Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  It was against this background that Browne and Harrison began to write. They filled their books with Old Testament kings, and they repeated the ideas of Stubbs and Mornay, echoing them by citing Asa as an ideal, godly ruler. They had little to lose, since both were marked men—Browne was in trouble for preaching at Cambridge after refusing his license—and neither could expect a flourishing career. As unemployed schoolteachers, lodging together in Norwich, England’s second city, where Harrison took a job as master of an almshouse, after the queen’s humiliation of Grindal they saw every sign that godliness was in retreat. Freke had arrived in 1576 and put a stop to prophesying. He suspended nine local Puritan ministers for skipping the Catholic elements within the prayer book. In the face of all this, Browne asked a new question, and came up with an answer that eventually led to Massachusetts.

  If the queen refused to reform her Church, and if the magistrates did nothing, how should individual Christians respond? Mornay had urged them to form their own congregations, or even leave the country, like the Huguenots fleeing from France. “Everyone Is Bound to Separate Himself from the Communion of Antichrist,” ran a chapter heading in the English translation of Mornay’s book about an ideal church. Browne came to the same conclusion, and, once across that mental threshold, he entered an exciting new world.20

  Separatism had two sides, embittered and creative, and the second of these Browne began to explore. In doing so, he probably followed the promptings of another French exile, a man called Jean Morély. A Parisian lawyer, Morély had also escaped the massacre of Saint Bartholomew and found his way to London. He turned to Walsingham for help, and Walsingham found him a home in Wales with a landowning friend and kinsman of the Sidney family. Another almost forgotten man, Morély ranked alongside Mornay as one of the period’s most audacious thinkers about politics and religion.*

  In 1562, Morély published a book that reads like a blueprint for the Plymouth Colony. In any Christian assembly, he said, authority belonged to “le peuple tout entier”—the people as a whole—free to vote to hire and fire their ministers, without a hierarchy of bishops or a national code of religious laws.21 Like Mornay, he compared a true church to Athenian democracy, with each congregation free to believe and to worship as it chose. Morély rested his case on the eighteenth chapter of Saint Matthew. There, the Gospel writer quoted Christ saying that a church came into existence at any moment when two or three Christians gathered together in his name. In this one verse, short and deceptively simple, Separatism discovered its founding text.

  Whether or not Browne ever met Morély, or Mornay, his ideas and those of the Mayflower Pilgrims were identical to those of the two Frenchmen. In all likelihood, Browne came across them during the 1570s, by way of the work of another Huguenot intellectual, Peter Ramus. He was a French professor of rhetoric and logic, killed on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in Paris. After leaving Cambridge, Browne retained his links with the university, where Ramus had come into fashion, and Browne clearly knew his writings well. From Ramus he learned his method of using charts and tables to express an argument visually. But Peter Ramus also stood shoulder to shoulder with Morély in heated French debates about the best way to run a Calvinist church. Ramus wrote his own treatise about religion, likening a congregation to a Greek or Roman republic, and in 1576 a batch of copies of the book arrived in England. They were shipped over by the ubiquitous Sir Philip Sidney.22

  If we follow the Pilgrims back to their roots, we enter this ideological territory. Browne and his followers created in Norwich a church of exactly the sort that Morély advocated. Like Asa and the Israelites, they made a pact with God and with each other. As Browne later put it, “There was a day appointed, and an order taken … thei gave their consent, to ioine themselves to the Lord, in one covenant & fellowshippe.” They wiped their assembly free from every corrupting stain of the Church of England: bishops, ministers, parishes, and tithes.

  In pursuit of authentic Christianity, based on the example of the apostles, Browne and Harrison also invented their own form of worship. It seems that it was loosely based on the prophesying that the Queen had vetoed, but it lacked a rigid format, and they had no presiding clergymen. Only by way of spontaneous prayer could they prove, to themselves and to others, that their faith was genuine. How else could they be certain that they belonged to the Calvinist elect, assured of eternal salvation?

  Again, Browne gives no dates, but it seems that the covenant day took place soon after the earthquake. Norwich was just emerging from three years of plague, and perhaps this added another source of urgency. So did the political climate. At that moment, Puritans hoped to win concessions from the queen, because Parliament was due to reassemble in January 1581. This too may have influenced Browne’s timing. It was widely expected that members of the Commons would again call for reform of the Church, but the queen prohibited any debate on matters of religion. Soon afterward, we find an exasperated Robert Browne in Suffolk, beginning his campaign of reformation.

  When Browne arrived, he found the neighborhood in ferment. The story begins with a strange incident on Christmas Eve in 1580, another episode that captures the electric atmosphere in which Separatism was born.

  THE SUFFOLK PROPHET

  Deep among unfenced fields of barley, eleven miles from Bury St. Edmunds, a narrow lane runs along the top of a low hill, above a village called Walsham le Willows. The farming has changed—the land is arable now, whereas then the people of Walsham reared sheep—but much else remains as it was. The pattern of roads survives, and the willow trees still grow. A footpath still follows the village’s processional way, which before the Reformation linked sacred wells among the hedgerows.

  Elizabethan Walsham was a lively place. It had a population of eight hundred, dwelling in cottages newly built from timber, clay, and thatch. Many still stand, their plaster walls painted as they would have been then, in earthen shades of brown and yellow.23 Beside the lane along the hilltop lived a tenant farmer called Withers, and he had a son called William, aged eleven.

  On December 24, young William Withers fell into a trance and remained unconscious for ten days, “to the great admiration of the beholders, and the greefe of his parentes.” For what happened next, we must rely on a pamphlet, printed a few weeks later by the most daring Puritan publisher of the age and dedicated to one of Sir Philip Sidney’s closest friends.24

  William suddenly came round. He began to speak in a loud voice that made his bed shake. This cinematic performance he repeated once or twice a day for the next few weeks. Each time his message was the same: a warning that the earthquake foreshadowed “a farre greater Earthquake, which you shall feele a taste of shortly, unless you repent.” The boy condemned pride, idleness, and infidelity, the wearing of ruffs, and the wickedness of stage plays.

  Soon young William became a celebrity. Visitors hurried to his bedside, and among them were Suffolk’s greatest Puritans, the county sheriff, Sir William Spring, and his brother-in-law Sir Robert Jermyn. According to the pamphlet, both were “men of greate zeale to God, lovers of religion and loyall subiectes to her Maiestie.” With them came a Jermyn protégé, the town preacher from Bury, and he certified that William was a godly child.

  Why did this odd episode become a brief sensation? It may have had something to do with the parliamentary session, since Suffolk’s MPs were Puritan men keen to rally public opinion. Most likely, too, young William was playing his part in some local struggle for power. Far from being placid backwaters, villages like Walsham were combustible places where religious language might be used as a means to express, to incite, or perhaps to stifle conflicts of a social or an economic kind. In Elizabethan England, men and women made the Gospel serve all these purposes, and to do so they exploited the Bible’s ambiguities to the full.

  We may never know exactly what was going on, but the manor belonged to Sir Nicholas Bacon, older brother of the great Sir Francis. He was far from popular. Bread prices were soaring, but so too was the cost of farmla
nd, and the Bacons, not their tenants, were the beneficiaries. During this period, they doubled their income at Walsham by using the law and an expert surveyor to force rents up as high as they would go. It might be that the Bacons and the Jermyns, who were friends, hit upon William Withers as an ally to help keep the peasantry in their place, by telling them that protest was a sin; or perhaps this is too cynical a view. Whatever the truth, in Walsham and West Suffolk there were issues to which Robert Browne could speak. Soon after the Withers affair, he turned up in the neighborhood. His intensity suited the mood of an anxious time.

  Within his sermons lay an element of social protest. Among the ungodly, Browne and Harrison included moneylenders, profiteers who drove up the price of food, and those like the Bacons who were “undoers of the poore men by the lawe.”25 Browne vilified clerics who lived off the fat of the land, he spoke of a coming day of judgment, and he told his listeners that no one could make them go to church. Of course, Browne lived in a world of ambiguity. He was himself a scion of the landed gentry, and his instincts were a mixture of the anarchic and the authoritarian. His words could convey many meanings, but this may have been why he made so great an impact: because they could appeal to many different interests. To a hard-pressed tenant farmer he might sound like an apostle of equality, while to a Puritan squire he spoke of the need for law and discipline.

  So it was, perhaps, with the Springs and the Jermyns, who were both godly and rich. Tudor Bury ranked as England’s twelfth-wealthiest town, and they dominated local affairs, much as the Cecils and Brownes ran Stamford. Their riches they owed to the cloth trade, since the Springs were the greatest textile magnates of the early Tudor period. For their part, the Jermyns farmed sheep in four counties. Like the Barrows, the Brownes, and the Bacons they prospered from the rising value of their lands.

  An active, enterprising man, Sir Robert Jermyn, when he died, left two thousand pounds to provide a dowry for even the youngest of his five daughters: the other Jermyn girls had all married well already. Four miles from Bury, he built Suffolk’s grandest manor house. For twenty-three years he served as the county’s deputy lieutenant, a trusted man, eager to repair coastal gun batteries and to maintain the queen’s peace. His Calvinism took exactly the form we might imagine, and one where an American future might be traced in outline.

  A TOWN UPON A HILL

  Forty years old in 1580, Sir Robert Jermyn was Suffolk’s uncrowned king Asa. His only surviving portrait gives us a bearded, thin-faced man, with a hint of nervous energy. Sir Robert admired John Calvin so much that he gave a set of his works to the people of Bury, helping to found one of England’s first public libraries. At Bury, he tried to build a Jerusalem as godly as Calvin’s Swiss republic.

  Bury was not a city on a hill, but it was at least a town on a slope, above what was left of the Abbey of St. Edmund. The monastery had been one of England’s largest, built on gently rising ground above the river Lark, but now all that remained were the gatehouse, ruined walls, and an immense heap of rubble. The stone went to build new civic amenities, chief among them a covered corn market, largely paid for by the Jermyns. They had made a great deal of money by dealing in old monastic land.26

  Jermyn and his fellow JPs based themselves at an inn, the Angel, still today Bury’s principal hotel, facing the gatehouse and the ruins. From it, they governed the town as moral policemen, locking up fornicators, the idle, and the feckless. In 1571, following a national trend, and one that Burghley urged all towns to adopt, they drew up a new code of rules to stamp out sin.

  They banned artisans from “loytring” and they compelled the children of the poor to become domestic servants. Unmarried women were obliged to have a spinning wheel, while vagrants were rounded up and shipped back whence they came. In the first two weeks of the new rules, the magistrates used them seventy times. They served injunctions on unmarried mothers, on a man caught by his wife watching a play in a tavern, and on “Alys Hill, wydow verraie old.” Poor Alice was given a place in an almshouse, but ordered “to applye her work.”27 Meanwhile, the town issued winter clothing to the needy, ran a hospital, and gave weekly allowances to orphans. As the years went by, discipline became even tighter.28

  The year before the earthquake, Jermyn sent Burghley a second set of rules, to show that Bury remained a well-ordered place. They laid down harsh penalties for blasphemy, swearing, witchcraft, being absent from a sermon, or making a noise in the pew. Lechers would be whipped until their blood flowed. Brawlers, scolds, and the argumentative were to be put in the stocks, but women offenders were punished most severely. They were to be carried on a stool around the marketplace before their flogging.29 In governing such a place, the authorities might find an obvious use for William Withers. Hoax or not, poor folk who had never heard of Calvin would understand the message of the Walsham prodigy: repent, obey, or face the wrath of God, or failing that the lash.

  All of this sounds like a parody, or a caricature, an appalling foretaste of the fictional Puritan New England of Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter. An old-fashioned Marxist might say that men like Jermyn adopted religion as a ploy to keep the workers in their place. There must be some truth in that, too, but Jermyn did not have everything his own way. The events that followed came to be known as “the Bury Stirs,” and the term was apt.30 Jermyn gave his support to radical preachers, and in doing so, he encouraged protest and controversy that ultimately spun out of control. Nearly thirty years later, as we shall see, a similar pattern of events led to the flight of the Pilgrims from England to Leiden.

  Religion in Bury was messy and divided. Bury had two parish churches, a few hundred yards apart, each with a conformist vicar, paid a meager stipend by the Crown. However, the citizens also employed two town preachers, whose salaries they paid themselves. Both were ardent Puritans, and one of them, called Mr. Gayton, was the man who examined William Withers. Gayton was not a Brownist, but he came close to it, and in the summer of 1581 he began his own crusade.

  The larger of the two churches was called St. Mary’s. With the backing of Sir Robert, Gayton climbed into the pulpit, and in Puritan style he rejected as superstitious nonsense the official regime of the Church, based on the authority of distant bishops. Again, he highlighted the democratic needs of the congregation: only the godly disciples of the parish had the right to choose the man who led them, Gayton said. Faced with this outrage, conservatives rallied to defend the vicar, and they called in the bishop’s deputy, the archdeacon of Sudbury. When he protested, Jermyn told the archdeacon to mind his own business and called the clergyman a tosspot.

  While this affair convulsed the town of Bury, in the countryside Browne preached illegally. Freke arrested him in April, when two of the queen’s most senior judges were visiting the region. They packed Browne off to London, but the outcome was merely a reprimand. Burghley defended his young kinsman, writing to Freke to excuse his conduct: he was simply zealous, and not a troublemaker, he told the bishop. Browne promptly came back to Suffolk and started all over again. When the bishop complained once more, this time Jermyn stepped in to protect him. He warned Browne to be careful, but he did so in mild terms, apparently taking a liking to the young radical. Jermyn praised Browne as a promising fellow, a maverick, but “very fit to yield the church his profitable service.”31

  In the England of Elizabeth, nothing was simple or straightforward. On this occasion and on others Separatists found an oddly indulgent hearing in high places. Old ties of loyalty between the Cecils and the Brownes might explain this, or perhaps it arose from dislike of the bishop. Freke was a famously pompous cleric, dominated by his imperious wife, and an embezzler, or so it was said. But outweighing these personal matters lay the national interest. If the Privy Council sided with Jermyn, it was doubtless because Suffolk was a coastal county with a surviving rump of suspect papists. For Burghley, patriotism and artillery outweighed the wounded pride of clergymen.

  Even so, Browne and Jermyn had gone much too far. Sooner or
later, the queen was bound to intervene, and all the more so when Harrison and Browne began writing books, printed in the Netherlands and then smuggled back home. This they could do with relative ease. Norfolk and Suffolk housed émigré communities of Walloons, Calvinist weavers from Flanders who had sought asylum but retained ties with their homeland. At last, in 1582, Browne and Harrison decided to go into exile themselves. With a few dozen followers, they set off for the freer climate of the Dutch port of Middelburg, recently liberated from Spanish control. As Browne put it, in words that foreshadowed the Mayflower, they “all agreed, & were fullie persuaded, that the Lord did call them out of England.”32 At home, meanwhile, the controversy continued.

  For two years, letters and petitions bounced back and forth between Burghley, Freke, and Jermyn, while the Puritans at Bury continued to agitate in defense of their preachers. The Bury Stirs finally came to a head in the summer of 1583. At St. Mary’s, the queen became the direct target of an abusive attack that left her determined to end the Stirs once and for all. Her response took a form so cruel that six decades later in America William Bradford still remembered the events with horror.

  QUEEN JEZEBEL

  In St. Mary’s Church, modern Bury possesses an unsurpassed museum of religious history. In the century before King Henry split from Rome, donors rebuilt and beautified the edifice. They created four chapels where masses were said for their souls. They restored the high altar, and they set up fourteen lesser altars, to Our Lady and the saints. During the Reformation, all this was torn down, the painted walls were whitewashed, and the candlesticks were sold. Even so, the Catholic past has left its evocative traces.