Explorations in New England: Hampton Court and William Brewster
As the Romish ritual was retained in the Anglican Church, many of the leading clergymen of the latter opposed its use. Bishop Hooper made Puritanism conspicuous by refusing to be consecrated in the ecclesiastical vestments; and Bishop Coverdale, at a later period, and other high dignitaries, refused to subscribe to the Liturgy and ceremonials, and so led the great army of Nonconformists. The fears and jealousy of the queen were aroused, and after years of effort, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, were declared by an act of Parliament to be the rule of faith and practice for all subjects of the realm. Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, was commanded to enforce discipline. He obeyed the royal voice with alacrity, and immediately issued instructions to the bishops to "forbid and prevent preaching, catechizing, and praying in any private family in the presence of persons not belonging to it, and to silence all preachers and catechists who had not received orders from Episcopal hands, or who refused or neglected to read the whole service, or to wear the prescribed clerical habits, or to subscribe to the queen's supremacy, the Thirtynine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer." Under a provision of the Act of Supremacy, the queen now established a court of High Commission for the detection and punishment of Nonconformists, with powers almost as absolute as those of the Inquisition of the Italian Church. With that tremendous engine of despotism, the Primate worked with vigor in the suppression of heresy. Ministers were silence; some persons were put to death, and there was petty persecution everywhere. Yet Puritanism flourished and grew more rank, especially in secret. Ministers and congregations withdrew from the Anglican Church, and sc acquired the name of Separatists or Independents. They numbered, at the time of the death of Elizabeth, about twenty thousand in the British realm, and were the special objects for Whitgift's lash. Some of their ministers and their congregations, unable to endure the pressure, withdrew to Holland, where there was religious freedom for all.
On the accession of James, a reputed "Presbyterian King," the Puritans indulged high hopes of toleration, perhaps of supremacy. They were doomed to wretched disappointment. Soon after James ascended the throne he called a conference at Hampton Court, in which he was the chief actor, playing the parts of brute and mountebank. The Puritan divines, some of them the most eminent scholars in the land, were annoyed by coarse browbeating by the Bishop of London, and the coarser jests of the king. Whitgift, venerable with age, was present, and when the "royal buffoon" said to the Puritan ministers: "You want to strip Christ again; away with your snivelling," and much more that was coarse and offensive, the Primate exclaimed, "Your Majesty speaks by the special assistance of God's Spirit;" and the Bishop of London fell upon his knees and said: "I protest my heart melteth for joy that Almighty God, of his singular mercy, has given us such a king as since Christ's time has not been." A brilliant modern English writer, expressing the verdict of history, says of that king: "He was cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited man on earth." The discussions at the Hampton Court conference, conducted with so much ill-breeding on the part of the king and some of the High Churchmen, led to the important result of the appointment of a commission of learned men to make that translation of the Bible now in use among Protestants.
The Puritans were humiliated and discouraged by this farce at Hampton Court; and when the king told them, "I will make you conform or I will harry ye out of the land," and silenced or imprisoned three hundred of their ministers, many of the thirty thousand Nonconformists in the kingdom felt like seeking refuge in a foreign country. And many of them did join their brethren already in Holland. Among them was Richard Clifton, pastor of a rural congregation in Nottinghamshire. In that congregation was John Robinson as teacher; and the most considerable private member was William Brewster, postmaster at Scrooby, and at one time a favorite of Secretary Davidson under Queen Elizabeth. The pastor and the congregation, after many trials, made their way to Amsterdam, in small companies, in 1608, where they were united. From that city, in the course of a few months, they went to Leyden, a city of seventy thousand inhabitants. Clifton was dead and Robinson was chosen to be their pastor, with William Brewster as the chief elder. After awhile they all found employment and were happy, with their families around them. The congregation became large and flourishing, for many of their persecuted brethren at home joined them.