Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Her revenues were small, and so the queen ruled by bluff and propaganda. She did so by way of favors granted and gifts received, by manipulation, and by sometimes reluctant consent, but also by way of occasional acts of extreme violence. These were sometimes effective, but often caused more problems than they solved. Faction and feud helped to determine the course of events as bishops and courtiers rose and fell in her favor. Like a pendulum, the queen’s authority in matters of religion often swung well clear of the ground. Sometimes the local bishop or archdeacon had Puritan leanings, or was simply idle or easily bullied by a local landowning elite. With patrons such as these, a professor of sincerity might hope to flout the rules of worship. But, like a pendulum, sometimes the queen’s demands for due order came hurtling back.

  Most famously, in 1576 she ordered a ban on prophesying, because it might be subversive. She suspended Edmund Grindal, the archbishop of Canterbury, who had dared to defend it. With Grindal in disgrace, she began to promote conservative bishops who made Puritans toe the line.

  One such man was Edmund Freke, the bishop of Norwich. In the spring of 1581, he heard about a young evangelist called Robert Browne, who had begun to preach illegally in the countryside in West Suffolk. Freke had him arrested, and reported the affair to Burghley. Browne was spreading “corrupt and contentious discours,” said Freke, at gatherings of “the vulgar sorte of the people … to the number of an hundred at a tym in privat howses & conventicles.”7 This was Separatism. In Robert Browne we see it take incendiary form, as a creed in which politics and faith reacted chemically with each other.

  CAMBRIDGE MEN

  Robert Browne was born in about 1550. He ended his days in prison in 1633, after the old man landed a punch on a parish constable who came to collect a local tax. In the words of an opponent, Browne was a “pestilent schismatic” who mixed with his social inferiors, inciting disobedience. It was also said, though proof was lacking, that Browne was “a common beater of his poor old wife … an open profaner of the Sabbath.”8 He quarreled bitterly with his own followers, and he aroused distrust, because he changed sides more than once.

  Browne was a “slipperie shifter,” said the hostile writer who called him a schismatic, and, worse still, he was a “wavering weathercock.”9 Much later William Bradford disowned Robert Browne, denying that he inspired the Plymouth Colony, but this was not because Bradford disagreed with what Browne had said. It was because Browne faltered, and made his peace with the authorities, and because of what Bradford called his backslidings. The Pilgrims never condemned Browne’s original teachings, and in Leiden in 1618 they reprinted a radical Brownist book, written as far back as 1581 by his closest collaborator. When Captain John Smith hung the name of Brownists around the neck of the Pilgrims, he did so with fairness. Until the 1640s, as a matter of routine the English gave the epithet to any Puritan who left the Church of England entirely.

  Robert Browne was not the first Separatist—there were a few in London in the 1560s—but he gave the movement its title because he was articulate, he was energetic, and at the outset he was fearless. By his own reckoning, he went to jail thirty-two times. Far from being a social outcast, he came from among the affluent gentry of the English Midlands, men whose grandsons led the fight against King Charles in the English Civil War. His sister married into a landowning family called the Pickerings, from the Nene valley in Northamptonshire, eighty miles north of London. After Browne returned to the established Church, becoming minister of a parish next to their manor at Titchmarsh, the Pickerings helped him to sue his flock for the tithes they owed him. In due course the younger Pickerings served as enthusiastic soldiers alongside Oliver Cromwell, a man who was more or less a Brownist himself.

  The Brownes were gentlemen too, a little farther north in the tiny county of Rutland. They lived in style at Tolethorpe Hall, where they practiced the social graces of the time: Robert Browne played the lute with skill. His father, Sir Anthony Browne, owned nine hundred acres at Tolethorpe, sixteen houses there and in the nearby town of Stamford, more farmland by the coast, and a London residence. During the 1570s and 1580s, landowners in sheep counties such as Rutland and Northampton did extremely well as prices and rents rose steeply. Because he was a second son, Robert Browne could not expect a large inheritance—when Sir Anthony died in 1590, he left Robert only one hundred pounds—but he was comfortable. He kept three servants, and in early manhood he did not need to work. When he became a schoolmaster, it was by choice.

  Apart from a rare exception like Ainsworth, Separatism was never the creed of the penniless. Besides Browne, its most famous leader was Henry Barrow, hanged at Tyburn in the 1590s, another man remembered by the Pilgrims as a martyr. The Barrows were landowners too, with a little empire spanning four counties, and Barrow’s father was a stern JP with Puritan affiliations. Although he was another younger son, Henry Barrow had five hundred acres of his own, yielding rents worth five times the income of the average vicar.

  Barrow and Browne certainly reached out down the social scale, especially in London, where we find shoemakers and domestic servants named among their followers. However, more often Brownists were skilled or self-employed men, including shipwrights, scriveners, and an apothecary. In the countryside, the typical Separatist came from the leading yeoman family in each village. He or she looked for leadership to an educated young gentleman-radical such as Browne, from a little higher up the social scale.10

  Politics also surrounded Robert Browne from birth. In the fifteenth century, the Brownes had made their fortune exporting wool to Europe from Stamford. By the 1480s, they dominated its affairs, serving often as aldermen, equivalent to mayors. They left an indelible mark. Today Browne’s Hospital, which they founded, still accommodates the elderly of Stamford, in limestone Gothic splendor in the middle of the town. When Stamford slipped into decline, failing to become a center for weaving cloth, the Brownes became rural landlords and lawyers. Ten times they were sheriffs of Rutland, and three times members of Parliament. Sir Anthony Browne was a JP and served as county sheriff.11

  In the sixteenth century, a new dynasty arose at Stamford, the Cecils, who became the greatest family of Tudor England. Wisely, the Brownes made friends with the upstarts, whose lands lay immediately next to theirs, and in due course the alliance may have saved the life of Robert the Separatist. The first Cecil to arrive was David Cecil, a Welshman who fought for Henry Tudor at Bosworth and then settled near Stamford in the entourage of Henry’s mother. He prospered, and also became an MP. Robert Browne’s great-uncle married David Cecil’s daughter: a good match, since the Cecils were amassing a great fortune. Her nephew was the most powerful of her kin, William Cecil, otherwise known as Lord Burghley.*

  Besides its wool, Stamford had strategic value, straddling the Great North Road. It fell within territory that Burghley took care to control. Here and elsewhere he created a web of patronage, a network of clients who gave him his eyes and ears in the provinces. He gathered about him gentry families such as the Brownes and the Pickerings: loyal men, ready to keep the muster rolls, lead the militia, and round up Catholic renegades. So, in Northamptonshire, we find Browne’s close kinsman Gilbert Pickering serving as captain of horse during the Armada crisis. In 1586, the name Robert Browne appeared beside those of the Pickerings on a list of local worthies responsible for lighting beacons to warn of a Spanish attack. This may have been our man.12

  On the face of it, to fulfill his ideals, Browne had no need to venture out of the mainstream of Elizabethan gentility. His father owned the right to appoint the minister of the parish church of Little Casterton, three hundred yards from their front gate at Tolethorpe. If they wished to make the church Puritan, the Brownes could do so, and certainly somebody stripped every vestige of Catholicism from the interior, since the plastered white walls are now as bare as can be. Indeed, by the late 1570s, the Stamford area as a whole had become a haven for the godly, where the JPs organized communal prayer and prophesying, even after the royal ba
n. So why did Robert Browne become a dissident? Other factors had to operate, to force him along a path of outright nonconformity.

  First, by way of education, Browne became exposed to the most avantgarde species of Puritan thinking. Then, at the time of the earthquake, during the debates about Anjou, he became convinced that those ideas needed to be made still more radical, and applied immediately, without waiting for Parliament to enact reform. Finally, and like any revolutionary, he needed an inflammable situation, awaiting a spark. It existed in Suffolk, in and around Bury St. Edmunds, where, whether they meant to or not, the local Puritan squires assembled the fuel he needed.

  His career began at Cambridge in about 1570, when Browne became a student at Corpus Christi College. It was small, with fewer than seventy members, and they were very young indeed. At Corpus, even the senior men, the twelve teaching fellows, had an average age of only twenty-eight. Given the need to train clergymen, and to educate the gentry, Cambridge had expanded fast, and so the number of fellows of Cambridge colleges had risen by one-third in the previous decade. Besides being youthful, they were, said an official report, “more intractable than they were wont to be.”13

  This was an understatement. In 1565, Burghley’s own college, St. John’s, witnessed the first of many feuds, when a young Puritan, aged twenty-seven, gave a sermon likening the unleavened bread used in the Eucharist to starch and paste. He condemned the wearing of a surplice, compulsory in the chapel. His supporters refused to wear the hated vestments, and they hissed those that did. They also spread rumors that a conservative opponent kept a girlfriend in a whorehouse.14

  This was not an isolated case. During Browne’s time at Cambridge, the most serious fracas occurred, caused by lectures given by Thomas Cartwright, professor of divinity, a man in his mid-thirties, and a Puritan. Taking as his text the Acts of the Apostles, describing Christianity as Saint Peter knew it, Cartwright called for an end to the hierarchy of the Church of England. Archbishops, bishops, archdeacons, the courts that administered Church law: popery tainted them all, and the prayer book, “an unperfecte book, culled & picked out of that popish dunghill, the Masse,” in the tactful words of a Cartwright supporter.15 He demanded a new type of church, with elected pastors, assisted by presbyters or elders, and a network of synods, linked to the Calvinist churches of Europe. Dismissed, Cartwright went into exile, in Geneva and then the Netherlands.

  Controversies like these were far more than academic tiffs. Later, Browne wrote a brief autobiography, sadly lacking in precise dates or locations, but speaking clearly of the depth of feeling that flowed into these debates. He recorded his despair at what he calls “the wofull and lamentable state of the church … and what abuses there were in the government then used.”16 This was not empty rhetoric: Browne was entirely genuine in his commitment to seeking out the truth, whatever his critics might say.

  We can be certain about this, because Browne graduated in 1572 with a bachelor’s degree. To begin with, he must have intended to become a clergyman. Men rarely bothered to graduate, unless that was their career choice, and Browne could easily have obtained a living in the Church, thanks to his connections. Despite this, he refused to make the necessary compromises until the early 1590s: he even threw on the fire a preaching license that his brother had obtained for him. So the young Browne must have been sincere, and his internal crisis was very real: it was also the cause of deep anxiety, to himself and others.

  Few have read his books closely, even among historians, and this is scarcely surprising. From Browne to Barrow, the early Separatists often wrote in a ranting, vitriolic style, laced with misogyny. Courageous and consistent though Henry Barrow was, in his writings the passages of eloquence and insight lie scattered amid long, wearisome tirades. They often come close to mania: he once demanded the demolition of England’s parish churches, because they dated from the age of popery. Indeed, their enemies said that the Separatists were madmen. Browne, for example, worked in partnership with Robert Harrison, a Cambridge friend, who also became a schoolmaster, until, like Browne, he was dismissed. Harrison had protested when the vicar baptized his godson with the sign of the cross, but he did so with such vehemence that the authorities wrote him off as a lunatic, “trobled with a frenesey, which sicknes … is thought incurable.”17

  And yet bigotry and rage were only part of the story. Browne had a sharp, rigorous mind. He used charts and tables to set out his views with acute precision. Indeed it may have been this that troubled the authorities the most. Browne took the doctrines of Puritanism, and with relentless logic he pressed them as far as reason and the Bible would permit. He also immersed himself in the latest political thinking. It was expressed in the language of the Old Testament, but it was radical nonetheless. It molded his vision of Christianity, and then, most radically of all, Browne tried to put it into immediate practice.

  THE COVENANT OF ASA

  In the Second Book of Chronicles, the Bible speaks of a Hebrew king called Asa. He did what was good in the sight of the Lord. When his mother worshipped an idol, Asa cut it down and burned it beside the brook of Kidron. He destroyed the altars of the heathens, he built new cities, and with the Lord’s help he vanquished the Ethiopians. Then a prophet arose, called Azariah. He warned that despite Asa’s good deeds, the people of Israel had forsaken God. Because they had no priests, and because they disobeyed the Law of Moses, they were in danger of defeat by their enemies. Asa listened to the prophet and gathered his people at Jerusalem. Together they sacrificed oxen, and together they made, says the text, “a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and with all their soul.” In return, God gave them twenty years of peace and plenty.

  In the 1570s, the most advanced Protestant thinkers seized on the books of Kings and Chronicles, finding a commentary about their own times in the stories of godly rulers of ancient Israel such as this. By far the most famous writer to do so was a Huguenot diplomat, who narrowly escaped murder in Paris on Saint Bartholomew’s Day. A contemporary of Browne’s, born in 1549, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay was one of the first French gentlemen to embrace the ideas of Calvin. Many decades later in New England, William Bradford spoke of Mornay with the highest respect. His fame rested mainly on a remarkable series of books he produced while in exile: books that made him an international figure. When the Pilgrim William Brewster died, he had two of Mornay’s volumes on his library shelves.18

  In London, Mornay joined the circle of ardent Protestants who surrounded Walsingham, and he became a close friend of Walsingham’s son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney. Between 1575 and 1579, Mornay wrote four works, three of which were soon turned into English. In the clearest prose, Mornay redefined Christian faith as a creed based on reason, at one with the wisdom of the ancient philosophers whom he admired. For him, a church should resemble a Greek or Roman city-state, a community based on free consent, ready to defend itself by force, if need be. He likened the pope to the Gauls who captured Rome, or to the tyrants who usurped democracy in Athens in the age of Socrates.19

  Tyranny was the subject of Mornay’s finest book, and there he called on the example of King Asa. Anonymously, it appeared in Switzerland in the year before the earthquake, under a Latin title that translates as The Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants.* Mornay pointed out that in the Bible, the Israelites chose their own kings, electing first Saul and then David. At the coronation, king and people alike entered into a dual covenant. The people and their monarch must both obey the Law of Moses and do the will of God, casting out idols and worshipping God as Moses ordained. Second—and this was far more controversial—the king was obliged to rule with justice and consent, just as Asa did, when he summoned his people to Jerusalem to ratify the covenant. If the sovereign failed to keep faith with his subjects, and with God, then the people were free to be rid of him.

  If the covenants were broken, the people had to repair the breach with the Lord, even if that meant taking up arms against their king. To avoid any hint of mob rule,
Mornay insisted that the people only do so under the leadership of “inferior magistrates,” the godly, right-thinking men who served below the monarch. Even so, this was daring stuff, and it appealed across frontiers. It fitted the needs of Calvinists, seeking grounds for resisting their lawful ruler, in France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and perhaps one day in England too.

  By the time of the tremor, these ideas had begun to circulate among England’s political elite. They found an audience with men such as Sidney, with Walsingham, and with the Puritans who operated close to them.* In 1579, a Puritan friend of Cartwright’s published a translation of Mornay’s book about Church government, and if men and women read it, they probably did so because of its politics rather than its theology. One question surpassed all others, and that was the danger posed by the possible marriage of Elizabeth with Anjou. Was a Protestant realm about to succumb to idolatry? Would priests celebrate the Mass in London? The debate about the French match reached its peak in the year before the earthquake, when the ideas of Mornay acquired fresh relevance.

  In August, a Puritan called John Stubbs published a book attacking the Anjou marriage in the same stark Old Testament terms. Like Asa, he argued, the queen had a duty to uphold true religion, and to observe the dual covenant. If she did not, she would bring down on her nation the wrath of God, and if that occurred, she should be overthrown. Elizabeth took offense, and Stubbs had his right hand chopped off for sedition. In a letter to the queen, Sir Philip Sidney made the same case against the match, but he avoided mutilation by adding sycophancy, as one did. Elsewhere, however, his writings expressed the same readiness, if the worst came to the worst, to depose an erring monarch.