CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE PURITANS.—
OF THEIR ORIGIN.
No subject in modern history seems more obscured by the views of the writers, than the history of that considerable portion of the nation so well-known under the designation of Puritans. It is a nick-name branding with derision or abhorrence, or it is a proud title exalting them, to use the description of a Scottish biographer of the Covenanters, into “men a little too low for Heaven, and much too high for earth.”
These active enemies to the established forms of the Government of England have been condemned as a captious, a moody, and a mischievous race, pertinacious on indifferent matters, and inflexible in their own absolute power, which is subversive of every other. Their sullen and intolerant natures paused not till their dissent had spread a general Non-conformity, in the Monarchy and the Hierarchy of England. By the advocates of popular freedom, these Puritans have been elevated into the very beatitude of their designation, as “the Salt of the Earth,” the promulgators of civil liberty, and its martyrs. By the wits, these Puritans have been exhibited in the grotesque shapes of ridicule, with very changeable masks on their faces ; and by the more philosophical, these separatists, not only in dogmas and doctrines, exhibit a more curious singularity in their manners, their language, and their sympathies with their fellow citizens.
What I shall say on the Puritans, will be first on their origin ; secondly, on their attempts in England ; thirdly, on the political character of their founder ; and lastly, I shall account for the perplexing contradictions in their political character, and explain why they appear at the same time the creators of civil and religious liberty, and its most violent and obnoxious adversaries.
The Protestants of England who flew from the Marian persecution found a hospitable reception in several towns of Switzerland and Germany. At Frankfort, under the eye of the magistrate, a church of the French Reformed was allowed to be alternately occupied by the exiles of England. Attentive to the prevention of future controversies and civic troubles, the policy of the burgher senator required that the new comers should not dissent from the French Reformed in doctrine or ceremonies ; and for their first public act he desired them to subscribe to the confession of faith which the French Reformed had not quite finished, but were about printing ; yet so perfectly tolerant was the chief magistrate of Frankfort, that he allowed the English to practise any ceremonies peculiar to themselves, provided their French brothers did not object to them. Never was a magistrate more tolerant, or more authoritative. Every thing at this period marks the feeble infancy of the Reformation.
The miserable are compliant and the fugitive have no home. The English emigrants raised no objection to accommodate themselves to the practices of the French Reformed, who were of the presbytery of their countryman Calvin. The Lutherans who still retained many of the ancient dogmas and ceremonies, appear to have been so bigoted, as to refuse receiving the English.
The emigrants, that they might not startle their new friends with objects strange to view or with matters as yet unheard, stripped their minister of his surplice, and threw aside the new Liturgy or Service-book of their late Sovereign Edward. In the ministration of the Sacraments many things were omitted as “superstitious.” In the Reformation under Edward the Sixth some difference of opinion had arisen from a single Bishop, Hooper, respecting wearing the rochet, and other Ecclesiastical robes. Hooper had resided in Germany, and had imbibed the new discipline ; but subsequently he had conformed to the regulations laid down in the Service-book of the English Sovereign.
These first compliant emigrants invited their dispersed brothers at Strasburgh, Zurich, and other cities, to join them ; but when several of these found that they were not allowed the entire use of what was called “the English Book,” they were on the point of leaving their Frankfort friends.
The famous Knox now arrived from Geneva, by invitation, as their minister. The party who required the use of “the Book of England” for the sake of peace, objected not to omit certain parts of the ceremonial prescribed in the Anglican service which “the country could not bear,” but they required at least to have “the substance and the effect.” Knox and Whittingham asked what they meant by the substance of the book? They replied that they had not come to dispute ; but while some of their brothers were laying down their lives for the maintenance of King Edward’s Reformation, their adversaries might well charge them with inconstancy, and might well triumph over the Protestants of England who had tacitly rejected their own Service-book. They prayed for Conformity, “lest by such altering, they should appear to condemn its chief authors who were now shedding their blood for it, as if there were imperfection in the doctrine, and mutability in the men, which might make even the godly doubt of the truth of which before they were persuaded.”
Knox retorted that what they could prove of that book to stand with the word of God, and “the country would permit,” should be granted. But Knox and Whittingham now professed that the Book of England was “A Mass-Book ;” and drawing up a Latin version submitted it to their friend and master, Calvin, as arbitrator. They were certain of his opinion before they asked for it. The Father of Dissent, replied that in the English Liturgy “I see many tolerabiles ineptias ; I mean, that it has not the PURITY which is to be desired.” Tolerabiles ineptias plainly translated was “tolerable fooleries,” but it was more tenderly turned into “tolerable unfitnesses.” Bishop Williams observed that, Master Calvin had his tolerabiles morositates.
The decree of the Oracle of Reformation at the little town of Geneva, detached some wavering minds from the English doctrine, who in the humility of their weakness probably imagined that they had a distinct notion of Calvin’s purity, and these enabled Knox and his party to carry all matters in their own way, shutting up King Edward’s Service-Book.[1]
At this time among these emigrants arrived from England Dr. Cox, who had been the tutor of Edward VI. and was afterwards under Elizabeth, the Bishop of Ely. The uncompromising Knox had now to encounter a spirit dauntless as his own. Knox had voted Cox and his friends into the church, and it was considered very ungracious that the last comers shuld thrust out those who had received them. Cox not only had the Liturgy of his royal pupil observed in defiance of Knox’s orders, but enforced its practice, by that single argument which resists all other arguments, Ego volo habere ! All now was trouble and contest. Both parties appealed to the little senate of the burghers of Frankfort. A magistrate came down to remind these disturbers of the town’s peace, of their first agreement—to accord with the French church, otherwise the church-door which had been opened might be shut. All parties instantly consented to obey the magistrate. But Dr. Cox was a politician !
The democratic style of Knox, often laid him open to the arm of “the powers that be.” In his “Admonition to Christians” where he had called Mary of England a Jezebel, and Philip by another nickname, he had also called the Emperor “an idolater, and no less an enemy to Christ than Nero.” This passage placed before the eyes of the honest burghers of Frankfort, in five minutes, was pronounced to be Læsæ Majestatis Imperatoriæ. The only writer of the history of these troubles at Frankfort, insinuates, that the party of Cox cruelly aimed by this ruse at the life of Knox.[2] The magistracy hinted to Knox’s friends that he had best depart quickly and quietly — Heylin describes Knox as stealing away by moonlight ; Neal the historian of the Puritans records “the magistrates in a respectful manner” desired his departure. Probably neither of these accounts are true ; both are warped by the opposite feelings of the writers. “The stealing away by moonlight” was a malicious picturesque invention of Heylin, for Knox was accompanied part of his way by some twenty friends, and we may doubt “the respectful manner” of the half-terrified burghers lest the Emperor’s council at that moment sitting at Augsburgh should have the same information of high treason laid on their council-table, and the free city cease to be free, for harbouring a Shimei. But what signify such minute accidents in the lives of the great movers of their age ? They weigh not, as the dust on the balance. The banishment from Frankfort might form an epoch in the history of mediocrity, the life of some solitary Nonconformist — it is scarcely noticeable in the career of Knox. He who was now hurried out of the town of Frankfort, baffled and outvoted, at no distant day, was to be the most terrible man whom Scotland ever beheld ; whose arm uplifted in prayer was to be as a sword of fire, and the thunder of whose voice was to convulse a kingdom.
The Nonconformists formed an inconsiderable minority ; and it is evident that the dignity of the tutor of Edward VI. had greatly influenced the grave magistracy. After the flight of Knox, two distinguished Puritans, we may begin now to give them their names, Whittingham, afterwards the Dean of Durham, who turned the stone-coffins of the abbots into horse-troughs, and Christopher Goodman, whose book on “Obedience” might more aptly be termed on “Insurrection,” rigidly held to “the French order, which is according to the order of Geneva ; the purest reformed church in Christendom.”
These fathers of English dissent offered to dispute against the Coxites, “Coxe et gregalibus suis” as Calvin distinguishes them. They would have proved that the order which these sought to establish ought not to take place in any reformed church. Each party looked to the civil magistrate to protect them from the other. Dr. Adolphus Glauburge a doctor of law, and nephew to Mr. John Glauburge the senator, made a plain answer, that “Disputation there should be none, it being decided that other order than the book of England they should not have.” The nephew referring to his noble uncle, the uncle to his learned nephew, in this see-saw of magistracy and theology, the peace of the city was not disturbed — for the disturbers now in despair of controversy, flew from “the great English book” to Geneva ; and it was from Geneva that Puritanism afterwards travelled into England.
Such was the origin of that dissent which sprang up in the infancy of the Church of England in Exile. It was even increased by personal quarrels. We stay not to tell of “a certain controversy which fell out at supper,” but which however rent the little Anglican church at Frankfort, by a violent schism, and as the naive historian describes it through many a lengthened page “so boiling hot that it ran over on both sides and yet no fire quenched.”
But what were the simple objects which had opened this eternal breach ? To say the most we can for these our first Non-conformists, their jealousy of Romanism, had inflicted on them strange horrors of “idolatries,” and “superstitions,” for some points of church discipline and certain accustomed ceremonies, which, abstracted from passion and prejudice, were of themselves perfectly indifferent. Such was the form of baptism ; they insisted that the water should be taken from a basin and not a fount. They protested against the churching of women as a Jewish custom, as if so many others which they affected were not equally so! And this fastidious delicacy of Judaic ceremonies was shown at the very time they were rejecting all Grecian and Roman and Saxon names to adopt the Scriptural names of Hebrew origin which they translated with a ludicrous barbarism.[3] They would sit and not kneel at the sacrament, because it was a supper. The sign of the cross in baptism—the ring in marriage—the decent surplice of the minister—were not according “to the French order.” Calvin and Bullinger and the learned in this early era of the Reformation were distressing themselves and their readers, with scruples of conscience, which to this present day are carried on by vulgar minds, with the same indecorous if not ludicrous protests.
As men do not leap up, but climb on rocks, they were only precise, before they were pure. Their earliest designation was a Precisian. A satirist of the times when they advanced farther in their reformation, in rythmes against Martin Mar-prelate, melts their attributes into one verse—
“ The sacred sect, and perfect pure-precise.”
They became Puritans under Elizabeth, whom in their familiar idiom they compared to an idle slut who swept the middle of the room, but left all the dust and filth behind the doors. “The untamed heifer,” as they called the Queen, long considered them only as “a troublesome sort of people.” The Queen said that she knew very well what would content the Catholics, but that she never could learn what would content the Puritans. At first confining themselves to points of ecclesiastical discipline, they only raised disturbances at “the candlesticks on the Queen’s altar,” at “the Romish rags” and ministers “conjuring robes;” all the solemn forms, which viewed in
“The dim religious light”
touch the mind, not polluted by vulgar associations, in the self-collectedness of its gathered thoughts.
Who could have foreseen that some pious men quarrelling about the Service-book of Edward the Sixth and the square caps and rochets of bishops, should at length attack bishops themselves, and by an easy transition from bishops to kings, finally close in the most revolutionary democracy ?
After the dissensions at Frankfort, Knox and Melville and several eminent Englishmen resorted to Calvin. Associating with a legislating enthusiast whose apostolical habits of life vouched his own doctrines and whose solitary contemplation was the institution of a new order of things, men of their ardent temper were susceptible of the contagion of his genius. Knox on his return to Scotland preserved an uninterrupted correspondence with Calvin ; and though he often acted before he consulted the supreme pastor of Reformation, still he never ceased with a proud submission to consult on what had already been done. Calvin at times had scruples and probably fears at the haste and heat of this great missionary of revolution, but his congratulations were more frequent than his fears. Knox indeed had only victories to recount, for he propagated the gospel by demolishing as fast as he procured hands, every religious edifice ; often leaving notice in the evening, for the monks to quit in the morning.
Whittingham, who married Calvin’s sister, discovered on his return to England all the force of his relationship. Christopher Goodman, an early associate of Calvin, was one of the heads of the Puritans, till Cartwright, who had himself sojourned more than once at Geneva, here became a little Calvin. These persons with some others, were the originators of democratical Puritanism, and they soon opened an intestine war with episcopacy, till at length in the struggle for supremacy, they struck at the throne itself.
1 We may form some idea of the convulsive emotions of men’s minds at this moment, when in one of the papers which passed between the parties about this time, the following paragraph is set down as a matter of ordinary news. — “ The Bishop of Gloucester, Mr. Hooper, a man worthy of perpetual memory, whom we hear to be burnt of late.”
2 This writer evidently inclines to the Knoxians, but this history is not written without candour, and Strype refers to it as an authentic narrative.
3 This early practice of the Puritans began under Elizabeth, since it is noticed by Bancroft in 1595. It was re newed with vigour under Charles the First. They not only adopted Scriptural names to get rid of Popery and Paganism, but they translated the Hebrew names into English Christian names — such as Accepted —Ashes — Joyagain — Kill Sin. They pitched a note higher by adding whole sentences to their names. The reader has met with “Praise-God Barebones,” but he may not be so well acquainted with his two brothers who it is said assumed Christian names of a more formidable dimension. The one calling himself “Christ came into the world to save Barebones,” and the other, “If Christ had not died thou hadst been damned Barebones ;” which latter, for shortness and to distinguish the brothers was familiarly curtailed to “Damned Barebones !”