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The Brownist Emigration
Brownism was the most severe form of political agitation of its time, and one which its opponents believed would lead to social turmoil, endless denominational fighting, rebellion against the monarchy, civil war, anarchy and dictatorship.
In the roughest part of England, a rural area outside the influence of either Yorkish nobles or London leadership, though, it emerged as a way to escape chaos destitution.
After they were purged for refusing to use the English Book of Common Prayer, John Robinson and John Smyth started a Brownist congregation in Scrooby, on the Yorkshire-Nottinghamshire border.
When one of their members was arrested, it drew attention to their illegal gatherings and the congregation decided to flee to the Netherlands. It quickly split into its more and less radical parts, with John Robinson leading the less radical component to Leiden to set up a new life. When life in Leiden proved impossibly difficult, they decided that North America might hold the answers.
Transcript
The story of Plymouth Colony is one that exists in sharp contrast to that of Jamestown. Instead of a place no Englishman had visited, Cape Cod had been one of the most popular North American destinations. The investors who would back the mission weren’t the best business minds in the kingdom – they were a group of people looking for any venture that might help them survive financially. Instead of being given a set of strict instructions from a top-down company, settlers were given a patent and left alone to fund and govern it. And, the Indian civilization, they encountered was one on the brink of destruction – not an empire at the height of its strength.
Perhaps the biggest difference of all, though, was its settlers. They weren’t a group of individuals vying for control – their core was a group of people insular enough they rarely questioned their leadership once elected, and had voluntarily remained insular to the point of isolation, even while living in one of Europe’s biggest cities. They were neither gentlemen nor servants, but a group of people in the middle, artisans and farmers. Like those who colonized Jamestown, they didn’t have colonization experience, but unlike those in Virginia, they had very little life experience. Many had never ventured beyond the Yorkshire-Nottinghamshire border before leaving for Leiden.
And instead of a subtle Catholic bias, these people were Brownists, and to fully understand them, we first need to explore both what Brownism was, and what it meant in particular to a small rural area on the Yorkshire-Nottinghamshire border at the turn of the 17th Century.
Introduction
Brownism was named for Robert Browne, a Puritan separatist preacher in the 1580s. He wasn’t the first of his kind, but he was the movement’s most visible agitator. He was from an affluent family who had made their fortune exporting wool to Europe, and had become the political leaders of their town. He was related to the Cecils, and it’s probably for this reason that while he was arrested 32 times, he was never seriously prosecuted.
He went to Cambridge, and quickly came to embrace the most radical of Puritan ideas, and when he graduated he toured East Anglia, the heart of Puritan England, delivering extremely provocative sermons. He angered the authorities, and then he would switch sides and angered his supporters too. East Anglia was the home of towns like Norwich and Suffolk, which were part of a broader international network of deeply Calvinist sea towns from La Rochelle to Gdansk, and of course the Netherlands. Pockets of Dutch weavers also inhabited these towns, and helped bring Puritan literature printed in the Netherlands into England.
Browne partnered with exiled Huguenots like Jean Morely and Philippe de Mornay and printed tracts which would serve as the basis of the Brownist movement, and also of Plymouth Colony specifically. Among their tenents was that in any Christian assembly, authority belonged to the people as a whole, free to vote, hire and fire their ministers without a hierarchy of bishops or a national code or religious laws. They compared a true church to Athenian democracy, with each congregation free to believe and worship as it chose. They also said that true believers should not share communion with people who weren’t part of the Calvinist elect.
The 1580s provided a unique opportunity for his movement to grow, for a couple of reasons. First, in that middle class of society between gentlemen and workers, literacy had doubled in the course of a generation. For the first time, a majority of people in the Eastern English Yeomen classes were now literate, and it was from this group that many Brownists came. They weren’t peasants, paupers, servants or the poor, and they weren’t old noble families. They were self-employed men in skilled trades, lower in social rank than Browne himself, but also people with a solid financial future, and oftentimes with some control in their towns. The movement grew with each Elizabethan battle against the Catholics, especially the sinking of the Armada, after which anonymous pamphlets were written calling for the deeper reformation that the Puritans and Parliaments had been advocating.
If literacy was at an all-time high, though, by the 1580s, religious life was at an all-time low. Four decades after Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries, over 80% of English congregations had never heard a sermon before. There simply weren’t enough educated preachers to fill even 20% of England’s parishes. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, they’d found educated preachers for about half of England’s parishes. That was an impressive increase over just two decades, and they’d done this by making the main purpose of the universities to produce clergymen. Browne was one of these clergymen, as were two young men named John Robinson and John Smythe.
As the universities struggled to produce clergy, and the Church of England limped along with readings from the English Book of Common Prayer, though the seeds of dissent were starting to grow. We discussed in the Prologue series how the reformation had occurred in England, and the kind of socio-economic tension involved, and as the Anglican Church limped along, a decent portion of the population was also growing in their own ideas. Catholic recusants worshiped in secret masses conducted in individuals’ houses, and on the other side, Puritans began to organize, to take over and purge the church of all previous catholic influences. They weren’t unique because they were Calvinist. They were unique because they were actively working to transform the Anglican Church into one that adhered to the Continental model, and to purge anything that differed from it. They had supporters like Walsingham who were close to the queen, giving them some sense of safety, but no one agitated more ceaselessly than the Brownists.
The agitation reached its head when a Suffolk church was vandalized with a message comparing Elizabeth to the whore of Babylon. That was distinctly not considered ok, and while Cecil yet again protected Browne, who briefly slipped away to the Netherlands, in response to the event Elizabeth sent William Bancroft – the future Archbishop of Canterbury – to investigate political agitation in the area.
Browne’s books were banned, and burned, save for one which Bancroft himself kept and read, and which still exists in the Library at Canterbury. Five ministers and 40 other people were convicted of nonconformity, and two people caught distributing the books were hanged. But, Bancroft began to read about the Brownists. He himself was an evangelical, and someone whose penchant for speaking his mind had caused him to be passed over for promotion to bishop until he was 53, but he wasn’t someone who spoke ignorantly. He wanted to understand people, and now, he wanted to understand the Brownists. He read everything Browne, Moray, Morley and Barrow wrote, and he came to a conclusion.
Bancroft decided that separatism was a spiteful and hypocritical concept, and one which would introduce devastating divisions into England. It would lead to endless division of denominations, and the sects would begin to squabble over petty issues. The denominational conflict, he said, would lead to Civil War, and either anarchy or dictatorship. Furthermore, denial of the monarch’s supremacy would ultimately lead to armed rebellion against the king or queen. Also, because England was a place with pre existing inequalities, taking away the hierarchy of the church would only put the poor at the mercy of the rich, and independent local churches wouldn’t be able to stand up to the rich either. The monarch, meanwhile, would be powerless to intervene on the side of fairness. He also noted that the people pushing hardest for change were also the landowners who were oppressing the poor.
Both Bancroft and his Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, John Whitgift, were dedicated evangelical protestants who had stood fast to their beliefs even when they weren’t popular. They weren’t Catholics, and in fact Whitgift had remained a defiant Protestant during Mary Tudor’s reign. They just had a very troubling prediction of what Brownism would lead to, and in reality, they pretty much nailed it. A couple years later, an investigation into a separate affair led Bancroft to discover that the leading mainstream puritan, Thomas Cartwright, was working to build a parallel church which would ultimately take over the Church of England. It was revolutionary sedition, and Bancroft pushed for a ban on private religious gatherings.
So, at its core, Brownism wasn’t just a religious movement. It was a form of political agitation that would make WHO blush.
130 miles Northwest of Norwich, though, it had a different meaning and motivation. Yes, there were still the hardcore political agitators, and the puritan organizers, but in a rural piece of land on the border of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, known as the Quadrilateral, the realities of life were very different, and this led to a different flavor of Puritanism.
This area was a deeply rural place, known as the most troubled area in all of England during James and Elizabeth’s reign. It was out of the reach of either the powerful men in Yorkshire, or those in London. It was crime ridden, there was twice the national rate of children born out of wedlock, there was adultery, drunkenness, and brutal local government. William Brewster’s father had been accused of lechery, and even the attempt to repair the parish church that had been deteriorating since the Dissolution of the Monasteries turned into a brawl. Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a well-liked Catholic soldier named Thomas, Baron Darcy, had been lord of the manor at one of the region’s bigger towns, but he had participated in the Pilgrimage of Grace. When the Lassells, a local family with ambitions of their own reported Darcy’s participation, he was beheaded and they were given all his money, land and power.
As you’d imagine, people got power that way didn’t use it honorably, and decades later, George Lassells’s grandson was behaving as he once had. He beat up a preacher in the streets, and was brought to court for trying to force his female employees to have sex in exchange for money. There was one local family strong enough to try to stand up to him, and they were in and out of court repeatedly over the course of years. When the Church tried to help that family end the domination, Lassells killed the family’s hawk and stole their dog and they ended up in court yet again.
In such an environment, you can see the appeal of trying to pull away and find some level of independence. For that, you had two choices – Catholicism and Puritanism. Being a Catholic was a much, much harder route. If you saw the show Gunpowder, the execution of the old woman was essentially a true story, but it happened in Yorkshire in the 1580s, not 1605. Elizabeth had sent an anti-Puritan man to be Archbishop of Canterbury, but she sent a Calvinist and friend of the Cecils to be Archbishop of York. In a letter to William Cecil, this Archbishop said Yorkists were popish, stupid, ignorant an stubborn, and that he intended to convert them.
So, Catholics were fined. They were killed. New clergy and schools were imposed on them. And meanwhile, even if what Puritans and Separatists did was technically illegal, the Archbishop turned a blind eye. He didn’t care about nonconformity unless Catholics were involved. There was a lot of Catholicism in the area, and in fact some of the Pilgrims, like William Bradford, had Catholic family members. But, if you weren’t specifically dedicated to Catholicism, and just wanted a place to worship peacefully and away from the tyranny of men like Lassells, Puritanism was a much, much safer option.
And it’s in this era that we can see Puritanism begin to grow in this area. It had a core of strong advocates like William Brewster, and a very favorable environment. Brewster was the nephew of the mayor of the Puritan town of Hull, and through this connection had started to work for Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, William Davidson. Davidson was soon scapegoated for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, though, and within two years Davidson was sent to prison, and Brewster was sent home. He was a known Puritan who had helped fight Catholicism, though, so he was deemed trustworthy enough to take over his father’s position as postmaster. By the time James took the throne, there was a relatively strong Puritan presence in the region.
The strongest Puritan defenders began to die, though. First Leicester and Walsingham, then Elizabeth, and four years later, her Archbishop of York. On the other side of the divide, so did Whitgift, but James replaced him with Bancroft.
True to his style, King James was much more openly hostile to the Puritans than Elizabeth ever had. He published two books attacking Puritans and Brownists, echoing Bancroft’s ideas with much more inflammatory wording. They were pests, a disease, an evil sorte. They were dividing his kingdom, which should be unified, and while the Brownists were the biggest problem, they were only putting into practice universal Puritan ideas.
He didn’t step up a campaign of violence, though. Instead, he allowed Bancroft to create a set of laws to deter Puritan activities. He required full acceptance of the Prayer Book, sealed off loopholes in laws and regulations, required parish church-wardens to report separatism, and at the same time tried to repair the church, with an evangelical bent. He was evangelical, and this would also make people less likely to look for Puritan alternatives, so now clergymen were barred from taverns and gambling, and every church was required to have a pulpit. He couldn’t get his regulations through Parliament, because Puritan sympathizers would likely oppose them, so the regulations were never fully legal and were opposed by puritan lawyers. In addition, the Archdiocese of York didn’t put the canons into effect until a couple years later, giving Northern English puritans time to build a wider movement. Eventually, though, they did take hold, and the people who refused to accept the Prayer Book were purged from the Church of England. Two of these people were John Robinson and John Smyth, no relation to our Jamestown hero.
They were the preachers of the Scrooby congregation of puritans that met at William Brewster’s old manor house. Both had gone to Cambridge as sizars, or poor-but-promising students who were allowed to attend in exchange for doing chores for richer students. Both had done well, and gone on to prestigious positions elsewhere. Robinson was deputy to the minister at St. Andrew’s Church in Norwich, a relatively wealthy city famous for its Puritanism, and Smyth got a teaching post at Lincoln. Robinson was a quiet person who, prior to the purge had never drawn attention to himself or engaged in excessive politics. Smyth was more actively combative and political, openly and personally insulting people who opposed Puritan reforms in Lincoln, like restricting the amount of beer sold in the city. He was also more radical, questioning the value of repeating the Lord’s Prayer, which wasn’t just used in sermons, but also as a blessing over any stressful situation.
Still, in 1605, both ended up back home, and they started exploring their options. Smyth tried becoming a teacher and a doctor, but was banned from those professions, too, and meanwhile the two read tracts by Browne and his colleagues. Persuaded by the arguments, and with no future career in the established church, they stepped outside the bounds of the law and started a separatist church. They started a congregation which met at Brewster’s old manor house every Sunday, and formed the heart of a rapidly growing movement throughout the region. For two years they worshipped peacefully with a huge range of people attending services, some drawn by Robinson’s quiet piety, and others by Smyth’s brashness.
All were trying to escape their troubled surroundings, but in 1607 economic pressure led to a revolt, which led to a series of hangings. It was a purely economic revolt against the continued enclosures and raising rents and hay prices, but it was in a religiously charged time, and people assumed the rising had something to do with either Catholicism or Separatism, though they weren’t sure which. For the new Archbishop of York, that was perfect. He’d go after Catholics and Separatists alike.
First, he went after the Catholics, who were required to take an oath of allegiance. Dozens of pages of records of Catholic arrest warrants exist in the High Commission archives. Only a handful of Brownists were arrested. In one session, 60 catholics were tried, and 14 imprisoned, whereas only 4 Brownists faced a similar fate. The Brownists were the people who were politically active. They used their arrests to attack the legal authority of the Anglican Church in a way that, if accepted, would strengthen Parliament, reduce Royal prerogative, and have wide ranging implications for English politics and law. Catholics were considered heretics, but Separatists who were arrested were the individuals considered political provocateurs, and one in particular named Gervase Nevyle, was well educated, well connected, and was aiming his political arrows at the heart of Jacobean politics. He escaped charges, the courts began sealing the records of any hearing involving a Brownist or Catholic who tried to oppose the Court, he left for Holland, published a book, and then returned and was imprisoned for sedition.
He was a member of the Scrooby congregation, though, and this drew the attention of the authorities toward Robinson and Smyth’s flock. They issued an arrest warrant for Brewster and another man named Richard Jackson, but both had vanished. The two were fined 20 pounds, which was the penalty imposed on Catholics who didn’t turn up to answer charges.
This was a big, big deal. It marked a change, and it was a message. Separatists were no longer safe. They’d watched Catholics suffer for 20 years, and if the Separatists were going to start facing what Catholics faced, they needed to protect themselves. They even worried about execution, which was in reality unlikely to affect Separatists who were protestants and therefore not considered heretics. Still, it was a big step in a dangerous direction, and the Scrooby congregation decided it was time to leave.
Thomas Helwys was the son of a man who had gotten rich investing in real estate, trading land, and had helped Brewster build the area’s puritan network. Legally, they needed a permit to go overseas, but they also knew that as Separatists they were unlikely to get such a permit, so Helwys got a boat and they unsuccessfully tried to slip across the channel to Holland. They were caught, but Cecil came to their aid and decided to let them go. They made it to Holland.
Soon after reaching Holland, they split up, though, just as Bancroft had predicted. Helwys was the first to go. He was extreme enough to make Bradford and the rest of the future Pilgrims uncomfortable. He ended up returning to London and dying in prison in 1614 after being accused of sedition. Next, Smyth and Robinson split. Smyth had adopted the most radical Protestant view of the time, anabaptism, and ultimately went on to found the Baptist movement in the English-speaking world. Robinson took 100 people to found a new congregation away from the factionalism in Amsterdam, in Leiden.
For 10 years Robinson tried to guide his congregation, though he himself started to see the negative of Brownism. Brownists had a double reputation in England at the time, on the one hand, they were seen as enthusiastic and creative, and on the other hand, they were seen as bitter. As they built their new church in Leiden, Robinson started to see the bitterness emerge, as well as anger and arrogance. He also saw them growing judgmental. They were people who had separated themselves from ungodliness, but Robinson saw a core of people who could encourage godliness, and instead he was watching them resent the people around them, looking down on the unsaved. So, he started encouraging them to join other people, even to the extent of encouraging them to occasionally attend other churches. He himself acted as a chaplain to the English regiments in the Netherlands. Most English authorities in the Netherlands were sympathetic to Calvinism, so even when asked to curtail activities like the printing of seditious books to send back to England, the authorities let Robinson’s congregation do as they pleased.
The problem with Leiden was, again, economic. The Pilgrims easily found work doing manual labor, but the work itself was much harder than they were used to in their agricultural life in England. They were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and they had no chance of becoming prosperous. There was no social mobility, and no financial security. The work was 7 days a week, and there were no seasons off, like winter in England. The diet was poor, and the children were forced to work too, as well as being at risk of losing their English identity. There was so little hope for their future that they worried that the children might turn to crime or become sailors, and the city was big, intimidating and no more religious than the Quadrilateral had been. In fact, they were required to work on the Sabbath and violate their own beliefs. There was a riot at Delft, and a few months later one in Leiden, again motivated by economic factors. In addition, the thirty years war loomed on the horizon, and if violence broke out between Spain and the Netherlands, they’d be on the front lines. They were quite literally on the outskirts of society, making their home in a row of little houses at the edge of town, and it was a society that was even less forgiving than the one they’d just left.
They started to consider Virginia. On the one hand, that was a daunting prospect. They’d heard the stories of Cassen and Ratcliffe’s deaths. There had also been a group of Separatists who had famously died en route to Virginia. The Dutch offered to let them settle in Middelburg, which was a more agricultural city, but also one closer to the Spanish border. But, going across the Atlantic seemed like the thing to do.
So, they reached out to Edwin Sandys with their Seven Articles, declaring their beliefs. Sandys praised their document and promised to help, and connected them to John Wolstenholme, a member of the Virginia Company, as well as Smythe’s magazine. Wolstenholme was happy to help. He was a devout Christian, though not a puritan, and worked to get the Pilgrims to go to Virginia. He wanted to strengthen the English presence in North America, and knew they needed more settlers for that. He brought in Fulke, a member of the Privy Council, and Greville, who was a part of the War Party and a close associate of George Villiers, the notorious Duke of Buckingham. They then brought in Robert Naunton, James’s future Secretary of State, and together they formed the core group of advocates for Pilgrims in Virginia. It was Naunton who convinced James to let the Pilgrims go to America, saying they were harmless, and that it would cost nothing to let them go since they planned to support themselves by fishing. James famously replied “So God have my soul, ‘tis an honest trade; ‘twas the Apostles’ own calling.”
Recommended sources
Making Haste from Babylon by Nick Bunker
Bunker is one of my favorite American historians, and this book is easily (and by far) the best I’ve read on the Plymouth Colony. It de-emphasizes the work of William Bradford which has always formed the basis of our understanding of the colony, and broadens the scope to understand the motivations of everyone involved in the story, Pilgrim friend and foe alike.