by Nick Bunker
Forgotten by everyone else, but never by the Irish, it came to be known as the Flight of the Earls. It involved the two great Gaelic magnates of the north: the old rebel Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone; and Rory O’Donnell, the Earl of Tyrconnell. Goaded by the authorities, and possibly hoping to find military support from Spain, in 1607 the earls boarded a ship at Lough Swilly and set off for exile in Rome. They left Ulster to the mercy of English colonists. This was only one of many episodes of exodus, enforced or voluntary, or somewhere in between.
In Scotland, James had already used the tactic of ejection many times against rebellious nobles or Calvinist troublemakers in the Church. The years after 1603 witnessed a new array of banishments or occasions when people fled because the Crown left them no alternative. In 1609, for example, the king and the Scottish parliament banned lawless “Egyptians” and ordered the Gypsies to quit the kingdom or be hanged. They dealt in much the same way with the Graemes, an extended Anglo-Scottish clan of border raiders. More than seventy Graemes suffered deportation to the Netherlands, where they were supposed to serve with English regiments. They deserted and came home, and so the Crown arrested fifty families of Graemes: men, pregnant women, and children. They marched them to a distant harbor and shipped them out to Roscommon in the west of Ireland.
The same year, in Edinburgh, the authorities jailed six ministers for illegally convening the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. They packed the six men off to France and to Holland, where one of them lived close to the Pilgrims in Leiden as minister of the city’s Scottish congregation. Many English Roman Catholics were compelled to leave as well.19
Like the painful stones within his kidney, men and women such as these irritated King James, and so they had to go: earls, Catholics, Gypsies, Graemes, and Presbyterians alike. Again, this was a consequence of his doctrine of sovereignty, and it found a parallel in the medical theories that fascinated the king.
Because Du Chesne, Mayerne, and the chemical doctors pictured disease as the product of superfluities, waste matter retained within the body, or poison coming from outside, they favored medicines designed to expel them from the patient. Enemas and laxatives figured high on their list of recommended drugs. When the king’s son Henry fell ill in 1612, Mayerne diagnosed his fever as the result of eating too many melons, grapes, and oysters. He gave the boy a purge made of senna and rhubarb, then opened his veins and bled him. Prince Henry died soon afterward, but Mayerne’s prestige survived. So did the concept of purgation.20
For James, the language of ill health supplied a rationale for banishment and exile. If the king was the doctor of his realm then, said James, he too should search out the “peccant humours” responsible for disorder and do his best to cast them away. If the kingdom succumbed to contagion, then the remedy was for the monarch “to purge it of all those diseases, by Medicines meet for the same.” The consequence was rejection for all those who clouded his vision of perfect uniformity. Among them were the Scrooby Pilgrims and many others: a battalion of Cordelias forced out by their King Lear.
For William Brewster and his friends, events came to a head in the Quadrilateral in 1607. A new archbishop of York arrived, a man devoted to the service of King James. He encountered the evangelists Smyth and Robinson and the Puritan network to which Brewster belonged, and again the consequence was exile. Into the story came another Separatist. This was Thomas Helwys, the forgotten leader of the Pilgrim flight from England.
Chapter Eight
DISOBEDIENCE AND CONTEMPT
… after the example of the Apostles, beeing shut out of Churches by the magistrate, we have gathered together the faithful into houses, and we have builded the true Jerusalem … it is lawfull in favour of the Trueth to make assemblies against the laws: no lesse then for good Citizens to assemble themselves against a tyrant usurping the commonwealth
—PHILIPPE DUPLESSIS-MORNAY, A TREATISE OF THE CHURCH (1579), a book owned by William Brewster in New Plymouth
Travel up the Idle valley from Scrooby, and eventually, if you cling to the river, you will find by the water’s edge the mossy rubble of an ancient chapel. Its ruins lie in what was once a deer park, spanning both banks, with an Elizabethan mansion at its center. The house vanished long ago, and a little way downstream an abandoned coal mine has left its heap of detritus at a place called Haughton Lound, where the Idle bends between boggy fields dotted with cinders and clumps of reed. Long before the colliery, it belonged to a family named Ellwes, or Helwys, as they also called themselves.
Their estate was small. When William Ellwes died in 1557, in his will he described himself as a farmer, staking no claim to be a gentleman. All the same, the Lound was good for farming, and Ellwes built a portfolio of tenancies, from Scrooby southward, mostly rented from the archbishop of York. William had four sons, and three of them rose with such speed that for once the word “meteoric” is fair.
People mocked the family as upstarts, but they attracted scorn only because they did exceptionally well. The eldest son, John, attached himself as a bailiff or a steward to the family who owned the chapel and the mansion. By trading in the soaring land market, he made himself a gentleman, with a manor house near Sturton. The youngest boy found his way to the capital and made a fortune, ending his days in 1616 as Alderman Jeffrey Ellwes, sheriff of London. The second son, Edmund, married an heiress and became a local official for the Exchequer. He acquired not only a coat of arms, but also Calvinism of a fervent kind.
Edmund probably wrote an intense anti-Catholic tract, published soon after the defeat of the Armada. It forecast the end of the world, with Queen Elizabeth leading the forces of the godly. And when Edmund Helwys died in 1590, he left behind a remarkable will, animated by the same religious zeal. Most wills began with a brief preamble, expressing faith in God and hope of resurrection. In his case, it covered nearly a page of manuscript, filled with quotations from Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. As Calvinists did, Edmund called himself a wretched sinner, and the world “a dirty stie, a grave of thorns … nothinge but feare, shame, tears, labour, sicknesse … and death.” On page two, he gave instructions for preserving his social status after his passing. He owned a pew at the front of the parish church. He wished to be buried beside it, with his arms engraved in brass on the slab.1
Edmund left his estate to his son Thomas, and Thomas Helwys became a Separatist. Born in about 1570, he died in London in about 1614, almost certainly in prison, accused of sedition. William Bradford never mentions him, but Bradford left out a great deal, and especially the names of those, such as Helwys, who later developed more extreme forms of Brownism in exile. Despite this, Robinson acknowledged Thomas Helwys as the man who led the flight of the Pilgrims to Holland in 1608. According to Robinson, Helwys “above all other guides, or others, furthered this passage into strange countries; and if any brought oars, he brought sails.”2 This was literally true, since he hired the boat and planned the escape.
We do not know how and why Helwys became a Puritan, but in 1593 he entered Gray’s Inn in London, where young men went to train as lawyers. Not everybody at Gray’s Inn was a Puritan, but many were. Most famous was Nicholas Fuller, one of the “benchers” who ran the inn’s affairs. In the 1590s, Fuller led the legal campaign to free Cartwright and the forward preachers from imprisonment. In Parliament, he fought against the new statute, passed in the year when Helwys entered the inn, which made Separatism a crime. Later still, we shall find Nick Fuller playing his part in the events that led to the flight of the Pilgrims. For the moment, the relevant point is that ties existed between lawyers and Puritans of the most radical kind.
Instead of practicing as a lawyer, however, Thomas Helwys came home, to live forty miles from Scrooby at Broxtowe Hall, close to the town of Nottingham. Despite his father’s rank, they did not own their lands, but rented them on a long lease, and so Helwys was less wealthy than his uncles. He ran a small herd of only four hundred sheep. As for his private life, tongues wagged: it was said that
Thomas had not lawfully married Joan Ashmore, the woman with whom he lived. Before their irregular wedding, Joan was his housekeeper, and in 1598 they were accused of fornication. This was an offense that might lead to a humiliating penance in the parish church. But no action was taken, and Helwys remained a protected member of the gentry. Six years later, a laborer took a dislike to Thomas Helwys and assaulted him. The JPs gave the man twelve months in jail.3
Helwys belonged to a web of Puritan-leaning landowners and lawyers spun across three counties. They must have been the people Bradford had in mind when he spoke of the “Godly and Religious” gentlemen who viewed Brewster with such respect. Their center of gravity lay around Sturton and Gainsborough, and by the early seventeenth century the most prominent was Thomas’s cousin Sir Gervase Helwys, son of John, a JP and a man with ambition. He lived at Saundby, between the two places, though his chain of property extended to the Humber estuary. As Puritans did, he acquired the right to appoint the ministers at Saundby and at Babworth, where Brewster’s friend Richard Clifton was the incumbent clergyman. When Clifton was dismissed, Sir Gervase replaced him with another Puritan with a history of infringing the rules that regulated worship.
At Gainsborough, his counterpart was another ambitious man, Richard Williamson, son of a local draper. Born in about 1560, he also entered Gray’s Inn, where he rose fast, to rank alongside Fuller among its most senior lawyers. He picked up Puritan sentiments, and he married his daughter into a famous family of Puritan clergy. Under King James, he became Sir Richard Williamson, living between the capital, his hometown, and York, where he joined the Council of the North. He belonged to the same network as Sir Gervase. Williamson protected local Puritan ministers, and he wielded authority as a JP for Nottinghamshire.4
It would be possible to add more names and to follow this network indefinitely, to and fro and down to London, but it would be tedious and unnecessary. All that matters is that by 1605, when the purge of Puritans began, Brewster and Helwys had a circle of kinsmen and friends entrenched in positions of power and influence, men who, like them, had only recently joined the ranks of the gentry. They were not, however, quite powerful enough.
Above them ranked the two greatest aristocrats of the region, men divided by religion and by old antagonisms: Gilbert Talbot, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, and Edmund, Lord Sheffield. Both had motives for wanting to end the period of toleration that Puritans had long enjoyed.
TWO RIVALS
Half a day’s walk from Scrooby stood another Elizabethan mansion long since destroyed. Worksop Manor was very tall, and it was very new, completed only in 1586. Ninety feet above the ground a great chamber looked out across the landscape, with a view so fine that Burghley’s son Robert Cecil called it the fairest gallery in England. Richard Torre of Scrooby supervised the workmen who built it, because it belonged to his master.5 He was George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, unhappily married to his countess Elizabeth, known to posterity as Bess of Hardwick.
The sixth earl died in 1590, survived by the countess, who lived on until 1608. His son Gilbert inherited not only the title but also his father’s difficulties with the queen. Under the Tudors, by way of loyal service against rebels and the Scots, the Talbots became the greatest family in the north, but in the 1580s they dwindled in authority and prestige. Queen Elizabeth gave George Talbot the task of taking care of Mary, Queen of Scots, but the two became a little too friendly. Elizabeth grew suspicious. When Gilbert became the seventh earl, he found himself exiled from court and denied the highest offices in the region.
In the eyes of Elizabeth, he suffered from two flaws: Roman Catholic sympathies and a vile temper. Gilbert Talbot married an ardent Catholic, who imported holy relics, and he quarreled with medieval ferocity. In 1598, during a duel with swords in Worksop Park, a local gentleman skewered the bowels of a Talbot family friend, and so the seventh earl assembled a hundred armed men to pursue him. The incident came close to causing a neighborhood civil war when the duelist gathered his own allies in the county. They were led by Talbot’s great rival Edmund, Lord Sheffield, the most powerful magnate in the region to the east, between Lincoln and York. He raised his own band of sixty men, and more bloodshed was only narrowly averted.6
Despite this, and much more acrimony, when James became king Gilbert Talbot began to regain royal favor. Both James and his queen stayed at Worksop, on their way south from Scotland, and the king knew that the Talbots had treated his mother well. Talbot was close to Robert Cecil, the king’s most trusted statesman. And so, very soon, James began to give Gilbert Talbot the offices he wanted and the power that went with them, making him a privy councillor.
Around Austerfield and Scrooby, the seventh earl was an awkward and intruding presence. He levied river tolls on the Idle, and in the Bawtry and Austerfield survey of 1608, high above the name of Robert Bradford, we find that of Gilbert Talbot. The seventh Earl of Shrewsbury owned Bawtry Hall, five cottages and twenty acres of land nearby, and he commanded a following among the gentry. He counted among his supporters not only the violent Lassells family but also the Mortons, the local Catholic renegades. More remarkable still was the hold that his stepmother, Bess, exerted over the economics of religion in the area. An inventory of her assets, made at Hardwick in 1609, shows that she claimed ownership of the rectories and the tithes of five parishes nearby, including Scrooby and the next-door parish of Everton. She had also purchased the right to nominate the minister in each one. Most likely, she bought all these properties from the Crown in the 1590s, as the queen scavenged for money to pay for the war in Ireland.7
These were real estate transactions. It seems unlikely that Gilbert Talbot and Bess of Hardwick hatched a great scheme to dominate belief and worship in the Pilgrim Quadrilateral. Even so, for a local Puritan the revival of the Talbots could only cause unease. Gilbert’s dislike of their kind made itself very clear in 1604, in an exchange of unpleasantness with Lady Isabel Bowes, an heiress and perhaps the most eminent Puritan gentlewoman in the north. They wrote to each other about the Hampton Court conference, but their letters swiftly descended into personal abuse. Talbot insulted Lady Isabel in crude terms and warned her not to meddle with sedition. Besides his loathing for Puritans, Gilbert Talbot also had a rival in Lord Sheffield; and soon he found an opportunity for combining the two animosities. It arose from a mixture of religion and local jealousy.8
Aged thirty-eight in the year when James became king, Sheffield was the son of a great beauty, Lady Douglas Sheffield, adulterous mistress of the Earl of Leicester. He became the most powerful man in the north of England during the critical period when Separatism began to take root in the region. Even so, he spent much of his adult life struggling with debt. Much of it was incurred to support the ladies of his family: his embarrassing mother—he had to mortgage four manors to pay her an annuity—and his six daughters, who needed dowries. His troubles deepened after he built his own country house, at Normanby, towering above the Trent near Scunthorpe. From here, he claimed as his sphere of influence all the country between York and Lincoln, and especially the cattle land to the north and east of Austerfield. But his financial position grew steadily worse. When James became king, Sheffield pestered him with requests for posts that might give him an income, until at last the king made Sheffield president of the Council of the North in September 1603. Unfortunately, the Sheffields had their own awkward religious profile. This too had its consequences.9
Lord Sheffield had married another ardent Catholic, with Catholic rites, and so he came under suspicion himself. As a means to clear his name, he renewed the campaign against those of his wife’s religion: as many as nine hundred were indicted at York in 1604. However, Sheffield had strayed too far in his eagerness to prove himself a good Protestant. As Bancroft removed the Puritan clergy in the south, it emerged that Sheffield had once employed just such a man as a tutor to his children. The preacher in question, called Bywater, later reappeared as a Separatist in Amsterdam, but before doing so, he
gravely offended King James. In January or February 1605, Bywater sent the king an insulting book, advocating Puritan reform.
In prison in the Tower of London, Bywater mentioned his link to Lord Sheffield. Hurriedly, Sheffield sought to clear his name. He wrote to Cecil to protest that, yes, he had employed Bywater, but the man was dismissed when he denounced his master for wasting his time with falconry.10 Meanwhile, as his rival Gilbert Talbot stood ready to supplant him, if Lord Sheffield fell from favor, suddenly the Puritans and their sympathizers in the north began to attract unwelcome attention from King James. The problem arose from an undiplomatic letter written by the archbishop of York.
His name was Matthew Hutton, and by this time he was an old man, close to death. Even so, at the end of 1604 Archbishop Hutton wrote to Cecil seeking leniency for Puritans, on the grounds that they were patriotic allies against the influence of Rome. Unwisely, in passing he criticized the king’s deer hunting, for damaging poor men’s crops. Worst of all, the letter must have circulated widely, because several copies survive, including one among the papers of Gilbert Talbot. It would appear that the Earl of Shrewsbury spread stories to the effect that Hutton and Lord Sheffield were conniving with Puritan ministers.
King James reacted as we might expect. That winter, as he roamed the countryside in search of animals to kill, he received one annoying petition after another from squires defending the Puritan clergy. Losing patience, with them and with his officials at York, on February 19 he issued a reprimand to Hutton and Sheffield, telling them to enforce the law against Catholic and Puritan alike: with “diligence and constancie,” he said, “against the disobedient both of the one sorte and of the other.” In their different ways, Sheffield and Hutton were both weak men, and especially Sheffield because of his debts and the threat posed by Gilbert Talbot. Inevitably, they felt obliged to placate the king. In doing so, they ended the years of official complacency concerning Brewster and his network.11
