Mayflower Leaving Southampton Photo: by Arthur Wellington Fowles, 1881.
‘By temperament, they hated ritual and loved simplicity.’
2020 is the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. Steve Tomkins says those on board had much in common with Friends
There is not an obvious kinship between Quakers and the puritan Separatists who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. As you’ll know, the Quaker movement emerged around thirty years later, and little more than ten years after that Quakers were being executed by puritans.
But the Separatists were a different breed of puritan to those who killed Quakers. The Separatists were pioneers of religious freedom and, while it is safe to say they had no love for Quakers, they were major figures in the religious world from which Quakerism emerged, and did much to prepare the way.
The Separatist movement, often known as Brownism after their most notorious leader Robert Browne, was forged in the puritan campaign of Elizabeth I’s early years. When Elizabeth insisted on restoring the ornate robes of Catholic tradition, along with other ceremonies which earlier Protestants had abolished, the puritans were those who campaigned to ‘purify’ the church. Elizabeth forced all ministers to accept her rules, and the Separatists were the puritan fringe so radical that they quit the Church of England in protest and formed illegal underground churches. Their services were raided, they were arrested and imprisoned. Five were executed and many others died in prison, so the Brownists went into exile, in Scotland, in the Netherlands and in North America.
The great complaint that puritans, including Separatists, made about the ceremonies of the Church of England was that they were unbiblical. The Bible gave a precise blueprint for the church, they believed, which demanded absolute obedience – on pain of damnation, said the Separatists.
This exacting adherence to scripture was a long distance from the outlook of the first Quakers, but it took Separatists quite some way in the same direction towards simplicity. They stripped away ecclesiastical tradition and ornamentation, scrapping rituals such as kneeling and the sign of the cross, getting rid of crosses and stained glass. They worshipped in plain clothes in plain rooms, or in woods, fields and ships. They abandoned all liturgy, which they called ‘babbling in the Lord’s sight’, including, most controversially, the Lord’s prayer. One group even banned reading the English Bible in worship as quenching the Spirit. They renounced times and seasons, abandoning Church festivals and refusing to call days and months by their names.
There was no getting rid of baptism and communion, because they are mentioned in the Bible, but the Brownists stripped these down to short, simple actions accompanied by one relevant sentence of scripture. And even these rites were not hugely important to them. One of their children reached the age of fourteen without being baptised because they had not ordained a minister; her mother, the delightfully named Widow Unyon, explained: ‘It was born of faithful parents which was enough for it.’
By temperament, they hated ritual and loved simplicity, and developed a way of reading the Bible to make it agree with them about that. The Old Testament was full of ritual, but it was only meant to prefigure Christ and the (almost) ritual-free Christian faith. When, for example, God commands people to make a sacrifice for sin, we should not take that literally, but spiritually, by repenting in our hearts.
The charismatic behaviour that gave Quakers their nickname had some precedent in Brownist worship. ‘In their prayer,’ reported one witness, ‘one speaketh and the rest do groan or sob or sigh, as if they would wring out tears.’ Another description says: ‘The chief gentleman of the place beginneth with a groaning, but yet with a loud voice crieth most religiously, “Amen”. And then the whole company of that sect follow, “Amen, amen”.’
There was a strong strand of anticlericalism and egalitarianism among the Separatists, too. Though they ordained ministers, they were happy to go for years without any. Whether they had them or not, any man was allowed to preach, and in later decades women too, taking turns throughout the day. Hearers were expected to ask questions and to judge for themselves. When it came to decision making, ministers and other ‘forward’ people were expected to advise, but had no special authority. Everything was decided democratically, by the whole people. The voice of God, said Browne, was heard not from those of particular position, but in the community.
They abandoned all hierarchy, holding that every congregation had direct access, and was directly answerable, to Christ. Each could appoint and remove its own ministers, an innovation that proved costly for Browne when his followers found his teaching too radical and told him he was sacked. That, in theory at least, was the voice of God.
The Brownists’ other great innovation was that religion should be free, and Christianity a voluntary community, not a church state. ‘The Lord’s people’, said Browne, ‘is of the willing sort.’ He said the state has no right to tell the church how to worship God, and the church had no right to make laws for unbelievers. Those who wish to join the church should be free to do so, those who don’t should be free to go their own way. There should be no coercion in religion, he said, because only those who come willingly are worth having. ‘The Lord’s kingdom is not by force.’
In other respects, the Separatists were a world away from the Quakers, and yet even here they prepared the ground by the mess they made. They were strict and absolute in their adherence to the Bible, considering Christ to be the great lawmaker. The problem was that once they decided they were free to disagree with the authorities of the Church of England and form their own truly biblical church, they quickly started disagreeing with each other’s interpretations of the Bible, and split, and split and split again. The spectacle of this perpetual disintegration, and the extremely bad grace with which they anathematised their former brothers and sisters, persuaded many people either to return to the bosom of the state church or to rethink their attitude to the Bible.
Similarly, they baptised babies in their own way and condemned the Church of England for false baptism. Their opponents pointed out that they had themselves been baptised in the Church of England, so were presumably not truly baptised. The Separatists tied themselves in logical knots trying to explain this away. Some ended up leaving, rebaptising themselves or each other and becoming Baptists or Anabaptists. Others returned to the Church of England.
Yet others rethought the whole idea of sacraments. The Separatists had always taught that the ceremonies of the Old Testament, such as circumcision and sacrifice, pointed figuratively to Christ and were abolished now that the spiritual religion of the New Testament had replaced the old literal religion. It had always been difficult to explain why, in that case, the New Testament retained the rituals of baptism and communion, except that Christ had commanded them and that was that. After the Separatists had over-exercised themselves fighting over true and false baptism, it seemed natural to some people that Christ’s practice of baptism was to be interpreted as spiritually as Moses’s practice of circumcision.
The Separatists led people away from the hierarchy, violence, clericalism and ornamentation of the Church of England. But by falling into rancorous disputes and splits over their legalistic interpretations of the Bible and Christian rituals, they left many dissatisfied and ready for a movement that would take these ideas to their logical conclusion.
Steve is the editor of Reform, the magazine of the United Reformed Church. His The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s outlaws and the invention of freedom is out now.
