Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  All of this happened only two hundred yards from Brewster’s front door in Stincksteeg. During 1617, similar riots flared up in one Dutch town after another, beginning in February, when in Amsterdam a mob ransacked the home of a rich merchant. Incidents of arson followed, and the authorities discovered caches of homemade bombs, bags of gunpowder fitted with matches. Looking on in horror from The Hague, Carleton sent anxious dispatches back to London, often in cipher—Dutch intelligence opened his mail—warning that the country was disintegrating.

  Behind all this lay religion: sectarian controversy intertwined with social unrest. For the English Separatists, the situation created new hazards of three kinds. One was obvious: the risk of falling victim to random violence in the street. The second was a matter of national security. If, as seemed likely, the Spanish intended to go to war again when their truce with the Dutch expired in 1621, then a divided republic might swiftly be overrun, ending religious freedom for people such as they. And, last but equally dangerous, the Pilgrims might find themselves forced to take sides and end up among the losers in a civil war whose outcome could not be foreseen.

  Theology supplied the origin of the conflict. In the 1590s, some liberal Dutch pastors began to file away the sharp edges of Calvinist doctrine, raising doubts about the idea of double predestination and flouting the official doctrine of the Dutch Reformed Church. This they could do, because that church had never been made compulsory. It could never compel everyone to accept its rigid Calvinist confession of faith. Many of the republic’s leaders never joined it at all. Those who did not included the central character in the drama of 1617, the Dutch statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the republic’s prime minister in all but name. Seventy years of age and a veteran of the revolt against Spain, he distrusted the clergy and resented their ambition to dominate the state.

  Oldenbarnevelt could not accept the idea that God created some human souls purely for the sake of damning them to hell. Nor did he wish to be dictated to by the Dutch Reformed Church, however patriotic it might be. And so, from about 1607, he sided with the liberals, or Arminians, led by the Amsterdam preacher Jacobus Arminius. Known also as the Remonstrants, the Arminians argued that God might choose to save everyone, and that human beings could freely assist God in doing so. More to the point, the Arminians were happy to accept that the state, led by Oldenbarnevelt, reigned supreme.

  In all of this, Oldenbarnevelt played with fire. Theology stirred up emotions, and he had made many enemies: he was a brilliant lawyer, but by birth he came from a landowning family in the rural east of the republic, and he was an elitist. Nobody hated him more than the popular hero of the Dutch, the son of William the Silent, Prince Maurice of Nassau, fifty years of age in 1617. A brilliant general, and a determined foe of Spain, Prince Maurice was also amoral, an undiscriminating lecher, and a man happy to use religious strife as a weapon in a contest for power.

  As Carleton put it, the disorders arose from “a schism in the church, countenanced and maintained by faction in the state.” Prince Maurice threw his weight behind the Counter-Remonstrants. They were the popular Calvinist party, anti-Arminian, a loose and unruly alliance of the Dutch Reformed Church, the urban working class, and merchants eager for another war with Spain, not least because they wished to take control of the trade with the Indies, East and West.10

  England’s ambassador at The Hague, and later secretary of state, Sir Dudley Carleton (1574–1632), from a portrait painted in about 1620 by the Dutchman van Mierevelt (Print in author’s collection)

  Each of the violent clashes of 1617 involved a sectarian fight between these two religious factions. The Amsterdam riot, for example, erupted because the rioters heard that an Arminian pastor was preaching in the house they attacked. At The Hague, thousands of Counter-Remonstrants occupied the city’s largest church, opposite Oldenbarnevelt’s mansion, and held it by force. Much the same was true at Leiden. There, and at other cities, the ruling oligarchy and the burgomasters were Arminians, and they mobilized their waardgelders to defend themselves against a popular rebellion. The barricades around the town hall at Leiden came to be called “the Arminian fence,” and the city became a sort of Dutch Belfast, divided by physical barriers as well as those of creed and class.

  How should the English exiles respond? Their sympathies lay entirely with the Counter-Remonstrants, because the Pilgrims were orthodox Calvinists, sharing the same stark dogma of double predestination. Their friend Ames acted as tutor to the sons of an Amsterdam merchant called Reynier Pauw, leader of the anti-Arminians in that city and a close ally of Prince Maurice’s. At Leiden, William Bradford loathed the Arminians, blaming them entirely for the unrest. John Robinson took an even more direct role in events, actively supporting the Counter-Remonstrants in fierce debates at the university. His friends included the most orthodox Calvinist professors, ardent supporters of Prince Maurice.11

  On the other hand, the English were merely foreigners, powerless and with little money. If they backed the wrong horse, they might find themselves in serious trouble. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the Pilgrims began an urgent debate about the idea of leaving for America, or that they found it very hard to reach a consensus. Which course of action was the more dangerous? To sail to the New World, where the traumas in Virginia gave little cause for confidence? Or to remain at Leiden, where anything might happen and where the economic climate was already difficult, and might soon become disastrous? The puzzle was all the harder to solve because the Dutch crisis offered a positive opportunity.

  Suddenly the Pilgrims found themselves in full agreement with King James about a religious question. From the very outset, both Carleton and the king supported the Counter-Remonstrants, and not merely because they felt that the Arminians were troublemakers, hairsplitters who endangered peace and prosperity. They also disliked Oldenbarnevelt. He often irritated the English by being too close to France or negotiating hard in disputes about trade. It was also rumored that Oldenbarnevelt took bribes from the Spanish. For England, the much younger Prince Maurice seemed far more attractive in every way.

  By the autumn of 1617, Maurice had made it clear that he would use force if necessary to defend the Counter-Remonstrants. With the army behind him, the prince was bound to win, an outcome that would suit the English very well. A military dictatorship led by the prince would unite the Dutch Republic and ensure that it stood firm against Spain. In all of this there lay a certain irony, which people noticed at the time: that, among the Dutch, King James was aligned with exactly the kind of Calvinist zealots whom he most disliked at home. For the Pilgrims, the situation had obvious benefits, all the same, by making them more acceptable to the English authorities. The king counted as his allies in Holland the very same Calvinist clerics who lived close to John Robinson and considered him their friend.

  So, that autumn, the Pilgrims sent John Carver back to London, along with another exile, Robert Cushman, who made an arduous living in Leiden combing wool. Cushman and Carver began the talks with the Virginia Company. They took with them the Seven Articles, a declaration of belief that explained how conventional the Pilgrims were in their theology. As so often, Bradford does not give the date, but the mission appears to have taken place immediately after the riots in the Breestraat. On November 12, the company’s treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys, wrote a friendly letter back to Robinson and Brewster, praising the Seven Articles and promising to help.

  Things did not go badly for the Pilgrims in the ensuing months. With the help of Sir John Wolstenholme, Fulke Greville, and Sir Robert Naunton they received royal consent to go to America. They had little hope of obtaining support by way of capital from the Virginia Company, but in Leiden they found themselves on the winning side. During 1618, Prince Maurice gradually isolated Oldenbarnevelt and the province of Holland, where the Arminians were strongest, while he mobilized his own base of supporters.

  In the summer and autumn, he disarmed the waardgelders, and in September the Arminian barricad
e came down. The following month Prince Maurice ousted the burgomasters of Leiden and installed a new town council. Huge crowds turned out to carry him into the city, “with much applause of the people,” Carleton told Naunton: “The boys marched about the town with a flag and a drum … felling Arminians by the score.”12 Prince Maurice toppled Oldenbarnevelt, having him arrested on a charge of treason. After a show trial, Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded in May 1619.

  By this time, however, the Pilgrims themselves had stumbled off course. As we shall see, they had a good chance of finding merchants in Amsterdam ready to finance the voyage, but in London their period of royal approval turned out to be brief. King James did not prohibit them from sailing to America, but he did find a new reason to be very angry with William Brewster.

  In 1616, Brewster hit upon a promising scheme, combining evangelism and the profit motive. At first, he had suffered worse than most in Leiden, because of the strain of keeping his large family—he and his wife brought with them five children—and because as a gentleman he had never done manual work. Gradually, he built a reputation as a tutor, teaching English to wealthy Danes and Germans studying at the university. Then, with backing from another Separatist, a minor landowner from Kent called Thomas Brewer, he went into the book trade. In early 1617, the Pilgrims began publishing titles at Leiden, mostly expensive, finely bound volumes for sale to academic Puritans at home.

  Title page of A Confutation of the Rhemists, printed by the Pilgrims at Leiden. This copy belonged to the poet Edward Benlowes (1602–76). A Royalist during the English Civil War, Benlowes was not a Puritan, but he was fiercely anti-Catholic, and this seems to have been the book’s appeal. (The Old Library, St. John’s College, Cambridge)

  The Pilgrim Press issued about nineteen books. By far their biggest seller was a thick, handsome folio by the great Thomas Cartwright, bearing the ponderous title A Confutation of the Rhemists. Written in the 1580s, and commissioned originally by Puritan sympathizers, including Walsingham, it was an anti-Catholic commentary on the New Testament. Although nothing in it was subversive, it fell afoul of a system of censorship introduced in 1586, when the Star Chamber decreed that printers must obtain a license from the archbishop of Canterbury for any title they sold. John Whitgift banned Cartwright’s book, fearing that it might enhance his reputation. It languished unpublished until 1618, when Brewster revived it and began shipping copies back to England.13

  Although it was unlicensed, the Confutation must have sold openly and well, because nearly sixty copies still exist, fifteen of them in college libraries at Oxford. It would have been impossible to smuggle a book as hefty as this in such quantities. It seems that Brewster had found a profitable niche: books a little too hot for English publishers to handle, but not scandalous enough to bring the full weight of authority crashing down. The following year, however, the Pilgrims went too far. On his list, Brewster included books by a Scottish author, works bound to infuriate a king who had suddenly become especially sensitive to criticism.

  THE PERTH ASSEMBLY

  For many years, the king had complained about scurrilous pamphlets printed abroad, mostly by exiled Catholics. There was, for example, a rebellious crew of Irish Franciscan monks who ran off seditious books in Gaelic from a printing press in their Belgian monastery, causing a mild furor in 1614.14 Then, the following year, a pocket-size title went on sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair, written in excellent Latin, accessible to every educated European. It was a comic sensation.

  Titled the Corona Regia (Kingly Crown), it was a satire aimed directly at King James. In October, an English informer in Brussels overheard two Jesuits chuckling about its contents. A few copies reached England and enraged the king. For the next two years he made his diplomats devote much of their time to tracking down the anonymous author. Besides making fun of the king’s pretentiousness, not least his posing as a peacemaker, the Corona mocked his heavy drinking, his habit of smacking his lips, and his vomiting after meals. Worst of all, the author broke a taboo by openly calling James a homosexual, with a preference for juveniles.15

  Scores of dispatches remain to show how great a fuss this caused. King James became even angrier when the theological civil war among the Dutch gave rise to pamphlets that reminded him about the defects of his own state church. At this point, James was pursuing his cherished plan to unite the Protestant churches of Europe. He took very unkindly to any suggestion that he had failed to bring religious peace to the British Isles. His fury became still greater if any writer touched on religious affairs in Scotland, his old domain.

  In the spring of 1617, James rode north to Edinburgh on his extravagant royal tour. In advance, he had sent up a list of changes he wished to see in the Church of Scotland, to make it more closely resemble English practice. Again, he wanted uniformity between his kingdoms, but he horrified the Scots by suggesting that they kneel to receive Holy Communion and by proposing to give more power to bishops. Leading the opposition was a prolific and popular minister called David Calderwood. Events soon followed a familiar pattern.

  James summoned Calderwood before a Church court. Calderwood did not attend, and so the king had him dismissed, banished from Scotland, and branded a rebel.16 In hiding in Scotland, then in a safe house in Holland, Calderwood wrote book after book attacking the king’s plans for the Scottish Church. He found a willing helper in William Brewster and the Pilgrim Press.

  By this time, the young Winslow, aged only twenty-two, had arrived in Leiden, after about five years as an apprentice printer in London. It seems that he came to work with the Pilgrims as a compositor in 1618, setting the type for their publications. Soon afterward, at about the end of that year, the Pilgrims began to print Calderwood’s books. This time they were definitely contraband, smuggled back across the North Sea. The operation must have been successful, because today the library at Edinburgh University owns four copies of the most controversial, the Perth Assembly, and Glasgow has another three.

  The Pilgrims had picked a fine time to upset the king, since his agents were still trying to find the men responsible for the Corona Regia. Meanwhile, Prince Maurice had seized power in The Hague, and with the support of King James he convened a synod at Dordrecht, with a view to settling the dispute with the Arminians once and for all. The synod began to assemble shortly after the comet lit up the night sky at the end of 1618, and the blazing star only made the delegates more quarrelsome. Despite the fall of Oldenbarnevelt, civil disorders continued, lasting far into the following year: in the worst incident, the army shot dead four Arminians in the town of Hoorn.

  Against this background of unrest, James feared that the synod might fail or reach the wrong result. If it did so, then pamphleteers on all sides might be to blame for inciting controversy. Before the synod, therefore, he urged the Dutch to clamp down on public debate about religion, by Dutchmen and exiles alike. This was all the more necessary, since Europe was sliding into war and James needed a peaceful, united Dutch Republic as his ally. In December, Carleton persuaded the Dutch authorities to issue a decree banning English exiles from printing books and sending them home.

  Brewster and the Pilgrims took no notice and printed Calderwood’s books regardless. Illegal copies began to turn up in Scotland. Until now, Sir Dudley Carleton had left the Pilgrims unmolested, even though he must have known of their activities: one of his best agents was an expatriate English Puritan. The same was true of Carleton’s superior at Whitehall, Sir Robert Naunton. He was a friend of the Pilgrims, not an enemy. Neither man displayed any eagerness to persecute the exiled Separatists. But at last, under orders from the king, in February 1619 they had to take action. And yet even then Carleton dragged his feet, risking the anger of his sovereign.

  On February 26, Naunton wrote to Carleton to tell him that the king was furious about another libelous book in Latin, apparently written by a Scottish nonconformist and printed in Holland. Carleton went to Prince Maurice to complain. He soon discovered that Calderwood was the likely author, bu
t he did not hurry to track down the publisher. Not until July did Carleton report that the guilty party was “one William Brewster, a Brownist, who hath been for some years an inhabitant and printer at Leyden.” Brewster, he said, either had printed Perth Assembly, which was freely available in Leiden, or would know who had. Poring over the books in question, and comparing their typeface with that of the Confutation, the ambassador decided that all three books came from the Pilgrim Press.

  But Brewster was nowhere to be found. According to Carleton, a few weeks earlier the Pilgrim had left for London. This was false: in fact, Brewster seems to have spent the whole of the spring and early summer of 1619 in England, where the Pilgrims were trying to close their deal with the Virginia Company. This they did on June 9, when the company granted them a first patent for a plantation. Then Brewster slipped back to Holland, where he lay low. He surfaced briefly at Leiden at the end of August, when at last he was spotted by Carleton’s informants.

  Even with the help of the Dutch, and after a reprimand from the king, Sir Dudley failed to detain the Pilgrim. After the authorities bungled an attempt to arrest him, Brewster went into hiding at Leiderdorp, a rural suburb only two miles from the Achtergracht. He reemerged in America, after traveling on the Mayflower, and the Pilgrims avoided mentioning his name in their early reports about life in New England. His backer Thomas Brewer was easier to find. In mid-September, his books, papers, and printing type were seized, marking the end of the publishing house.

  Even so, Brewer escaped harsh treatment. Because he was a member of Leiden University, he could be locked up only in the university’s own prison. Carleton had to negotiate hard before the university would allow Brewer to be taken to England for questioning. Sir Dudley had to give assurances that the English Crown would treat him well, meet his expenses, and release him after three months. Not until November 12 did the university finally deliver Brewer to an English officer, Sir William Zouche, for the journey to London. Even then, John Robinson came with him as far as Rotterdam. Far from putting Brewer in handcuffs, Zouche bought him drinks as they waited for the weather to clear.17