Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  King James took all this very seriously, because the High Commission operated with his direct authority. Attack the commission, and you attacked the royal prerogative. This explains why at York the commissioners treated Gervase Nevyle with such great care. By speaking as he did, the young man put them on notice that he intended to protest, like Fuller, against their right to exist, and to do so in constitutional terms. On Christmas Day, the commissioners met and gave special instructions concerning the minutes of proceedings against the “disobedient or contemptuous.” In future, they would be kept in a chest with three locks in the archbishop’s registry. Evidently, they expected a legal challenge. If it came, they needed to be sure that they could defend themselves, with a written record of the offending words uttered either by Nevyle or by any Roman Catholics who tried the same tactic.33

  Freedom to worship as they wished was, without doubt, the goal that the Separatists were seeking, but civil liberties of different kinds depended on each other. If Fuller won his campaign, then the High Commission would lose all its jurisdiction over moral offenses, or tithes, or prohibited books, as well as its powers to coerce those who would not go to church. If he was victorious, then Parliament would gain in power and prestige, while the Crown would see its prerogative diminished.

  William Bradford did not spell this out at length, but he recognized that the Separatists were doing more than simply trying to evade prosecution. When he condemned Bancroft’s canons and the Church courts for being anti-Christian, he also said that they were “unlawfull.” By employing that specific word, Bradford makes the same connection between Separatism, due process, the authority of Parliament, and the right to a jury trial.

  Undetered, the High Commission continued to close in. In December, they went after Brewster and a second man at Scrooby, Richard Jackson. They issued warrants for their arrest, on charges of Brownism, but both men had vanished: Brewster had resigned his office as postmaster. In their absence the commission fined them twenty pounds, a substantial sum.34 It was the same penalty they imposed on Roman Catholics who failed to turn up to answer charges. By doing so, the High Commission made it plain that they intended to use the full rigor of the law against the Separatists, exactly as they did when dealing with their Catholic counterparts.

  This was very new: the records from Nottinghamshire show nothing like it in the previous thirty years. It also created another alarming prospect: the risk of death by hanging. As we shall see, the authorities never came close to employing the death penalty, but it is quite likely that by the end of 1607some of the Separatists believed that they were in danger of the noose.

  One thing can be said with certainty: the Pilgrims ran no risk of death by fire, since the penalty of burning at the stake applied only in cases of heresy. Nobody ever accused the Pilgrims of that. Nor could the High Commission hang a man or woman for Separatism. It was against the law to attend “unlawful assemblies, conventicles or meetings” for religious purposes, but this was not treason. It was not even a capital crime. The penalty was imprisonment until the defendant confessed, took an oath not to repeat the offense, and then returned to worship in the parish church. After three months in jail, those who refused could be handed over for punishment either to the JPs or to the king’s judges at the county assizes, where a jury trial might be required. Even if found guilty, the offenders faced not death but banishment. They only became felons, liable to face the death penalty, if they returned without permission.35

  However, the Separatists ran the risk of conviction for a different offense. Nevyle used words that might give rise to a charge of sedition because, like Fuller, he questioned the lawfulness of the court. Saying what he said in court was not a crime, but it might be if the Separatists were found to be spreading the same talk in their area, or if they put it into print. So, when the Crown charged Fuller with sedition, the Pilgrims had to think very carefully. Even sedition was not automatically a felony: Nick Fuller was released and died a wealthy man. But from their reading, especially of Ainsworth, who carefully listed the sentences imposed on earlier Separatists, Robinson and Smyth knew that the Crown had used the law against sedition to send Henry Barrow to the gibbet.

  Even if this were not so, Archbishop Matthew remained an intractable foe. He kept Nevyle in prison, still refusing to testify. Unable to find Brewster, the High Commission arrested Joanna Helwys and John Drew of Everton. They appeared in court on March 22, 1608, they refused “to take an oath to answeare according to lawe,” and they were also detained in York Castle. Meanwhile, Robinson preached illegally at churches near Sturton, in November 1607 and again in March 1608. Then his name too disappears from the records that remain.

  By now, the Separatists had already made their first, abortive effort to leave the country, in the autumn of 1607. This in itself, the act of emigration, was probably illegal, though the precise Jacobean letter of the law is hard to reconstruct. Since at least the 1540s, the Privy Council had required people to obtain a license before traveling overseas, but the register of licenses has mostly failed to survive: the relevant entries in the archives relate chiefly to Roman Catholics suspected of heading for Flanders to enroll in the Spanish army. We do not know how, if at all, the rules were applied to seamen or merchants. But whatever the law may have said, Bradford makes it plain that the Separatists expected harbors to be closed against them.

  They hired a ship to meet them in a secluded haven, somewhere close to the town of Boston in Lincolnshire. Only after a long delay did the ship arrive, by night, but the skipper had betrayed them. Customs officers boarded the vessel, stripped and searched the Separatists, both men and women, seized their books, money, and belongings, and took them to the town under arrest. The local justices asked London what to do: after a month in custody, most were set free, under orders from the Privy Council. According to Bradford, seven remained in prison, to be tried at the assizes, but they were also released.

  Little trace of this episode remains among the archives: merely a single scrap of manuscript, undated and overlooked, but preserved in the county record office at Lincoln. It lists fifteen Separatists, accused of “certaine unlawfull assemblyes” at Boston, “maliciously and with seditious intent,” language drawn from the Elizabethan statutes against religious nonconformity. Among the fifteen were Richard Clifton and Thomas Helwys, and somebody called “W.Br.g”: William Brewster, gentleman, perhaps. Alongside them was another interesting name, that of Leonard Beetson, from Boston, a draper, who shortly afterward joined the town council.36

  Beetson was neither famous nor important, but other material survives about him that helps place all this in its context. Much later, Beetson became a close friend of John Cotton, the Puritan vicar of Boston who, in the 1630s, sailed to the new town of the same name in America.*

  Sixty miles of countryside lie between Boston and Scrooby, and so this scrap of paper and the mention of Leonard Beetson suggest that by 1607 Brewster and Helwys had already built a far-flung movement. Their extended network linked them directly to the local municipal rulers of a distant town that many years later became one of the principal sources of English settlers in Massachusetts, a decade after the voyage of the Mayflower. It seems that the original organization of Separatists was far larger than scholars have recognized. The ties between the Separatists and the later migrants to New Boston may have been much closer than those described in standard histories of these events.

  No further attempt at escape was possible during the winter. Conditions were atrocious: “most miserable … frost and snow for many weeks … such weather as no man could travel through,” as Toby Matthew put it in his diary. Then, in the spring of 1608, Thomas Helwys led a party of Separatists who tried again. This time we can describe the episode exactly as it happened, and again with new sources beyond William Bradford.

  * John Beck, the mayor who dismissed Smyth, was barred from office in 1609 for “inordinate and excessive drinkinge … the lothsome & odyous sinne … which tends to the overthro
w of the cyttie.”

  * Without documentary evidence, historians have often said that Smyth and the Separatists worshipped at Gainsborough Old Hall. A magnificent fifteenth-century brick manor house, it still stands close to the parish church. It belonged to Sir William Hickman, which means that the story is unlikely to be true if it refers to events in 1607, in view of Hickman’s attitude to John Noble. However, Smyth commanded widespread respect in the town, and so he would certainly have been a guest there in earlier years. In any event, the Old Hall retains its exceptional importance as one of the finest late-medieval buildings in England.

  * When Beetson made his will in 1625, dying shortly afterward, he left twenty shillings to “our revrent Pastor John Cotton Vicar of Boston.”

  Chapter Nine

  STALLINGBOROUGH FLATS

  Betweene Grimsbe and Hull … was a large comone a good way distante from any town.

  —WILLIAM BRADFORD, DESCRIBING THE SITE OF THE FLIGHT OF THE PILGRIMS BY SEA FROM ENGLAND IN 1608

  It was May 12, a cold Thursday, about four in the afternoon. The flood tide had peaked, the brown foam of the river had turned to a rapid ebb, and the wind had begun to blow from the higher ground upstream. The moment had come for ships bound down the estuary to slip their moorings, and to look for the deep channel toward the open sea.

  The Francis, a sailing barge built to carry coal, swung at her anchor in the shallows in Stallingborough Haven, on the south bank of the Humber. Here a stream flowed slowly down between salt marshes, where sheep grazed three or four to the acre. At the point where it entered the river, the stream carved a deep trench, winding out through the mud of the haven until it merged with the breakers. On the mud, churned into rust-colored puddles like dung beside a cattle trough, an onlooker would have seen black-and-white wading birds picking out cockles with their long beaks.

  This was the widest point on the estuary, nearly six miles across in the year 1608, far wider than today, but the width was deceptive. At the flood, each tide carried in from the North Sea many hundreds of tons of silt, to be washed out again with the ebb. But the frequent storms stemmed the outflow, and the red and brown clay particles dropped down to form a cordon of shifting mudflats. Stallingborough Haven lay at the thin, northernmost tip of the largest of the flats, a long wedge of mud that fanned out southward along the shore as far as Grimsby, five miles away.

  Covered with shallow water at high tide, when seen from a distance at low tide the flats seemed to form a solid, dry beach, but again the appearance was misleading. Anybody trying to cross them would find that a man’s boot sinks deeply into the upper layers of the wet silt. A soft ooze, it has a color and a thickness that resemble dirty pink heavy cream.

  The mudflats shelved downward with only the gentlest of gradients. Even two thousand yards from the shore, in places the water was barely three feet deep. For this reason, the mayor and burgesses of Hull, the chief port of the Humber, had placed a buoy or a beacon on Burcom Shoal, a mile or so out into the estuary from Stallingborough. It warned mariners to follow the seaward channel to its north. But in the dark, in the frequent fogs, or caught between tides and winds beating against each other in opposite directions, even a local skipper with a flat-bottomed craft could find himself stranded by sandbanks that constantly moved and might baffle the most experienced pilot.1

  So it had been with the Francis. She came from Hull, farther up the river, her master was Henry Spencer, and the customs records describe her as a vessel of fifty tons, capable of long coasting voyages from Tyneside to the Thames. And yet the falling tide had trapped her on Wednesday on the flats at Stallingborough. Seeking refuge from a heavy swell, she had entered the haven and found herself grounded, unable to move until Thursday noon.

  In the ordinary way of things, the delay might have caused little harm. The usual business of vessels the size of the Francis was to pick up coal, either from Newcastle or from the quaysides by the river Trent, and then to ferry it to Hull or all the way down to London to feed the kitchen fires of the capital. There as well as in Yorkshire the winter had been harsh, the coldest perhaps for more than forty years, freezing the river at London Bridge. Whatever the date of Spencer’s arrival, demand would be keen, as householders filled their cellars for the following year.2

  On this occasion, however, the ship’s cargo consisted not of coal but of human beings and their belongings. Spencer docked at Gainsborough on Monday, and then the following morning, May 10, he received aboard ten women, three children, and two men, one old and one young. As she passed down the Trent, and then into the Humber, the Francis must have made more stops at the creeks and river ports along the way, because by the time she reached Stallingborough on Wednesday, she was filled with between eighty and a hundred passengers. Their bed linen, chests, and trunks came with them, amid the coal dust, and they were seasick. Shallow though it was, the Humber had a foul reputation for choppy voyages.

  Because of the people, another sailing vessel waited in the estuary not far from the shore, somewhere close to the spot where today a light vessel has replaced the old Tudor beacon. She intended to take the passengers of the Francis across the sea, to her own home port. She was foreign, this other craft, a Dutchman bound back to Amsterdam, and most likely smaller than the barge she had come to meet. She was a hoy, the name given to a tiny Dutch ship with a single mast, rigged fore and aft, the sort of bustling little thing we see today crowding the foreground of oil paintings by Frans Hals.

  As the tide ebbed, she hoisted her anchor and her sails, but before she did so, a rowboat put out to meet her. The two oarsmen and the boat belonged to the Francis, and they carried as many as sixteen men who had been waiting on the shore, pacing up and down above the mud. They had come on foot over the chain of low hills, the Wolds, which run parallel to the coastline a few miles inland. At about four o’clock they clambered out of the rowboat and into the Dutch hoy. As they did so, they looked back and saw a troop of armed men, on horseback and on foot, hurrying down toward the haven. The members of the troop carried guns and bills, an infantry weapon of the day, a curved blade mounted on a long wooden shaft.

  The armed men were most likely the local militia, under the orders of the Grimsby justices. To reach Stallingborough, they had to cross a wetland that stretched back behind the shore for as much as two miles, as far as the parish church at Stallingborough village, and then curved down along the coast in Grimsby’s direction. A bridle path or two led across the marsh, between the grazing livestock, but the land was so flat that anybody walking along the path would be visible from a long distance.

  When he saw the militia, the master of the hoy swore loudly. He hoisted his anchor and set his sails. Off he went toward the North Sea, taking with him his sixteen Englishmen. They left behind on the Francis their belongings, their comrades, their wives, and their weeping children. The Dutchman and his passengers reached his home port safely, but only after a difficult passage, buffeted by gales, which took them far out to the northeast, close to the coast of modern Norway or Sweden. Meanwhile, the eighty people left at Stallingborough divided into two groups. While the able-bodied men among them scattered and fled, the women and children and their leaders remained behind to face the magistrates.

  THE CASE OF THOMAS ELVISH

  On Friday, May 13, the justices questioned the master and crew of the Francis, probably at the town hall of Grimsby. They also brought before them Thomas Helwys, the man who led the attempted escape. Diligent servants of the Crown, the two JPs sent down to Whitehall Palace a copy of the depositions taken from Helwys, and his servant, and from Spencer and one of his crewmen. The event they record was nothing other than the flight of the Pilgrims from the coast of England, the episode of suffering and escape that William Bradford later chronicled with such emotion in his history of the Plymouth Colony.

  As so often, Bradford passes over in silence his own role in the incident. However, so intensely does he describe the voyage of the hoy to Amsterdam that it seems like
ly he was on board and witnessed the events. It has always been thought that his narrative provided the only version of this affair, the distant precursor of the landing at Plymouth Rock, but this is not so. In fact, the depositions have lain forgotten and forlorn among the English State Papers for four centuries. They expand on Bradford’s story, adding far more detail and confirming the accuracy of what he writes. They also place the episode firmly back within its historical setting.3

  Until now, readers have examined the depositions perhaps only twice: when they were cataloged in the reign of Queen Victoria, and then when they were microfilmed, a few decades ago, along with the rest of the Privy Council’s working memoranda. It may seem remarkable that the depositions have gone unnoticed, but the reason is very simple. The relevant catalog entry gives not the slightest indication of the importance of what lies behind it.

  The catalog appeared as long ago as the 1850s, in the form of the Calendar of State Papers for the early years of the reign of James I. It was compiled by a busy archivist called Mary Green.4 At the time, the Pilgrims had only recently attracted interest from historians in England, and Mrs. Green may have known nothing about them. She produced more than forty volumes of calendars, and the speed with which she worked meant that she could not dwell for long on each of many thousands of documents. By this time Joseph Hunter, the Englishman who knew most about the Pilgrims, was sick and elderly and rarely seen among the archives: he died in 1861. Even if Mrs. Green had heard of Helwys (and that is unlikely), the allusion to him was easy to miss. Jacobean writers wrote the name with an anarchic variety of spellings—Ellwis, Helliwis, Elwaies, and so on—and at Grimsby the justices found a version of their own. They described him as “Thomas Elvish of Basford in the county of Nottingham gen.” In the index of the catalog only the name Elvish appears.