Radical Puritans in England 1550 - 1660

R.J. Acheson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317880691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This study of religious tensions in Early Modern England explores the different religious separatist movements between 1550-1660. It describes the development of radical sectarianism during the reign of Charles I and explores why the unity of radical cause was shattered following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Part One:     The Background:
The Radical Tradition

 

Throughout this volume, the term ‘separatist’ is frequently employed. As a definition, however, it is open to misuse, and in this study it will be applied strictly only to those individuals or communities whose ideas about how the religious life of the nation should be organised differed from ‘official’ views. In other words, separatists did not, for a variety of reasons, regard the Established Church as a ‘true’ church. This being so, they felt impelled to separate themselves both physically and spiritually from what was for them a ‘Church of confusion, where the Lord's people may not tarry’ (17). This is a crucial distinction; there were many who regarded the services and even the theological position of the Church during the period in question with distaste, but not all such took the momentous step of total separation. The chronicler of the Broadmead separatist church notes this as late as 1640:

These few being thus joined, confirmed and separated, they began very much to increase … But divers that were grave, sincere, and godly people, that had gone all along with them step by step until this, would not enter into church fellowship at that time, standing off for many years (18).

This whole issue of attitudes was an important one, dividing nonconforming Puritans from semi-separatists, and both these from separatists as such. It drew a thin but very real dividing line between these respective groups which, in the face of the enforcement of episcopal discipline, might otherwise have been logical allies. Indeed, to anticipate one of the arguments put forward in this study (see Chapter 4), it may be that the real achievement of Archbishop Laud's policy was for a brief but seminal time to forge an alliance between these sharply disparate elements.

Given this strict definition, the evidence for separatism before 1550 remains elusive. It is traditional in any study of the development of religious tension in early modern England to analyse the contribution of later Lollardy to the English Reformation, particularly within the context of the influence of continental radicalism in the shape of Lutheranism in the 1520s or Anabaptism in the 1530s and 1540s. Such an approach has its adherents: in a relatively recent essay, Christopher Hill has gone so far as to suggest that there may have been a continuous tradition of dissent linking the Lollards of the fifteenth century with the Levellers* of the late 1640s (81). Yet it can equally be argued that the Lollards have no direct relevance to a study of separatism. Whilst it cannot be denied that their assault on ‘priestly’ authority was a telling blow at one of the fundamental pillars of the pre-Reformation Church, and that their rejection of the efficacy of sacraments was instrumental in laying the foundations for later popular scepticism, there is no hint of a desire to set up an alternative ecclesiastical system in Lollard activities or demands. God may well have been ‘in no place made by men's hands’, but that does not mean that the Lollards saw their secret assemblies or conventicles as ‘gathered’ churches. By and large, Lollards were quick to recant when pressure was applied, ‘turned’ rather than ‘burned’, and on the whole were content to practise a kind of Nicodemism'. Some of them, like John Grebill of Tenterden, found no conflict of interests in holding Lollard beliefs and the position of churchwarden at one and the same time (61, 77).

Moreover, although Irving Horst has argued powerfully for Anabaptism as an important influence in England during the 1530s and 1540s, and has rescued its followers from the shadows, he has been able to produce little evidence to suggest that these individuals drew themselves apart into consciously separatist churches, in stark contrast to their continental precursors (45). Indeed, although there is plenty of evidence for the existence of Anabaptist ideas in England at this time, there is very little for that of separatist congregations before 1553 (83). A direct relationship between fifteenth-century Lollardy and sixteenth-century Anabaptism on the one hand, and seventeenth-century separatism on the other therefore remains unproven. But there is little doubt that the seeds of the separatism and sectarianism which were to shatter the fabric of the national Church from the 1620s onwards were indeed sown in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and it is upon this period that the first part of this study concentrates (65).

The first English separatists?

Over 150 years ago, the pioneering historian John Strype referred to the group of men and women arrested at Bocking in Essex in 1550 at a large conventicle as ‘the first that made separation from the Reformed Church of England’. Much ink has since been spilt concerning this group, which was led by the elusive figure of Henry Hart, but it would seem that Strype's original analysis is probably correct.

In April 1538, Cranmer wrote to Thomas Cromwell in defence of a handful of parishioners from the Weald of Kent indicted for unlawful assembly. As far as the Archbishop was concerned, their only offence was that they were ‘fauters [that is favourers] of the new doctrine’ and he was anxious that the progress of the Reformation at provincial level should not be hamstrung in this instance by conservative officialdom. Of this group, the most interesting is the figure of Henry Hart of Pluckley; if there are doubts about his ecclesiological* attitudes at this stage, there are none by the time of the discovery of the conventicle at Bocking in Essex twelve years later in which Hart was a principal figure. Present at this assembly was a group from Kent who regarded Hart as their inspiration and themselves as separatists. Not only did some of them admit that they had refused to attend the communion service for over two years, but two of their number revealed that behind this action lay a doctrine of segregation or ‘shunning’ which was to reappear in the same Wealden area during later heresy investigations in Mary's reign [doc. 1]. The last statement in this extract (see below p. 81) is of some significance in that it precisely foreshadows the irreconcilable divide which was later to distinguish separatists from semi-separatists. It would thus appear that at a relatively early date there is evidence for the belief in the necessity for the godly to hold themselves literally apart from the ungodly, carrying with it the rejection of the ‘permixt’ congregation, that is one ‘which is mingled with all sorts of people, profane and wicked’.

One of the Bocking congregation, a Maidstone schoolmaster, was made to preach a recantation sermon by Cranmer in 1553. Thomas Cole preached at length against ‘the stinkyng floure of separation or segregation from others’ and concluded that if the established authorities would not root out the evil and the godless, then ‘must the private man commit the matter to God’ and receive the sacrament without separation, a view prefiguring the ‘wheat and tares’ approach of the semi-separatists of the early seventeenth century (6).

Henry Hart remained a separatist for the rest of his life. A report by one of Bishop Bonner's informers, Stephen Morris, refers to Hart's activities in London prior to his arrest by the Marian authorities. Apart from stressing Hart's opposition to the doctrine of predestination*, Morris reports that Hart had drawn up certain articles ‘to be observed amongst his company’, and this is suggestive of some form of covenant*, which was the essential feature of the gathered separatist churches of the seventeenth century (16).

Nothing confirms the depths of Hart's separatism more than the dispute he had in prison with John Bradford and other Edwardian Protestanis. Hart was offended by the others gambling and refused to worship with them even in the face of a common enemy and persecutor. This quarrel, normally referred to as the ‘King's Bench’ dispute (after the prison where it took place), shocked many of Bradford's followers, and none more so than John Careless, who became deeply upset when these divisions were thrown back in his face by his Catholic interrogators. Careless was moved to say of Hart that ‘it had been good for that man if he had never been born’ and he concluded with the wish that ‘all men that be godly-wise, beware of that man, whose opinions on many points are very noisome and wicked’ (16). It remains something of a mystery that Hart escaped the stake, given Bradford's martyrdom: he died in 1557, possibly back in his own parish of Pluckley (19).

The dominance of free-will or predestinarian theology in Hart's group has led at least one writer to see Hart as an Anabaptist, whilst another refers to his followers as ‘halfway Anabaptists’ (45, 49). It is difficult to accept this designation, since one of the key doctrines of Anabaptism at this time – that of ‘celestial flesh’* – is absent from any evidence concerning Hart and his followers. Nor did the group reject child baptism. It seems likely, therefore, that the Hart group were not Anabaptists. Alternative sources for Hart's antiredestinarian views have to be sought, and it may be that the literal approach to the Scriptures which had been a distinguishing feature of Wealden Lollardy provides the answer (32).

In the last resort, it is impossible to assess the role of Hart within the context of evolving separatism. He is of intrinsic interest since his case sheds light on how radical sectarian attitudes could develop, given lax enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline, out of the first phase of the Protestant Reformation. A further example from this period is the case of Joan Boucher, who was burnt in 1551 for holding views that were clearly Anabaptist, and who had reached that position from Lollardy in the 1520s via Protestantism in the 1540s. However, the influence wielded by such figures must remain conjectural, since the religious scene changed dramatically with the accession of Mary in 1553 and her restoration of Catholicism.

Part Two: Analysis

1 ‘The Blood of the Martyrs is the Seed of the Church’: the Marian Persecution and the Growth of Separatism

When confronted by Bishop Bonner in April 1557, Ralph Allerton of Much Bentley in Essex declared that there were three religions in England:

The first is that which you hold; the second is clean contrary to the same; and the third is neuter, being indifferent, that is to say, observing all things that are commanded outwardly as though he were of your part, his heart being set against the same.

This portrait of English religious belief during Mary's reign is as understandably partisan as it is oversimplified, for the restoration of the ‘old’ religion, and the subsequent enforcement of the heresy statutes, had the effect of blurring the distinctions between non-Catholics which were becoming perceptible by the end of Edward VFs reign. Within the context of separatism this poses problems of identification, especially since one of the principal sources for this period – the carefully compiled accounts of Protestant martyrdom in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments –contains inaccuracies prompted by Foxe's desire to portray the Protestants as united.

Broadly speaking, however, we can make the following distinctions amongst opponents of the Catholic restoration: those who fled abroad to Germany and Switzerland; those who refused to attend their parish churches and belonged instead to secret organisations led by ordained ministers using the Edwardian Prayer Book; those who refused to attend their parish churches and went to small conventicles in which lay leadership was inevitable; those who belonged to radical sectarian groups which would have been persecuted under any regime in sixteenth-century England; those who attended conventicles in which both Protestants and radicals participated; and those who refused to attend church but worked out their own, solitary, course, giving in under persecution or going to the stake as the case might be.

The best-documented example of what might be termed an orthodox Edwardian congregation during Mary's reign is doubtless that in London under the supervision of a series of ministers, including John Rough, Augustine Bernher, and Thomas Bentham. Various accounts in the pages of Foxe enable a clear picture of this church to be drawn. John Rough, for example, was elected minister by the congregation, which may suggest awareness of the practice in the exiled Protestant churches abroad. The congregation met in a variety of places; on the occasion of Rough's arrest, they had assembled at the Saracen's Head in Islington on the pretext of ‘hearing a play’, and there is little doubt that Rough was administering the sacraments to this assembly according to the Edwardian Prayer Book. The number of this congregation appears to have fluctuated between forty and 200, and a later deposition describes their custom of holding services ‘in a ship called Jesus ship’ whilst it sailed between RatclifFe and Rotherhithe (16).

Such congregations can be traced in parts of England other than London. In an important article on this subject, Dr Martin has drawn attention to the existence of such assemblies in Lancashire, Devon, Sussex, Essex, and Suffolk (84). The arrest and interrogation of Edmund Allin, a miller from Frittenden in Kent, reveals that the lack of a minister or itinerant preacher did not prevent small groups from meeting to observe the Protestant ritual, since great play was made by his persecutors of the quantity of books that were confiscated from his house.

Totally radical groups have left less trace. The Familists discovered in Guildford in 1561 may well already have been active in Mary's reign, whilst a congregation led by ‘father Browne’, which came to light in 1555 in the North London area, was probably separatist in intent. In a statement curiously similar in form to that made by Ralph Allerton, Browne is reported to have preached that there were three religions:

the one termed my lorde chancellors religion; the other Cranmeres Latymers and Ridleys religion; and the third he called Goddes religion.

He dismissed the first, described the second as ‘not good’, and declared the third to be best. His apparent disapproval of Cranmer tends to suggest that Browne and his followers were radical separatists (83, 11).

In addition to these groups, which can be said to have had some form of organisation or discipline, there were many individuals, of whom the majority were Protestants in the Edwardian mould, who seem to have ploughed their own furrow without recourse to membership of any type of assembly. As with the conventicles there were, however, important differences and distinctions between them. An interesting example of this is afforded by the evidence surrounding the deaths often men and women from Wealden parishes in 1557. Foxe records that the articles against them ‘needeth no great rehearsal, seeing they all agreed together’, yet at least one of them, William Prowting of Thurnham, revealed beliefs that would have resulted in prosecution even under the laxity of a Protestant regime and which appeared in at least two other depositions of Kentishmen at this time [doc. 2.]. It is clear, ...