Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  They removed his vital organs and his viscera, for separate burial in a casket. Then they embalmed the cadaver and placed it inside a sheath of lead. They encased the lead box in an oak coffin, filled with spices, its surface wrapped in purple velvet studded with gilded nails and hinges. On Monday, April 4, 1625, eight days after the death of the king at his country home in Hertfordshire, the cortege set off for Whitehall Palace. Drawn by six black horses, the hearse traveled through pouring rain some sixteen miles southward, past London to the river Thames. At last, that evening, the coffin arrived in the royal apartments, where the monarch would lie in state.2

  The dead sovereign was the first King James. Whenever the Mayflower drama is replayed, he always appears somewhere on the stage, as the villain or sometimes the comic accessory, and rightly so. If James had never lived, men and women would still have migrated to America, but their precise motives and the pattern of events might have taken a very different shape. For that reason, we have to delve into the king’s character, to find what lay behind his antipathies, including his hatred of the Puritans. In doing so, we reenact the intense curiosity felt by the people of his age.

  Throughout his lifetime, since his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, last saw him when he was ten months old, the body of the king was the object of the piercing gaze of strangers, for what it might reveal about the destiny of the state. Because monarchy obliged the king to display himself to his subjects, James always dined in semipublic, in front of those admitted to the royal apartments. His love of hunting on horseback meant that he was often seen in the open air too.

  Privacy of a kind existed in the bedchamber, which James said should not “be throng & common,” but instead a place where the king could meditate and speak discreetly. And yet even here he would not be alone. “Kings’ actions (even in the secretest places) are as the actions of those that are set upon the stages, or on the tops of houses,” James told Parliament in 1610, and this was literally true.3 In the bedchamber, Stuart kings had about them a half-dozen gentlemen-in-waiting.

  So, over the course of his reign, first as king of Scotland and then after 1603 as king of England too, many thousands of people saw James. Often they wrote down their observations. For this reason, and because so many portraits survive—at least fifteen oil paintings, besides medals, busts, and the like—we can re-create a remarkably reliable picture of his appearance and his mannerisms. He also bequeathed to posterity an archive of evidence about his long feud with Puritans and Brownists. Because King James wrote copiously in four languages, much of it comes from his own pen.

  James published two books containing attacks on the likes of Robert Browne. In the second, titled A Meditation upon the Lord’s Prayer, and dated 1619, James gave a pithy account of their origins. He wrote with a lucidity that modern historians would do well to emulate. “Our Puritans are the founders and fathers of the Brownists: the latter onely boldly putting into practise what the former doe teach,” he pretty accurately said, and he threw in for good measure an insult or two aimed at what he called “these innumerable sects of new Heresies, that now swarme in Amsterdam.”

  Much earlier, in his manual of kingship called the Basilikon Doron, James piled up an even larger heap of abuse of Brownists and Puritans alike. Rash, brainsick, and heady, vain, proud, and pharisaical, ungrateful, fanatical, seditious, and conceited, they were “very pestes in the Churche & common-weale,” said the king. And, in case readers failed to take the point, his editor inserted an extra little caption, calling Puritans “an evill sorte.”4

  Why did James hate nonconformity so much, and why did he feel compelled to venture into print? Queen Elizabeth, that mistress of delegation, never stooped to verbal combat with Separatists: for her, a couple of public hangings every ten years did the trick quite well enough. What made James behave so differently, with less physical violence, but with so much more emotion?

  He acted as he did because he wished to defend the hygiene of the realm. Aptly enough for a king who spent his later years in almost constant physical pain, James tended to speak about his kingdoms in the language of the body and medicine, in terms of anatomy, well-being, and morbidity. In doing so, he did more than merely repeat medieval clichés that compared the realm and its people, the body politic, to a frame of human flesh and blood.

  Men and women at the time used figurative language so freely and with such verve that it was impossible to say where metaphors finished and reality began. They did not think in terms of rigid lines of demarcation between soul, mind, and body, or between matters that were personal and those that were political. Nor did they slice up their experience into segregated zones, as we do. They did not insist on sharp boundaries between fields of knowledge, each one with its academic police ready to handcuff those who dare to cross their borders. In the eyes of Jacobeans, God had created everything, and so everything was connected to everything else. For them, an educated man or woman was a person who tried to see things as a whole.

  So it was with King James. He never used one metaphor where five would do. “What God hath conjoined, let no Man separate,” he said in 1604, as he urged his first Parliament to unify England and Scotland by force of law. “I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawful wife: I am the head, and it is my body: I am the shepherd, and it is my flock, I hope therefore, no man will be so unreasonable, as to think … that I, being the Head, should have a divided and monstrous body.” In the eyes of King James, a Christian king performed the role of a bridegroom, a father, and a pastor; he was God’s lieutenant on earth, he was the origin of justice, and he was the source of wealth and well-being.

  From the heart of the kingdom, the sovereign pumped the blood of mercy through the arteries of the state. That being so, he also served as the doctor of the nation. James called the monarch “the proper Phisician” of his kingdom, with a duty to cure it from sickness, and this he meant entirely literally. He used the phrase not in some work of learned theory but in his most famous and practical text, A Counter-blaste to Tobacco of 1604, his fierce attack on the practice of smoking.

  A king and a philosopher, a monarch but also a human being, James experienced dominion as an alternating condition of power and fragility. “I am a Man of Flesh and Blood, and have my Passions and Affections as other men,” he said in 1607, and this was an understatement.5 Often succumbing like a Shakespearean hero to waves of emotion emitted from an obscure source, James felt the troubles of his realm in his skeleton, his nerves, and his intestines. His views about health and medicine formed a seamless whole with his wider doctrine of government, and with the ideas that caused him to loathe religious nonconformists.

  King James thought of Puritans as a disease, which at its worst took the form of the Brownists. But before we venture into the depths of his mind, there is a story of surfaces to be told swiftly. It concerns events that took place between the Puritan crusade to the Netherlands, and the execution of Henry Barrow in 1593, and then, a decade later, the purge of nonconformists overseen by King James.

  THE ROAD TO HAMPTON COURT

  Barrow the Separatist went to his death in a season of defeat for the Puritan cause. Another change in political fortunes had occurred, with the decline of the party at court who sympathized with Puritanism. Leicester and Walsingham died, in 1588 and in 1590. Davison languished in disgrace. The Puritan clergy lost their most powerful defenders. They also faced a determined foe in the form of John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, with at his side the implacable Richard Bancroft.

  Soon after the defeat of the Armada in 1588, an underground Puritan printing press began running off anonymous pamphlets. They were filled with abuse against the bishops of the Church of England, penned by someone who called himself Martin Marprelate. Amusing for the first few pages, until the polemic begins to pall, The Marprelate Tracts denounced the bishops as swinish rabble, sauceboxes, petty popes, and lying dogs, men guilty of corruption and embezzlement. The author called for a much deeper reformation, of the kind
that Puritans in Parliament had long been looking for. He also gave Whitgift and Bancroft the opportunity they needed to embark on an all-out attack on Puritans within the Church.

  Neither man was a bloodless bureaucrat. Both were evangelical Christians. A man renowned for his charity, Whitgift had been a defiant Protestant during the reign of Mary Tudor. He became a convinced Calvinist, making his name with lectures intended to prove that the pope was the Antichrist. And far from being a careerist, Bancroft had a reputation for being blunt and combative. Often passed over for promotion, he did not become a bishop until the late age of fifty-three. However, both men had come to believe that Christianity depended on an efficient, disciplined, well-financed hierarchy, with the bishops as commanding officers. Their attitudes hardened and became authoritarian. The Marprelate affair made them all the more convinced that they were right.

  As the leading mainstream Puritan, Thomas Cartwright tried to distance himself from Marprelate, but to no avail. Bancroft’s hunt for the author soon turned up embarrassing evidence against Cartwright and his friends, men known as “forward preachers.” Bancroft was able to show that they were building in secret a parallel church of their own, a presbyterian club of clergymen and supporters among the landed gentry. When the time was right, they would step out of the shadows and remake the Church of England as a presbyterian assembly. It would be run by preachers and lay elders, with not a trace of old Catholic ritual, not a bishop in sight, and very little role for the queen. This, said Bancroft, was sedition of a revolutionary kind.6

  In 1590, the Church authorities jailed Cartwright and eight other forward preachers and stripped them of their posts as parish clergy. Their lawyers mounted an excellent defense, tying the prosecution in legal knots, and in due course they were released, after three unpleasant years in prison but without the trials reaching a conclusion.

  Even so, the affair dealt a body blow to the Puritan movement. And when Parliament met in 1593, Archbishop Whitgift got what he wanted, a new statute aimed directly at the most radical Puritans and Brownists. For the first time, the law entirely banned private religious gatherings—“unlawful assemblies, conventicles or meetings under pretence of any exercise of religion”—and imposed penalties of banishment or prison.

  Despite this, the forward preachers left trailing behind them a mass of loose ends. Many years later, they resurfaced and made fresh connections. Puritan books were still read, and Puritans survived in the universities and elsewhere, despite a hostile climate. They often met bafflement, irritation, or anger among their neighbors, people who liked a little Catholic ritual and preferred a lenient religion that did not demand endless devotion. The strongholds of the Puritans were quite few and far between. But although they had a narrow base, they put down deep roots. In places, we find a critical mass of Puritan ministers and supportive local gentlemen, yeoman farmers, and town tradesmen. They were the kinds of people who later supported the New England project, or even made the trip themselves.7

  Elizabeth died, and King James came south in 1603 to claim the throne. That summer, the survivors among the forward preachers began a campaign to persuade the king to take the Church down a Puritan path. Their manifesto was called “the Millenary Petition.” It listed more than thirty changes that they wished to see. Some came from the old Puritan agenda, such as calls for an end to the sign of the cross in baptism or to bowing at the name of Jesus. Others were economic, intended to increase the incomes of the parish clergy by ending practices such as the leasing out of tithes, the kind of thing that had caused so much trouble at Sturton. The petition also contained one particular demand that neither James I nor the archbishop could possibly accept.

  The petitioners wanted to ease the burden of “subscription,” the rules which required that clergymen swore that the Book of Common Prayer was entirely the Word of God. If this change were made, it would remove the most powerful weapon in the armory of discipline. Bancroft had become the bishop of London, he was Whitgift’s most likely successor, and he had his own project of an entirely contrary kind. He wanted a much tougher set of rules to impose moral and religious discipline, and he intended to enforce it with subscription.

  However, the king did not simply reject the petition out of hand. A man who usually relished the exchange of ideas, he convened a debate, which took place at Hampton Court Palace in January 1604. At this event, James exploded with the infamous outburst in which he issued threats against the Puritans who attended, pledging that he would “harry them out of the land.” This was an incident so notorious in Pilgrim history that in 1921, during American celebrations of the Mayflower’s tercentenary, an actor dressed up as King James repeated the same words, accompanied by bagpipes, to an audience including President Harding. Time and again, writers about the Pilgrims have quoted or misquoted James, uncritically and without asking what he meant, and without examining the quality of the source.8

  The sentence appears in a semiofficial account of the event, approved by Bancroft, and written by a clergyman called William Barlow. He and Bancroft intended to mock and belittle the Puritans, making them out to be pedants, with the conference portrayed as a total defeat for the Puritan cause. Barlow reports James’s exact words as follows: “If this bee all, quoth he, that they have to say, I shall make them conforme themselves, or I will harrie them out of the land, or else do worse.”9 The most revealing clause is the first—“if this bee all”—because Barlow wished to suggest that the Puritans were trivial, and their complaints petty.

  Barlow says that James became exasperated by the leading Puritan spokesman, a wordy academic who wished to make minor amendments to the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. This, says Barlow, seemed “very idle and frivolous” to the king and his bored privy councillors. They relieved the tedium by laughing over an old joke to the effect that “a Puritane is a Protestant frayed out of his wits.” The king’s threat to harry them out of the land was apparently something similar. It seems to have been a heavy-handed effort in sarcasm from an irritated monarch who had endured two full days of circuitous pomposity. If so, it was entirely in character for James.

  As it happens, the conference was not an annihilating defeat for Puritanism. Most famously, it led to James’s authorized translation of the Bible. It also gave rise to a list of small reforms, such as a pledge to make the ecclesiastical courts fairer and not to excommunicate people for trivial offenses. Measures like these helped to cool the heat of controversy, and so, after the purge of Puritans ended, in about 1608, England enjoyed a decade of relative calm in matters of religion.

  However, in the immediate aftermath of Hampton Court, these elements of compromise paled by comparison with Bancroft’s energetic attack on dissenters. Whitgift died soon after the conference, leaving Bancroft to carry on the campaign against all those who disturbed peace and good order. First, he pressed ahead with inspections of every aspect of cathedral and parish life, covering drunkenness and fornication, as well as signs of religious laxity. At the same time, in 1604, the king issued two proclamations against nonconformity. He insisted that everybody follow the Book of Common Prayer to the letter.

  This allowed Bancroft to use the tool of subscription. He gave clergymen a deadline of November 30 to sign up to full acceptance of the prayer book, or face dismissal. Meanwhile, Bancroft had prepared another weapon: a new, steel-plated set of canons, laws, and regulations for the Church, intended to seal off every loophole through which a Puritan might creep. For example, they imposed new duties on parish churchwardens to report offenses such as private conventicles or unlicensed preachers. This made it far harder for villagers to turn a blind eye to each other’s nonconformity.

  These new rules were not simply a matter of sterile coercion. Since Bancroft was an evangelical himself, he wished to repair the shaky morals of the parish clergy and to see sermons preached every Sunday and in every parish. If he could carry out these reforms, he would make pious men and women far less likely to look for Puritan alternatives. So
, for example, his canons included strict rules barring clergymen from taverns and from gambling, together with a requirement for every church to have a pulpit. And splendid new pulpits did indeed appear. Within a few miles of Scrooby, for example, churches in the villages of Tickhill and North Wheatley possess sturdy Jacobean examples. Erected in 1608, they remain in excellent condition today.

  However, Bancroft’s canons contained a flaw. Because Puritan sympathizers might oppose them, the king never submitted the canons to Parliament for approval. They became law only by way of his personal decree. For this reason, uncertainties lingered about their legality, and opened the way for protests by the same lawyers who defended Cartwright. Even within the Church, men had their reservations.

  In the north, in the archdiocese of York, doubts expressed by high-ranking opponents meant that not until March 1606 did the canons come into force. This delay allowed Brewster and his allies to carry on their activities far longer than they could have done in the south. They were able to build a far wider movement than would otherwise have been possible.10

  By the time Bancroft became archbishop of Canterbury, in December 1604, the deadline had passed for clergymen to subscribe. Within the next five years, mostly during the first twelve months, he achieved the dismissal from their parishes of about eighty ministers who resolutely refused. In a sense, this was a trivial number, less than 1 percent of the parish clergy at the time; but, again, the numbers matter less than the commitment of the small minority involved. The victims of the purge included four Puritans living near Scrooby, associates of William Brewster. Among them was the white-bearded Richard Clifton. What’s more, Bancroft swept up within his net the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, seeking to rid them of nonconformity as well. In due course, two Cambridge men, John Robinson and John Smyth, led the Separatists of the Quadrilateral out of the Church of England.