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cents have perished within these five years, and of these, some aged widows, aged men, and young maidens, etc. ;" others had been "grievously beaten with cudgels" in bridewell, and cast into a place there, called Little Ease, for refusing to attend their chapel-service. "Upon none," they continue, thus committed by the prelates, and dying in their prisons, "is any search or inquest suffered to pass, as by law in like case is provided."*

In another place the sufferers suggest their apprehension, that the bishops intended "to imprison them unto death, as they have done seventeen or eighteen others, in the same noisome gaols, within these six years."

They complain bitterly of the outrageous treatment to which they were exposed out of prison and in. Speaking of the bishop of London and " that whole lineage," they say: "Their unbridled slanders; their lawless privy-searches ; their violent breaking open and rifling our houses; their lamentable and barbarous usage of women and young children in these hostile assaults, and ever robbing and taking away whatsoever they think meet from us: . . their dealing this way towards us, is so woful, Right Honorable, as we may truly demand with grief of heart, whether the foreign enemy, or our own native countrymen, do possess and bear rule over us in our dear and native country! . . Bishop Bonner, Story, Weston, dealt not after this sort; for those whom they committed close, they brought them, in short space, openly into Smithfield, to end their misery, and to begin their never-ending joy; whereas Bishop Elmor [Aylmore], Doctor Stanhope, and Mr. Justice Young, with the rest of that persecuting and blood-thirsty faculty, will do neither of these.

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"There are many of us, by the mercies of God, still out

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of their hands: . we have as good warrant to reject the ordinances of Antichrist, and labor for the recovery of Christ's holy ordinances, as our fathers in Queen Mary's

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"Are we malefactors? Are we anywise undutiful to our Prince? Maintain we any errors? Let us, then, be judicially convicted thereof, and delivered to the civil authority. But let not these bloody men both accuse, condemn, and close murder us, after this sort; contrary to all law, equity, and conscience; where, alone, they are the plaintiff, the accusers, the judges, and the executioners of their most fearful barbarous tyranny! They should not, by the laws of the land, go any further, in cases of Religion, than their own Ecclesiastical Censures, and then refer us to the Civil Powers. Their forefathers, Gardener, Bonner, Story, dealt thus equally; and we crave but their equity. Oh, let her excellent Majesty our Sovereign, and your Wisdoms, consider and accord unto us this our just Petition. . .

"We crave for all of us, but liberty either to die openly, or to live openly in the land of our nativity. If we deserve death, it beseemeth the Magistrates of Justice not to see us closely murdered; . . if we be guiltless, we crave but the benefit of our innocency, that we may have peace to serve God and our Prince, in the place and sepulchres of our fathers.

"Thus protesting our innocency; complaining of violence and wrong; and crying for Justice on the behalf, and in the name of that Righteous Judge-the God of Equity and Justice, we continue our prayers unto Him for her Majesty, and your Honors."*

It was among these afflicted and tormented Christians that Barrowe, and Greenwood, and Penry suffered so long:

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one of whom described his own sufferings and those of his companions thus: "These bloody men (the ecclesiastical commissioners) will allow us neither meat, drink, fire, lodging; nor suffer any whose hearts the Lord would stir up for our relief, to have any access to us: by which means seventeen or eighteen have perished in the noisome gaols, within these six years; some of us had not one penny about us when we were sent to prison, nor anything to procure a maintenance for ourselves and families, but our handy labor and trades; by which means, not only we ourselves, but our families and children are undone and starved. ** That which we crave for us all, is the liberty to die openly, or live openly in the land of our nativity: if we deserve death, let us not be closely murthered, yea starved to death, with hunger and cold, and stifled in loathsome dungeons."

"Among those who perished in prison during this persecution," says Neal, "was one Mr. Roger Rippon, who, dying in Newgate, his fellow prisoners put this inscription upon his coffin :”

"This is the corpse of Roger Rippon, a servant of Christ, and her majesty's faithful subject, who is the last of sixteen or seventeen which that great enemy of God, the archbishop of Canterbury, [Whitgift] with his high commissioners, have murthered in Newgate, within these five years, manifestly for the testimony of Jesus Christ: his soul is now with the Lord, and his blood cried (crieth?) for speedy vengeance against that great enemy of the saints, and against Mr. Richard Young [a justice of the peace in London-a bishop's tool-] who, in this, and many the like points, hath abused his power for the upholding of the Romish antichrist, prelacy, and priesthood. He died A. D. 1592."*

* His. Pur. Vol. 1. p. 520; Hanbury, p. 90.

The houses of the suspected Separatists were broken open and ransacked in the night, without so much as a warrant for the deed; their property plundered; and themselves hurried to prison, and to death; for no other crime than that of meeting together, as did the primitive disciples, and "spending the whole day in prayer, expounding the Scriptures, and other religious exercises."

To cover the cruelty of their proceedings, the bishops accused the Separatists of seditious designs against the State. But nothing of this kind could ever be proved against them. They perseveringly protested their loyalty; and some of those who were publicly executed, (as we have seen) commended their sovereign to God with their expiring breath.*

* Hume intimates, (Vol. III. p. 58) that the "political speculations, and the principles of civil liberty," which the Puritans entertained," rendered them in a peculiar manner the objects of Elizabeth's aversion." It is not improbable that this politic princess perceived the tendency of Puritan principles, and particularly, of the Separatist's principles towards civil liberty; but after a somewhat careful examination of their history, I can discover no avowal of such opinions; nor practical demonstration of such principles. Barrowe and Greenwood were condemned "for disturbance of the State," but, at the time of their death, they gave such evidence of their loyalty to their queen, praying so earnestly for her long and prosperous reign, that Elizabeth is said to have repented that she had suffered them to be executed.

It was an artifice of her bishops, in order to cover their own cru. elty, to accuse these men of disloyalty. But history has lifted the veil, and shown the lawn of the bishops to be more deeply stained with the blood of these martyrs, than even the purple of the queen. It was, however, the policy of the Court to confound names and parties which were entirely distinct: viz., The advocates of civil liberty in the parliaments, and the advocates of religious liberty in the church. Such men as Peter Wentworth and attorney Morrice, in the House of Commons, were stigmatized as Puritans, and

Thus suffered the men who maintained most of the fundamental principles and important doctrines of modern Congregationalism.

They were men of deep-toned piety, of ardent zeal, of unflinching principle, and unconquerable courage. They were the most decided and uncompromising Puritans of their time. The more moderate, contrived to avoid the laws; but, these men would hold no parley with unscriptural requisitions. They would not, even in appearance, countenance the errors of the English Hierarchy. They stood fast in the liberty wherewith Christ himself had made them free. They appealed to the Word of God as the standard of their faith, as their rule of church government, and of religious practice. They aimed at primitive simplicity in their church polity: and in defence of this, they begged the privilege of confronting their adversaries; and declared their readiness to show their own church order "to be warranted by the Word of God, allowable by her Majesty's laws, and, in no way prejudicial to her sovereign power:"*** to disprove the public hierarchy, worship, and government, by such evidences of Scripture as their adversaries should not be able to withstand; protesting, that if they failed herein, they were not only willing to sustain

classed with Cartwright and Barrowe. This was done, that the bad names of the latter (bad only among bad men) might embarrass the efforts of the former, to throw off from Parliament the incubus of Elizabeth's tyranny, and to extract the poisonous fangs from the bishops' jaws. The nation had become accustomed to the persecution and imprisonment of the Puritans, and would be likely to submit more patiently to the incarceration of Wentworth, and the degradation and imprisonment of Morrice, if called Puritans. The parties thus identified by the policy of the Court, and by their own sufferings, were naturally drawn together, and ultimately became one,

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