convenient season for some more effectual measure of relief. Bancroft Six weeks after his great triumph at the Hampton Court Conference, Whitgift died, and Bancroft, Bishop of London, a man equally arbitrary, more enterprising by reason of his fewer years, more sycophantic on the one hand and more offensive on the other, succeeded to the primacy. He at once followed up with unswerving rigor the advantage supplied by the king's conversion. In the convocation which soon after met, of Canterbury. he procured a ratification of a Book of Canons1 of 1604. his own composition. Its one hundred and forty one articles embodied the loftiest pretensions of the Established Church, and submission to them was challenged under penalties of deprivation for the clergy, and excommunication, imprisonment, and outlawry alike for clergy and laity. The number of Non-conformist clergymen in England and Wales at this time is believed to have exceeded fifteen hundred. For further security against the spread of dissent, the importation of religious books from the Continent was prohibited, and printing in England was subjected to the censorship of the bishops. With such extreme jealousy was Non-conformist preaching regarded, that a man made himself liable to fine and imprisonment by repeating to his family the substance of sermons which he had heard at church. Numbers more of recusant ministers were silenced or deprived; were sent to prison; and others escaped abroad. 1 It was in these Canons that the divine right of episcopacy was first asserted in the English Church, having been defended hitherto on the ground of its being an orderly system, to the institution of which the authority of the Church was competent. Cartwright and other Presbyterians had anticipated some the Churchmen in occupying the ground of Scriptural authority in defence of their polity. 2 Neal says, "above three hundred." (History of the Puritans, II. 64. History of New England, I. 71.) See also Calderwood, Altare Damascenum, Præf. CHAPTER IV. AMONG the congregations of Separatists which had been formed while dissension was active in the bosom of the Church, were two near the northeastern corner of Nottinghamshire. One was gathered at Gainsborough, just within the western border of the county of Lincoln. The other held its meetings at a village named Congregation Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, near to the point where it touches the counties of Lincoln and York. Of 1 For the recent discovery of this fact, which with its relations is so interesting, New England history is indebted to the Rev. Joseph Hunter, an assistant keeper of Her Majesty's Records. (Collections concerning the Church or Congregation of Protestant Separatists formed at Scrooby, &c. London, 1854.) Morton (New England's Memorial, Davis's edition, 17) and Mather (Magnalia Christi Americana, Book I. Chap. II. §1) had told no more than that the Leyden congregation came from "the North of England," except that Mather (Ibid., Book II. Chap. I. § 1) implies that they were of Yorkshire, and says that Bradford was born in "Ansterfield," a place which has been sought by some generations of New England antiquaries in vain, and in fact is not known in English geography. Prince (Chronological History, 99), quoting from Bradford's History (afterwards lost and very lately recovered), described them as having "lived near the joining borders of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire"; and according to a statement in a portion of Bradford's History, preserved in the records of the at Scrooby. Plymouth church (Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, 465), "they ordinarily met at his [Brewster's] house on the Lord's day, which was a manor of the bishop's." At Scrooby, in the hundred of Basset Lawe, a mile and a half southeast of the market town of Bawtry, Mr. Hunter finds that there was at that period a manor, "an ancient possession and occasional residence of the Archbishop of York," and "the only episcopal manor that was near the borders of the three counties." In the Assessment of Subsidies granted by Parliament in 1571, he meets with a rate of "William Brewster, of the township of Scrooby cum Ranskil"; and he learns that, in April, 1608, William Brewster and two others, "of Scrooby, Brownists or Separatists," were fined by the Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes for non-appearance to a citation. The missing" Ansterfield," the birthplace of Bradford, according to Mather, Mr. Hunter discovers at Austerfield, village a mile or more northeast from Bawtry, on the other side of that town, -- a where the church books show the name Bradford to have been common this congregation, according to the division and nomenclature of church offices which had come into use in the sect, Richard Clifton was Pastor and John Robinson was Teacher. William Brewster was the most considerable private member. Richard Clifton. 1586. July 11. Clifton, who was fifty years old at the time of the queen's death, had seventeen years before been instituted to the rectory of Babworth, near Scrooby. At what time he withdrew, or was ejected, from his place in the Established Church, does not appear. Of the early history of Robinson, nothing John Robinson. at that period, and record the baptism of William Bradford, son of William, as having taken place March 19, 1590. The demonstration is complete. The reading Ansterfield was a mistake of the copyist or of the printer. If Mather knew the true word, he had no opportunity to correct the press, as he had his book printed in England. Morton (Memorial, 1) dates the origin of the congregation in the last year of Queen Elizabeth, the same year when unconsciously Gosnold was exploring for them a place of retreat. "In the year 1602, divers godly Christians of our English nation in the North of England, being studious of reformation, and therefore not only witnessing against human inventions and additions in the worship of God, but minding most the positive and practical part of divine institutions, they entered into covenant with God and one with another in the enjoyment of the ordinances of God," &c. But Bradford says: "After they had continued together about a year, and kept their meetings every Sabbath in one place or other, they resolved to get over into Holland as they could, which was in the years 1607 and 1608." In the margin of Dr. Young's edition of the extract from Bradford's History in the Plymouth church records, the date 1602 stands against the statement of the gathering of this congregation. But the manuscript has no such marginal entry. The editor added it, I suppose, on the authority of Morton. (See Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 22, note; and see below, 135, note 1.) Austerfield is a hamlet of perhaps thirty brick houses, roofed with tiles. At least two of them look as if they had been standing in Bradford's time. The church, or "chapellerie," as its " Register Booke" calls it, is large enough to hold only a hundred and fifty persons. Part of it, at least, is as old as the thirteenth century. It had no other than an earthen floor till the year 1835, and the oaken rail of the chancel is the same before which Bradford was held up to be baptized two hundred and seventy years ago. It has two bells, and is entered on one side under a Saxon arch, from a porch with stone benches, where it is natural for the visitor to imagine the New-England governor sitting when a boy, in the group of villagers. The nearest way from Austerfield to Scrooby is by a path through the fields. Unnoticed in our history as these places have been till within a few years, it is likely that when, towards sunset on the 15th of September, 1856, I walked along that path, I was the first person related to the American Ply Brewster. is certainly known, except that he had lived at Norwich.1 Brewster-who "had attained some learning, viz. William the knowledge of the Latin tongue, and some insight into the Greek, and spent some small time at Cambridge, and there been first seasoned with the seeds of grace and virtue"-at an early age "went to the court, and served that religious and godly gentleman, Mr. Davison, divers years when he was Secretary of State, who found him so discreet and faithful as he trusted him above all others that were about him, and only employed him in all matters of greatest trust and secrecy. He esteemed him rather as a son than as a servant, and for his wisdom and godliness in private he would converse with him more like a familiar than a master. He attended his master when he was sent in ambassage by the queen into the Low Countries (in the Earl of Leicester's time), as for other weighty affairs of state, so to receive possession of the cautionary towns."2 mouth who had done so since Bradford trod it last before his exile. I slept in a farm-house at Scrooby, and reconnoitred that village the next morning. Its old church is a beautiful structure. At the distance from it of a quarter of a mile, the dike round the vanished manor-house may still be traced, and a farmer's house is believed to be part of the ancient stables or dog-kennels. In what was the garden is a mulberrytree, so old that generations before Brewster may have regaled themselves with its fruit. The local tradition declares it to have been planted by Cardinal Wolsey during his sojourn at the manor for some weeks after his fall from power. The property belongs to Richard Milnes, Esq., of Bawtry Hall. There is a bridge over the Idle, at the place of a ford by which Bradford used to cross on his Sunday walk to Scrooby, coming from Austerfield through Bawtry. 1 "Even as when I lived with you," 1585. says Robinson in a dedication of the People's Plea for the Exercise of Prophecy" (Works, III. 287) to his "Christian friends in Norwich and thereabouts." When Bradford says that, "after they had continued together about a year, ..... they resolved to get over into Holland, ..... which was in the years 1607 and 1608" (see the last note), he is perhaps to be understood as reckoning from the time of their being joined by Robinson, whom he had mentioned just before. The minister of Scrooby and of Leyden may have been the John Robinson who was matriculated at Christ College, Cambridge, in 1592, and became a Fellow in 1598. (Hunter, Collections; comp. Mass. Hist. Coll., XXXI. 113.) A Memoir of him by Mr. Robert Ashton is prefixed to the edition of his works published in 1851 by the Congregational Union of England. In respect to Robinson's early life, it is barren of facts. 2 Bradford, History of Plymouth 1587. The conversation of Davison, who was one of the eminent Puritans of that time, may well have given a bias to the mind of his young dependent. When Davison had fallen into disgrace with the queen, in consequence of her simulated displeasure at his issue of a warrant for the execution of the Queen of Scots, Brewster appears to have retired to Scrooby, probably his birthplace; not, however, till he had remained with his patron "some good time after, doing him many faithful offices of service in the time of his troubles." Scrooby was a post-town on the great road from London -1607, Sept. to the north, and there he held the office of postmaster, or, as it was then called, post, for several years.1 Clifton's congregation "ordinarily met at his house on the Lord's day, and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them to his great charge." Some such hospitality was the more needful, as they probably came together from considerable distances. William Bradford, one of Brewster's guests and fellow-worshippers, was a 1594, April 1 30. William .... • led to the belief that it was Bradford's lost History, which on examination it proved to be. When Prince used it in 1736, it belonged to the library kept in the tower of the Old South Church in Boston. In 1775, that church was occupied as a riding-school for the British cavalry, and then it was, probably, that the book was taken away, and carried to England. Plantation, 409, 410. This inestimable ford preserved by Morton and Prince, book, after being lost for nearly ninety years, was found in 1855, in the episcopal library at Fulham, and has since, through the kindness of the late Bishop of London, been published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, under the oversight of that very judicious and learned antiquary, Mr. Charles Deane. The manuscript was known to have been used by Morton, Prince, and Hutchinson in the composition of their works. What was its fate after Hutchinson's publication of his second volume, in 1767, remained unknown. In 1846, Bishop Wilberforce, in his History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, referred to a "manuscript history of the Plantation of Plymouth in the Fulham Library." The identity of his quotations from it with language of Brad 1 Hunter, Collections, 65. In the Postmaster-General's Office, Mr. Hunter found memoranda of accounts with "William Brewster, post of Scrooby," from April 1, 1594, to September 30, 1607, at which time another person succeeded him. How long Brewster had held the office before April, 1594, does not appear, as there is no earlier record of the names of postmasters on that route. |