RESULTS OF ELIZABETH'S PERSECUTION

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surrender their comfortable surroundings, they were content to swim with the current, and let the Reformation take care of itself. The new men coming into the ministry saw that the path to preferment lay, not through scholarship, eloquence, or piety, but through the practice of the courtier's arts. They, too, learned their lesson, and the second generation was little vexed by reformers in the high places of the Church.*

But there was another class, much more difficult to deal with-men who could neither be bribed nor flattered into silence. It is easy enough to-day, when forms and ceremonies have lost much of their power, to speak of them as narrow-minded, because they would not wear the old priestly robes, nor use rites which kept alive the recollections of the ancient Church. They were wiser than their modern critics and understood their age. They sought a separation from the papacy as complete as that which the Israelites effected when they placed a sea and a wilderness between themselves and the Egyptians. Elizabeth also took in the situation as well. She was determined that there should be no such separation. The ships of her reforms were too valuable to be burned; they might be useful for a return voyage to Rome. The zealots who persisted in thwarting her plans could be dealt with in only one manner. They must be suppressed at any cost.

Mary had attempted to crush out heresy by force, but such a general persecution as she had carried on, even if possible, would have defeated its object. Elizabeth committed no such blunder. The stake and the axe make

*The reforms proposed at the accession of James I., by about one ninth of the clergy, were opposed by the whole bench of bishops and both the universities.

picturesque sufferers. It is the blood of the martyrs that in all ages has been the seed of a Church. A canonized saint appeals to the popular imagination. His ashes require neither food nor raiment; they ask for nothing but a little earth, sympathy, pity, tears, remembrance. But a living martyr, made to suffer for his opinions, occupies a very different position. He requires a continued, substantial support, and, however fervent may be the first feelings in his behalf, to carry on a work of charity for years calls for something more than sympathy or pity; it presupposes in a people a depth of religious conviction little known among the English masses of the sixteenth century.

When, therefore, Elizabeth drove the reforming divines from their livings, forbade their formation of separate congregations, and left them to wander about the country as itinerant preachers and schoolmasters, while she also, in the main, frowned upon the men in civil life who upheld their doctrines, she adopted the most effective form of persecution which could be practised on her people. It was pursued systematically and persistently for many years. In time its results became very marked in one direction. When the Marian exiles died off they left few successors among the scholars of the land. We hear little more of deep learning among the Puritans, or of Puritanism among the upper classes. Reform was no longer fashionable.

But although the policy of Elizabeth explains how Puritanism died out among the prelates of the Church, and how it came to leave the habitations of the wise and great, it does not explain how it came to dwell among the lowly, and why it spread in spite of persecution. These are different and more important questions. The teaching of a Calvinistic theology by the Genevan ex

EARLY IMMIGRATION FROM THE NETHERLANDS

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iles is not an adequate explanation, for the teachers were too few in number to have produced the acknowledged result, and the people were in no condition to be affected by religious dogmas. In truth, when we consider the general condition of the people, the wonder is that Puritanism, as a religious and political force, was not entirely crushed out in England while Elizabeth was on the throne. It had little lodgment among the masses. They had, to be sure, the remembrance of the persecution under Mary, but that remembrance became fainter year by year. Very few of them could read, and every attempt was made to keep them ignorant. Left to themselves, unaffected by any influence from abroad, except that which we have already noticed, it is probable that, even if they had not returned to Catholicism, we should hear nothing of the movement which in the next century gave birth to the Commonwealth.

If now we leave England and cross the Channel to the Netherlands, we shall perhaps discover the origin of the leading foreign influence which kept alive the spirit of English Puritanism, and which ultimately shaped its character.

As we have seen in a former chapter, the Reformation in the Low Countries began at the bottom, among the artisans in the cities, and the tillers of the soil in the rural districts. Quite early there began to pour into England a little stream of these enlightened and religious workmen. The regions to which they were always attracted were the low, swampy lands on the eastern coast, which reminded them of home. There they built their dikes, dug out canals, and gave to a district in Lincolnshire the name of Holland. They swarmed into Norfolk, and laid the foundations of the weaving industry, which made Norwich the second city in the king

dom. When Wyclif arose, in the fourteenth century, to preach the doctrines of a reformed faith, he found most of his adherents among these weavers. In fact, during the persecution of the Lollards more persons suffered death at the stake in Norfolk than in all the other counties of England put together.* In a few years after Wyclif's death the Lollard preachers were suppressed, and their sect disappeared from public view. But in the low districts on the eastern coast, where the Netherlanders had settled, the reforming spirit still survived. So late as 1520, Longland, bishop of Lincoln, reported that Lollardism was especially vigorous and obstinate in his diocese, where more than two hundred heretics were once brought before him in the course of a single visitation.+

When, a century and a half after the death of Wy. · clif, Charles V. began his persecution of the Protestants in the Netherlands, which was intensified under his successor, the little stream of emigration from across the Channel swelled into a mighty river. In 1560, it was estimated that England contained 10,000 refugees from Flanders, with their ministers and preachers, and in 1562 the number had increased to over 30,000. How many came over in the next few years cannot be accurately determined, but Davies, upon the best foreign authorities, estimates that before the termination of Alva's rule over one hundred thousand heads of families had left the

*Roger's "Story of Holland," p. 51.

"The Beginnings of New England," John Fiske, p. 62. Most of the victims of Bloody Mary came also from the manufacturing districts of the South and East. Green, "History of the English People," vol. ii. book vi. chap. ii.

Reports of the Spanish Ambassador, Froude, vii. 270, 413.

NETHERLAND REFUGEES IN ENGLAND UNDER ALVA'S RULE 489

Netherlands, a majority of whom found a home in England.* A census taken by the lord-mayor of London in 1568, the year after Alva's arrival in the Netherlands, shows that of 6704 foreigners then in the city and its vicinity, 5225 were from the Low Countries.+ Elizabeth did not encourage their remaining in London, where, at a later day, they flocked in such numbers as to attract the notice of the Spanish ambassador, and so dispersed the new-comers through the country. In the first quarter of the next century, London, in a population comparatively small, numbering probably not 130,000 inhabitants, contained not fewer than 10,000 foreigners.§ In 1571, there were in Norwich alone, by actual count, 3925 Dutch and Walloons. In 1587, the number had risen to 4679, making a majority of the population. They located by thousands in the Cinque Ports—that is, Dover, Sandwich, Hastings, Romney, and Hythe.** In Sandwich

*Davies's "Holland," i. 567. Green puts the number in England at over 50,000. "Hist. of the English People,” vol. ii. book vi. chap. v. + Strype's "Annals," vol. iv. Supplement, p. 1.

Idem, ii. 387.

§ Nicholas's "Pedigree of the English People," p. 538. This author says that they were mostly Huguenots, but at that time the great French emigration had not taken place. The Walloons from the Netherlands were often called Huguenots in England, as in Canterbury, for example, and this probably causes the confusion. We are told by the Duc de Sully, the great French minister, that when he visited Canterbury, in 1603, he found that two thirds of the inhabitants were Netherland refugees. To this circumstance he attributed the superior civilization and refinement of manners which he noticed in that city. "Works," tome iv. lib. xiv. p. 217.

| Blomefield's "Hist. of County Norfolk," iii. 282, 291, quoted in Dexter's "Congregationalism," p. 72.

¶ Southerden Burn, p. 69.

**Green's "Hist. of the English People," vol. ii. book vi. chap. v.