by Nick Bunker
At York, when the archbishop dealt with a nonconforming clergyman, he used his Chancery Court. It generally met on a Friday, no more than once a month. Suddenly, in March 1605, the meetings became much more frequent, with eight in less than six weeks, beginning soon after the king’s reprimand arrived. Swiftly, the court called before it five Puritan ministers from Nottinghamshire to answer charges of nonconformity. Four of them refused to sign up to Bancroft’s test of loyalty: Richard Clifton of Babworth, Henry Gray of Bawtry, Robert Southworth of Headon, and Richard Bernard of Worksop. Each village lay within twelve miles of Scrooby. In April, the archbishop dismissed all four from their parishes, and the first three men on the list were excommunicated.12
At a stroke, national and local politics came together and swept away the local platoon of Puritan ministers supported by Brewster and his friends. No action was taken yet against laypeople, because Bancroft’s canons had not come into force. Indeed, if matters had ended there, the emigration to Holland and America might not have occurred, since nobody in the area had yet taken the radical step of leaving the Church of England entirely to become a Separatist. For that to happen, the locality needed its own compelling equivalent of Robert Browne.
Leadership of such a kind soon arrived in the shape of the preaching radicals Robinson and Smyth. Both had excelled at Cambridge, and in their late twenties they had every prospect of a lifetime of advancement in the Church. Then both men, and especially Smyth, became outcasts and pariahs, with wrecked careers. So, at the end of 1606, or thereabouts, they decided to take the path of illegality. Early the following year they led the act of separation. They took with them Brewster, Helwys, and the most radical Puritans in the Quadrilateral.
MR. ROBINSON AND MR. SMYTH
It would be hard to exaggerate their importance. Although he never crossed the Atlantic, John Robinson remained from afar the mentor of the Plymouth Colony. And if any single person can claim to have launched the Baptist faith in the English-speaking world, then John Smyth was the man.13 Born in about 1575, John Robinson definitely came from Sturton, and some evidence suggests that Smyth was born there too, though his name is too common to permit an exact fix of his ancestry. Smyth was the older man, by about six years, judging by the dates at which they entered the university. Smyth became a member of Christ’s College in 1586, and Robinson arrived at Corpus Christi in 1592.
Both men belonged to the lowest tier of Cambridge students. They were sizars, or promising boys with little family money, permitted to enter the university if they could pay their way by doing chores for richer young men. From the college records, it seems likely that Robinson owed his place at Corpus to another dynasty of aristocrats, the Manners family, Earls of Rutland. They had feudal rights over Sturton and treated the village as part of their sphere of influence. In 1590, Corpus began to attract the sons of noblemen, including Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland, who joined the college in that year. In all probability somebody at Sturton recommended the young Robinson to serve as a sizar for the earl.
A college like Corpus might offer a clever sizar a swift route to success. If he displayed outstanding aptitude for Greek and Latin, he had every chance of obtaining a fellowship and then moving gracefully onward into a career in public service. At Corpus, this was all the more likely because of the prestige of its new master, John Jegon. A staunch Calvinist, marked out for greatness by Burghley, Jegon was the son of a weaver, but he rose to become the bishop of Norwich. His brother Thomas Jegon acted as Robinson’s tutor, the young man worked hard, and the Jegons rewarded him for it.
Within four years, Robinson achieved the rank of scholar, and in 1598 Corpus made him one of its eleven fellows. In rotation he served his turn as college lecturer in Greek and then as dean. Five minutes’ walk away at Christ’s, John Smyth had done just as well, becoming a fellow in the autumn of 1593 and remaining on the faculty for the next seven years.14
By itself, a fellowship did not count for much, since Christ’s and Corpus were far from rich, and each college suffered periods of financial difficulty. Fellows had their rooms, and food and drink, but their pay was small, and if they wished to marry, they had to resign. But while at the college, they had the leisure and the opportunity to make friends and allies, and to look for a job to become available elsewhere. Best of all, they might find a post as minister of a large and wealthy parish, or as a “lecturer,” a clergyman hired by a town or city government to preach sermons to its citizens.
So it was with Smyth and Robinson. In 1600, Smyth left Cambridge to become city lecturer at Lincoln, with an annual salary of forty pounds, eight times his pay as a fellow at Cambridge, plus the rent for his house and the right to graze his cows on the communal heath. He married soon afterward, and children followed. As for Robinson, after his year as dean he held no further offices at his college, but instead, as he neared the age of thirty, he began to ask for long leaves of absence. He took three months off in the autumn of 1603, he resigned his fellowship in February 1604, and then a few days later he married Bridget White of Sturton. He found a post at Norwich as deputy to the minister of St. Andrew’s Church, a man called Thomas Newhouse. This was a distinguished parish, and it should have made a splendid base, in a city famous for clean streets and godliness.
It might seem that both Smyth and Robinson had found their niche. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. At Lincoln, John Smyth fell afoul of city politics. For many years, the city had been divided into factions: a small group of wealthy tradesmen, Puritan by inclination, squabbling with townspeople with no desire to belong to a godly republic. Drink apparently played its part. The leaders of the popular party included men who ran malt houses and spent their days in the tavern. It seems that behind the politics lay disputes about how many alehouses to allow in the city, how much beer could be brewed, and how much the city should spend on welfare payments for the unemployed.
Never a man to mince his words, Smyth gave sermons that aligned him with the Puritans. He spoke against “profanity, oppression of the pore, drunkenes, poprye, or any other sinne,” but it seems that he personally insulted one of the leaders of the opposition. His friends tried to make Smyth lecturer for life, but they lost control of the city council, voted out of office by a large majority. In 1602, the new mayor fired John Smyth and reported him to the bishop of Lincoln as a nonconforming Puritan.* Although he petitioned the king, and appealed to Lord Sheffield, the episode blighted his career forever.15
In 1603, the archbishop of Canterbury took away Smyth’s license to preach, and he lost his livelihood. By this time, he had buried one son and baptized at Lincoln an infant daughter. He called her Mara, the word that in the Hebrew Bible stands for “bitterness.” His health was poor. Again and again, Smyth had reported sick for weeks at a time while at Christ’s College. It seems that he suffered from some chronic disease, perhaps the tuberculosis that, according to Bradford, ended his life when Smyth was little more than forty.
Meanwhile, John Robinson fared little better. On the face of it, his position at Norwich should have been ideal, a first step toward evangelical fame in a place where the clergy and the city fathers were sympathetic. Thomas Newhouse had been a colleague of John Smyth’s at Christ’s College, and like him he preached enthusiastically, giving every Thursday a lecture steeped in Calvinism. By way of predestination, God had chosen the elect, and damned the rest, the reprobate, to hell, and this was justice, said Thomas Newhouse. John Robinson never wavered from the same creed, and so he should have fitted in at St. Andrew’s with little trouble.
This was all the more true since by now his old master John Jegon had come to Norwich as the bishop. And yet somehow Robinson offended his superiors. His period in Norwich remains mysterious, with few entirely reliable sources, but it seems that he fell victim to Bancroft’s purge. Early in 1605, Jegon began investigating his clergymen for traces of nonconformity. Soon afterward, Robinson paid a visit to Sturton, and gave a sermon at Retford. Somebody reported h
im to the authorities for doing so without a license; presumably, Jegon had already withdrawn it. By this time, both Robinson and Smyth had more or less reached the end of their careers as ministers within the established Church. Even so, Separatism remained a daring and dangerous step to take.16
Men and women did not become Separatists in a blinding moment of insight and conversion. All too often, historians have written about the Mayflower as though leaving the established Church were a move people often made in Jacobean England, simply because the Church was irksome, or unsatisfying, or because it lacked evangelical excitement. In fact, separation was exceedingly rare, and especially for career clergymen such as Smyth and Robinson. They abandoned the Church of England only after a long period of anxious meditation, and after trying every other option.
As far back as 1597, three of Smyth’s colleagues at Christ’s complained about him to the university for opposing the wearing of the surplice and the use of the sign of the cross in baptism.17 So, by that time, he was already a mainstream Puritan; but it took him another decade to make the leap into Separatism. Before he did so, he underwent an intense nine-month period of thought and discussion, beginning in the summer of 1606. By then, he had tried alternative careers, as a schoolmaster and a physician, until the authorities vetoed those as well. Robinson’s history is less clear, but he studied alongside the leading Puritans at Cambridge for nearly ten years. No record has been found of any nonconformity on his part during this period.
People became Separatists because they believed that it was essential for salvation; but salvation itself was a mystery. Nothing about it was simple. First, each Christian had to determine, by way of prayer and introspection, which group he or she belonged to, the elect or the damned. As Newhouse put it at St. Andrew’s: “Hearing this voyce dailie sounding in the Church, that there is a number of men in the counsell of God rejected, wee are to examine oure estates, and to make question: whether it be we or not?” Only those who had authentic faith could be sure that they were among the elect, and not the excluded multitude. But faith was not a tranquil state of mind: it was a dynamic process, unfolding over time, by way of a long adventure toward maturity. Smyth and Robinson became Separatists because, gradually, they lost confidence in the conventional English parish as a place where they could follow such a path.
Most likely by way of the work of an older fellow of Christ’s, William Perkins, it seems that both Smyth and Robinson came under the influence of a German Calvinist, Zacharias Ursinus. Another forgotten man, he was in his day the leading theologian at the great university at Heidelberg. Ursinus spoke of salvation as the product of a sequence of different kinds of faith. Each stage had an emotional tone of its own, assembled from alternations of hope and fear, shame and guilt, despair and longing. The effects of faith included both joy and deep anxiety. For Ursinus, and for Robinson and Smyth, true faith included uncertainty: one of its distinguishing marks, said Ursinus, was “the strife and conflict within us of … faith & doubtfulness.” The others included belief in the Holy Trinity and predestination, of course, but a human being must first display a sincere desire for salvation.
Struggle and doubt were signs that the yearning for faith was unfeigned, while another might be found in perseverance in good deeds. Since a true Christian possessed “an earnest purpose of obeying God according to all his commandments,” as Ursinus put it, he or she had also to display charity and to practice self-denial.
It seems that Robinson had a special talent for taking subtle ideas such as these and expressing them forcefully, in plain language. William Hubbard, the first official historian of New England, referred to Robinson’s “polished wit, ingenious disposition and courteous behaviour.” So, when he came to write an essay on faith, Robinson summed up what Ursinus had said about his relationship with doubt. “We are not here to imagine an idea of Faith, free in this infirmitie of our flesh from doubting,” he wrote. “The tree may stand, and grow also, though shaken, and bended with the wind: so may Faith.”18 His essay appeared in a book that came to be one of the most widely owned at New Plymouth.
In themselves, none of these ideas were unorthodox, but John Smyth added an extra element that most definitely was. His first altercation with his bishop arose when he questioned the value of repeating the Lord’s Prayer, a central, compulsory part of the Anglican service book. Smyth worried about its misuse not only in the church but also in the countryside, where conjurers chanted it over sick cattle, as well as feeding it to rabid dogs. His qualms deepened into profound unease about any prayer read from an official liturgy.
For Smyth, prayer should be “conceived,” by which he meant deeply felt, rewritten, and re-created anew by each believer to express a faith deeply personal. Again, this followed logically if faith was seen as a dynamic oscillation within each human soul, but it was a dangerous thing to say. Many years before, Richard Bancroft had condemned “conceived prayer” as an unruly kind of worship that would lead to chaos. John Smyth openly advocated the practice, in a book published in 1605.19
Eventually, both Smyth and Robinson clambered over a last mental barrier. They began to read the work of Browne, Barrow, and Ainsworth. Like them, Robinson and Smyth came to focus sharply on the eighteenth chapter of Saint Matthew, and its message that a true church existed whenever two or three people gathered in the name of Christ. Like Browne, they came to believe that only when people assembled in such a way, and freely made a covenant with each other and with God, did they follow the path of Christianity. Once they reached that point, they became committed radicals. Bishops, Church laws and canons such as Bancroft’s, compulsory tithes, the parish system, ecclesiastical lands and property, the entire economic basis of the Church of England: all of them had to go, in pursuit of authentic worship and faith, the only assurance of election.
Neither man underwent this process of thought in academic seclusion. They were responding to what they saw around them. Self-evidently, or so it seemed to them, the parish church could not be a congregation of the elect if it allowed the ungodly, people perhaps like the Lassells family, to worship and to take the Eucharist alongside true Christians. And, especially in the case of John Smyth, both men were reacting to the unfairness with which they were treated.
By the spring of 1604, Smyth had settled firmly at Gainsborough, where he practiced medicine, and fathered two more daughters. He found friends among the local Puritans, gentry and tradesmen alike. In the absence of the usual vicar, who was sick, they persuaded Smyth to preach. Early in 1606, somebody told the bishop that Smyth had done so without a license. Local gentlemen rallied to his defense, including Williamson and Sir Gervase Helwys, who signed letters praising him. Regardless, the authorities called Smyth before an ecclesiastical court. He was convicted of being “contumacious.” In November they barred him from working as a physician without a license from the bishop.20
So John Smyth began his climactic period of reflection. He traveled ninety miles south to Coventry to consult a group of moderate Puritan clergy to hear their arguments for remaining in the Church. At about this time, possibly on the way home, he fell seriously ill and took shelter with Thomas Helwys at Broxtowe. There, in February 1607, he preached illegally in a parish church nearby; then Smyth vanished from the local archives, as he and Robinson turned their backs on authority.
In America, Bradford described the events that followed with tantalizing brevity. The act of separation occurred, he says, because of what he calls “the tiranny of the Bishopps against godly preachers and people in silenceing the one and persecuting the other.” This was an entirely accurate description of the treatment of John Smyth. If we had more documentation about Robinson, we could probably say the same about him. “The Lord’s free people,” Bradford wrote, “joyned themselves (by a Covenant of the Lord).” They formed two distinct churches of their own, entirely Separatist.
One led by Smyth met at Gainsborough, while the other was convened at Scrooby Manor by Clifton, Robinson, and Brewste
r. Two letters survive, one by Thomas Helwys, that give some idea of their style of worship. It was an all-day exercise, beginning at eight in the morning and ending at five or six in the evening, in two sessions divided by a two-hour break at noon. They sang psalms, but most of all they worshipped by “prophesying,” reading a biblical text, with each participant standing up to discuss it: a radicalized version of the Swiss practice invented many decades earlier and advocated by Browne.21
These were not tiny groups of farmers, plowmen, and their wives assembling in cottages in remote hamlets. Since Scrooby Manor was a station of the Royal Mail on the highway, it would have been hard to hide the gatherings, while Gainsborough had one of the busiest grain markets in the region. News of what was going on soon reached a wide public. As early as January 1608, an anti-Puritan published a book in London that alluded to the affair, and he mentioned the involvement of the local gentry.
“Hear you not of Teachers and people in the farthest parts of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire etc. who are flatly separated?” the author wrote. He mentioned “a Gentlewoman of place, who is said to be absolutely gone from the Church,” and it is conceivable he was referring to Lady Isabel Bowes. She had ties with radical Puritanism and certainly knew John Smyth. When examined as a whole, the evidence suggests that this was a conspicuous movement, gathering momentum. A series of strong personalities converged and then collided, across a swath of land where tensions had reached the breaking point.