In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the populations of Europe west of Russia and the Balkan peninsula, except the Jews and the Moors of Spain, belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. There were some Turks and Albanians who were Mohammedans in the Balkan peninsula, but the rest of the inhabitants, along with all Russians, belonged to the Greek Catholic Church. These two branches of the Christian church had existed since the eleventh century. Because of its efficient organization, the Western Church thrived over the centuries, maintaining its unity with little dissention throughout the Middle Ages.

That unity disassembled in an ecclesiastical revolt led by Martin Luther that resulted in a permanent division of the church. The movement started out as a protest against what Luther considered improper practices of the church. As a monk who had been concecrated a priest, Luther objected particularly to the role of indulgences, certificates that were said to shorten one's time in purgatory. Luther found no authority in scripture for such a practice. The Ninety-Five Theses that he displayed in Wittenburg on 31 October 1517 began with "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said 'Repent', he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance." The last two theses inspired generations of Christians to this day:

94. Christians should be exorted to be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, death, and hell; 95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace."

To Luther it was necessary to understand the shame, horror, pain, and helplessness of an execution to understand the Divine power that made heaven and earth. To the Protestants who were to follow his lead, these theses were exhortations to martyrdom.

Although it was never his intention to "rent the seamless robe of Christ" and form a new denomination, the breach between his views and those of his opponents soon became so wide, compromise was impossible. Luther was a prolific writer who took advantage of Gutenberg's new invention to publish books, hymnals, and english translations of parts of the New Testament. Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther in 1520. A year later, Emperor Charles V (King of Spain and head of the Holy Roman Empire [a name used to designate the loose and weak union of German states]), declared Luther an outlaw and his life forfeited. In the Edict of Worms, Charles said "It is certain that a single friar errs in his opinion which is against all Chritiandom and according to which all of Christianity wil be and will always have been in error both in the past thousand years and even more in the present." Charles, however, was too preoccupied with warfare and other concerns to enforce his edict. Lutheranism was left to expand in the North German states and Scandanavian countries.

Soon after Luther started his revolt in the church, Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich, Switzerland began to attack the authority of Rome . Zwingli's views, which were very much in agreement with Luther's on most points of doctrine and practice, were readily accepted. In a short time, several Swiss cantons had thrown off their allegiance to the old church.

In 1536, John Calvin, a Frenchman, took charge of the reform movement in Geneva. He was the ablest writer among the early Protestant theologians. His great theological treatise, "The Institutes of the Christian Religion," was regarded by his Catholic opponents as the "Koran of the Heretics." Owing largely to his exceptionally logical mind and the fine literary quality of his writings, John Calvin became the great moral and religious teacher of our ancestors. His works became accepted as a correct formulation of Protestant doctrines. For more about Calvanism, please refer to the section on Puritanism.

Geneva, like Zurich, became a refuge for religious exiles who shared Calvin's ideas on religion.

Lutheran books first appeared in England in 1521. At Cambridge, the future center of Puritan academic thought, proselytizers emerged to extol the virtues of a purified faith while denouncing what they saw to be the corruption of the Roman Catholic church. The small minority that professed the Protestant faith were ardent in their beliefs and willing to accept marytrdom in accordance with Lutheran doctrine. As their numbers grew, church condemnation of their heresies intensified. Persecution increased. In 1526 Cardinal Wolsey presided over a massive book burning of Lutheran books. Thomas Bilney, a respected Cambridge preacher, was burned as a heretic in 1531. In 1536, William Tyndale was executed by strangulation for printing an illegal English translation of the Bible. His last words were, "Oh, Lord, open the eyes of the people of England.

For nearly two centuries English and European people were to be divided along religious lines, with both Protestants and Catholics committing horrible crimes against one another in the name of The Prince of Peace. Their fortunes shifted with each successive rein, as their rulers followed their own religious convictions and sought to impose them on their subjects.

The Formation of the Church of England

Henry VIII's divorce of Catherine of Araagon and marriage to Anne Boleyn , in the face of Pope Clement V's refusal to grant an annulement, precipitated England's break with Rome. Five years earlier, Henry had been declared Keeper of the Faith for writing a book on the sacraments against Luther. In 1529, he was excommunicated. His response to this censure was The Act of Conformity which established him and his royal successors as as the heads of the English Church, which came to be known as the Anglican Church. Monastaries were abolished and the wealth of the diocese was confiscated by the Crown, making Henry VIII a very wealthy ruler, and his counsellors, the recipients of his largesse, very wealthy men.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that Henry had Protestant leanings. He continued to see himself as Defender of the Faith and looked with a jaundiced eye at all reformers. He tolerated them only because they strengthened him in his new and precarious position as Holy Father in defiance of Rome. He sentenced Thomas Moore to death for not recognizing him as the head of the church, and had many others executed for their Papist sympathies when they refused to acnowledge The Act of Supremacy (1534). The English people, then, were torn between being branded as heretics by Rome or branded as traitors by their King.

In 1539, the new order of things was presented in the Six Articles, "the whip with six strings". The confessional was to be retained, along with private masses. Priests were not to marry. Vows of chastity were eternal. Communion in both was not obligatory. Lastly, all had to believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation. Under this doctrine, at the moment of communion under the right auspices, wine and wafers became the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ. To believe otherwise, that the act was merely symbolic, was an "abominable" heresy punishable by death.

Henry countenanced only two changes that pleased the reformers. The worship of "idols" was forbidden and images and shrines were destroyed throughout the realm (with an eye on the gold, silver, and precious jewels they contained). More significantly, every church was to install a Bible for public use. That this Bible was to be in English, and not in Latin, was a revolutionary innovation that was to have incalcuable consequences throughout the ages. For the first time, any Englishman who could read could examine Holy Scripture and form opinions about it, without the intervention of Clergy. Here was born the right to freedom of conscience and independent thought that was cherished by Protestants throughout the Reformation.

It wasn't until the succession of Henry's son, Edward VI, in 1546, that the Church of England began to assume a Protestant aspect. The sickly boy's Protector, the powerful Duke of Somerset, repealed Henry's Six Articles. The first book of Common Prayer appeared, authored by Thomas Crammer. Steps were taken, in 1552, towards shaping a Protestant Service when the Service Book was published.

The Counter Reformation

The course of reform was quickly halted in 1553, when King Edward died at age 23 and his fervent Catholic sister Mary took his place. Like her Spanish mother, Henry VIII's first wife Catherine of Aaragon, Mary had remained steadfastly Roman Catholic. Since the age of ten, when her father's ministers forced her to renounce her legitimacy and support Ann Bolyn's marriage to Henry, she defiantly held on to her faith. Now, bent on revenge and determined to do God's Will, Bloody Mary, as she came to be known, recognized the Pope as the temporal and spiritual leader of Christiandom. The Roman rite was reinstituted throughout the kingdom. Jesuit missionaries were permitted in England.

From 1553 to 1558 273 Protestants were burned at the stake. Mary failed to see that their martyrdom only earned them more converts. Many of the condemned went to the gibbet or stake with a dignity and grace the multitudes who saw them. The last two of Luther's 95 thesis had pointed the way to the true believers.

• 94. Christians should be exorted to be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, death, and hell;
• 95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace."

To Luther it was necessary to understand the shame, horror, pain, and helplessness of an execution to understand the Divine power that made heaven and earth.

Bloody Mary's health was as fragile as her younger half-brother's, and like him, she met an early death. During her five year reign she had held her younger half-sister Elizabeth, daughter of Ann Boleyn, under house arrest first in the country estate of Woodstock, then in the Tower of London at the site of many executions of the Protestant "scaints".

As a Protestant and potential heir to the throne, Elizabeth had wide support among the English commoners and noblemen. To Mary, she was a rival she didn't know how to dispose of. Elizabeth was allowed to live because executing her would have incited Protestant rebellion.

When Bloody Mary died in 1558, it was Elizabeth's turn to ascend the throne. A truly remarkable woman, in her long rein she was able to balance antagonistic forces by shifting favor and pitting them against each other to keep both within bounds. She was a master of procrastination and seeming indeciseveness, strategies which preserved her and her nation in an implacably hostile world of warring religious passions. Above all, she supported England's emerging class, many of whom were protestants.

As head of the English Church, Elizabeth, like her predecessors, demanded conformity to her religious views. She preferred Roman mass, but deposed many of the bishops she found in office. To offset any papal leanings of the others, she mitered some of the less radical Protestant leaders who had fled to Holland during Mary's rein. As a sop to Catholics she permitted kneeling at communion (known as the "Black Rubric" by anti-papists) but would not allow the cope to be worn at any other time, to the satisfaction of the Protestants.

Elizabeth insisted that the Church and State were one. No one could preach without a license. Uniformity of belief was was enforced by a Court of High Commission which shared Elizabeth's belief that the stake and the gallows were the surest means of spiritual conversion.

The failure of catholic Mary Queen of Scots and Phillip of Spain to overthrough "heretical" England, allowed the island nation to evolve in its religious course. It was during this time that an extremist strain of Protestantism emerged. These were people who declared that the original simple Christian faith had been corrupted and needed to be restored to its "primative order, libertie, & bewtie".

In 1565, Archbishop Parker denounced those extremists as "those precise men", soon to be known as Precisians and eventually Puritans. The were Puritans not for theeir moral code, it should be noted, but for their theological doctrine.

The form of intense Puritanism that was to influence the clergymen of the Congregational church of our forbears began with Reverend Robert Browne. In 1580, at Norwich, Browne began his reformist ministry. After being jailed a few times for non-conformity he fled with his flock to Zealand, a part of Holland closest to East Anglia. There he publishedfive books defining his faith and espousing separation from England's church. He and his followers believed that a church that fails to exclude the irreligious cannot represent the saved and lead its membership to salvation. "Magistrates" he postulated, have no ecclesiastical authority. Only by "public covenant with each other and with God" can a genuine and perfect church be created. Church authority, he maintained, rested on member's interpretation of the Bible.

Although Browne recanted in later years, broken by years of struggle, persecution, and imprisonment, his fundememtal message was a guiding light to future Puritan clergymen. He rejected Calvin's thesis that the church had to wait until the state took action. His book, Refusing...... was carried to the new world by William Bradford and the pilgrims of Plimith Bay. At the height of the English Civil War sixty years later, those who were viewd as being "disobedient in manner of religion" were referred to as Brownists.

Puritans proposed to worship as they imagine the early Christians did. Their scholars combed through the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles to discover exactly how the primitive churches were organized. The congregational Church in New England happened to be organized on a democratic basis, not because Puritans were enamored of democracy, but because leaders such as John Cotton (Pastor of Boston 16 ) and Thomas Hooker (Founder and Pastor of Hartford) insisted that their churches copy the exact organization of the First Church of Corinth and the First Church of Phillippe, about which they knew very little. The Apostles and Evangelists did not say much about them.

The English Puritans were radical in that they proposed to get at the root of everything, no matter who or what stood in their way. However, in a larger way, they were conservative to the point of being reactionary, since their aim was to restore "the church unspotted," pure of the early Christians so to reform society. They strove to lead the New Testament life and at the same time earn a living.

The Puritans wished to sweep away the practices of the Renaissance, to get back to apostalic times when men who had seen Jesus plain were still alive. God, they believed, had dictated the Bible as the complete guide to life; the Holy Ghost and the Trinity maintained a line of communication to each individual Christian through the Holy Spirit and his conscience.

In response to the light of conscience and written word, the Puritan yearned to know God and approach Him directly without intermediary. He rejected ritual because he saw it as a distorting screen between him and the Almighty. At odds with his view, however, was the established Church of England.

By the early seventeenth century Puritan influence in England grew as more and more noblemen, craftsmen, and merchants declared themselves anti-papist. Many members of Parliament in both houses, Lords and Commons, were Puritans. By the time James VI of Scotland ascended the throne of England as James I. Puritan influence was strong enough to arouse Catholic alarm and retribution. In 1607 Catholic extremists attempted to blow up the King and Parliament in the Gunpowder plot. It failed. Ironically, the royal target of the assassination was considered to be a "crypto-papist" by the Puritans who thought James was filling his court with Catholics. His marriage to Princess Henrietta of Spain, a Catholic, was viewed with great dread.

James, liike his predecessor Queen Elizabeth, tried to placate both sides while maintaining absolute authority over church and state. Although he had filled his court with Catholic ministers, he authorized the tranlation of the Bible that was to be his legacy and the jewel of English literature: The King James Bible.

It was King Jame's heir, Charles I who was to reap the whirlwind of religious discord. Woefully unprepared for rule ­ his elder brother Henry, not he, had been groomed for the assessition ­ Charles lacked his father's political adroitness and flexibility. Where James I considered himself very wise about religious matters but knew the limits of his power, Charles would not tolerate any dissention and fought battles he couldn't win. Guided by inept advisors like Lord Buckingham (George Villers), a long time court favorite, he embarked on a succession of disasterous military campaigns against Spain and then France. In 1623 he married Queen Henrietta Maria of France who installed her catholic entourage in the palace, attended mass, and was openly contemptouous of her new subjects. Even worse, as events were to prove, he appointed he inflexible William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury.

In the 1630's, the zeal with which Anglican Archbishop (1630 to 1643) William Laud sanctified and enforced conformity to these practices which were anathema to the Puritans strengthened their will to oppose them. Laud looked upon Puritan practices as blasphemous, and strove to restore candles and crosses to the altar as well as kneeling, chanting, and other forms of worship that had been brushed aside by the Puritans. At the same time, Charles I was seen as "crypto-papist" like his father because he also married a Catholic Queen and was very lenient towards recusatrants. (see definition)

Religious tensions in England and Scotland came to a head on Sunday, 23 July 1637, when the new Anglicized prayer book ­"Laud's Prayer Book"­ was introduced to the congregation of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburg, Scotland. A riot broke out in the church (see illustration above) and the ministers, bishop and archbishop of St. Andrews fled for their lives. With characteristic disregard and underestimation of the depth of religious fervor of his subjects, Charles I had attempted to standardize religious worship to conform to his passion for uniformity and the Arminian precepts of Archbishop William Laud, his factorum-factotum of all things religious in his realm. Two years earlier, Charles had re-released the Book of Sports (1633) and decreed that every English clergyman should read it to his congregation. Many refused, including Reverend Henry of Whitfield, who was pastor to Henry Doude and the 25 families who were to follow him to the New World.

"That fatal book," as the new prayer book was to be called many years later by Charles' widow, Henrietta Maria, set the course toward war with Scotland, civil war, and regicide that was to sweep England until 1642.

The Great Migration had begun, with thousands of East Anglican Puritans fleeing to the New World. Reverend John Higginson had prophesied that God would chasten the Motherland with calamaties. "When you see Jerusalem compassed with armies", he warned, "then flee to the mountains." Among those in flight was our ancestor Henry Doude and the congregation of Henry Whitfield.

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¹ Lambert Osbaldeston, a Westminster schoolmaster.
² From Archbishop William Laud by Charles Carlton, p. 12

Sources:

• Carlton, Charles. Archbishop William Laud (1987, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London)
• Carlton, Charles. Charles I the Personal Monarch (1995, 2nd Edition, Routledge)
• Chitwood, Oliver Perry. A History of Colonial America (1961, Harper & Row, New York)
• Eerdmans, William B., publisher Christianity in America (1983, William E. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI)
  
• Harris, John. Saga of the Pilgrims From Europe to the New World (1983, The Globe Pequot Press. Chester, Connecticut)

Main Directory / Dowd Genealogy / Related Links: The Puritans / The Seeds of Albion / Henry Whitfield