor ways was their radicalism directed against Cartwright-style presbyterianism, to which they owed the argument that congregations or parishes had a special authority of their own.76

The new century also saw the arrival of men and women who started out as nonconformists before moving on to Separatism. In Nottinghamshire, the Cambridge-educated layman William Brewster was in trouble in 1598 for “repeating sermons publicly in church without authority.” A bishop’s visitation had uncovered nonconforming ministers in the same region in 1590, and more were detected a few years later, one of them the minister Richard Clifton. In the aftermath of the canons of 1604, any nonconformist of Brewster’s temperament had to choose between hard times in England and the freedom he would gain by moving to the Netherlands. Facing the same predicament, John Robinson (d. 1625) and John Smythe (d. 1611) resolved it by choosing exile over nonconformity. Both men were graduates of Cambridge who briefly served the state church, Smythe as lecturer in the town of Lincoln until he was dismissed for preaching “erroneous doctrine.” Thereafter, he continued to preach and may have gained a license to do so before losing it again. Robinson was associated with a church in Norwich until he ran afoul of the canons and was deprived in 1606.77

Both men decided to leave the Church of England after listening to arguments for and against such a step; among those urging them to remain were the much-punished Hildersham and John Dod. By the close of 1606 or perhaps the following spring, laypeople and ministers, a group that included Clifton, had formed two covenanted congregations or “fellowship[s] of the gospel,” one of them with Smythe as its minister, the other led by Robinson and Clifton. A year later, the two communities fled to the Netherlands, although Clifton and some others did not arrive until 1608. Their reasons for leaving the state church included the regulative principle, which guided their reading of Scripture as a description of what Christ “hath commanded,” to which they added a yearning for the company of “Christ’s faithfull and obedient servants.”78

Soon after reaching Amsterdam, Smythe began quarreling with Francis Johnson and Henry Ainsworth about the role of laypeople in church affairs and, by 1609, decided that baptism within the Church of England was invalid. Although he was not the first Separatist to question infant baptism, he turned idea into action by rebaptizing himself and several laypeople in his congregation, one of them the well-to-do merchant Thomas Helwys (d. 1616?), who came with him from England. A year later, Smythe challenged the doctrines of original sin and election. Before he died in 1611, the evolution of his quest for the true church and a valid form of adult baptism led him and a fraction of the congregation to join a Mennonite church in Amsterdam. (Mennonites owed their name to Menno Simons, a former Anabaptist who adopted pacificism.) Helwys shared Smythe’s disdain for orthodox Calvinism. When he returned to England in 1612, he became one of the founders of the Arminian Baptist tradition (see chap. 8), an honor he shares with Smythe in Baptist historiography. By this time he had written A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612). An excited reader of Daniel and Revelation, Helwys discerned four scriptural “prophecies” about the relationship between divine judgment and the history of England. The third of these foresaw “the brightness of his [Christ’s] coming [2 Thess. 2:8] for the consuming and abolishing . . . the man of sin” (i.e., the bishops), and the fourth, “Christ’s coming in judgment.” As many others had done before him, he employed this apocalypticism to “awaken” England from a “dead security and spiritual slumber.” Wanting, as well, to free himself and his fellow Separatists from the slur of being “sower[s] of sedition,” he extolled the authority of James I and pleaded his loyalty to the king’s “power” in “all earthly things.” On the other hand, he spurned the bishops, contrasting the “bondage” they imposed on “the disciples of Christ” with communities that emancipated themselves from the “man of sin” and “edif[ied] one another in the liberty of the spirit.” He also argued that the civil state should stop punishing the faithful few who wanted to practice what the New Testament taught; if they offended in doing so, they “should be punished only with the spiritual sword and censures.” Assertions of this kind enable modern Baptists to hail him as the first Englishman to call for unqualified religious freedom.79

John Robinson was cut from a different cloth, as was his congregation, which left Amsterdam in 1609 and resettled in Leiden. Always an orthodox Calvinist, he intervened during the dispute about Arminianism that split the Dutch Reformed Church. His reflections on the nature of the church became the benchmark of a congregation-centered polity he discussed with several nonconforming but not Separatist ministers who arrived in the Netherlands after having gotten into trouble in England. The most impressive of these men was Ames, who turned up in 1610 accompanied by Robert Parker and became the chaplain of an English garrison. Soon, the two men met Henry Jacob, who moved to the Netherlands in 1606. William Bradshaw, who remained in England, came to know Cartwright in the 1590s when both were living in Gurnsey; that he referred to himself as a “Presbyterian” at one point may have been a consequence of this friendship. Never taking up the work of ministry, he endorsed a congregation-centered polity in English Puritanisme, which Ames enlarged and translated into Latin in 1610. Paul Baynes (d. 1617), another friend of Ames’s who stayed in England, theorized about congregational autonomy in a book Ames saw through the press, The Diocesans Tryall (1618).80

Except for Jacob and, after 1630, a few others, none of these men brought into being an actual congregation, and Jacob’s was a singular version of proto-congregationalism or, as was said in the 1640s, “semi-Separatism.” What Ames had to say of church order after 1620 was an incidental feature of his academic theology, and the garrison church he served was not organized along congregational lines. Moreover, these men were constantly rubbing shoulders with Scottish dissidents such as John Forbes, who ministered to a congregation in Delft and was the principal architect of the local English classis. In the free-floating world of what has been characterized as Dutch Puritanism, lines were constantly being crossed and identities rearranged in ways that defy neat classifications; for example, Hugh Peter, who is considered a congregationalist because he emigrated to Massachusetts after spending several years in the Netherlands, initially wanted to work with John Paget, who remained on good terms with Parker and accepted the jurisdiction of the Dutch Reformed (state) church. Well into the 1640s, Ames was being cited by British presbyterians, as was Parker. In turn, Separatist printers republished texts dating from the movement associated with Cartwright and Travers.81

Passing by Jacob, Ames, and John Robinson for a moment, another phase of Dutch Puritanism unfolded in the 1630s with the founding or refounding of two “gathered” congregations. The first of these experiments occurred in 1633 in Rotterdam under the auspices of Hugh Peter and the second in Arnheim, where a group of affluent English exiles formed a church in 1637. Imprisoned from time to time and his license to preach suspended in 1627, Peter went back and forth between England and the Netherlands, where in 1629 he became the chaplain of an English regiment. Four years later, after receiving an invitation to minister to the English church in Rotterdam, he agreed to take up the post if the congregation accepted a covenant he seems to have drafted. Only about a third of congregation did so, possibly because others objected to the provision that anyone who wanted to become a member would have to undergo a “meet trial” for their “fitness.” Thereafter, no one who had previously belonged was admitted to the Lord’s Supper unless this happened. The Arnheim congregation was situated somewhere between nonconformity and Henry Jacob-style semi-Separatism, a space defined, in part, by the decision of John Bridge and John Ward, its ministers, to renounce their ordinations in the Church of England and reordain each other. Theirs became a troubled community, some favoring and others opposing the practice of allowing laymen to prophesy. The outcome was schism, whereupon the discontented minority moved to Amsterdam. As the historian Keith Sprunger has emphasized, the Arnheim congregation had strong ties to godly members of the English nobility. When the authority of Charles I began to collapse in 1640–41, the ministers who founded it returned to England, where several of them played an important role in the making of English Independency (see chap. 8).82

Well before either of these churches came into being, Henry Jacob had organized a “free congregation independent” in London. As early as 1604–5, Jacob was arguing that the visible church existed in the form of “particular ordinary” congregations, each of them entrusted with the power of the keys (Matt.18:17) and exempt from the authority of any “synod.” As outlined in Anno Domini 1616: A confession and protestation of the faith of certaine Christians in England (Amsterdam, 1616), his was a project predicated on Christ as king of the true church and Scripture as the source of its form, assertions he used to nullify the principle of things indifferent. As well, these rules justified the decision to eliminate bishops and a “provinciall” or “diocesan” form of church, that is, any version of centralized authority, for Jacob rejected the concept of a visible universal or “catholic” (in the root sense of this word) church that existed apart from local congregations. Like Browne before him, Jacob emphasized the “liberty” of “true visible Christians” to participate in governing their congregations, a liberty exercised by men but not by women to choose and ordain a minister. Church discipline was handled by the same group, and men were entitled to prophesy (speak) during services. Jacob expanded the “voluntarie” aspects of church order to a minister’s maintenance; instead of any fixed version (as in tithes), he extolled free-will offerings. Worship was also free in the sense of jettisoning set prayer.83

Like the Separatists of the 1580s and early 1590s before him, Jacob tied together soteriology, or the possibility of being saved, to church order. In Reasons taken out of Gods word (1604), he argued that the right kind of church order was essential to securing “the safety of our souls,” using the much-cited 2 Peter 1:10 as his proof text for the argument that obeying divine law was part and parcel of being a true believer. Like Separatists as well, he wanted to prevent “prophane and scandalous” people from entering the church, which was open only to “true visible Christians,” the wording used in the Confession of 1616. Assertions of this kind harkened back to the practical divinity and its emphasis on sanctification as a reliable sign of the work of grace as well as to Calvin’s insistence on the church as a sanctified community. Otherwise, the Confession was relatively conventional in what it said about two-kingdoms theory, the duty to obey the civil magistrate, and the role of the state in protecting true religion.84

Jacob’s was a project that eludes quick- and-easy labeling.85 Even though he accepted reordination after having renounced the ordination he received in the Church of England, he insisted on maintaining fellowship with local parishes in England, to the point of allowing his followers to have their children baptized in that setting. Earlier, in 1605, he had petitioned James I to “tolerate” an autonomous “assembly,” a request he sweetened by offering to have everyone in the group take the oath of supremacy and “keepe brotherly communion with the rest of our English Churches.” Reiterated in a subsequent petition, these proposals suggest that Jacob may have been thinking of his congregation of circa 1616 as akin to the “stranger” churches that continued to exist in London. Internal tensions, together with an eventual crackdown by the authorities, prompted Jacob and a portion of the congregation to immigrate in 1622 to Virginia, where he seems to have died by 1624. After a period of lay leadership, the congregation recruited John Lothrop, a nonconforming minister who also renounced his ordination. At a moment when the congregation was coming under severe pressure from the government, Lothrop moved in 1634 to Massachusetts, where the people who came with him founded the town of Scituate within the boundaries of Plymouth Colony. By this time, the London congregation had become a site of free-floating speculation about ministerial authority and other aspects of church order, with infant baptism favored by some and rejected by others.86

Aspects of what Jacob, Robinson, Ames, and Bradshaw were saying seem to echo Robert Browne’s concept of the church. Yet it is doubtful that Separatist manifestos of the 1580s had directly influenced any of these men. Although their efforts to avoid the taint of “Brownisme” may have been self-serving, it seems likely that they owed a good deal to Cartwright and the cohort of “presbyterians” that included Travers and Fulke. It is easy to overlook the insistence of an earlier generation of reformers that ministers in the Church of England serve a single parish, each of them charged with administering church discipline. As well, that generation had emphasized every congregation’s privilege of consent and the close connections between ecclesiology and soteriology.87 Some forty years later, preferences of this kind were ripening into a stronger version of congregational autonomy. Given the date of Bradshaw’s English Puritanisme and Jacob’s musings of 1604 and 1605 on the authority of every “particular ordinary Congregation,” neither man could have been influenced by Robinson. Nonetheless, Jacob sharpened his understanding of congregational autonomy and the structure of ministry during the conversations he and Robinson had in 1610. So, perhaps, did Ames, even though he and Jacob disagreed with Robinson’s repudiation of the Church of England and may have persuaded him to acknowledge the possibility of “private” communion with parishes in England, a step he took by 1618 when he endorsed the possibility of hearing sermons that were preached in the state church.88

The master word in the ecclesiology of this group was “edification,” which Ames regarded as the most important purpose of ministry: “The duty of an ordinary preacher is to set forth the will of God out of the word for the edification of the hearers.” For Robinson, edification was impossible in a state church that retained close connections with the civil state and used a corrupt liturgy. For him, it was also the most reliable evidence that congregations could use in admitting persons to the covenant—indeed, the only evidence given the premise that the visible church was unable to identify the elect and therefore remained imperfect. Nonetheless, Robinson evoked the image and idea of church members as “spiritually hewn and lively stones . . . purchased with the blood of Christ . . . elect, redeemed, sanctified, justified.”89

Circumstances transformed the Leiden Separatists into a fabled identity as “fathers” or “founders” of the new American nation. Learning of the English settlements in Virginia and the Caribbean, the community began to ponder the benefits of quitting the Netherlands and, in 1617, agreed to immigrate to North America, a decision linked to the impending resumption of war between Spain and the Netherlands and the older members’ dismay that their children were being assimilated into Dutch culture. To this end the Leiden community sent a carefully worded statement to the Privy Council acknowledging the authority of the king “in all causes, and over all persons,” to which it added the qualification that “in all things obedience is due unto him either active, if the thing commanded be not against God’s Word, or passive if it be, except pardon can be obtained.” As well, the group acknowledged episcopacy insofar as it was “derived from” the monarchy—that is, not based on Scripture—and tempered their Separatism by agreeing that the state church was responsible for saving “thousands in the land.”90 After a brief flirtation with the Dutch colonizers of New Amsterdam, the group secured the financial support of a few English merchants, a patent from the Virginia Company of London, hired a ship, and recruited specialists like the soldier Miles Standish. In September 1620, a hundred people crammed on board the Mayflower. (Robinson stayed in Leiden, where he died in 1625, but others from the Leiden community continued to arrive.) Reaching Cape Cod in November, well to the north of the region specified in the patent from the Virginia Company, the group went ashore in present-day Massachusetts. Before leaving the Mayflower, the leaders of the venture responded to “mutinous speeches” among some of the “strangers” (passengers who had not been part of the Leiden congregation) by creating a document known ever since as the “Mayflower Compact.” The forty-one men who signed it agreed to “covenant . . . together into a civil body politic” capable of enacting “just and equal laws,” a government to which they pledged “all due submission.” On land, the colonists suffered a horrific rate of death during the winter and early spring of 1620–21. Nonetheless, more people continued to arrive, some of them Separatists, others not. Until the early 1630s, when the church in Plymouth finally acquired a minister, William Brewster, the ruling elder of the Leiden community, preached, although never able to administer the sacraments in keeping with the principle that these must be performed by a duly ordained minister.91

Among the English congregations in the Netherlands, controversy persisted about aspects of church order and their relationship with the Dutch Reformed Church. In the early 1630s, Paget’s church in Amsterdam underwent a time of troubles after some of its members urged their aging minister to accept a colleague. Thomas Hooker, the first to be considered, was admired by the congregation’s lay leadership but not by Paget, who handed him twenty questions about worship, church governance, Separatism, and the practical divinity. In his response, Hooker straddled the Separatist/non-Separatist divide: church members could attend a Separatist congregation; free-form prayer was as acceptable as fixed forms; new members should be admitted by the congregation but also approved by the leadership. On one point, however, he was emphatic. Congregations could choose their ministers without seeking the consent of the Dutch Classis, a practice justified by the principle that “particular congregation[s] hath complete power by Christ’s institution to give a . . . call . . . without any derived power from a Classis.” Hooker underscored this “congregationalist” stance by citing objections by Ames, Parker, and Baynes to a “superior ecclesiastical power.”92 Paget rejected this argument and, against the wishes of the church, persuaded the local authorities to prevent Hooker’s appointment. Other candidates also came and went, one of them John Davenport, who began to preach informally to the congregation in 1632 or early 1633 while Paget was ill. Although some in the congregation wanted him to remain, he was politically unacceptable to local representatives of the English government and, on the issue of baptism, at odds with Paget. By the mid-1630s, moreover, Davenport was citing Ames and Parker on the limited authority of synods, a strong sign of an emerging sympathy for a decentered church system. This turn of affairs accounts for his removal to Rotterdam, where he became Peter’s co-pastor, remaining there until 1637 when, like Peter before him, he left for Massachusetts.93

The Old Order Changeth

Narrating the debates in the Netherlands has carried us beyond the reign of James I, who died in early 1625. In the final years of his life, the king drew closer to a group of English bishops who encouraged him to distrust any and all “puritans.” The most influential of these men was Richard Neile, though in matters of theology Lancelot Andrewes (d. 1626) led the way in extolling the importance of the sacraments as means of grace and objecting to the practical divinity as too preaching-centered. Andrewes and Neile regretted a key aspect of the Elizabethan Settlement: the destruction of altars and the transfer of the communion table to the lower end of the chancel or the middle of the church. Acting cautiously, the two men intervened in a few parishes to relocate the table to about the same place where altars had been when the Church of England adhered to Rome.

What the king thought of these efforts is uncertain, but by the early 1620s he was no longer the James of 1618. Everything he wanted by way of alliances was being undone by the Thirty Years War. Moreover, a new favorite had entered his life, the young George Villiers whose ascent to the rank of Duke of Buckingham (1616) happened with amazing swiftness. Neither fish nor fowl religiously, Buckingham broke with the old nonconformity in the mid-1620s. His master had already begun to detach himself from what he characterized as a “popular” movement and, by the early 1620s, was also moving away from Reformed orthodoxy. In the context of agitation about the “Spanish match,” he told Archbishop Abbott in 1622 to instruct clergy in the church to stop meddling in “matters of state.” In 1624 the king refused to punish the minister Richard Montagu, who derided the Calvinist affinities of the Church of England in A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1623) and a sequel, Appello Caesarem (1625). Angered by its themes, the House of Commons voted to censure Montagu on the grounds that his “Arminianism” was a stalking horse for Catholicism, coupling this gesture with a petition to the king warning him that popery was gaining ground in England. James ignored the petition and, when one of the bishops reintroduced images into his diocese, defended him against his critics.94

Suddenly worship, anti-Catholicism, Reformed orthodoxy, and the royal supremacy were all in play, issues that simultaneously were arousing popular anxieties in Scotland. The more Charles expanded on what his father had begun, the more he undermined each of the assumptions that had enabled moderates in three state churches to downplay “conscience” and endorse the “old non-conformity.” Would a crisis in the new king’s relationship with that version of Puritanism rejuvenate the more daring wing of the movement in England and revive the agenda of circa 1580—that is, no Book of Common Prayer, no episcopacy, and sharp limits on the royal supremacy? And what would happen if the king’s program utterly overturned Scottish assumptions about covenant, church, and nation?