The violence of persecution aroused the spirit of the persecuted tenfold; the press was resorted to as a means of defence, as well as for the propagation of opinion, but to little purpose. Any book or pamphlet reflecting on the present state of affairs was seized and burnt, and the author subjected to a fine and imprisonment. On this the suspended ministers and their party resolved on openly seceding from the church, believing that as they were not permitted to preach nor to officiate “without idolatrous geare, it was their duty to break off from the public church and to assemble in private houses and elsewhere.” They did so; they held their meetings in private houses and in fields and woods. One congregation was broken up in London, and as many as could be seized were hurried to prison. In 1575, ten men and one woman were condemned to the stake; the woman recanted; eight of the ten were banished, and two were burnt; and two others were put to death, after long and severe imprisonment, for circulating the tracts of the Brownists.
The prisons were full of Nonconformists; “died,” says their historian, “in their dungeons, like rotten sheep,” from hunger, cold and the noisome state of the prisons; and three of their ministers, Barrow, Greenwood, and Penry, were executed at Tyburn with peculiar circumstances of cruelty. Nothing but the preserving power of God could have left a remnant alive.
Still, though silenced by law and forbidden to preach or circulate their opinions, their views operated as leaven through the whole mass of society. Prohibitions, fines, imprisonments, ignominy, loss of property, nay, even of life, could not extinguish their zeal. Their works, produced at secret printing-presses, were diffused through the whole of the land as by invisible agency. The human mind had now risen up to do battle manfully for truth for conscience-sake, with the weapons of powerful argument and the keen arrows of sarcasm and wit, and no might of human oppression could overcome it.
In 1583, Grindall was succeeded by Whitgift, and with such prelates as Whitgift and Bancroft, Elizabeth, as she grew old, grew more and more intolerant. Whitgift, one of the fiercest of persecutors, used to go down on his knees before the queen to implore her not to show the slightest favour to the Nonconformists, lest it should invalidate her own infallibility. Under his guidance she refused to listen to the milder councils of her ministers; and the terrible Star Chamber and High Commission Court exercised a power almost equal to the Inquisition in Spain. Every one was compelled to answer on oath any question proposed either against others or themselves. The whole country groaned together; and Burleigh, remonstrating but in vain, declared that not even the Inquisition of Spain used so many questions to entrap their victims. Finally a law was enacted, that whoever above the age of sixteen refused to go to church, attended a conventicle, or denied the queen’s supremacy, should be imprisoned without trial till they conformed and signed an article of recantation. Refusing to sign this, they should be banished for life, or if refusing to quit the nation, or returning without royal licence, should be put to death without benefit of clergy.
But not even this terrible law could wholly effect its purpose, whatever ruin and misery it might occasion. There were already, in the counties round London alone, 20,000 stiff-necked frequenters of conventicles, who would not bow down to the Baal of conformity. Great numbers again fled to Holland.
The persecutions of the Puritans, however, somewhat abated before the death of Elizabeth, as a change of policy towards them was looked for on the accession of James, from whom the puritan party might even expect favour. But a very short time sufficed to prove how mistaken were these hopes. James, though brought up in the strictest accordance with the Calvinistic doctrines of the Scottish kirk, and though he had thanked God, while in Scotland, that he was at the head of the best and purest church in the world, by which he would stand to the death, and who abused the English establishment, “with its ill-sung mass,” as “wanting nothing of popery but the liftings;” yet no sooner had he arrived in England, and was met by the servile obeisance of bishops, who knelt before him and offered the most abject flattery, than he thanked God that he was now the head of a church where the bishops knew how to reverence a king. The bishops rejoiced; they had dreaded that in James, England would have had a presbyterian monarch; they found him a shallow boaster, whom their flatteries could make the tool of their will. Within nine months of his accession his key-note was “No bishop, no king;” and at the desire of his favourite bishops, he called a conference between them and the Puritans, when on the Puritans requesting permission to hold their assemblies for worship, the king interrupted them: “You are aiming,” said he, “at a Scotch presbytery; there Jack, and Tom, and Will, and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council, and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say ‘it must be;’ then Dick shall reply, ‘nay, marry, but we will have it thus.’ And therefore I repeat my former speech, and say, the king alone shall decide.” “I will have one doctrine,” said he, “and one discipline; one religion in substance and in ceremony;” adding, “that he had lived among such sort of men as the Puritans were since he was ten years old, but might say of himself as Christ said, ‘though I lived among them, I was none of them;’ nor did anything make me more detest their courses than that they disallowed of all things which had been used in popery.” Then, turning to his bishops, he declared that, “by his soul he believed Ecclesiasticus was a bishop, and that a Scottish presbytery agreed as well with monarchy as God and the devil.” And of the Puritans he said, “I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land, or else worse—only hang them, that’s all!”
Bishop Bancroft fell on his knees, and exclaimed, “I protest my heart melteth for joy, that Almighty God, of his singular mercy, has given such a king as has not been since the time of Christ!”
The king closed the conference by declaring “that if any would not be quiet and show their obedience, they were worthy to be hanged.” Bancroft was made archbishop of Canterbury. The canons of the church now in force were revised and enlarged, and it was enacted that whoever should speak against the Thirty-nine Articles, or the established church, should be excommunicated, put beyond the benefit of law, and subjected to all kinds of injury and injustice. This law was enforced with bitter cruelty; 300 nonconformist ministers, many of whom had been pastors of their congregations for twenty or thirty years, were very soon silenced, while hundreds of brave and conscientious men were imprisoned, fined, and driven into exile. Among those who sought refuge in Holland was the well-known John Robinson, who is generally considered to be the father of the Puritans in New England, and thus the royal bigot and persecutor James became, through the overruling of God’s providence, the means of establishing puritanism on the broad, free soil of America.
Through all the oppression and bigotry of this and the preceding reigns, the general intelligence had, however, greatly increased; the struggle between established authority and the growing spirit of popular liberty was becoming more and more determined. “The Bible,” says the author of the “History of Priestcraft,” “had been secretly making a mighty revolution in the popular mind. In the troubles and sufferings which kings and priests had inflicted, it had been the secret and precious companion; its poetry the most magnificent, its maxims the most profound, its promises the most momentous in the world, were not lost on the human heart; its doctrines became more clearly understood, and the spirit of man rose with its dignifying knowledge.” Enlightened, enfranchised, ennobled by the glorious teachings of this divine book, the victims of persecution became the unflinching promulgators of the truth and the liberty for which they suffered. Oppression, imprisonment, fines, spoiling of goods, and death, all were made the means of still further creating in the human soul a necessity for the liberty which was born through the Gospel.