Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  At the front of the church, a stone slab still protects the bones of Bury’s last abbot. Sixty feet above his grave, gilded angels look down on the modern congregation from a magnificent oak roof erected in the fifteenth century. In 1583, a visitor entering the western end of the church would also have seen beneath the angels an imposing emblem of the Crown and its supremacy, between the nave and the chancel.

  Supported by a lion and a dragon, the queen’s arms dominated the interior. From a painting made in the eighteenth century, and preserved in the church, and from rare surviving examples elsewhere in Suffolk, we can guess the shape the arms would have taken. Painted in vivid colors on wooden boards ten feet high, they would have stood on a horizontal beam, twenty feet above the flagstones, with probably alongside them a passage from Saint Paul: “Let every soule submit hym selfe unto the auctorite of the hyer powers … The powers that be are ordeyred of God.” A favorite text of Martin Luther’s, it taught the lesson of obedience. To left and right there would have been vertical panels, displaying more biblical texts, painted in black letters.33

  One day the worshippers arrived to find the panels daubed with a slogan from the book of Revelation: “I know thy works, and thy love, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and that they are more at the last than at the first.” What did this signify? The message took its meaning from what follows in the Bible: “Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee, that thou sufferest the woman Jezebel, which maketh herself a prophetess, to teach and deceive my servants; to make them commit fornication, and to eat meat sacrificed unto idols.”34

  Nothing more offensive could be said about the Virgin Queen. The words implied that Elizabeth was the whore of Babylon, a tyrant, a false prophet, and a pimp, whose resistance to Puritan reform threatened her subjects with damnation. Obscene and seditious, the insult remained on the walls for three months, until Bishop Freke sent to Bury a clerical detective called Richard Bancroft. He was thirty-eight years old, a former college wrestler, and the most determined enemy the Separatists would ever have.35

  A man of the highest importance in Pilgrim history, Bancroft later became archbishop of Canterbury. He led the efforts under King James to enforce conformity. Although he was obsessive, even paranoid in his pursuit of Puritans, Bancroft was not merely the compliant tool of despotism. He was certainly never what Puritans called a “dumbe dogge,” a shallow cleric unable to preach. Bancroft amassed a library of six thousand books, he wrote and spoke well, and he worked hard. His hatred of Brownism arose from cogent argument, and not from blind prejudice or bigotry.

  Bancroft believed that Separatism was spiteful hypocrisy, nonsense that would lead either to anarchy or to dictatorship. If every congregation went its own way, the schism that followed would cause an endless process of division. Christianity would fracture into countless squabbling sects. Bancroft forecast, accurately, an English civil war between denominations. He also pointed out that England was an unequal place and independent local congregations would not remain for long.

  The rich would manipulate each church for their own ends, with the queen powerless to intervene on the side of fairness. Pious men like Jermyn, Bancroft said, were also landowners who oppressed the poor. And if Separatists denied the queen’s supremacy, then one day they might also condone armed rebellion. He quoted from Browne and Mornay, comparing them to prove that this was so.36

  Bancroft swiftly tracked down those responsible for the outrage at St. Mary’s. Then, whatever the strength or weakness of his case, he took part in an act of vicious repression that left long memories of injustice. On June 30, Elizabeth banned the books of Browne and Harrison, making their possession a felony. A few days later, the lord chief justice began a crackdown at Bury, convicting five Puritan ministers of nonconformity, while a grand jury laid charges against forty laypeople. They fired Jermyn from his post as a JP, a disgrace that it took years, and the crisis of the Armada, for Sir Robert to live down.37

  The worst fate awaited a shoemaker called John Coppin and a tailor named Elias Thacker, accused of distributing the forbidden books. In all likelihood, they were merely scapegoats: it seems that Coppin had been in prison in Bury since 1578, when fellow inmates heard him slander Her Majesty. They were taken outside the town to a patch of boggy ground, where the judges hanged Thacker and Coppin and burned the books. They apparently saved only one from the flames. It survives in the library of today’s archbishop of Canterbury, where Bancroft’s stately handwriting records its origin.38

  Sixty-five years later, William Bradford added an extra detail to the story. According to Bradford, Coppin and Thacker bravely defied their accusers, saying this to the judges: “My Lord, your face we fear not; and for your threats we care not.”39 It seems that no other source records these words, and this suggests that they came from an oral tradition, carried on board the Mayflower. And between the Plymouth Colony and Bury St. Edmunds there may exist a still more direct connection.

  On May 9, 1568, a couple called John and Margaret Carver took an infant to be baptized at Rougham, a nearby village. The child’s name was John, and the Carvers were Jermyn family retainers. When Sir Robert’s father died, he left forty shillings to “Margerie Carver,” alongside a bequest to the man who kept his rabbits. It is possible, though not certain, that the John Carver born at Rougham was the same John Carver who sailed on the Mayflower and became the first governor of New Plymouth. At his own death in 1614, Sir Robert Jermyn remembered in his will “my servant John Carver.”40 To serve in the household of a man as rich as Sir Robert carried no stigma: the people who ran his estates would command respect in local society. The Pilgrim John Carver’s origins may always remain a mystery, but if the boy born at Rougham was our man, then at the time of the hangings he was an impressionable fifteen.

  Robert Browne eventually came back to the British Isles. As Bancroft predicted, he split with his supporters, and then he upset the Scots; in Edinburgh even the Presbyterians found him impossible, and locked him up. Protected by Burghley, and then by the Pickerings, Browne withdrew to the English Midlands and became a reluctant conformist. For forty years he served as vicar of Thorpe Achurch, in the meadows by the Nene, occasionally lapsing back into dissent, until his last violent clash with the law.

  Meanwhile, his books made a deep impression, read by Barrow and others.41 Browne left a network of converts and followers in London, in Norwich, and along the eastern coast, in the region where many of the Mayflower passengers originated. Bancroft, for his part, acquired a resolute loathing of everything for which Browne stood. In 1593, he assisted in the process that led to Barrow’s execution, and then a decade later he set in motion the sequence of events that led to the exile of the Pilgrims.42

  In the Bury Stirs, we find a pattern that came to be repeated. In terms of theology, a Brownist did not really differ from a Puritan. Both groups of people wished to create a godly community where piety kept sin and disorder at bay. For this reason, and because of a shared hatred of Spain and the pope, a patriotic squire such as Jermyn might shelter or encourage a nonconformist such as Browne. From time to time, however, events acquired a momentum of their own, as religious dissent took an exceptional form that caused alarm at the highest level of church and state.

  At that point, in a pocket or cell of the kingdom, a crisis might occur, when politics and local strife combined to cause an explosion, a sudden collision with authority. In such a situation, the local Puritan leaders, men like Sir Robert, would find themselves unable to prevent a drastic purge from above. In such a crisis, a committed group of zealous men and women might choose the path of outright Separatism, followed by emigration. This was very rare indeed, but it happened in the case of the Pilgrims as well as Robert Browne. The decisive events occurred in the valleys of two rivers in the north of England.

  * An estate map from 1615 shows land owned by the Brownes immediately abutting the Cecil property at Wothorpe Manor, overlooking the town from the southeast. In e
ffect, the two families encircled Stamford with their estates, as well as owning houses and inns within it.

  * The Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, probably written jointly by Mornay and his friend Hubert Languet, another French Calvinist diplomat.

  * Mornay also shared Sidney’s dream of founding Protestant colonies in the New World. After the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, Mornay considered leading Huguenot exiles to Canada or Peru.

  * Until quite recently, it was impossible to argue that Morély exerted any influence in England. Only in 1993 did two French scholars publish the details of his period in exile, including his ties to Walsingham.

  Chapter Five

  MEN AND WOMEN OF THE CLAY

  England, from Trent and Severn hitherto,

  By south and east is to my part assign’d;

  All westward, Wales beyond the Severn shore,

  And all the fertile land within that bound,

  To Owen Glendower; and, dear coz, to you

  The remnant northward, lying off from Trent.

  —SHAKESPEARE, KING HENRY IV PART 1 (1597)

  There is a place on the outer end of Cape Cod, close to a trailer park twenty miles from Provincetown, where a narrow stream winds slowly down toward the marshes beside Wellfleet Harbor. Before it passes through a culvert under a country road, it measures no more than a yard across. Nothing remains nearby to suggest that the site has any historical significance.

  In December, the month when skies are at their clearest on the coast, the brook soaks its way forward in an icy brown mess of fallen leaves. And yet for William Bradford, who stepped across it on December 7, 1620, the stream came as a blessing, a merciful relief from the sandy dryness of the Cape. He carefully noted the event in Mourt’s Relation. “We saw two becks of fresh water … the first running waters that we saw in the country,” Bradford wrote.1

  His account of these opening weeks in America contains details so exact that today one can follow on foot the path he took. Living in an age before pesticides and tractors, William Bradford had to know land with an intimacy that few of us share today. This is why he carefully examined each slope of the new country, soil that he might have to cultivate one day by hand, with an iron mattock or with a plow drawn by oxen. He catalogs the trees and the russet surface of the Cape, its ponds, and even the texture of the ground. Describing the Provincetown Hook, Bradford speaks of the “excellent black earth” a spade deep, and this is true. Drive a blade into the cordgrass on the edge of the salt marsh, and up comes wet, dark peat.

  When he talks about the stream, Bradford displays his origins by using a dialect word. To call it a “beck” marks him out as a man from what he called “the North Parts” of England. This word for a stream rarely appears on a map of the country south of the Trent, the river that divided the two halves of the kingdom. Born and raised nearly two hundred miles from the capital, William Bradford and his Mayflower colleague William Brewster came from a region of wetland, heath, and wide open fields of red clay, just inside the North Parts.

  Of course, people could migrate to Massachusetts without being born in that part of the country. The great majority of those who colonized New England originated elsewhere, chiefly in East Anglia, much nearer to London, but numbers mattered less than leadership. It was leadership that made a new venture a success or a deadly fiasco, and the men who led the Plymouth Colony came from a precise, distinctive zone, with special tensions, limits, and possibilities that shaped their upbringing and their attitudes. They came from a place where the land carries many meanings, inscribed by glaciers, by floodwaters, by politics, and by religion.

  THE SCROOBY MISTAKE

  This is the eastern edge of England’s mining country, green and black, a mixed terrain of wildlife and machinery, spoil heaps, woods, and pasture. Mostly, the coal mines have closed, the tips made over for cubicled housing in brick and tile, but the country still has its rabbits, its foxes, its retired miners with emphysema, and its peaks and falls, made from a coupling of industry and nature. Historians will tell you that the Mayflower Pilgrims came from Scrooby, in the northern corner of Nottinghamshire. This is not false, but by itself it says nothing about the country or its character. Least of all do the books mention coal, the embarrassing resource that has left the region looking as it does today.

  Come to Scrooby by car, twenty minutes from the old railway town of Doncaster, and you will see little that the Pilgrims might recognize, and a very great deal that they would not. Three thousand yards to the west, a tall blue and gray tower overlooks the village from the summit of a ridge. Visible fifteen miles away, it overwhelms the limestone steeple of Scrooby’s medieval church. Built only twenty years ago, the tower holds the winding gear for the shafts of Harworth Colliery, Britain’s deepest coal mine. Used only occasionally now, because of lurking methane gas and buckled rock, the shafts descend three thousand feet. At the bottom, the seams dip away under the earth, shelving downward to the east and beneath the North Sea, bearing hundreds of millions of tons of virgin coal.

  At Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, the medieval church of St. Wilfred, viewed from the northwest. At the left, the lane leads toward Scrooby Manor, while on the right is the cottage known as the Old Vicarage, partly dating from around 1600. Behind the low stone wall beside the lane is the old village pound, used to keep stray animals. (Photography: Nick Bunker)

  Eight miles away in the same direction, plumes of steam rise over another ridge. They come from power stations in the valley of the river Trent, located there for the sake of access to coal and water. Not far to the north, an airport sits on a low plateau, above Austerfield in Yorkshire, the place where William Bradford was born. Before it became an airport, its hangars kept the Vulcan jets that carried the hydrogen bomb for Britain. Enter the village of Scrooby, and again you will find the relics of the Pilgrims half-hidden and overshadowed by the vestiges of a much later age.

  The church remains, gray, small, and squat, built mostly in the fifteenth century, with the eroding heads of angels perched around its windows. Nearby is a cottage with a timber frame, dating from about 1600, which Brewster may have helped to build for the parish minister. Part of Brewster’s home still stands, at Scrooby Manor, out-of-bounds to the casual tourist, though a tumbled heap of broken masonry remains visible behind the garden wall of a house nearby. Beyond the wire, a soggy depression marks the site of a medieval moat, with fishponds to right and left, but the blatant, dominating feature of the place is the railway. The main line from Edinburgh to London slices noisily down the western edge of Austerfield. Then it passes within two hundred yards of the manor at Scrooby, cutting it off from open country to the east.

  The railway runs where it does because it follows the path of the Great North Road, the old highway to Scotland. William Brewster lived here because he was the postmaster at Scrooby, stabling the horses that carried the king’s mail from London to the Scottish capital. Scrooby stands at a gateway between north and south, where the English Midlands meet the Vale of York. The railway, the coal mines, and the airport with its runways facing Germany and Russia are modern signs of the strategic value of the place.

  Long before the era of the Pilgrims, people had already molded the landscape for centuries, including the Romans who laid a road across the wetlands. Scrooby, and the land around it, were sought after for reasons that differed from one period to another: game for hunting, or proximity to the sea, or the deep geology of coal. Whichever resource mattered most, at any given time, the district was never minor or irrelevant.

  Little of this history has left its mark in books about the Pilgrims. This is because it clashes with an orthodox version of the Scrooby story, a version dating back to 1849. In that year, a Presbyterian minister called Joseph Hunter published the first account of their roots. He depicted the Pilgrims as simple folk from an obscure place with little or no past to speak of, and certainly no scars left by industry or warfare. Hunter identified Scrooby as the home of William Brewster and the site of the Sep
aratist assembly that formed the nucleus of the Mayflower community. In doing so, he fashioned a naive and mistaken image of the people in question.

  “They were but inconsiderable persons at home,” Hunter wrote. “There is scarcely anything to be told of their early history, besides the very small facts … which make the history of men who are of but small account in the midst of a larger and advanced population.” Oddly patronizing, Hunter set the tone for the writers who followed him.2

  Hunter was an excellent archivist, but he lived at a time when historians took little interest in people who ranked below the upper reaches of the landed gentry. As a result, he made errors and oversights. Because Scrooby was a small village a long way from London—in 1603 it had little more than two hundred residents, or forty households—he portrayed the Pilgrims as a tiny, humble band, arising in some spontaneous way from rural tranquillity. Hunter made them sound isolated, or eccentric. He gave the impression that nothing more could be found out about them.

  None of this was fair, but Hunter’s work had an enduring effect. Another English writer, William Bartlett, picked up his material and made it popular, in a book of 1853 called The Pilgrim Fathers. An illustrated bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it added the visual elements of pointed hats, wide linen collars, and the landing on Plymouth Rock. Bartlett gave wide currency to the same mistakes about Scrooby, and both men distorted or misunderstood William Bradford’s account of events.

  Bradford never refers to Scrooby by name. He did not pin the Separatists to the village with Hunter’s degree of precision. Bradford says that they came from “sundrie townes & vilages, some in Notinghamshire, some of Lincollinshire, and some of Yorkshire,” implying that the movement was wide and diffuse, as indeed it was. Joseph Hunter chose to focus on a single detail, of a kind he could easily verify from the archives that he knew best. Bradford says that the Separatists met at Brewster’s home. The house in question was a manor owned by the Church of England. He did not identify it, but Joseph Hunter lived nearby, and he recognized that Bradford was referring to Scrooby Manor. It was a valuable property belonging to the archbishop of York, and Hunter rapidly found proof that it was the spot Bradford had in mind.