Professor of American History in Yale College.
THE preceding chapter has outlined the growth of Separatism in England, and prepared the way for the story of the fortunes of that remarkable congregation which has given a new significance to the name “Pilgrim.”
Elizabeth’s policy of Uniformity, so sternly pursued by her last Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift (1583-1604), was ostentatiously adopted by her successor, James I., at the Hampton Court Conference held in his presence by learned men of the Puritan and High Church parties in the first year of his reign; and when this conference was quickly followed by the elevation of Bancroft, a more arbitrary Whitgift, to Whitgift’s vacant place, those who were earnest in the opposite opinions were forced to choose between persecution and exile.
SITE OF THE MANOR-HOUSE.
[This cut follows an engraving in Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 40, representing the scene about thirty years ago. Raine, Parish of Blyth, p. 129, referring to the time of Edwin Sandys, raised to the archiepiscopal throne of York in 1576, says: “Under him a family of the name of Brewster occupied the manor-house, which had gradually and insensibly dwindled down from a large mansion to a moderately sized farmhouse;” and Raine gives for a frontispiece a view of the remaining fragment, which is copied by Dr. Dexter in Sabbath at Home, 1867, p. 135. Mr. Deane says of it, “It may have been originally connected with the manor-house, which has long since passed away.” (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xi. 404.) Dr. Dexter gives a plan of the neighborhood.—Ed.]
SCROOBY AND AUSTERFIELD.
There were doubtless other neighborhoods where the Separatists maintained thriving congregations for a longer or shorter time after the King’s policy became known; but by far the most zealous company of which accounts remain was one formed by residents “of sundry towns and villages, some in Nottinghamshire, some of Lincolnshire, and some of Yorkshire, where they border nearest together.” In 1602, or thereabout, these people, from places at least eight or ten miles apart, gathered themselves into a church,—probably at Gainsborough, a market-town in Lincolnshire, on the Trent; at least we know that when the original congregation divided, in 1605 or 1606, into two,—perhaps for greater security, as well as for local convenience,—it was at Gainsborough that one branch remained, which soon chose John Smyth, a Cambridge graduate, who had been some time with them, to be its pastor, and that with him many of this portion of the parent stock migrated in 1606 to Amsterdam.