The Beginners of a Nation

IX

The Ferrars. In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant, the courts or meetings of the Virginia Company were held for years. The two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicholas, served in turn as deputy governors of the Virginia Company. This pious Ferrar family, as it became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing Virginia something of the air of a project for propagating the gospel. Nicholas, the father, gave money for the education of infidels in Virginia. A school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, and rewards were given to those colonists who would educate Indian children in their families. After the younger Nicholas, who was a man of remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a romantic enthusiasm, became deputy in 1622, the production of silk and wine and iron and the educating of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. A college was proposed, for which an endowment of thirteen hundred pounds was collected, and to which a valuable library was bequeathed by a settler. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity of all this, and complained of those in charge that "they spent Michaelmas rent in mid-summer moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir Francis Wyatt, wished that "little Mr. Ferrar were in Virginia, where he might add to his zeal a knowledge of the country."

The horrible massacre of March, 1622, made the Indian question something other than the Ferrars saw it. All schemes for educating the savages were obliterated in a day. The only thought after this was how to put the savages to death, old and young, men and women, more often by foul means than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they did not surpass, the treachery of the Indians. With the dissolution of the company by quo warranto proceedings in 1624 the government of the colony passed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had no more to do with Virginia.

X

Later History of the Ferrars. The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the younger, though without direct relation to colonization, throws light on the age of colony beginnings. Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for his mother, now a widow, the manor lordship of Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, and took the entire Ferrar family, including his brother and his sister with eighteen children, into religious retirement. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic community gave alms to the poor, illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, and worshiped in its little chapel with genuflections and other observances that procured for it the nickname of the "Protestant Nunnery," and brought down upon it the pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who had taken deacon's orders, was the real head of the community. He prepared at Little Gidding what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron of the four gospels. By means of relays of worshipers the Ferrars kept their devotions always in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted antiphonally during each twenty-four hours. Those whose turn it was to keep vigil were wont to leave a candle at the door of Nicholas and to wish him good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at which hour he was accustomed to rise and begin the exercises of the day. The strength of this belated mediæval saint gave way under a discipline so austere, and he died in 1637. Peckard's Life of N. Ferrar. Arminian Nunnery 1641. Little Gidding, with its "fair grove and sweet walks letticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated a few years later by the counter-zeal of the Puritans, who showed an especial indignation against the organ, which they broke into pieces to light fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, App. to Pref., cix. Behold an epitome of the first half of the seventeenth century – its idealism in affairs, and its war to the death of opposing ideals in religion!

Advent of Puritanism. In the very years during which the Ferrars were most active on behalf of Virginia the earliest Puritan movement toward America set in. The attenuated mediævalism of the Ferrars did not lack a certain refined beauty, but it was hardly suited to the rough work of hewing a road along which civilization might march into a savage wilderness. The Puritans, with their robust contempt for æsthetic considerations – making firewood of organs with delight, and feasting without scruple on the sheep of those whom they esteemed idolaters – were much the fitter to be champions against the American Canaanites.

BOOK II.

THE PURITAN MIGRATION

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM

I

Love of display in Elizabeth's time. Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth. The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses. Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. [36 - Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was appointed Sheriff for Surrey and Sussex before they were disjoyned. He had 116 servants in liverys, every one livery'd in greene sattin doublets. Divers gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garbe and habit, which at that time (when 30 or 40 was the usual retinue of a High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great matter… He could not refuse the civility of his friends and relations who voluntarily came themselves, or sent in their servants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir George Yeardley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the king had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia, "which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down the streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. 110, Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving men is sharply called in question in a tract entitled Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, 1579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of a serving man's position, while its decline is confessed in A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both of these tracts are reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe Library, 1868. The serving man was not a menial. He rendered personal services to his master or to guests, he could carve on occasion, and as a successor to the military retainers of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any of his master's quarrels; but his principal use was to lend dignity to the mansion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first Jamestown emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have seen.] High sheriffs and other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends to lend state to their office. Machyn's Diary, 324, note. Edward VI set out upon a progress in 1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon. She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

The age of the drama. A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.

Display in dress. Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. Peckard's Life of Ferrar. It was thus that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, passim. Men of the lowest ranks, desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display in people of lower rank. [37 - The Anatomie of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes, 1583, Pickering's reprint, pages 16, 17: "It is lawfull for the nobilitie, the gentrie and magisterie to weare riche attire, euery one in their callyng. The nobility and gentrie to innoble, garnish, and set forth birthes, dignities, and estates. The magisterie to dignifie their callynges… But now there is suche a confuse mingle mangle of apparell, and suche preposterous excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he lusteth himself, or can get by any kinde of meanes. So that it is very hard to know who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shal haue those which are neither of the nobilitie, gentilitie nor yeomanrie … go daiely in silkes, veluettes, satens, damaskes, taffaties and suche like; notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birthe, meane by estate, and seruile by callyng. And this I compte a greate confusion, and a generall disorder in a Christian common wealth."] Even the severe Puritan moralists did not object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty rank.

II

Observance of ceremonies. Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American history. Compare supra, p. 41. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the "starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor, delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates. There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen, and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of showy red cloaks. Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green velvet. De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church, and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again aboard the ship where he dwelt.

Formality at Plymouth. Even at a later date in the rather hungry little Pilgrim colony at Plymouth almost as much ceremony was observed, though the people were extreme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on Sunday morning the men came to Captain Standish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing a musket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three abreast, led by a sergeant. In the rear walked the governor, in a long robe. On his right was Elder Brewster, wearing a cloak. De Rasieres's letter, 2d N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii, 352. On the governor's left was Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak and side arms, and carried a small cane as a sort of baton of authority perhaps. Thus "they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."

Puritanism an outgrowth of the time. It was only in an age such as this that resistance to the celebration of rites and the observance of forms could be made a capital article of faith by the Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of a surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on certain occasions, was a matter for scruple and violent debate, for the grave consideration of the lawgiver and magistrate, and for severe penalties.

III

Origin of the Puritan movement. Fuller's Ch. Hist., book v, sec. iv, 27, 28. In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI there were those who objected to "the vestments," and one may even find what were afterward called Puritan opinions condemned among current errors in the twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII; but Puritanism – as a party protest against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship – had its origin in the persecution of Queen Mary's time. 1536. The English Protestants who fled from that fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cities of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva were the places to which these English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and Strasburg became cities of refuge for many of those who were to become leaders of the Anglican or Conservative party, while others who tended to what were afterward called Puritan views went sooner or later to Geneva, where Calvin was the dominant influence.

A. D. 1553. In the cities in which they found safety the exiles organized English churches. The English exiles. More remarkable religious communities were never gathered into single congregations. Five bishops and five deans of the English Church, and more than fifty eminent doctors of divinity, with younger men who were destined to play a leading part in the future, were comprised in these little churches. Such communities soon became centers of animated discussion and debate.

Outbreak of dissension. During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity; but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John Knox – the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish reformation.

Character of the debates at Frankfort. This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence – the little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude. Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the United States.

The rise of the two great parties. In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, resulting now in the exiling from the city of one beaten minority and now in the departure of another, and in the driving away of one leading disputant after another, there appeared at length the features of the two great parties of English Protestantism face to face for the first time. One of these parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the Protestant conscience could be made to bear, insisted upon the superior authority of the clergy, and sought to disturb as little as possible the ancient order of the English church. On the other hand, in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort contentions, the tendency of the ultra wing of the Protestants to the notion of a local and independent church and to a democratic church government was already apparent. [38 - A Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 1564, is the primary authority. It is almost beyond doubt that Whittingham, Dean of Durham, a participant in the troubles, wrote the book. The Frankfort struggles have been discussed recently in Mr. Hinds's The Making of the England of Elizabeth, but, like all writers on the subject, Hinds is obliged to depend almost solely on Whittingham's account. The several volumes of letters from the archives of Zurich, published by the Parker Society, give a good insight into the forces at work in the English Reformation. See, for example, in the volume entitled Original Letters, 1537-1558, that of Thomas Sampson to Calvin, dated Strasburgh, February 23, 1555, which shows the Puritan movement half fledged at this early date when Calvin's authoritative advice is invoked. "The flame is lighted up with increased vehemence amongst us English. For a strong controversy has arisen, while some desire the book of reformation of the Church of England to be set aside altogether, others only deem some things in it objectionable, such as kneeling at the Lord's Supper, the linen surplice, and other matters of this kind; but the rest of it, namely, the prayers, scripture lessons and the form of the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper they wish to be retained."] Even the peculiarity of two ministers presiding over one church, which was cherished later in New England, appeared among the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this time.

A purified ritual. While attempting to mediate between the parties at Frankfort, Calvin expressed his preference for a ritual of greater purity than that established by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. Extreme Protestants rallied round this ideal of a liturgy purified of human tradition. It was some years later, after the Frankfort church had been dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, that this party came to be known by the name of Puritan – that is, a party not so much bent on purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant worship from mediæval forms. [39 - There are many and conflicting accounts of the origin of the name. In the Narragansett Club Publications, ii, 197-199, there is an interesting statement of some of these by the editor of Cotton's Answer to Roger Williams, in a note.]

Return of the exilies, 1558. After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth the English Protestants returned to their own country. The two great parties that were to divide the English church had already begun to crystallize. Those who had settled at Strasburg and Zurich came back hoping to re-establish the Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the Prayer Book of Edward VI. Those who returned from Basel and Geneva had caught the spirit of the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the reformation to a more logical extreme; while the Frankfort church, or what remained of it, had been storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of congregational independence in church government.

Results. The petty squabbles of the English exiles, transplanted to England, grew into bitter feuds and brought forth persecutions and political struggles. The settlement of New England, the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, the growth of non-conformity, the modification of the English Constitution and of all English life, were germinally present in the differences between the exiles at Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Horne at Frankfort-on-the-Main about gowns and litanies and the authority of the priest. It is not often that a great historical movement can be traced through a single rill to its rise at the fountain head.

IV

The Puritan debate. The theological debates that fill so large a place in the history of the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe were mainly concerned with speculative dogmas. However futile controversies may seem that seek to reduce to formulas the relations between God and man, they have at least a topical dignity. But the debates about ceremonies and vestments which the exiles brought back to England from the Continent, and which held first place there during the reign of Elizabeth and James, were bitter without being serious. A life-and-death struggle concerning the wearing of "white surplices" or the making of the sign of the cross in baptism can not but seem frivolous to the modern mind. Certayne Qvestions concerning silk or vvool in the high priest's ephod, 1605. Learned scholars like Broughton and Ainsworth thought it not beneath them to write tractates discussing the material of which the ephod of a Jewish high priest was made. It was learnedly demonstrated that the ephod was of silk, and there were sober essays on the linsey-woolsey side of that controversy. To the fine-spun mind of that time the character of the Jewish ephod was thought to settle the propriety of the Christian surplice. To the modern reader the whole debate about vestments and liturgies would be amusing if it were not so tedious. It is necessary to steady one's judgment of that age by remembering that deeper things sometimes lay concealed under these disputes regarding the contemptible mint and cumin of ecclesiasticism. Puritanism at its rise was an effort to escape from formalism, the outgrowth of an aspiration for greater spirituality in worship; but it gradually passed into an opposite formalism as rigid as that from which it had escaped.

Uniformity not possible. It was in vain that Elizabeth tried to compel uniformity. The difference between the radical and the conservative is constitutional, and is manifest in every period of agitation. Neither the mediation of moderate men nor the compulsion of authority can bring these two sempiternal divisions of the human race into agreement. The conservative English churchman limited his Protestantism to the rejection of the pope's authority, and to certain moderate reforms in church government and ritual. He shuddered with alarm at every proposal to reconstruct religious institutions which were moss-grown with ancient sentiment. The extreme Puritan, on the other hand, went about his work in the spirit of a Jehu. He saved all his reverence for the precepts of the Bible, now becoming common in the vulgar tongue. He applied biblical phraseology to the affairs of life in a way that would have been impossible had he possessed any sense of humor. He felt himself impelled by the call of God to carry out in England the changes that had taken place in the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, and to go even further. He would have no surplices, no sign of the cross, no liturgy, no church holy days. Away with these rags of Antichrist, was his cry. Let us get back to the simplicity of the primitive ages. The Anglican, on the other hand, felt himself an Englishman above all, and without a stately liturgy, great bishops in square caps and lawn sleeves, Christmas feasts, solemn Good Fridays, and joyous Easters, there would have remained for him no merry England.

V

Growth of party spirit. The party line between Anglican and Puritan was not at once sharply drawn. It was only after debates growing ever more acrimonious, after persecutions and numberless exasperations, that the parties in the Church of England fell into well-defined and hostile camps. If there had been some relaxation of the requirements of uniformity, if a conciliatory policy had been pursued by the government, the ultimate division might have been postponed until party spirit had cooled; but in that day blows took the place of words, and words had the force of blows. The queen herself could write to a bishop who scrupled to do what she desired, "By God, I will unfrock you!" and moderation in debate was not to be expected from lesser folk.

Puritanism the party of opposition. When the reformer has warmed to his work he looks about him for new abuses to fall upon. The dominant discontent of any age is prone to spread its wings over other grievances, and feebler movements seek shelter from the strong. Puritanism no doubt gathered momentum from the widespread agrarian and industrial disturbance in this and the preceding reigns. The profit from sheep-raising had induced many manor lords to inclose the wastes on which the peasants had pastured their cattle for ages. The humble copy-hold tenant, having no longer grass for his cows or mast for his pigs, was driven to distress by agricultural progress. In some cases even the common fields, cultivated in allotments from ancient times by the members of the village communities, first as serfs and later as tenants, were turned into sheepwalks, and hamlets of tenants' cottages were torn down to make room for more profitable occupants of the soil. [40 - That the Puritans early made common cause with the suffering tenantry is not a matter of conjecture. Philip Stubbes, in 1583, in the Anatomie of Abuses, pp. 126, 127, writes: "They take in and inclose commons, moores, heathes, and other common pastures, where out the poore commonaltie, were wont to haue all their forrage and feedyng for their cattell, and (whiche is more) corne for themselves to liue vpon; all which are now in most places taken from them, by these greedie puttockes to the great impouerishyng and vtter beggeryng of many whole townes and parishes… For these inclosures bee the causes why riche men eate vpp poore men, as beastes dooe eate grasse." One might cite recent economic writers on the effect of inclosures, but the conservative laments of the antiquary Aubrey, in his Introduction to the Survey of Wiltshire, written about 1663, give us a nearer and more picturesque, if less philosophical, view. He says: "Destroying of Manours began Temp. Hen. VIII., but now common; whereby the mean People live lawless, no body to govern them, they care for no body, having no Dependance on any Body. By this Method, and by the Selling of the Church-Lands, is the Ballance of the Government quite alter'd and put into the Hands of the common People." Writing from what he had heard from his grandfather, he says: "Anciently the Leghs i. e. Pastures were noble large Grounds… So likewise in his Remembrance was all between Kington St. Michael and Dracot-Ferne common Fields. Then were a world of labouring People maintained by the Plough… There were no Rates for the Poor in my Grandfather's Days … the Church-ale at Whitsuntide did the Business… Since the Reformation and Inclosures aforesaid these Parts have swarm'd with poor People. The Parish of Caln pays to the Poor 500£ per annum… Inclosures are for the private, not for the publick Good. For a Shepherd and his Dog, or a Milk-Maid, can manage Meadow-Land, that upon arable, employ'd the Hands of several Scores of Labourers." Miscellanies on Several Curious Subjects, now first published, etc., 1723, pp. 30-33. It will fall within the province of another volume of this series to treat of the systems of landholding brought from England, and I shall not go further into the subject of inclosures here. A portion of the agricultural population seemed superfluous in consequence of inclosures, and colonization was promoted as a means of ridding the country of the excess of its population.] The worst offenders were the greedy courtiers who had secured the estates of the English monasteries. Workmen ruined by the dissolution of the guilds were added to the ranks of the unhappy. All the discontent begotten of these transitions from mediæval life tended to strengthen the leading opposition – and that leading opposition was Puritanism.

VI

Widening the field of protest. Puritanism also progressively widened its field of protest. Beliefs that Protestants rejected were symbolized by the vestments of bishop and clergy. Advanced Protestants insisted that the shadows should be banished with the substance, that the symbol should disappear with the dogma. We have seen that in Frankfort the inchoate Puritan party wished to abolish the litany and purge the service book of all the remains of the old religion. This controversy raged in England, and the Puritan side did not at first lack support even among the bishops. But Elizabeth, the real founder of Anglicanism, molded the church to her will, putting down Catholics and Puritans with a hard hand. The more advanced of the party came at length to believe that all "stinted" prayers "read out of a book" were contrary to the purity and simplicity of Christian worship. The hostility of the bishops to that which the Puritans believed to be the cause of God no doubt helped to convince the persecuted party that the episcopal office itself was contrary to Scripture.

Puritanism becomes dogmatic. Most of the Puritans of Elizabeth's time, under the lead of the great Cartwright, became Presbyterian in theory and sought to assimilate the Church of England to the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, holding that theirs was the very order prescribed by the apostles. [41 - In the matter of Church government Puritanism passed through three different periods. In the reign of Elizabeth the Church-Puritan was mainly Presbyterian under Cartwright's lead. But there was even then a current that set toward Independency. Separatism was the outward manifestation of this tendency, and according to Ralegh's estimate, cited in the text, there were about twenty thousand declared Separatists in England in 1593. After the suppression of the presbyteries within the Church in the last years of Elizabeth, and the crushing out of the Separatists by rigorous persecutions, questions of the particular form of Church government fell into abeyance among the Puritans for about forty years. "Indiscriminate anti-prelacy was the prevailing mood of the English people," says Masson, "and the distinction between Presbyterianism and Independency was yet caviare to the general." Life of Milton, ii, 590. Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine (as quoted by Masson), confesses in 1641 that until that year he had never thought what Presbytery or Independency was, or ever spoke with a man who seemed to know it. See also Hanbury's Memorials, ii, 69. Writers on this period do not seem to recognize the fact that the two views were in some rivalry among the early Puritans, and that the theory of the independence of the local church seems to have been at least foreshadowed in the opinions at Frankfort. But there was a long generation in which these differences among the Puritans were forgotten in their life-and-death conflict with the Episcopal party. Then, as Puritanism came into power, the example of other Protestant European countries drew England toward Presbyterianism, while the voice of New England came from over the sea pleading for Congregationalism.] Another but much smaller division of the Puritans tended toward independency, finding in the New Testament a system different from that of Cartwright. Both the Presbyterians and those who held to local church government wished to see their own system established by law. Neither faction thought of tolerating Anglican practices if the Anglicans could be put down. The notion of a state church with prescribed forms of worship enforced by law was too deeply imbedded in the English mind to be easily got rid of, and the spirit of persecution pervaded every party, Catholic or Protestant. Every one was sure that divine authority was on his side, and that human authority ought to be.

VII

Anglicanism becomes dogmatic. A corresponding change began to take place in the Episcopal party. The earlier defenders of Elizabeth's establishment argued, somewhat as Hooker did later, that the "practice of the apostles" was not an "invariable rule or law to succeeding ages, because they acted according to the circumstances of the church in its infant and persecuted state." Episcopal government they held to be allowable, and maintained the attitude of prudent men who justify their compromise with history and the exigency of the time, and advocate, above all, submission to civil authority. But the tendency of party division is to push both sides to more positive ground. There arose in the last years of Elizabeth a school of High-churchmen led by Bancroft, afterward primate, who turned away from Hooker's moderation and assumed a more aggressive attitude. Like the Presbyterians and the Independents and the Catholics, these in turn maintained that their favorite system of church economy was warranted by divine authority, and that all others were excluded.

Failure of Elizabeth's policy. When the High-church leaders had reached the dogmatic assertion of apostolic succession and a divinely appointed episcopal form of government as essentials of a Christian church, the fissure between the two ecclesiastical parties in England was complete. Each had settled itself upon a supposed divine authority; each regarded the other as teaching a theory contrary to the divine plan. Elizabeth's policy of repression had produced a certain organic uniformity, but the civil war of the seventeenth century was its ultimate result.

VIII

Bitterness of the debate. The controversy between the two Protestant parties naturally grew more bitter as time went on. The silencing of ministers, the Fleet Prison, the inquisitorial Ecclesiastical Commission, and other such unanswerable arguments did not sweeten the temper of the Puritans. The bitterness of the controversy reached its greatest intensity in 1588, when there appeared a succession of anonymous tracts, most of them signed Martin Marprelate. They seem to have been written mainly by the same hand, but their authorship has been a matter of debate to this day.

The Marprelate tracts. The sensation produced by these violent assaults is hardly conceivable now. There were no newspapers then, and there was but little popular literature. 1588. Here were little books printed no one knew where, written by no one knew whom, concerning a religious controversy of universal interest. They were couched in the phrase of the street, in the very slang and cant of the populace, and were violent and abusive, sometimes descending to sheer blackguardism. Marprelate went gunning for large game; his deadliest abuse he let fly as from a blunderbuss at the very heads of the English church. The Dean of Salisbury he calls "Doctor of Diviltrie and Deane of Sarum." It was the first time in the history of polemics that any one had addressed a high dignitary of the church with such irreverent titles as "You grosse beaste!" "You block, you!" Sometimes Martin bends his knees with mock reverence, as when he calls the clergy "right poysond, persecuting and terrible priests." He blurts out epithets against "the sinful, the unlawful, the broken, the unnatural, false, and bastardly governours of the church; to wit, archbishops and bishops"; and addresses them as "you enemies to the state, you traytors to God and his worde, you Mar-prince, Mar-land, Mar-magestrate, Mar-church, and Mar-commonwealth." The Marprelate tracts in Lenox Library. The spice of the books, that which gave them their popularity, was doubtless their rollicking impudence. "Wo – ho, now, Brother London!" he cries to the Bishop of London. "Go to, you Asse!" is a kind of kennel eloquence relished by the populace. Martin seems even to giggle and sneer and hiss in type in such expressions as "tse, tse, tse."

An Admonition to the People of England, p. 25. The little books went everywhere. The Bishop of Winchester sadly confessed that these "slanderous pamphlets, freshe from the presse," were "in men's hands and bosoms commonly." The queen and courtiers read them, and students had nothing better to laugh at. Who will not stop in the street to hear one clown rail cleverly at another? But to see the bishops collectively and the primate and others severally put into a pillory and pelted in this daring fashion by a man who knew that his life would pay the forfeit for his libel if he could by any means be discovered, was livelier sport than bull-baiting.

Dr. Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, replied to the first pamphlet somewhat ponderously, as became a bishop who feels that the proprieties forbid his being too interesting. Marprelate wanted nothing better than a bishop for an antagonist; and while the whole constabulary force of the kingdom was hunting him for his life, the nimble Martin was chuckling over the excitement made by a new tract of his, headed with the well-known street cry of a tub-mender, which played derisively on Bishop Cooper's name, "Hay any worke for Cooper?" This tract professed to be "printed in Europe not farre from some of the Bounsing priestes." Nugæ Antiquæ, ii, 89, 90. In this paper Martin shows to what depth a religious debate in Elizabeth's time could descend; he stoops to make the bishop ridiculous by twitting him with the infidelity of his wife, a scandal which the unfortunate prelate had treated with "Socratical and philosophical patience."

Lenox Collection, N. Y. Pub. Library. There were not wanting many imitators of Martin's grossness on the other side of the controversy, who were just as libelous but for the most part less clever. One of the tracts in reply was called An Almond for a Parrat. The author says he had heard that Martin was dead, or, as he expressed it, "that your grout-headed holinesse had turned uppe your heeles like a tired jade in a medow and snorted out your sorrowefull soule, like a mesled hogge on a mucke-hille." This is beastly without being vivacious. Comp. Bacon's An Advertisement touching Controversies, etc. While the press and the stage were occupied with coarse retorts on Martinism, there appeared tracts in favor of peace. There are other evidences of the existence of a moderate party that lamented the excesses of both sides in this debate.

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Advance of Puritan opinions. Puritanism was evolutionary from the beginning. Its earlier disputes about vestments and litanies grew by degrees to a rejection of all liturgies as idolatrous. Even the reading of the Bible as a part of the service came at last to be reprehended by extremists, and the repetition of the Lord's Prayer was thought dangerously liturgical. The advanced Puritans sought to exclude from Christian worship everything pleasing to the æsthetic sense, confounding bareness with simplicity. Compromises continued to be made inside the church, but in the ultimate ideal of Puritan worship there remained, besides the sermon, nothing but long extemporary prayers and the singing by the untrained voices of the congregation of literal versions of the Hebrew Psalms – doggerel verse in cobblestone meters.

X

Opposition to May-poles. In its early stages Puritanism was a crusade against idolatry, and drew its inspiration in this, as in nearly everything else, from the Old Testament. To the word "idolatry" it gave an inclusiveness not found in the Jewish Scriptures, and puzzling to a mind accustomed to modern ways of thinking. There was hardly any set observance of the church in which constructive idolatry did not lie concealed. All holy days except Sunday were abhorred as things that bore the mark of the Beast. Even in the reign of Edward VI, long before the name of Puritanism was known, the May-poles round which English people made merry once a year were denounced as idols in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross by Sir Stephen – the "Sir" being a polite prefix to a clergyman's name. This Stephen, curate of St. Catherine Cree, was a forerunner of Puritanism, who sometimes defiantly preached from an elm tree in the chuchyard and read the service standing on a tomb on the north side of the church. He wanted the saintly names of churches and the heathen names of days of the week changed, so keen was his scent for idolatry. The parish of St. Andrew Undershaft had received its distinctive name from a very tall May-pole that overtopped the church steeple. This pole was erected annually, and it rested from one May to another on hooks under the eaves of a row of houses and stalls. In the newborn Protestant zeal against idols Sir Stephen denounced especially the lofty shaft of St. Andrew. 1549. The people in their rage took it from the hooks and sawed it in pieces, and its sections were appropriated by the several householders who had given it shelter and who presently heaped its parts upon one great bonfire. Puritanism kept up its Don Quixote battle against May-poles until there was hardly one standing to seduce the people to idolatry. Rushworth, Pt. III, vol. ii, 749. A. D. 1644. When the Puritan party came into power, nearly a hundred years after the days of Sir Stephen of St. Catherine Cree, one of its earliest laws ordered that all May-poles – "an heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness" – be taken down.

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