And in sketching the history of St. Ogg's the novelist remembered that time of ecclesiastical ferment now written about, when "Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for conscience' sake, and went forth beggared from their native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now," she said, "on which those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow, quaint gabled houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and penetrated by surprising passages, which turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand over-flowed continually by the rushing tide." Did not Maggie Tulliver, in white muslin and simple, noble beauty, attend an "idiotic beggar" in the still existing Old Hall, where the Fathers worshipped and John Smyth taught—"a very quaint place, with broad, jaded stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall"?
In this Old Hall the Separatist church was founded in 1602, and here it had the friendly protection of the Hickman family, Protestants whose religious sympathies had brought them persecution and exile in the past.
Photograph by Welchman Bros., Retford
The Old Hall, Gainsborough, in which the Separatist Church was Founded in 1602
But the "foreign-looking town" which George Eliot endowed with romance had, like the neighbouring estuary town of Boston, which her language might have served almost as well to paint, been the abode of hard, historic fact. We can imagine the Scrooby brethren crossing the ancient ferry to bid their friends at Gainsborough farewell. For in 1607 we read, this "groupe of earnest professors of religion and bold assertors of the principle of freedom and personal conviction in respect to the Christian faith and practice" had formed the resolution to seek in another country the liberty they found not at home.[2] But it was as unlawful to flee from their native land as to remain in it without conforming, for the statute of 13 Richard II, still in force, made emigrating without authority a penal crime.
Not Gainsborough alone in the North and East appeals to the never-ending stream of reverent New World pilgrims to Old World shrines. On an autumn day of the year above named came Elder Brewster to the famed new borough of Boston. There he cautiously looked about him, and made a bargain with the captain of a Dutch vessel to receive his party on board "as privately as might be." But they were betrayed, arrested, stripped of their belongings and driven into the town, a spectacle for the gaping crowd, then haled before the justices at the Guildhall and "put into ward," there to await the pleasure of the Privy Council concerning them.
Boston is a unique old shrine—a place "familiar with forgotten years," as George Eliot says; a town, as already hinted, resembling Gainsborough in many outward features, but even wealthier in associations dear to the hearts of New World pilgrims. Boston and Gainsborough are regarded as the two most foreign-looking towns in England. Many of Boston's inhabitants still hold the brave spirit which enabled their ancestors to endure the religious stress of the seventeenth century. It has been a cradle of liberty since that idea first held men's thoughts and roused them to action.
The quaint buildings, the ancient towers of Hussey and of Kyme, the Guildhall, the Grammar School, the great church with its giant tower all crusted o'er with the dust of antiquity: these stood when Bradford and Brewster and their companions in search of freedom were arraigned before the magistrates for the high crime and misdemeanor of trying to leave their native land.