It may be easily believed that none of the guests whom the Earl of Leicester placed at his table by the side of his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, were clowns. But the supposition of any necessary connection between Puritanism and what is harsh and rude in taste and manners, will not even stand the test of an observation of the character of men who figured in its ranks, when the lines came to be most distinctly drawn. The Parliamentary general, Devereux, Earl of Essex, was no strait-laced gospeller, but a man formed with every grace of person, mind, and culture, to be the ornament of a splendid court, the model knight, the idol, as long as he was the comrade, of the royal soldiery, the Bayard of the time. The position of Manchester and Fairfax, of Hollis, Fiennes, and Pierrepont, was by birthright in the most polished circle of English society. In the Memoirs of the young regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, recorded by his beautiful and gentle wife, we may look at the interior of a Puritan household, and see its graces, divine and human, as they shone with a naturally blended Ilustre in the most strenuous and most afflicted times.1 The renown of English learning owes something to the sect which enrolled the names of Selden, Lightfoot, Gale, and Owen. Its seriousness and depth of thought had lent their inspiration to the delicate muse of Spenser. Judg 1 The following contemporaneous portrait of an officer of the Puritan Commonwealth corresponds little with the ideal which has since been received. Colonel Hutchinson "could dance admirably well, but neither in youth nor riper years made any practice of it; he had skill in fencing, such as became a gentleman; he had great love to music, and often diverted himself with a viol, on which he played masterly; he had an exact ear and judgment in other music; he shot excellently in bows and guns, and much used them for his exercise; he had great judgment in paintings, graving, sculpture, and all liberal arts, and had many curiosities of value in all 3 kinds; he took great delight in perspective glasses, and, for his other rarities, was not so much affected with the antiquity as the merit of the work; he took much pleasure in improvement of grounds, in planting groves and walks and fruit-trees, in opening springs, and making fish-ponds.” (Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, I. 33, 34.) 2 The "painful" Owen, carrying within his broad forehead the concentrated extract of a thousand folios, was considered in his time something of a coxcomb in personal appearance. (Tayler, Religious Progress in England, 95.) 3 See the Fifth Eclogue of Spenser, and his "Mother Hubberd's Tale," ing between their colleague preachers, Travers and Hooker, the critical Templars awarded the palm of scholarly eloquence to the Puritan. When the Puritan lawyer Whitelock was ambassador to Queen Christina, he kept a magnificent state, which was the admiration of her court, perplexed as they were by his persistent Puritanical testimony against the practice of drinking healths.1 For his Latin secretary, the Puritan Protector employed a man at once equal to the foremost of mankind in genius and learning, and skilled in all manly exercises, proficient in the lighter accomplishments beyond any other Englishman of his day, and caressed in his youth, in France and Italy, for eminence in the studies of their fastidious schol-ars and artists. The king's camp and court at Oxford had not a better swordsman or amateur musician than John Milton, and his portraits exhibit him with locks as flowing as Prince Rupert's. In such trifles as the fashion verses 484 et seq. His relations to the Earl of Essex may well have brought him under Grindall's influence. 1 "How could you pass over their very long winter nights?" the Protector asked Whitelock at the audience of return from his embassy. "I kept my people together," was the reply, "and in action and recreation, by having music in my house, and encouraging that and the exercise of dancing, which held them by the eyes and ears, and gave them diversion without any offence. And I caused the gentlemen to have disputations in Latin, and declamations upon words which I gave them." And the dialogue proceeded :— Cromwell. "Those were very good diversions, and made your house a little academy." Whitelock. "I thought these recreations better than gaming for money, or going forth to places of debauchery." Cromwell. "It was much better." (Whitelock, Embassy to Sweden, II. 438, 439. The book, lately republished, is very interesting for its illustrations of manners in the time of the Commonwealth, as well as for its other contents.) 2 "Haste then, nymph, and bring with theo Jest, and youthful Jollity, Sport, that wrinkled Care derides, "King 3 The "prick-eared knaves" to whom Sir Geoffrey Peveril gave the credit of trowling his Cavalier friends down "like so many ninepins, at Wiggan Lane," certainly did not set the fashion of hairdressing to all their party. Pym," for a time the representative Roundhead, wears, on the canvas of Houbraken, the same moderate chevelure as is now thought becoming for a chamberlain of Queen Victoria. But when the body of Hampden, the "Great Brother," as Strafford called him, (Lord Nugent, Life of Hampden, I. 150,) was disinterred, twenty-five years ago, it was thought at first to be a woman's, from of apparel, the usage of the best modern society vindicates, in characteristic particulars, the Roundhead judgment and taste of the century before the last. The English gentleman now, as the Puritan gentleman then, dresses plainly in "sad" colors, and puts his lace and embroidery on his servants. the profusion of long hair. Mrs. Hutchinson says (Memoirs, 181), that her husband, "having naturally a very fine thick-set head of hair, kept it clean and handsome, so that it was a great ornament to him"; and in his portrait, it rolls in curls down his shoulders and over his mail. CHAPTER VIII. Position of the Church. 1621. YEARS had passed since the severity of the government had overcome the Separatists, forcing them either to disband their congregations, or flee from the kingdom. From the time when Bishop Williams Puritans in was made Keeper of the Great Seal, four years before the death of King James, the High-Commission Court again became active, and the condition of Puritans in the Church was day by day more uneasy. While some among them looked for relief to a happy issue of the struggle which had been going on in Parliament, and resigned themselves to await and aid the slow progress of a political and religious reformation in the kingdom, numbers, less confident or less patient, pondered on exile as their best resource, and turned their view to a new home on the Western continent. There was yet a third class, who, through feeble resolution or a lingering hope of better things, deferred the sacrifices which they scarcely flattered themselves that they should ultimately escape, and, if they were clergymen, retained their preferments by a reluctant obedience to the canons.1 The coquetry of Buckingham with the Puritans, inspiring false hopes, was not without effect to excuse indecision, and hinder a combined and energetic action. 1 "We have feared a judgment a long time. But yet we are safe. Therefore it were better to stay till it come. And either we may fly then, or, if we be overtaken in it, we may well be content to suffer with such a Church as ours is." Such was one of the "Objections" replied to in a paper, which was circulated in England in 1629, and was probably from the pen of Winthrop. It is printed in Dr. Young's "Chronicles of Massachusetts," 271. It contains pregnant hints as to the object of the emigration proposed in it. Of course, to publish the plan in plain language, and in its full extent, would have been to defeat it. The Reverend Mr. White. Among the eminent persons who had reconciled themselves to the course of compromise and postponement was Mr. John White, an important name, which at this point takes its place in New-England history. White, who, since the second year of King James's reign, had been rector of Trinity Church in Dorchester, was a man widely known and greatly esteemed, alike for his professional character and his public spirit.' The subject of New-England colonization, much canvassed everywhere among the Puritans, who were numerous in the part of the kingdom where he lived, was commended to his notice in a special form. Dorchester, near the British Channel, the principal town of the shire, furnished numbers of those who now made voyages to New England for fishing and trade; and they were often several months upon the coast without opportunity for religious worship or instruction. Mr. White interested himself with the ship-owners to establish a settlement where the mariners might have a home when not at sea, where supplies might be provided for them by farming and hunting, and where they might be brought under religious influThe result of the conferences was the formation of an unincorporated joint-stock association, under the name of the "Dorchester Adventurers," which collected a capital of three thousand pounds. ences. The Dorches The Dorchester company turned its attention to the spot on Cape Ann where now stands the town of Gloucester. It has been mentioned that the Council for ter company. New England, perpetually embarrassed by the oppugnation of the Virginia Company and the reasonable jealousy of Parliament, had recourse to a variety of expedients to realize the benefits vainly expected by its projectors. In carrying out one scheme, that of a division of 1 "Mr. John White, a famous Puritan divine, usually called the Patriarch of Dorchester. . . . . . He was a man of great gravity, presence, and influence in his party for several years." (Echard, History of England, 653.) |