queen gave her orders to the archbishop of Canterbury, "that no man should be suffered to decline, either on the left or on the right hand, from the drawn line limited by authority, and by her laws and injunctions." The vehemence of persecution, which comprehended one third of all the ecclesiastics of England, roused the sufferers to struggle fiercely for selfprotecting and avenging power in the state, and, through the state, in the national church.

Meantime, the party of the Independents, or Brownists as they were scornfully called, shading into that of the Puritans, were pursued into their hiding-places with relentless fury. Yet, in all their sorrows, they manifested the sincerest love for their native country, and their religious zeal made them. devoted to the queen, whom Rome and the Spaniards had forced, against her will, to become the leading prince of the Protestant world.

In November, 1592, "this humble petition of her highness's faithful subjects, falsely called Brownists," was addressed to the privy council: "Whereas, we, her majesty's natural-born subjects, true and loyal, now lying, many of us, in other countries, as men exiled her highness's dominions; and the rest, which remain within her grace's land, greatly distressed through imprisonment and other great troubles, sustained only for some matters of conscience, in which our most lamentable estate we cannot in that measure perform the duty of subjects as we desire; and, also, whereas means is now offered for our being in a foreign and far country which lieth to the west from hence, in the province of Canada, where by the providence of the Almighty, and her maj esty's most gracious favor, we may not only worship God as we are in conscience persuaded by his word, but also do unto her majesty and our country great good service, and in time also greatly annoy that bloody and persecuting Spaniard about the bay of Mexico-our most humble suit is that it may please your honors to be a means unto her excellent majesty, that with her most gracious favor and protection we may peaceably depart thither, and there remaining to be accounted her majesty's faithful and loving subjects, to whom we owe all duty and obedience in the Lord, promising hereby and taking

God to record, who searcheth the hearts of all people, that, wheresoever we become, we will, by the grace of God, live and die faithful to her highness and this land of our nativity."

The prayer was unheeded. No one at court in that day would suffer Independents to live in peace in England or plant a colony. "As for those which we call Brownists," wrote Bacon, in 1592, "being, when they were at the most, a very small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the good remedies that have been used, suppressed and worn ont; so that there is scarce any news of them." Yet, in the next year, it was said by Raleigh, in parliament, that there were in England twenty thousand of those who frequented conventicles. It was proposed to banish them, as the Moors had been banished from Spain. To root out the sect which was become the depository of the principles of reform, an act of parliament of 1593 ordered those who for a month should be absent from the English service to be interrogated as to their belief, and menaced obstinate non-conformists with exile or with death. For the moment, under the ruthless policy of Whitgift and the queen, John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, both educated in the university at Cambridge, the former a regularly ordained minister, the latter for some years a member of Gray's Inn, London, after an imprisonment of about seven years, were selected by Whitgift for execution. Burleigh interposed and "gave the archbishop sound taxing words, and he used some speech with the queen, but was not seconded by any." Under the gallows at Tyburn, with the ropes about their necks, they prayed for England and England's queen; and so, on an April morning, were hanged for dissent.

John Penry, a Welshman, who had taken his first degree at Cambridge, and had become master of arts at Oxford, a man of faultless life, a preacher of the gospel to the Welsh, was convicted at Westminster Hall of the same seditiousness. "In the earnest desire I had to see the gospel in my native country," so he wrote to Lord Burleigh, “I might well, as I confess in my published writings, forget my own danger; but my loyalty to my prince did I never forget. And, being

now to end my days before I am come to the one half of my years in the likely course of nature, I leave unto such of my countrymen as the Lord is to raise after me the accomplishing of that work which, in the calling of my country unto the knowledge of Christ's blessed gospel, I began." His protestation after sentence was referred to the judges, who reported him guilty of separation from the church of England, and of "the justification of Barrow and Greenwood as holy martyrs." Archbishop Whitgift was the first to affix his name to the death warrant; and, on the seventh of June, 1593, just as the sun was going down toward the west, one of the purest men of England, exemplarily faithful to his country and to its prince, suffered martyrdom on the gallows.

"Take my poor desolate widow and my mess of fatherless and friendless orphans with you into exile; you shall yet find days of peace and rest, if you continue faithful," was one of the last messages of Penry to a company of believers in London whom banishment, with the loss of goods, was likely to betide. Francis Johnson, being arraigned, pleaded that “the great charter of England granteth that the church of Christ shall be free, and have all her liberties inviolable;" but, after a close imprisonment in jail for more than a year, he was sentenced to abjure the realm. He it was who gathered the exiled Southwark church in Amsterdam, where it continued as an example for a century.

CHAPTER XII.

THE PILGRIMS.

OUR narrative leads us to the manor-house of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, where William Brewster, who had been educated at Cambridge, had been employed in public affairs by an English secretary of state, and had taken part in an embassy to the Netherlands, resided as successor to his father in a small office under the queen. He furthered religion by procuring good preachers to all places thereabouts, charging himself most commonly deepest, and sometimes above his means. The tyranny of the bishops against godly preachers and people, in silencing the one and persecuting the other, led him and many more of those times to look further into particulars, and to see the burden of many anti-Christian corruptions which both he and they endeavored to cast off.

The age of the queen and the chance of favor to Puritans from her successor conspired to check persecution. The Independents had, it is true, been nearly exterminated; but the non-conforming clergy, after forty years of molestation, had increased, and taken deeper root in the nation. Their followers constituted a powerful political party, inquired into the nature of government, in parliament opposed monopolies, restrained the royal prerogative, and demanded a reform of ecclesiastical abuses. Popular liberty, which used to animate its friends by appeals to the examples of ancient republics, now listened to a voice from the grave of Wycliffe, from the vigils of Calvin. Victorious over her foreign enemies, Elizabeth never could crush the religious party of which she held the increase dangerous to the state. In the latter years of her reign her popularity declined, and after her death "in four

days she was forgotten." The accession of King James, on the third day of April, 1603, would, it was hoped, introduce a milder system; for he had called the church of Scotland "the sincerest kirk of the world;" and had censured the ser vice of England as "an evil said mass."

The pupil of Buchanan was not destitute of shrewdness nor unskilled in rhetoric. He aimed at the reputation of a "most learned clerk," and so successfully that Bacon pronounced him incomparable for learning among kings; and Sully, who knew him well, esteemed him the wisest fool in Europe. At the mature age of thirty-six, the imbecile man, afflicted with an ungainly frame and a timorous nature, escaped from austere supervision in Scotland to freedom of self-indulgence in the English court. His will, like his passions, was feeble, so that he could never carry out wise resolution; and, in his love of ease, he had no fixed principles of conduct or belief. Moreover, cowardice, which was the core of his character, led him to be false; and he could vindicate deception and cunning as worthy of a king; but he was an awkward liar rather than a crafty dissembler. On his way to a country where the institution of a parliament existed, he desired "to get rid of it," being persuaded that its privileges were not an ancient, undoubted right and inheritance, but were derived solely from grace and favor. His experience in Scotland had persuaded him that Presbyterian government in the church would, in a monarchy, bring forth perpetual rebellions; and while he denied the divine institution of bishops, and cared not for the profits the church might reap from them, he believed they would prove useful instruments to turn a monarchy with a parliament into absolute dominion.

The English hierarchy had feared in their new sovereign the approach of a "Scottish mist;" but the borders of Scotland were hardly passed before James began to identify the interests of the English church with those of his prerogative. "No bishop, no king," was a maxim often in his mouth, at the moment when Archbishop Whitgift could not conceal his disappointment and disquiet of mind, that the Puritans were too numerous to be borne down. While James was in his progress to London, more than seven hundred of them