VIII.

THE PURITANS SUFFERING.

New Canons. Supplication to Parliament. Cartwright and Whitgift. Private Press. New Persecuting Act. Brown and the Brownists. Supplication of the Deprived Ministers. Whitgift's Inquisitorial Articles. Martin Mar-Prelate. Act against separate Worship. Sufferings of the Puritans. Their touching Narrative. Roger Ripon. Barrowe. Greenwood. Penry.

HAVING stated the main grounds on which the Puritans rested their complaints and their defence, and having shown the nature of the efforts to reduce them, we may now pass more rapidly over a long series of events, consisting mainly of a continued recurrence of the same sort of doings. You have only to picture to yourselves a long struggle of thirty-two years, from this period to the death of Elizabeth, in which the power of the queen, the council, and the bishops, with their chancellors and spies, was exerted, with every engine of oppression; Star Chamber, High Commission, oaths ex officio, harassing and expensive prosecutions, ruinous fines imposed without legal limit, imprisonments, excommunications depriving the subject of his civil rights;-imagine these engines plied with relentless severity, against all who should omit a ceremony, or scruple a habit, or say a word against the Prayer-Book, or question the authority of the Bishops; then picture to yourselves Puritanism everywhere spreading and increasing, till the pri sons are full; families broken and scattered; thousands of women and children in distress, till a voluntary exile or banishment, or death fills up their misèries; imagine all this, and you have a true outline of a history which might now be filled up with ample and heart-rending details, extending through the life of a whole generation. Nor did these persecutions cease when James I. ascended the throne; but new modes of persecution and still fiercer rigors were devised by that conceited, but heartless and perfidious prince; till our fathers chose a home on the shores of a howling wilderness, rather than endure life under such tyranny in their native land.

We are now to draw a rapid outline of the history of the thirty-two remaining years of Queen Elizabeth.

Though the Commons were forbidden to meddle with religion, they still ventured to present an humble address to the queen, beseeching her, as head of the Church, for some reformation and relief. The deprived ministers at the same time petitioned the Convocation of clergy to use their interest with the queen for a redress of grievances. "If a godly minister," say they, "omit but the least ceremony for conscience' sake, he is immediately indicted, deprived, cast into prison, his goods wasted and destroyed, he is kept from his wife and children, and at last excommunicated."

Instead of redress, the Convocation framed new Canons, to increase the burden of the Puritans. All were now required to subscribe to the whole Prayer-Book, and forms of ordination; all preachers who should not subscribe, were to be excommunicated.

The Archbishop of Canterbury summoned before him the principal clergy of both provinces, who were known to be averse to this compulsory uniformity, and let them know that if they were to continue their ministry, they must subscribe and conform.

Some of the Puritan ministers drew up an application to parliament setting forth their grievances, and calling, in the spirit of men indignant under grievous and protracted wrongs, for redress. Those who presented this petition were thrown into prison. Cartwright, who had become famous for his courage and perseverance in defending the Puritan cause, and who had before this been driven into exile, immediately drew up what he called an "Admonition to parliament;" and thus commenced the long and famous controversy between Cartwright and the no less celebrated Whitgift, afterwards archbishop. Cartwright, on the side of the Puritans, maintained that "The Holy Scriptures are not only a standard of doctrine, but of discipline and government; and that the Church in all ages is to be regulated by them. Whitgift, on the side of the established Church, maintained that the Scriptures are not a rule of Church discipline or government; that the apostolical government was adapted to the Church in its infancy and persecution; but that the government of the Church might be changed to adapt itself to the civil constitution and government in different ages and countries: and on this ground he defended the order, organization, and worship of the established Church of England." It is worthy of remark that "The Judicious Hooker" takes the same ground. The Divine right of the constitution and order of the Church of England, its advocates had not, as yet, attained the hardihood to maintain.

They rested its claims, not on the institutions of the Word of God, but on the power of the Church to arrange its own polity, or rather on the power of every Christian civil government to regulate the polity of the Church according to their will. "To reckon bishops and priests as the same office" [i. e. as to their order] Burnet declares, in his History of the Reformation, to have been" the common style of the age?

The queen, whether distrusting the prowess of Whitgift or otherwise, took it upon herself to answer his opponent with regal arguments. She issued her proclamation, requiring all her subjects who had any copies of Cartwright's Admonition, to bring them to their bishops, and not sell them, under pain of imprisonment. The issue of the debate was according to the cas tom of the times: Whitgift was in due time made an Archbishop; Cartwright was reduced to beggary and exile.

No man now might open his mouth against the "Church" or the Hierarchy, or plead for the Puritans, without ruin: no press in the whole kingdom might openly advocate their cause. In this emergency some persons procured a press which they worked in private, removing it from time to time to prevent discovery. The pamphlets printed at this press were scattered over the land. Who could destroy them? What law could describe them all? Who could tell from whence they came? The queen and bishops were in deep trouble; their rage was baffled; their power was vain. Archbishop Parker used every art to discover this press. He sent out emissaries; he employed spies; but all to no purpose. Whereupon he vented his grief to the Lord Treasurer: "I understand," said he, "throughout the realm how the matter is taken; the Puritans are justified, and we are adjudged to be extreme persecutors." The queen rebuked the bishops for being so slow in putting down the Puritans; but what more could the bishops do? In every shire commissioners were appointed to put in execution the penal laws against Puritans. The queen by proclamation declared her royal pleasure that they should be punished with the utmost severity. The lords of the council added their authority and efforts. The Lord Treasurer made a long speech to the Commissioners in the Star Chamber, in which, "by the queen's command, he charged them with neglect ;" and said, "The queen could not satisfy her conscience without crushing the Iuritans."† The queen said repeatedly that "She hated them worse than the Papists.t

The work of persecution receiving this fresh impulse, went vigorously on. "The officers of the spiritual courts planted their spies in all the suspected parishes to make observation of those *Vol. i., p. 587.

† Neale.

+ Ibid.

who came not to church.

The keepers [of the prisons] were charged to take notice of such as came to visit the prisoners or to bring them relief. * * * Spies were set upon these, to bring them into trouble. * * The conduct of the Commissioners was high-handed and imperious; their under officers were ravenous and greedy of gain; the fees of the court were exorbitant, so that if an honest man fell into their hands, he was sure to be half ruined."*

The clergy in some dioceses had been accustomed to meet for mutual aid in studying and expounding the Scriptures. These exercises had gone under the name of Prophesyings. The archbishop told the queen that those meetings were "little better than seminaries of Puritanism" (and quite likely they were so, since in them, godly men met to confer about the sense and doctrine of the Scriptures). The archbishop, moreover, declared to the queen that "The more averse the people were to popery, the more they were in danger of non-conformity" (nor shall we be inclined to doubt this also); "that these exercises [of Prophesyings, or conference meetings] tended to popularity, and made the people so inquisitive that they would not submit to the orders of their superiors as they ought." The queen thereupon ordered these meetings to be suppressed.

But the people, as well as the ministers, seem to have been seized with this same mania for meeting and studying the Word of God. Many people in various quarters had been accustomed to meet together on the holidays, and at other times when their work was done, to read the Scriptures, and to confirm one another in Christian faith and duty. The Commissioners ordered the ministers of the parishes to suppress these meetings. The people replied that they had conformed to the orders of the Church; and that they only met together after dinner, or after supper, on holidays; and that only for the mutual instruction of themselves and their families; for the reformation of their manners; and for a further acquaintance with the Word of God. "For heretofore," said they, "we have spent and consumed our holidays vainly; in drinking at the ale-house, and playing at cards and dice, and other vain pastimes;" and "we thought it better to bestow the time in soberly and godly reading the Scriptures, only for the purposes aforesaid, and no other." But to do even this was regarded (and no doubt justly regarded), as tending to Puritanism'; and it is worthy of remark that the Episcopal Hierarchy has not recovered from its ancient horror of conference meetings to this day. These meetings were suppressed.

Grindal, who succeeded Archbishop Parker, A. D. 1575, would originally have been a Puritan, had he not felt himself

* Neale.

compelled to yield to the necessity of the times. His desire was to cherish the godly ministers who had been deprived for nonconformity, rather than to persecute them. He ventured not only to relax these persecutions, but to remonstrate with the queen. But Queen Elizabeth was not to be gainsayed, even by the Primate of all England. By an order from the Star Chamber, she forthwith confined him to the house, and sequestered him from his archiepiscopal function for six months; nor could he ever afterwards regain her favor. The work of persecution went on.

An act of parliament was now passed, providing that "All persons who do not come to church, or chapel, where common prayer is said according to the act of uniformity, shall forfeit £20 a month to the queen, and shall suffer imprisonment till it is paid.* Those who should be absent for twelve months, besides their former fine, should be bound with two sufficient sureties in a bond of £200, for their future compliance. Every schoolmaster who should not come to Common Prayer was to forfeit £10 a month, be disabled from teaching school, and suffer a year's imprisonment. The effect of this was to condemn non-conformists to perpetual imprisonment.

It is not surprising that these cruel enactments, and the fierce and unrelenting manner in which these laws, canons and injunc tions, were enforced, should provoke some roughness of resolution and some asperity of language among the thousands who were compelled to endure such things for so many years. But these complaints were hushed with new and unheard of laws. Any who should "devise, write, print, or set forth, any book, rhyme, ballad, letter or writing, containing any false, seditious or slanderous matter, to the defamation of the queen's majesty," &c., -should suffer death and loss of goods. "Sundry Puritans," says Neale, "were put to death by virtue" of this statute.

The period to which we are now arrived, witnessed the rise of the BROWNISTS. These denied the Church of England to be a true Church, and her ministers to be rightly ordained. The discipline of the Established Church they denounced as antichristian; and her ordinances and sacraments as invalid. Their first congregation was gathered in 1583. In some respects these people maintained some of the fundamental principles of Congre gationalism;-but they differed from Congregationalists in maintaining the extreme of Independency, in making the ministerial office temporary, and the minister the mere creature of a congregation, made and liable to be made at their pleasure. They differed from all other Puritans in breaking off from the communion of the English and the continental churches; re

*Neale.