that he was sent to prison for contempt, and there he died at the age of eighty, a miserable and despised old man, but a beneficed minister of the Church of England, and in regular standing.1 He died in the year 1630, when the Separation. which he deserted, and for which Thacker and Copping suffered an ignominious death, had founded a Christian commonwealth in New England. They died in their early manhood; he lived on, and “the days of his years, by reason of strength, were fourscore years;" yet how much better and more blessed was it to die as they died, than to live as he lived!

1 Fuller, "Church History," v., 63–70.

CHAPTER VI.

SEPARATISM BEFORE THE HIGH COMMISSIONERS.

Ir was not so easy as Elizabeth and her prelates had supposed to suppress the new theory of freedom in the church. The idea of "Reformation without tarrying for any," as it survived the hanging of its first confessors, survived also the treachery of their unworthy associate. Only ten years after that hanging there was a bill in Parliament (1593) for a new law against "the Brownists," so called though Browne was no longer one of them; for some new securities were thought necessary against a party that was growing formidable. On that occasion, Sir Walter Raleigh, arguing against the bill -not that he cared for the Brownists, whom he pronounced "worthy to be rooted out of the commonwealth," but because he valued those principles of English liberty which the bill proposed to sacrifice-made a significant statement: "I am afraid," said he," there are near twenty thousand of them in England." Twenty thousand of them in England, only ten years after that hanging at Bury St. Edmund's!

Already the Separation was beginning to be spoken of among the people by another name than Browne's. Henry Barrowe, "a gentleman of a good house" in Norfolk, and a graduate of the University of Cambridge, became, after leaving the university, a member of the legal profession in London, and "was sometime a frequenter of the court" of Queen Elizabeth. Governor Bradford has given us that account of him which was current fifty years later among the Separatist founders of Plymouth, some of whom had been "well acquainted with those that knew him familiarly both before and after his conversion," and one of whom had received information from a servant of his who "tended upon

him both before and sometime after" the great change in his life.

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"He was a gentleman of good worth, and a flourishing courtier in his time.” Walking in London one Lord's day with one of his companions, he heard a preacher at his sermon, very loud, as they passed by the church. 'Let us go in,' said he, and hear what this man saith that is thus earnest.' Moved by the sudden impulse, in he went and sat down. And the minister was vehement in reproving sin, and sharply applied the judgments of God against the same; and, it should seem, touched him to the quick in such things as he was guilty of, so as God set it home to his soul, and began to work for his repentance and conviction thereby. For he was so stricken as he could not be quiet, until by conference with godly men, and further hearing of the word, with diligent reading and meditation, God brought peace to his soul and conscience after much humiliation of heart and reformation of life.” In this process of reformation "he left the court and retired himself to a private life, sometime in the country and sometime in the city, giving himself to study and reading of the Scriptures and other good works very diligently; and being missed at court by his consorts and acquaintance, it was quickly bruited abroad that Barrowe was turned Puritan." Another account of his conversion, given by one who may have known him as a young man at court, is that he "made a leap from a vain and dissolute youth to a preciseness in the highest degree, the strangeness of which alteration made him very much spoken of."2

Long afterward, the life which he lived in his youth was unkindly referred to as a disgrace to his memory. Enemies of the Separation reported that he "was a great gamester and a dicer when he lived in court; and, getting much in play, would boast of loose spending it”—as if there were no

1 Bradford's "Dialogue," in "Chronicles of the Pilgrims,” p. 433, 434. 2 Lord Bacon's Works (Philadelphia, 1842), ii., 249.

such thing as the true conversion of a sinner, or as if the conversion of Augustine from a wayward and vicious life to eminence among the saints were less marvelous or more miraculous than the conversion of that young man in the court of Queen Elizabeth. "That he was tainted with vices at the court before his conversion is not very strange," said Bradford; "and if he had lived and died in that condition, it is like he might have gone out of the world without any public brand on his name, and have passed for a tolerable Christian and member of the church." From the "vain and dissolute" life of a courtier, he was strangely converted to a life of serious godliness. The fact was notorious at the time, as we know from indubitable testimony.

"Barrowe is turned Puritan" was the story among the lawyers at Gray's Inn, and among gay courtiers. Any man who seemed in earnest to do the will of God, taking the Bible for his guide, was in those days called a Puritan. But, as to the question of church reformation, this young man, no longer "vain and dissolute," did not rest in mere Puritanism. His inquiries soon brought him to the more advanced position of separation from all national churches. His connections and the notoriety of his conversion, as well as his talents and his zeal, made him conspicuous among the Separatists; and soon the name "Barrowist" began to be used instead of "Brownist."

The name of Henry Barrowe is inseparably associated in history with that of his friend and fellow-sufferer, John Greenwood. Of Greenwood we know that he had taken a degree at Cambridge, had received ordination from episcopal hands, had served as chaplain in the family of a Puritan nobleman (Lord Rich, of Rochford, in Essex), but had renounced all connection with the so-called Church of England, and, in cooperation with Barrowe, had made himself obnoxious to the ruling powers by his conspicuous activity among the Separatists. He was a young man-probably not thirty years of age a husband, and the father of a young son, when we

find him a prisoner in the Clink prison in Southwark. The date of his arrest and confinement does not appear.

On a Lord's day in November (Nov. 19, 1586), six years and a half after Copping and Thacker had been put to death for maintaining that Christians in England ought to unite in separate and voluntary churches, according to the New Testament, Henry Barrowe, having heard that his friend Greenwood was in prison, made haste to visit him. The keeper of the prison took the opportunity of detaining Barrowe without a warrant, and hurried to Archbishop Whitgift, at Lambeth, with the news of the capture. On his return with two of the archbishop's officers, the captive was conveyed by water to the Lambeth Palace, and underwent an examination before Whitgift and two others of the High Commission; for the business, being ecclesiastical, was not thought inappropriate to the Lord's day.

The examination was far from satisfactory to the examiners, as will appear from some passages which show strikingly what the man was, and what were his principles.

At the beginning, Barrowe found opportunity to allege that his imprisonment by the keeper of the prison, without warrant, was contrary to the law of the land. He was asked, "Know you the law of the land ?" "Very little," he replied; "yet I was of Gray's Inn some years." When the archbishop and the two doctors derided his unskillfulness in the law (it being to them ludicrous that an English subject should complain of being shut up in prison without a warrant from a magistrate), he added, "I look for little help by law against you."

The archbishop, proposing that, according to the usage of the High Commission, he should be sworn to answer whatever questions might be put to him, asked him, “Will you swear ?" He answered, "I hold it lawful to swear, if it be done with due order and circumstances." "Reach a book," said the archbishop, "and hold it him." With a provoking simplicity, the prisoner asked, "What shall I do with it ?”