by Nick Bunker
THE DREWS OF EVERTON
Along the Trent valley, between March and August 1607, episodes of public disobedience, anger, and agitation began to come to the attention of the authorities. On the Lincolnshire side of the river, at Torksey, a Puritan clergyman gave an angry sermon. He called his flock “sinfull Sodomites,” because they objected to another Puritan who had preached in the same pulpit before him. Not far away at Retford, a woman was cited before the archdeacon’s court for standing up one Sunday and haranguing the minister in front of the congregation. At Gainsborough, a tradesman found himself in trouble for failing to doff his hat in church.
When each one is looked at in isolation, after four hundred years, episodes like these seem tiny, trivial, or even comic. But within them lay a pattern.22 For the first time, the rigor of Bancroft had begun to bite hard on laypeople in the region, as well as on what remained of the Puritan clergy. The result was protest and dissent. It was this—the involvement of the laity, and the organization they established—that made the events which followed remarkable, with no obvious parallel at the time.
Nobody knows the precise date when the act of separation occurred, the moment when Brewster and the rest felt that they must quit the Church of England for good. However, it probably took place in March. At that time, the critical dates were those when men and women were obliged to receive the Eucharist, a ceremony that served as a test of obedience. It only took place five times a year, and between Christmas and Easter week in 1607 a long interval elapsed of more than three months without any Eucharist required.23 No record survives of trouble at Christmas, but several incidents of refusal occurred at Easter. The festival fell on April 5.
Two days later, in accordance with Bancroft’s new rules, the churchwardens of Everton tersely reported that four men and one woman had failed to take Holy Communion. At least one of the offenders was a member of Brewster’s dissident group at Scrooby. This incident displays far more clearly than any other the social origins, and perhaps the motives, of the men and women who formed the nucleus of these early Pilgrim congregations.
Two miles from Scrooby, Everton sat on the top of the North Clay, above the Idle wetlands. A smaller version of Sturton, it was another open field village with a rich mixture of grazing land, meadows, and cornfields, with woods on the higher ground. It was a place where rents were high too, but where the farmers could enjoy a standard of living much better than at Bradford’s Austerfield, forty minutes’ walk across the valley. Among them were a prosperous yeoman family called the Drews. They were men and women who grew wheat and rye, reared sheep, and held radical views.
The Drews lived a few hundred yards from the church, in a hamlet called Harwell. It occupies the crest of a sandy ridge between the cornfields and the meadows. At the family’s head was Richard Drew, a man of modest education who could not sign his name. Even so, he was pious and affluent enough when he died in 1616 to leave three pounds, fifteen weeks’ wages for a laborer, toward the schooling of poor children of the parish.
Feather beds, kitchen scales, mattresses, rugs, carpets, and red curtains figured among the possessions of the up-and-coming Drews. They were some of the first people in the region to have in their houses a room called a parlor. Among Richard’s sons in 1607 were three young men in their twenties who all became defiant Puritans. Robert and John were two of the five Evertonians who did not receive the Eucharist at Easter, and Roger was named in July for refusing to go to church at all. John Drew, aged twenty-three, seems to have been the most outspoken. Later the authorities locked him up in the cells at York Castle for being a Brownist. Banished by the Privy Council in 1609, he headed for the Netherlands to join Brewster and his comrades. And although his father, Richard, does not seem to have been an active rebel, he did what he could to shield his sons. He incurred a fine of two shillings.24
Why should such a family opt for refusal and resistance when the vast majority of their equivalents in England did not? Most likely, the personal influence of Brewster had a great deal to do with it. The Drews must have known him for many years, because the archbishop of York was lord of the manor at Everton, and Brewster’s father would have collected the rents. They must also have known Richard Clifton, because his brother John was another Evertonian yeoman. According to Cotton Mather, after his illness at the age of twelve, Bradford began to listen to Clifton “not far from his abode.” In all likelihood, he simply forded the Idle and walked up the wooded slope to the same village.
Why was Everton a haven for dissent? Another explanation was political, though the politics were very local. If the lord of the manor was an absentee, like the archbishop, then in practice the yeoman farmers could run their own affairs. This they did at Everton, where little authority existed but their own. All but one of the large tenants and landowners at Everton came from families known to be Puritan sympathizers. The Drews and their friends dominated the parish church, serving as churchwardens, while John Drew kept the parish funds. In 1609, long after the Pilgrims went into exile, the vicar of Everton was still complaining about the nonconformists, including John Clifton.
They were self-employed men, large tenant farmers, or tradesmen who had become used to independence, in matters of belief as well as in the running of their open fields. Something similar occurred in Gainsborough too, although there the politics were urban. In August 1607, a Gainsborough man called John Noble was reported to the authorities for failing to take Holy Communion for twelve months. He also refused to remove his hat during Sunday service, a gesture often made by Puritans.
John Noble was a man of substance, one of Gainsborough’s largest taxpayers. He was a draper with a shop in the middle of the town and business contacts in London. One of the founders of the town’s grammar school, he served as parish constable. Again, he valued independence from outsiders. In alliance with Sir Richard Williamson, and with another local attorney called Edward Aston, from 1605 onward John Noble fought a long and angry legal battle with the lord of the manor, one Sir William Hickman, a newcomer from London who charged exorbitant levies on market traders and tried to ban Noble from doing any business at all. It was Hickman who reported John Noble for nonconformity.25
All three men—Aston, Noble, and Williamson—belonged to the local Puritan network. Aston later stood bail for Joan Helwys, the Separatist, when she was arrested. We can fairly assume that John Noble was one of the tradesmen who worshipped with John Smyth. It seems that Gainsborough had not merely a few nonconformists but an active Puritan party, men tied together by business and common self-interest as well as religious friendship. Not all of these men became Brownists. But they had every reason to sympathize with separatism, if the movement had a godly, disciplined tone and served as a weapon against social evils.*
The Old Hall at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, viewed from the north, showing the bay window of the great hall, built in about 1465. (Photography: Nick Bunker)
Most of the local gentry apparently agreed. In their role as JPs, they turned a blind eye to Brownism. Under ecclesiastical law as it stood, the judges who sat in the archdeacon’s court could impose only limited penalties, small fines or excommunication, and they had no power of imprisonment. However, if an offender persisted, the archdeacon could send him or her to the JPs to be dealt with more severely. Alternatively, the JPs could prosecute themselves, using the criminal law against Catholic recusants or Separatists. In Nottinghamshire, their sessions were fully minuted, and the minutes survive in their entirety. They show no trace of any action against Brewster or his friends.
Not, that is, until October 1607, when at last they began to call a few Separatists before them. By that time events had moved on. At a much higher level the authorities had become aware of the civil disobedience in the Quadrilateral. The lenient old archbishop of York had breathed his last. When a new man came to take his place, he tackled the problem with urgency.
DANGEROUS SCHISM
In early July, the new archbishop left London for the north
. When the decisive encounter came, in November, it involved a direct confrontation with a defiant Brownist. However, this was not a simple clash between dictatorship on the one hand and ardent faith on the other. It was a confrontation between two sets of equally evangelical Christians. It arose from a wider conflict about the basis of the authority of the Church, and about constitutional law.
Aged about sixty-three, the new archbishop, Toby Matthew, came from another family of tradesmen. In his teens he made his name as a scholar of precocious brilliance: men called it “half a miracle,” so swiftly did he take his master’s degree. As the young dean of an Oxford college, he made himself popular with his generosity, and for what one observer called his “cheerfull sharpnes of witt,” involving a taste for outrageous puns.
As he worked his way up through the hierarchy, mainly in the far north at Durham, Toby Matthew lost neither stamina nor enthusiasm. Although he often fell ill, with rheumatism, toothache, and catarrh, he keenly pursued his vocation as a preacher. In the space of forty years he delivered nearly two thousand sermons, preaching regularly even in his seventies, when he might have left the task to juniors.26
And yet the diligent Toby Matthew was never his own man, and the Gospel reached the ears of his congregation filtered through a sieve of politics. As bishop of Durham, Matthew had met King James the moment he came south across the border in 1603, he traveled with him to London, and he preached frequently at court. Most recently, he had risen from his sickbed in April 1607 to give a sermon to the young Prince Henry. His spell in the south the previous winter was the result of politics too, as he lent his support in Parliament to the king’s final, doomed attempt to legislate for the complete union of England and Scotland. So we can fairly assume that Toby Matthew saw himself as the king’s instrument, seeking loyally to impose the Crown’s authority.
As he traveled up the Great North Road, he passed through country troubled by unrest of another kind, causing alarm at Whitehall Palace at the very time when reports of Brownism were also beginning to arrive. In towns and villages less than a day’s ride west of the highway, the spring and summer of 1607 witnessed the most serious popular revolt of the reign of James I. It was known as the Midland Rising. It flared up in May, before being swiftly crushed in June, with Gilbert Talbot playing a leading part in its suppression. A spate of hangings followed. Behind the rebellion laymaterial realities at their cruelest and most basic, at a point when the fall in the real incomes of the laboring poor had very nearly reached its lowest point.
In 1607, with the price of grain rising sharply, landlords in parts of the Midlands were making matters worse, by raising rents and by enclosing open fields and turning them over to grazing land. Crowds of people numbering in thousands gathered to break down hedges and to fill in ditches. Economic protest though it was, suspicions were aroused that one or another group of religious dissenters, Catholic or Puritan, had fomented the unrest. In the autumn, as the price of bread soared again after another poor harvest, to reach its highest level since the 1590s, the Privy Council continued to worry. No evidence links the Pilgrims to protests against enclosure, but the Midland Rising created a climate of unease that may help to explain why the archbishop acted as he did.
For his part, Toby Matthew had a reputation as a man “industrious against Papists.” At York he found a weapon against them in the form of the Court of High Commission, a tribunal with wide powers against religious offenders. Thanks to new legislation, action could be taken far more effectively than in the past. Applying solely to Roman Catholics, the statute became law in 1606 as part of the Crown’s response to the Gunpowder Plot. It obliged them to take a new oath of allegiance, requiring them to disown the authority of the pope. Armed with this, Matthew stepped up the campaign against the old religion to new heights.
While only a handful of arrest warrants were issued against the Separatists, the lists of those relating to Catholics fill scores of pages in the archives of the High Commission. As many as sixty such cases, covering two hundred individuals, appear in the records relating to a single session of the court in June 1607 alone.27 More than a century ago, when a visiting American scholar examined the same minute book at York, he published only the few entries relating to the pursuit of the Pilgrims. He suppressed the evidence of much harsher treatment of those of a different persuasion.
Henry Martyn Dexter, the writer in question, passed over in silence the material that deals with the anti-Catholic purge. His motives for doing so were all too obvious. When Dexter’s book appeared in Boston in the early 1900s, its pages were strewn with barbed asides against the pope and the Catholic religion.28 Among the details he omitted were, for example, the relative numbers of prisoners in the cells. Only four Brownists were imprisoned, but they shared the jail at York with fourteen “recusants in the castle,” Catholics detained for “superstitious errors & disobedience,” and for refusing to take the oath of allegiance.29
Henry Martyn Dexter was a New England Protestant, at a time when in Boston and New Haven prejudice against Italians and Irish Catholic immigrants was commonplace. It serves no purpose today to chastise him for that. However, by detaching events from their context, Dexter misrepresented and misunderstood the material he studied, and because the archives at York have received little attention, his errors have never been corrected. By failing to reexamine the original records, later historians have left intact a vague, naive account of the affair.
The fact was that the Brownists did not go to jail simply for being radical in their religious views, or for creating a Separatist community at Scrooby. They did so because they attacked the legal authority of the Church, and in terms based on a defense of civil liberties that applied across a far wider domain than religion alone. When the final crisis came, it concerned politics and law, rather than faith or theological dissent.
Toby Matthew presided over his first session of the High Commission on August 13. He went straight to work against Catholics, and then he headed north to the town of Ripon, one of their strongholds, where four days later he dealt with them again. A recess followed in September. In October he reconvened the court, and on the sixth of the month he handled fifty-six cases of Catholic nonconformity, covering some 170 individuals: in the margin, the word “fled” appears next to three names.
At first, the archbishop used mild measures against the Separatists. Rather than bullying his opponents, he tried to convert them. During the recess, he traveled south to Nottinghamshire. He gave four sermons, preaching at Bawtry against the Brownists on September 10. Then back he came to York, where he fell ill with his old ailment of catarrh. Then, in November, a Brownist came up before the High Commission, in the shape of a gentleman called Gervase Nevyle, the first to be imprisoned.
He was “a very daungerous schismaticall Separist Brownist & irreligious subiect,” said the court, but that was not why they sent him to jail. They locked him up because he refused to testify on oath. In this respect, the Nevyle case was evidently unusual, and sensitive. The clerk neatly wrote out a verbatim report, much longer than the brief notes that he normally made. Specifically, he referred to the fact that Nevyle offended the archbishop by refusing to be sworn, by making “contemptuous speches,” and by declining to answer questions. The clerk gave the substance of what Nevyle had said: he insulted the archbishop by “protesting … againste his authoritie (and as he tearmed it) his antichristian hierarchie.”30
Why did his case require careful handling? First, Nevyle was well connected. His contacts included the lawyers of Gray’s Inn. More than one Gervase Nevyle appears in the records, but our Separatist was almost certainly a young man of twenty-one, Gervase Nevyle of Grove. This was a village on the North Clay, where the Nevyles were lords of the manor: it appears that they also owned land at Everton. At Grove, they allowed a radical Puritan to serve as minister, one of the men dismissed by Archbishop Hutton in 1605. Even more to the point, the young Gervase was the nephew of the Gainsborough lawyer Sir Richard Williamso
n, who served on the very same court, the High Commission, that was about to hear his case.31
Second, it seems that Gervase Nevyle was remarkably well-informed about the law. By using the words he did, he made an uncomfortable connection between his case and a great legal controversy that was raging in London, fascinating advocates and irritating King James. Far from being a despotism, Jacobean England was intensely legalistic, and political debate often found its principal arena in the courts. When Nick Fuller represented Puritans in the 1590s, he defended them by arguing that the legal apparatus of the Church was unconstitutional. In 1607 the issue was revived when he defended a merchant from Norfolk who, like Nevyle, refused to give sworn testimony when charged with Separatism. In Parliament, and in a book printed unlawfully, most likely in Amsterdam, Fuller called for the outright abolition of the High Commission.
In language very similar to Nevyle’s, Fuller said that the court was unjust, arbitrary, and unlawful. The High Commission contravened Magna Carta because it did not allow trial by jury. It had no right to imprison defendants, he claimed, since Parliament had never voted freely to give it powers to do so. Worst of all, the court compelled the accused to give testimony on oath before they knew the charges against them: it forced them to incriminate themselves, flouting an ancient privilege of English defendants. According to Fuller, the High Commission had no right to try offenders of any kind, whether they were Catholics or Brownists, adulterers or bigamists, or publishers of unlicensed books.
Fuller’s campaign reached its climax in the summer and autumn of 1607, at the very moment when the authorities at York began to take action against Brewster and his comrades. In June, the House of Commons came close to voting to do away with the High Commission, and of course Toby Matthew knew this situation intimately: he was sitting in the House of Lords. In July, the authorities arrested Nick Fuller, and then in October the High Commission in London sent him to prison. His friends obtained a writ of habeas corpus, and the case went to the leading forum in the realm, the Court of King’s Bench. They decided against Fuller on November 24, but the controversy continued, when the following month his illegal book turned up in England. The authorities rearrested him in January 1608, and this time they charged Nick Fuller with sedition.32
