Through the reigns of the Protestant King Edward VI and the Catholic Mary I, the Puritan movement –whether tolerated or suppressed – had continued to grow, especially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. Some Puritans favoured a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Others were content to remain within the structure of the national church but oppose Catholic and episcopal authority.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an uneasy peace prevailed within English religious life. The Queen, although Protestant, had indicated that she would not tolerate any demands for further reformation. On her death, her successor James I reinforced opposition to dissent and non-conformity. Sympathy for Puritan ideals, however, survived, with the movement encompassing not merely those who refused to conform to established rituals and ceremonies (nonconformists) but also those who believed that the Bible alone should be used as a source of guidance, that sermons were more important than the liturgy and that life should be a constant act of worship.
Moderate Puritans were generally deeply pious individuals who tried to balance a commitment to further reform with a duty to abide by ecclesiastical law. Puritan nonconformists, on the other hand, felt no such constaints – they would not tolerate the wearing of surplices, the sign of the cross at baptism, kneeling at the sacrament or the ‘churching’ (blessing) of women after childbirth.
Henry Greenwood, who became vicar of Hempstead towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign was, for most of his tenure, a nonconformist Puritan. He attended St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1564, graduating with a BA in 1568 and an MA in 1571, when he was ordained. From 1576 to 1596 he was the headmaster of Felsted School but resigned to take up his first cure at Hatfield Peverel. He then moved to Hempstead, where the right to present the living was held by the Mordaunt family of Wincelow Hall. Lestrange Mordaunt may well have chosen Greenwood because of his Puritan sympathies.
During most of Greenwood’’s life, he wore his nonconformist credentials very obviously. He referred to himself as a “preacher of the word” rather than a vicar. While at Hempstead, he was indicted at the archdeaconry court for not wearing a surplice and for refusing to read prayers on holy or festival days. His sermons (of which 13 editions were produced) reveal an intolerance of ritual and a Calvinist belief in predestination although, unlike Calvin, he did not see hell as merely allegorical.
Hell is the most lamentable and woful place of torment where (in regard of the extremity of torment imposed upon the damned) there shall be screeching and screeming, weeping, wayling and gnashing of teeth for evermore … where torment shall be upon torment, each torment ceaseless, endless, remediless, where the worme shall be immortal, cold, intolerable, stench indurable, fire unquenchable, darkness palpable, scourges of the devills terrible and screeching and screeming … there is howling and horror, sobbing and terror, where weeping helps not., and repentance boots not, where pain is killing, worme gnawing and fire consuming’.
Greenwood’s churchwardens, too, were regularly in trouble with the church authorities. In 1625, they were indicted for failing to provide ‘a fair cloth for the communion table’ and they continually refused to give notice of holy days or allow services to be held on these occasions. In addition, in 1632 they were not prepared to arrange for there to be singing in their churches on the anniversary of King Charles’s coronation day. The informant on at least one of these occasions, who must have been a conformist, was another Hempstead man, Robert Harte.
Intriguingly, towards the end of his life, Greenwood published a tract urging conformity with the established church. This late shift towards conformity was an unusual direction for a clergyman to take. There is no evidence that any pressure was brought to bear and it may be simply that, at the age of 89, he had grown weary of the struggle between the warring factions of the Church of England. However, whether he died, resigned or was replaced in 1634, it is significant that his successor – this time at the instigation of Robert Mordaunt – was another moderate Puritan.
Samuel Newton, another graduate of St John’s Cambridge who went on to serve as Vicar for almost 50 years, was also a medical practitioner. This may have helped him to survive in a turbulent period which saw, the Civil War, the execution of the King, the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration.
Newton was a moderate Puritan – which made him liable to trouble from at least two groups of parishioners: those who felt that they were being taken too far away from their nonconformist beliefs, and those who were generally hostile to religion or who just had better things to do with their Sundays.
Newton suffered more than his predecessor from the attentions of both these groups. It was fairly common, in the 17th century, for parishioners to leave bequests to their parish priest, often with the condition that he should preach at their funeral. These were usually monetary bequests of a few pounds or shillings but on occasion they could amount to quite sizeable holdings of land. However, Newton received no bequests from during the 1630s and early 1640s.
The nonconformists included the joiner John Turpin, who was a churchwarden in 1634, the year of Newton’s arrival. He does not seem to have been prepared to co-operate with Newton: the following year, he was ‘in the churchyard in service tyme upon Sunday and was so lowde there that he disturbed the minister when he was reading divine service so that he was forced to throw off the surplice and leave his reading and go out into the churchyard and fetch him in’. Another nonconformist, the husbandman Thomas Mosse, was indicted in June 1635 for working on Ascension Day.
According to M-M Egan, the troublemakers who plagued Newton included the “‘quarrelsome and profane labourer John Frogg, who was accused at separate times both of refusing to pay church rates and of not attending church; Anne Mastall and Elizabeth Duff who made social calls during divine service; and the inappropriately named John Church, who once tried to blame his absence from church on sickness but was able to make no excuses for other absences or when he and several others were caught drinking in his house during service time one Sunday. William Mallory, Nicholas Silvester and Thomas Haster, three other men who preferred a drink to attending divine service, were also disinterested in religion as opposed to men with conscientious objections to Puritanism.”
The board in St Andrews intriguingly records that the curate Thomas Ellis – one of three known to have served under Newton – was ‘ejected’ in 1662. Sadly we know nothing about Ellis but the date tends to suggest that he may have had stronly Puritan tendencies which did not endear him to the authorities after the end of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.