The Pilgrim Chronicles

by Rod Gragg

  “She stood the fiery ordeal without flinching”

  A quantity of books were now thrown into the fire, one of which (the Communion Service) he caught, opened it, and joyfully continued to read it, until the fire and smoke deprived him of sight; then even, in earnest prayer, he pressed the book to his heart, thanking God for bestowing on him in his last moments this precious gift. The day being hot, the fire burnt fiercely; and at a time when the spectators supposed he was no more, he suddenly exclaimed, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit! And meekly resigned his life. . . .

  Simon Miller received the crown of martyrdom. Miller dwelt at Lynn, and came to Norwich, where [the bishop committed him] to his prison, where he remained till the 13th of July, the day of his burning.

  Elizabeth Cooper, wife of a pewterer of St. Andrews, Norwich . . . was taken from her own house by Mr. Sutton the sheriff, who very reluctantly complied with the letter of the law, as they had been servants and in friendship together. At the stake, the poor sufferer, feeling the fire, uttered the cry of Oh! upon which Mr. Miller, putting his hand behind him towards her, desired her to be of good courage, for, said he, “good sister, we shall have a joyful and a sweet supper.” Encouraged by this example and exhortation, she stood the fiery ordeal without flinching, and, with him proved the power of faith over the flesh.

  Agnes Bengeor and Margaret Thurston were doomed to the fire at Colchester, Sept. 17, 1557. Humbly they knelt to pray, and joyfully they arose to be chained to the stake, uttering invocations and hallelujahs, till the surrounding flames mounted to the seat of life, and their spirits ascended to the Almighty Saviour of all who truly believe!

  The title page of the 1563 edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of These Last and Perilous Days featured a montage of images. Popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, it was widely read in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

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  John Noyes, a shoemaker, of Laxfield, Suffolk, was . . . led to the stake, prepared for the horrid sacrifice. Mr. Noyes, on coming to the fatal spot, knelt down, prayed, and rehearsed the 50th psalm. When the chain enveloped him, he said, “Fear not them that kill the body, but fear him that can kill both body and soul, and cast it into everlasting fire!” As one cad placed a fagot against him, he blessed the hour in which he was born to die for the truth; and while trusting only upon the all-sufficient merits of the Redeemer, fire was set to the pile, and the blazing fagots in a short time stifled his last words, “Lord, have mercy on me! Christ, have Mercy upon me!” The ashes of the body were buried in a pit. . . .

  Mrs. Cicely Ormes. This young martyr, aged twenty-two, was the wife of Mr. Edmund Ormes, worsted weaver of St. Lawrence, Norwich. At the death of Miller and Elizabeth Cooper, before mentioned, she had said that she would pledge them of the same cup they drank of. For these words she was brought to the chancellor, who would have discharged her upon promising to go to church, and to keep her belief to herself. As she would not consent to this, the chancellor urged that he had shown more lenience to her than any other person, and was unwilling to condemn her because she was an ignorant, foolish woman; to this she replied, (perhaps with more shrewdness than he expected) that however great his desire might be to spare her sinful flesh, it could not equal her inclination to surrender it up in so great a quarrel. The chancellor then pronounced the fiery sentence, and, September 23, 1557, she was brought to the stake, at eight o’clock in the morning.

  Two Protestants die for their faith in this engraving from a sixteenth-century edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Foxe’s hugely popular book was a reminder of what could potentially befall anyone who incurred royal displeasure.

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  After declaring her faith to the people, she laid her hand on the stake, and said, “Welcome, thou cross of Christ.” Her hand was sooted in doing this, (for it was this same stake at which Miller and Cooper were burnt) and she at first wiped it; but directly after again welcomed and embraced it as the “sweet cross of Christ.” After the tormentors had kindled the fire, she said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit doth rejoice in God my Saviour.” Then crossing her hands upon her breast, and looking upwards with the utmost serenity, she stood the fiery furnace. . . . Her courage in such a cause deserves commendation—the cause of Him who has said, “Whoever is ashamed of me on earth, of such will I be ashamed in heaven.”5

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Rather than Turn, They Will Burn”

  Queen Elizabeth I called him her “little black husband.” His name was John Whitgift, and he was the archbishop of Canterbury during the later years of Elizabeth’s reign. The unmarried queen trusted the black-robed clergyman so much, court gossips claimed, that she listened to his opinions as a wife would listen to her husband. And John Whitgift did not like Puritans. As the archbishop of Canterbury, he was the senior pastor in the Church of England, with a junior archbishop presiding in the city of York, and he wielded immense power over the lives of the English people. Whitgift had risen through the ranks of the Church, serving as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University and bishop of Worcester, attaining the post of archbishop of Canterbury in 1583, at the height of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. He had gained the queen’s notice and favor as a bishop, and when promoted to the top position in the Church, he became Queen Elizabeth’s principal minister and chief confessor. To Whitgift, it was said, the queen shared “the very secrets of her soul.”1

  “Yea, He Will Be with Us in Fire and Water”

  Puritan Separatists Accept Persecution and Death for Their Faith

  Archbishop Whitgift was determined to rein in the Puritans and other “non-conformists”—and if they resisted, he intended to punish then. Although he shared the fundamentals of the Puritans’ Protestant doctrine, he fiercely disagreed with their criticisms of the Church of England. As archbishop of Canterbury and the Church’s top official, it was his charge to bring all of England into conformity with Church doctrine, policies, and practices. In 1583, with the queen’s blessing, he officially prohibited preaching, teaching, and Bible training in private homes—a favorite practice of some Puritan ministers. The queen also allowed him to establish the Court of High Commission within the Church of England. The Court outlawed the publication of any literature it considered to be critical of the Church, and was granted authority to arrest, imprison, and punish anyone it deemed to be a threat—including ministers who preached without an official license or anywhere besides an Anglican church. Whitgift considered his three main enemies to be Catholics, the fledgling Baptist or Anabaptist movement, and what he called “wayward persons”—which included Puritans and Separatists.

  Whitgift’s repression apparently intimidated some Puritans, and made others more careful about calling for reforms. “Our Puritan brethren,” observed a Church official, “are lying in concealment, partly silenced by a most able [archbishop], and partly terrified by the authority of our queen. . . .” Puritans believed the Bible commanded all Christians to submit to authority—but not if forced to choose between man’s law and God’s law. At such times, Puritans believed, the Christians’ first obligation was to God’s higher law. “In that obedience in which we have shown to be due to the authority of rulers,” wrote John Calvin, “we are always to make this exception, indeed, to observe it as a primary: that such obedience is never to lead us away from [God], to whose will the desires of all kings ought to be subject. . . .” The Puritans, therefore, responded to Whitgift’s repression by remaining submissive to the queen and the Church except on issues for which they felt called to obey a Higher Authority. Not so the Separatists—who saw Whitgift’s persecution itself as a violation of higher law and further justification for worshipping outside the Church of England.

  Adding to the queen’s suspicions of Puritans, Separatists, and other dissenters were attempted revolts by England’s repressed Catholics. Earlier, in 1569, Catholic noblemen from northern England had attempted to forcibly overthrow Elizab
eth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots, who was Elizabeth’s cousin and the Catholic ruler of Scotland. The uprising, known as the Rising of the North, was defeated by Queen Elizabeth’s forces, and hundreds of its supporters were executed. Eventually, in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, was also executed for plotting Queen Elizabeth’s assassination. As a result of the uprising and repeated attempts on her life by Catholic radicals, Elizabeth’s official policies toward Catholicism hardened, and English Catholics would not obtain full religious freedom for centuries.

  While the reforms they sought were mainly church-related, the Puritans undoubtedly wondered if they too might sometime face the same fate as England’s Catholics, even though they threatened no violence against the queen. After all, Elizabeth I was the head of the government denomination that they so earnestly wanted to reform. And they had numerous complaints. They opposed kneeling for communion, for example, which they considered to be worshipping the elements rather than the Lord. They resisted the Church of England requirement to bow at the church altar, which they viewed as misplaced devotion. They were offended by liturgical ceremonies, which they saw as man-centered and prideful, and they opposed the requirement that ministers in the Church of England wear a surplice (a Catholic-style priestly tunic that Anglican officials considered to be an indispensable symbol of ministerial authority). One Church official reportedly had declared that it was less sinful to have “begot seven bastards than to have preached without a surplice.” To Puritans, the surplice was a man-centered adornment that detracted from humble, Bible-based worship.

  Press operators proof the first draft of their latest publication. Separatist writers such as Robert Browne produced a steady stream of theological pamphlets and books—and works that harshly criticized the Church of England.

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  While Puritan attempts to “purify” the Church of England were generally ecclesiastical in focus, they nonetheless challenged the authority of the official government denomination. Anglican officials were constantly aggravated and often infuriated by the repeated appearances of Puritan pamphlets and books that were critical of the Church of England. Eventually, Queen Elizabeth also grew weary of Puritan criticism of the state Church, and therefore was willing to give Whitgift the authority to force them into conformity with Church policies and practices. It was a severe repression. Puritan publications were deemed seditious, and their authors and printers were arrested and punished as traitors to the Crown. Countless Puritans were arrested and jailed alongside hardened criminals in notorious English prisons such as the Clink, the Bridewell, the Fleet, and the Gatehouse.

  One of the most sensational cases of Puritan persecution was that of John Penry, a Welsh Catholic who became a Puritan while he was a student at Cambridge University. After graduation, Penry transferred to Oxford University, earned a graduate degree, and was officially licensed by the Church to preach to university students. In his late twenties, he returned to his native Wales, where he became an itinerant Puritan preacher and prolific Puritan writer. By then, the Bible had been translated into the Welsh language, but the Church of England was slow to supply an adequate number of Bibles to the churches in Wales. Increasingly frustrated by the lack of Bibles, Penry authored and published a series of pamphlets critical of Church officials. Archbishop Whitgift ordered him arrested, and he was briefly imprisoned. When released, he resumed publishing and continued to call for changes to the Church.

  Separatist preacher and writer John Penry is hauled to his execution site. In 1593, the thirty-four-year-old Penry was hanged in London for penning an unpublished manuscript that Church officials deemed disrespectful to the queen.

  NATIONAL AND DOMESTIC HISTORY OF ENGLAND

  In 1590, Penry’s home in Northampton was raided by Church authorities, but he escaped to Scotland. Two years later, he quietly returned to England and began preaching to a Separatist Puritan congregation in London. In 1593, he was recognized by a Church official and was again arrested. Church officials searched his home for evidence to justify executing him, but found nothing worthy of a capital charge. After combing through his papers, however, they found a manuscript which they declared to be harshly disrespectful to the queen. It was an unpublished draft, but it was enough for Archbishop Whitgift: Penry was declared to be “a seditious disturber of her Majesty’s peaceable government.” On May 29, 1593, the thirty-four-year-old Puritan preacher was hanged. Before his execution, Penry had asked to see his wife Eleanor and their four daughters—Sure-Hope, Safety, Comfort, and Deliverance—but his request was denied. A month before his death, however, he did manage to get a farewell message to the members of his London congregation:

  To the distressed faithful congregation of Christ, in London, and all the members . . . of this poor afflicted congregation, whether at liberty or in bonds: Jesus Christ, that great King and Prince of the kings of the earth, bless you, comfort you with His invincible Spirit, that you may be able to bear and overcome these great trials which you are yet (and I with you, if I live) to undergo for His name’s sake, in this testimony.

  Beloved! Let us think our lot and portion more than blessed, that are now vouchsafed the favor not only to know and to profess, but also to suffer for the sincerity of the Gospel; and let us remember that great is our reward in Heaven, if we endure unto the end. . . .

  Wherefore, my brethren, I beseech you be of like mind herein with me. I doubt not but you have the same precious faith with me, and are partakers also of far more glorious comfort than my barren and sinful soul can be. Strive for me, and with me, that the Lord our God may make me and us all able to end our course with joy and patience: strive, also, that He may stay His blessed hand (if it be His good pleasure), and not make any further breach in His church by the taking away of any more of us as yet, to the discouraging of the weak, and the lifting up of the horn of our adversaries.

  I would, indeed, if it be His good pleasure, live yet with you, to help you to bear that grievous and hard yoke which yet ye are like to sustain, either here or in a strange land. And my good brethren, seeing as banishment with loss of goods is likely to betide you all, prepare yourselves for this hard entreaty, and rejoice that you are made worthy for Christ’s cause, to suffer and bear all these things. . . .

  “I humbly beseech you . . . take my poor and desolate widow and . . . fatherless and friendless orphans with you”

  The Lord, my brethren and sisters, hath not forgotten to be gracious unto Zion. You shall yet find days of peace and of rest, if you continue faithful. This stamping and treading of us under His feet, this subverting of our cause and right in judgment, is done by Him, to the end that we should search and try our ways, and repent us of our carelessness, profaneness, and rebellion in His sight; but He will yet maintain the cause of our souls, and redeem our lives, if we return to Him. Yea, he will be with us in fire and water, and will not forsake us, if our hearts be only intent on serving Him, and especially of the building of Zion, whithersoever we go. . . .

  And here, I humbly beseech you—not in any outward regard, as I shall answer before my God—that you would take my poor and desolate widow and my mess of fatherless and friendless orphans with you into exile, whithersoever you go; and you shall find, I doubt not, that the blessed promises of my God, made unto me and mine, will accompany them, and even the whole church, for their sakes. For this, also, is the Lord’s promise unto the holy seed; as you shall not need much to demand what they shall eat, or wherewith they shall be clothed; and, in short time I doubt not but that they will be found helpful, and not burdensome to the church. . . . Be kind, loving, and tender-hearted the one of you towards the other; labor every way to increase love, and to show the duties of love, one of you towards another. . . .

  Finally, my brethren, the eternal God bless you and yours, that I may meet with you all unto my comfort in the blessed kingdom of Heaven. Thus having from my heart—and with tears—performed (it may be) my last duty towards you in this life, I salute you all in t
he Lord, both men and women, even those who I have not named, as heartily as those whose names I have mentioned (for all your names I know not). And remember to stand steadfast and faithful in Jesus Christ, as you have received Him, unto your immortality; and may He confirm and establish you to the end for the praise of His glory. Amen.

  The twenty-fourth of the fourth month April, 1593.

  Your loving brother, in the patience and suffering of the Gospel,

  JOHN PENRY

  A witness of Christ in this life, and a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed.2

  “Rather than Turn, They Will Burn”

  Despite Dangers and Threats, Puritan Separatists Grow in Numbers

  If Archbishop Whitgift’s crackdown on non-conformists made England’s Puritans uneasy, it was a genuine threat to the nation’s Separatists. Despite their call for reforms, mainstream Puritans were still officially members of the Church of England, and in most cases their protests were not considered to be treasonous. That, and their growing numbers, encouraged even Archbishop Whitgift to show some restraint in dealing with them. So did the existence of prominent Puritans in almost all walks of English life, from academia to commerce to Parliament. England’s Separatists, however, were an easier target. Like the Puritans, the sect also had a cross-section of the English population in its ranks, including members and leaders who were accomplished in their professional fields, but Separatists were few in number compared to the ranks of Puritans. And, unlike the Puritans, their principal goal was illegal—Separatists felt called by Scripture and conscience to worship outside the authority of the Church of England—and in their day that was a criminal act under English law.