Elizabeth I and Religion 1558-1603 by Doran Susan;

Author:Doran, Susan; [SUSAN DORAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

6

Separatism

Separatism is a word used to label a tendency of some radical Protestants to break away from the national Church and form their own separate congregations of believers. At one time, some historians confused radical Puritans with Separatists, and saw them both as part of the same dissenting tradition. For them, there was a direct line of descent from Elizabethan Puritans, to the religious exiles on the Mayflower, down to the mid-seventeenth- century radical sects. Such historians could therefore detect and describe many examples of Separatism in the late Elizabethan period.

Now, however, historians are defining Separatism more carefully and they recognize that there is a narrow, but important, line dividing Elizabethan Puritans from Separatists. Unlike Separatists, Puritans remained within the national Church, attended their parish services regularly, and did not form alternative churches of the godly. Despite their dissatisfaction with the official Church and distaste for much of its liturgy and practice, most Puritans shrank away from Separatism, partly because of a fear of schism but also because they could not bring themselves to leave the fellowship of their fellow Protestants (Spufford 1974).

For Separatists, on the other hand, the blemishes in the Established Church demonstrated that it was not the ‘true’ Church, and they consequently felt that they had to withdraw totally from it and establish instead their own separate churches which only the elect would attend (Collinson 1983). Separatism, while distinct from Puritanism, thus took Puritanism to its logical conclusion, and many of its leaders, like Francis Johnson, a London Separatist of the early 1590s, began life as Presbyterians but gradually drifted into Separatism, as they lost hope that the Established Church would reform itself.

The roots of English Separatism can be found in the underground churches of Mary’s reign and some of the London congregations which grew up during the Vestiarian Controversy. The congregation which met at Plumbers’ Hall in 1567 was implicitly Separatist although few of those who attended the meetings were Separatist in intention; as their spokesmen explained to Grindal, bishop of London, they wanted to hear the godly preachers ‘displaced by your law’, and ‘we bethought us what was best to do; and we remembered that there was a congregation of us in this city in Queen Mary’s days’. Grindal, however, realized the potential sectarianism of such groups and recommended severe punishment for the ringleaders, who were in his view ‘people fanatical and incurable’ (Collinson 1967).

The Separatist Movement as such, however, did not take shape before the 1580s, when Robert Browne and Robert Harrison put their energies into setting up congregations of the elect and writing polemical works in support of Separatism. Both men were Cambridge graduates and deprived school-masters who in 1580, on deciding that ‘we are to forsake and deny all ungodliness and wicked fellowship’, formed a Separatist church in Norwich. Browne soon became well known to the authorities and spent some time in prison before going to Middleburg in the Netherlands with his congregation in 1582.

While abroad, Browne and Harrison published several works in which they developed a covenant theology.

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