Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-29198-3, 978-3-030-29199-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction (Tali Berner, Lucy Underwood)....Pages 1-39
Front Matter ....Pages 41-41
Jewish Children and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Illustrations (Tali Berner)....Pages 43-74
‘All things necessary for their saluation’? The Dedham Ministers and the ‘Puritan’ Baptism Debates (Anna French)....Pages 75-98
‘Children of the Light’: Childhood, Youth, and Dissent in Early Quakerism (Naomi Pullin)....Pages 99-126
Childhood, Youth and Denominational Identity: Church, Chapel and Home in the Long Eighteenth Century (Mary Clare Martin)....Pages 127-164
Front Matter ....Pages 165-165
Cross-Channel Conflict: The Challenges of Growing Up in Minority Calvinist Communities Across the Channel (Susan Broomhall)....Pages 167-189
A Web of Crosses and Mercies Interlaced: Breakdown and Consolidation of Family Patterns Amongst Loyalist Anglicans Under the Pressures of Civil War (Fiona McCall)....Pages 191-221
Childhood, Family and the Construction of English Catholic Histories of Persecution (Lucy Underwood)....Pages 223-253
Front Matter ....Pages 255-255
Early Modern Child Abduction in the Name of Religion (Joel F. Harrington)....Pages 257-274
Raising Children Across Religious Boundaries in the Dutch Revolt (Jesse Sadler)....Pages 275-298
When They Come of Age: Religious Conversion and Puberty in Fifteenth-Century Ashkenaz (Ahuva Liberles)....Pages 299-318
Conversion, Conscience, and Family Conflict in Early Modern England (Bernard Capp)....Pages 319-340
Conclusion (Tali Berner, Lucy Underwood)....Pages 341-352
Back Matter ....Pages 353-362

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD

Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe Edited by Tali Berner · Lucy Underwood

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood Series Editors George Rousseau University of Oxford UK Laurence Brockliss University of Oxford UK

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind to historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no historical series on children/childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the identity and attraction of the new discipline. Editorial Board Matthew Grenby (Newcastle) Colin Heywood (Nottingham) Heather Montgomery (Open) Hugh Morrison (Otago) Anja Müller (Siegen, Germany) Sïan Pooley (Magdalen, Oxford) Patrick Joseph Ryan (King’s University College at Western University, Canada) Lucy Underwood (Warwick) Karen Vallgårda (Copenhagen) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14586

Tali Berner  •  Lucy Underwood Editors

Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe

Editors Tali Berner Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel

Lucy Underwood University of Warwick Coventry, UK

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ISBN 978-3-030-29198-3    ISBN 978-3-030-29199-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Hebrew MS A4, folio 11v. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Introduction  1 Tali Berner and Lucy Underwood

Childhood, Religious Practice and Minority Status  41 Jewish Children and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Illustrations 43 Tali Berner ‘All things necessary for their saluation’? The Dedham Ministers and the ‘Puritan’ Baptism Debates 75 Anna French ‘Children of the Light’: Childhood, Youth, and Dissent in Early Quakerism 99 Naomi Pullin Childhood, Youth and Denominational Identity: Church, Chapel and Home in the Long Eighteenth Century127 Mary Clare Martin

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Contents

Family and Responses to Persecution 165 Cross-Channel Conflict: The Challenges of Growing Up in Minority Calvinist Communities Across the Channel167 Susan Broomhall A Web of Crosses and Mercies Interlaced: Breakdown and Consolidation of Family Patterns Amongst Loyalist Anglicans Under the Pressures of Civil War191 Fiona McCall Childhood, Family and the Construction of English Catholic Histories of Persecution223 Lucy Underwood Religious Division and the Family: Co-operation and Conflict 255 Early Modern Child Abduction in the Name of Religion257 Joel F. Harrington Raising Children Across Religious Boundaries in the Dutch Revolt275 Jesse Sadler When They Come of Age: Religious Conversion and Puberty in Fifteenth-Century Ashkenaz299 Ahuva Liberles Conversion, Conscience, and Family Conflict in Early Modern England319 Bernard Capp Conclusion341 Tali Berner and Lucy Underwood Index 353

Notes on Contributors

Tali  Berner  teaches at the Programme for the Research of Child and Youth Culture, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She is a historian of early modern Jewish history, interested, in particular, in the history of children and childhood and the family. Her book In Their Own Way: Children and Childhood in Early Modern Ashkenaz was published in 2018 by the Shazar Center publication in Hebrew. Susan Broomhall  is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia. Her research explores women and gender; emotions; science and knowledge practices; material culture; cultural contact and global encounters; and the heritage of the early modern world. She is completing Gender and the Dutch East India Company for Amsterdam University Press and Lettered Feelings: Emotions in the Correspondence of Catherine de’ Medici for Brill. Her next projects include Gender and Agency in Jesuit Circulations Across East Asia, 1580–1650 for ARC Humanities Press and a co-authored monograph, with Carolyn James and Lisa Mansfield, entitled Gendering the Italian Wars. Bernard  Capp is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications on early modern history include When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (2003) and The Ties that Bind: Siblings, Family and Society in Early Modern England (2018). He is researching a book on Barbary corsairs and their English slaves.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Anna French  is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Liverpool, UK. She is an author of Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (2015), a number of articles and chapters on early modern children, and editor of Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (2019). She is general secretary of the European Reformation Research Group and director of the Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She is working on a project which explores early modern perceptions of the early lifecycle, and of the journeys people experienced between conception (as far as it was understood) and infancy. Joel  F.  Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University (USA). He has published seven books on the history of pre-­ modern Germany, including The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honour and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (2013) and The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (2009). He is working on a study of the Hessian mercenary Hans Staden, who in 1557 published his best-selling account of 9 months among the cannibalistic Tupinambá of Brazil. Ahuva Liberles  is a visiting research fellow in the History Department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. She is in the final stages of her doctoral research, ‘On the Threshold of Baptism: Jews, Christians and Religious Conversion in Late Medieval Regensburg (1450–1479)’ written in the Jewish History Department, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and under the supervision of Professor Israel Yuval and Dr Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner. Since 2015 she has held a Doctoral Scholarship, from the Center for the Study of Conversion and InterReligious Encounters (I-CORE), Ben Gurion University (BGU), Beer Sheva and is a lecturer for History and Education at the David Yellin Academic College of Jerusalem. Mary Clare Martin  is principal lecturer, research lead and head of the Centre for the Study of Play and Recreation at the University of Greenwich, UK.  Her research interests are in the history of children, young people and education, including religion, illness and health, youth movements, and play and recreation. She also researches aspects of the history of women’s suffrage and political organisations from 1880 to 1940. She is co-founding director of the Children’s History Society, UK, and co-convenes the Life-Cycles and Education in the Long

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Eighteenth Century seminars at the Institute of Historical Research, London. She teaches the history of childhood, youth and education at undergraduate and post-graduate level. Fiona McCall  is an early modern historian specialising in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious and social history. Her work focuses on anti-clericalism, religious conflict, family and memory within parishes during and after the English Civil War and interregnum. She is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth and Departmental Lecturer in Local and Social History, University of Oxford Department of Continuing Education, UK. She is the author of Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013). Naomi Pullin  is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism (2018) and has published a number of articles and book chapters on different aspects of early Quaker culture and women’s involvement in international religious communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is developing a new research project on female incivility in the British Atlantic between 1660 and 1775, which is supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Jesse Sadler  is a lecturer at Loyola Marymount University (USA). He is an early modern historian interested in the social and familial basis of politics, religion and trade. He received a Ph.D. in European History from UCLA, in 2015. He has previously published articles on intellectual history and popular politics, including ‘News as a Path to Independence: Merchant Correspondence and the Exchange of News during the Dutch Revolt’ in the volume In Praise of Ordinary People: Early Modern England and the Dutch Republic (2013) edited by Margaret Jacob and Catherine Secretan.1 Lucy Underwood  is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-­ 1  Sadler, Jesse. 2013. “News as a Path to Independence: Merchant Correspondence and the Exchange of News During the Dutch Revolt.” In In Praise of Ordinary People: Early Modern England and the Dutch Republic, edited by Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan, 65–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Reformation England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), ‘Persuading the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects from Their Allegiance: Treason, Reconciliation and Confessional Identity in Elizabethan England’, Historical Research 89:244 (2016); ‘The State, Childhood and Religious Dissent’ in H. Crawforth and S. Lewis (eds.) Family Politics in Early Modern Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); ‘Sion and Elizium: National Identity, Religion and Allegiance in Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune’ Renaissance and Reformation 41:2 (2018). She is the editor for the Renaissance (1450–1650) volume of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Youth (forthcoming). She is researching a project on English Catholic constructions of national identity.

List of Figures

Jewish Children and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Illustrations Fig. 1 Minhagim, Venice 1600, 21b 44 Fig. 2 Minhagim, Venice 1600, 63b 52 Fig. 3 Paul Christian Kirchner. Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche. Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724? Next to page 82 53 Fig. 4 Recueil de coutumes et régles pour fixer les fêtes du calendrier hébreu BnF heb 586 22r. (Bibliothèque nationale de France https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53014834z.r=h%C3 %A9breu%20,586?rk=21,459;2)55 Fig. 5 Minhagim, Venice 1600, 67b 56 Fig. 6 Paul Christian Kirchner. Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche. Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724?, next to page 148 57 Fig. 7 Nuernberg cod. 7058 fol. 43v-44r (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg) 58 Fig. 8 Bernard Picart. (Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam)60 Fig. 9 Bernard Picart. (Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam)62 Fig. 10 Minhagim, Venice 1600 10b 63 Fig. 11 Paul Christian Kirchner. Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche. Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724? next to page 132 64

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List of Tables

Childhood, Family and the Construction of English Catholic Histories of Persecution Table 1 Table 2

Answers to question ‘Whether he has ever suffered anything for the faith?’ 231 Types of persecution 232

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Introduction Tali Berner and Lucy Underwood

Bridget Goulding, born in 1599 in Protestant England, was the daughter of Catholic parents. But according to an account of her childhood apparently from her recollections, this did not mean she had been a Catholic all her life. At 13, Bridget ‘began to be troubled, seeing such difference of religions, and prayed earnestly unto God with tears, that if she were not in the right, He would bring her to it’. Soon after, she went to live with her Catholic grandmother; but her grandmother ‘seeing her so young and wild… durst not trust her to come unto priests’, whose presence in the house was illegal. Then, ‘upon report of pursuivants coming’ one day, her father ‘gave her two books to hide’: deducing that they were Catholic works, Bridget read them and resolved her doubts. She persuaded an ‘old blind woman’ living in the house to bring her to a priest, who could r­itually ‘reconcile’ her to the Catholic Church, and ‘came into the Church, even before her grandmother knew it’.1  A.  Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran: at St. Monica’s in Louvain (now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon) vol.1 1548–1625, vol.2 1625–44 (Edinburgh: Sands & co., 1904), vol.1 p. 198–9. 1

T. Berner (*) Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel L. Underwood (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_1

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This example captures several of the issues which make the study of religious division and conflict important to the study of early modern childhood, and vice verse. There is the question of inculturation, of how religious doctrines and practice could be transmitted to children, made more complicated by proscription: it was dangerous for all concerned to let children be party to crimes. Bridget had internalised the religious culture around her, with her anxious concern to be ‘in the right’ and to achieve salvation—but she was also isolated from it, lacking confessional identity until she was at least 13. Despite—or perhaps because of—this early confusion, Bridget’s religious experience is characterised by her agency. The narrative emphasises her autonomy: her individual prayer to God, her reading to reach an intellectual decision about religion, and her final reconciliation without the knowledge of her Catholic parent figures. Finally, there is the tantalising sense of almost, but not quite, hearing Bridget’s voice in this account which must have come from her, but is not hers. These problems of inculturation, proscription, agency and access to children’s experiences are ones which recur across confessional, geographic and chronological divides. The historiography of religion in post-Reformation Europe has, in recent years, seen the development, adaptation and appropriation of theories of confessionalisation, to make them useful ways of understanding the lived experience of Europe’s peoples as well as the strategies of its rulers.2 Histories of religious conflict have been balanced by studies of coexistence and toleration—its emergence in practice as much as the development of toleration as theory and principle.3 Collections aimed at comparing ­different territories and confessional communities have also helped to integrate historiography across national boundaries.4 2  See Dagmar Freist’s use of this interpretation in ‘Crossing religious borders: the experience of religious difference and its impact on mixed marriages in eighteenth-century Germany’, in C.  Scott Dixon, D.  Freist and M.  Greengrass (eds.), Living with religious diversity in early modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 202–223 at pp. 204–7; K. von Greyerz, trans. T.  Dunlap, Religion and Culture in early modern Europe 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) pp. 40–45. 3  For example, Scott Dixon et al. Living with religious diversity; A.M. Walsham, Charitable Hatred: tolerance and intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); H. Louthan et al. (eds.) Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating religious difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011). 4  Examples include C. Gribben & R.S. Spurlock (eds) Puritans and Catholics in the TransAtlantic World 1600–1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); B. Kaplan, B. Moore, H. van Nierop, J. Pollmann (eds.), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the

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The history of childhood and youth has seen comparable developments. Diachronic and transnational perspectives have been attempted, through collections united by thematic focus.5 Historians have investigated childhood and/or youth in conjunction with gender, history of emotion, the history of medicine, mediaeval kingship, art history and studies of death and commemoration.6 The point is not only that all these approaches are relevant to the study of childhood in the past, but that studying children, childhood and youth can illumine our understanding of these diverse subjects.7 Historians of early modern religion have not ignored the potential of childhood studies. Some earlier works, such as Johann P.  Sommerville’s and Carmen Luke’s, working within a paradigm of discontinuity and profound change in perceptions and experience of childhood, proposed the theological changes of Protestantism as the causes of posited changes in childhood.8 Yet subsequent research on both the early modern and mediaeval periods has not only replaced a hermeneutic of discontinuity with one of continuity, but has undermined the extent to which the trends identified by Luke or Sommerville can be regarded as peculiar to, or dependent on, Protestantism.9 Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Charles H. Parker, ‘Paying for the privilege: the management of public order and religious pluralism in two early modern societies’ in Journal of World History 17:3 (2006), pp. 267–296. 5  For example, K. Barclay, K. Reynolds, C. Rawnsley (eds.) Death, Emotion and Childhood in Pre-Modern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); M. Muravyeva and R.M. Toivo (eds.), Parricide and Violence Against Parents throughout History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6  Naomi J.  Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds.) Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); K.  Moncrief (ed.), Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); G.E.  Coolidge, (ed.) The Formation of the Child in Early Modern Spain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); C.D. Fletcher Richard II: Manhood, Youth and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); M.K. Averett (ed.), The Early Modern Child in Art and History (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015); Barclay et al. Death, Emotion and Childhood; H. Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7  Cf some of Barclay’s and Reynolds’ remarks in ‘Introduction: Small Graves: Histories of Childhood, Death and Emotion’ in Barclay et al. Death, Emotion and Childhood pp. 1–24. 8  C.J. Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992); C.  Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: the discourse on childhood (New York: SUNY Press, 1989). 9  See, for example, A. Classen (ed.) Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the results of a paradigm shift in the history of mentality (Berlin, 2005); L. Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); K. Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A youth confraternity in Florence,

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This is not to say that the profound social changes which occurred during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not affect childhood and children—and certainly our access to evidence concerning them. The Protestant and Catholic Reformations sharpened the existing debate regarding humanism, education and the rejection of the scholastic system. All three stressed the importance of the education of young children, although, of course, they each had a different understanding of what that education should include. For both Protestant and Catholic leaders, the purpose of literacy and education was to create disciplined believers, rather than career opportunities. In a way, this worked in favour of girls, who were taught so they could become better wives and mothers. This new emphasis on domestic education as well as formal schooling, slowly changed the image of childhood to be more identified with a time of formal, structured, learning. This change may have been more prevalent among religious minorities; Jews, who had held the ideal of universal education since late antiquity, materialised it by offering community funded education which could include the poor. As early as 1536, upon embracing Calvinism, Geneva made elementary school mandatory.10 The advent of print changed the way children were educated, including how they encountered religion—for example in the rise and spread of printed catechisms and other genres of religious instruction.11 The printing press facilitated reproduction not only of the written word, but also images; printed material included not only books, but also wall posters, charts, images and tables that could be hung in houses and classrooms. Thus print offered children more than books, and affected their education in multiple ways. The reality of greatly increased religious plurality may partly explain the preoccupation with spiritual autonomy and claiming of individual religious identity evident in some early modern religious groups; a phenom1411–1785 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); K.  Carter, Creating Catholics: catechism and primary education in early modern france (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011); O. Logan, ‘Counter-Reformatory theories of upbringing in Italy’, in D.  Wood (ed.) The Church and childhood (Studies in Church History 31) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 275–284. 10  A.  Bellavitis, ‘Education’ in Cavallo, Sandra, and Silvia Evangelisti, eds. A Cultural History of Childhood and Family. Vol. 3, A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age. (Oxford: Berg, 2010) 11  Carter, Creating Catholics; I. Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and catechising in England c.1520–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); G. Scott, ‘The poor man’s catechism’, Recusant History 27:3 (2005), pp. 373–82.

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enon that was not invented in the early modern era, but did perhaps receive greater emphasis.12 Although studies of childhood in the age of Reformations have included religion, religious minorities are more rarely looked at, and general histories have frequently failed to include them in their analyses.13 Some monographs have dealt with childhood and youth in relation to religious minorities and religious conflict, covering a specific time, place and community.14 This book aims to contribute to our understanding of religious division and the development of confessional culture through looking at their impact on childhood, youth and family relations in different religious groups and diverse times and places. By bringing together these studies, we hope that the collection as a whole will enable comparisons, illuminating common problems and experiences as well as those that were peculiar to particular confessions and situations; and both similarity and difference in responses to the challenges of trans-generational survival. The articles in this volume discuss children and childhood in the context of the family. Many see both fields—the history of the family and the history of childhood—as overlapping, or even interchangeable. This is noted in projects such as the six volumes of E.  Foyster and J.  Marten, A Cultural History of Childhood and Family. These fields have much in common in terms of topics, sources and, of course, the shared interest in children. They also share a similar historiography: 12  A.  Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013), pp. 428–41; D.B. Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) pp.  33–60; N.  Pettit, The Heart Prepared: grace and conversion in puritan spiritual life (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1966) pp.  190–7; L. Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity and autobiography at the English colleges of Rome and Valladolid 1592–1685’ in Historical Journal 55:2 (2012) 349–74; B.B. Diefendorf, ‘Give us back our children: patriarchal authority and parental consent to religious vocation in early counter-Reformation France’ The Journal of Modern History 68:2 (1996), pp. 265–307. 13  For example, it seems from the index that Hugh Cunningham fails to mention Jews, Huguenots, Calvinists, and Anabaptists, (there are a few references to puritans): H. Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (Harlow & New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2005). The index to Cavallo & Evangelisti, A Cultural History of Childhood and Family refers to Jews, and puritanism, with one reference to Quakers. 14  T. Berner, In Their Own Way: children and childhood in early modern Ashkenaz, (Zalman Shazar Center, Jerusalem [in Hebrew], 2017); A.  French, Children of Wrath; Possession, prophecy and the young (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) L.  Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); R.  Lieberman, L.  Bernfeld, H.  Davidson, C.  Galasso, Cristina & D.  Graizbord, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010).

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both struggle with the challenges of studying universal, ahistoric topics over the course of time, without falling into generalisations and dogmas. The study of family is deeply rooted in demographic and quantitative studies. Similar to the history of childhood, it emerged as a field of historical research with the publication of a single book—L. Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500–1800, and in attempts that followed to refute Stone’s thesis.15 This vibrant field of study has developed in many directions. Studies such as H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds) The Family in Early Modern England and M.R. Forster and B.J. Kaplan (eds) Piety & Family in Early Modern Europe demonstrate the progression of the field and its diversity of topics and approaches. While the study of the family and the study of children are interconnected, they are still two distinct fields of historical inquiry. The topic of family is perhaps more amorphous than that of children, more difficult to define and set boundaries to; studies of the family must continually define and redefine what constitutes a family. Even when discussing children, the history of the family is usually written from the perspective of adults, due to the greater prevalence of available data and sources, while historians of children and childhood struggle more to uncover the perspectives of children. The idea of the family, as well as the dynamics of specific families, is introduced in this volume in various ways. The image of the family and attempts to maintain this image in the face of civil war stands at the centre of Fiona McCall’s article. The challenges presented by religious changes and divergence in the paths of families stands at the centre of other articles. Some essays demonstrate the fragility of the early modern family in the face of religious change: Joel Harrington and Ahuva Liberles both address the implications for families of divided religious beliefs. Other articles stress the importance of family ties in maintaining religious belief and creating community. Lucy Underwood’s article recounts family memories of persecution and how those memories became part of the consciousness of relatives who had not directly experienced them, while Susan Broomhall shows how familial ties were preserved in conditions of exile. 15  For further discussion of the history of the field: H.  Berry and E.  Foyster (eds) The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–8; T.K.  Hareven & A.  Plakans (eds.) Family History at the Crossroads: A “Journal of Family History” Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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Generally speaking, ‘children’ is understood both chronologically, to mean pre-adult people, but also in relational terms—meaning sons and daughters. Yet Liberles’ article highlights the distinction between them: while the children she discusses lost their right of inheritance, negating their status as offspring, they remained children in the chronological sense. Since Philippe Ariès presented his theory regarding lack of parental love in the Middle Ages, much scholarly effort has been dedicated to studying questions of affection and emotions within the family framework. While many of the articles in this volume do relate to the question of parental love, they depart from the Ariès paradigm by examining multiple aspects of the ties that bind or break families. All over early modern Europe, young people were faced with the dilemma of whether to follow their own consciences and deep religious convictions, or to remain loyal to their families, respect and obey their parents. Bernard Capp’s and Naomi Pullin’s articles portray the stories of some of these young people, illustrating the complexities of parent-child relations. While scholars have concentrated on the important connection between parents and children, material in this volume points to the significance of other familial ties. Jesse Sadler’s and Harrington’s chapters demonstrate the ways in which parents were only one factor in the upbringing of children. Whether as a result of the death of a parent, or due to pro-active and religiously driven extended family members, kin had much influence on the religious upbringing of children. Sadler’s and Capp’s articles also highlight a much-neglected relationship—ties between siblings, which could be of great importance in early modern families.

The Scope of This Volume The essays in this book range over a broad time-frame, from the 1420s to c.1800, a longue durèe approach that bridges the supposed chasms of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Of course, direct juxtaposing of practices and attitudes 400 years apart, without consideration of the many changing variables, would be of limited usefulness, but sensitive comparisons could be fruitful in exploring both continuity and change across several centuries. Mary Clare Martin’s chapter takes the history of Dissenting communities in England up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the beginnings of a society in which religious plurality was a policy, rather than simply a fact, and yet sectarian divisions still influenced children’s upbringing to a considerable degree. Liberles’ article reaches back into the late mediaeval period, to remind us that religious conflict in

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Western Europe did not arrive with the Reformation, and also offers a point of comparison for the questions of agency and autonomy which have been important in studies of early modern childhood and youth.16 Broomhall’s and Sadler’s chapters look at French and Dutch communities during the era of confessional wars, before the 1598 Edict of Nantes created a modus vivendi in France that would last until 1685, and the Peace of Westphalia acknowledged the territorial boundaries that confessional divisions had wrought in the Low Countries and Germany; Harrington takes a longer chronological approach, looking at how religious pluralism played out within families once it was an accepted part of Europe’s international order, but still problematic from the viewpoint of established churches in various confessional states. Anna French discusses the impact of puritan ideas on English Protestantism during the pre-civil wars era, when puritanism could be, depending on time, place and the individual ‘puritans’ concerned, a proto-separatist religious minority or a reforming movement within the Church of England. Pullin’s and Capp’s chapters look at Dissent in England after the Restoration, when it was clear to the descendants of the puritans that the Church of England would never be reformed according to their definition, and separatism began to re-shape their experience of conversion, religion and family, and attitudes to the majority religion. For English Catholics, though their fortunes and aspirations fluctuated with changes in the English polity (secular and religious), their situation as a minority group built around separatism from the established religion and more or less proscribed, remained the base line and became core to identity. As will be seen, the problems, challenges and pre-occupations of religious minorities and the experience of childhood and family within them were affected by these developments; and yet in other ways remained constant. Religious division was not new to Europe in the early modern era, but there can be little doubt that the age of Reformations greatly increased the experience of religious division and religious plurality across the continent. Rulers and peoples alike struggled to find ways of living with the new realities of multiple Christian confessions, their responses fluctuating from determined repression aimed at creating uniformity, containment and restriction, and (rarely) grudging acceptance of minorities through some degree of toleration. In every polity in Europe, there were groups and 16  P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: formative experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent.

 INTRODUCTION 

9

communities that could be called ‘religious minorities’. They existed in varying relations to the majority religion and state, and of course the same confession could be the majority religion in one territory, repressed in another, and existing under restrictions in another. This introduction will outline the historical origins and broad circumstances of the various minority groups with which the chapters in this book deal. This collection contains two articles concerned with children in late Mediaeval and Early Modern Jewish communities in German speaking lands. Jews had been living in these areas (to which they referred as Ashkenaz), since Late Antiquity, but conditions there had deteriorated steadily during the late Middle Ages. During this period there were dramatic changes in the configuration of the map of Western Europe. By the late fifteenth century there were almost no Jewish communities remaining. Following the expulsion of the Jews from England (1290), France (1306) and Spain (1492), Jews were expelled from many, if not most major German towns.17 Overall, it is estimated that, 100,000 Jews were forced to leave Western Europe in the course of the fifteenth century.18 In the wake of the church councils held in Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431– 1449), which caused further hostility in the attitude of the church towards Jews, other communities suffered from persecutions and t­ emporary expulsions. This is the background to Ahuva Liberles’ article, which discusses the fate of children captured and converted to Christianity in the midst of such persecutions. The reformation of parts of German lands did not improve the status of the Jews; reformed Saxony and Hesse, for example, passed anti-Jewish legislation in the 1530s. The centre of Jewish life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was concentrated mostly in Eastern and Southern Europe. Yet, already in the sixteenth century, with the rule of Charles V, the situation was changing in favour of the Jews. Political changes were accompanied by a renewed interest in the Jews and their traditions, as discussed in Tali Berner’s article. The seventeenth century 17  Besides the persecutions of the Jews of Vienna in 1420–1421 (The Vienna gezerah) the most noticeable expulsions are: Cologne (1424), Saxony (1432), Speyer (1435), Breslau (1453), Regensburg (1515). In the few remaining urban Jewish communities, such as Frankfurt am Main, Jews were confined to the small living quarters. For a history of Jews in mediaeval Germany: M. Breuer, “The Jewish Middle Ages”, M. A. Meyer (ed.), GermanJewish History in Modern Times, vol I: Tradition and Enlightenment, 1600–1780. (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 7–77. 18  N. Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An alternative history of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015), p. 2.

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witnessed a dramatic return of Jews to England, some areas in France and the establishment of Jewish communities in cities that had not previously had significant Jewish populations, such as Hamburg, Amsterdam and others in the Low Countries. This was followed by the reestablishment of some of the communities in German lands and a quick flourish of others in Western Europe, fostered by the stream of refugees from the 30 Years War and the massacre of Polish Jews in 1648–1649. These dramatic changes are strongly tied to the religious changes in these countries and the acceptance of the Jews as a minority among other religious minorities.19 These growing communities were quick to establish new self-­ governing institutions, schools, charity societies and, relevant to Berner’s article, printing houses, which answered the growing demand for printed material for the less educated parts of society.20 Several of our chapters focus on groups in England which were Protestant in a Protestant state, but alienated from the form of Protestantism established there. Chapters by French, Pullin, Capp and Martin engage with a history of Protestant dissent from the beliefs and practices of the Established Church from Elizabethan ministers disputing prescribed rituals, to the distinct confessional denominations to which the chapel-goers of the late Hanoverian period belonged, and which in many ways saw themselves as the puritans’ heirs. ‘Puritan’ is probably the most difficult group to define, and complicates the definition of a ‘religious minority’. On the one hand, puritanism cannot be pinned down to a definite set of beliefs, nor characterised by separation from the Established Church. ‘Puritan’ was a term imposed from the outside: those of whom it was used might describe themselves simply as ‘godly’—that is, only behaving as all Protestants should, not adhering to some different confession. Or they might reject the accusation while accepting the concept (much as Protestants refuting accusations that they were ‘papist’ did not deny the existence of Catholicism, just its application to themselves). Arguably, ‘puritans’ differed from separatist religious minorities in that they intended to reform the established Church, not to replace or rival it. Puritanism was, as the title of Patrick Collinson’s seminal The Elizabethan

 Breuer, “The Jewish Middle Ages”, pp. 75–77.  For an overview of the cultural and daily life of German Jews: R.  Liberlis, ‘On the threshold of modernity: 1618–1780’, in M.  Kaplan (ed.) Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 9–92. 19 20

 INTRODUCTION 

11

Puritan Movement proposed, a movement rather than a confession.21 It did not see the established Church as a false Church—but worried about its potential to be so. The people often called ‘puritans’ did not leave the Church of England en masse, but their remaining in it depended on the possibility of opting out of some of its practices. Hence French’s chapter focuses on how puritan ideas influenced mainstream Protestantism, how their anxieties over the baptism of children ironically ensured its continued centrality, rather than attempting to identify and then examine a ringfenced group called ‘puritans’. On the other hand, when people perceived a distinct concatenation of beliefs and religious practices at odds with the official Prayer Book and church structure, and certain people who were particularly committed to them, it was not an optical illusion. If nobody called herself or himself a puritan, people who others called puritans did use the term ‘godly’ to refer to preachers, individuals and networks they approved of. And these ‘godly’ Protestants rejected some practices of the Established Church; they encouraged each other to marry within ‘godly’ circles in order to raise godly children—something which would encourage the emergence of a self-conscious minority through household homogeneity as defined against the ‘ungodly’ majority; and they were sometimes liable to some form of penalty for challenging the Established Church. In this sense, puritans were always a potential religious minority, which even in the Elizabethan period was acquiring some of the habits of language and thought of a self-perceived persecuted community. By the 1620s and 1630s, the potential for separatism was being realised, with ministers going to exile in Holland, and groups of ‘godly’ setting up colonies in the Americas, where the Book of Common Prayer would have no place in their worship; this was partly because the Established Church was becoming more sympathetic to its conservative elements, reducing godly hopes of influencing it. The civil wars between Charles I and his parliament, resulting in the execution of the king in 1649 and a succession of republican governments until the restoration of his son, Charles II, in 1660, were in a sense the puritans’ golden opportunity: they could control parliament and church, and complete the Reformation at last. Of course, the years 1640–1660 proved more complicated than this, and, without the controlling hand of the episcopal, monarchical Church of England, saw the emergence and competition of myriad forms of broadly Protestant Christianity; Oliver Cromwell, ruling as Lord Protector from 1653–1658,  See P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967).

21

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decided to tolerate most of them while denying any of them supremacy. The hopes of the 1640s, that this long-awaited triumph of the godly would herald the 1000-year rule of Christ and his saints, did not materialise. Arguably, the Restoration and the religious settlement of 1662 was when the puritan movement to reform the Church of England was buried, and when those who held puritan beliefs decided that it was or had become a false church, and hence salvation must lie outside it. Their history became that of the ‘non-conformists’ or dissenters.22 In Charles II’s reign, Protestant dissenters were expelled from any posts they held in the Church of England; they could be fined for holding illegal conventicles, and were sometimes imprisoned. From 1672, and the king’s Declaration of Indulgence, licenced places of worship were allowed them; in 1685, the Catholic James II decreed toleration for all forms of Christianity, but his attempts to get this enshrined in statute law resulted in his deposition in 1688–9.23 In 1689, the ‘Toleration Act’ gave Protestant non-conformists most of what James had offered them, while excluding Catholics from any legal concession. At the end of the eighteenth century, the position of Protestant nonconformists was that they had legal freedom of worship. They were still excluded from civic office, with the exception of seats in Parliament, by the Test and Corporation Acts (1673) unless they would receive the Anglican Communion; but a custom of passing annual Indemnity Acts allowed Dissenters in practice to avoid most of the restrictions caused by these laws, which were repealed in 1828.24 The ‘Society of Friends’, known as Quakers, first emerged late in the Interregnum. The Friends were one of the few groups (Catholics and adherents of the Book of Common Prayer being two others) to whom Oliver Cromwell did not extend toleration; and the Restoration government was no friendlier. During their first two or three generations, the Quakers were a marginal 22  For puritanism, see J.  Coffey and P.C.H.  Lim (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially J.  Craig, ‘The growth of English puritanism’, pp.  34–37; A.  Milton ‘Puritanism and the continental Reformed churches’, pp. 109–126; F.J. Bremer, ‘The puritan experiment in New England, 1630–1660’, pp. 127–142; P. Lake, ‘The historiography of puritanism’, pp. 346–71. 23  M.R.  Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3 vols., 1978) vol.I pp. 221–7, 247–49. 24  Watts, The Dissenters vol.I pp. 263–7, 482–90; R.W. Davis, ‘The strategy of “Dissent” in the repeal campgain, 1820–1828’ in Journal of Modern History 38:4 (Dec., 1966), pp. 374– 393; K.R.M. Short, ‘The English indemnity Acts 1726–1867’, Church History 42:3 (1973) pp. 366–376.

 INTRODUCTION 

13

and heavily disapproved of group. There were never lethal laws against them, but they were often imprisoned, fined or subjected to other penalties. Prosecution of Quakers was often linked to their rejection of some civil requirements, such as swearing oaths. During the reign of James II, Quaker leader William Penn supported the king’s plans for toleration, and consequently had to work hard regain the favour of William III and Mary after James’ overthrow. By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, the Quakers had gained freedom of worship through the Toleration Act, though they were still barred from public office, and they had been allowed to found colonies in North America (notably Pennsylvania, in 1681). Many Quakers also became prominent, successful businessmen and merchants during the eighteenth century, with several mercantile dynasties emerging (including the Cadburys, Rowntrees, Barclays and Lloyds). Although the eighteenth century has been nominated the ‘Quietist’ period in Quakerism in contrast to its early radical fervour, it was also an era of missionary expansion around the Atlantic world, including travelling and preaching by women ministers and missionaries.25 By contrast to the puritans, Catholics were unequivocally a proscribed minority in England after 1559, who regarded the Established Church as a false one; and while their fortunes varied considerably over the next 200 years, according to domestic and international politics, this basic fact remained constant. Separatism was also, from early on, a defining feature of English Catholicism—which is not to say all Catholics practised it all the time; outward conformity was frequently practised and often explicitly defended, but the persistence of recusancy (the conscientious, and illegal, refusal to attend services of the Church of England) remained fundamental to the persistence of Catholicism. Catholic worship was banned in 1559, after the accession of Elizabeth I, who also reinstated the Royal Supremacy over the Church of England. By the 1580s, penalties had grown more stringent, and more often enforced. Recusants were liable for heavy fines, and hearing or saying Mass carried fines and imprisonment. It was defined as treason (and therefore a capital offence) to convert to Catholicism; also for an Englishman ordained as a Catholic priest since 1559 to enter the country, and a capital felony to harbour such a priest. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, about 130 priests and 60 laypeople had been 25  R.C.  Allen, ‘Restoration Quakerism, 166–1691’ and R.  Rogers Healey, ‘Quietist Quakerism, 1691-c.1805’ in S.W. Angell & P. Dandelion (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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executed; there were several more in James I’s reign, and renewed executions during the parliamentarian ascendancy in the civil wars. The last executions of Catholics occurred during the hysteria of the ‘Popish Plot’ (1678–81), a non-existent conspiracy supposedly to kill the king and overthrow Protestantism. Thereafter, only financial penalties and imprisonment were enforced, until the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778–92 gave Catholics limited rights to worship; the penal laws were lifted in 1829.26 The creation of a Catholic majority and Protestant (Huguenot) minority in France was, rather than the state-initiated religious change(s) seen in England, a history of civil war. When it first emerged during the 1540s, Calvinist Protestantism was proscribed, with those convicted of ‘heresy’ liable to be executed. However, due in part to the patronage and protection of some powerful nobles, Calvinism grew very strong in some cities and regions. In 1562, the Regent (Catherine de Medici) issued an edict of toleration; however, refusal by militant Catholic factions to accept it prompted the Protestant Huguenots to resort to war. The ‘Wars of Religion’ continued, on and off, until 1629; various peace settlements allowed the Huguenots greater or lesser licence to worship, often in lands belonging to Huguenot nobles, or particular towns the Huguenots had taken over. Crowd violence was committed by both sides during the wars, and in particular several thousand Huguenots were murdered in the massacres on and following St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) 1572, in Paris and other cities. Outside protected areas, or towns which they held, Huguenots were both a proscribed minority, and adherents of a military enemy.27 In 1598, Henry IV—who had converted to Catholicism to secure his accession—enforced a settlement, the Edict of Nantes. This, remarkably, gave Huguenots a legal right to worship according to their creed—although only in certain towns and locations, and they were not allowed to proselytise. They were permitted to control certain towns and fortresses for a limited period, and although all Frenchmen were obliged to pay tithes to the Catholic Church, in theory the King agreed to com26  There is a wide literature on English Catholicism, but general overviews are scarce. They include J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975); M.A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basing stoke: Macmillan, 1998). A.M. Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, conformity and confessional polemic in early modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1993) is the seminal work on outward conformity. 27  M. Prestwich, ‘Calvinism in France, 1555–1629’ in M. Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 71–107; A.A. Tulchin, ‘The Michelade in Nîmes, 1567’ in French Historical Studies 29:1 (2006), 1–36.

 INTRODUCTION 

15

pensate the members of permitted Huguenot congregations; Huguenots were not officially barred from holding any public office. The Nantes dispensation, therefore, allowed Protestants a legal existence in France and enabled them to establish a national organisation for the governance and financing of their church. The provisions of the Edict of Nantes were, however, progressively eroded, especially after 1659, until in 1685 Louis XIV revoked it.28 After the Revocation, Huguenot worship was no longer allowed in France; many Huguenots, pastors and others, fled France—illegally, as the royal authorities had forbidden emigration. Many others converted under pressure. Those who subsequently dissented from Catholicism could be sent to the galleys or prison, and their property confiscated; leaders—preachers or ‘prophets’—could be executed, as were 70 of them up until 1700. In 1702–4, resentment at persecution prompted the Camisard rebellion in the Cévennes and Languedoc; it was eventually put down, but fear of further rebellion may have limited government persecution thereafter. French Protestantism survived, through outward conformity and clandestine practice, until toleration was decreed in 1787.29 In the Netherlands, resentment at the persecution of emergent Protestantism combined with the desires of local princes and provinces for greater self-determination to produce the Dutch Revolt, in which a number of the provinces engaged in a revolt against their hereditary overlords, the Habsburg monarchs who also then kings of Spain. The northern, Protestant United Provinces were eventually recognised, in 1648, as the Dutch Republic, while the southern, Catholic provinces were remained in Habsburg control, and were referred to as the Spanish Netherlands. When Protestant—in this case Calvinist—rule was established in the northern Netherlands, Catholicism was proscribed. The law allowed private freedom of conscience, so that individuals could identify themselves as Catholics, and did not require membership of the official Reformed Church—but Catholic worship was illegal. During the seventeenth century, Catholics developed ‘hidden’ churches housed within officially private dwellings, regularly paying ‘recognition money’ for the authorities not to raid and shut them down. In episodes of more severe repression, Catholic priests were sometimes arrested, imprisoned and banished, but 28  E. Labrousse, ‘Calvinism in France, 1598–1685’ in Prestwich, International Calvinism p. 285–314. 29  P.  Joutard, ‘The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: end or renewal of French Protestantism?’ in Prestwich, International Calvinism pp. 339–368.

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persecution did not become lethal.30 In the southern Netherlands, Protestantism was proscribed. Just prior to the Dutch Revolt, and while the Spanish commander, the Duke of Alba, was attempting to reinforce royal control, repression of rebels and Protestants was severe and combined with wartime brutality which did not spare the general citizens. In 1579, the Treaty of Arras ensured that Roman Catholicism would be the official religion of those provinces that remained loyal to the Crown; however, the new Spanish commander, Alexander Farnese, ran a policy of allowing Protestants to migrate to Protestant provinces when territories accepted ‘reconciliation’ with the crown, in deliberate contrast to Alba’s brutality.31 Because, despite the war, the borders between the two territories remained open for trade until 1623, migration for religious reasons was relatively easy. The links between North and South could also protect minority groups in both places: for example, when the Catholics of the northern town of Sas van Gent agreed to advocate toleration of Protestant services in St. Maria-Horebeke across the border, in exchange for toleration for themselves.32 Wartime exigencies created the religious minority who form the subject of McCall’s essay. In 1645–6, the Parliamentarian regime in London abolished the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer in its quest for a purer, more Protestant national church, and began to dismantle the ­episcopacy. After the Parliamentarian triumph and the execution of Charles I, the Anglican bishops were abolished and the Prayer Book prohibited until the restoration of 1660. Clergymen who supported the king, the prayer-­book or both were deprived of their parish appointments, which obviously meant loss of home and income. Some went into exile, and some were imprisoned. The tumultuous experiences of royalist, Prayer Book clergy (called ‘malignants’ by their opponents) did not end up producing an easily definable religious minority with identifiable congregations and members, partly because the emergency was relatively short-lived. However, the experiences of those who supported the Church of England 30   C.H.  Parker, ‘Cooperative confessionalisation: lay-clerical collaboration in Dutch Catholic communities during the golden age’ in B. Kaplan et al. (eds)., Catholic Communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); C.H. Parker, ‘Paying for the privilege’, pp. 272–5. 31  G.H. Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. 131–155. 32  W. te Brake, ‘Emblems of coexistence in a confessional world’ in Dixon, Freist and Greengrass, Living with religious diversity, pp. 53–79, at p. 67.

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were certainly perceived as persecution and commemorated as an episode which showed Anglicans as a persecuted church.33 This book uses Western Europe as an analytical unit for the study of religious changes during the early modern period. The focus is on England, Germany, France and the Low Countries, locations which presented much religious diversity, as well as religious tension, while also providing rich documentation that enabled specific research on children and family. There are obvious gaps, for example, Spain; Scandinavia; Eastern Europe— or, looking further, the Ottoman Empire. It is to be hoped that future research will allow comparisons between the groups and locations we have focused on, and those it has not been possible to include. One challenge of studying religious minorities in the early modern period is finding a balance between defining geographical scope, and the reality of constant migration and the dispersion of minorities across political and geographical boundaries. Even the articles concentrating on a defined geographical and political unit—England—demonstrate this tension: young Quakers depicted in Pullin’s and Capp’s article left their homes and families to seek a new life on the continent or even in America, therefore expanding, in a way, the scope of this volume to the new world. Geographical and political boundaries started correlating with religious borders, as formulated after the Peace of Augsburg (1555), and even more so after the 30 Years War in 1648. Thus the decision to convert from one denomination to another was often accompanied by a move across political borders and vice verse, as demonstrated in Sadler’s article. While Sadler stresses the significance of borders, Broomhall, Berner and Liberles stress the creation of communities across political and geographical borders, creating imagined units, with or without geographical continuity. New ways of communication, such as the printing press and the books of customs discussed in Berner’s article, helped form these imagined territories, which in this example document the traditions of west and central European Jews, who referred to themselves as ‘Ashkenazim’, and to the lands that more or less cover the Holy Roman Empire as ‘Ashkenaz’. Children moving within these territories could not only find shelter and support, but would also recognise many customs and traditions across the region. 33  F. McCall, Baal’s Priests: Loyalist clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); J.  Maltby, ‘Suffering and surviving: the civil wars, the Commonwealth and the formation of Anglicanism’ in C.  Durston & J.  Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) pp. 158–180.

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Studying the History of Childhood Histories of children and childhood have two related but distinct objects: to analyse perceptions of and attitudes to children/childhood in past societies, and to explore the experiences of children. Sources for the latter are notoriously difficult to find, the more so the further back in time one searches; yet they can be discovered, and while using material cautiously and sensitively, we should not despair and declare the recovery of children’s voices and experiences to be a flat impossibility. Nor should the study of ‘discourses’ of childhood and of childhood itself be opposed. Expectation and perception becomes part of experience; lived experience may also, just possibly, affect what appears in literary sources and prescriptive texts. Understanding people’s perceptions is also valuable per se, and not only as a second-best to the ‘impossible’ task of discovering something about historical realities. Similarly the history of family consists in both the history of theories, perceptions and expectations of family and domestic relations, and how people actually lived in relation to each other. The most obvious issue for writing histories of family and childhood is that, before the modern period, so few sources exist that emanate from children as children. Even for later periods, when journals, letters and other texts penned by children survive, it is difficult to know how much adult supervision and input went into their composition, and how this affects the communication of the child’s perception and experience. In the early modern period, adults report children’s actions, their own perceptions of children, occasionally children’s or adolescents’ words, and their own efforts towards children’s upbringing; even autobiographical sources are generally adults—even if quite young adults—recalling, and perhaps re-interpreting, childhood events. Yet we should not overstate the degree of alienation here. Although the two have been compared, attempting a history of childhood solely through adult sources is not the same as attempting a history of women when almost all the sources were written by men; all adults have, after all, been children whereas men had not experienced being women. Reading a 24-year-old’s account of something he did aged ten is not the same as reading the ten-year-old’s contemporaneous account, but nor is it like reading a man’s account of his wife’s life. Sources for religious minorities living with some degree of proscription can, in a way, be seen as of two sorts: those produced by ‘insiders’ and by ‘outsiders’. ‘Insider’ sources include the persecution narratives, martyr reports, conversion narratives and exhortatory literature produced by

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most groups and circulated among them, as well as correspondence, internal administrative records, and devotional literature. ‘Outsider’ sources included judicial and administrative records kept by more or less hostile authorities, either of church or state; religious polemic; pseudo-martyr works attempting to refute narratives of persecution; ethnographic works such as those written by early modern Christians about Judaism. These groups of sources offer different challenges and opportunities, depending mainly on what the writer was creating the text for, and whether s/he was inclined to a sympathetic or hostile view of his/her subject. Administrative records such as recusancy lists are mainly concerned to record known dissidents, the penalties they paid, and the government’s potential and actual financial gains. Judicial records, similarly, are not directly polemical: their function is mainly to record, although they serve the rhetorical function of emphasising the authority of the state and the criminality of the dissidents who are punished. ‘Insider’ and ‘outsider’ sources also overlap, of course: records of examinations are created by ‘outsiders’, but can transmit the words and hence voices of the examinees, who were aware that such interviews, whether public or private, were opportunities to defend their faith. Intended audiences also overlapped: martyrologies, for example, have a triple potential audience: members of the community in question; members of other confessions, who the writers wish to convince of their group’s innocence and victimisation; and, often, co-religionists from outside the polity who may sympathise with and/or assist the proscribed community. Spiritual autobiography or conversion narratives are often explicitly polemical, aimed at justifying the writer’s conversion. Devotional and educational literature might also have a dual audience: for example, English Catholic catechisms aimed apparently at children also sometimes seem to expect Protestant readers, and to address them, so that the work slides between education and evangelisation.34 Even in the case of more private works, such as devotional literature, correspondence or internal reports, writers were aware that ‘outsiders’ might come to read them: as happened with, for example, the intercepted letters examined by Broomhall. This led writers on the one hand to use codes and to be cautious with identifying details, and on the other perhaps to self-censor, for example, avoiding content which might implicate the writer or reader in political sedition. ‘Insider’ and ‘outsider’ sources work in conjunction for the historian, as when administrative records can be used to corroborate  Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent pp. 56–8.

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the content of persecution narratives; or when, as in Broomhall’s chapter, the examinations of the couriers can yield further information about the correspondence they carried. All these sorts of records can potentially be studied by historians of childhood, youth or family. Some are explicitly focused on children, either as audience or as subject, or make their concern with family primary and explicit. In others, our target subjects are mentioned in passing, in conjunction with the author’s primary focus; these, by revealing embedded attitudes and assumptions, can be equally fruitful. Broomhall gives an example of this, mining the intercepted letters between Huguenots and their exiled kin for references which reveal how children, and parent-­ offspring relations, fitted in to the religious, emotional and social lives of these communities; some of Pullin’s sources do the same work, piecing together the place of children and family amid the religious and evangelistic priorities of early Quakers. Sadler reconstructs a story of family strategy and kinship bonds from the surviving letters of multiple writers across several years, combining them with other sources to fill the silences, and balance the viewpoints offered by the letters. The scarcity of texts written by children or adolescents has been mentioned. Adult texts written about children include the prescriptive— catechisms, advice manuals, sermons and other texts which tell us what it was thought children ought to know, do and understand and how they should be treated; and the descriptive, including autobiography, hagiography, martyrology and texts which purport to describe what some children and youths did and experienced. The obvious danger with prescriptive sources is assuming that practice matched theory, or even that most readers agreed with the theory of any given writer; but assuming an opposition between the two also impedes understanding. The visual sources used by Berner are from published books that are broadly speaking ‘prescriptive’, in that they aim to guide readers’ practice of religious rites; she uses them to explore expectations for children’s participation in worship. But, as regards children, they can also be approached as descriptive: the illustrators were attempting to show scenes their readers would find familiar and realistic. In a sense, what makes these sources so useful is that children are not the central focus; they are just included as a familiar element, so that these pictures are a window onto what Ashkenazi Jews considered normal activities for children. Using descriptive sources requires an awareness of the writers’ purpose, and of how they are often prescriptive as well as descriptive; we may draw

 INTRODUCTION 

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back and wonder about corroboration when, for example, a hagiography asserts that a particular person said or did a certain thing, but we can certainly learn much about what was considered both exemplary and reasonably plausible conduct for a child, adolescent or parent. Autobiography, if it offers a filtered version of childhood experience, also shows how people fitted early experiences into their self-perceptions, and the significance they attached to them. Related to, but distinct from, autobiography are narratives which recount experiences of the writer’s relatives or family. These kinds of narratives, as well as being sources for family history, offer insights into early modern childhood. If an adult recounts his parents’ conversion or an episode of persecution occurring when s/he was about ten, his or her account may tell us what happened to his parents; but it also tells us what a ten-­ year-­old knew about the conflicts around them, what events were being discussed in the hearing of children, and—if the text can be compared to other sources—what he or she did not know, or has not remembered, or has re-interpreted. McCall’s use of the Walker papers and Underwood’s examination of the St Monica’s Chronicle and Responsa Scholarum deal with this kind of source. Both Broomhall’s and Liberles’ chapters use forms of legal or judicial records emanating from minority communities themselves. Liberles’ records are responsa offered by experts in Talmudic law to questions arising from complex legal cases; the writers of these sources used particular cases to create a general principle, which might then be imitated. Liberles’ analysis in turn extrapolates from these the attitudes to childhood, youth, the transition to maturity, and agency in religious belief which the writers both propose and assume, and tries to deduce how these established principles could have affected individual lives. The documents of the French Stranger Church in London used by Broomhall are contemporaneous records of complaints and accusations as they were referred to and resolved by the Elders. Although they are presented as documenting particular cases, not consciously as precedent, cumulatively these records would do the work of responsa, expressing and shaping how this migrant religious community maintained order and disciplined its members, particularly at important points of the life-course such as marriage. Such records are not overtly concerned with such matters as emotion and emotional practices, but by reading what they do say closely, Broomhall deciphers, again, the assumptions made about the affectivity of family relations, the welfare of children, and community concern with children’s and young people’s

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upbringing and smooth transition to adulthood. Although it should always be acknowledged that this kind of work is in part educated guessing, judicial records can offer glimpses of the social and emotional fabric of a community which go far beyond the minimal, legal information they directly record.

Sections and Themes The essays in this book are collected into three sections based on common themes. The first section, ‘Childhood, religious practice and minority status’, looks at the role of children and childhood in the religious practice of minority groups. This includes how beliefs about childhood affected religious rites such as baptism, and how children experienced religious practice, whether or how they took part, and how the circumstances of a minority community affected their experience. Berner’s chapter on childhood in early modern Ashkenaz emphasises ritual participation, children’s presence in collective worship and in domestic religious rites, and how these practices helped to ensure their self-identification with the community, while surrounded by a hostile majority culture. Pullin explores the impact on children of early Quakerism’s focus on mission, conversion and persecution—young people’s own conversion, and their endurance of persecution, are considered, as well as how their parents’ conversion or missionary activism affected them. French’s chapter looks at how puritans, whose situation as a religious grouping was very peculiar, were influenced by their beliefs about sin in how they regarded children and infancy, and also influenced wider Protestant culture. Debates about the meaning of infant baptism show children at the centre of religious practice, and of rites central to confessional identity. By the eighteenth century, groups who in many ways saw themselves as the puritans’ heirs were unambiguously separate from the Church of England, and their children’s experiences reflected this, as Martin’s chapter illustrates—even to the use of the Westminster Assembly’s 1645 catechism to instruct children. Although Protestant non-­ conformists were no longer actively persecuted, they remained conscious of minority status, marginal compared to the established church, and keenly identifying with a heritage of persecution going back to (at least) 1662. The second section looks at family and responses to persecution. Here, the subjects of childhood (experiences of and attitudes to childhood) and family overlap. Children’s experiences in minority groups such as English

 INTRODUCTION 

23

Catholics and French Huguenots were influenced by concerns of family. Broomhall explores how those French Huguenots who migrated to England sought to maintain family and affective ties, even while the choice to migrate threatened the physical separation of the family. Within England, the acts of the consistory of the Huguenot church show how the leaders of the French Huguenot community were aware of the importance of maintaining order, integrity and social convention within families in order to safeguard the community’s reputation and cohesion. Her chapter also hints at the dilemma families faced between ensuring their children’s physical safety, and promoting their spiritual welfare by incorporating them into a criminalised religious community, something English Catholics also struggled with.35 Underwood’s and McCall’s essays approach in different ways the question of how central, and how successful, families were in transmitting religious identity and insulating religious minorities from the erosive effects of persecution. McCall examines how the turmoil of the British civil wars (1642–1660) affected the families of those who lost benefices, property or suffered imprisonment and exile for adhering the Church of England’s Prayer Book and its episcopal structure, during the ascendancy of the Parliamentarians who abolished both; she observes how religious and familial ties might be either strengthened or destroyed by the difficulties and separation involved. Underwood examines how people’s memories of their childhoods and their parents or families were central in building up an English Catholic culture to which persecution was a key part of self-identity. One of McCall’s main sources are the manuscripts collected by John Walker as material for his Sufferings of the Clergy; many of these involve sons and daughters writing about the sufferings of their parents, as remembered from their own childhoods. Although the sources used by Underwood were not intended for publication, in both cases we see histories of persecution formed through the transmission of collective family memory and childhood recollections. While none of the sources are expressly designed for this end, in all three chapters the texts used indicate the ways in which religious conflict affected children, through the vicarious experience of persecution, confrontation with hostile officialdom or knowledge of their parents’ activities. The third section addresses explicitly family relations, of which the upbringing of children is a key feature. It explores how families dealt with religious conflict, whether or not religion was the determining factor in  See Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent.

35

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making decisions or forming relationships—and whether conflict or co-­ operation dominated. Joel Harrington’s essay deals with the actions of state authorities, supported by ecclesiastical ones, regarding children affected by religious rivalry; but it also necessarily addresses family conflict, since it was in cases of families ‘mixed’ in religion that the state usually ended up intervening. This chapter highlights both co-operation and conflict, since very often agreements had been made at the time of a ‘mixed’ marriage regarding the children’s religious upbringing, and the contested abduction occurred because one party reneged. These often bitter disputes demonstrate how vulnerable co-operation was to breaking down, and also how individuals’ level of commitment to religion could change (so that a pre-nuptial agreement could seem intolerable ten years and a few children later). Sadler’s chapter, by contrast, looks at an example of co-operation, in which kin of different religions negotiated the upbringing of children, apparently prioritising material, educational and marriage prospects over religious confession—and this across perhaps the most bitterly contested confessional border in early modern Europe, that between the Protestant north and Catholic southern Netherlands. Capp moves away from questions of upbringing and adult negotiations over children’s fate to juvenile religious conversion and its consequences for family. While in some of the cases Harrington looks at a child or adolescent’s own beliefs became important to a custody dispute, Capp focuses on young people who converted away from their family’s religion, consciously defying adult authority. Whether conflict ensued varied, and such conflict took various forms: among siblings, or between mutually supportive siblings and angry parents; between parents, or between children and a united parental front. Young people juggled obligations to God and to parents, but parents also juggled obligations to their children’s spiritual and material welfare, to true religion, and to the state; their dilemmas should not be overlooked.

Themes and Topics Education has, necessarily, been an important theme in the historiography of childhood, including childhood and religion and the history of religious minorities. Education can encompass formal schooling, religious instruction and inculturation, and (as early modern contemporaries used it) the general upbringing of a child. Religious education specifically could take many forms—from the formal study of educational texts, to pious

 INTRODUCTION 

25

admonitions in parental correspondence, and (where there was proscription) it might be public, domestic or even secret. Education— when it meant encounter with a rival confession—could also appear as a threat; or as a dilemma, when families had to decide how to prioritise religious identity in making decisions about education and schooling.36 Berner discusses the incorporation of children into domestic and community worship and ritual. For religious minorities, familial education became, in a sense, protective, innoculating the children against the alien influences they would encounter in wider society, although where worship was proscribed this also carried a direct risk to the community.37 In Harrington’s chapter, conflicts over the confessional upbringing of children often coalesced around the choice of school for them; when a persecuting state tried to intervene in the upbringing of children, it was often through enforced schooling. Ideally, religious, social and academic education were meant to work harmoniously, as were the contexts of household, religious institution and school, to produce adults equipped to fulfil their obligations to God, family and society. When religious division instead placed them in tension, both parents and children faced conflict. Struggles over education and upbringing tend to concentrate focus on the decisions, efforts and disputes of adults: fighting over which religion a child is to be educated in presupposes that education will be decisive in determining what they believe and identify with as an adult; it tends to represent children as passive recipients. Yet, as some cases of contention 36  See, for example, Carter, Creating Catholics; C.  Villaseñor Black, ‘Paintings of the education of the Virgin Mary and the lives of girls in early modern Spain’ in Grace E. Coolidge (ed.) The Formation of the Child in Early Modern Spain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); A.C.F. Beales, Education under Penalty: English Catholic education from the Reformation to the fall of James II, 1547–1689 (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1963); Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent pp. 51–60, 75–112; J.R. Watt, ‘Calvinism, childhood, and education: The evidence from the Genevan Consistory’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 439–456, J. Couchman, ‘“Our little darlings”: Huguenot children and child-rearing in the letters of Louise de Coligny’ in Miller and Yavneh, Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood. 37  See Berner’s chapter in this volume, also her In Their Own way: and for comparison Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent pp. 51–71; also references in C. Galasso, ‘Religious space, gender, and power in the Sephardi diaspora: the return to Judaism of new Christian men and women in Livorno and Pisa’ in R. Lieberman, L. Bernfeld, H. Davidson, C.  Galasso, Cristina & D.  Graizbord, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010), pp. 101–128.

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over education indicate, children’s participation in, or resistance to, religious education was crucial to its outcome. The girl who, while her elders were disputing whether to hand her back to her Lutheran mother, ran away from the Catholic school where she had been placed, demonstrates this.38 Even within the area of education, then, the question of children’s and adolescents’ agency is raised, and this is even more pertinent when considering issues like conversion. How much agency could, or did, children have in forming their religious identity? How and when did adults attribute such agency to them? In terms of adult expectations, the transition from childhood to adolescence may have been deemed important, and this across cultural and chronological boundaries. Liberles’ essay shows that rabbinic authorities considered Jewish children who had been taken from their parents and baptised to be responsible for their conversion/apostasy only if they persevered in it after ‘years of discretion’, which at least one authority defined as 13, or the usual age of bar mitzvah. In the eighteenth century, the Protestant-Catholic agreements explored by Harrington stipulated that no-one should attempt to convert a child away from the religion s/he had been brought up in until the age of 14 was reached. The English recusancy statutes (mandating attendance at Protestant church services) applied only to those aged 16 and over—also excusing children but encompassing youths, though the division is set two years later. These examples may suggest a widespread attitude holding both that adolescents had sufficient understanding and autonomy to embrace a particular religion, and that children were merely recipients of adult formation. However, the nature of younger children’s agency is still worth exploring. Underwood has argued, in the case of English Catholics, that people certainly remembered experiences and actions in childhood as crucial to their religious identity, which they distinguished from that of their parents; though of course we are dealing with adults’ perceptions of their past childhood, not children’s testimony as children.39 Many of Pullin’s sources also suggest autonomous and active engagement with a proscribed religion on the part of Quaker children. Confrontations with legal authority also provide windows onto children’s engagement with religion. Pullin mentions Quaker children holding meetings, and children (ages not specified) imprisoned with their parents. Broomhall’s chapter shows that the  See J. Harrington’s chapter in this volume.  Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent pp. 19–50.

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 INTRODUCTION 

27

ten-year-old companion of a Huguenot courier was questioned. Records of English Catholic children suggest that officials looking for information often assumed that children would be involved and therefore have such information; Catholics also reported, for example, schoolboys being punished for refusing to attend Protestant worship, hence being held responsible for their dissidence.40 As this last illustrates, the boundary between education and prosecution was in fact blurred: while the boys saw themselves as Catholics being persecuted for their beliefs, their schoolmasters thought they were administering discipline as part of properly educating a child. In numerous custody/abduction cases, while adults talked about education and guardianship, the children may have experienced what happened as persecution and imprisonment. The boundaries between persecution/education were also blurred at the other end: most confessional states liked to advertise their willingness to ‘instruct’ amenable religious dissidents rather than to punish them, and sometimes offered instruction as an alternative to imprisonment.41 Such practices obviously acknowledge the potential convert’s agency, but also imply that his dissent is the result of ignorance. Education and coercion, autonomy and its denial, were intertwined in relation to both adults and children. Children below adolescent age might be regarded as primarily the objects of education, but this did not mean adults did not acknowledge or value their autonomy at all. Children’s and young people’s wishes and beliefs were sometimes cited in custody cases, particularly when (as in the post-1648 German cases Harrington discusses) the legitimacy of a conversion was at stake. Catholic clergy were willing to admit children to ­liturgical rites which both implied personal commitment, and meant directly breaking the law. Societies of Friends permitted young people to testify in meetings, and children attended them. When they reported incidents of confrontation with the state involving children, writers of various religious confessions concurred in presenting children as both victims of persecution, and heroes of resistance. It was the combination of helplessness and autonomy which gave these narratives their effect. Education and agency merge, or are sometimes pitted against each other, when the question of conversion arises. Most of our chapters deal in some way with juvenile religious conversion, its origins and impact.  Ibid., pp. 67–71.  M.C.  Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 172–4. 40 41

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Capp explores youthful conversion, mainly to Quakerism, and its impact on family relations; Pullin also looks at how parental conversion affected children, who were integrated into their parents’ new religious identity; Underwood also looks at conversion in the context of family and collective religious identity. Sadler examines how the children of a Dutch Protestant came, apparently without conflict, to be brought up by Catholic relatives and embrace Catholicism; Liberles and Harrington both consider, in different ways, conversions of children and what was deemed the ‘age of consent’ for confessional allegiance: that is, when a person’s religion might cease to be more or less determined by their education, and become a matter of what they chose. Of course, what educators always hoped was that consistent instruction would make it unlikely for a young person not to choose the beliefs they had been educated in; but that did not mean they did not value autonomy. For the historian, distinguishing children’s and adolescent’s agency from the shadow of adult influence and formation can seem a knotty problem. But when people insist on reporting choices they made at 9, 10 or 14 years of age as their own, their interpretations should not be dismissed. What we can be sure of is that autonomy in religious commitment was valued (across confessional divides), in children and youths as well as their elders, but no-one thought it developed in a vacuum. To say that children’s religious choices were not fully autonomous is, perhaps, only to observe a truth about all human decision-making. Every conversion, of course, was also an apostasy, and this is key to the conflict that they caused. Parents or family members might be angered or grieved not only because of what their children were embracing, but also because of what they were rejecting: true religion and potentially salvation, as well as parental authority and the community identity received through their family. When relatives produced clergymen to discourse on religion with their errant family member and try to talk him or her out of conversion/apostasy, spiritual as well as material and social concerns were surely present. Sometimes conflict, whatever its motivations, was deep and lasting; often it gave way, in time, to coexistence and the practical toleration that necessarily characterised much of the experience of religious diversity much of the time in early modern Europe. The family implications of apostasy may have differed when a person converted to a majority religion compared with conversions to a minority religion. In the second case, the rejection of the state’s as well as parental authority was implied, and fears

 INTRODUCTION 

29

for the convert’s material welfare (i.e. the danger of persecution) might play a role in efforts to prevent conversion/apostasy; this could be a factor in many of the cases Pullin and Capp discuss, as also for the Catholic converts mentioned by Underwood. In the first case, apostasy might be keenly felt as rejection precisely of persecution—a refusal to suffer for truth, easily interpreted as cowardice or self-interest.42 Apostasy could also weaken the morale of beleaguered communities, as it suggested that proscription was working; when it occurred as a result of the forcible re-education of children, it was both less devastating, since the conversion could be belittled as not genuinely chosen—and more so, because it meant the violation of family as well as the loss of the apostate’s faith. Apostates/converts placed themselves outside certain of the ‘mechanisms’ religious minorities used for survival: secrecy, dissimulation, private education. At the same time, they might paradoxically become important to other mechanisms, connivance and tolerance:43 an example is Roger Bradshaigh of Bradshaigh, Lancashire, a Catholic child who became and remained Protestant after being brought up by Protestant guardians, and his relations with his Catholic kin.44 Studying ‘apostasy’ and its implications as much as ­‘conversion’ and its ramifications offers a more rounded perspective on religious change. The context of the family, where the affective as well as material and social significance of apostasy comes across strongly, is a fruitful way of doing this; and youthful conversion, due to young people’s greater dependence on and subjection to familial authority, puts the issues into sharpened focus. Most of the articles in this volume are social histories, dealing with the reality of life of children and families. Yet, religious symbols and images were key to children’s experience of religion, and children were important in the array of religious symbols and icons. The Child Jesus, of course, 42  cf. K.P.  Luria, ‘The power of conscience? Conversion and confessional boundarybuilding in early modern France’ in C. Scott Dixon et al., Living with Religious Diversity pp. 109–125, at pp. 109–111. 43  Te Brake, ‘Emblems of coexistence’, pp. 68–74 offers a categorisation of ‘mechanisms’ of survival, of which ‘secrecy’ ‘dissimulation’ ‘casuistry’ and ‘private education’ concern members of the community, while ‘connivance’, ‘toleration’ and ‘indifference’ rely on the actions of third parties. 44  Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent pp. 78–9; A.J. Hawkes, ‘Sir Roger Bradshaigh of Haigh, knight and baronet, 1628–1684’ in Chetham Miscellanies n.s.vol.8, no.5 (1945); M.  Blundell, Cavalier: Letters of William Blundell to his friends, 1620–1698 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1933) pp. 41,183–5, 213.

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played an important part in Christian theology, legends and visual images of all denominations. To a much lesser degree, baby Moses played a role in Jewish tradition. Childhood was used as metaphor in the bible, and the relationship between God and believers was often described as a parent-­ child relationship. These figures and images played a role not only in making religion more accessible to believers, but in particular in the education of children. The centrality of these images and metaphors, and their influence on the actual lives of children, are explored in different ways in some of our chapters. The use of metaphors serves as a point of departure in Pullin’s article: early Quakers referred to themselves as ‘children of the light’ or ‘children of god’,evoking both the biblical metaphor of parent-child relationship and an image of childhood as consisting of purity, innocence and proximity to the divine. This notion, Pullin argues, also influenced the centrality of children in this movement. While the Quakers evoked a positive image of childhood, more pessimistic images of infants and children also existed. The issue of infant baptism was not only a subject of theoretical and theological debate among the different Christian denominations. The way it was perceived and the meaning and importance given to it stemmed from different understandings of the nature of children, and in turn had ramifications on the upbringing of children. French discusses the anxiety puritans and other radical Protestants had around this sacrament as part of puritan theories concerning the sinfulness of infants and women. Seeing baptism as the beginning of a process and not the end of one, puritans stressed the importance of education as it, combined with baptism, leads towards potential salvation. This notion also emphasised the liminal nature of childhood, thus creating a particular image of childhood among puritans and other radical Protestants. A different way in which children functioned as images and icons was through visual art. Visual images played an important role in the religious education of children of all denominations. Berner’s article discusses the question of what the inclusion of children in these scenes can teach us both about the domestic devotion of children and about the purpose of these images and their audience. Ariès’ provocative argument, that parents were mostly indifferent to their children in the Middle Ages has long been refuted, but for many years discussion revolved around the question of whether parents loved their children, and in how they expressed this love. In recent years, publication of volumes such as C. Jarzebowski and T.M. Safley, Childhood and

 INTRODUCTION 

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Emotion: Across Cultures 1450–1800, expanded the discussion to encompass an array of emotions, escaping the binary discussion of love/indifference or care/neglect, taking into account cultural differences in the expression of emotions, as well as particular and extreme situations, such as sickness, death and persecutions. Above all, it will become clear to the reader of this volume that parents and other adults expressed a wide range of emotions towards children, but indifference was rarely evident. The case studies discussed by Capp display the array of parental and filial emotions, positive and negative. Broomhall sees the letters sent between family members in exile as full of emotions, expressing a range of emotions from love, care, worry, sorrow and restrained anger. When addressing the question of expression of emotions in the early modern context, we must pay careful attention to the means by which contemporaries practised these emotions. The ways in which emotions were displayed, if at all and to what degree, varied. Broomhall and McCall agree that the expression of emotions was a gendered concept, applied mostly by mothers to children, and by women to other women. Although not exclusive to women, Broomhall finds that letters from fathers to sons tended to be more practical. Emotions such as love and care could be manifested in different ways. Broomhall sees the exchange of goods between parents and children as an expression of love and affection. On the other hand, the religious leaders quoted by McCall make it clear that love was not always manifested in kind, gentle gestures: for religious leaders of the time harsh treatment, strict rules and subordination of children, were nevertheless expressions of love. The display of emotions was not confined to parent-child relations. It was manifested by other relatives, who expressed concern, love and care, but also anger and distain towards their young relatives. Emotions were expressed by children outside of family settings: heated debates with ­masters during times of apprenticeship, which evoked many emotions, are especially noticeable in the chapters. Yet, while the above was true for children of both majority and minority communities, religious persecutions and religious diversities within families raised particular challenges, as well as opportunities. The preservation of family happiness was important at times of peace, as demonstrated by McCall. Religious leaders encouraged ‘mutual relation to each other’, as important for the survival of both family and religion. But this was maybe even truer in times of distress: the Huguenot community, scattered between England and the continent, gave high priority to the mainte-

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nance of family ties through mutual expressions of emotions. Even when religious discord tore families apart, and children decided to choose loyalty to another denomination over obedience, emotions were not always completely negative. Grief and anger were mixed with concern and sorrow. Parents expressed genuine concern for the earthly well-being of the child, as well as their soul’s destiny. In this particular intersection of family, emotions and religious, we can see that emotions and religious belief did not collide with each other, rather struggled to maintain a certain balance. Forced or voluntary migration was central to the experience of religious minorities in Early Modern Europe. Growing numbers of individuals and groups migrated for religious reasons, from the late fifteenth century onwards. Jews and Muslims were exiled from Spain, Catholics fled England and the Netherlands, and some 150,000 Huguenots were expelled from France after 1685.45 Not all migrations were forced, nor were they all due to purely religious causes, some were also influenced by economic and political grounds. Yet, forced or voluntary, religious or economic, these moves were powerful influences on families and children. As Heinz Schilling demonstrated, each group experienced migration in different ways, but there are many similarities between different groups.46 Schilling argued that religiously caused migration has served as a vector of change and played an important role in the changes experienced by early modern European society.47 Exile influenced family structure, economic status and occupation, as well as theology and philosophy. Many of the key thinkers of the period were exiled, and this experience influenced their work.48 The process of migration enabled, or forced, religious communities to define themselves and promoted processes of confessionalisation. In particular, the articles in this volume demonstrate the centrality of migration and exile experiences in the lives of children, and how children were affected by the experience and perception of migration. The lives of the Huguenot children and families discussed in Broomhall’s article, were shaped by their experience of expulsion and exile. The forced dispersion of families among France, the Low Countries and England was devastating,  Terpstra, Religious refugees p. 2.  H.  Schiling Early Modern European Civilization and Its Political and Cultural Dynamism (Lebanon NH: New England University Press, 2008), p. 33–64. 47  Schiling, Early Modern European Civilization, p. 41. 48  Terpstra, Religious Refugees p. 5. 45 46

 INTRODUCTION 

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but was also the motivation for the correspondence that stands at the foundation of this article. The cases of conversion discussed in Liberles’ article are a result of persecutions and expulsion of the Jews of Vienna. There were indirect influences as well: the printing of books of customs in Northern Italy, discussed by Berner, was a by-product of the migration of German Jews south of the Alps, seeking to preserve their unique customs when encountering the old and well—established traditions of Italian Jews. English Catholics engaged in a form of migration peculiar to children, when Catholic boys, and increasingly girls, went overseas for their schooling (the boys at a number of English schools or colleges, girls in schools attached to convents).49 Most often, this was a temporary migration, since they returned to England as adults; but those young women who became nuns, of course, remained in exile. A number of historians have explored the relevance of gender to histories of childhood: both in that gender expectations influenced boys’ and girls’ experiences of childhood, and that education played an important part in shaping its subjects to the gender roles they would fulfil as adults.50 None of the essays in this collection takes gender as its main focus, but the topic surfaces in each of them, and suggests potential for further research. On one hand, gender could directly influence children’s experience of religion: for example, the practice in mixed marriages of bringing up daughters in their mother’s religion and sons in their father’s, discussed in Harrington’s chapter. In numerous families, the sex you were born thus dictated what beliefs you would be taught. Yet religion itself was not ‘gendered’: boys and girls could be brought up either Protestant or Catholic depending on which way round the parents’ religion was divided. There is no sense, for example, that couples fought over which religion sons would be taught because they were more important than daughters. Some of our sources are inescapably gendered: for example, of the two main sources for Underwood’s chapter, one deals exclusively with men 49  Beales, Education under Penalty; C. Bowden, ‘“For the glory of God”: a study of the education of English Catholic women in convents in Flanders and France in the first half of the seventeenth century’ in R. Aldrich, J. Coolahan and F. Simon (eds.), Faiths and Education: Comparative and historical perspectives, Paedagogica Historica Suppl.Series. V. (1999) 77–95. 50  See, for example, A.M.  Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in Early Modern England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1995) pp.  297– 321, 364–375; Miller and Yavneh Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood; K.  Moncrief (ed.), Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); F. Lacouture, ‘“You will be a man, my son”: signs of masculinity and virility in Italian Renaissance paintings of boys’ in Averett, Early Modern Child in Art and History pp. 99–116.

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(the Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome) and the other with women (the Chronicle of the English Augustinian convent at Louvain). There are obvious differences: the Responsa offer us autobiographical texts written by the young men and youths concerned, while the nuns’ voices are mediated through the writing of only one of their number, Mary Copley. The male Responsa writers were training to return to England as missionary priests; Copley’s and her sisters’ dedication to the English Catholic cause consisted in leaving England permanently to live as cloistered nuns. On the other hand, these and other sources show a lack of gender difference in certain respects: in both male and female religious conversions, for example, autonomy and rational decision-making as well as faith were valued. Both men and women, boys and girls, spoke of spiritual journeys influenced by reading both religious polemic and devotional works, or by family influence, or through contacts from outside the home.51 Future research examining the relationship between gender roles and formative experiences in religious minorities must examine where experiences and expectations were common across the gender divide, as well as contrast and difference. The essays in this collection, varied in time, place and subject as they are, do suggest some common themes that make it worth examining childhood in religious minorities as a unified phenomenon with various manifestations. Conflict and persecution both made religious education more crucial, and more difficult, sometimes creating dilemmas between spiritual and material welfare; the essays in this book suggest that children were not routinely shielded from conflict, and often played an active role in minority communities; secrets were as likely to be kept by them as from them. The importance of children’s agency and identity was also sharpened, at the same time as proscription might impede the formation of religious identity; questions of agency were especially central to conversion, to the children themselves and to the adults who described, promoted or forbade their conversions. Common across religious and geographic boundaries seems to be the potential importance of children as exemplars, as victims of persecution and heroes of resistance; their youth and apparent weakness only heightened their exemplary value. We can also see a recurring awareness of the transition to youth, of a distinct point at which children could be held responsible for their religious choices. Finally, the strains put on family relations by religious division, conflict and  See Underwood’s chapter in this volume, as well as Bernard Capp’s and Naomi Pullin’s.

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minority status recur; what appears is that while family ties and religious beliefs often clashed, one does not simply defeat the other—rather an ongoing tension, if not always a happy equilibrium, is maintained. Identifying recurring themes and shared discourses is promising for future research, since it allows detailed comparison to identify difference, differences of emphasis or development, within a shared framework. We hope the essays in this volume will help to make such comparative study possible.

Bibliography Primary Sources A. Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran: at St. Monica’s in Louvain (now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon) vol.1 1548–1625, vol.2 1625–44 (Edinburgh, Sands & co., 1904).

Secondary Sources R. Aldrich, J. Coolahan and F. Simon (eds.), Faiths and Education: Comparative and historical perspectives, Paedagogica Historica Suppl.Series.V (1999). R.C. Allen, ‘Restoration Quakerism, 166–1691’ in S.W. Angell & P. Dandelion (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). S.W. Angell & P. Dandelion (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). M.K. Averett (ed.), The Early Modern Child in Art and History (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015). K. Barclay, K. Reynolds, C. Rawnsley (eds.) Death, Emotion and Childhood in Pre-­ Modern Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). A.C.F.  Beales, Education under penalty: English Catholic education from the Reformation to the fall of James II, 1547–1689 (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1963). A. Bellavitis, ‘Education’ in S. Cavallo & S. Evangelisti (eds.), A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age (Oxford: Berg, 2010). T. Berner, In Their Own Way: Children and childhood in early modern Ashkenaz, (Zalman Shazr Center, Jerusalem [in Hebrew], 2017) H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds) The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). C. Villaseñor Black, ‘Paintings of the Education of the Virgin Mary and the Lives of Girls in Early Modern Spain’ in Grace E. Coolidge (ed.) The Formation of the Child in early modern Spain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

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M.  Blundell, Cavalier: Letters of William Blundell to his Friends, 1620–1698 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1933). J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975). C. Bowden, ‘“For the glory of God”: a study of the education of English Catholic women in convents in Flanders and France in the first half of the seventeenth century’ in R. Aldrich, J. Coolahan and F. Simon (eds.), Faiths and Education: Comparative and historical perspectives, Paedagogica Historica  Suppl. Series.V (1999), 77–95. W. te Brake, ‘Emblems of coexistence in a confessional world’ in C. Scott Dixon, D.  Freist and M.  Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) pp. 53–79, at p. 67. F.J. Bremer, ‘The puritan experiment in New England, 1630–1660’ in J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 127–142. M. Breuer, “The Jewish Middle Ages”, M. A. Meyer (ed.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol I: Tradition and Enlightenment, 1600–1780. (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 7–77. K. Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and primary education in early modern France (Notre Dame, IN: Unversity of Notre Dame Press, 2011). S. Cavallo & S. Evangelisti (eds.), A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age (Oxford: Berg, 2010). A. Classen (ed.) Childhood in the middle Ages and the Renaissance: the results of a paradigm shift in the history of mentality (Berlin, 2005). J.  Coffey and P.C.H.  Lim (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). G.E. Coolidge, (ed.) The Formation of the Child in Early Modern Spain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). J. Couchman, ‘“Our little darlings”: Huguenot children and child-rearing in the letters of Louise de Coligny’ in N.J. Miller and N. Yavneh (eds.), Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Oxon and New  York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 101–116. J. Craig, ‘The growth of English puritanism’, in J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 34–37. H. Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (Harlow & New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2005). R.W.  Davis, ‘The strategy of “Dissent” in the repeal campaign, 1820–1828’ in Journal of Modern History 38:4 (Dec., 1966). B.B.  Diefendorf, ‘Give us back our children: patriarchal authority and parental consent to religious vocation in early Counter-Reformation France’ The Journal of Modern History 68:2 (1996), pp. 265–307.

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C. Durston & J. Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). K.  Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A youth confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). A.M.  Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in Early Modern England 1500– 1800 (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1995). C.D. Fletcher Richard II: Manhood, Youth and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). D. Freist, ‘Crossing religious borders: the experience of religious difference and its impact on mixed marriages in eighteenth-century Germany’, in C. Scott Dixon, D.  Freist and M.  Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 202–223. A.  French, Children of Wrath; Possession, Prophecy and the Young (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). C. Galasso, ‘Religious Space, Gender, and Power in the Sephardi Diaspora: The Return to Judaism of New Christian Men and Women in Livorno and Pisa’ in R. Lieberman, L. Bernfeld, H. Davidson, C. Galasso, & D. Graizbord, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010), pp. 101–128. K. von Greyerz, trans. T. Dunlap, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). C.  Gribben & R.S.  Spurlock (eds) Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). P.  Griffiths, Youth and Authority: formative experiences in England 156–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). T.K. Hareven & A. Plakans (eds.) Family History at the Crossroads : A “Journal of Family History” Reader (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1988). A.J. Hawkes, ‘Sir Roger Bradshaigh of Haigh, knight and baronet, 1628–1684’ in Chetham Miscellanies n.s.vol.8, no.5 (1945). R.  Rogers Healey, ‘Quietist Quakerism, 1691-c.1805’ in S.W.  Angell & P.  Dandelion (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). D.B.  Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). G.H.  Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic exile in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. 131–155. P.  Joutard, ‘The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: end or renewal of French Protestantism?’ in M.  Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 339–368. B. Kaplan et al. (eds)., Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). M. A. Kaplan (ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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F. Lacouture, ‘“You will be a man, my son”: signs of masculinity and virility in Italian Renaissance paintings of boys’ in M.K. Averett (ed.), The Early Modern Child in Art and History (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015) pp. 99–116. E. Labrousse, ‘Calvinism in France, 1598–1685’ in M. Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 285–314. P. Lake, ‘The historiography of puritanism’, in J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) pp. 346–71. R. Liberlis, “On the threshold of modernity: 1618–1780”, in M.A. Kaplan (ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 9–92. R. Lieberman, L. Bernfeld, H. Davidson, C. Galasso, & D. Graizbord, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010). O.  Logan, ‘Counter-Reformatory theories of upbringing in Italy’, in D.  Wood (ed.) The Church and childhood (Studies in Church History 31) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 275–284. H. Louthan et al. (eds.) Diversity and Dissent : Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011). C.  Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: the discourse on childhood (New York, 1989). K.P.  Luria, ‘The power of conscience? Conversion and confessional boundary-­ building in early modern France’ in C. Scott Dixon D. Freist and M. Greengrass (eds.), Living with religious diversity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate 2009) pp. 109–125. J. Maltby, ‘Suffering and surviving: the civil wars, the Commonwealth and the formation of Anglicanism’ in C. Durston & J. Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) pp. 158–180. F.  McCall, Baal’s Priests: Loyalist clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). M. A. Meyer (ed.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol I: Tradition and Enlightenment, 1600–1780. (Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 7–77. N.  J. Miller and N.  Yavneh (eds.) Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). A. Milton ‘Puritanism and the continental Reformed churches’, in J. Coffey and P.C.H.  Lim (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) pp. 109–126. K.  Moncrief (ed.), Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). M.A.  Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). M.  Muravyeva and R.M.  Toivo (eds.), Parricide and Violence against Parents Throughout History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

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H. Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). C.H. Parker, ‘Cooperative confessionalisation: lay-clerical collaboration in Dutch Catholic communities during the Golden Age’ in B.  Kaplan et  al. (eds)., Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570– 1720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Charles H.  Parker, ‘Paying for the Privilege: The Management of Public Order and Religious Pluralism in Two Early Modern Societies’ in Journal of World History 17:3 (2006), pp. 267–296. N. Pettit, The Heart Prepared: grace and conversion in Puritan spiritual life (New Haven CT & London: Yale University Press, 1966). M.  Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 71–107. M.  Prestwich, ‘Calvinism in France, 1555–1629’ in M.  Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 71–107. M.C.  Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 172–4. A.  Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013). H. Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization and Its Political and Cultural Dynamism (Lebanon, NH: New England University Press, 2008). C. Scott Dixon, D. Freist and M. Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). K.R.M.  Short, ‘The English Indemnity Acts 1726–1867’, Church History 42:3 (1973) pp. 366–376. C.J.  Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,1992). N. Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). A.A. Tulchin, ‘The Michelade in Nîmes, 1567’ in French Historical Studies 29:1 (2006), 1–36. L.  Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). A.M.  Walsham, Charitable Hatred: tolerance and intolerance in England 1500– 1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). A.M. Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, conformity and confessional polemic in early modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1993). J.R. Watt, ‘Calvinism, Childhood, and Education: The Evidence from the Genevan Consistory’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 439–456. M.R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3 vols., 1978).

Childhood, Religious Practice and Minority Status

Jewish Children and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Illustrations Tali Berner

This woodcut (Fig. 1) depicts an adult and a child, presumably a father and a son, performing the ritual of bdikat chametz—following the commandment to remove every remnant of leavened bread from the house, in preparation for the holiday of Pesach (Passover). While the father cleans the higher surfaces, the child is cleaning the floor, probably because of his youth and flexibility.1 This is just one of many illustrations depicting daily activities, holiday preparations and observance of rituals among early modern European Jewish communities. The involvement of children in the preparations for Passover is demonstrated in written texts as well. Rabbi Pinchas Katzenellenbogen (1691 Dobnow–1765?) recounts in his memoir how one year, “when I stayed with my grandmother the Rabbanit [the rabbi’s wife], may her soul rest in peace, when it was time to search for the chametz, on the eve of the 13th of the month of Nissan, I searched

1  The image appears in Sefer Minhagim [Book of Customs], (Venice: Giovanni di Gara, 1600), 21b.

T. Berner (*) Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_2

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Fig. 1  Minhagim, Venice 1600, 21b

for the chametz”.2 Yet, I argue that this image, like many others, ­contributes to our knowledge of Jewish children and families in Early Modern Western Europe in ways that texts rarely do. For example, this illustration teaches 2  Pinchas Katzenellenbogen, Sefer Yesh Manchilim, ed. Yitzchak Dov Feld, (Jerusalem: Machon Hatam Sofer, 1984). The translation of this text is mine. The author was about nine years old at the time.

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us that children were given specific tasks that were perceived as more appropriate for their age and physical abilities. But these images provide much more than the specific roles children were given. In this article, I will demonstrate that such images add crucial and often unique information regarding domestic devotion, domestic religious education and the observance of religious rituals and commandments in the home. After situating these images within their cultural context and within other data concerning the Jewish household and Jewish domestic culture, I will proceed to utilise them to (1). further our knowledge regarding the participation of children in domestic religious life, focusing on their particular forms of participation; (2). analyse the roles of the images in ­education and the transmission of ideas regarding “proper” domestic behaviour and family structure.

Images of Jews in Early Modern Europe This article is based on an analysis of visual depictions of daily life, ceremonial activities and religious observance within the private sphere. The earliest illustration studied here appeared in a manuscript from around 1503, and the latest from around the 1730s. A body of such images is a novelty for the early modern period. While we have many illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, daily scenes are rare. Generally speaking, Jews refrained from creating portraits and did not engage in visual arts. Their appearance in the early modern period had to do with technological changes, the invention of print and a combination of ideological and cultural changes that resulted in a new and growing interest in the Jewish religion and the practices of the Jews. The invention of print and the ability to produce books on a large scale brought a flourishing of books printed in Yiddish, the spoken language of Western and Eastern European Jews. The publishers and printers discovered a new, vast and eager audience—women, children and unlearned men who could not understand Hebrew.3 One of the unique characteristics of this literature, Chone Shmeruk argued, is the use of illustrations as part of

3  For a history of the printing of illustrated books, both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, see: Diane Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity and Memory in the Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy, (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 89–90.

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the composition of the books.4 In particular, we are concerned here with a series of images prepared for Yiddish books of customs—Minhagim— that appeared in Venice during the final decade of the sixteenth century. These images depict various scenes of Jewish ceremonial life, in both the private and public spheres. The woodcuts, first printed during the short renaissance of Yiddish printing in Northern Italy,5 travelled East and North with the re-establishment and expansion of the Jewish diaspora in German lands during the seventeenth century.6 Their career was quite remarkable. The images printed in the 1593 Venice edition of the Minhagim were reprinted in 30 editions of this book between 1593 and 1768, and some were used for a prayer book reprinted in at least 20 editions,7 among others, in Prague (1606–1607, 1611, 1624, 1629 or 1657–1660, 1665), Amsterdam (1645, 1662, 1685, 1707, 1723, 1728, 1768) Frankfurt (1674, 1690, 1708, 1715, 1733, 1762) and Fürth (1752, 1756).8 These woodcuts are still in use today as embellishments for various items, from wedding invitations to prayer books. Diane Wolfthal demonstrates that the 1593 Minhagim illustrations were adaptations of German Christian woodcuts. Although a non-Jewish artist was probably involved in their making as well as in the making of the 1600 Minhagim, they were nevertheless adapted to the Jewish audience.9 Shmeruk argues that these were the only illustrations in the history of 4  Chone Shmeruk, The Illustrations in Yiddish Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Texts, the Pictures and Their Audience, (Jerusalem: Akademon Press, 1986) [Hebrew]. 5  Chone Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature: Aspects of Its History, (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1978), 72–79 [Hebrew]. 6  On the reestablishment and expansion of Jewish communities, especially after 1648: Mordechai Breuer, “The Early Modern Period”, in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol I: Tradition and Enlightenment, edited by Mordechai Breuer and Michael Graetz, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 79–103; On the daily life of Jews in the Early Modern Period: Robert Liberles, “On the Threshold of Modernity”, in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, edited by Marion Kaplan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 9–92. 7  Shmeruk, The Illustrations. 8  For a full list see: Chone Shmeruk, “HaIyurim Min Haminhagim BeYiddish Venezia 1593 BeHadpasot Khozrot”, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore, 12 (1984), appendix 1, 34–35, and 32, ft. 4. To the best of my knowledge, these images remained in inner-Jewish use and were not used in non-Jewish context even in modern times. 9  Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish, 94–101. The 1600 edition presents a more skilful work, and the style is Italian and not German. Yet, the illustrations are similar in many ways.

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early modern Yiddish books to have been specially prepared for these specific publications and not taken from non-Jewish books or previous Yiddish publications.10 Yet, this was not the only context in which depictions of the everyday life of Jews were produced. The other genre, which produced dozens of illustrations, was the ethnographic literature written by Hebraists— Christians and Jews who converted to Christianity and began writing about Jews and Judaism in growing numbers.11 As noted by Aya Elyada, although Jews constituted a very small part of the total German population, they attracted attention well beyond their actual numbers and prominence. The growing interest of Christians in contemporary Jews, their customs, rituals and way of life, was noticeable in the German States from the turn of the sixteenth century. The most explicit manifestation of this interest was the new genre of Christian ethnographic writing about Jewish ceremonies and everyday life.12 As opposed to their mediaeval predecessors, these writers, although often holding negative and even hostile attitudes towards Jews and Judaism, had a deep and genuine interest in Jewish practices. Influenced by empiricist methods, they strove to give the reader accurate and impartial first-hand ethnographic accounts. They were also more interested in Jewish daily life, rituals and material culture than their mediaeval predecessors. This is true for both the texts and images that accompanied many of these books.13 The objective descriptions and depictions of the Jews did not preclude a prevailing negative attitude or a fundamental hostility towards Jews and Judaism.14  Shmeruk, The Illustrations, 33.  For a comprehensive study of ethnographic descriptions of Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe, see: Yaacov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). More specific aspects of this literature were studies by Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish language in early modern Germany, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Eli Freiman, Jewish Culture in Ashkenaz in the Beginning of the New Era: A View from the Perspective of Jews and Christians, Popular Culture, and Rabbinic Culture, Unpublished dissertation, (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007) [Hebrew]. 12  Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish, 4. 13  Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes, 2; Richard I. Cohen, “The Visual Image of the Jew and Judaism in Early Modern Europe: From Symbolism to Realism”, Zion, 57 no.3 (1992), 275–340 [Hebrew]. 14  Cohen, The Visual Image, 278. Cohen locates this new tendency in the early sixteenth century, with the publication of Pfefferkorn’s book about Jewish customs. The woodcuts 10 11

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This dramatic change was also strongly connected to other cultural and scientific shifts of the early modern period: the change in attitude towards the Old Testament, the growing interest in foreign cultures and increasing tolerance towards Jews and the movement in art from symbolism to realism.15 These changes corresponded to changes within the Jewish community, and its position and visibility among the main hubs of commerce and cultural exchange of the time, such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, Prague, Frankfurt and others. After being expelled from most German States by the end of the fifteenth century, Jews returned in growing numbers to some of these and established new communities in cities that had previously lacked a significant Jewish population.16 These demographic and geographic developments were accompanied by cultural and religious changes such as openness to other cultures, interest in the self and self-­ portrayal and a recognition of the visual dimension as a form of communication. Whether appearing in Jewish or non-Jewish books, these early modern images have not received much scholarly attention. They did not enjoy the admiration and attention given to elaborate mediaeval illuminated manuscripts nor the artistic appreciation enjoyed by nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century Jewish art.17 If they were studied at all, it was as part of the history of print, testifying to the connections between printers, or as an addendum to the text. Therefore, in this article, I draw attention to this much-neglected source. Moreover, although some scholars have studied the images printed in non-Jewish books and others, those printed in Yiddish books, the few studies that examine both sources tend to compare and contrast. While I will juxtapose the Jewish with the non-Jewish illustrations at times, my primary goal is to examine the ways they combine to offer a fuller, multifrom this book also appeared in some of the editions of Antonius Margaritha’s book. They became the norm in books about the Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Idem, p. 295. 15  Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998), 67. 16  See footnote six for studies on Early Modern German Jewry. 17  “To most scholars, the term ‘Jewish art’ brings to mind ritual objects that were used in the home or synagogue. When illustrated books are discussed, they are usually the magnificently illuminated manuscripts commissioned by wealthy or learned men that were written in the holy language of Hebrew.” Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish, xxv.

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dimensional view of domestic religious education and religious practice in the private sphere and the place of children within domestic devotion.

The Early Modern Jewish Household A short overview of the Jewish household is necessary to better understand the images discussed in this article. The early modern Jewish household has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. The few surviving census records give us some demographic and statistical information. We should first note that all accounts of Jews living in the large cities of western and central Europe describe the Jewish streets and houses as crowded, of poor construction and built to the maximum height enabled by the technology. These living quarters were usually occupied by a nuclear family—two married adults, with an average of two–three children at any given time. In addition, relatives, students, female and male servants are often mentioned in the contemporary literature as being part of the household. That brings the average number of residents of a household to between five and seven.18 Recent scholarship has paid growing attention to domestic devotion and acts of piety in the private sphere in both Catholic and Protestant frameworks in mediaeval and early modern Europe.19 Although they draw on a large range of sources and different aspects of domestic devotion, they all focus on the practice of prayer. Others have referred fleetingly to rituals such as baptism and the last sacrament that sometimes or even frequently took place in the home.20 One should note, that the difference 18  On the Jewish family as a nuclear family: Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis, (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 135; for statistical studies on Jewish households: Gerald L. Soliday, “The Jews of Early Modern Marburg, 1640–1800: A Case Study in Family and Household Organization”, History of the Family 8 (2003), 503–506; Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Jewish Household Structure in an Early Modern Town: The Worms Ghetto Census of 1610”, History of the Family 8 (2003), 481–493; Liberles, On the Threshold, 52 [Hebrew]. 19  See, for example, the following edited volumes: Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, ed., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005); Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (ed.) Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, (Oxon and New York: Routledge 2016). 20  Diane Webb, “Domestic Space and Devotion in the Middle Ages”, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 27–47.

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between Catholic domestic devotion and Jewish domestic devotion, is that the former concentrated more on prayer in private, while the latter focused on ritual. In order to live a full Jewish life, a Jewish man needed a community— at least ten adult men. This is the minimum number for a quorum required to perform most public ceremonies, life cycle rituals and, most importantly, daily prayers in the synagogue. Yet, although the emphasis was on the importance of the community and the performance of many religious acts in public, the home played a central role, both in religious activity and as a space of religious education. Much of the daily practice and holiday celebration took place at home. The observance of dietary laws, blessings over candles and wine on the Sabbath and on holidays and preparations for holidays, especially Passover, as we saw above and will see later. Some life cycle rituals also took place in the private sphere. In short, Jewish life provided multiple opportunities for both public, communal observance and domestic devotion. Therefore, rabbis and moralists had no need to instruct their followers on what they were permitted to do in the house, nor did they have to invent new traditions to give meaning to religious practice in the house. They mostly had to encourage their community members to fulfil the commandments and include children in the process. And while participation in the service in synagogue was limited to adult Jewish men and required some level of literacy, domestic rituals and customs involved the entire family and often included props and activities. Although very little is known regarding the mediaeval Jewish household, it is safe to say that in the early modern period, the role of the parents (or other relatives) as educators was enhanced, due to the spread of printed material that instructed parents on how to teach children and stressed the importance of including them in daily religious activities, such as visiting the sick and praying in the synagogue. Sources discussing the household, and depictions of daily Jewish life and the home were still scarce, even towards the end of this period. Therefore, this body of illustrations contributes crucial information to our attempts to study the early modern Jewish household, particularly the religious activities that transpired there and the parts the children played in them. As scholars have noted and as I have demonstrated elsewhere, children often played an active role and were highly visible in public and commu-

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nal, daily and ritual Jewish life. Although they were not formally included in the quorum in the synagogue, they were nevertheless included in certain rituals and were even essential for the performance of others. They were also welcome guests at life-cycle rituals such as weddings and other ceremonies and played an active role in those activities that occurred in the private sphere.21 Other scholarship has discussed parent-child relations, but little has been said about the roles of children in domestic religious practices.

Jewish Children in Visual Depictions of Domestic Devotion The appearance of children in the visual arts in the early modern period has been the subject of much scholarly study, even debate, ever since Philippe Ariès first made his argument regarding the ways in which changes in the attitudes towards children and childhood were manifested in art. Turning away from Ariès, exhibitions, catalogues and some theoretical scholarship have referred to the variety of depictions of children in Early Modern visual images.22 Yet, I have not been able to find a non-Jewish parallel to this phenomenon, of a relatively large number of illustrations of children included in or performing religious and ritualistic acts. Although some of the images resemble certain Protestant art, the differences in practice between Judaism and the various forms of the Christian faith make any attempt for consistent comparison impossible. Children appear in the majority of such depictions, in both the private and public spheres, which I have discussed at some length elsewhere.23 Below I present and analyse a selection of 11 images. 21  Tali Berner, “Children in the Synagogue and in Communal Life in the Early Modern Era in Ashkenaz: the Contribution of Childhood Research to Establishing a New Perspective in the Study of Jewish Society”, Zion 78 no.2, (2013), 183–206. [Hebrew]; Tali Berner, “Children and Rituals in Early Modern Ashkenaz” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7 no.1, (2014), 65–86; Simcha Goldin, “Jewish Children and Christian Missionizing.”, in Sexuality and Family in History, edited by Israel Bartal and Isaiah Gafni, (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1998), 97–118. [Hebrew]. 22  Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, (New York: Vintage books 1962), 33–49; Matthew Knox Averett, ed., The Early Modern Child in Art and History, (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015). 23  Berner, Children and Rituals, 65–86.

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Candle Lighting and Havdalah Images of children participating in the rituals of candle lighting and Havdalah (the ceremony ending every Sabbath and holiday) might be the most common, probably because they begin and end every Sabbath and holiday. The images that appeared in both Minhagim books were not specific to one or the other, and the printers could use and reuse them for both. In this image from Minhagim 1600, (Fig. 2) we see a woman, probably the lady of the house, who has just finished lighting the candles in the hanging candelabra. Another woman is pointing at the candles, perhaps indicating that she also participated in the blessing, while two girls are facing the woman lighting the candles. The girl on the right is looking in the same direction as the two women—towards the candles, but the other seems to be looking back. She is also holding something in her hand— apparently a loaf of bread, as she is setting the table, indicating that the artist tried to depict multiple activities at the same time. By portraying her gazing behind her, perhaps at the other women, the artist might be indicating that though the candles are the focal point, the women themselves and their acts are worth noting as well and that the girl is learning to emulate them.

Fig. 2  Minhagim, Venice 1600, 63b

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Fig. 3  Paul Christian Kirchner. Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche. Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724? Next to page 82

Another depiction of candle lighting (Fig. 3) may provide an answer to the question of what the girl might be trying to learn. This one appears in one of the multi-activity scenes which was printed in one of the most central compositions of the Hebraist literature: Paul Christian Kirchner’s Jüdisches Ceremoniel.24 In the leftmost corner of the illustration, we see two figures—a woman and a girl, possibly a mother and daughter—lighting candles, this time with the candles standing on the table. Here, the artist decided to capture an earlier moment: just as they are preparing to say the blessing. When looking closely at the illustration, one notes that the girl is not standing 24  Paul Christian Kirchner, Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche, (Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724?).

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passively next to the adult female figure; the artist has depicted her raising her hands and preparing to cover her eyes for the blessing. This might testify to one of the characteristics of images commissioned and produced by non-Jews, an interest in “peculiar” customs of the Jews. In this case, it is the motion of raising the hands before covering the eyes for the blessing. Comparison between the images demonstrates the different goals and audiences of the two, the images in the Minhagim were meant for a Jewish audience, to whom the scene was clear and who could distinguish between the daily use of candles for light and Sabbath and festive candle lighting. The commissioner of the images probably wanted to show the fulfilment of the commandment, by showing it when completed and the house lit and ready for Sabbath. Kirchner and the artist, Johann Georg Puschner, were more interested in what was special about and different in the rituals of the Jews, therefore catching the woman and girl in the most unusual act of covering their eyes for the blessing. The presence of girls in these scenes might not come as a surprise, as lighting candles is one of the three commandments reserved for women,25 but Puschner’s illustration testifies to the active role girls took in this important ritual, thereby adding crucial evidence to our very restricted knowledge about girls. This is an example of an image revealing information not found in other sources. A similar phenomenon is seen in the Havdalah ceremony held at the end of each Sabbath and holiday, marking the transition from the holy to profane, and including the use of candlelight, wine and spices. There are three images from Jewish sources depicting this scene. The first is an image from a 1503 manuscript (Fig. 4)26 showing two children and five adults in the scene, four men, one in the centre holding a cup of wine in one hand and giving his other hand to one child and three others, one holding another cup, one a candle and one a box of besamim, spices, required for the performance of the ritual. The two children and the woman are very present, though only observing 25  The three “female” commandments are lighting candles on the eve of the Sabbath, taking a piece from the dough and observing the laws of menstrual purity. Contemporary manuals and moral books stressed the importance of the strict observance of these commandments and their centrality in feminine piety. See: Yemima Chovav, Maidens Love Thee: The Religious and Spiritual Life of Jewish Ashkenazic Women in the Early Modern Period, (Jerusalem: Dinur Center, 2009); Edward Fram, My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth Century Poland, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007). 26  BnF MS Heb 586. Regarding this manuscript: Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish, 3–25.

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Fig. 4  Recueil de coutumes et régles pour fixer les fêtes du calendrier hébreu BnF heb 586 22r. (Bibliothèque nationale de France https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/btv1b53014834z.r=h%C3%A9breu%20,586?rk=21,459;2)

the ceremony. One child, maybe the older, is in the middle of the scene and the other, maybe a girl or a younger child, is at the far left, holding onto the woman, and again, looking away from the ceremony, maybe towards the painter or the audience. The turning away here might be part of what Woldthal sees as the artist’s tendency in this manuscript to depict un-orthodox moments, and less iconic compositions, perhaps more true to reality. The 1593 Minhagim (not shown here) depicts two boys standing on the table and holding two ritualistic objects, while the adult male is holding a cup in one hand and holding his other hand against the light, as the customs prescribe.27 The second image, from Minhagim 1600 (Fig.  5), shows an entire family, a perfect composition, represented by an adult male, an adult woman and four children: two boys and two girls. Here again, the man is shown in the same position and the boys are holding the objects, with one of the boys also holding up his hand. All the figures are looking towards the centre, focusing their gaze on the large candle. The composition places the males in the centre and the females at the periphery, the adults on one side and the children on the other, granting this image an iconic quality. While the image, like the other ones discussed here, has a clearly descriptive function, it is also prescriptive, demonstrating how families should practice, which I will discuss later. The boys in the previous two images are not merely holding the objects; their participation is essential for the performance of the ritual. By holding 27  On the custom of looking at one’s fingernails under the light of the Havdalah candle: Freiman, Jewish Culture in Ashkenaz, 143–158.

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Fig. 5  Minhagim, Venice 1600, 67b

the ritualistic object, they enable the adults to fully complete the ceremony. This is manifested in the fact that the boy holds the candle up while the others raise theirs towards it as part of the ritual. In this case, the images reveal yet another way children functioned in religious rituals at home, not only by participating but also enabling them to occur. These images also demonstrate the importance of ritualistic objects, and I would argue, the importance of objects in the initiation of children into religious life, both in the house and in the public sphere. It is no coincidence that the objects take up a lot of space, catch the eye of the viewer and are at the centre of attention of the figures. This use of ritual and other objects will appear again in the next images as well. Children and Birth Rituals The participation of children in domestic devotion and rituals that took place at home was most pronounced in birth rituals. Two rituals that took place in the private sphere are depicted in contemporary illustrations: the reciting of the Shema at the newborn’s bedside and the ceremony of the Hollekreisch. As in the candle lighting scene, Puschner’s illustration here (Fig.  6) testifies to a ritual we know little about from contemporary written

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Fig. 6  Paul Christian Kirchner. Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche. Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724?, next to page 148

sources, the reciting of the Shema text at the bedside of a newborn male child. The image, which is part of a larger composition showing different birth rituals and customs, depicts a group of boys standing in a half-circle around the bed of the mother while holding books, either prayer books or bibles. The adult male standing at the side is perhaps the baby’s father or a teacher. The children are probably reciting the verse from Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one”. This verse (usually referred to as the Shema) is recited three times daily, twice in daily prayers and a third time prior to sleep. While the children might have recited other verses or prayers, this one verse is considered a basic, fundamental verse encompassing the essence of Judaism. Reciting the Shema at the bedside of a mother and her newborn son was one of

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Fig. 7  Nuernberg cod. 7058 fol. 43v-44r (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg)

many protective rituals and acts that performed prior to the circumcision of a male child, on the eight day after birth.28 The other ritual depicted in illustrations is the Hollekreisch, shown here in a manuscript from 1589 (Fig. 7).29 The Hollekreisch was the exclusively Ashkenazic (Germanic-Jewish) naming ceremony for both boys and girls. While boys received their “sacred” Hebrew name as part of the circumcision ceremony, both boys and girls received their “secular” name in this ritual.30 The custom was that children—boys for male babies and girls for female babies—came to the newborn’s house and announced the name of the baby while lifting the infant in its cradle three times. At this point, the ritual took on strongly gendered dimensions. For male babies, after the cradle was lifted, the older boys read a series of verses from the Pentateuch: the first and last verses of each book and other key verses, such as the Ten Commandments. The boys would also place a tallit and tzitzit (a ritual four-cornered garment with fringes) and a book or a page from the Talmud in the bed. In contrast, no scriptural verses were read over the cradle of a baby girl; instead, the older girls would place part of a bridal garment in the baby’s cradle. After the ceremony was over, the newborn’s 28  On birth rituals: Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Life in Medieval Europe, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 55–118. On the Hollekreisch ritual, its history and roots, see Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 93–99. For the early modern version, see Berner, Children and Rituals, 76–77. 29  Nuernberg cod. 7058 fol. 43v–44r. 30  Boys usually had two names: one in the vernacular, used on a daily basis, and one in Hebrew, used in ritual and sacred occasions, such as in the synagogue and in the marriage contract (the ketubah). The “secular” name often corresponded to the Hebrew name: either a translation of the Hebrew or based on an association with the Hebrew name. Girls usually had only one name, referred to as “secular”, although it could be in either Hebrew or the vernacular.

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father would give candy to the children. Girls were given sweets inside the house, while for boys, candy was thrown into the street in front of the house for them to collect. The images here demonstrate the two primary components of the ritual, visually depicted by the lifting of the cradle and the handing out of fruits. Although only two boys are shown here, textual descriptions of the ritual seem to indicate that many children participated. This is an interesting point, as we have seen other scenes with multiple numbers of children. What might have been an interesting scene—the children catching the fruit, is not depicted here at all. This might be an artistic decision—only two children were needed to lift the cradle, and the artist wanted to show the mother with the fruit. Birth rituals are unique in that they brought children from other families into the house. This was a semi-public ritual occurring in the private sphere and brought together many children, who were the main figures in these rituals. One can ask why children were so prominent in these rituals. I argue that in these cases, the children acted as a kind of living amulet, presenting in their bodies the power of life and hopes regarding the newborn. Children here also act as mediators between the community and the family, bringing the notion of a larger community and context into the intimate space of the mother and newborn. Passover Illustrations connected to Passover comprise a separate category. This holiday, with its massive preparations and focus on the house, drew much attention and was depicted in various ways. In these, we see mostly preparations for Passover, rather than performance of ritual as we see in both Jewish and non-Jewish images of other rites. We have already discussed the illustration of the child helping to search for chametz. A similar illustration31 (not shown here) depicts the same ritual but with three figures: a man, presumably the father and the head of the household, performing the main part of the ritual—removing pieces of bread; a woman, presumably the wife and mother, carrying vessels of water for baking the matzah; and a child bending under the table to catch small crumbs of bread. Here again, we see the special role reserved for children. The children, and especially the child in the 1593 version, are  Minhagim, (Venice, 1593).

31

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Fig. 8  Bernard Picart. (Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam)

captured in mid-action. It seems quite clear that the artist did his best to transfer the feeling of movement in this image, with the breadcrumbs falling and the child collecting. Other images, such as the Passover cleaning scene created by Bernard Picart (Fig.  8), show  girls participating in preparations alongside other women.32 Note the difference between this scene and the other two, 32  Much scholarly attention was given recently to the monumental work of Bernard Picart, which this image is part of: Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book that Changed the World: Picard and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010); Ilana Abramovitch, “Brenard Picart’s Ceremonies and customs of the Several Nations of the Known World (1723): Moving Pictures”, Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, division D vol. II, (1990), 93–99; Samantha Baskind, “Judging a Book by its Cover: Bernard Picart’s Jews and art history”, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies,15 no.1 (2016), 6–28. See also: Samantha Baskind, “Bernard Picart’s Etchings of Amsterdam’s Jews”, Jewish Social Studies, 13 no.2, (Winter 2007, New Series), 40–64.

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which depict boys. While boys are presented as participating in the specific ritual of checking for the chametz, in this scene, we see an adult male engaging in the ritual alone, while the girl appears to be waiting for the adult female to start making dough for the matzah. The women and the girl here, in the centre of the composition, are engaged in what might appear to the non-Jewish viewer as regular preparations for baking, rather than a ritual act. This might be in line with what some of the scholars have described as Picart’s attempt to “normalise” and familiarise the Jews to a non-Jewish audience.33 The images of Passover preparations reveal another quality of both Jewish and non-Jewish illustrations. They relate a feeling of activity and haste, all part of the commandment to eliminate all chametz from the house and the need to bake matzah—unleavened bread—within a certain time frame. These images do not merely show children as bystanders or use them to complete the composition or serve as icons but show them fulfilling very specific tasks, probably ones reserved for children. These testimonies are in line with two textual accounts we have. One is from a letter Leona Levia of Fano wrote to her brother, and the other is the aforementioned memoir. In a letter from around 1560, Leona Levia Fano, a young woman located in Lugo, Italy, writes to her brother—probably in one of the days before the holiday, that she could not fulfil his request (which probably had to do with the family’s accounting books), since she was too busy cleaning the house and preparing it for Passover.34 These accounts reveal not only how involved children were with these preparations but also how they were given or assumed responsibilities. These were not just simple household chores but rather holiday preparations carrying religious burdens and requiring precision. The fulfilment of the commandment depended upon these children, and the family relied on them to keep the family from sinning. Holidays, Festive Meals and Pastimes Our last category consists of depictions of holiday celebrations. Here, I included two illustrations of a festive meal, one printed in different locations in Minhagim 1600 (Fig. 9) and the other created by Picart (Fig. 10).  Ilana Abramovitch, “Brenard Picart’s Ceremonies and customs”, 94–97.  Letter by Leona Levia: Yacov Boksenboim, Letters of Jews in Italy: Selected Letters from the Sixteenth Century, (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 1994), 208–209. 33 34

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Fig. 9  Bernard Picart. (Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam)

The two images are similar. In both cases, the artist has arranged the figures so that they are all facing the viewer, with a child in the front. Yet, while the child in Picart’s image is feeding a cat, the other depicts a child (perhaps a servant) bringing food to the table.35 Again, the children appear in the front of the composition (including the nursing baby in Picart). Although, as in many of the other illustrations, the attention of adults in these images is not on the children, here the viewer’s attention is nevertheless drawn to the children, who also seem to be more active than the other figures.36 These illustrations might echo the genre discussed by Ariès—the family preparing to say grace over the food, with the child blessing the food.37 The family is portrayed eating together as a religious  It is interesting to observe that both illustrations include an animal—a cat and a dog.  An intriguing feature in Picart’s illustration is the non-Jew, maybe Picart himself, observing the scene from the side. 37  Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 360–361. 35 36

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Fig. 10  Minhagim, Venice 1600 10b

act. It might also bring to mind images such as Abraham Bach’s Proper Table Manners, where we see the adults positioned looking at the viewer and the children on the periphery, yet catching the attention of the audience. Following the argument above regarding Picart, his depiction of the Jewish family with the child and the cat is part of the attempt to show that Jewish families were similar to those of their Christian neighbours, which might explain why we find such strong resemblance between these Jewish and non-Jewish images. Special attention should be given to the illustration of the home on the holiday of Purim (Fig. 11). Eight children appear in the front of the composition. This is one of the very few images where we find children not only in a group but in also engaging with each other. The number of children, combined with the fact that the children are engaged in play, evokes a comparison with Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games. Though our image depicts fewer children and fewer games and toys and it also includes adults (which are absent from Bruegel’s), we can nevertheless note that the games are similar. The children in the centre are engaged in a bowling game. The children sitting on the floor are probably playing with a spinning top, while the two children on the left seem to be acting out a scene. All of these are activities that also appear in Bruegel’s painting. One could

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Fig. 11  Paul Christian Kirchner. Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche. Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724? next to page 132

argue that the non-Jewish artist of the Purim scene depicted games and toys with which he was familiar, but written sources testify that Jewish children indeed played these games as well.38 The only game that does not appear in Breuel’s Children’s Games is cards, which we see in the hands of the child on the right side of the image.39 This game was often mentioned in the list of forbidden games, together with drawing dice, as it included gambling. Yet, there was some tolerance towards these games on the holi38  Tali Berner, In Their Own Way: Children and Childhood in Early Modern Ashkenaz, (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2018) 39  Another toy that appears in Bruegel’s picture is a rattle. An image showing the reading of the Book of Esther in the synagogue depicts children with rattles, which were used in that case almost as a religious objects.

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days of Hanukkah and Purim, as they were considered to increase the joy of the holiday. One might ask whether these images could be counted as depicting “domestic devotion”. Although the activities seem to be secular, or at least not presented as any kind of clear religious activity, the meals and play were nonetheless strongly connected and identified with specific religious holidays or occasions and, as we can see with some of the games, reserved for these occasions. Therefore, including these images provides a more realistic impression of how holidays, particularly Hanukka and Purim, were really celebrated.40 While these non-Jewish images lack accuracy and often misrepresent some customs, they nevertheless seem to provide a better feel of everyday life and the spirit of the events than do many Jewish written and visual sources.

Children and Acts of Domestic Devotion Early modern illustrations, whether appearing in a Jewish or non-Jewish context, provide important and unique information regarding the ways in which children participated in religious acts occurring within the private sphere. Looking at the images thematically rather than dividing them according to the context in which they were published allows us to gain a fuller picture of the customs, rituals and holidays depicted. As demonstrated above, many of the details depicted in the images are supported by other sources. Other illustrations provide otherwise unknown information, yet, assuming their relative accuracy in general, we can safely assume that the artist portrayed reality in these cases as well. Besides testifying to the roles of children in the performance of various Sabbath and holiday-related rituals and life cycle events, the illustrations can teach us about other child-related issues in early modern Europe. The most prominent of these is gender roles and the construction of gender during childhood in relation to religious observance. The presence of gender here is even stronger in these images than in written texts. Girls and women appear in a few places in the images. It should be noted that when girls appear, they are depicted with women and not alone. We see them saying the blessing over the candles—a commandment reserved for women—and in the Passover preparations, and as well as the 40  Freiman argues that Hebraist books are important sources for learning about the lay approach and performance of rituals. Freiman, Jewish Culture in Ashkenaz, 22–24.

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passive role portrayed in the image of the Havdalah. On the other hand, the illustrations reflect the active roles expected of boys and men: the boy cleaning under the table, the boys holding the sacred objects used for the Havdalah ceremony and the boys performing the Hollekreisch and reciting the Shema at the bed of the new born. In this sense, the images confirm the assumption that gender roles were assigned early in life and that both boys and girls were expected to act according to their prescribed gender roles from a very young age. These differences in the gender roles between the sexes were not restricted to the public sphere but were manifested, and perhaps even intensified, within the private sphere and in family settings. Another issue that emerges from the images are adult-child relations. As we have noted regarding the images of the festive meals, the adults’ attention is directed away from the children. This is true in other images as well. Yet, we can see children holding onto the adults. This might indicate that the learning process was through observation and participation and not by direct instruction. It could also testify to the positions of children in both the private and public spheres, intimating that they were present and very much noticed by outsiders (as we can see from the composition, which places them at the centre) but did not receive much attention. The focus of the adults was on the sacred objects or ritual and not on the children, even in most of the domestic scenes. The final issue, appearing mostly in non-Jewish images, is the way children are framed in action. I argue that this testifies to a sensitivity to the nature of children as being constantly active and in motion. The images are therefore important as sources for the history of Jewish children, demonstrating both their participation in certain Sabbath and holiday-related rituals, preparations and lifecycle ceremonies, as well as broader aspects of children’s lives.

The Visual and Textual in Yiddish Books and Domestic Religious Education Having derived information from these images about the participation of children in acts of domestic devotion and holiday celebrations, I would now like to discuss another dimension of the illustrations printed in Yiddish language books, which allows further discussion of the importance of these images to the history of childhood. Even in the age of print and growing literacy, visual images nonetheless played an important role in the transmission of cultural and religious val-

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ues, both in Protestant and Catholic education.41 In her study of the role of visual depictions and objects in the domestic religious education of children in Early Modern Italy, Evangelisiti demonstrates that domestic images, most particularly sacred ones, appear to have played an important role in the educational process and were indeed understood as powerful media for the education of children, as much and perhaps more powerful than verbal ones.42 Although non-verbal images were more susceptible to multiple interpretations, they were nonetheless seen fitting as educational materials for all parts of society.43 Among these, portraits of little children, baby Jesus and saints, were perceived as particularly fitting for the decoration of the household as part of creating the right educational domestic environment.44 A similar phenomenon was detected by Nuechterlein in the Netherlands where the new genre of placing the virgin in a domestic background emerged.45 These new depictions of the virgin and baby Jesus reflect the creation of new domestic sacred spaces. Although the images with which we are concerned were not meant to be hung from the walls, some were printed in books and booklets that were meant for daily use, and therefore seen by children and adults on a regular basis. What role did they play in the education of young? And what message did they carry? In his study on the illustrations in early modern Yiddish literature, Shmeruk suggests that children and adolescents were part of the target audience of these books. This assumption was made based on the illustrations alone, rather than on the content of the books, although Shmeruk assumes that the books were read to children.46 He demonstrates how the visual images were a unique feature of Yiddish literature, specifically noting that the Hebrew versions of the same books were printed without 41  For the Catholic context: Silvia Evangelisti, “Learning from Home: Discourses on Education and Domestic Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy”, History 98 (2013), pp. 663– 679. In the Protestant world: Jeroen J.H.  Dekker, The Restrained Child: Imaging the Regulation of Children’s Behaviour and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, The Dutch Golden Age, History of Education and Children’s Literature, XIII, no.1 (2018), 17–39. 42  Evangelisti, “Learning from Home”, 678. 43  Evangelisti, “Learning from Home”, 663–679. 44  Evangelisti, “lLearning from Home”, p. 671. 45  Jeanne Nuechterlein, “The Domesticity of Sacred Spaces in the Fifteenth-century Netherlands”, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 50–79. 46  Shmeruk, The Illustrations, 39.

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images, while the author/translator added images when translating them into Yiddish. This tendency, Shmeruk argues, proves that this literature was targeted, among others, to children and adolescents. Moreover, he emphatically argues that the study of these books is essentially a contribution to the history of children’s literature.47 I follow up on his argument and suggest that the combination of the illustrations and rhymes that accompanied them with the themes of the illustrations and their locations in specific genres is what made them reading material for children and an important component of religious domestic education. Because of this, they played a key role in the history of Jewish childhood and of Jewish education. Let us look at some of the rhymes that accompanied the 1593 Minhagim illustrations and their reprints. The first is attached to the already mentioned illustration of the Havdalah ceremony: (this is) how the head of the household makes Havdalah with such seriousness/ and accustoms and draws his children to mitzvoth and good deeds.48

This short text, one example of many, demonstrates how a child could learn not only about how the ritual should be performed but also about the atmosphere (serious) and the purpose of children’s participation: to learn, to emulate, to be educated. Other verses take a lighter approach: The poor man hit him/ because he doesn’t have a head.49

This rhyme refers to the belief that on the day of Hoshana Rabba, as discussed in the text, one’s fate of life or death is decided, and if one does not see one’s head in one’s shadow or has no shadow, one is doomed to die that year. Combined with the illustrations, the rhymes give the children an alternative reading experience. They could look at the illustrations, read the rhymes and get an understanding of the holiday or ritual without having to read the full text. At the same time, the short texts provide limitations on the interpretational options of the reader, thus rendering the images less dangerous.  Shmeruk, The Illustrations.  ‫וויא דער בעל בית הבדלה מכט אזו גר ערנשטליך‬/ ‫ךילדניק ינייד םיבוט םישעמ ’נוא תוצמ וצ טכיצ וא טניוויג ’נוא‬ Minhagim, (Venice: Giovanni di Gara, 1593), 3b. 49  ‫דש ער הוט קיין קאפף‬/‫ דען האט גישלאגן דער טרופף‬Minhagim, 64b. 47 48

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One might imagine that children looked at these illustrations on various occasions, yet one received special attention. The Passover Seder is a ritual that does not appear directly in the images but was apparently facilitated by them (the ritualistic retelling of the story of the exodus, using a special text: the Haggadah). Telling the story of the exodus from Egypt is a biblical commandment directed at children, as stated in a number of places, such as Exodus 13:8: “You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt’”. Shmeruk claims that printing illustrations in the Passover Haggadah was meant to help children throughout the long night and awaken their interest in the Passover customs and rituals.50 This is clearly manifested in the 1606–1607 Passover Haggadah: The pictures were designed for the sake of the children/to keep them awake/so they won’t fall asleep during the Passover night.51

This claim is supported by the fact that these books include not only those images of reality with which we have been concerned, but also depictions of the biblical stories of Passover and other holidays. The images, therefore, mirror not only the reality, in that children helped with the preparations, but were also materials for contemplation and reflection. We might even hypothesise that the publishers chose to use illustrations depicting children because they understood the appeal of these images to children, who might have identified with them. While children read the books (or at least looked at the illustrations and read the rhymes), they had a more specific, educational and normalising effect on them. The introduction to the 1606–1607 edition of the Passover Haggadah and “summary of the Passover commandments” in Yiddish, which included many of the Minhagim illustrations, reveals the intended audience of the book, those who lived outside the large Jewish communities and did not receive much education. These books, images included, were supposed to demonstrate the “correct” way of performing these commandments and rituals, which included children. As with many other areas of both Jewish and European history, print played a normalising role and spread a homogenous image of domestic devotion. This role was strengthened by specific qualities of the images. Shmeruk also points to  Shmeruk, The illustrations, 34–60.  ‫ דש זי ניט זולן שלופן אין דער סדר נכט‬/‫ דז מן זיא וועכדיג מכט‬/‫די גימעל פון דען קינדרן וועגין זיין ווארין דר טרכט‬ Shmeruk, Studies, 50–51. 50 51

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the emblematic nature of the illustrations, which enabled their reprinting not only in the original context but also in other compositions such as symbols and icons.52 This quality, no doubt, contributed to the popularity of the woodcuts and added an educational prescriptive quality to them. Wolfthal also argued that the woodcuts from 1593 and 1600 tend to portray “appropriate” Jewish behaviour and “proper” social order and gender divisions while excluding deviant behaviours such as mixed dancing, card playing and active roles of women, which were portrayed in the earlier manuscripts.53 Domestic education played an important role in the education of both boys and girls, but especially in the lives of girls. While the community and the privately funded school system grew and expanded during the early modern period, the hadarim—Jewish schools—were restricted to theoretical education and seemed to have neglected the study of daily practice. The students were on vacation during the Sabbath and holidays, so parents were supposed to teach their children what to do on these occasions. Aside from some exceptions, girls did not attend these schools. It is still unclear how girls were educated, but the assumption is that they were taught at home or in some domestic setting. Therefore, we must assume that most of the practical religious education took place at home, although we have very little evidence to support it. From these images, we learn that children likely learned by way of emulation and participation, but domestic education might have included texts as well. The publication of textbooks, primers and other educational materials became fashionable in the seventeenth century, but it seems that most of these books, which primarily targeted a younger audience, were not as popular as books that were intended for the entire family.54 The Minhagim as well as books like the Tzena Ureena, a Yiddish commentary on the weekly Torah reading, became bestsellers. I argue that parents might have preferred to teach their children or give them the same books they themselves had used, and that children might have also preferred these books over those that were more didactic. Wanting to maximise their market, the publishers added the images and informed their audience that the promise  Shmeruk, Studies, 35.  Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish, 63–84. 54  Chava Turniansky, “‘Mikra Meforash’ LeEliezer Zusman Rodelson: Sefer Yotze Dofen Lelimud Hachumash BeYiddish”, Hamikra Bere’i Mefarshaves: Sefer Zicharon LeSarah Kamin, edited by Sara Yeffet, (Jerusalem: Magnes 1994), 497–517; Shalhevet Dotan-Ofir, History, Books, and Society: Yiddish Didactic Books Printed in Early Modern Amsterdam, Unpublished dissertation (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010) [Hebrew]. 52 53

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on the front of the book was true—it was indeed intended for “old and young, women and men, maidens and lads”.

Conclusion The images created and printed by Jews and non-Jews in early modern Europe serve an important role in understanding domestic devotion, with particular attention to children’s roles in these activities, during this period. They portray children as active participants, participating in the preparations for Passover, holding ritualistic objects in the Havdalah ceremony and as facilitators for some rituals. They also reflect gender divisions and testify to the place of children in the family and the ways in which children learned. The children depicted in the images fit into our knowledge of children in Early Modern Jewish communities in central and western Europe—highly visible and present in almost every activity. They provide specific knowledge about children in the private sphere—details that perhaps were not considered worth documenting, such as girls’ participation in candle lighting, seating arrangements around the table or games children played as part of holiday celebrations. The images demonstrate how the home was a locus of education and training, and how various religious objects were used to support and strengthen domestic religious education. Furthermore, these images played a complex and diverse role in the history of childhood. The iconic nature of the illustrations and viewing children as their primary audience have broad ramifications on our understanding of the function of these illustrations in the histories of childhood and of domestic devotion and religious education. As Wolfthal suggests, “They [1593 and 1600 Minhagim] too, are critical for understanding the Jewish past, since they reached hundreds of Yiddish-speaking homes, and in this way helped shape how Jews visualised romance and ritual, conceptualised Jewish identity, and formed a collective Jewish memory”.55 Indeed, they played an important role in the education of children and in implementing “proper” behaviour and social and religious order. The images, together with other texts, portrayed the “proper” Jewish family, and constructed a Jewish version of a protestant “holy household”,56 with the father at the centre, the wife and children surrounding him, with the children emulating the adults performing normalised and uniform customs.  Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish, p. 208.  Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 55 56

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Bibliography Manuscripts BnF MS Heb 586. Nuernberg cod. 7058 fol. 43v-44r.

Primary Sources Katzenellenbogen, Pinchas, Sefer Yesh Manchilim, ed. Yitzchak Dov Feld, (Jerusalem: Machon Hatam Sofer, 1984). Kirchner, Paul Christian, Jüdisches Ceremoniel, oder, Beschreibung dererjenigen Gebräuche, (Nurenburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1724?). Sefer Minhagim, (Venice, 1593). Sefer Minhagim, (Venice: Giovanni di Gara, 1600).

Secondary Sources Abramovitch, Ilana, “Brenard Picart’s Ceremonies and customs of the Several Nations of the Known World (1723): Moving Pictures”, Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, division D vol. II, (1990), 93–99. Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, (New York: Vintage books 1962). Averett, Matthew Knox (ed.), The Early Modern Child in Art and History, (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015). Baskind, Samantha, “Bernard Picart’s Etchings of Amsterdam’s Jews”, Jewish Social Studies, 13 no.2, (Winter 2007, New Series), 40–64. Baskind, Samantha, “Judging a Book by its Cover: Bernard Picart’s Jews and Art History”, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies,15 no.1 (2016), 6–28. Baumgarten, Elisheva,  Mothers and Children: Jewish Life in Medieval Europe, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). Berner, Tali, “Children and Rituals in Early Modern Ashkenaz” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7 no.1, (2014), 65–86. Berner, Tali, “Children in the Synagogue and in Communal Life in the Early Modern Era in Ashkenaz: the Contribution of Childhood Research to Establishing a New Perspective in the Study of Jewish Society”, Zion 78 no.2, (2013), 183–206. [Hebrew]. Berner, Tali, In Their Own Way: Children and Childhood in Early Modern Ashkenaz, (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2018) Boksenboim, Yacov, Letters of Jews in Italy: Selected Letters from the Sixteenth Century, (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 1994).

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Breuer, Mordechai, “The Early Modern Period”, in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol I: Tradition and Enlightenment, edited by Mordechai Breuer and Michael Graetz, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Chovav, Yemima,  Maidens Love Thee: The Religious and Spiritual Life of Jewish Ashkenazic Women in the Early Modern Period, (Jerusalem: Dinur Center, 2009).Fram, Edward,  My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth Century Poland, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007). Cohen, Richard I., “The Visual Image of the Jew and Judaism in Early Modern Europe: From Symbolism to Realism”, Zion, 57 no.3 (1992), 275–340 [Hebrew]. Cohen, Richard I., Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998), 67. Dekker, Jeroen J.H., “The Restrained Child: Imaging the Regulation of Children’s Behaviour and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, The Dutch Golden Age”, History of Education and Children’s Literature, XIII, no.1 (2018), 17–39. Deutsch, Yaacov, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Dotan-Ofir, Shalhevet, History, Books, and Society: Yiddish Didactic Books Printed in Early Modern Amsterdam, Unpublished dissertation (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010) [Hebrew]. Elyada, Aya, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish language in early modern Germany, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). Evangelisti, Silvia, “Learning from Home: Discourses on Education and Domestic Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy”, History 98 (2013), pp. 663–679. Freiman, Eli, Jewish Culture in Ashkenaz in the Beginning of the New Era: A View from the Perspective of Jews and Christians, Popular Culture, and Rabbinic Culture, Unpublished dissertation, (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007) [Hebrew]. Goldin, Simcha, “Jewish Children and Christian Missionizing.”, in Sexuality and Family in History, edited by Israel Bartal and Isaiah Gafni, (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1998), 97–118. [Hebrew]. Hunt, Lynn Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book that Changed the World: Picard and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010). Katz, Jacob, Tradition and Crisis, (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961). Soliday, Gerald L., “The Jews of Early Modern Marburg, 1640-1800: A Case Study in Family and Household Organization”, History of the Family 8 (2003), 503–506.Friedrichs, Christopher R., “Jewish Household Structure in an Early Modern Town: The Worms Ghetto Census of 1610”, History of the Family 8 (2003), 481–493.

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Liberles, Robert, “On the Threshold of Modernity”, in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, edited by Marion Kaplan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005). Martin, Jessica and Alec Ryrie (ed.),  Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, (Oxon and New York: Routledge 2016). Nuechterlein, Jeanne, “The Domesticity of Sacred Spaces in the Fifteenth-century Netherlands”, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 50–79. Roper, Lyndal, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Shmeruk, Chone, “HaIyurim Min Haminhagim BeYiddish Venezia 1593 BeHadpasot Khozrot”, Studies in Bibliography and Booklore, 12 (1984). Shmeruk, Chone, Yiddish Literature: Aspects of Its History, (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1978). Shmeruk, Chone, The Illustrations in Yiddish Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Texts, the Pictures and Their Audience, (Jerusalem: Akademon Press, 1986) [Hebrew]. Spicer, Andrew and Sarah Hamilton, ed., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005). Turniansky, Chava, “’Mikra Meforash’ LeEliezer Zusman Rodelson: Sefer Yotze Dofen Lelimud Hachumash BeYiddish”, Hamikra Bere’i Mefarshaves: Sefer Zicharon LeSarah Kamin, edited by Sara Yeffet, (Jerusalem: Magnes 1994), 497–517. Webb, Diane, “Domestic Space and Devotion in the Middle Ages”, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 27–47. Wolfthal, Diane, Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity and Memory in the Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy, (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004).

‘All things necessary for their saluation’? The Dedham Ministers and the ‘Puritan’ Baptism Debates Anna French

On December 6th 1583, a group of ministers were called to Lambeth Palace to meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury and a number of bishops—including those of London, Salisbury and Rochester—alongside the Dean of Westminster. John Whitgift was in his first few months as Archbishop of Canterbury and was determined to pull back from some of the more ‘godly’ ways endorsed and tolerated by his predecessor, Edmund Grindal. The group of ministers, all hailing from Sussex, were some of the first to be seen by Whitgift during the early stages of the ‘subscription struggle’, which saw ministers who acted as agitators for further religious reform required to endorse Whitgift’s Three Articles or lose their living.1 1  In The Dedham Conference notes, Matthew Parker records that the ministers involved in this encounter were from London, but this detail has been corrected in Patrick Collinson, John Craig and Brett Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582–1590 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), p. 108. The ministers, who were in fact from Sussex, were caught up in Whitgift’s attempts to gain control and influence during the vacancy of Chichester.

A. French (*) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_3

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In their meetings with the bishops, the ministers questioned and contested the beliefs and articles of faith they were now being asked to avow, seeking concessions in return. In particular, they had three key issues which they wanted to discuss with their new Archbishop. Each involved those ‘Rubrikes’ of the Book of Common Prayer that dealt with infant baptism. This chapter will examine the views of the Dedham ministers, and others who followed a zealous Protestant position, to unpick their beliefs about baptism. It will argue that the more radical reformers’ anxieties surrounding the spiritual status of infants, expressed through clerical debate and within puritan polemical literature alike, influenced and shaped wider Protestant culture. What was distinctive about these anxieties was an unfettered fear of human sin. The godly emphasised the role of original sin, and especially the particular sin held by women and newly born children, in a way that powerfully shaped Protestant perceptions of the very young. By doing this, puritan agitators, in turn, found themselves in the position of emphasising the importance of the sacrament of baptism, a sacrament they simultaneously argued needed to be simplified and downplayed within the English Church. This chapter will, therefore, bring together the histories of Protestant and puritan belief, those about baptism and those about childhood, infancy and women, to consider how the rite of baptism was negotiated during the English Reformation. The Sussex ministers were some of the many in Elizabethan England who believed in the importance of properly reformed religious discipline— something they felt was decidedly lacking in the Elizabethan Church— and who gathered in ‘conferences’ of like-minded ministers to discuss such matters. In their edited volume of Sussex’s Dedham conference and lectures, Patrick Collinson et  al. describe the ministers as possessing an unconsciously ‘Presbyterian ecclesiology’ which was in ‘embryo’ form, and also as ‘so-called Puritans’.2 These are terms, of course, that the ministers would never have used or recognised themselves. Indeed, the term ‘puritans’ cannot be used without consideration. Before delving more deeply into the histories of infancy and baptism in post-Reformation England, it would be wise, then, to define the language being used here. The histories of reformed belief, and most especially the histories of the interaction between the Protestant mainstream and those who may have believed themselves to be godly—or puritan, as they may have been called 2

 Ibid., p. xxii.

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by the seventeenth century—have been the subject of much historiographical debate, recent and otherwise. Much of this questioning centres on considering what that relationship between ‘puritans’, who held a more radical viewpoint within the post-Reformation Church establishment, and those who held more moderate Protestant beliefs, actually was. This chapter proceeds from the assumption that the godly did subscribe to a more intense version of Calvinist theology, and that this ‘hotter’ form of Protestant faith could place them into opposition with the established Church, as the Sussex ministers’ experience at Lambeth palace can reveal. As the Dedham volume editors state: […] the so-called puritans whom we meet in the documents published in this volume are not to be defined in themselves as a distinct religious species but only in the context of the imperfectly reformed church in which, as highly committed and fully informed protestants, they stood out as so many sore thumbs, a minority group, often obnoxious to the majority, and identifiable to themselves as ‘the godly’.3

Indeed, the puritan figure is a slippery one, and often evades tight definition: their difference, or otherness, was relative to the position in which they found themselves within the contexts of the post-Reformation English Church. Their more radical faith existed on the broader spectrum of Protestant belief and practice: we must not forget that the godly sat on pews next to, and lived alongside, Protestants of varying degrees of belief. Some puritans were moderate in their beliefs—and, simultaneously, as Alexandra Walsham has argued, ‘zealous Protestantism’ could be a popular religion.4 It was also possible at this time to hold puritan opinions without being someone who was, or who defined themselves as, a puritan: as Alec Ryrie has suggested, the term ‘puritan’ is ‘better used as an adjective than a noun’.5  Ibid., p. xxiv.  Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 325; Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 5  Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 6. On Puritans being seen as participants within a broader Protestant continuum, see, for example, Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Walsham, Providence. 3 4

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The subject of infant baptism, which was the matter under discussion at Lambeth in late 1583, is a useful window through which to glimpse the competing religious relationships and tensions at work in post-­Reformation England. One of the characteristics that defined adjectival puritanism was a more intense emphasis on, or anxiety surrounding, human sin—and baptism was in this regard a critical point of contention between believers of many stripes. If we look more deeply into these relationships and their resultant theological discussions, it is possible to see that encounters between those with godly convictions, like our Sussex ministers, and the official Church—as represented by the bishops sat before them at Lambeth—were not simply ones of opposition. Indeed, whilst Whitgift attempted to weed out the more zealous or radical ministers working within the Elizabethan Church, he himself was a committed predestinarian.6 Diarmaid MacCulloch has pointed out that ‘conformists’ like Whitgift were not so much anti-puritan as confident that there was ‘nothing in the existing settlement of the Church that was an obstacle to godly reformation’.7 This is a subtler relationship than simple antagonism, involving questions of means as much as disagreements on ends. Of course, religious debate and divide did exist in post-Reformation England, especially during the pre-Civil War fervour of the 1630s; but it would be anachronistic to read back these later debates on to the experiences of the godly throughout the whole of the Reformation period, or to allow them to distract us from moments of cohesion and compromise. When we explore the lives of people, when we unpick the lived experience of their faith and their pastoral realities, the significance of these notional boundaries between ‘puritan’ and ‘moderate’ begin to blur. The godly, especially during the late sixteenth century, as can again be seen in the Lambeth meetings and in the Dedham conference more widely, sought discussion and clarity within the frameworks of the established Church. In this way, godly ministers operated within, alongside and as part of the mainstream Church. For instance, authors who held puritan convictions, such as William Perkins, who will form part of our discussion, wrote texts which set out to influence the religious mainstream. Within this situation, the godly did not necessarily hold a minority position, and certainly not an  Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480–1642 (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) p. 139.  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 384–5. MacCulloch goes on in the same passage to refer to a ‘spectrum of nonconformism’, which is an especially useful phrase. 6 7

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isolated one: they were, in fact, influencing and helping to shape the English Protestant Church. As a result, English Protestant faith operated on a spectrum, with levels of intensity varying in the experiences of particular Christians, and even waxing and waning throughout the life-cycles of the same individuals. This chapter will, then, situate puritans within this wider context to which they belonged: that is, their position was relative as much as it was absolute—they situated themselves by reference to the mainstream Protestant position, and were a crucial part of the dialogue that formed it. The terms ‘godly’ and ‘puritan’ will here be used to refer to those who held, at one time or another and with varying intensity, particularly zealous sets of Protestant convictions. These people may or may not have identified as such, and their relationship to any notional ‘mainstream’ will have shifted over time; their views existed within a wider Protestant landscape and helped to shape early modern Protestant experience from within.

Official Baptism, the Sussex Ministers and the Three ‘Rubrikes’ This brings us back to Lambeth Palace in 1583, and to the issue of infant baptism. Some of the most obvious of the spiritual fault-lines evoked above, at which points the religious debates of the period surfaced more obtrusively than others, were moments when the soul of an individual, or group of individuals, appeared to be in the most danger. One of the most prominent of these moments, of course, was the period of infancy, most especially the time between birth and baptism. Indeed, baptism became a site of particular tension and anxiety during the period of the English reformations, and as a result, became a point of negotiation between those with puritan convictions and the Church establishment.8 Given their ­particular focus on sin and salvation, puritan anxieties about the uncer8  For further reading on the Reformation baptism ceremony, from social and religious perspectives, see Will Coster, ‘Tokens of Innocence’: Infant Baptism, Death and Burial in Early Modern England’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds), The Place of The Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and his Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chaps. 5–8; Anna French, ‘Disputed Words and Disputed Meanings: The Reformation of Baptism, Infant Limbo and Child Salvation in Early Modern England’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in

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tainty of the infant soul helped in this arena to shape Protestant opinion more widely, and this process will be the subject of the rest of this chapter. One of the main reasons for this anxiety and tension was the disputed nature and status of infants at this time. The image of the infant, both before and after birth, was one of a creature in a state of physical and spiritual liminality, a creature who had come from the body of a woman, and who did not yet ‘know’ God. According to the Bible, women were created as secondary to men, as helpmeet to their male companions, a view various Protestant writers adopted. As William Perkins, a puritan turned mainstream author, argued, ‘The male is a man of a superior sexe, fit for procreation. The female is a woman of inferior sexe, fit to conceive and beare children’.9 Furthermore, Protestants, especially those with more radical convictions, focused intensely on the sinful nature of the female body, and these perceptions were interconnected with the processes of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as with infants.10 Baptism, as the ceremony of infants, became a key part of this struggle over who—or perhaps what—an infant was or could become. This was a rite that was, in its official format, sometimes experienced by those with puritan leanings as an imposition by an ‘ungodly’ mainstream, and negotiations between different members of the Protestant faith can tell us much about perceptions of infants and infant salvation at this time. In the English Church, it was the Book of Common Prayer that laid out the approved form of Protestant baptism. The second of Whitgift’s Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Karen E.  Spierling, Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 9  On early modern perceptions of procreation see Patricia Crawford, ‘The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England’ in her Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2004); Gail Kern Paster’s ‘Complying with the Dug: Narratives of Birth and the Reproduction of Shame’ in her The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Anne Stensvold, A History of Pregnancy in Christianity: From Original Sin to Contemporary Abortion Debates (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). See also William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie (London, 1609), STC (2nd ed.) 19,677, p. 24. 10  Genesis 2:18–25. See William Perkins on the inferiority of women in his Christian Oeconomie, p. 24; on discussions of the sinful nature of the female body in historiography see, for example, Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003); Susan Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Luther on Women: A Sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1997) esp. ch. 2.

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Three Articles demanded ministers declare that the Book ‘containeth in it nothing contrary to the word of God’. The Book of Common Prayer had a history of revisions, but in 1583 the most recent edition was still the 1559 version—and yet its stipulations remained so controversial that Whiftgift felt it necessary to demand of his Church’s ministers explicit approval for it. The Sussex ministers, like many who sought further reform of the Church, believed that the Book gave rise to ambiguity and doubt, in their case especially concerning the rite of baptism. These concerns, therefore, ‘moved them to require of the said most reverend father and the rest afore […the] interpretation of the said Rubrikes’.11 The ministers argued that they should not be required to subscribe to any belief or action that was against the word of God and that anything that they did preach or teach needed to be ‘according to the Analogy of faith’.12 What they meant by this was simply that they should not be asked to perform any rite or religious duty which might imply or introduce scriptural contradiction. As a hermeneutical principle, the ‘analogy of faith’ held that scripture does not contain internal contradictions, but is rather harmonious across its parts—as one would expect, given it was believed to be the word of God. For the ministers, any interpretation of any biblical passage had to be matched with other sections of the Bible, to ensure that they—that is, the interpretation, not the passage, since the former was the element derived from human reasoning—did not contradict any other passage. Before they could subscribe to the Three Articles (and thus retain their living), then, they sought clarification that the interpretations Whitgift championed were consistent with godly understanding of scripture. Critically, some of the issues that concerned them found their root in an effort on the part of the authorities to assuage the anxieties of believers at the other end of the spectrum—those who might miss such things as the signings of the cross or the use of salts during baptism. For their part, the ministers’ concerns with the baptism ceremony as it was set out in the Book of Common Prayer, and as the Church was requiring its ministers to perform it, were threefold. First, they were worried about the relationship between baptism and confirmation, and its implications for the conferment of grace and infant salvation; secondly, they held uncertainties about the use of the ‘crosse in baptism’; and finally they expressed doubts about private or emergency baptism, and the implied role of women within such a rite.  Collinson, Craig and Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures, p. 109.  Ibid., p. 109.

11 12

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These discussions took place against the backdrop of the second half of Elizabeth I’s reign, in which Archbishops Whitgift and Bancroft pursued a strategy aimed at imposing conformity across the Church, and the ministers’ encounter with Whitgift was not untypical during the 1580s. This was a period in which the established Church became more conservative and disciplinarian, as it sought to foster that greater conformity. On the one hand, the Elizabethan Church attempted to row back on some of the more subversive forms of Protestantism which had been influenced by an earlier generation of Marian exiles; on the other, Elizabeth’s reign had always struggled to accommodate lingering Catholic, or quasi-Catholic, beliefs. In both respects, what parishioners felt was often quite separate to what they were required publicly to profess, and their expectations were often quite different to what might be implied by or contained within official doctrine.13 As Micheline White has argued, for example, from the 1560s onwards the Elizabethan Church became concerned with reforming ‘all aspects of private prayer, including the assumptions readers brought into their devotional closets; the way they interpreted the meaning of the Biblical verses in front of them; and the way they translated those meanings into lived devotional performances’.14 The phrase ‘lived devotional performances’ is important when we consider all acts of worship, and what was implied or interpreted by or through them: the liturgy itself, as set out in the Book of Common Prayer, was to be acted and performed by ministers to their congregations. This involved an exchange between minister and parishioner—between Church and church-goer—which was being negotiated within the pages of the Book of Common Prayer just as much as its doctrinal orthodoxy was being disputed at Lambeth Palace. All ministers, puritan or otherwise, were keen to provide assurances to their flocks. The concern of the Archbishop, and other defenders of the Book of Common Prayer, was that the congregation took away with them the correct messages from liturgical rites such as baptism. Confirmation and crossings were seen to be lingering popish rituals which had no place in Protestant worship as it was to be enacted by Church ministers, and therefore not just references to any suspicious 13  For emotional responses to reformed faith, see esp. Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and also Ryrie, Being Protestant. 14  Micheline White, ‘Dismantling Catholic Primers and Reforming Private Prayer: Anne Lock, Hezekiah’s Song and Psalm 50/51’, in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds.) Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) p. 113.

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beliefs or practices had to be removed, but also any room for continued confusion, misreading or anxiety amongst parishioners that may result from those excisions. All this brings us back to our ministers, who were concerned over the tightening of regulations and the wording used within them. On their first concern, the relationship between baptism and confirmation, ministers raised doubts surrounding the words used in the preface of the Catechism in the Communion Book, which aimed to reassure parents that ‘no detriment’ would come to their children if they delayed confirmation. What the Book of Common Prayer intended to do was to reassure those in the pews that confirmation was not, as they might erroneously believe, necessary as a sort of ‘seal’ on salvation—and to make clear that the only rite a child needed in order to be welcomed into the Church was infant baptism. The Book thus emphasised: ‘children being baptised haue all things necessary for their saluation and be undoubtedly saued’.15 In so doing, it introduced an ambiguity: what the ministers wanted to know was whether these passages meant that the Church of England was effectively arguing that the baptism ceremony itself actively conferred grace (‘grace tanquam ex opera operato’). This would not have been in line with scripture or Protestant theology (baptism being a sign or token of God’s grace, not the conferment of it). The group of bishops and the Archbishop assured the ministers that the ‘booke had noe such meaning’, and that they were intended to dissuade believers ‘from the opinion which the papistes had’, which they argued implied that children were not ‘perfectlie baptised until they be also bishopped’. In short, Whitgift sought to prevent any members of a given congregation wrongly linking confirmation, or ‘bishoppinge’, with beliefs about salvation. The Archbishop also assured the ministers that the Church of England’s rite of baptism contained in it nothing contrary to the word of God, as it sought to ensure that ‘children may know what their godfathers promised for them in their baptisme and also lerne to performe the same’. For puritans, and for Protestants more widely, one of the most important aspects of the baptism ceremony was that it constituted a beginning (a word used in the 1552 and 1559 Books of Common Prayer): it was not as an end in itself, and did not assure ­salvation. It was, rather, the beginning of a child’s Christian life and journey. The ministers concluded, then, that ‘they were satisfied’ with Whitgift’s answer.16  Collinson, Craig and Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures, p. 109.  Ibid., p. 109.

15 16

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On the second point, the ‘Rubrike’ on the ‘forme of baptisme’ asked the priest to ‘make a crosse on the childs forehead’.17 The role of crossings in baptism held traditional connotations and associations with baptismal exorcism. As Eamon Duffy argues, the sign of the cross was seen by Catholics to be a sacred ‘formulae’ which could ‘banish the Devil’—and as such became, during the periods of the Reformation and post-­Reformation, a highly contentious issue.18 The traditional exorcism (as it had appeared in the Catholic ceremony) was removed in the second Book of Common Prayer in 1552, but beliefs about its efficacy still lingered within the popular imagination.19 The ministers, therefore, desired to know whether the crossing was to be an addition to the ceremony and framed as a crucial part of it—which could potentially imply that, without the signing, baptism would be perceived to be ‘imperfecte’. Whitgift’s party, however, answered that the book had ‘no such meaning’ and that ‘the crossing of the child was only a ceremony significant and a profitable circumstance according to the words expressed in the booke’.20 The ministers recorded in their own minutes of this exchange that they were indeed content with this answer, but zealous Protestants remained, in practice, sceptical and critical of continued crossings throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England as across Europe, and continued to agitate for an urgent need to remove any hint of exorcism in order to achieve a truly reformed faith.21 The ministers’ third and final baptism-orientated concern was thornier, as it related to the possibility that women could baptise an infant—or, as the ministers put it, ‘the last doubte was of baptising by women’. Baptism by women would take place privately and was a form of the rite which was traditionally reserved for emergencies when it seemed that an infant might die before a minister could reach them. Many Protestants, including those  Ibid., p. 109.  Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) p.  281. See also Cressy’s chapter ‘Baptism as a Sacrament and Drama’, in his Birth, Marriage and Death; French ‘Disputed Words and Disputed Meanings’. 19  For the traditional Catholic ceremony, see J.D.C.  Fisher, Christian Initiation in the Medieval West. A Study in the Disintegration of the Primitive Rite of Initiation (London: S.P.C.K., 1965). 20  Collinson, Craig and Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures, p. 109. 21  On the efforts of the Reformed to thoroughly cleanse the baptism ceremony from any ‘popish’ trappings, see, Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 220–222. 17 18

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with puritan convictions, held strong feelings about private, or emergency, baptism—and yet the rite was retained in each edition of the Book of Common Prayer. These anxieties continued for two key reasons: firstly because, as the ministers were fully aware, the private baptism provision inevitably involved women, since  the women in a birthing room were most likely to meet an infant who was in grave danger. Thus, the rite was seen to be specifically giving women the authority to baptise, which was seen as problematic—in part due to their lay status, but mainly, as was the case with our ministers, due to their perceived lesser authority compared to men. In 1559, Archbishop Matthew Parker had declared that private baptism was to be reserved, out of necessity, for those babies who may die soon after birth. But even he emphasised that women baptising the young was the very last resort, arguing that, if no minister was present, it would be best to locate a ‘grave and sober man’ to undertake the task: in other words, it was merely preferable that the baptiser be ordained; it was their gender that, except in the most extreme cases, was non-negotiable.22 Just over a decade before our ministers arrived at Lambeth, the ‘puritan’ authors of the Admonition of 1572 argued that ‘baptism by women’ was a lingering popish hangover and needed to be stopped. They complained that women baptising infants ‘meddle in ministers’ affairs’ across the whole country.23 Whitgift had attempted to tackle this puritan discontent more widely, when defending the Church’s position against the writings of the more radical Thomas Cartwright. He maintained that the sacrament ‘remaineth in full force and strength, of whomsoever it be ministered’, and further that ‘the sacrament is not in the man, be he minister or not minister, be he good or evil, but in God himself, in his Spirit, and his free and effectual operation’.24 Cartwright, meanwhile, had protested that ‘I take the baptism of women to be no more the holy sacrament of baptism, than I take any other daily or ordinary washing of the child’.25 Whitgift responded to this by reminding Cartwright, and the readers of his works, that if it were true that only ministers could baptise, ‘then there be many that go under the name of Christians which were never baptized’, 22  Edward Cardwell (ed.), Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, Vol 1. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1844), p. 238. 23  ‘An Admonition to the Parliament’, in W.H.  Frere and C.E.  Douglas (eds.) Puritan Manifestoes: A Study in the Origin of Puritan Revolt (London: S.P.C.K, 1954) pp. 11, 26. 24  John Ayre (ed.), The Works of John Whitgift, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1851–3), ii. 528–9. 25  Ibid., p. 525.

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including the ‘divers’ people to have been ‘baptised by women’. Whitgift used Calvin’s Institutes to defend his position, and called the views of Cartwright ‘strange’ and ‘absurd’ when compared to the views of other reformers: thus again revealing the fact that so-called mainstream moderates were similarly influenced by Calvinism, and therefore blurring and complicating the notion of a hard-and-fast divide between them and those we may term puritans.26 Yet, for our ministers, and those who shared their views, the continued provision for any woman to be able to deliver the sacrament of baptism, as well as the continued position of the mainstream Church on the matter, remained, to say the least, problematic. Emergency baptism occasioned a secondary concern, too: any provision for it implied that baptism was necessary for salvation. Although the ministers do not refer to it here, many Protestants, most especially puritans, widely disputed the need for emergency baptism. They instead held that, through the doctrine of predestination, God had decreed who was to be elect before birth, and no watery washing at the hands of any minister (or layperson, female or male) would or could alter or influence the salvation, or destination, of the child’s soul. In this sense, ‘emergency baptism’ was oxymoronic: for the godly in particular, there was never an urgency behind any baptism; as Cartwright had argued, such a belief was ‘founded upon a false ground, and upon an imagined necessity (which is none indeed)’.27 This being the case, there seemed, to the more radical, little need to allow specific provision for ensuring the ceremony could happen in extremis.28 The zealous ministers were, in other words, keen to prevent baptism being seen as a transformative rite, or one that was necessary to save a soul. They followed those such as Zwingli, who argued that any ritual which may be confused for exorcism, or any private baptism, was superfluous and superstitious, as the rite was simply one which offered a newborn initiation into their new community. There was no need, then, for the rite to be performed in private, away from that community.29

 Ibid., pp. 525–7.  Ibid., p. 525. 28  For further reading on emergency baptism after the Reformation, see esp. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, esp. Chap. 5; Spierling, Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva, esp. Chap. 5; Hannah Cleugh, ‘Teaching in Praying Words? Worship and Theology in the Early Modern English Parish’, in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie (eds.) Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) esp. pp. 22–23. 29  Spierling, Infant Baptism, p. 32. 26 27

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In the most obvious example of constructive ambiguity to be found amongst the ministers’ exchanges with Whitgift, the bishops responded to the doubts surrounding private baptism by arguing that the Book of Common Prayer did not ‘name’ women. This presumably implied that the ministers could therefore subscribe whilst also forbidding or discouraging private baptism by women in their parishes, without strictly being in contravention of their beliefs or the Book of Common Prayer (one assumes that the same, however, would be true for a minister holding that emergency baptism was permissible and women ideally suited to providing it).30 On this point, the ministers did not comment on whether or not they were pleased with the response they were given, perhaps not being fully reassured that the absence of the word ‘women’ was enough to prevent individuals of that gender from being involved in emergency baptisms (which clearly, it was not). Furthermore, their anxiety over the involvement of women was a position arising from an intense puritan focus on female sin and inferiority. The puritan emphasis on sin—and most especially their emphasis on female sin, and the infant sin which was acquired by babies’ necessary closeness to women—paradoxically leant greater significance to the baptism ceremony, and to the resultant desire to preserve its integrity. Baptism, for Protestants of all shades of opinion, did not and could not save a child; but it could confer status, independence and identity; with all its traditional connotations, it continued to provide a necessary separation from the sinful woman who gave birth to a child. Indeed, as others have argued, the rite of baptism held all the symbolism and meaning of rituals associated with separation or rebirth. Baptism was, and is still, seen to be a fundamental rite of passage, where the baby leaves the body of the woman, and is brought to a new space to undergo, as Cressy argues, ‘rites of separation’; as Spierling suggests, baptism had a long tradition of being a ritual which ‘separated the child from the evil that still clung to him or her from the ‘pre-life’ stage’; and as Adriano Prosperi tells it, baptism was ‘birth in spirit, the rebirth of the soul’.31 Against this fraught theological, liturgical and pastoral backdrop, the puritans did indeed have a difficult task trying to challenge or unpick these tightly entwined beliefs, as the case of our  Collinson, Craig and Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures, p. 109.  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p.  97; Spierling, Infant Baptism, p.  36; Adriano Prosperi, Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, Brepols, 2016). p.  161. see also Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). 30 31

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ministers reveals. But, and even more significantly, they became part of these conversations, and they became part of the reason that baptism held such significant connotations and implications. The Sussex ministers’ doubts, and the responses they received, tell us a great deal about this process. These exchanges between members of the ‘mainstream’ Church hierarchy and those with godly, or ‘puritan’, leanings give us some insight into the theological and liturgical fault-lines and anxieties that existed in Protestant and ‘reformed’ circles in general, and into those surrounding the subject of baptism, and infancy, in particular. Many godly Protestants expressed worries about what the ceremony meant, what the Church was implying the ceremony of baptism meant, how much power the Church wished to invest in it, and about whether baptism was seen to confer grace onto a child and about the role of women in relation to the ceremony. As David Cressy has argued, for the Elizabethan godly, writing in such texts as The Admonition to Parliament of 1572, the Church was seen to be ‘but half-cleansed’, and issues relating to the font, crossings and private baptism were ‘abominations’ leftover from a popish past.32 For those who wanted to see the Church fully reformed, all that was needed to baptise someone, as with the early Christians detailed in biblical literature, was the person who needed to receive the rite, a person to administer it, and water. Mainly, for puritans, as we can see through the words of the Dedham ministers, there was a lingering concern about how transformative the Church and its representatives intended the ceremony to be, or how far their perceived permissiveness allowed it to be, in the eyes of their congregations. These concerns are important to the historian of early modern religion, and more specifically to the historian of early modern childhood, as they reveal the levels of Protestant discord and anxiety which surrounded bringing new life, new souls, into the world. Furthermore, this anxiety existed across the spectrum of English post Reformation faith. Despite the fact that baptism was no longer, officially, believed to confer grace, or to alter or affect God’s predestined purpose, in practical terms the ceremony still held a high level of significance—for Protestants of all stripes and persuasions. Whether those with puritan leanings liked it or not—and however much they protested that God had decreed the soteriological status of every soul before birth, which no earthly rite could alter—even after the Reformation, baptism continued to be seen as a  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 108.

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transformative rite. Part of the reason for this was the basic human need to welcome new life and to assure parents that the rocky road which was often experienced by their vulnerable new offspring was at least in part sheltered by God’s oversight and loving protection. Indeed, baptism remained important to the English reformers, and to those in Europe, despite the lack of a strong scriptural insistence on a need for it. Zwingli attempted to justify the rite’s survival by comparing baptism to circumcision: circumcision represented the Israelites’ membership of the old covenant, whereas Protestant baptism represented membership of the new covenant. The English Church was, though, unusual in its insistence, set out in the Prayer Book, that all children, even those who were illegitimate, or of evidently sinful parentage, be baptised—much to the displeasure of those with puritan leanings.33 Yet, another part of the reason for the ceremony’s continued endurance was, in fact, the beliefs of the godly themselves. Indeed, despite the Protestant claim that baptism was not necessary for salvation—and despite their desire to simplify, or to downplay, the ceremony—the godly themselves actually contributed to the continuing emphasis on, and perceived significance of, the rite in England. This is a fact which has not previously been sufficiently acknowledged within the historiography. Certainly, as good Calvinists, those with puritan convictions expressed anxiety over all the issues considered so far here, as well as whether to baptise the children of sinners, in much the same way as their European counterparts.34 But their emphasis on these questions p ­ roceeded from and contributed to precisely the curiously English context in which the ceremony was seen to be so important. Indeed, as stated at the outset of this chapter, puritans were and can be defined against their relative  Cleugh, ‘Teaching in Praying Words?’, pp. 17–22.  Those involved in the Dedham Conference sometimes discussed their baptism-related dilemmas, which included raising questions about what to do with ‘children base born’. By ‘base born’, they meant, for example, children of ‘an offensive person’, the offspring of those who ‘did refuse the lordes supper’ and those of ‘straunger […] Irish women’. In cases of sinful parents known to the parish, the Dedham ministers tended to suggest the use of appropriately and carefully chosen godparents, who would be able to answer for the children (even though puritans disliked the general use of godparents, arguing that in most cases parents should answer for their own children). However, they often refused to baptise the children of strangers to the parish, fearing that they were illegitimate, meaning that, for the godly, they had no chance of being elect. Refusing baptism was, though, against the recommendations of the Church itself. See Collinson, Craig and Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures, esp. pp. 8, 16, 28 and 46. 33 34

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position to the wider English Church, as much as any absolute one. Puritan interaction with other English voices in the post-Reformation Church led to an intense emphasis on baptism, and its relationship not just to debates about predestination, but also to perceptions of sin (both female and infant): in arguing strenuously that, for example, baptism must not be administered by women, or that baptism needed to be preserved for those who had a chance of being amongst the elect, or at least denied to those who were believed to be entirely unworthy of possible election, puritan convictions joined the chorus of those placing such critical emphasis on the rite.35 Puritans, then, had a more complex relationship with the mainstream against which they sometimes defined themselves—and this can be clearly seen in how they imagined and negotiated baptism in particular. In order to conclude the discussion in this chapter, it will be useful to briefly consider the impact of all these debates on the figure of the early modern infant, as puritans imagined him or her, in their writings. How did puritan polemic shape and mould ideas about what it meant to be a child in the early modern period?

Locating the Early Modern Infant in Puritan Writings Despite the importance Protestant commentators attached to the image of family—and the many advice manuals they penned about how to procreate, and then give birth to and raise children—as well as all the baptism debates we have considered, the image of the infant, the smallest child, is quite hard to locate. As a result, early modern infants are a category of people rarely considered in early modern historiography.36 The spiritual status of the infant was, as we have seen, heavily disputed, and occasioned 35  For puritan debates on whether to baptise children of perceived sinners, see Collinson, Craig and Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures, esp. pp. 16, 28, and 46. 36  The fact that infants, and children more widely, are largely missing from early modern historiography (and historiographies more widely) is an odd reality. Early moderns did in fact spend considerable time writing about the lives of the young in this period, albeit in ways different to how we might expect. See footnote 8 above for publications on infant baptism. On early modern childhood more widely see Anna French, Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Hannah Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lucy Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post Reformation England (London: Palgrave, 2014).

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much anxiety, with puritan writers emphasising their capacity for sin more than most. Even after birth, the spiritual status of a newly born ‘creature’ was contested, and it was not until after baptism that they were named. Infants themselves were seen to occupy an extremely contested space within the early modern mind. The sin they were perceived to hold made them theologically vexed and soteriologically uncertain creatures. Little wonder that such complicated, and unknowable, beings were shied away from in texts. Indeed, for Protestants, and for puritans in particular, infants presented something of a theological conundrum. Various sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century texts, most commonly midwifery and family advice manuals (often written by those who held puritan leanings), presented the image of the child, newly born, as a creature stained red, covered in blood, and wailing—in an acknowledgement of the sin they had committed, been born both of and into. One of the overriding themes of Protestant childhood, or one of the beliefs that underpinned what it actually meant to be a child in early modern culture, was that this period of life was one of great instability and uncertainty. Children came from a place of sin (sex and conception, as well as their mother’s womb), and were born into a situation of precariousness in which, given their natural stage of naivety and incomprehension, they were unable to ‘know’ God, or to understand or recognise the path of true religion. This, combined with the natural vulnerability and frailty of their small bodies, led to much anxiety. Indeed, the anxiety seen in the discussions between the Dedham ministers and Whitgift resurfaces in polemical texts, especially those written by puritans—who were, by the seventeenth century, much more self-aware of their ‘godly’ identities. Yet, as emphasised above, these zealous Protestants still remained part of more mainstream culture, and set out to preach to, and publish for, not only a puritan audience but a general one. William Perkins in particular, as a minister within the established church, was a puritan writer who endeavoured to find ways to communicate with those in the pews more widely. Protestants of various shades, but most especially puritan-influenced families, were advised to seek god-fearing partners. Indeed, as Thomas Becon advised in his Catechism, ‘whosoever indendeth to have good, godly, and virtuous children […] it is necessary that he be wary and circumspect in choosing his wife’: women, he argued, in the worst circumstances, produce ‘monstrous and wicked children’.37 As part of 37  Thomas Becon, The Catechism of Thomas Becon, ed., John Ayre (Cambridge, 1844) pp. 346–7.

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establishing a good Christian family, English Protestants, however, were also reminded of the importance of baptism, and encouraged to understand what was meant by the ceremony—that is, mainly to conceive of it as a welcoming into the Church. Therefore, parents were expected to educate their children as quickly as possible, so that they could come to know God in their own right. As Perkins argued: The […] point of education of children, is to Provide that they may liue well, and to lead a godly life […] First they are to be carefull, that the child, so soone as may bee, after it is borne, bee admitted into the true Church of God by Baptisme, and have a fit name giuen vnto it. Secondly, they are to endeuour to sow the seeds of godlinesse and religion in the heart of the child, so soon as it comes to the vse of reason and vnderstanding; and it is to grow in knowledge and grace.38

Perkins’s writing here shows that Protestants, as puritans would aver, did not see baptism as an easy door to salvation. But they did see it as part of a ‘package’. Baptism, as argued above, symbolically separated the body of the child from that of the mother—and, when combined with education, could help children towards their potential salvation, as part of nurturing in them understanding. Perkins also wrote ‘[…] obserue both the inclination, and the naturall gifts of bodie and mind that are in the child, and accordingly to bestow it in some honest calling & course of life’. He then quoted Proverbs 20:11: ‘A child is knowne by his actions, whether his worke be pure and right’.39 Perkins was in this way depicting baptism combined with Christian education as a way of nurturing the child’s individual character, and ultimately their salvation—which would proceed not out of the rite itself, but out of a process of coming to know God, and revealing their godliness through their own individual actions and ­behaviour. Such writings are not entirely in-line with teachings about predestination, but they did provide a framework for both understanding and raising young Protestant children. It is possible to see in this quite subtle theology why the ministers we met above were anxious to define baptism so carefully: to prevent confusion around it and to regulate its pastoral meaning. Baptism was a fundamental rite for the infant, but it did not on its own grant salvation. It did,  Perkins, Christian Oeconomie, p. 137.  Ibid., p. 137.

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rather, help a child embark upon the right, and godly, path in life. Indeed, according to texts penned at the time, only Christ was born without the spot of sin; the rest of humanity needed to earnestly engage as early in life as possible with the ‘covenant of reconciliation’—although most would agree that attempting such reconciliation in childhood was, at the very least, something of a challenge. Nevertheless, for Protestants, especially the more zealous amongst them, this challenge needed to be met as early as possible; the battle for their infants’ souls started right after birth— even, one might argue, before it. The whirlwind of sin which was seen to surround both infants and children (and, to some extent, youths) was expressed in contemporary literature. The spiritual status of the mother was fundamental to the spiritual status of the child, as evidenced by puritan deliberations over whether to baptise the children of ‘sinful’ women, or those who they ‘could not tell whether it [the infant] were begott in lawfull marriage’.40 Furthermore, beliefs about female and infant sin, and fears and anxieties surrounding their potential for salvation, provided a key lens through which early moderns perceived women, pregnancy and infants. Some writers more than others emphasised the themes of sin and salvation, and the soteriological problems presented by the pregnant or birthing mother and infant. Such details are clear in a funeral sermon written by puritan minister Sampson Price which was both delivered and published in 1624. The sermon, entitled The Two Twins of Birth and Death, is interesting because it helps us to understand how late Elizabethan concerns amongst the godly carried through to puritan Jacobeans—and therefore map this mutable community’s development and relative cohesion over time.41 It presents us with the trope of the blood-stained and crying child, making their way from the womb into the world, with deliverance occurring thanks to God. This image was a powerful one precisely because it clearly portrayed the relationship, in the early modern, and particularly puritan, mind, between the image of the child and the potent idea of sin. For early modern people, children and babies were hideously sinful, and descriptions of them cast into high relief the fears surrounding those interrelated concepts of sin  Collinson, Craig and Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures, p. 46.  Even by this time, puritan identity was, according to Tom Webster, ‘context-dependent, friable and necessarily mutable’; yet, simultaneously, the ‘community was maintained’ via mutual ‘observation of the criteria for godliness’ amongst its self-declared members. See Tom Webster, ‘Early Stuart Puritanism’, in John Coffey and Paul C.H.  Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), p. 62. 40 41

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and salvation, and therefore the problematic question of how infants and children might achieve the latter. As Price saw it: […] man is borne miserable [… and] enters into the world bathed in bloud, an image of sinne, his first song is the lamentation of a sinner, weeping and sobbing.42

For Price, the image of the newly born infant was something fearful, representative of human sin, symbolic of the original sin humankind had been indebted with since the Fall. Indeed, human infants were more sin-­ soaked, more damnable and more representative of sin, than any other newborn creature, for they had fallen from God’s love, they were the punished. As Price emphasised: […] Fishes of the sea have shells, Trees of the Forrest have knotty barkes, Beasts of the field hard hides, bees stings, Hogs bristles, Hedgehogs prickles, Beares rough hayre, Birds feathers, fishes scales, sheepe fleeces, serpents stings, cockes spurres, Elephants and bores teeth and tuskes, yet man commeth from the prison of his mothers wombe as a poore worm, the most naked of all living creatures.43

What is significant here is the deep and unremitting sense of human sin—the sin held by the child and the mother, and the emphasis on their lucky escape from its deadly grip. When commenting on the sin held by the newly born infant’s mother, Price writes: ‘the mother lyeth by but halfe flaine by the birth, and when she looketh vpon the fruit of her labour pranked up, it is as the Thief pardoned’.44 Price notes that, during the pains of labour, both mother and child could die, in fact perhaps should die and be damned, as punishment for their sin. But if they were saved, and offered the opportunity of human life, this was due to the graciousness of God. As Price goes on to say, from the stance of the mother, ‘this childe had been her death, had not God given her a safe deliverance in the great danger of childbirth’. The child, too, had also been in grave danger—they ‘might have dyed from the wombe, and giuen up the ghost when he came  Sampson Price, The Two Twins of Birth and Death (London, 1624) STC (2nd ed.) 20,334, p. 8. 43  Ibid., p. 8. 44  Ibid., p. 8. 42

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out of the belly’—but they had not because, at that moment, they had God on their side.45 Writers like Price encouraged their readers to look to God for mercy and to thank Him for the safe delivery of infants. In this drama, baptism might be a marker—but it had no power of its own, and this was what the Sussex ministers insisted that Whitgift clarify.

Conclusion In conclusion, the perilous nature of puritan perceptions of infancy was reflected in the anxieties, shared by all Protestants, that surrounded the ceremony of infant baptism. For early modern writers of all stripes, the theme of the family, and more particularly the difficult phase of infancy, were theologically muddied and pastorally complicated issues. This spiritual uncertainty paved the way to many anxieties. The infant was, then, a soteriologically complex entity; but one which became much less fraught, in the minds and writings of early moderns, when they were presented at the font for the baptismal washing, for the symbolic second birth. For puritans, it was precisely this thorny theology that led them to insist upon baptism’s inefficacy in cleansing sin from the infant—but in so doing they paradoxically placed greater emphasis on the sacrament than one might expect. When the Sussex ministers challenged the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace in 1583, they did so because they feared a contradiction between the biblical irrelevance of baptism and the Book of Common Prayer’s ambiguous insistence on such continuations as emergency baptism—that is, on permitting women, however morally slippery they were perceived to be, to deliver salvation to dying infants. That puritans felt this issue was so serious as to necessitate risking their living in a challenge to the Three Articles is evidence enough that infant salvation posed unique difficulties for reformed thought. That Whitgift responded in a manner which soothed the assembled ‘godly’ demonstrates in turn that puritan anxiety over these issues could inform ‘mainstream’ Protestant thought, and drive it towards a similar ambivalence—despite simultaneously retaining a pastoral commitment to a sacramental balm for the endemic and urgent uncertainties occasioned in part by the very focus on sin that puritans encouraged. The result of all this was that, for the infants themselves, the moment of  Ibid., p. 9.

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baptism came to be the one at which they were perceived to be clearly separated from the woman from whom they came—and the one at which they were no longer viewed as creatures, but as beings in their own right. But that is another story.

Bibliography Primary Texts ‘An Admonition to the Parliament’, in Puritan Manifestoes: A Study in the Origin of Puritan Revolt, ed., W.H. Frere and C.E. Douglas (London: S.P.C.K, 1954) Becon, Thomas, The Catechism of Thomas Becon, ed., John Ayre (Cambridge: Parker Society, Cambridge University Press, 1844) Christian Initiation in the Medieval West. A Study in the Disintegration of the Primitive Rite of Initiation, ed., Fisher, J.D.C. (London: S.P.C.K., 1965) Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582–1590, Patrick Collinson, John Craig, and Brett Usher (eds.) (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003) Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, ed., Edward Cardwell vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1844) Perkins, William, Christian Oeconomie (London, 1609), STC (2nd ed.) 19677 Price, Sampson, The Two Twins of Birth and Death (London, 1624) STC (2nd ed.) 20334 Whitgift, John, The Works of John Whitgift, vol 3, ed., John Ayre (Cambridge: Parker Society, Cambridge University Press, 1851–3)

Secondary Texts Benedict, Philip, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002) Cleugh, Hannah, ‘Teaching in Praying Words? Worship and Theology in the Early Modern English Parish’, in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie (eds.), Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) Coster, Will, “Tokens of Innocence’: Infant Baptism, Death and Burial in Early Modern England’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds.), The Place of The Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Coster, Will, Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)

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Crawford, Patricia, ‘The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-­ Century England’, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2004) Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) French, Anna, Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015a) French, Anna, ‘Disputed Words and Disputed Meanings: The Reformation of Baptism, Infant Limbo and Child Salvation in Early Modern England’, in Jonathan Willis (ed.), Sin and Salvation in Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015b) Gowing, Laura, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003) Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Karant-Nunn, Susan, Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Luther on Women: A Sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Karant-Nunn, Susan, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Kern Paster, Gail, ‘Complying with the Dug: Narratives of Birth and the Reproduction of Shame’, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Newton, Hannah, The Sick Child in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2004) Marshall, Peter, Reformation England 1480–1642 (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) Prosperi, Adriano, Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, Brepols, 2016) Roper, Lyndal, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1997) Ryrie, Alec, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Spierling, Karen E., Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Stensvold, Anne, A History of Pregnancy in Christianity: From Original Sin to Contemporary Abortion Debates (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015) Underwood, Lucy, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post Reformation England (London: Palgrave, 2014)

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Van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960) Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Webster, Tom, ‘Early Stuart Puritanism’, in John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), p. 62. White, Micheline, ‘Dismantling Catholic Primers and Reforming Private Prayer: Anne Lock, Hezekiah’s Song and Psalm 50/51’, in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds.) Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)

‘Children of the Light’: Childhood, Youth, and Dissent in Early Quakerism Naomi Pullin

In the summer of 1682, persecution of Quakers in Bristol was at an all-­ time high under the superintendence of Sheriff John Knight and his constables. The number of Quaker prisoners in Newgate and Bridewell prisons had reached 160, and their offences ranged from attending illegal ‘conventicles’, refusing to pay their tithes, and local church rates, to breaking the peace. Although the suffering of the Bristol Quaker community was great, their spirits were greatly refreshed by news that their children had continued the meetings for worship in their absence. For, as the Quaker hagiographer Joseph Besse observed in his eighteenth-century c­ ompilation of suffering, 55 youths aged between 10 and 12 ‘kept up their Meetings I am grateful to Elizabeth Bouldin, Alexandra Walsham and Bernard Capp for their thoughts and feedback on different drafts of this chapter. Catie Gill also provided valuable assistance when the chapter was in its early stages. The writing of this chapter was undertaken during a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge: I am thankful to both the Trust and the University for their support. N. Pullin (*) University of Warwick, Conventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_4

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regularly’. The ‘remarkable Gravity and Composure’ of these young recruits was celebrated, as they suffered many abuses on account of their parents’ witness. Their ‘Courage and Constancy’ in continuing their parents’ legacies meant that some were put in the stocks, while others were thrown into prison or suffered physical blows and beatings. They continued to meet clandestinely until their parents were released, despite the prospect of violence and incarceration.1 This pattern of suffering, which continued until 1688, underscores the fact that children were active and visible members of early Quaker culture in their own right, providing momentum and encouragement for a heavily persecuted and fragmented dissenting community. Children were the vessels through which the faith and its peculiar customs and practices were perpetuated, and this chapter explores life within the early Quaker household from the perspective of the movement’s youngest members. It explores the active role that children and young people played in the movement’s charismatic early years and argues that the shift from first to second generation Quakerism altered the relationship that children were expected to have with their parents and Quaker elders. It reveals that the leadership’s concern to retain young people within the faith encouraged the eighteenth-century leadership to place the correct upbringing of youth above all other forms of active proselytising and missionary work. Educating the next generation was a valuable undertaking within a more conservative church culture. The story of the Quaker children of Bristol provides a fascinating insight into the effects of persecution on the wider family (in both a temporal and spiritual sense), but also raises intriguing questions about the relationship between youth and dissent. Should children align with the religious views of their parents, or follow their own religious conscience? What impact did persecution and ministerial work have on the children of Quaker converts? How important were children to the evolving Quaker mission? And above all else, what was it ‘like’ to grow up in early Quaker culture? These issues have been largely neglected in the scholarship to date, with the focus primarily remaining on childrearing practices. There has been some effort to explore Quaker education and the institutions established in the later eighteenth century to secure a ‘guarded’ educa-

1  Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, 2 vols (London, 1753), i, pp. 66–8.

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tion for new generations of Friends.2 This was a theological and pedagogical concept that recognised the innocence of children and the need to protect them from worldly influences.3 Some consideration has also been directed towards the disruptive effects that the Quaker emphasis on direct inwards spiritual revelation had on the household and family.4 Yet more remains to be uncovered about the experience of childhood within early Quaker culture. From the start, the idea of ‘childhood’ was a compelling metaphor for the early Society. Indeed, childhood to seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century Friends (as Quakers referred to themselves) was a highly fluid concept, since youth and age were not fixed categories and did not necessarily denote the same thing. The earliest converts described themselves as ‘Children of the Light’ and ‘Children of God’, expressions that encapsulate the idea that spiritual youth was experienced by everyone irrespective of their age or worldly experience: all members were ‘children’ within the eyes of God. Elizabeth Bathurst, for instance, addressed members of her new religious community as ‘little Children (in the spiritual stature, being my self one of that Number)’ and Thomas Ellwood described Isaac and Mary Pennington, ‘as affectionate Parents, and tender Nurses to me, in

2  See, for example, Elizabeth Bouldin, ‘‘The Days of Thy Youth’: Eighteenth-Century Quaker Women and the Socialization of Children’, in New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800, ed. by Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 202–20; Victoria E. Burke, ‘‘The Art of Numbering Well’: Late-SeventeenthCentury Arithmetic Manuscripts Compiled by Quaker Girls’, in Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730, ed. by James Daybell and Peter Hinds (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 246–65; Jerry W. Frost, ‘As the Twig Is Bent: Quakers Ideas of Childhood’, Quaker History, 60.2 (1971), pp. 67–87; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Nature and Nurture in the Early Quaker Movement: Creating the Next Generation of Friends’, Studies in Church History, 55 (June, 2019), pp. 161–76; Sydney V. James, ‘Quaker Meetings and Education in the Eighteenth Century’, Quaker History, 51.2, 1962, pp. 87–102; Barry Levy, ‘“Tender Plants”: Quaker Farmers and Children in the Delaware Valley, 1681– 1735’, Journal of Family History, 3 (1978), pp. 116–35. 3  See Bouldin, “The Days of Thy Youth”, p. 209. 4  See for example, Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 212–35; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp.  146–79. My monograph Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), explores the disruption of a woman’s conversion to the household in Chap. 1, pp. 36–40.

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this time of my Religious Childhood’.5 Moreover, little distinction was made in Quaker writings between young children and adolescents, who were often described under the same collective terminology.6 The ensuing discussion thus recognises that childhood was both a spiritual state and a life-cycle stage that defined a specific category of Friends approximately under the age of 20, for whom writings, guidance, and advice were explicitly directed. Using the printed spiritual autobiographies of Quaker ministers, Quaker records of suffering, as well as family correspondence held in repositories in Britain and North America, I aim to offer a multifaceted picture of childhood within a marginal religious community. One of the problems with these sources is how to access the experience of the young in unmediated form. As Alexandra Walsham reminds us, accounts of childhood are rarely written by children: they tend to be written by adults either describing the actions of children or recollecting their own childhoods.7 The experiences of Quaker children can therefore never be wholly recovered. Moreover, there is a general absence in the surviving documents of early Quaker history on the first years of life or how early Friends believed young children should be raised. As Jerry W.  Frost has noted, early descriptions of infancy are generally found in documents that originate after the middle of the eighteenth century, and most date from the 1770s. Nevertheless, as he explains, this did not mean that children were neglected subjects in early Quaker writings: many family letters and documents relating to Quaker Meetings show a keen interest in matters relating to the family and extended household.8 This was combined with a 5  Elizabeth Bathurst, Truth Vindicated by the Faithful Testimony and Writings Of the Innocent Servant and Hand-Maid of the Lord, Elizabeth Bathurst (London, 1695), ‘An Epistle to Such of the Friends of Christ, as have lately been Convinced of the Truth as it is in Jesus’s’, p. 138; Thomas Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (London, 1714), p. 100 [original emphasis]. 6  In an undated epistle to Quaker Women’s Meetings, representatives of the Quaker Women’s Box Meeting in London set out the responsibility of mothers over their children, describing those who were old enough to enter service as ‘Children to be kept close to their Employments and to their Meeting … [and] made diligent in their places and stations’. MGR 11a4 London Women’s Meeting Epistles, 1671–1753, fol. 15, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London (hereafter cited as LRSF). 7  Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age, and Religious Change in England, c.1500–1700’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 21 (2011), pp. 99, 120. 8  Frost, ‘As the Twig is Bent’, pp. 74–5.

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burgeoning genre of educational literature addressed to children.9 The vast collection of materials relating to early Quaker culture, which were consciously preserved by the movement’s earliest leaders, offers an unrivalled opportunity to understand the lived experiences of young people and to see how children shaped and were shaped by early Quakerism.

Conflicts of Conscience: The Impact of Conversion on Quaker Youth Quakerism emerged in the Midlands and Northern Counties of England in the late 1640s, and the first converts did much to prove themselves uncooperative and, at times, dangerous to contemporary social norms and customs. ‘It was a movement of unruly antinomian rebellion against institutionalised religion’, writes Walsham, for those who described themselves as ‘Friends’ would not participate in the customs of daily life, refusing to doff their hats to social superiors, greet passers-by with the usual ‘good morrow’ and would address strangers and superiors with the familiar ‘thee’ and ‘thou’.10 They also refused to pay tithes and rates for the upkeep of local churches. More extreme were the actions of some converts who railed at priests and magistrates, ran through public spaces dressed only in sackcloth and ashes, and, in the case of one leader, committed blasphemy by re-enacting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem to the people of Bristol.11 Established religion came to be connected with stubborn conservatism, whilst Quakerism celebrated an inversion of traditional patriarchal and deferential structures. In repudiating contemporary gestures of obedience and setting themselves against established authority, including the authority of their parents, it is unsurprising that the movement attracted passionate and charismatic young converts, equipped with a set of customs and beliefs that might teach or facilitate the conversion of their elders.12 This 9  See David Blamires, ‘Early Quaker Educational Books for Children’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 63 (2012), pp. 20–30; and Walsham, ‘Nature and Nurture’, pp. 161–76. 10  Walsham, ‘The Reformation of the Generations’, p. 119. 11  For the account of blasphemy see Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996). Some of the early Quaker extremes are discussed in Hilary Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 1–12. 12  One of the early Quaker leaders was the ‘martyr’ James Parnell, who the leader George Fox described as ‘a little boy … About 15 years old’. Parnell ‘was convinced and came to be a very fine minister of the word of life and turned many to Christ’. George Fox, The Journal

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part of the chapter will explore the turbulent nature of conversion to Quakerism—both when children joined the movement without their parents’ consent and vice versa—along with the challenges that missionary work brought to the continuation of ordinary domestic life. However, as this section will also show, it is important to recognise that despite these intergenerational tensions, Quaker children provided an important active role in supporting the movement in its earliest years: as champions of their relatives, as martyr figures, and as spiritual counsellors. It is clear that early Quaker culture was ‘marked by family conflict and intergenerational friction’, as evidenced in the writings of the early leaders.13 Texts such as George Fox’s Saul’s Errand to Damascus, first published in 1653, urged new converts to reject the authority of ordained clergymen and their parents or spouses. ‘Opinions do tend to break the relation of Subjects to their Magistrates, Wives to their Husbands, Children to their Parents’, he wrote.14 James Parnell expressed something similar when he explained how Christ’s coming had turned the world upside down and ‘set at Variance, Father against Son, and Son against Father, and Wife against the Man’.15 Converting to Quakerism, therefore, threatened the fabric of family life, as demonstrated in Thomas Ellwood’s autobiography, which Bernard Capp explores in detail in this volume. Ellwood recorded how he had received several ‘Buffets on [the] Head’ and ‘a Whirret on the Ear’ for refusing to remove his hat in his father’s presence in the early years of his conversion.16 Similarly, William Penn faced a difficult domestic situation after he started attending Quaker meetings, for his father ‘endeavoured, both by words and blows to deter him therefrom’, and eventually ‘utterly disappointed of his hopes … turned him out of doors’.17 The fact that Friends accepted household division as an inevitable consequence of conversion had serious implications for parent-child relationof George Fox, ed. by John L.  Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 163. 13  Walsham, ‘Nature and Nurture’, p. 163. 14  George Fox, Saul’s Errand to Damascus: With His Packet of Letters from the High Priests (London, 1653), p. 4. 15  James Parnell, A Collection of the Several Writings Given Forth from the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1675), ‘A Shield of Truth’, pp. 67–8. 16  Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, p. 82. 17  John Gough, A History of the People called Quakers, 2 vols (Dublin, 1790), II, pp. 213–17.

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ships. They are well expressed in a letter Hannah Howden wrote to her parents, when she was 16 years old, setting out ‘a few reasons why I dissent from the ways and forms of the church of England’. In a personal plea to her mother she acknowledged that ‘It is a great sin to disobey parents’ but, as she went on to explain, ‘I believe it is a far greater [sin] to disobey God, nor do I believe I have committed any in disobeying you in this matter, for I find it my duty to obey God before man’.18 This statement underscores the dilemma of conscience faced by many post-Reformation religious groups who opposed the established church. After all, disobedience to one’s parents was a grave sin, as stressed in the fifth commandment, ‘Honour thy father and mother’, but it was also sinful to obey commands that were profane. It was an experience that many of the movement’s young converts faced, as they relinquished their filial ties for their new religious calling. Sarah Tomlinson, the daughter of a Church of England minister, was permanently disowned by her family after embracing Quakerism and was charitably taken in and raised by a Cheshire Friend, Tabitha Arden.19 Similarly, Jane Hoskins felt a spiritual calling to travel to Pennsylvania in 1712. In direct opposition to her conformist parents, she joined a family as an indentured servant and travelled to Philadelphia to escape their disapproval. In the spiritual autobiography she penned in later life, Hoskins contrasted the freedom and liberty of her new life in America with the repressive influence of her parents, who inhibited her spiritual progress.20 Hoskins’s voyage to the New World became a symbolic act of severing ‘parental emotional bonds’.21 The experiences of conversion of one or both parents also had significant consequences for their children. This is particularly pronounced in the case of older children who were unsettled by a parent converting to this eccentric new faith, with its peculiar doctrines and marginal status in post-Restoration society. Indeed, one aspect of conscience that has largely remained absent from the scholarship is the tensions that arose between 18  LRSF, Temp MS 745 Robson MSS, pp. 65–6, ‘A Letter Written by Hannah Howden, a Young Woman About 16 Years Old to Her Parents’, c.1770. 19  LRSF, Testimonies Concerning Ministers Deceased, vol. 1, 1728–1758, YM/TCMD, pp. 31–2, ‘The Testimony of Sarah Tomlinson’, 16 February 1730. 20  Jane Hoskins, The Life and Spiritual Sufferings of That Faithful Servant of Christ Jane Hoskens, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1810), pp. 3–9. 21  Sheila Wright, “Truly Dear Hearts’: Family and Spirituality in Quaker Women’s Writings, 1680–1750’, in Women, Gender, and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Sylvia Monica Brown (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007), p. 103.

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older children who chose to remain true to the faith of their upbringing— for the most part, consistent with the principles of Anglicanism—whilst they watched one or both of their parents join ‘heretical’ sects. Although it is rarely discussed in detail in early Quaker writings, some glimpses of familial disharmony can be found in the autobiographies of early converts, especially women, who tended to provide more details about their domestic circumstances than their male co-religionists.22 One of the more striking and unusual instances is recorded in a publication from 1677 called The Work of God in a Dying Maid, a collection of accounts recounting the death of 15-year-old Susanna Whitrow. In contrast to many deathbed testimonies, which offer details of the ‘joyful death of committed Quakers’, this account explores Susanna’s rejection of her mother’s faith as well as her eventual deathbed conversion.23 Family conflict is a prominent theme in the account, which contrasts the exemplary faith of her mother, Joan, with the evil associated with her conformist father. It was only on her deathbed that Susanna realised she was a ‘true Quaker’ and embraced her mother’s faith, after recognising that she had ‘greatly dishonoured the Lord in my former Life’ and wished to live her remaining few hours in ‘his praise’. Her transgressions included a failed romance, being more obsessed with ‘lying vanities’ than religion, and deriding women speaking in Quaker Meetings. Joan Whitrow reflected on these events years later and took consolation from the fact that ‘the Lord Commanded me to depart from the Multitude, and from all the concerns of this World, to seek him apart’. Thus, despite the fact that God had afflicted the family with ‘sore and grievous Judgements’ for their failure to repent, Joan Whitrow’s duty to God had enabled her to place her religious calling before family circumstances.24 Accounts of family discord are, however, unusual. This is mainly because the surviving sources tend to paint conversion to Quakerism in a harmonious and orderly light. As Catie Gill observes, ‘because most versions of the family are idealised in Quaker writing, few examples of this kind remain as

 I explore the reasons for this gendered differentiation in Female Friends, pp. 58–60.  Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 177. 24  Rebecca Travers et al., The Work of God in a Dying Maid: Being a Short Account of the Dealings of the Lord with One Susannah Whitrow (London, 1677). 22 23

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evidence of the strain placed on the family by Quaker group membership’.25 It is nevertheless impossible to deny that the first wave of conversion to Quakerism must have been trying for children, especially when their parents disagreed over the ‘correct’ religious upbringing they should have. In addition, the household was severely disrupted by the persecution of Quaker parents whose children may have been too young to comprehend what was happening. Many experienced constant invasions of domestic space, when their parents had household objects and possessions seized by local bailiffs. Some lost their parents too when they were carried off to prison for refusing to pay tithes or fines. Such experiences are recounted in the voluminous body of suffering literature kept by local Quaker Meetings and later published in Joseph Besse’s compendium of Quaker suffering. It included the names of some 12,000 individuals who experienced financial distraint or persecution during the Commonwealth and Restoration periods.26 Besse described the consequences of persecution for the helpless children of the first Friends, sometimes in harrowing detail. Among them were the two sick children of Sarah Baker, a poor widow from Bedfordshire, whose goods were seized following her attendance at an illegal conventicle. Among the items requisitioned was a skillet of milk for ‘the poor Babes Sustenance’.27 Another scenario of suffering outlined ‘the cruel usage and banishment of four Women Quakers’ from the Isle of Man. All of these women were the carers of young children. On her arrest, Jane Christen, who was a mother of five, asked her captors ‘What shall I do with my sucking Child?’, to which they callously replied, ‘We care not if the Dogs eat him’. One of her acquaintances, whose husband was undertaking ministerial service at the time of her arrest, was shipped to Peel Castle prison whilst her four children were left ‘weeping and mourning on the Seashore’.28 While such accounts are full of hagiographic embellishment, they  Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community, p. 105. Where tension did arise between spouses because of the conversion of one partner to the movement, the account almost always concludes with reconciliation. The minister Alice Hayes, for instance, includes details about the bitter marital feud that unfolded with her husband, Daniel, after she had joined the movement. However, he eventually came to respect her beliefs: ‘His love returned again’ and he ‘was convinced that it was the Truth I suffered for’. Alice Hayes, A Legacy, or Widow’s Mite; Left by Alice Hayes, to Her Children and Others (London, 1723), pp. 39–49. 26  Arnold Lloyd, Quaker Social History: 1669–1738 (London: Longmans, 1950), p. 98. 27  Besse, A Collection of Sufferings, i, p. 8. 28  Besse, A Collection of Sufferings, i, pp. 281–2. 25

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nonetheless provide insight into the disruption that religious sectarianism inflicted on ordinary domestic life. Recounting the impact of persecution on the whole family rather than just the individual sufferer added dramatic effect to the literature on Quaker sufferings. Moreover, it underscored the fact that it was not the parents’ witness that caused the greatest damage to domestic harmony, but the magistrates and persecutors who unashamedly entered the family home and threatened the very survival of helpless and innocent members of the household. Domestic stability was also affected by those Quaker men and women who ministered abroad for extended periods of time, especially since the spontaneous nature of the Quaker ‘inner light’ meant that they did not necessarily know how long they would be absent or where they would be preaching. I will discuss childcare arrangements in such circumstances in the next section, but it is important to note that little is known about the experiences of their children and those relatives left at home. This is mainly because few sources with such an overt domestic focus survive for the early period of Quaker history. Those who were called to ministry often spoke of the self-inflicted trials they faced in renouncing their domestic identities for their spiritual calling.29 On returning home from two years of missionary work in the colonies, Mary Weston wrote to her former companion, Mary Pemberton, in 1752, explaining how her 6-year-old daughter ‘had almost personally forgotten me’, but acknowledged that after their long separation ‘it was a joyefull meeting … To us all when favour’d to behold the faces one of another again’.30 Mary Weston Junior appears to have accepted her mother’s ministry and the trials it brought, as indicated in a parcel Mary Weston sent to Mary Pemberton, which included ‘a few pamphlets I think worth the Childrens persual’, as well as ‘a few impressions from sundry medals’, produced by ‘my little daughter’ to be divided amongst the Pemberton children as her recipient felt fit.31 Like Mary Weston Junior, children were far more than passive or uncomprehending victims of their parents’ spiritual worldviews. Many were active proselytes in their own right, as demonstrated in the opening account of Quaker children continuing Meetings for worship in Bristol. In January 1666, for instance, the persecutor William Armorer came to  I explore this in detail in Female Friends, pp. 57–68.  Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, MS Coll 484A Pemberton Family Papers, vol. 8, p. 34, Mary Weston to Israel and Mary Pemberton, Wapping, 23 May 1752. 31  Ibid., p. 38, Mary Weston to Mary Pemberton, 6 June 1752. 29 30

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­ isperse a Meeting in Berkshire and found only four young women in d attendance: Hannah Kent, Sarah Binfield, and Elizabeth and Anne Whitehart.32 17-year-old Elizabeth Braithwaite similarly demonstrated great stoicism, as recorded in an account of her sufferings from 1684, which recounted her imprisonment and death at Kendal gaol. She had followed Quaker tenets from a young age but was fined and committed to prison along with several other Friends for failure to attend Sunday worship. At the time she was taken, several of her neighbours offered to pay her bail and many ‘were sorely grieved that she should go to Prison, blaming the Officers for Presenting her, telling them, it was a shame for them, she being in a manner but a child, and one whom they knew to be an innocent Maid’. But Braithwaite felt compelled to refuse her neighbours’ offers of help, explaining that the prison ‘is my place, and my present home’ and where she felt she had ‘most peace and content’. Two months later, she fell ill and died. After her death, members of her community ‘reflected upon the severity of her Persecutors, and bore testimony to her blameless and innocent life’. For Braithwaite’s memorialists, her experience of suffering was enhanced by her youth. She had proved herself stoic and dedicated to her religious community and thus served as an exemplar for other young members of the Society. They should be encouraged by the spiritual refreshment Braithwaite had experienced in Quaker Meetings and by the obedience she showed to her parents and dedication to their religious testimony.33 Like the accounts of the martyrs in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, such texts served an important purpose in instilling new generations with a sense of reverence for their Quaker forebears and reinforcing the importance of constancy, faith, and patience for the survival of their religious inheritance. One of the most remarkable acts of youthful martyrdom occurred in 1680 when Mary Samm, a girl only 12 years old, joined her grandfather William Dewsbury in Warwick gaol. She had come from her parents’ home in Bedfordshire to act as her grandfather’s prison companion and attendant. Sadly, she soon succumbed to fever and died.34 Her presence in the prison brought much comfort to her ailing grandfather,  Besse, A Collection of Sufferings, i, p. 27.  Anon., A Brief Relation of the Life and Death of Elizabeth Braytwhaite, a Maid of the Age of about Seventeen Years (London, 1684), pp. 1–4. 34  William Dewsbury, The Faithful Testimony of that Antient Servant of the Lord, and Minister of the Everlasting Gospel William Dewsbery (London, 1689), pp. 348–52. 32 33

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and her last words and dying expressions were spiritually edifying to those who surrounded her. In the account that was later published, she stressed to her mourners the benefits of her youth, noting that ‘They that live longest endure the greatest sorrow’.35 Her worldly inexperience and innocence ensured her eternal salvation. Such accounts also proved that children did not have to be passive recipients of instruction: they could also be encouraged and educated to be ‘receptive to the Light, public ministry, and active service’.36 In theory, the right to minister was open to young people as much as to their Quaker elders, so hearing examples and listening to the exhortations of weighty elders and itinerant ministers could serve as the inspiration for their own ministerial careers. Although unusual, evidence can be found of young people addressing Quaker Meetings for worship with weighty spiritual insight. At the age of 15, the American minister Elizabeth Hudson described how she felt an incumbent ‘weight and exercise of the ministry’ to address a public gathering of Friends at Philadelphia Bank House Meeting.37 Hudson would later go on to undertake extensive ministerial work across the British Isles, proving that young people were not only the Society’s future but also had the potential to immediately contribute to the Society through ministry and words of spiritual exhortation. This idea was encapsulated in a letter written by James Morton to draw attention to the spiritual development of a young girl called Abigail Wright, describing her as ‘a valuable young woman’ who, ‘If she keep hir place firm, I believe she will be an honner to the society and … Encourage the Good in all’.38 The narratives of dying children also served as an important vehicle for expressing positive images about the spiritual contribution Quaker children made to the wider Society. Nine-year-old Rebecca Toovey was remembered in 1714 as a pious child who had loved attending Quaker Meetings and reading Friends’ books. A few weeks before her death, it 35  William Rawes, jun., Examples for Youth, in Remarkable Instances of Early Piety (Dublin, 1800), p. 37. 36  Bouldin, “The Days of Thy Youth”, p. 209. 37  Hudson was only 25 when she undertook transatlantic ministerial service to Britain. Margaret Hope Bacon (ed.), Wilt Thou Go on My Errand? Journals of Three eighteenth Century Quaker Women Ministers: Susanna Morris, 1682–1775; Elizabeth Hudson, 1722– 1783; Ann Moore, 1710–1783 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1994), p. 127. 38  Huntington Library, California, mssSHA Shackleton Family Correspondence, Box 4, fol. 124, James Morton to Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton, 12 September 1781.

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was reported that she had attended a Meeting in London, where she had heard a Friend exhort ‘the children of Friends to make choice of the blessed truth for their portion’, which moved her to tears and ‘caused her to utter many sweet and heavenly expressions’.39 These accounts had a vital function in the survival of the Society because their main purpose was to instil other young people with a sense of gravity about the Quaker faith and set of morals befitting a godly life. Thomas Hains allegedly behaved ‘himself more like a man than an infant’ during his sickness in December 1700. He informed those that gathered at his deathbed that he was ‘sensible of the love and tender regard which his parents had towards him’ and expressed his willingness to die, saying: Thou art a God of love; thou art a God of mercy; thou knowest the hearts of them that love thee … Lord, remember thy people. Thou knowest the hearts of the ungodly; thou knowest the hearts of the wicked; thou hast nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against thee.40

His life, though short, had been exemplary. The account also underscores the fluidity of Quaker ideals about childhood, for in this context, the physical child is presented as a ‘spiritual adult’. This provides a notable contrast to the metaphor of childhood discussed earlier, in which recent converts regarded themselves as spiritual children. The authoritative behaviour of children like Rebecca Toovey and Thomas Hains are representative of many narratives of dying children, depicting them as paragons of virtue and godliness in their domestic situations and relationships with their parents. It assigned them a venerable spiritual role, showing how a young person could cast off the distractions of infancy, such as playing with toys or engaging in frivolous leisure activities and, instead, lead a sober and pious life entirely devoted to spiritual reflection and serving God. Taken together these positive images of children who shared their parents’ commitment to the Quaker faith provide an indication of the self-sacrifice young people were willing to make for their Quaker elders, and also shows how their spiritual vitality enhanced the movement during its turbulent early years. 39  William Evans and Thomas Evans (eds), Piety Promoted in A Collection of Dying Sayings of Many of The People Called Quakers (14 vols, Philadelphia, 1837–1859), II, pp. 91–2. 40  Rawes, Examples for Youth, pp. 15–8.

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Childhood, Youth, and the Evolution of Early Quakerism Conversions to Quakerism and the inevitable domestic tensions they caused persisted, but from the 1670s and 1680s it is possible to detect a heightened concern on the part of the movement’s elders for the ‘younger generation’. Symptomatic of an evolutionary process that Max Weber termed the ‘routinisation of charisma’, as Quakerism entered its second generation there were questions about whether the movement’s efforts were better spent seeking out new converts ‘in the world’ or retaining the faith within Quaker families.41 By the end of the seventeenth century the majority of members were children of Friends.42 For them, suffering was never commonplace and, with the increasingly endogamous character of second-generation Quakerism, very few children came from religiously divided households. It, therefore, became central to the mission that these young members of the community, already brought up with an appreciation of Quaker values and beliefs, were retained within the Quaker ‘family’. This section will explore the experiences of young people in this more conservative church culture, focusing upon Quaker attitudes to education and the anxiety that surrounded the children of Friends who had not experienced their own moment of personal ‘convincement’.43 Emphasis will be placed on the communal mechanisms used to encourage young people to remain faithful to Quakerism, as well as the wider support structures in place within the Society to facilitate the travel of ministers who were leaving behind young families. It emphasises how young people came to be placed at the centre of the movement’s culture and way of life. Quaker theology emphasised the innocence of children: evil entered as the child matured. In contrast to Lutherans and Calvinists, Friends 41  This is linked to Max Weber’s ‘sect’ to ‘church’ thesis, as articulated in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Economy and Society. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H.  H. Gerth and C.  Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 51–5. 42  Richard T. Vann argues that the children of Quaker parents constituted as many as 80 to 90 per cent of Quaker membership by 1750, The Social Development of English Quakerism 1655–1755 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 167. 43  Although this phrase is used rather ambiguously in Quaker writing, convincement generally referred to the process of conversion whereby an individual experienced a moment of revelation and sense of unity with the indwelling Christ. It also meant embracing the complex and distinct lifestyle that accompanied Quaker beliefs, such as adhering to their doctrines on plainness.

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believed that children were not naturally evil, but if they were not secluded from the polluting influences of ‘the world’ there was the possibility that an inclination to evil would predominate and they could be lost to the faith. In many respects, of course, this contradicted the experience of the movement’s founders, who had proved their ability to overcome the worldly evils that surrounded them.44 Tensions over the admission of young members are tellingly evidenced in the Keithian schism of the 1690s, which centred on the argument that parents should register the dates of their children’s ‘Spirituall’ as well as ‘outward’ births in Monthly Meeting registers, in support of his view that it was necessary for all members to demonstrate their own sincere convincement.45 The uncertainty of Quaker attitudes on the education of their youngest members parallels those in many transatlantic religious communities, forced to reformulate their attitudes towards childhood as their movements evolved. The Moravians and Puritans, for instance, similarly questioned the balance between turning their backs on the sinful world that surrounded them, in an effort to promote the purity of their offspring, and the need to attract new converts through evangelical spiritual conversion.46 This is particularly well demonstrated in the case of the Halfway Covenant that came to characterise New England Puritanism from 1662. This innovation permitted the children of visible saints who had not themselves experienced conversion the opportunity to be baptised and receive communion. The burden of ministry, then, was not on converting new souls but on disciplining those already converted.47 Similarly, for second-­ generation Friends, it was very important that children were reared by god-fearing Quaker parents who would take care to preserve their offspring in their original innocence. Of particular concern was the issue of plainness, and how to prevent the corruption of young people who followed the fashions and vain pastimes  Frost, ‘As the Twig is Bent’, p. 76.  J.  William Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait of the Society of Friends (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973), p. 68. 46  On the transformation of Moravianism see: Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem: From Communal Mission to Family Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); and Peter Vogt, “Everywhere at Home’: The EighteenthCentury Moravian Movement as a Transatlantic Religious Community’, Journal of Moravian History, no. 1 (2006), pp. 7–29. 47  See Robert G.  Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 1969). 44 45

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of their contemporaries. The problem was observed by Voltaire in 1735, who noted in Letters Concerning the English Nation how ‘children, whom the industry of their parents had enrich’d, are desirous of enjoying honours, of wearing buttons and ruffles; and [are] quite asham’d of being call’d Quakers, [so] they become converts to the Church of England, merely to be in the fashion’.48 A number of Quaker authors spoke of this waywardness in their spiritual writings. Catherine Payton explained that despite the ‘promising beginnings’ of her childhood, like many young people her ‘natural disposition was volatile’ and she ‘yielded to divers temptations, and was allured from the simplicity of truth’, especially by reading plays and romances, poetry, and philosophy. She also made connections with other young women who were ‘not of our society’, and whose conversation ‘I did not profit by’.49 Reflecting on her teenage years, Mary Weston similarly described how she came to view herself ‘in an undone Condition without a Saviour’, after she ‘had run with the Multitude in the broad Way, gratifying my vain Mind in the Delights, Pleasures and Pastimes of a deluding World; following the Customs, Fashions and Language which now brought me under great Sorrow and deep Lamentation’.50 The question then, for the movement’s elders, was how to guard their young members against spiritual corruption and the temptations of ‘the world’. Part of the solution, it was argued, was the work of parents within their families. Although very few writings addressed the shape of family worship or devotion within the Quaker household, a large number of printed epistles and writings chose to offer counsel to parents about the appropriate standards by which to ensure a godly and ‘guarded’ education for their offspring.51 In 1690, Geertrude Deriks Niesen wrote an epistle to admonish Friends to return to the high standards of the movement’s early years by encouraging Friends to take seriously their childrearing responsibilities. Seeing as they were ‘Leaders to the next Generations’, it was important that children should be instructed in a pattern of godly living. Indeed, for Niesen, ‘the bringing up of our Children’ was a ‘very weighty Concern’  Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733), p. 29.  Catherine Phillips (née Payton), Memoirs of the Life of Catherine Phillips: To Which Are Added Some of Her Epistles (London, 1797), pp. 6–11. 50  LRSF, MS Vol 312 Journal of Mary Weston, pp. 1–2. 51  The lack of writings on family worship is discussed by Frost, who argues that early Quakers were more interested in denying the consequences of others’ doctrines than in formulating their own. Frost, ‘As the Twig is Bent’, p. 69. 48 49

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that needed to be placed before all other service to the Lord, for children, as she explains, ‘are committed to us as a particular Charge and Ministry, from their time of Innocency upwards’. It was thus essential that children were brought up in the ‘Fear of God’ by good example and ‘gentle Chastizement’.52 Another epistle, written by the Women’s Meeting at York, exhorted ‘Mothers of Children’ to be ‘good Examples to your Children and Servants in all good things, Discouraging the Evill, and Encouraging the Good’. It noted the disorder that resulted when ‘Children Rule over Parents’, which did ‘not tend to Truth’s honour’.53 It is clear that by the 1680s an almost complete reversal had taken place in early Quaker thought. In contrast to the early converts, who had encouraged new members to rebel against parental authority to join the movement, it was now expected that the children of Quakers would follow the beliefs of their parents and guardians.54 From this point forwards, the stress was very much on ensuring a strict and guarded education for children befitting the movement’s standards of plainness. Mechanisms were even in place to ensure that such instructions were followed, as in a set of queries the Women’s Meeting in Lancashire put to their female members. Question six, for example, asked whether all children were ‘religiously educated … To prevent them being corrupted by evil words, vain manners &c.’ while question nine questioned whether mothers kept their children ‘out of the corrupted Friendships and Spirit of the World, and labour to have their Familys in orderly government’.55 This form of advice functioned in a similar way to the Church of England’s ‘Articles of Visitation’ that were distributed to churchwardens before an episcopal visitation. Quaker Quarterly Meetings would ask their constituent Monthly Meetings to provide regular returns on each of these queries. Although evidence suggests that Monthly Meetings may have preferred to deal with matters locally, rather than report them to their Quarterly Meetings, such questions nevertheless show how the behaviour and activities of young people 52  Geertruyd Deriks Niesen, An Epistle to Be Communicated to Friends, and to Be Read in the Fear of the Lord in Their Men and Womens Meetings (London, 1677), pp. 3–4. 53  LRSF, MGR 11a4 London Women’s Meeting Epistles, 1671–1753, fol. 74, printed epistle ‘From our Womens Yearly Meeting Held at York’, 6th and 7th May 1698, pp. 2–3. 54   A similar phenomenon in early Protestantism is discussed by Walsham, in ‘The Reformation of the Generations’, pp. 105–6. 55  LRSF, MGR 11a4 London Women’s Meeting Epistles, 1671–1753, fol. 57, Queries issued by Lancaster Women’s Meeting ‘To Be Observed by Women Friends in the County of Lancashire’, 15 August 1748.

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fell under the dual surveillance of their parents and the wider community of Friends.56 This method of surveillance, moreover, underscores the fact that local Monthly Meetings had a responsibility for caring for Quaker children. With a strong institutional structure, young people and their parents became a central focus of the business of the Meetings, who saw themselves as a second family with a moral responsibility to assist in the spiritual socialisation of their young members. Ministers felt a particular obligation to ensure that Quaker youth-led exemplary lives, not just as future leaders of the Society, but as symbols of good faith within the family. The minister John Banks wrote in his spiritual autobiography that one reason for including so many of the letters he had penned to his wife and children, was because of the ‘great care and concern that attended me day and night, about the bringing up of my children in the fear of God … and in giving them counsel and advice according to their capacities’.57 This passage encapsulates how ministers viewed their positions within and management of the household as central to their spiritual identities. It is from this time that travelling Friends increasingly addressed the Meetings they visited with their thoughts on childrearing. The English minister Mary Weston, for example, recorded in her journal that her advice and admonishment in Newport, Rhode Island, had such an effect on some of the Quaker youth that they afterwards discarded some of their extravagant finery ‘to the Joy of parents and other Friends’.58 Others spoke directly to parents, voicing a concern that their children were becoming corrupted by the fashions and customs of the ‘world’. Deborah Bell ‘closely cautioned parents to perform their duty to their children in endeavouring to their utmost to bring them up in the fear of the Lord and to be themselves good examples to them in all things lest their Blood be required at their hands’, during one Meeting in Dolobran in 1711.59 Whilst travelling in the American colonies, the English minister Elizabeth Wilkinson felt a pressing need to address Matinicock Meeting in New  York ‘concerning the Education of their Children’. She advised them ‘Not to indulge wrong things that they  I explore this more fully in Female Friends, pp. 123–4.  John Banks, A Journal of the Labours, Travels, and Sufferings of That Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, John Banks 2nd edn (1798), p. 140. 58  LRSF, MS Vol 312 Journal of Mary Weston, p. 62. 59  Quoted in Bouldin, “The Days of Thy Youth”, p. 205. 56 57

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might do out of their Sight’ and urged them to remove anything that might be a bad example to the younger members of the community, including ‘Papish Reliques of Gravestones at the Heads & feet of their deceased friends’.60 The nature of Quaker worship, which took place within both the home and Meeting house, enabled the authority of ministers to move beyond institutional walls. This was encapsulated in the practice of family visitations, which were undertaken regularly by representatives of the local Meetings as well as by ministers when they visited an area for an extended length of time. These visits, which combined family devotion with discreet advice, had an important function in impressing religious principles on young members. The impact that hosting a minister had on young Friends is recorded in detail in a number of Quaker ministers’ journals. Catherine Payton, for example, recalled how ‘Friends who travelled in the ministry’ often lodged at her childhood home. She described how ‘I loved their company when but very young, and their tender notice of me I commemorate with gratitude. And here I remark, that if our youth prized the favour of the company and converse of such … who have had large experience of the love of God, they might profit thereby’.61 Deborah Wardell’s husband recounted a similar scenario, noting how ‘she was descended from honourable Parents’ who ‘kept open doors for Travellers that were sent abroad in the service of Truth’. Conversations with these venerable Friends inspired her early calls to ministry.62 Jane Pearson described how constant exposure to a regular stream of ministers, who lodged with her aunt in Carlisle, instilled in her ‘a great love for good Friends’ and sometimes even gave her ‘the blessing [of divine inspiration] which is fresh with me to this day’.63 The best way of evangelising within the home was by good example, and a common theme in these preachers’ testimonies was the necessity for parents to ensure that their children were not exposed to frivolity from a  Haverford Library and Quaker Special Collection, Pennsylvania, 975 B Diary of Elizabeth Wilkinson, entry for 4 May 1762 [Long Island], pp. 39–40. 61  Phillips, Memoirs of the Life of Catherine Phillips, p. 5. 62  LRSF, Testimonies Concerning Ministers Deceased, vol. 11,728–1758, pp.  62–4, ‘Lancelot Wardell’s Account and Testimony on Behalf of his Dear Wife Deborah Wardell, Who Died the 7th of the 10th month 1732’. 63  Jane Pearson, Sketches of Piety: In the Life and Religious Experiences of Jane Pearson (London, 1817), p. 18. 60

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young age. Here the Old Testament story of Eli, as recounted in Samuel I, Chaps. 2 and 3, had particular weight as a moralising tale. Eli had rebuked his children for their ‘evil dealings’, but had not done enough to restrain them from sin and, as a result, the Lord’s judgement came upon him.64 This message had the dual purpose of not simply correcting or admonishing; it also encouraged parents to provide an education for their children that would enable them to participate fully in the life of the Society in the future. But who was expected to care for the children of Quakers if a parent had experienced a spiritual calling to visit other families, far distant, as part of their ministerial service? The children of ministering fathers, for the most part, seem to have been cared for by their mothers. Phebe Bateman, daughter of John and Ann Gratton, described how her mother was primarily responsible for the family’s tuition because her father was frequently travelling and in prison when they were young. Although Phebe makes no comment about how she found this experience, she described how her mother had ‘a tender care for us all … and in our Bringing-up, had an Eye to the Lord, that we might be trained up in his Fear, and was not backward in reproving of us, for any Appearance of Evil’.65 Many Quaker husbands commented on the fortitude of their spouses in willingly giving them up to travel and care for the children and family in their absence. Thomas Chalkley, for instance, left a testimony in 1724 of his ‘virtuous and loving wife’, Martha, who ‘never hindered me in the service my great Master called me to’, despite having to care for nine young children in the isolated Quaker community in Maryland.66 The struggles that male ministers might face with childcare is underscored in the journal of John Griffith, who was forced to ‘go out of business’ and place his children ‘where they might be trained up in the way of Truth’ following the death of his wife Rebecca in 1746. This, he notes, took a number of years to organise and clearly shows the great responsibil64  Chapters 2 and 3 of Samuel describe Eli’s providential rebuke and the conversion of Samuel, after Eli lost his sight. This is also explored by Bouldin in “The Days of Thy Youth”, p. 205. 65  John Gratton, A Journal of the Life of that Ancient Servant of Christ, John Gratton (London, 1720), ‘Phebe Bateman’s Testimony Concerning Her Dear Father and Mother’, pp. xiv–xv. 66  Thomas Chalkley, A Journal Or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, and Christian Experiences, … Of Thomas Chalkley (London, 1751), p. 113.

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ity of the wife and mother in caring for both children and the family ­business during their husbands’ frequent absences.67 Unfortunately, it is unclear where Griffith’s children were placed, but it was likely to have been under the care of Friends who attended his local Meeting in Essex. Certainly, as Barry Levy has shown with reference to poor and middling Quaker families in North-Western England, family models were determined by an emphasis on households working together and pooling their resources, which removed traditional reliance on ‘informal human relations’.68 This meant that a child with Quaker parents was not just born into a Quaker household but also into a wider ‘household of faith’, with access to the economic resources and emotional support of their religious community. What is less clear, however, is how childcare would have functioned if a Quaker mother was absent for an extended length of time. Since fathers would have primary responsibility for the family business and would require more assistance to care for their children, it is highly probable that childcare fell to either a Quaker grandmother or elder daughter. Although this type of domestic labour is hidden from many of the surviving records, a few glimpses of some domestic situations can be inferred from family correspondence. Sarah Tuke, for instance, confessed to her friend and cousin Tabitha Hoyland that she found it tiresome to have to look after her younger siblings while her step-mother, Esther Tuke, was absent from the home on ministerial service. Sarah would later go on to be a leading educator of Friends, but it is understandable that the level of responsibility passed to elder daughters while their mothers travelled must have been trying at times.69 The disruption of the nuclear family by female itinerancy was to some extent obviated by the presence of surrogate parents, who provided stability, certitude, and continuity to ordinary domestic life. Of particular note 67  John Griffith, A Journal of the Life, Travels, and Labours in the Work of the Ministry, of John Griffith (London, 1779), pp. 56–60. 68  Barry S.  Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 36–7. 69  Letters exchanged between Sarah Tuke and her cousin Tabitha Hoyland between 1772 and 1782. Quoted in Sheila Wright, “Every Good Woman Needs a Companion of Her Own Sex’: Quaker Women and Spiritual Friendship, 1750–1850’, in Sue Morgan (ed.), Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 94–5.

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is the important role of the grandmother, whose sense of familial ­obligation provided extensive support to families affected by ministry. A few hints of their labours can be inferred from a letter that Isaac Hall sent to his wife Alice, while she was travelling in Ireland. He detailed the circumstances of their young children, noting how their daughter, Sarah, could walk with their son, John, to their grandmother’s house. He ended the letter by explaining that ‘My mother is very well and she helps us all she can’.70 Similarly, when the Irish minister Elizabeth Jacob travelled to the American colonies in 1712, she advised her son, Isaac, not to ‘disobey thy father and Grandmother and to be in anywise stubborn … in my absence’.71 Harder still, however, was the situation of those female ministers who were the daughters of ministers. It has been noted that the Kendal minister Rachel Wilson recruited a young woman called Ruth Seaman to care for her ten children whilst she travelled, since her mother also undertook missionary work and could not be relied upon as a substitute for childcare.72 Although it is hard to access the experiences of the children in this situation, it does show Quaker views on gender equality working in practice, since women were equally supported to undertake transatlantic travel despite childcare responsibilities and complicated domestic circumstances. Despite the problems they faced in their domestic life, Quaker authors deftly used their life accounts and writings to show how their ministerial work benefitted the wider ‘household of faith’. As public figures, ministers believed that their exhortations would serve as intermediaries between the Quaker home and wider society. And although a number of female ministers dedicated their spiritual autobiographies to their children, their texts had the express intention of offering instruction and patterns of piety to other young members of the society. Alice Hayes’s spiritual autobiography was titled A Legacy, or Widow’s Mite, Left by Alice Hayes, to Her Children 70  Isaac Hall to Alice Hall, Broughton, Cumberland, 26 May 1747, in John Hall Shield (ed.), Genealogical Notes on the Families of Hall, Featherstone, Wigham, Ostle, Watson and so on (Allendale, 1915), pp. 36–7. 71  LRSF, Portfolio MSS, vol. 41, fol. 48, Letter from Elizabeth Jacob to Isaac Jacob, Lurgan, 10 January 1712. 72  LRSF, Dictionary of Quaker Biography entry for ‘Ruth Seaman’. This domestic situation is explored in Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1999), pp. 162–3.

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and Others (1723). The account recalls how ‘she was often deeply engaged in spirit before the Lord for her children’ and she hoped that ‘they might serve him faithfully in their generation’.73 Susannah Blandford added a note to her spiritual autobiography ‘to you my dear Children’, in which she drew upon Ecclesiastes 12:1 to remind them to ‘Remember your Creator in the days of your Youth, and you shall find the Comfort of it in your Old Age, or at your Death’.74 Personal words of counsel thus took on significance beyond the writers’ domestic circumstances, as they became authoritative and instructive when combined with their status as ministers. Their messages also encouraged parents to keep a careful watch over their young families. But more than this, exhortation on matters relating to childrearing and family life added weight to their authority as ministers, providing them with a powerful and distinctive subject on which they could write and publish. Adherence to Quakerism altered how their family life was structured, and this affected the experiences of children growing up within the faith. One notable example was the erosion of traditional parent-child bonds because of the absence of Quaker fathers and mothers from the family home following persecution or through ministerial work. This meant that it was incumbent upon the wider religious community to take notice of and support the education of the younger members of their Society. As Bouldin argues, investing so much in teaching young Friends how to move between the Meeting house and outside world helps to explain how the Society survived beyond its first generation.75 Words of spiritual counsel aimed at reaching children took place in a range of settings, including the household, public exhortation, and in a variety of print genres, such as narratives of suffering, deathbed testimonies, and journals of deceased ministers. The spiritual family in many respects regarded their role as equally important to that of the parents, in which children carried a double obligation to live in ‘heavenly subjection’ to both their parents and their spiritual elders. Like other religious communities undergoing a transition from ‘radical’ sect to settled church, the challenge was how young people, who had been raised in the faith and who might not necessarily experience their  Hayes, A Legacy, or Widow’s Mite, p. 91.  Susannah Blandford, A Small Account Given Forth by One That Hath Been a Traveller for These 40 Years in the Good Old Way (1698), p. 14 [original emphasis]. 75  Bouldin, “The Days of Thy Youth”, p. 203. 73 74

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own personal moment of spiritual revelation, could be encouraged to live a plain and austere lifestyle, on the margins of the wider community, and carry on the faith for future generations. This stood in contrast to the movement’s earliest years, where the spiritual convincement of new converts was essential to its survival. But unlike other religious groups, Quakers had a unique institutional structure that was able to provide the spiritual support, counsel, and admonishment necessary for young people and their parents to lead ‘guarded’ and godly lifestyles. This consisted of a multi-tiered Quaker Meeting system and a regular stream of itinerant ministers travelling between Meetings, both of which operated on a transatlantic scale. Their venues of exhortation shifted easily between the setting of the Meeting house, the walls of the household, and large-scale public Meetings to Quaker and non-Quaker audiences. At times, this led to friction, not least because Quaker Meetings placed an important emphasis on ‘weighty’ Friends and Meeting elders regularly visiting Quaker families and monitoring the behaviour of Quaker parents. But above all, it showed a complex and vast support network of Friends who viewed education not just as the responsibility of parents, but of the entire religious community. Such activities often inspired the spiritual growth and development of young Friends. It is necessary to reiterate the difficulties of accessing the experience of Quaker youth and to acknowledge that much still remains to be uncovered about their lived experiences and spiritual encounters. Many of the available sources offer only representations and projections of particular ideals, primarily written by adults that follow Quaker convention. Nevertheless, it is clear that studying the experience of young Friends can shed new light on the relationship between the children of Quakers and their parents, as well as the nature of Quaker family life in the evolving movement. Quaker youth were not merely passive recipients of ministerial exhortation and writing: they were the future of the Society, needing to be inspired but also expected in due course to instil a sense of awe among other members of their communities. The few glimpses we are able to uncover of Quaker childhood in personal correspondence, accounts of suffering and deathbed narratives, not only point to their centrality in the developing movement, but shed light on the variety of roles and experiences they constructed for themselves as they redefined what it meant to be a ‘Friend’ and ‘Child of the Light’ in the maturing Quaker community.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Anon., A Brief Relation of the Life and Death of Elizabeth Braytwhaite, a Maid of the Age of about Seventeen Years (London, 1684). Bacon, Margaret Hope (ed.), Wilt Thou Go on My Errand? Journals of Three 18th Century Quaker Women Ministers: Susanna Morris, 1682–1775; Elizabeth Hudson, 1722–1783; Ann Moore, 1710–1783 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1994). Banks, John, A Journal of the Labours, Travels, and Sufferings of That Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, John Banks 2nd edn (1798). Bathurst, Elizabeth, Truth Vindicated by the Faithful Testimony and Writings Of the Innocent Servant and Hand-Maid of the Lord, Elizabeth Bathurst (London, 1695). Besse, Joseph, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, 2 vols (London, 1753). Blandford, Susannah, A Small Account Given Forth by One That Hath Been a Traveller for These 40 Years in the Good Old Way (1698). Chalkley, Thomas, A Journal Or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, and Christian Experiences, … Of Thomas Chalkley (London, 1751). Dewsbury, William, The Faithful Testimony of that Antient Servant of the Lord, and Minister of the Everlasting Gospel William Dewsbery (London, 1689). Ellwood, Thomas, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (London, 1714). Evans, William and Thomas Evans (eds), Piety Promoted in A Collection of Dying Sayings of Many of The People Called Quakers (14 vols, Philadelphia, 1837–1859). Fox, George, The Journal of George Fox, ed. by John L.  Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952). ——— Saul’s Errand to Damascus: With His Packet of Letters from the High Priests (London, 1653). Gough, John, A History of the People called Quakers, 2 vols (Dublin, 1790). Gratton, John, A Journal of the Life of that Ancient Servant of Christ, John Gratton (London, 1720). Griffith, John, A Journal of the Life, Travels, and Labours in the Work of the Ministry, of John Griffith (London, 1779). Hayes, Alice, A Legacy, or Widow’s Mite; Left by Alice Hayes, to Her Children and Others (London, 1723). Hoskins, Jane, The Life and Spiritual Sufferings of That Faithful Servant of Christ Jane Hoskens, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1810). Larson, Rebecca, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775, 1st ed (New York: Knopf, 1999).

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Niesen, Geertruyd Deriks, An Epistle to Be Communicated to Friends, and to Be Read in the Fear of the Lord in Their Men and Womens Meetings (London, 1677). Parnell, James, A Collection of the Several Writings Given Forth from the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1675). Pearson, Jane, Sketches of Piety: In the Life and Religious Experiences of Jane Pearson (London, 1817). Pemberton Family Papers, MS Coll 484A, vol. 8, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Phillips, Catherine, Memoirs of the Life of Catherine Phillips: To Which Are Added Some of Her Epistles (London, 1797). Portfolio MSS, vol. 41, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. London Women’s Meeting Epistles, 1671–1753, MGR 11a4, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. Rawes, William jun., Examples for Youth, in Remarkable Instances of Early Piety (Dublin, 1800). Robson MSS, Temp MS 745, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. Shackleton Family Correspondence, mssSHA, Box 4, Huntington Library, California. Shield, John Hall, (ed.), Genealogical Notes on the Families of Hall, Featherstone, Wigham, Ostle, Watson etc. (Allendale, 1915). Testimonies Concerning Ministers Deceased, vol. 1 1728–1758, YM/TCMD, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. Travers, Rebecca et al., The Work of God in a Dying Maid: Being a Short Account of the Dealings of the Lord with One Susannah Whitrow (London, 1677). Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733). Weston, Mary, Journal of Mary Weston, MS Vol 312, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. Wilkinson, Elizabeth, Diary of Elizabeth Wilkinson, 975 B, Haverford Library and Quaker Special Collection, Pennsylvania.

Secondary Sources Blamires, David, ‘Early Quaker Educational Books for Children’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 63 (2012), pp. 20–30. Bouldin, Elizabeth, “The Days of Thy Youth’: Eighteenth-Century Quaker Women and the Socialization of Children’, in New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800, ed. by Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 202–20. Burke, Victoria E., “The Art of Numbering Well’: Late-Seventeenth-Century Arithmetic Manuscripts Compiled by Quaker Girls’, in Material Readings of

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Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730, ed. by James Daybell and Peter Hinds (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 246–65. Damrosch, Leo, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Frost, J. William, The Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait of the Society of Friends (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973). ——— ‘As the Twig Is Bent: Quakers Ideas of Childhood’, Quaker History, 60.2 (1971), pp. 67–87. Gill, Catie, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Hinds, Hilary, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). ——— God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Levy, Barry, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). ——— ‘“Tender Plants”: Quaker Farmers and Children in the Delaware Valley, 1681–1735’, Journal of Family History, 3 (1978), pp. 116–35. Lloyd, Arnold, Quaker Social History: 1669–1738 (London: Longmans, 1950). James, Sydney V., ‘Quaker Meetings and Education in the Eighteenth Century’, Quaker History, 51.2, 1962, pp. 87–102. Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Pope, Robert G., The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 1969). Pullin, Naomi, Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Vann, Richard T., The Social Development of English Quakerism 1655–1755 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969). Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Nature and Nurture in the Early Quaker Movement: Creating the Next Generation of Friends’, Studies in Church History (forthcoming, 2019). ——— ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, c.1500–1700’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 21 (2011), pp. 93–121. Weber, Max, Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H.  H. Gerth and C.  Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2013). Wright, Sheila, “Every Good Woman Needs a Companion of Her Own Sex’: Quaker Women and Spiritual Friendship, 1750–1850’, in Sue Morgan (ed.),

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Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 89–104. ——— “Truly Dear Hearts’: Family and Spirituality in Quaker Women’s Writings, 1680–1750’, in Women, Gender, and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Sylvia Monica Brown (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007), pp. 97–113.

Childhood, Youth and Denominational Identity: Church, Chapel and Home in the Long Eighteenth Century Mary Clare Martin

The eighteenth  century has been much neglected as far as children’s experiences of religion are concerned. Foundational narratives of the history of the family and of childhood associated the eighteenth century with a more secular approach to child-rearing,1 attributed in part to the ideas of Locke, Rousseau and the Romantic poets.2 A recent overview of

I am indebted to Mark Burden for his comments on the early part of the text, to Catherine Dille for references, and to the Education in the Long Eighteenth Century seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London, for relevant stimulating discussions.  L.Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977), 151, 154–5, 435–7, 442, 452–3, 457, 464–8, 667–71, 677–8; 682. 2  H. Cunningham, Children, Childhood and Western Society since 1500 2nd edn, (London, Longman, Pearson education, 2005), 55–6, 61–78. 1

M. C. Martin (*) University of Greenwich, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_5

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“Faith and Religion” focuses almost entirely on the cult of sensibility.3 Some scholars have sought to identify a “Pious Nonconformist Mode”,4 among middling sort Dissenters.5 Others have suggested there might be little difference between the behaviour of Anglican and Protestant Dissenting families of the middling sort towards their offspring.6 Indeed, Anglican exemplars of “affectionate families” sharing religious conversations and practice between adults and children are well attested.7 Children’s experiences in minority religious groups are still absent from recent scholarship on the eighteenth-century. Heywood and Reider-­ Asgaard et al analyse aspects of childhood religion in a European, including Nordic, context, but not the complexities of English, let alone British, denominational identity for the young.8 Apart from recent scholarship on Methodism, Dissenting education and religious conversion, existing work on children in minority religious groups is more likely to focus on the dying than the living.9 The extensive new work by literary scholars and the 3  Alison P. Couldert, “Faith and Religion” in E. Foyster and J. Marten, A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Age of Enlightenment (London, Bloomsbury, 2010), 147–164. 4  Stone, Family, 466–7. 5  Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009). 114–119, and passim. 6  M.  Hunt, The Middling Sort: commerce, gender and the family in Britain, 1680–1780, (Berkeley, London, University of California Press, 1996), 48. 7  Stone, Family, 15, 155, 245–6, 667. 8  C.  Heywood, Childhood in Modern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018), 83. R. Asgaard, M. Bunge and M. Roos, eds, Nordic Childhoods: From Folk Beliefs to Pippi Longstocking (London, Routledge, 2018). 9  For existing scholarship, see L. Ryan, John Wesley and the Education of Children: Gender, Class and Piety (New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 2018): P. Sangster, Pity My Simplicity: the Evangelical Revival and the Religious Education of Children (London, Epworth Press, 1963). M.C.Martin, “Marketing Religious Identity: Female Educators, Methodist Culture and Eighteenth-century Childhood”, in M. Hilton and J. Shefrin, eds, Educating the Child in the British Enlightenment: Texts, Beliefs, Practices (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009), 63–78:M. Burden, “Dissent and Education”, in A. Thompson, ed., The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018), 358–386. For death, see, for example, K. Barclay, “Grief, Faith and Eighteenth-Century Childhood: The Doddridges of Northampton”, in K. Barclay, K. Reynolds and Rawnsley, Death, Childhood and the Emotions in Premodern Europe (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2016), 173–190. P. Pritchard, “Young Saints and the Knots of Satan: Moral Exemplarity, Ministry and Youth in Early Modern Dissenters’ Writing”, in “Writing Religion, 1660–1830”, Journal of EighteenthCentury Studies, 41, No 2, (June 2018), 225–240. H.  Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), 165.

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Dissenting academies project focuses mainly on print culture and philosophy for the education of older children or young adults.10 A strong strand in the historiography has characterised Dissent (or at least certain groups, such as the Rational Dissenters and Quakers), as more attractive or “enlightened” than Anglicanism, giving women more intellectual freedom and being more interesting for children.11 This ignores the more sombre aspects of the religious practice of some minority groups and their diversity. Yet, religious practice was one aspect of life over which children might exercise choice and which they might adapt for their own purposes, in ways which could be creative, rather than merely a form of resistance.12The adult imperative that children should internalise religious habits and learn to participate provided the opportunity for children to practise and perform autonomously.13 This essay will explore children’s and young people’s experience of religion, and in particular, the relationship between domestic piety and public worship between 1688 and 1800, across different religious denominations in Britain. I will start with attendance at church or chapel, including sermons and then examine practices such as learning to read and religious books, praying and saying or singing psalms and hymns. Returning to markers of religious development, it will then focus on religious conversion and finish with confirmation and Holy Communion. Any discussion of eighteenth-century experience requires a sensitive discussion of denominational identity. Jonathan Clark has argued that denomination, rather than class, was the major language of conflict from 1660 to 1833 and that it provided choices of religious allegiance.14 In 10  Dissenting Academies Online: Database and Encyclopaedia: https://dissacad.english. qmul.ac.uk. T.  Whitehouse, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent. (Oxford, OUP, 2015). Isabel Rivers, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018). “Writing Religion, 1660–1830”, special issue of Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41, No 2, (June 2018). 11  R.  Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians, 1760–1860 (Longman, London, 1998). K. Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995). 12  But, on agency, see for example, Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education”, History of Education 45, 4 (2016): 446– 459. (Special Issue on Marginalized Children and Vulnerable Histories). 13  See Lucy Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Post-Reformation Dissent (Houndmills, Palgrave, 2014), 142–161 on “autonomy”. 14  J. Clark, English Society, 1689–1832, 2nd ed., (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), 125.

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Keith Snell’s view, denominational identity was more important than class identity in relation to Sunday schools from 1780.15 Jan Albers found that there were many bitter disputes, rather than toleration in Lancashire and suggested that, “The key to understanding the significance of religion for this society may be in a cultural analysis of denominational and sectarian religious identities”, rather than by studying elite theology, like Jonathan Clark.16 Frances Knight has argued there was a shift from diversity in the eighteenth century, when Nonconformists frequently considered it as normal to be baptised or married in the Church of England, to a more sectarian approach after 1826.17 Identifying specific ages to mark the beginning and end of childhood and youth is complex and context-dependent. Despite all the critiques of Philippe Aries, his argument that definitions of childhood and youth are socially constructed has been widely accepted.18 In a recent helpful analysis, Kathryn Gleadle cites Alysa Levene’s argument that, even at age seven, children might be considered to have some competence. However, even eighteen-year olds might be considered as children by the Poor Law.19 In the 1700s, the age of consent for girls was 12 and boys was 14.20 Even in 1833, the age of maturity was described as 14 by the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment.21 Paupers might be apprenticed from the age of seven, but it was more usual to apprentice children from 10 to 14 15  K.  Snell, “The Sunday school movement: child labour, denominational control and working-class culture”, in Past and Present, 164 (Aug 1999), 122–168. 16  “J. Albers, ‘Papist Traitors’ and ‘Presbyterian rogues’: Religious Identities in EighteenthCentury Lancashire” in J.  Walsh, S.  Taylor and C.  Haydon, eds, The Church of England 1689–1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), 318, 317. 17  F.  Knight, “From Diversity to Sectarianism: the Definition of Anglican Identity in Nineteenth-Century England” in R.  N. Swanson, ed., Unity and Diversity in the Church, Studies in Church History (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996), 377–386. 18  See, for example, J. Nelson, “Parents, Children and the Church in the Earlier Middle Ages” in D. Wood, ed., The Church and Childhood: Studies in Church History 31 (Boydell, Woodbridge, 1994), 81–114. 19  K. Gleadle, “The Juvenile Enlightenment: British children and youth during the French Revolution” in Past and Present, vol 233 (2016), 143–184, citing A. Levene, The Childhood of the Poor in London: Wellfare in Eighteenth-Century London (Houndmills, Palgrave, 2012), 17, 73. 20  U.  Boker, “Childhood and Juvenile Delinquency in Eighteenth-Century Newgate Calendars”, in A.  Muller, Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century, (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008), 136. 21  Cited in H. Hendrick, Child Welfare: England 1872–1979 (London, Routledge, 1994), 26. J.  Walvin, Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914 (London, Penguin, 1982), 13.

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upwards22: indeed, Anna Davin has noted that young workers might be perceived and treated as semi-dependent.23 Heywood has suggested that the terminology from the ancient world, with key dates at seven-year intervals (infantia, pueritia, adolescentia) continued into the modern period,24 but within Protestantism, there were no specific religious rituals at age seven, as with pre-Counter-Reformation communion.25 While acknowledging that the end date of the age of legal majority of 21 remained constant and that “youth” could encompass ages seven to over 21, this essay will draw on the definitions provided within the personal memoirs analysed below to develop understanding of the relationship between “age” and religious experience.

Sources Debates about how to research the history of children have had a long history. This essay attempts to recover the experiences, if not the “voices”, of children, drawing on personal memoirs.26 Much autobiographical writing in the eighteenth century relates to the labouring poor as well as elite groups. This includes the early Newgate Calendars, the Lives of the Early Methodist preachers and Zachariah Taft’s Biographical Sketches of Holy Women27 Clearly conversion narratives are subject to issues of retrospective distortion, or hagiography, yet have been used creatively, by, for example, 22  N. Goose, “Introduction” to N. Goose and K. Honeyman, eds, Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2013), 4 (115–6). 23  A. Davin, “What is a Child”, in A. Fletcher and S. Hussey, eds, Childhood in Question: Children, parents and the state (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999), 15–36. 24  Heywood, Childhood, 81–83. 25  R. Asgaard, M. Bunge and M. Roos, eds, Nordic Childhoods: From Folk Beliefs to Pippi Longstocking (London, Routledge, 2018), Ch 3. 26  Bernard Capp, The Ties that Bind: Siblings, Family and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–10. 27  P.  Earle, A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650–1750 (London, Methuen, 1994): Z.  Taft, Biographical Sketches of the Lives and Public Ministry of various Holy Women whose eminent Usefulness and successful labours in the Church of Christ have entitled them to be enrolled among the great benefactors of mankind, in which are included several letters from the Rev J. Wesley never before published (1825), I, 41–2. T. Jackson, ed., The Lives of the Early Methodist Preachers Chiefly Written by Themselves, edited with an introductory essay in three volumes Tentmaker Publications, Stoke on Trent, 1998 (retypeset from the fourth edition which contained additional lives and was in 6 volumes, in 1871).

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Bruce Hindmarsh and Phyllis Mack.28 This is despite being constructed according to a formula, usually of early “religious impressions” in childhood and youth, a period of “falling away”, and then some ground-­ breaking experience involving a revelation of God’s presence and forgiveness of sin. While acknowledging that these narratives were shaped by a framework, they are important in gauging the kind of messages which authors wished to convey. Moreover, specific memories, of, for example, books read, or places of worship, maybe less subject to distortion than other forms of memory. The sample selected here has been chosen across religious affiliations and social ranks. It includes some from middling sort or labouring backgrounds, while other subjects were related to ministers, schoolmasters or yeomen farmers or businessmen. Memoirs were produced by and about some of the most radical thinkers of the century, and those who changed from or rejected the religion of their upbringing, as well as the orthodox. Another challenge is that most studies focus on specific denominations rather than making comparisons between minorities and the Church of England.29 The periodization which associates the period 1688 onwards with the modern world inhibits study of the continuities between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, family traditions of being either a royalist or Jacobite or a supporter of Cromwell, of being ejected from a living or persecuted also persisted, and could be recorded in family annals.30 The “long eighteenth century” covers the period from the Toleration Act of 1689 to the removal of civil disabilities for Dissenters in 1828 and Roman Catholics in 1829. My subjects were selected if they were born before 1800, and would, therefore, have come of age before or during the 1820s.

Religious Diversity At the start of our period, in 1689, there were three main religious groupings in the British Isles: Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. In England, Anglicanism was dominant; as the William’s wars 28  D.B. Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford, OUP, 2005). P. Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007). 29  See, for example, Underwood, Childhood. F. James and I. Inkster, eds., Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld circle, 1740–1860 (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012). S.  Stevens, Quakers in Northeast Norfolk, 1690–1800 (Lewiston, New  York, Edwin Mellen, 2012). 30  Thus the High Church John Bowdler’s father Thomas resigned from his Admiralty post in 1688. T. Bowdler, Memoir of the Life of John Bowdler (London, Longman & Co, 1825), 9–10.

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in Ireland were to demonstrate, Roman Catholics were subject to considerable political and legal pressures, which hampered the education of their young, including those of the middling sort.31Across the whole of the seventeenth century, Protestant Dissent remained a diffuse network of interlocking theological and religious principles, but by the early-­ eighteenth century four groups are observable: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers; in reality, the first three groups had some overlapping members, but Quaker practice was already quite distinct. Baptists were mainly opposed to infant baptism, and the Quakers (founded by George Fox) were opposed to most outward forms, believing instead in the Inner Light.32 Before the Toleration Act of 1689 permitted Dissenters to attend their own place of worship, if it was registered, the law required everyone to attend the Church of England. Unlicenced schoolmasters could be prosecuted, and to be licenced, subscription to the Anglican 39 articles was required. In Scotland, where there had been many conflicts between the Presbyterians and Episcopalians in the seventeenth century, and the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian, Glover argues it became the “mark of politeness” for differences to be muted.33 In Ireland, the majority of the population were Roman Catholic although the Established Church was Church of England. Whereas some clergy were ejected in 1662 because they refused to take the Act of Uniformity, in 1688, a High Church group, the non-jurors, refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of William III and some also lost their livings.34 During the eighteenth century, there was further fragmentation. Methodism started as a revival movement within the Church of England but broke away to form a separate denomination after the death of John Wesley in 1791. From Methodism’s earliest days it was divided theologically between Wesley’s followers who favoured Arminianism and the disciples of George Whitefield who were Calvinists. A comparable division is observable among eighteenth-century Baptists, who were split  C.  Bowden, “Convent Schooling for Girls in the ‘Exile’ period, 1600–1800”, in M.  Ludlow, C.  Methuen and A.Spicer, eds, Churches and Education, Studies in Church History, 55, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2019),177–204. 32  M. Watts, The Dissenters from the Reformation to the French Revolution, I, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978), 186–94. 33  K. Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2003), 136. 34  D. Rosman, The Evolution of the English Churches (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114. 31

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between those who believed in the possibility of universal salvation (‘General’ Baptists) and those who stressed that salvation was limited to the elect (‘Particular’ Baptists). The first Unitarian chapel, founded by an Anglican clergyman, was at Essex Street, from 1785 although it had roots in earlier anti-Trinitarian discussions within both Anglican and Presbyterian intellectual circles, Joseph Priestley being a key figure.35 The Church of England also embraced divisions between “High” and Low. The High Church group were associated with Jacobitism and the Tory party in the early-eighteenth century. The Low Church group tended to be politically closer to the Whig Party; largely speaking, members of this group were more sympathetic to the rights of Protestant Dissenters to worship, and many were on good terms with prominent Dissenting ministers.36 By the early-eighteenth century, Huguenots (French Protestants) had several of their own churches in England, although many members of the community had joined Anglican and Protestant Dissenting congregations.37 Thomas Secker (1693–1768), the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1758 to 1768 had been brought up a Dissenter.38 The Evangelical Revival affected a number of Anglican clergy, particularly in Yorkshire, where John Walsh distinguished three groups, Old Dissent, the Methodists and the Evangelical clergy, mainly Calvinist.39 While regional variation was considerable, fewer than 10% of the population overall have been estimated to have been non-Anglicans.40 Michael Watts found there were only 338, 120 Dissenters in England in

35  M. Watts, The Dissenters from the Reformation to the French Revolution, I, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978), 186–94, esp. 426–8, 488. R.  Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in England, 1662–1961, (London, Independent Press, 1966), 150. 36  G.M.  Ditchfield,“Complexities of Latitudinarianism in the 1770s”, in I.  Rivers and D.  Wykes, eds, Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher and Theologian, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 144–171, 146–150. 37  D.  Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989). 38  R.G. Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England, Studies in Modern British Religious History 17, (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2007), 21–23. 39  J. Walsh, “The Yorkshire Evangelicals in the Eighteenth Century with especial reference to Methodism” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1956). 40  D. Rosman, The Evolution of the English Churches (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 136. Stevens, Quakers, 45.

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the early-­eighteenth century, about 6% of the population.41 In North Hampshire, in the diocese of Winchester, where there were vigorous attempts to attack the Dissenters and distrain possessions from Quakers for non-payment of tithes, the proportion in some archdeaconries dropped from about 10% in 1725 to 6% in 1788.42 Yet, evidence from Wiltshire suggests sympathy for Dissent, since many Anglican parish officers were reluctant to present their Dissenting neighbours for non-attendance at the Church of England.43 There were many conflicts between the varied religious denominations. Representatives of Old Dissent disapproved of the emotionalism and enthusiasm of Methodism, and some considered Unitarians, who did not believe in the Trinity as heretics.44 They, in turn, have been considered the most tolerant.45Amongst Evangelicals, there were differences between the theology of Arminianism, High or moderate Calvinism.46 Baptists were divided while Methodists were disapproved of, even attacked by many Anglicans. Besides changes between denominations, there were changes within denominations over the eighteenth century. Quakers became loosely known as “gay” Quakers and plain Quakers.47 While it is now more usual to refer to “Enlightened religion”, rather than characterising the Enlightenment as “secular”, the move by some towards deism and atheism was nevertheless a significant development.48 The availability and distribution of places of worship for minority religious groups varied enormously in different parts of the country. Whereas “closed” parishes, which kept Dissenters out, reflected the dominance of  S. Orchard, “Congregationalists”, 33 in Thompson, ed., Oxford History, II, citing Watts, Dissenters, I. 42  W. Gibson, “The diocese of Winchester, 1689–1800” in J. Gregory and Chamberlain, eds, The National Church in Local Perspective (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2003), 105. 43  D.  Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 155–172. 44  Albers, “Papist traitors’’ and ‘‘Presbyterian rogues’’, 323. 45  J. Uglow, The Lunar Society: the Friends who made the future (Faber and Faber, London, 2002), 169. 46  Rosman, Evolution, 74–5, 163–5. 47  A Hare, The Gurneys of Earlham, 2 vols (London, G.  Allen, 1899), I, 26, 46. Janet Whitney. Elizabeth Fry: Quaker Heroine (London, Bombay, Sydney, George Harrap & Co, May 1937, Repr 1938), 35–36 and passim. 48  “Writing Religion”, JECS, S.J.  Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: the Myths of Modernity (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004), Ch 3. 41

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the Church of England and Tory landowning, in others, a wide range of religious denominations might be represented.49 Watts notes that, although there were fewer Quakers, they were more evenly spread across the country than Congregationalists and Independents, which tended to be located in particular areas.50 Roman Catholics were concentrated in specific parts of the country, for example, a survey in 1767 found two out of five were in Lancashire.51

Experiences of Worship and the Sacraments The main part of this essay will analyse the engagement of children with religious practice across denominations, and the interplay between public worship and domestic religion. It will examine children’s experiences across denominations, where possible their responses, and, the extent to which children experienced religious practice differently between and within denominations. It also maps the interplay between oral culture and the spoken word. Whereas oral culture and popular culture are often elided, in opposition to elite culture, oral culture was important for the upper and middle class young, even if not to the same extent as for the poor. Indeed, Whyman has highlighted the significance of literacy to many of the poor.52 Michael Watts highlighted the significance of pious parents in influencing the Methodist preachers of the next generation, and these memoirs highlight the roles of both males and females as religious ­educators.53 I will start with places of worship, as the site of religious community, but also examine how public rituals and practices, such as sermons, might be reproduced at home. Moreover, whereas many studies emphasise the similarities between adherents of evangelical religion,54 it is important not to conflate all groups under this banner.

49  See M.C.  Martin, “Children and Religion in Walthamstow and Leyton, 1740–1870” (University of London PhD thesis, 2000), 53–74. Martin Blocksidge, Samuel Rogers: The rise and fall of the banker poet (Brighton, Sussex Academic Press, 2013), 19–20. 50  Watts, Dissenters, I, 267–289. 51  Rosman, Evolution, 132–3. 52  S.  Whyman, The Useful Knowledge of William Hutton: Culture and Industry in Eighteenth-Century Birmingham (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018), 4–12. 53  Watts, Dissenters, I, 426–8. 54  L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, Routledge, 2012), 24–8 and passim.

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Church Buildings and Church Attendance To what extent did children attend church or chapel with their families? James Obelkevich surmised that the head of the household could be expected to represent other family members.55 However, other sources suggest that four was the expected age of starting to attend church, chapel or meeting with their families, and some clearly did so.56 George Shadford (born 1739) in Lincolnshire, an Anglican and future Methodist preacher, recorded that “in the forenoon”, on Sundays, his father made him accompany him to church with him, though in the afternoon, George tried to escape and play.57 Christopher Hopper, born in Ryton in Durham in 1722, went to school, aged five, and attended the Church of England on Sundays.58 Richard Cecil (1748–1815), future Evangelical Anglican clergyman, whose father was Established Church and mother a Dissenter, was taken by his father to church on Sunday.59 As this indicates, when parents were from different religious backgrounds, this also opened up different options for the young. Adam Clarke, born in the 1760s, son of a schoolmaster and small farmer, who grew up in Ireland, and whose father was “Church” and mother Presbyterian, recalled that they had to attend Church every Sunday, and occasionally the Presbyterian chapel, but they all preferred the church.60 Some children attended services twice on Sunday, at different places of worship,61 for example, William Fuller Pocock (1783–1836), son of a builder, went to (Leyton) parish church in the morning and to a Methodist evening service (about 1787).62 William Jay, aged 14, who was apprenticed to his father, attended a new meeting house established by Thomas Turner on Saturday evening and then on Sunday morning at 7 a.m. so as not to interfere with the Anglican service. 55  J.  Obelkevich, “Religion” in F.M.L.  Thompson, ed. The Cambridge Social History of Britain: Vol III, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), 320. 56  A.  Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). 57  “George Shadford” in Jackson, ed., Lives, III, 314. 58  “Christopher Hopper” in Jackson, ed., Lives, I, 148. 59  J. Pratt, The Life, Character and Remains of the Rev Richard Cecil: Collected by Josiah Pratt a new edition (London, Whittingham and Rowland, 1811), xi. 60  James Everett, Adam Clarke Portrayed, 2 vols (1843–4), I, 14–15, 38. 61  Bayne-Powell, English Child, 126. H. Solly, These Eighty Years: the Story of an Unfinished Life (1899), I, 54–5. 62   Royal Institute of British Architects, “In Memoriam”, PoFam/1/3, 18: WWP Reminiscences, PoFam/1/2, 17.

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He recorded his feeling of joy at the meetings.63 John Valton, born in London in 1740, of French parents who came to London in 1738, and his brother and sister “was trained to a regular attendance” at “the Romish” chapels in London during his early years. After being educated in France, he was sent to a grammar school in Yorkshire. The clergyman master did not know he had been brought up a Catholic, and sent him to church with his own sons.64 Quaker children had to sit through silent services. In the 1770s, the children of Lewis Dillwyn attended Tottenham Meeting for the first time aged about three or four. (Lydia Dillwyn went for the first time aged four in 1789, and her brother Lewy sometimes attended, aged three.)65There were differing responses to these meetings. The “gay” Quakers, the Gurneys of Earlham Hall, near Norwich, frequently criticised Goat’s Lane Quaker meeting in Norwich,66 and the Quaker poet Crabb Robinson also recalled his boredom. Yet in both families, there was a recognition that sermons could be interesting, with Crabb Robinson asking the minister to preach from the book of Revelation.67 Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, nee Galton, (b. 1787) whose father was one of the Lunar Society, recalled of her childhood that “It was one of my greatest pleasures to be taken to the Friends’ meeting, either on the Sunday or on week days, and felt the presence of God there. I well remember after my own childish ‘meeting’ was over, as I used to watch the presence of the sunbeam ...”.68 William Hutton’s life-story records the pressures which Dissenters, as a minority, might encounter outside the family circle. He was sent to work at seven years old, and recalled that “we were the only family of Dissenters at the mill”. One of the clerks tried to turn him to the Established Church offering him a halfpenny. “My father winked at it”.69 However, when he 63  The Autobiography of William Jay, edited by George Redford, John Angell James (1854, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust edn, 1974), 23. 64  “The Life of John Valton”, in Jackson, ed., Lives, III, 226–227. 65  Library of the Society of Friends, Calendar of the Diaries of William Dillwyn, National Library of Wales (Typescript photocopies): Vol II (Jan 1781-Dec 1790): L092.3 DIL, 98.5, 64, 113; 30 7th month 1789; 10 6th month 1781; 8 10th month 1786; 31 10th month 1790. 66  Bayne-Powell, English Child, 128–9. 67  Bayne-Powell, English Child, 128. 68  The Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, edited by her relation Christina C. Hankin; vol 1 Autobiography: vol 2: Biographical Sketch and Letters (London, 1858) 46. 69  William Hutton, Life of William Hutton, and the History of the Hutton family (London 1816) 110.

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grew older, he still attended Dissenting Meeting; on July 12,1741, he went to Meeting “as usual”.70 Church and chapel buildings also functioned as a site for meetings and sociability, which might assist the transition to adulthood.71 Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who was brought up in the Church of England, though his mother imposed Calvinism on all her children, recalled how his aunt ran a women’s meeting in conjunction with their chapel, and how he was allowed to go along when he was very young.72 Elizabeth Collett (b. 1762, in Cornwall), one of Taft’s “Holy Women”, ran a Methodist class-­ meeting, aged 16.73 Mary Hays attended a chapel in Stoke Newington, where she met numerous literati.74 Samuel Follows sent away and apprenticed at 14 to a Quaker in Yarmouth, Norfolk, in the 1730s, attended Meeting on First Day and made many friends and contacts within the Quaker community there.75 Perhaps unusually, the Gurneys of Earlham attended Roman Catholic mass, Methodist chapels, Unitarian meetings and a Jewish meeting.76 Baptism Since baptism usually took place in infancy, and rarely figured in memories of childhood, it will only merit a brief mention here. The rite for admission to Christian churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, has been considered to be almost universal in the Church of England in this period.77 Quakers and most Baptists did not practise infant baptism.78 From 1689,  Hutton, Life, 128.  L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (London, Routledge, 2012), 100. 72  Autobiography of Joseph Priestley, Memoirs written by himself, An Account of Further Discoveries in Air, with an introduction by Jack Lindsay (Bath, Adams & Dart, 1970), 1. 73  Taft, Biographical Sketches, 117. 74  G.L. Walker, “Mary Hays, 1753–1849: an Enlightened Quest”, in B. Taylor and S. Knott, eds, Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, Routledge, 2008), 493–518. 75  Whyman, Pen and the People, 147–8. 76  V. Anderson, Friends and Relations: Three Centuries of Quaker Families (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980), 240. A. Hare, The Gurneys of Earlham (London, G. Allen, 1895). 77  D.  Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–199. S. Wright, ed., “Confirmation, Catechism, Communion: the role of the young in the Post-Reformation Church”, in idem, ed., Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, Hutchinson, 1988), 203–228. Smith, Religion, 51. W.M. Jacob, The Clerical Profession in England and Wales (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), 173, 194–6. Underwood, Childhood, 11–19. 78  Stevens, Quakers, 48. 70 71

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Protestant Dissenters began to hold baptisms in their own places of worship if they were licenced, though not marriages or funerals. However, these were not always recognised by the Church of England, so children might not be buried in Anglican churchyards.79 Registers were kept in Presbyterian meetings and these were recorded at Williams’ library. In one study of the London hinterland, only tiny numbers of Nonconformists were baptised, compared to numbers in the parish church. The surviving baptismal registers of Walthamstow Old Meeting, a popular place of worship in Essex, show the dominance of one family, the Sollys.80 The Puritan rejection of godparenthood continued in Nonconformist culture in the eighteenth century.81 For Baptists, the ritual occurred after religious conversion.82 Sermons The sermon gained particular significance after the Reformation for Protestants, the pulpit often replacing the altar as central feature of places of worship.83 Sermons were important across denominations and types of churchmanship, and children might actively choose to listen to or imitate them. A possibly apocryphal story exists of three-year-old Samuel Johnson insisting on going to hear the controversial High Church cleric Sacheverell, c 1702, sitting on his father’s shoulders.84 The young Quaker Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), when at school in Devizes, read DeFoe’s Family Instructor85 and set himself up as a preacher. “On the Sunday” he said, “I read a sermon to them, and I made the boys and servants attend prayers”86 William Godwin’s Calvinist father, a preacher, “liked to read expositions and sermons to his family, permitting no other relaxation”.87 Godwin in his turn gave sermons in his mother’s kitchen, aged eight, and “discoursed  S. Orchard, “Congregationalists”, in Thompson, Oxford History, II, 33.  See Martin, “Children and Religion”, 348. 81  William Coster, “From Fire and Water”: the Responsibilities of godparents in early modern England, in Wood, ed., Church and Childhood, 305–6, 301–311. 82  For John Ryland, see Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 301–320. 83  Rosman, Evolution, 50–51,138–139. 84  J. Boswell, Life of Dr Johnson, cited in I. Stickland, The Voices of Children, 1600–1914 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1973), 10. 85  Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor 86  Bayne-Powell, English Child, 128. 87  Ford K.  Brown, The Life of William Godwin (London, Toronto, J.M.Dent & Sons, 1926), 3. 79 80

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on sin and damnation... bringing tears to the eyes of an erring playmate”88 An account of William Carey (1761–1834), future founder of the Baptist Missionary Society, described how he “made an impression on dull rustics”. When they said, “Well if you won’t play, preach us a sermon”, he mounted an old dwarf witch elm seven feet high.89 Girls might also act the preacher, examples being the Gurneys of Earlham. In 1798, at a visit, of Prince William Frederick of Gloucester, in Rachel and Betsy’s room, Rachel (aged 20) dressed up as a Quaker minister and preached one of her “capital sermons”, which was much enjoyed by the younger children.90 Joseph Priestley learned how to benefit intellectually from sermons. “It was my custom at that time to recollect as much as I could of the sermons I hear, and to commit it to writing ... I insensibly acquired a habit of composing with great readiness”.91 Preaching was a popular form of entertainment and adults might go to sermons from different denominations in the same day.92 Attending different preachers was also an activity for adolescents. Rowland Hill went to the Lock hospital every week, aged about 18, in the 1770s.93 Presbyterians and Unitarians also valued preaching, which they argued influenced their ­children.94 Although evangelical preaching had a significant impact and might lead to conversion, some accounts emphasised the tedium of sermons. One, writing in 1887 stated, “The preaching of the time did nothing more for young Carey than for the rest of England and Scotland”.95 This reproduced the nineteenth-century narrative of Anglican tedium, in comparison with the alleged liveliness of Dissent.96 Similarly, Elizabeth Ham (b. 1783) referred back to the tedious nature of preaching that she was used to, before hearing Dr. Southwood Smith in a Unitarian chapel.97 Yet, it was claimed of Henry Venn, the evangelical Anglican based in Yorkshire,  Brown, William Godwin, 1,2.  George Smith, The Life of William Carey: shoemaker and missionary (London, John Murray,1887), 6. 90  Hare, Gurneys of Earlham, 72–73 citing Richenda Gurney’s journal. V.  Anderson, Friends and Relations: Four generations of Quaker families (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1980), 245. 91  Priestley Autobiography, 74. 92  Hunt, Middling Sort, 48. Ingram, Religion, 85. Knight, “Diversity”, 378. 93  E. Sidney, Life of the Rev Rowland Hill (London, and Baldwin & Cradock, 1835), 20. 94  Memoir of the late Eliezer Cogan, from the Christian Reformer for April 1855, London, Charles Green, Hackney, 1855, 5,17. 95  Smith, William Carey, 7. 96  See Ingram, Religion, 5–18, for a discussion. 97  Ham, Life, 199. 88 89

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that “the devotion he aroused, especially among the young, was little short of idolatry”. “S. Bottomley used to hide himself in a pew after the Sunday morning service so that he could be locked in the church and stand in Venn’s pulpit and kneel on the stool which Venn had used”.98 Learning to Read and Religious Books A persistent paradigm has characterised the eighteenth century as a period of consumer revolution, including the beginning of children’s literature.99 Grenby has recently noted that children’s literature to some extent “fragmented along denominational lines” by the end of the century, but there is little evidence that children’s reading was denomination-specific.100 Most of the books named by my subjects were the earlier staples of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), James Janeway’s Token for Children (1673), or John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Material culture was a starting point, regardless of denomination.101 The younger Baptist John Ryland (1753–1825) recalled, “My mother taught me a great deal of Scripture History, by explaining to me the pictures on the Dutch tiles in the parlour chimney at Warwick”.102 This practice, recommended by the Nonconformist divine Philip Doddridge (1702–51), persisted across the century. “Aunt Polly” (Mary Anne Galton) used to tell Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (1778–1856) fairy tales, and Scripture histories, “illustrative of the pictures on the Dutch tiles, which then formed the common ornament on chimney-pieces. I used to listen with delight to the story of Noah or of Abraham, of Joseph and his Brethren, of Caleb and Joshua, of David and Jonathan”. She recalled the contrast between “exulting pride” associated with the tales of ancient Greece compared to “the sweet and soothing feeling of rest with which I listened to those of the holy men of old”.103 This 98  Walsh, “Yorkshire Evangelicals”, 198–9, citing Henry Venn, 1824, MS, and Life of Henry Venn, 26. 99  J.H. Plumb, “The New World of Children in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, 67 (May 1975), 64–95. 100  Grenby, Child Reader, 85–91, 99–102. 101  S. Mandelbrote, “The Bible and Didactic Literature” in S. Pennell and N. Glaisyer, ed., Didactic Literature in England, 1500–1800 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003), 20. J.E.  Ryland, Pastoral Memorials, selected from the manuscripts of the late Rev John Ryland, with a memoir of the author (London, Bristol, 1826–8), including “Memoir of John Ryland”, 4. 102  “Memoir of John Ryland”, 4. 103  Schimmelpenninck, Life, 6.

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critique of classical heroes in favour of Bible stories illustrates the continuing significance of Protestant Old Testament heroes in one of the allegedly “progressive” intellectual and scientific minority groups in the late-­ eighteenth century.104 Pictures, though not universally approved, were also significant.105 (In the Dissenting Rogers household, the only adult pictures were family portraits.106) “We had in our nursery”, said another author, Mrs. Sherwood (1775–1851), daughter of an Anglican clergyman, “an old picture of the Day in Judgement and my father had a Milton’s Paradise Lost furnished with beautiful prints. We had also a Prayer Book full of pictures”107 Richard Cobb wrote to his friend the High Church John Bowdler, about 1770, that “my daughter is with me looking over a book of pictures, which want so much explanation, and I am so often called off to admire their astonishing beauty that I can only write about nothing...”.108 A taste for solitary reading as a child was often later perceived as key to future religious or intellectual promise, and was also symbolic of the plebeian self-education analysed by Whyman.109 John Newton (1725–1807), Dissenter and future Evangelical Anglican clergyman, claimed that when he was four years old, he could “read with propriety in any common book”. His mother “stored my memory, which was then very retentive, with many valuable pieces, chapters and portions of scripture, catechisms, hymns and poems”.110 His mother died on July 11, 1732, and he then read Bennet’s Christian Oratory, began to read and pray, and kept a ­diary.111 George Shadford, (b. 1739) the future Methodist preacher, recalled that on Sundays, after dinner was over, his father “made me and my sister read a chapter in the Bible”. As he got older, he broke away from his companions to read by himself on the Lord’s Day.112 The Rev. T. Priestley wrote of his brother, Joseph (1733–1804), the future scientist, ­philosopher, and Unitarian, “Joseph had soon acquired more learning  Her father was a member of the Lunar Society. Uglow, Lunar Society, 313.  Rivers, Vanity Fair, 106  Blocksidge, Banker Poet, 15. 107  Cited in Bayne-Powell, English Child, 130. 108  Bowdler, Memoir, 34. 109  Whyman, Useful Knowledge, 4–13. 110  The Life of the Rev John Newton, “an authentic narrative”, (London Religious Tract Society, 1831), 12. 111  Life of John Newton, 1–7. 112  Jackson, Lives, 139. 104 105

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than the common schoolmasters, for he rarely spent an hour for any recreation. From eleven to thirteen he had read most of John Bunyan’s works, and other authors on religion, besides the common Latin authors”.113 The future atheist William Godwin (b. 1756) recorded that his first book was Pilgrim’s Progress, the second Janeway’s Token for Children. “I felt as if I was ready to die with them”. “My temper at that time seemed quite suitable to her [his mother’s] wishes. I had little inclination to the noisy sports of children”. He read the Bible thoroughly at a dame’s school at Guestwick, and read the Old Testament and New Testament again and again.114 Charles Lamb, (1775–1834), the future author, used to read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and would put his hands in the flames as if he were a martyr. He also “relished” Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, and wondered how all the beasts in the picture got into the ark.115 Elizabeth Ham (b. 1783–1859), an Anglican, born in the 1780s, wrote, “I had been taught to read from The Single Psalter and the Bible, as was then the fashion, no other book had ever been put into my hands except to look at pictures. The children of this generation little know the advantages they have over their grandmothers”.116 (Yet, when visiting the library, she was given “Little Goody Goose-Cap” by the family doctor, and read it all.)117 Betsy Gurney (1780–1845), from a family of “gay Quakers” allegedly was “so affected by the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac that she dreaded going to Meeting lest her parents should sacrifice her there”.118 Even very young children might read texts by Protestant founding fathers. Joshua Marshman, a Baptist missionary noted “July 1, 99, My son John read ‘calvin on the defence till breakfast’, on board ship”.119 Varying responses to religious books were recorded. Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck recalled how, when she was a “very little child”, and ill with asthma, and a family friend read to her from Pilgrim’s Progress, the story of Apollyon and Giant Despair: “the fearful visions and terror it occasioned nearly cost me my life. It was many days before I recovered from its effects”.120 113  Memoir of Dr. Joseph Priestley to the year 1795, written by himself with a contribution to the time of his decease, by his son, Joseph Priestley, and observations on his writings, by Thomas Cooper... and the Rev William Christie. (To which are added, from the posthumous discourses.) (London, 1809), 7 citing F. Serm, 36. 114  Brown, Life of William Godwin, 4, 12. 115  Bayne-Powell, English Child, 229. 116  Life of Elizabeth Ham, introduced and edited by Eric Gillett, (1783), 32. 117  Ibid, 32. 118  Hare, Gurneys of Earlham, 48. 119  S.  Chatterjee, Hannah Marshman: the first woman missionary in India (Hoogly, S. Chatterji, 1987), 31. 120  Schimmelpenninck, Life, 47.

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However, when she was older, after 1788, she had a copy with “hideous copperplate illustrations”, which she loved. She also had a Bible “with excellent prints from paintings of the first masters”.121 Elizabeth Ham recalled of her school where she was the only boarder, Ma’am Tucker was a Presbyterian and when she was at home in the evenings we used to have The Pilgrim’s Progress read aloud. I used to like this, all but the long applications which were appended to the great detriment of the story, for I could understand it all very well, much better than I ever did the Church Catechism or the Presbyterian one either. The moral or meaning that you discover yourself makes a much deeper impression than those which are forced on your attention in so many dry words.122

Barbauld, the Unitarian educator and author, has been regarded as ground-breaking in her writing for children. She wrote Lessons for Children, 1778–9, which omitted references to sin and damnation, and has been regarded as progressive, to teach her adopted son Charles to read.123 Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck recorded how, on Sundays, her mother “made me read to her a verse or two of Barbauld’s very popular Prose Hymns for Children”.124 Most of the children in this study did not mention Barbauld as an influence, and these were from the wealthier groups. As Godwin’s biographer noted of his childhood in the eighteenth century: “There did not then exist the Moral Tales, the Infants’s Own Books of later periods”.125 Prayer, Hymns, and Psalms Prayer and praise were communicated in family contexts, and could be adapted by children for their own purposes. Arguments about decline in family prayers over the eighteenth century have now been challenged.126  Schimmelpenninck, Life, 137, 140.  Life of Elizabeth Ham, 36. 123  Bayne-Powell, English Child, 240–241. F.  James, “Religious Dissent and the AikinBarbauld circle, 1740–1860”: an introduction, in F.  James and I Inkster, ed, Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld circle, 1740–1860 (Cambridge, UK and New  York, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–16 (1–27). 124  Schimmelpenninck, Life, 4. 125  Brown, William Godwin, 4. 126  W.M. Jacob, “‘Conscientious attention to publick and family worship of God’: Religious Practice in Eighteenth Century Households”, in J. Doran, C. Methuen and A. Walsham, eds, Religion and the Household: Studies in Church History, 50, (Woodbridge, 2014), 312. Smith, “Baptists” in Thompson, ed, Oxford History, II, 72, argues that the practice waned amongst Baptists. 121 122

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Histories from an earlier period, such as Bogue and Bennett, argued that it was de rigueur for Dissenters to conduct family prayers.127Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) recalled “My father also had a strong sense of religion, praying with his family morning and evening”.128 Female householders were likely to conduct prayers. Joseph Priestley went to live with an aunt after the death of her husband, who prayed every morning and evening in the family, until Joseph was about 17, “when the duty devolved on me”.129 In the strict Dissenting Rogers family, in Newington Green, Thomas Rogers presided over family prayer and bible-reading morning and evening. Samuel Rogers sometimes led them once he grew older, the prayers in his prayer book being composed by the Unitarian Price.130 Nor was this practice confined to Dissenters. The former tutor, William Ogilvie, who married Emily, Duchess of Leinster, insisted on family prayer.131 For Quakers, waiting on God in silence at family worship was perceived as preparation for attendance at meeting.132 Teaching children to pray on a one to one basis was another adult responsibility which could develop children’s autonomy, either individually or collectively. George Shadford’s mother “insisted on my saying prayers every night and morning”.133 For Mary Wiltshaw (b. 1763), one of Taft’s ‘Holy Women’, who was born in Spalding or Holbeach in Lincolnshire, “secret prayer became an exercise in which she took great delight...She was much affected at school, reading that ‘David prayed 7 times a day’”.134 John Ryland (1753–1825) said “I was accustomed to say a prayer morning and evening, often adding a few expressions of my own to the form drawn up by Dr Watts”.135 The young Quaker Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) attended school in Devizes. “On the Sunday” he says, “I made the boys and servants attend prayers. But I scorned reading a prayer; I prayed extempore and did not hold my gift in low estimation”.136 This highlights a difference between Evangelical Anglicans and Dissenters. 127  D. Bogue and J. Bennett, History of the Dissenters from 1688 to 1808 , 4 vols (1808–12), III, 338–9, cited in Jones, Congregationalism, , 128. 128  Priestley Autobiography, 69. 129  Priestley, Memoirs of Dr Priestley, 17. Priestley Autobiography. 74. 130  Blocksidge, Banker Poet, 14–15. 131  S. Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Louisa, Emily and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1994). 132  Homan, Children and Quakerism, 12–15. 133  “George Shadford” in Jackson, ed., Lives, III, 315. 134  Taft, Holy Women, I, 183. 135  Ryland, “Memoir”, 4. 136  Bayne-Powell, English Child, 129.

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Henry Venn, the evangelical clergyman, was devoted to the Liturgy for its beauty and for the soundness of its doctrine and believed it to have great advantages over the extempore prayer of the Dissenters.137 Since the Reformation, the main source of church music had been the psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins (a new version being produced by Tate and Brady).138 Singing in places of worship was pioneered by the Baptists John Bunyan and Particular Baptist Benjamin Keach as well as in Anglican charity services.139 As Rivers has argued, there are many memories of saying or repeating religious verse at home.140 Many hymns were written by Methodists, adapted from those of the Moravians, as well as by Dissenters, and were even used by the royal family. Thus, in November 1743, the Dissenting minister John Barker (1682–1762) wrote to his friend Philip Doddridge about the verses he had composed: “I am glad to hear your Poetry will be admitted into the Royal House. May it do as much good there as in cottages”, and referred to young Prince George. “learning his verses by heart”.141 The young Baptist, John Ryland, (b. 1753) learned the 23rd Psalm in Hebrew and repeated it to Hervey before he died.142 Accounts suggest children’s engagement. A possibly apocryphal story about the young Isaac Watts (1674–1748) claimed he complained about Psalms as a child. His father suggested he produced something better, so he wrote one himself, thus beginning his career as a hymn-writer.143 Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck recorded, of the period 1819–26, how “Carry” a very young child, said on the way to the beach, sitting on the back of a mule, “do let me say my hymn louder, for the poor mule is listening and cannot hear me”.144 Singing could be regarded with suspicion by Anglicans, while the strictest Dissenters were against including anything non-Scriptural in a service.145 It was reported to the SPCK in the Salisbury diocese, after the 1715 Rebellion, that “Much disaffection to the King had [been sowed] by young  Walsh, “Yorkshire Evangelicals”, 200. MS letter to Mrs. Riland, September 23, 1786.  Rivers, Vanity Fair, 345, 349. 139  Karen E. Smith, “Baptists”, in Thompson, Oxford History, 72: J.R.Watson, “Dissenting Hymnody”, in Ibid, 359. 140  Rivers, Vanity Fair, 374–5. 141  Cited in M.  Deacon, Philip Doddridge of Northampton, 1702–1751, (Northampton, Northamptonshire Libraries, 1980), 108. 142  Ryland, “Memoir”, 4. 143  Thomas Milner, Life of Watts, cited in Jones, Congregationalism, 128, notes 7, 8. 144  Schimmelpenninck, Life, 384. 145  Rivers, Vanity Fair, 345, 349. 137 138

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people meeting together to sing Psalms”.146 Yet, this suggests psalm-singing could be popular. Indeed, some young people took initiatives to promote singing. William Roby not only recalled singing, in a Calvinist chapel, psalms and hymns and other hymns with supplements from 1769 onwards, but he also collected hymns for Sunday scholars, and tried out different chapels.147 Religious Conversion Much of the social history of religion has focused on conversion as a defining feature of religious identity.148 Certainly, there was an expectation of conversion as a rite of passage within “gathered churches”, for example the young John Ryland, son of a minister, and Anne Dutton, aged 15.149 Ryland described his conversion being stimulated by the conversation of his school friends, and fear that he was losing his chance of salvation.150 While many of the early Methodist preachers were first-generation converts, numerous accounts describe the experience as coming in adulthood, not childhood. Howell Harris, who led the Welsh Revival, for example, was 21.151 William Grimshaw (born 1708, near Preston), although ordained in 1731, did not feel an “earnest concern for his own salvation” until 1734, when he was 26.152 However, conversion did occur in childhood, or over a series of years, documented by Thomas Jackson and Zachariah Taft. Margaret Watson, between five, and eight to nine years of age, was “often convinced of her sinful and lost estate, and frequently greatly felt her need of a Saviour. After a season of deep and pungent sorrow, Christ Jesus revealed himself to her as a Saviour”.153 Mary Dudley, born in 1750  in Bristol, experienced conversion aged 20, and started going to Friends’ meetings, leaving off ornaments.154 By mid-century, 146  Cited in D. Spaeth, “The enemy within: the failure of reform in the diocese of Salisbury in the eighteenth century”, in Gregory and Chamberlain, eds, National Church, (121–144), 139. 147  W. Gordon Robinson, William Roby, 1766–1830 and the Revival of Independency in the North (London, The Independent Press, 1954), 54. 148  L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 2nd edn. (London, Routledge, 2012), 83, 87–88. 149  Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 291–4. 150  Ryland, “Memoir”, 5–8. 151   H.J.  Hughes, Life of Howell Harris, the Welsh Reformer (London, Newport (Mon), J. Nisbet & Co, 1892), 8–16. 152  W.  Myles, The Life and Writings of the Revd William Grimshaw, 2nd edn, (London, Thomas Cordeaux, 1813), 6–9. 153  Taft, Biographical Sketches, I, 179. 154  Ibid, 149.

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evangelicalism was making inroads in many Dissenting denominations, notably Congregationalism.155 There was also a move towards evangelicalism within Quakerism. A particularly well-known case was that of Elizabeth Fry, nee Gurney, a “gay” Quaker. When she was 18, in 1798, the American William Savery came to speak at “Goat’s” meeting house. She was “deeply affected” and began to eschew the things of the world, adopting plain dress, educating poor children in their laundry, and eventually becoming a prison reformer.156 At 18, William Carey was “emptied of self”.157 Conversion was not universal, even in communities in which it was expected. Some children whose parents were already evangelical proved resistant to attempts to convert them. One such was Elizabeth, daughter of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, even when George Whitefield was brought in to pray over her. She married an Irish peer in 1752, and never saw her mother again.158 Joseph Priestley described his awareness of how he should be experiencing conversion, and his distress because this did not happen. Indeed, it is claimed that this absence led him to question the religious beliefs of his childhood, and move towards Unitarianism.159 Some might be converted to Deism or atheism. (Sir) James Stonhouse (born 1716) was influenced by his medical tutor, Nicholls, “who took great pains to instil his pernicious principles into the minds of his pupils”. He became a deist for seven years, and his “conversion” to Evangelical Christianity came well into adulthood.160 Catherine Cappe, philanthropist, moved from Anglicanism to Unitarianism as an adult, aged about 29.161 Catechism Teaching the Church catechism contained in the Book of Common Prayer to “children, youth and ignorant persons” was a requirement of the 1549 and successive prayer books, both in church and at home.162 The diarist  Jones, Congregationalism, 146–186.  Hare, Gurneys of Earlham, 98–103. 157  Smith, Carey, 17. 158  A.C.H. Seymour, The Life of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (Edward Painter, London, 1844), 53–4. 159  Priestley, Autobiography, 73. 160  The Life of Sir James Stonhouse, D.D, with extracts from his tracts and correspondence, the preface signed by A. Greenhill, (Oxford, J. H. Parker, 1844) 3–5. 161  H.  Plant, Unitarianism, philanthropy and feminism in York, 1790–1820: the career of Catherine Cappe, (York, Borthwick Institute, 2003), 2–5. 162  Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), 71–4, 122–3; Heywood, Childhood. But see M.C. Martin, 155 156

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John Evelyn’s son (b. 1655) could allegedly recite the church catechism, aged two,163 while John Pawson, one of the early Methodist preachers was taught the Church Catechism by his parents.164 George Shadford (b. 1739) in Lincolnshire was sent to be catechised by the minister every Sunday.165 In the 1640s, the Westminster Assembly designed a longer and shorter catechism, which was still used by many Dissenting families after the Restoration,166 and in Dissenting chapels.167 Curiously, although Evangelical Anglicans might reject the Church catechism as too High Church,168 for many Dissenters, the Assembly’s Catechism was a staple of their education. Adam Clarke, son of a teacher and small farmer, who grew up in Ireland in the 1760s, learned both the Church Catechism and the Shorter Catechism as his father was “Church” and his mother was a Presbyterian.169 The father of Elkanah Armitage (1749–1835) would spend Sunday evening reading and teaching the “Assembly’s Catechism”.170 In 1731, Robert Pease, 14-year old son of a merchant, an apprentice in Norwich wrote: “7 nights I get a Catechism against Popery”.171 In 1769, William Adams wrote to his grandson, at French’s Boarding School at Ware in Herts, that “your Grand Mamma has desir’d me to acquaint you that when your Peppa has occasion to send anything to you he will send the Assembly’s Catechism at the same time”.172 One of the first memories of Joseph Priestley(1733–1804), of his mother was that “she was careful to teach me the Assembly’s Catechism, and to give me the best instructions the little time that I was at home” (as he lived with his grandfather).173 His brother, the Rev. T. Priestley, claimed “Catechizing at home, 1740–1870: Instruction, Communication, Denomination”, Churches and Education, Studies in Church History 55, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019), 256–273. 163  L.A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), 243. 164  “John Pawson”, in Jackson, ed., Lives, II, 251. 165  “George Shadford” in Jackson, ed., Lives, 137. 166  See Martin, “Catechizing at home”, 257. 167  Priestley Autobiography, 73 “We were all catechised in public till we were grown up”. 168  G.W.E.  Russell, The Household of Faith; portraits and essays (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 240–1. 169  James Everett, Adam Clarke Portrayed, 2 vols, (London, 1843–4.) I, 14–15, 38. 170  Elkanah Armitage (1749–1835) in W. Gordon Robinson, William Roby (1766–1830), 52–3. 171  Whyman, Pen and the People, 34. 172  Cambridge University Library, Adams letters, October 15, 1767, ADD 7621/103, fol. 4. William Adams to Master William Smith. 173  Priestley, Memoir of Dr. Priestley, 69.

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“At four years of age, Joseph could repeat the Assembly’s Catechism, without missing a word. When about six and a half, he would now and then ask me to kneel down with him while he prayed”.174 Joseph also recalled his father “carefully teaching the children and servants the Assembly’s Catechism, which was all the system of which he had any knowledge”.175 John Ryland recalled, “But when I was very young, I was unwilling to repeat one or two of the passages about the misery of the wicked in Dr Watts’ first set of catechisms, I used to burst into tears, if ever it came to my turn to say them”.176 Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck nee Galton (b. 1778), learned a question or two from Priestley’s Scripture Catechism on Sundays with her mother, when she was young, and later historical catechisms from the Old Testament and New Testament.177 While dissension existed between Dissenters as to the value or otherwise of learning the Shorter Catechism,178 Elizabeth Ham, the Anglican, daughter of a yeoman farmer, and later writer, reflects the characterisation of the Anglican catechism as dull. Sent as a weekly boarder to her old Governess, Ma’am Tucker, on the Esplanade, Weymouth, she noted that “at one time we used to be sent to a Chapel of an evening to attend a Class held by Mr Lamb, the minister. But all the religious instruction I ever remember receiving was to learn by rote answers to questions which I repeated as so many words, without attaching the slightest meaning to them, except such an erroneous one as fancying ‘the earth beneath’ meant the esplanade at Weymouth. ... I remember when my little sister was taught the catechism, it was a long time before she could be broken of saying ‘run round’ to the Devil instead of ‘renounce’”.179

Yet, for others, learning the Church Catechism could provide the opportunity for “family time” and questioning.180

174  idem, 5. S. Mandelbrote, “The Bible and Didactic Literature” in S.  Pennell and N. Glaisyer, ed., Didactic Literature in England, 1500–1800 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003), 28. 175  Priestley Autobiography, 71. 176  Ryland, “Memoir”, 4–5. 177  Schimmelpenninck, Autobiography, 4. 178  Cogan, Memoir, 5. 179  Life of Elizabeth Ham, 37. 180  Martin, “Catechizing”, 268–70.

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Confirmation and Church Membership Confirmation marked full entry into the Church of England, followed by communion, while in Dissenting communities, the equivalent was ­admission to church membership. Phillip Tovey has redressed the stereotype of poor provision for confirmations in the eighteenth century, but found very limited evidence of children’s experiences, beyond that of Mary Bosanquet (1739–1815), future Methodist preacher.181 Thomas Secker, the future Archbishop, who was brought up a Dissenter, originally trained for the Dissenting ministry, but was confirmed into the Church of England, probably in his early twenties.182 William Cowper was confirmed at Westminster school, which he left aged 18 in 1749–50. He recalled “the pains Dr Nicholls took to prepare us for Confirmation”, the only aspect of religious education during his school days. He began to pray in secret, but “after Confirmation relapsed to total forgetfulness of God”.183 The Anglican George Shadford was sent aged 14-years old to be confirmed,184 while the elite Amelie Murray was confirmed in 1744 at the hands of Bishop Keith of Edinburgh after moving there.185 John Valton (b. 1740), brought up a Roman Catholic, was later sent to a grammar school in Yorkshire, and was confirmed when the Bishop of Chester came, with about 200–300 young persons though he felt very guilty and disloyal about it: “the next day my conscience sorely reproached me, and I thought I should be damned for what I had done, having been baptized a Papist”.186 Elizabeth Ham (b. 1783) described Anglican confirmation as very dry. “I had little idea of Religion except forms. I had been regularly confirmed, that is, I had gone through the forms. On a Confirmation having been announced, Dorchester on a certain day, I had called on the officiating clergyman at Weymouth, sent up my names, received in return a card ‘examined and approved by me’ and duly signed. Betsy W had a similar card to  P. Tovey, Anglican Confirmation: 1662–1820, (London, Routledge, 2016), 224–351.  Ingham, Religion, Reform and Modernity, 37. The exact date of his confirmation is unknown, but estimated about 1720–21. 183  J. Memes, Life of William Cowper (London and Washington, Kennikat Press, 1972), 13, 17, 23. (Memoir, 1816). 184  “George Shadford”, in Jackson, Lives. Vol III, 315. 185  Cited in Glover, Elite Women, 137. 186  John Valton, in Jackson, Lives, Vol III, 227. 181 182

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Monkton slpt Uncle Harris, and next morning to Dorchester, presented heads. Uncle Goffa congratulated himself that no longer my sins to answer for”.187

Reinforcing later critiques of Anglicanism as dry and meaningless, this account contrasts with the description by Mary Bosanquet, daughter of wealthy merchants of Huguenot extraction, and future Methodist preacher. Thus, in the 1750s, she was confirmed at St Paul’s Cathedral, “read the Order of Confirmation, with the Ministration of Baptism, over and over, and besought my God to give me power to keep the charge of the Lord faithfully”.188 Sarah Lawrence, who grew up in Bosanquet’s religious community, was confirmed at Leeds Old Church the Sunday after she was admitted to the Methodist Society.189 The equivalent ceremony in Old Dissent was admission to church membership, and for Baptists, adult baptism. The young John Ryland (1753–1825) received baptism in 1767, with two of his father’s pupils, and Joseph Dent, also his future brother in law. Afterwards, he had thoughts of the ministry, and “received the final approval of his church” to enter it on March 10, 1771.190 Members of the Baptist Steele circle recorded giving an account of their religious experience to the congregation of their chapel. On June 11th, when a minister from Kent preached, Clemence and Sarah Etheredge were baptised. The same Sunday Anne Steele (1717–1778), aged 15, Betty Green and John Parsons gave in their experience. When accepted, they then were baptised in the service on July 9, an unusually long interval.191 Holy Communion The meaning of Holy Communion had been a key area of controversy at the Reformation.192 In the long eighteenth century, there were differences as well as similarities between religious denominations. Quakers denied  Life of Elizabeth Ham, 50.  JRUL, MAM, Fl, Box 23, Pt 1, 10–11. 189  Taft, Biographical Sketches, Vol I, 41. 190  Ryland, “Memoir”, 8. 191  J.R.  Broome, A Bruised Reed: Anne Steele: her life and times (The Gospel Trust, Harpenden, 2007), 80. 192  Ryrie, Being Protestant, 336–337. 187 188

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the Lord’s Supper, as it was frequently described.193 In Anglican churches in the eighteenth century, it was usually held only once a month, or even three times a year, and has been described as a service of non-­ participation.194 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was likely to be once a month for Congregationalists.195 By contrast, for Roman Catholics, the Mass was of supreme importance. The Roman Catholic John Valton used to assist at the altar (and was proud to do so), and wear a surplice, when he lived in Boulogne in France, aged 9 to 13, where he boarded with an abbot who said Mass two to three times a week in an adjacent chapel.196 Although Protestantism is usually identified as a “religion of the word”, many Dissenting groups discussed here apparently valued the sacraments. Benjamin Keach asserted that “the central act of worship was the Lord’s Supper”.197 The Nonconformist minister Philip Doddridge urged his daughter to participate at the Lord’s Table, and expressed his joy that she had participated in the blood of Christ.198 Nonconformists might be “put forward” for communion as an indication of piety, an example being Mercy Doddridge (aged 15), in 1751.199 Joseph Priestley, aged 19, wanted to take communion in the congregation he had always attended and was supported by the minister and his aunt, but the elders refused because when they interrogated him, he did not express belief in original sin and divine wrath. This was also interpreted as a turning point in his loss of faith.200 Some young women from the Anglican elite reported intense spiritual satisfaction, as did other children in Methodist schools observed by John Wesley.201 Mary Bosanquet, confirmed in the 1750s, recalled “For some months after, every time I approached the Lord’s table, I had a very peculiar sense of his presence, and sometimes I felt as if the Lord Jesus did  Homan, Children, 54.  Rosman, Evolution, 245–246. 195  Jones, Congregationalism, 226. 196  Jackson, Lives, III, 226. 197  Watson, “Baptists” in Thompson, Oxford History, 359. 198  G.  Nuttall, Calendar of the Correspondence of Philip Doddridge DD (1702–1751) (London, H.M.S.O., 1979), 1555, 317. 199  J. Humphreys, ed., Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge, (London, 1829–31) V, 143. PD to PD, 1749. 200  Priestley Autobiography, 73. 201  N.  Curnock, ed., The Journal of the Rev John Wesley, VI, (London, Epworth Press, 1938), 177, for Miss Owen’s school at Purblow. 193 194

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from his own”202 George Shadford, the future Methodist preacher, received the ‘blessed sacrament’ aged 16, for which he prepared with care. He recorded that as he approached the table of the Lord, ‘it seemed so awful to me’, but his ‘good impressions’ lasted only three months”.203

Experiences of Denominational Rivalry or Difference How did children experience denominational identity when growing up in a minority religious community? This section will analyse case studies of the fluidity of denominational identity and how children made their own choices. While many children experienced persecution or discrimination for belonging to a minority religious group, none of the sources suggest the kind of secrecy relating to Underwood’s study, for a denomination which was illegal.204 Indeed, Nonconformists existed in a kind of uneasy relationship, sometimes respected, others criticised. For some young people, the fluidity of denominational boundaries could be more painful and confusing than rigid separation. William Wilberforce, sent to live with his uncle and aunt in London was brought home because he was becoming too “Methodistical”.205 Conversely, the elder daughter of the Congregational Reed family of Sheffield was brought home from London with her teacher early in the nineteenth century, because she had attended an Anglican service, plays and dances.206 Clearly, some autobiographies were constructed to demonstrate the shift towards Dissent, or away from it. Joseph Priestley documented how the aunt who partly brought him up was “truly Calvinistic in principle”, but invited the most heretical preachers in the neighbourhood to her house, so he was brought up without bigotry. At grammar school, he became a Necessarian.207 William Hutton (1723–1815), aged 12, noted how disputes about the Trinity had been going on for years, and his uncle and his friends were “religionists”.208 William Carey (1761–1834), 202  Methodist archive, John Rylands University Library, Fletcher-Tooth Papers, MAM, Fl, Box 23, Pt 1, 10–11. 203  “The Life of George Shadford, written by himself”, in Jackson, Lives, III, 315. 204  Underwood, Childhood, 1–3, 166–70. Rosman, Evolution, 66–71, 130–136. 205  A.  Stott, Wilberforce: Family and Friends (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), 12–13. 206  A.  Twells, The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: The “Heathen” at Home and Overseas (Palgrave, Houndmills, 2009), 93. 207  Priestley Autobiography, 71, 74. 208  Hutton, Life, 125.

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son of a weaver and schoolmaster, and future founder of the Baptist Missionary Society, described how he entered Hackleton, as an apprentice, aged 16, “with hate in his heart to the Dissenters”.209 Like the elder apprentice, he tried to pray alone, attend church three times a day, and patronise the dissenting prayer meeting. He attended prayer meetings until February 10, 1779, a day of fasting and prayer, and returned to church worship, but from the age of 18, attended only Dissenting worship. Described as “a Calvinist of the broad missionary type of Paul”, he suddenly became a Baptist and was baptised by John Rylands junior, on October 5, 1783.210 William Godwin shows the transition from Old Dissent. His grandfather was educated for the ministry with Isaac Watts and Bishop Butler, and his uncle studied for the ministry under Doddridge. In his eighth year, he was consecrated to the ministry. He became a Sandemanian and was ejected from Homerton college in 1772, but went to Hoxton under Andrew Kippis, a pupil of Doddridge. At the age of 14, he renounced Calvinism (but avoided Socinianism).211 John Valton, unsurprisingly for a Methodist preacher, was retrospectively critical of his time in France, “bowing to images of wood and stone and wax, imbibing baneful potions, idolatry and superstition” and also making confession.212 Elizabeth Ham recorded how, as a young adult, she was ridiculed by the children in her care for attending chapel rather than church, and resigned when their mother reinforced their prejudices.213

Conclusion This essay has explored issues relating to religious identity for children of Protestant Dissenting denominations over the period 1689–1829, from the introduction of the Toleration Act until the removal of civil disabilities. Drawing on autobiographies, letters and other personal memoirs of well-known and little known people from a range of Protestant Dissenting affiliations, it also sheds light on family relationships and the processes of transmission of religious practice.  Smith, Carey, 9.  Smith, Carey, 12–13, 17. 211  Brown, William Godwin, 1–8. 212  Valton, in Jackson, Lives, Vol III, 226–227. 213  Ham, Life, 202. 209 210

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The major differences between Old Dissent and the Church of England lay in the teaching of the Church Catechism, or the Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, and ceremonies of admission to church membership or Anglican Confirmation., as well as public worship. While Quakers did not believe in such outward forms, the process of intergenerational transmission of religious practices such as hymns, psalms and prayers at home did not necessarily differ across the spectrum of High Church, Evangelical or mainstream Anglican, or different forms of Dissent. The experience of conversion was significant for many of my subjects, and autobiographies also highlighted childhood experiences, not only of parental instruction, but also of warm relationships, and of children taking initiatives. One the one hand, a strand in the memoirs identified the rejection of play, and childhood love of reading as indicative of future piety or intellectual ability. Alongside this, children recalled adapting poetry, psalms, prayers or hymns or playing at preaching as continuous themes. The oral culture of shared participation in religious practice was important for upper or upper middle class children, while many from poorer backgrounds highlighted their early literacy. Clearly there are caveats about the nature of the source material, the reasons for writing and the identity of the writers, who almost all became preachers, ministers or writers. Yet, their social and religious backgrounds were extremely diverse. Even subjects who broke away from or neglected the theology of their early upbringing frequently remembered the process of early religious teaching as a positive one, often with similar approaches across denominations. Attending church, chapel or meeting was also recalled as enjoyable by many. Narratives of rejection and boredom were less frequent than those of enjoyment and participation.

Bibliography Primary Sources Cambridge University Library, Adams letters, 15 Oct 1767, ADD 7621/103. Library of the Society of Friends, Calendar of the Diaries of William Dillwyn, National Library of Wales (Typescript photocopies): L.092.3 DIL, Vol II (Jan 1781-Dec 1790). Methodist archive, John Rylands University Library, Fletcher-Tooth Papers, manuscript autobiography of Mrs Mary Fletcher, MAM, Fl, Box 23, Pt 1. Royal Institute of British Architects,

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“In Memoriam William Fuller Pocock, FRIBA, 1779-1849” (Typescript), presented by Miss Molly Powel, PoFam 1/2.

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Glover, K, Elite Women and Polite society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2011). Goose, N.,“Introduction” to N.  Goose and K.  Honeyman, eds, Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750-1914 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2013), 1–22. Green, I., The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c.1530– 1740 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996). Grenby, M. The Child Reader: 1700-1840 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011). Gregory, J. and Chamberlain, J.S. eds, The National Church in Local Perspective: the Church of England and the Regions, 1660-1800 (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2003). (Ham) Elizabeth Ham, by herself, introduced and edited by Eric Gillett (London, Faber and Faber, 1945). Hare, A., The Gurneys of Earlham (London, G. Allen, 1899). Hendrick, H., Child Welfare: England 1872-1989 (London, Routledge, 1994). Heywood, C., Childhood in Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018). Hindmarsh, D.B.  The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). Hughes, H.J., Life of Howell Harris, the Welsh Reformer,  (London, Newport (Mon), J. Nisbet & Co, 1892).  Humphreys, J. D., ed, The Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge, 5 vols, (London, 1829–31). Hunt, M., The Middling Sort: commerce, gender and the family in Britain, 1680-­ 1780, (Berkeley, London, University of California Press, 1996). Hutton, W. Life of William Hutton, and the History of the Hutton family (London 1816). Ingram, R.G. Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England, Studies in Modern British Religious History 17, (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2007). Jackson, T., ed, The Lives of the Early Methodist Preachers Chiefly Written by Themselves, edited with an introductory essay in three volumes Tentmaker Publications, Stoke on Trent, 1998 (retypeset from the fourth edition which contained additional lives, and was in 6 volumes, in 1871). Jacob, W.M. “‘Conscientious attention to publick and family worship of God’: Religious Practice in Eighteenth Century Households”, in J.  Doran, C.  Methuen and A.  Walsham, eds, Religion and the Household: Studies in Church History, 50, (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2014), 312. Jacob, W.M.  The Clerical Profession in England and Wales (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007). James, F., and Inkster, I, ed, Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld circle, 1740-­ 1860 (Cambridge, UK and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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(Jay) The Autobiography of William Jay, edited by George Redford, John Angell James (1854, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust edn, 1974). Jones, Tudur, R. Congregationalism in England, 1662-1961, (London, Independent Press, 1966). Knight, F. “From Diversity to Sectarianism: the Definition of Anglican Identity in Nineteenth-Century England” in R. N. Swanson, ed, Unity and Diversity in the Church, Studies in Church History (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996), 377–386. Levene, A., The childhood of the poor: welfare in eighteenth-century London (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Mack, P., Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007). Mandelbrote, S., “The Bible and Didactic Literature” in S. Pennell and N. Glaisyer, ed, Didactic Literature in England, 1500-1800 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003). Martin, M.C. “Catechizing at home, 1740-1870: Instruction, Communication, Denomination”, in Ludlow, Methuen and Spicer, eds, Churches and Education, Studies in Church History 55, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019), 256–273. Martin, M.C., “Marketing Religious Identity: Female Educators, Methodist Culture and Eighteenth-century Childhood”, in M. Hilton and J. Shefrin, eds, Educating the Child in the British Enlightenment: Texts, Beliefs, Practices (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009), 63–78. Martin, M.C. “Children and Religion in Walthamstow and Leyton, 1740-1870” (University of London PhD thesis, 2000). Memes, J., Life of William Cowper (London and Washington, Kennikat Press, 1972). (Memoir, 1816) Myles, W., The Life and Writings of the Revd William Grimshaw, 2nd edn, (London, Thomas Cordeaux, 1813). Nelson, J., “Parents, Children and the Church in the Earlier Middle Ages” in D. Wood, ed, The Church and Childhood: Studies in Church History 31 (Boydell, Woodbridge, 1994), 81–114. Newton, H., The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). (Newton) The Life of the Rev John Newton, “an authentic narrative”, (London Religious Tract Society, 1831). Nuttall, G, Calendar of the Correspondence of Philip Doddridge DD (1702-1751) (London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979). Obelkevich, J., “Religion” in F.M.L. Thompson, ed The Cambridge Social History of Britain: Vol III, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), 311–356. Orchard, S., “Congregationalists”, in Thompson, ed, Oxford History, II, 30–53. Plant, H., Unitarianism, philanthropy and feminism in York, 1790-1820: the career of Catherine Cappe, (York, Borthwick Institute, 2003).

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Plumb, J.H., “The New World of Children in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, 67 (May, 1975), 64–95. Pollock, L.  A., Forgotten Children: parent-child relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983). Pratt, J., The Life, Character and Remains of the Rev Richard Cecil: Collected by Josiah Pratt a new edition (London, Whittingham and Rowland, 1811). (Priestley) Autobiography of Joseph Priestley, Memoirs written by himself, An Account of Further Discoveries in Air, with an introduction by Jack Lindsay (Bath, Adams & Dart, 1970), 1. Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley to the year 1795, written by himself with a continuation to the time of his decease, by his son, Joseph Priestley, and observations on his writings, by Thomas Cooper…and the Rev William Christie. (To which are added, from posthumous discourses.) (London 1809). Pritchard, P., “Young Saints and the Knots of Satan: Moral Exemplarity, Ministry and Youth in Early Modern Dissenters’ Writing”, in “Writing Religion, 1660-­ 1830”, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41, No 2, (June 2018), 225–240. Rivers, I., Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720-1800 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018). Robinson, Gordon W. William Roby, 1766-1830 and the Revival of Independency in the North (London, The Independent Press, 1954). Rosman, D., The Evolution of the English Churches (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003). Russell, G.W.E. The Household of Faith; portraits and essays (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1902). Ryan, L., John Wesley and the Education of Children: Gender, Class and Piety (London, The Epworth Press, 2017). Ryland, John, D.D. Pastoral Memorials selected from the manuscripts of the late Rev John Ryland D.D. of Bristol with a memoir of the author, 2 vols (London, Bristol (printed), B.J.Holdsworth, 1826–8) With a memoir of the author. Ryrie, A., Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). Sangster, P., Pity My Simplicity: the Evangelical Revival and the Religious Education of Children (London, Epworth Press, 1963). (Schimmelpenninck) The Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, edited by her relation Christina C. Hankin; vol 1 Autobiography: vol 2: Biographical Sketch and Letters 2nd edn, (London, 1858). Seymour, A.C.H. The Life of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (London, Edward Painter, 1844). Sidney, E., Life of the Rev Rowland Hill (London, and Baldwin & Cradock, 1834). Smith, K. E. “Baptists”, in Thompson, ed, Oxford History, II, 54–76.

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Smith, M.  Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1780-1865 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994). Snell, K., “The Sunday school movement: child labour, denominational control and working-class culture”, in Past and Present, 164 (Aug 1999), 122–168. Solly, H., “These Eighty Years”: the Story of an Unfinished Life, I, (London, Simpkin & Marshall, 1899). Spaeth, D., The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660-1740 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000). Spaeth, D., “The enemy within: the failure of reform in the diocese of Salisbury in the eighteenth century”, in Gregory and Chamberlain, eds, National Church, 121–144. Stickland, I, The Voices of Children, 1600-1914 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1973). Stott, A. Wilberforce: Family and Friends (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). Stevens, S., Quakers in Northeast Norfolk, 1690-1800 (Lewiston, New York, Edwin Mellen, 2012). Stone, L. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977). (Stonhouse) The Life of Sir James Stonhouse, D.D,, with extracts from his tracts and correspondence, the preface signed by A. Greenhill, (Oxford, J. H. Parker, 1844). Taft, Z., Biographical Sketches of the Lives and Public Ministry of various Holy Women whose eminent Usefulness and successful labours in the Church of Christ have entitled them to be enrolled among the great benefactors of mankind, in which are included several letters from the Rev J. Wesley never before published I, (1825, Peterborough, Methodist Publishing House, 1992 reprint). Thompson, A.  C., ed, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: Volume II, The Long Eighteenth Century, c 1689-1828 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018). Tillyard, S. Aristocrats: Caroline, Louisa, Emily and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1994). Tovey, P. Anglican Confirmation:1662-1820 (London, Routledge, 2016). Twells, A., The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850: The “Heathen” at Home and Overseas (Houndmills, Palgrave, 2009). Uglow, J., The Lunar Society: the Friends who made the future (London, Faber and Faber, 2002). Underwood, L. Childhood, Youth and Post-Reformation Dissent (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Walker, G.L., “Mary Hays, 1753-1849: an Enlightened Quest”, in B. Taylor and S.  Knott, eds, Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, Routledge, 2008), 493–518. Walsh, J., Taylor S., and Haydon, C., eds, The Church of England 1689-1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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Family and Responses to Persecution

Cross-Channel Conflict: The Challenges of Growing Up in Minority Calvinist Communities Across the Channel Susan Broomhall

This essay explores emotional and social challenges for children and young people growing up within Francophone Calvinist communities. They were members of minority groups that were in flux across the Channel, between France, Flanders and England, during the later-sixteenth century.1 1  Key literature includes Pettegree, Andrew, Foreign Protestant Communities in SixteenthCentury London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Grell, Ole Peter, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603–1642 (Leiden: Brill, 1989); Backhouse, Marcel F, The Flemish and Walloon Communities at Sandwich during the Reign of Elizabeth I (1561–1603) (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten, 1995); Vigne, Randolph and Graham C.  Gibbs, eds., The Strangers’ Progress: Integration and Disintegration of the Huguenot and Walloon Refugee Community, 1567–1889: Essays in Memory of Irene Scouloudi (London: Huguenot Society, 1995); Grell, Ole Peter, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996); Spicer, Andrew, The French-Speaking Reformed Community and their Church in Southampton, 1567– c. 1620 (London: Huguenot Society, 1997); Gwynn, Robin D., Huguenot Heritage: The

S. Broomhall (*) The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_6

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Although the emotional lives of children are a challenge to access, historians are increasingly looking to a diverse range of sources and re-reading familiar ones, with new lenses for analysis. These consider how social norms shaped the expression and practice of feelings for and by children, how children were acculturated into these modes of emotional conduct, and the sometimes severe consequences for young people who resisted or failed to perform expected affective behaviours.2 The present analysis, therefore, understands emotional practices, like the concept of childhood itself, as socially and culturally constructed phenomena performed as relational acts of, and within, communities. The performance of feelings between parents and children and experiences of childhood and youth that I study here were not only made and interpreted within a community of shared faith but were also an important part of the maintenance of this dispersed community. These emotional practices were particularly necessary in the face of multiple political, economic and practical challenges that confronted these minority faith groups, and in many cases, spread friends and family members out across the continent and Channel in search of protection and stability. In these contexts, emotional and social rituals of parenting and engagement with children as the future of the faith, as objects in need of protection, and as individuals with their own History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001); Goose, Nigel, and Liên Luu, eds., Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); Broomhall, Susan, “Authority in the French Church in later sixteenth-century London”, in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015): 131–49, Broomhall, Susan, “From France to England: Huguenot charity in London”, in Experiences of Charity, 1250–1650: Revisiting Religious Motivations in the Charitable Endeavour, ed. Anne M. Scott (Farnham, Ashgate, 2015), 191–212. 2  Barclay, Katie, Kimberley Reynolds and Ciara Rawnsley, eds., 2016. Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016); Jarzebowski, Claudia, “Childhood”, in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2016), 214–17; Olsen, Stephanie, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015); Jarzebowski, Claudia and T.M. Safley, eds., Childhood and Emotion across Cultures, 1450– 1800 (London: Routledge, 2014); Miller, Naomi J., and Naomi Yavneh, eds., Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Evangelisti, Silvia and Sandra Cavallo, eds., A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, vol. 3: Early Modern Period (1450–1650) (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2010); Crawford, Patricia, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Broomhall, Susan. ed., Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Dekker, Rudolf, Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland: From the Golden Age to Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 2000).

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emotional trajectories, became significant ways in which the idea of the Calvinist community could be maintained and fostered. This essay examines two significant textual sources by which we can trace some of the experiences of children and young people growing up within Francophone Calvinist communities in the sixteenth century, identify some of the particular social and emotional challenges for these diverse and distributed faith and family communities and analyse how filial and parental feeling and responsibilities were performed. These source types are distinct and offer different, yet complementary, insights into Huguenot experiences at this time. The first is a packet of letters written in 1569 and 1570 by Calvinists in the Low Countries, smuggled out to friends and family across the Channel in England. This packet was confiscated by authorities in the Low Countries, and the letters remain today in the Belgian Royal Archives. A second source for investigation are consistory acts of the French Huguenot community of Threadneedle Street, London, for which records remain for 1560–1561, 1564–1565 and 1571–1577, making the two sources near-contemporary. Acts and letters offer different conceptualisations of ‘children’ within them. Scholars now recognise that identification as a child was not only understood through gendered or age-related dimensions but also as part of ongoing parental-filial relations that extended through the life course, and as a stage of pre-adult status dependence. These conceptualisations of children and childhood are present in both the sources studied here. Both these forms of texts represent different kinds of social and emotional transactions of individuals and their communities. They served different purposes in communication and regulation. They were texts that helped to produce the social identities of Calvinist individuals, families and of the community as a whole, in part through their expression of feelings and responsibilities about children. Such a practice was not specific to Calvinism; narratives about children informed how Catholic communities situated and understood themselves also.3 In this case, these emotional displays were informed by pre-existing social identities and Calvinist faith practices, but they were also a dynamic response to new situations and contexts in which Calvinists found themselves, in minority contexts, in this 3  See Broomhall, Susan, “Beholding Suffering and Providing Care: Emotional Performances on the Death of Poor Children in Sixteenth-Century French Institutions”, in Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, eds. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds and Ciara Rawnsley (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 65–86.

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period.4 Letters among Calvinists that discussed children’s welfare, education, thoughts and desires and the consistory’s oversight of the lives of Church members, including parents and children, helped to sustain the Calvinist communities of the period.

Filial Affections and Parental Duties On Sunday, 26 February 1570, Henry Fléel and his ten-year-old companion Jehan Desmadry were stopped by the Captain of the Fort and Château of Hénuin in a small boat as they were making their way to Calais. Despite Fléel’s initial claims that he was simply a poor man from Laventie seeking to earn his living in the fields near Marck, it was soon discovered that his basket filled with cheese, jams and onions contained a false bottom with an additional compartment holding 79 letters. Fléel confessed that he had been asked to deliver these letters to a certain Donnèrque Olay at the Three Kings tavern in Calais. Fléel claimed that he did not know any of the authors of the letters, which had been given to him by a certain du Buis between Hondschoote (in present-day France) and Reningelst (today, in Belgium). Although Fléel’s fate is not known for certain, the last remaining records transferring his case to the Council of Troubles (1567–1574), a special tribunal designed to investigate those involved in the religious and political turmoil within the Habsburg Netherlands, named him as one of ‘two obstinate heretics’.5 These letters, written in French and Flemish, by both men and women, provide insights into both expectations and experiences of exile in the later-sixteenth century.6 These letters were the product of covert ­communicative practices among a marginalised Calvinist community that 4  I am drawing from insights developed by Judith Butler concerning the construction of gendered selves through the ongoing practice of acts legitimate to that culture, as performativity. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999). See also Broomhall, Susan, “Cross-Channel affections: Pressure and persuasion in letters to Calvinist refugees in England, 1569–1570”, in Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, eds. Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika (London: Routledge, 2019), 27–43. 5  ‘deux hérétiques obstinez’, Order to the Secretary of the Council, Brussels, [after 16 April 1570], Verheyden, A.L.E., “Une correspondance inédite adressée par des familles protestantes des Pays-Bas à leurs coreligionaires d’Angleterre (11 novembre 1569–25 février 1570)”, Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire 120 (1955), 231. All dates have been adjusted to new style. 6  See Broomhall, “Cross-channel affections”.

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extended from the southern Netherlands and northern France to England. All had been written between November 1569 and mid-February 1570. Dates were important when the ability to correspond was so irregular and uncertain. About 30% of the authors were female but only 15% of the recipients were women, reflecting the reality that men more commonly than women went into exile and established a base from which to send home funds or to bring families to. Moreover, these were documents in which ideas about children were rehearsed and explored. They also articulated parental and filial duties and revealed practices of these duties performed through the letter. We can, furthermore, discern something of the emotional experiences of children, as these were a topic of discussion for the adult letter-­writers and through them, we can even read and hear, occasionally, the voices of children themselves. As texts of communities, households and families spread across the Channel, letters were a site in which authors (if not also their readers) practised parenting duties and filial obligations. The unnamed daughter of Wiliame le Roy, then in England, wrote to him, asking for clarification of her mother’s death: I have heard from Jean Houdoux that Jacquet Rousel told him that my mother had left this world, he was very surprised not to have had any letter from you about it, nor me either, which I can hardly believe. I beg you to put my mind at rest, also to know of everything briefly of how all my friends are doing. I feel it so strongly that I can’t write more about it.7

Her request, in strongly emotional language, suggested not a little surprise at her father’s lack of information to her, and something of a rebuke at his paternal failing to inform his own daughter. In the same text, she demonstrated a commitment to fulfil her own filial obligations, sending. two and a half ells of blue cloth; item, four shirts for a small boy; item two shirts for a small girl; item, three men’s shirts; a bonnet; two gingerbreads, two cheeses, pots of jam, two ells of white cloth.8

She further enclosed a pot of cream on behalf of her sister and asked her father to thank her sister Susaenne, presumably in England, for sending her needles. Her care and attention to, and affection for, her distant father 7  20 February 1570, Archives générales du royaume à Bruxelles (AGR), Conseil des Troubles (CdT) 96, 88r. 8  AGR CdT 96, 88r.

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were materialised in gifts that were part of women’s domestic duties and which were likely hand-made gifts. Parenthood was also performed through such letters and in doing so, suggest the kinds of responsibilities that parents could have for children growing up in the care of others. For mothers, articulation of feelings of love and support for children was a vital component of letter-writing practices. Thus, the mother of Benoy de le Court emphasised her sorrow: ‘I cry many times a week’ and grief at the absence of her children: ‘now I have no one and it seems that I will never see you again, nor my two daughters, nor your children’.9 These sentiments could also be expressed by third parties, fulfilling a maternal expectation of ongoing love and remembrance of children abroad. Thomas Le Den assured his sister Jenne of their mother, ‘since the hour and day that you went, her eye has never been dry and she is always crying, praying to God who watches over you to return you to her and us all’.10 The explicit expression of such feelings were more common in letters by or about women but such emotions were not exclusively the expressive preserve of mothers. The author of the letter written on behalf of the parents of a ‘young boy’, Martin du Val, was just as concerned to emphasise their love and affection for their son: as to your father and mother, they pray most affectionately that you write back home some news as soon as possible, for, because they have had no news of you, it seems to them that you are dead, even though all they desire is to be given news of you to know of your state and how it is for you, in doing so you will give them joy and jubilation.11

Parenthood implied duties of care and concern that were not diminished by distance, which could be enacted through the rhetorical performance of the letter. 9  ‘je pleure mainte fois la sepmaine, maintenant je nay personne et il me semble tousjours que je ne vous voiray james plus ny mes deux fille ne vos enfans’, 3 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 42r. 10  ‘depuis leur et le iours que vous et en vois, son oeil na poinct este secq et tousiours pleure prian Dieu quy vouus veille retourner envers luy et nous tous’, 1 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 6r. 11  ‘touchant vre pere et vre mere ils vous prient tresaffectueusement que vous leur renvoiez de voz nouvelle le plus briefvement quil vous sera possible car daultant quil nont nulle nouvelle de vous Ilz leur semble avoir que vous este mort parquoy tout leur desir est que doner de voz nouvelle pour scavoir de vre estat et comment il vous est en cela faisant vous leur donnerez joie et liesse’, AGR CdT 96, 36r.

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However, the explicit emotional engagement seen in these examples above was distinct from the rhetorical patterns common to fathers writing directly to their sons. These letters, by contrast, tended to focus on practical elements of parental duties and oversight: finances, education and moral behaviour. These topics were consistent with the paternal responsibilities that were part of the powers of fatherhood, in what Philip Grace has recently conceptualised as ‘affectionate authority’.12 The unnamed father of Arnoult instructed his son with advice on the education of his grandson: ‘I beg you to hold the hand of your son Jehan, have him taught Latin, to write numbers well and then afterwards to put him to learning languages, for he is ready, make sure he does not waste his time’.13 Creton provided an epistolary lecture to his son that money ‘earned through hard work should never be uselessly dissipated’.14 Jacques Berot who evidently had care of his grandsons, told his daughter, Agnies, that her ‘two sons here are well and grow in size and beauty—little David is most delightful. … David asks to be remembered to his mother, brother and sister and kissed me this morning as his remembrance for you’.15 In reporting the affectionate respect of young David for his mother, Berot was able to demonstrate his own attention to the moral and familial education of his grandson, and his insistence on bringing his dispersed generations of his family together through letters and their explicit rhetoric of emotions. These letters suggest that fathers who had crossed the Channel ahead of their families were expected to maintain their rights and responsibilities to direct children’s education, placement with relatives and marriage arrangements. Wives aided husbands to perform paternal authority by deferring in the letter text to husband’s authority on such matters, even if in practice the lengthy delays and doubts about letter survival must have meant decisions were often made locally. The wife of Jacques du Puys

12  Grace, Philip, Affectionate Authorities: Fathers and Fathers Roles in Late Medieval Basel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 13  ‘Je vous prie de tenire la main a vre filz Jehan de luy faire aprendre le latin a bien escripre le chifre et puis apres de le maitre pour aprendre les langaige car il est en poin / fait quy ne pert poin son tamp’, 2 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 32r. 14  ‘gaingnies a grant labeur ne soit inutillement dissipe’, 9 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 66r. 15  ‘voz deux enffans dicy se portent fort bien et croissent en grandeur et beaulte et le petit David est fort plaisant. … Ledict David se recommande à sa mere, à son frère et sa soer et a ma baisie ce matin pour fere sadicte recommendation’, 2 February 1570, AGR CdT 96.

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wrote, for example, asking her husband’s views about their children’s future opportunities both in the Low Countries and in England: As to our children, write me your advice, that is as to whether I should bring them or not. As to Gerom, he lives at Vuessele with our nephew Philippes Nys but this coming Easter, he will have done his term. And as to Hetyaven, he lives with your brother Pol, but his term lasts until next Toussaint. So, do not forget to write all about it to me, so that I can do by your good advice and arrange one and the other.16

As this letter suggests, a key decision to be made was whether wives and children were to follow the head of the household to the new community across the Channel. A number of wives articulated their concerns about this dilemma in terms of prospects for children, and distinguished opportunities for sons and daughters separately, in their new location. Thus Jacquelinne Leurent lamented to her husband Jean Dambryne that she had not heard his thoughts on whether their children or some of them, should follow him to England: I am in great pain at night, for I have no news of you, even though I’ve written several times, I want to be close to you but what must I do for our children? As to the girls, I will be able to find the means to place them somewhere, but as to the others, you need to write to me your intention or if you have the means to support us all together.17

In these debates, as elsewhere, letters sometimes suggested glimpses of the voices, hopes and desires of children as they were heard and reported generally by mothers. The missive of Marguerite, the wife of Jean Lecoup, explained: ‘This is to tell you that I will come to see you briefly with your 16  ‘Et quant a nos enfans, escryfie moy votre advys, asavoir sy je les ameneray aveycke may ou non. Quant à Gerom, demeure it Vuessele avecke notre neveu Philippes Nys, mays à che Pacque il aura fayt son terme. Et quant à Hetyaven, il demeure avecke votre frere Pol, mays son tereme dure encor jusque a la Tousy prochyn. Par quoy, ne laysier de moy mande Ie tont, afin de fayre Ie tout par bon advys et acorde de l’ung et de l’autre’. 3 February 1570, AGR CdT 96. 17  ‘Ie suis de nuict en grande paine, que n’ay nulls nouvelles de vous, combien que je vous ay rescript par pluiseurs fois, je desire bien d’estre aupres de vous, mais sy fault-il scavoir que nous ferons de noz enffans. Quant aulx fillettes, je trouveray bien Ie moyen les mectre quelcque part, mais quant aulx aultres il fault que me mandes ou escrivies vostre intention et sy vous aures bien Ie moyen de nous nourrir ensamble’, 3 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 35r.

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god-daughter who has promised to come with me, but your daughter, she does not want to leave the country’.18 The wife of Martin Plennart told him of her desire: that you be close to your wife and your children, for you will be as safe here as the others who are coming home every day. Write to me, … it is not the road for a wife and two children. … your daughters Annette and Marie keep asking when their father will come, your daughter Marie says that you cannot come because you have sore feet.19

Making no secret of her desire to have Plennart return home, his wife perhaps included the child-like speech and imaginings of their daughters as an emotive pull to draw her husband home. As was evident from the queries from wives to husbands above, a number of children in Calvinist communities in the Low Countries were raised by one parent or in surrogate parenting arrangements. After her own husband had died, Chatelinne Boudiffart wrote to her brother Jan of her hopes to be ‘both a good father and good mother to my four children’, in a letter that was most likely seeking to elicit support from her brother.20 The niece of Pierre Gruelz told her uncle in England that her mother had died and her father remarried and taken the household assets with him to the new marriage. She asked her uncle emotively to visualise how the family had been left as ‘seven poor children now, without a mother’.21 These letters, from women who lived in households without a male head, asked brothers and uncles to take on the responsibilities and authority of a father.

18  ‘vous adverti que que je vous irai veoir en brif avecq vostre fileu, laquelle m’a promis de venir avecq moy, et de vostre fille, elle ne veux point venir hors du pais’, 10 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 89r. 19  ‘la mienne voulente que fusiez aupres de vostre femme et voz enffans car vous seriez le paisible aussy bien que les aultres quy reviennent journellement. Vous me mandez, que je regarde sy les chemin sont faceux, de cela il vous fault avoir la passienche, car jay espoir, moiennant la grace de Dieu, quil changera les choses et que vous reviendrez avecq elle, car ce ll’est point la ung chemin pour une femme et deux enfaans … vostre fille annette et marie demandent tousiours quant leur pere viendra vostre fille marie dict que vous ne scavez venir et que vous avez mal a voz pieds’, 1 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 37r. 20  ‘que je puis estre a mes quatre enfant bon pere et bonne mere’, n.d., AGR CdT 96, 84r. 21  ‘nous somme a cest heur 7 pouvre enfant sa mere’, 2 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 3v, 3r.

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The case of young Jehan Desmadry provides an opportunity for a closer analysis of the experience of one such child, raised in a single-parent household in a minority community amid a hostile environment. He was captured along with Fléel and the basket of letters and the documents of his interrogation remain in the Belgian archives. Jehan lived with his mother, Marie de la Ruelle, in Lille after his father was exiled in 1568 and had gone to live in England. He attested in his evidence that a fortnight before his capture, his mother had taken him to a tavern. He had stayed there for seven days. Then, a man whom he did not know had been asked by his mother to lead him to the house of his uncle. Then he stayed in the house of a man whom he did not know, where he spoke to some women who came to the house with a man called Henry. He had left in the company of Henry and they slept together in a village that he did not know the name of. Then, they travelled on the next day to another town, where Henry rented them a boat. It was at the fort of Hennwin that the two were arrested. Jehan explained that he understood that Henry was in charge of taking him to England to meet his father with whom he would then stay.22 Potentially, the young Jehan obfuscated, declining to reveal the names of the network that had planned his journey to the authorities. On the other hand, these impressions of rather loose connections of trust may have been Jehan’s experience of his journey. In the course of two weeks, he had stayed and been moved through a series of households, presumably connected by their shared faith, although this was not made clear in Jehan’s testimony to Catholic investigators. Jehan’s testimony did not directly reveal his feelings about these experiences but his evidence can be complemented with a letter from his mother Marie de le Ruelle to her husband in England, which was also included in the basket of hidden letters.23 This revealed a pattern of increasing danger that had led her to seek young Jehan’s removal from the household. She told her husband how the family’s goods had been confiscated after his banishment, and that she had then been forced to take in four Spaniards to their home.24 She had thus planned to remove their son, Jehan, from these circumstances. Her choice of words suggests that in doing so, she was also following her husband’s request. Her letter showed her concerns 22  Interrogations, Saint-Omer, 28 February to 9 March 1570, Copy conserved at the AGR, CdT, 91, fols 139–144v; Verheyden, “Une correspondance inédite”, 226. 23  8 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 58r–59r. 24  AGR CdT 96, 58r–59r.

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about Jehan’s safety in the hands of strangers within the community and over such large distances: I send you my son Jan by the porter of this letter, not knowing well who he is but I did not want to disobey you, giving him instructions to lead him to you, hoping that he will be well introduced and he will be more Christian being with you.25

Young Jehan Desmadry never made it to his father in England, for he was arrested with Fléel and the letters. His fate in the hostile Catholic community of the Low Countries at this period is unknown. In summary, these letters articulated and practised parental and filial duties of intense feeling within these emotionally charged, yet far-flung, households. There was immense pressure on these documents to do emotion work for parents and children—both directly and through the extended network of kin and the faith community who might extend support or advice. The ability of parents to fulfil obligations (from financial support and educational advice, to housekeeping, health, nutritional and emotional care) and to derive pleasures from children may have been severely challenged by these distributed familial situations, but it was nonetheless central to the performance of parenting in letters. Similarly, the ability of grown children to care for elderly parents in financial, practical and emotional forms was disrupted. But such expectations were still maintained, indeed experienced in new ways, through these letters. They revealed and acted as part of a wide network of surveillance, care and information that aimed to enable parents and children on both sides of the channel to derive and offer support of different kinds to each other.

Parental Protection and Care In this section, I turn to examine a second source for understanding children’s lives and emotions in Calvinist minority communities. These are the sixteenth-century acts of the consistory that functioned as part of the Threadneedle Street Church in London. This was the oldest of the French 25  ‘La presente sera pour vous adverty que ay rechu votre lettre par le porteur de ceste, par laquelle me mande, que je vous envoye mon fies Jan par le porteur de cest, ne sachans bonnement quy il èt mais je ne vous ay voulut desobeyr, luy ay baillyet ensergien de le vous mener, attendant que il sera bien introduyt et que il aiet plus de crynten aupres de vous’, 8 February 1570, AGR CdT 96, 58r–59r.

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Churches in England, first established in 1550. The community was comprised largely of French-speaking refugees from northern France and the Low Countries. After the death of Edward VI, the Church was disbanded and many members returned to the continent. However, with the ascension of Elizabeth to the throne, the French Church was re-established in 1559. By 1560, the Church began to order itself, electing elders and deacons in July of that year, with remaining acts of the consistory commencing in June of that year.26 These Churches formed tight-knit communities, linked not only by shared faith practices but also by their experiences as migrants in a country that was not always sympathetic to the practical aspects consequent to their flight from persecution. Most arrived with few possessions and faced restricted working opportunities and harsh regimes of taxation.27 The Church provided an important network for strangers to the city and security for those who had not received or could not receive letters of denisation.28 It also relied on networks established with other French Churches across the country and to other groups of shared faith on the continent. The Church sought not only to manage the moral and social life of its community but also their reputation among Londoners more broadly, with whom interactions were restricted. The records studied here are those of its consistory. This was a ‘company’ of senior men elected from among the congregation to serve as elders and deacons, who dealt with a wide range of disciplinary offences for which members of the community were brought before the elders—regulating life stages within the community from baptism, marriage and death rites, providing welfare to orphans, widows, the poor, elderly and ill; and moral regulation.29 Its textual record offered insights there from the eyes of ‘the company’ who sat temporarily as quasi-parental figures in judgement on the morals and behaviour of the child-like members of the shared faith community. These 26  June 1560 to September 1561, April 1564 to December 1565, then June 1571 to September 1577. 27  For analysis of the rights of aliens which declined in the 1570s and 1580s, see Luu, Liên, “Natural-Born versus Stranger-Born Subjects: Aliens and their Status in Elizabethan London”, in Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England, eds. Nigel Goose and Liên Luu, (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 57–75. 28  Johnston, Elsie, ed., Actes du Consistoire de l’église française de Threadneedle Street, Londres. Vol. 1, 1560–1565. Quarto Series, 48 (London: The Huguenot Society of London, 1937), xiv. Their legal position was precarious because of the non-confirmation of the charter by Elizabeth, page xv. 29  See the literature in fn 1.

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documents provide complementary insights to the letters studied above, into concerns of Huguenot parents for children both at home and abroad, as well as children’s resistance and self-determinations within a relatively isolated faith community in a new land. A key matter of the consistory’s attention was its preferred policy of family reunion, bringing geographically separated members of households together under one roof. This was seen as a preventative measure that would stop promiscuous behaviour that was sometimes revealed within travelling parties across land and sea, and among men who had often travelled ahead of wives and families.30 However, reunions too could be fraught with practical and moral challenges. In August 1561, for example, Claude Datter was listed in the acts, seeking the consistory’s advice as to whether it was a good idea to send his wife to Geneva in the company of a young man who was on his way there, in order to bring back his children. The council recommended that it would not be edifying for her to be alone with only a single, young man for company and advised him not to permit it. The elders accepted as a lesser risk that the family would remain distributed because Datter was equally unable to make the journey for the time being.31 A decade later, the elders debated a similar enquiry, whether Des Roches should send his wife back to the continent to retrieve his children, ‘because he has two children which it is reasonable that he has brought here’. They concluded that ‘a good opportunity is presented for his wife to pass over the sea in the train of Madame de Mouy’ for this plan would see Des Roches’ wife travel in the company of an apparently elite woman.32 Although the reunion of children with their parents was a priority for the community, it could not usurp the responsibilities of parents, especially wives, to travel in a morally appropriate manner to do so. Other complications arose for children born of parents from different foreign Protestant communities that had settled in England. In October 1564, Jaenne, the wife of Cornil Ven Plache, who was himself a member of a Flemish Church in London, came before the consistory to justify the delay in the baptism of her child. She responded that ‘her conscience 30  For more on the elders’ attempts to enforce moral standards and their authority in such ways, see Broomhall, “Authority in the French Church”. 31  2 September 1561; Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, p. 55. 32  ‘pource quil a deux enfans lequelz il est raisonable quil les fasche venir Icy. Pourcela se presente une belle commodite Que. sa femme passra la mer avecq le train de Madame de Mouy’, 4 July 1571; Oakley, Anne M., ed., Actes du Consistoire de l’église française de Threadneedle Street, Londres. Vol. 2, 1571–77 (London: The Huguenot Society, 1969), 2.

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could not allow her to have the child baptised in either the Flemish or English church’. The elders asserted her husband’s paternal rights over the child and indicated that the child should be baptised in the church of her husband; that is, the Flemish Church. Jaenne then explained that the mixed-Church couple could find no one to stand as witnesses at the baptism. The elders advised Jaenne to proceed with the ceremony nonetheless, witnesses or not.33 In September 1565, the consistory reported the irregular baptism of Jehan, the child of church member Guillaume Santunne. Jehan had died during the ceremony and the elders were keen to document at some length in the community’s record that the rites had been performed correctly: ‘before the baptism was finished, the child died, however Monsieur Cousin baptised him with the daughter of Pierre le Plumasier, saying if there is still life inside, I baptise you – etc.’.34 Baptism was a vital moment of community membership and generational renewal, one that was an essential aspect of identity formation, belonging and hopes for the future especially for these displaced and unsettled Huguenot migrants. Children’s education and training occupied an important place in community management performed by the elders through the consistory. Sometimes, we glean indirect insights into the lives of children and youth through agreements of apprenticeships and service that went awry. For example, through a contract dispute between Honoré Seneschal and Octavien, the schoolmaster, in April 1564, we discover that Seneschal had hired the schoolmaster to teach his daughter to read. As the two men had been heard publicly insulting each other, it came to light that the length of the agreement had not been well established: Octavien thought he was only expected to provide tuition for two to three months and no more.35 In August that year, Nicolas des Portes came before the elders to complain that Guillaume Lulier had dishonoured their agreement for his wife to nurse Lulier’s illegitimate child. Lulier did not dispute the contract but claimed that Des Portes had continually increased the rate of pay. When the new nurse that Lulier hired to care for the child arrived, Des Portes 33  ‘sa conscience ne pourroit porter quil fut baptizes en leglise des flamens ny en celle des Englois’, 29 October 1564; Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 85. 34  ‘avant que de baptesme fut aceue ledyt enfant estoit mort, neantmains monsieur Cousin le baptizy auec la fille de piere le plumasier, en disant sil y a encore vie dedns. Je te baptize – etc’, 18 September 1565: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 117. 35  4 April 1564: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 56.

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had refused to relinquish control.36 On other occasions, the consistory records were used to witness and document agreements between parishioners about children. Gefroy de Lespine and Vincent Breton came to record ‘a little accord’ between them about Lespine’s 12-year-old son, Samuel. He was to be taught by Breton the art of filemaking and receive food for three-quarters of a year, with his father to provide clothes and money for the apprenticeship.37 These agreements demonstrated the aims of the Church to oversee and foster practices of wetnursing, training and education that were long established in communities on the continent. However, these negotiations took place in a less clear context than was usual, for the character of fellow church members with whom children were to be placed was less well known since they came not from a shared point of origin but from a variety of locations across French-speaking territory. This made documentation of the validation of the elders to individuals and the agreements that they reached all the more important for church members in entrusting their children to others. While many of these agreements were run of the mill, the consistory acts also record the involvement of church members and elders in regulating cases of potential abuse to children in their community. In 1560, Jehan Gatte came before the elders to complain about Joachin le Loup, specifically that he had beaten a boy who lived with him, and that he did not treat him as a Christian should. However, Jacques Marabut testified that this was not true. The elders asked the men to bring the boy forward for examination, but in the meantime, Gatte declared that he found himself satisfied, having heard more amply the condition and handling of the boy.38 In November 1564, ‘the widow of the late Glaude’ was brought forward because a concern had been raised that she treated the orphan children of the late Jehan Legiere poorly. The widow responded that she had done her best, but that the older girl had run away. She did not know where she was and the other, younger daughter had also run away eight times, and she ‘had trouble knowing how to hold on to her’.39 While neither of these cases demonstrated action and resolution produced by the consistory itself, they suggest that community members were anxious to  1 August 1564: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 71.  ‘ung petit acord’, May 1561: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 40. 38  17 December 1560: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 19. 39  ‘a bien de paine a la scauoir tenire’, 1 November 1564: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 86. 36 37

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protect the welfare of children and raised concerns about cases when they saw them. At times, the elders could enforce a punishment with the aim to protect children from mistreatment. In August 1571, parishioners even produced witness depositions for the consistory that Jonas Denis mistreated children who worked for him. He was directed by the elders to recognise and amend his fault.40 The elders were hesitant to take on parental roles if surrogates could be found within the community. This may have been partly borne of economic concerns, as the Church regularly struggled to support the many claims on its resources.41 In February 1561, the consistory heard the case of the daughter of Jacques Senglier. She had been left to live with Master Pierre Marchant, an Englishman who now wanted her to leave. Jacques Fichet and Antoine du Ponchel, two members of the French Church, brought her case to the consistory, asked the elders to assist in placing her with ‘some good household and people of good standing’ until her father’s intentions were known. However, the elders baulked at this suggestion that they take responsibility, ‘the Church does not enter willingly into such a charge’, suggesting instead that she be placed in the house of Ponchel until they had heard from Jacques Senglier who he deemed appropriate.42 The intended or unintended abandonment of children by their parents travelling to and fro across the Channel caused particular headaches for the elders. In April 1574, they complained in the acts there are some who leave this town to go over the sea, having left their children in the hands of others, who have the charge of them, [and who] have led them to the deacons of this town, so as to take total charge of their expenses. … if some think to abandon or leave such children acquitted, we will pursue all means of justice to make them take them back.43

 22 August 1571: Oakley, Actes du Consistoire, 12.  For more on the financial constraints on the Threadneedle St Chruch at this period, see Broomhall, “From France to England”. 42  ‘quelque bonne meson et gens de biens’, ‘leglise nentreroit point volentiers en tel charge’, 4 February 1560: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 28. 43  ‘Dautant que quelques uns partant de ceste ville pour aller dela la mr, ont laisse leurs enfans les mains daucuns, lesquels se sentans charges dicheux, les ont amenes aus dyacres de ceste eglise Afin den prendre la charge totalle pour son deschargers, … sy aucuns pensoient abandoner et delaisser lesdictz enfans pour en estre quicte, on saydera du moien de la justice pour les leur faire retirer’, 4 April 1574: Oakley, Actes du Consistoire, 134. 40 41

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However, as part of an international network of Calvinists, the Threadneedle St Church also played its role in assisting young migrants to new lives and prospects in England. This included wayward children and youths. Hence, in September 1565, the acts recorded that there ‘was another young girl that those from the Church of Antwerp sent to us as much because she had abandoned herself to bawdiness in Antwerp and Tournai, as to see if there might not be a better means to retire her here from such poverty than over there’.44 Here, the elders acted as substitute father figures tasked to protect and care for the young girl. Generally speaking, parental and especially paternal authority was upheld by the elders, for their own power to instruct the community derived from the same model of fatherly responsibility and love. However, the elders also recognised that some children might wish to live in the Calvinist faith that was not that of their parents. This was a particularly complex issue to negotiate since in supporting such a convert, the elders were subverting the norms of parental authority that they otherwise strove to uphold.45 In November 1565, they debated the case of Jean Bouvette, a native of Paris and son of Jehan a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris. This said Joene had been made a monk in the cloisters of Chartreux in Paris, God having allowed him to recognise the truth, he had left and retired to Geneva. Being in Geneva, his kin and those of his cloister sent people to him to lead him away from Geneva by trickery and taking him to Avignon where he was prisoner for 4 months, having left, he want straightaway to the church in Orleans. There where he dared not remain for fear of his relatives and was advised to come to this country by the ministers to be safest until his kin be apprised of it.46 44  ‘Il y auoit vne autre Jouene fille que ceulx de leglise danuers nous enuoierent pour tant quelle sestoit abadonne a paillarder en anuers et tournay pour voire sil ny auroit point meilleur moyen de le Retirer ycy poourete que par dela’, 20 September 1565: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 117. 45  In a not dissimilar set of debates within Catholic community regarding children’s vocational decisions, see Diendendorf, Barbara B., “Give us back our children: Patriarchal authority and parental consent to religious vocations in early counter-reformation France”, Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1995), 265–307. 46  ‘natif de paris filz de Jehan aduocat du parlement de paris, ledyt Joene auoit este mis Religieux aux cloestre de chartreux de paris Dieu luy ayant donne a cognoistre la verite Il se est sortis dehors, et Retire a geneue estant audyt geneue ses parens et ceulx de son cloistre enuoient gens a pres luy pour le mener hors de geneue ce quil feirent par finesse et le Rammenarent a Avignon la ou quil a este prisonier 4 moys en estant sortys il sest Retirer Incontinent a leglise dorleans, la ou quil na osse demourer pour la Crainte de ses parens et

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This dramatic account appears in some detail in the elders’ accounts. Bouvette had presented before the consistory with a letter of support from Nicolas des Gallars, sieur de Saules, at the Church in Orleans, requesting assistance until the views of his parents could be established. It seems likely that the account transcribed some of Des Gallars’ letter of introduction but the fact that it was documented at some length suggests the concerns of the elders to make clear why they would support a son who was potentially, if not certainly, disobeying the will of his father. Their support was positioned in the acts as contingent on hearing the father’s advice, although delays in communication meant they were unlikely to receive a response with any degree of alacrity. In this case, communication challenges worked to favour Bouvette’s integration in the local French Church in London. Negotiations for children’s marriages also appear in the consistory acts, as families sought information and approval from the elders about marriage choices in their new homes. In October 1561, Nicolas le Roy sought the backing of the elders to insist upon his parental rights, although in asking for support he demonstrated the weakness of his authority. He wanted the elders to ‘admonish his daughter because she wanted to marry against his will and that of her mother to a young man called Jehan Gramer whom no one knows and can provide witness for’. Le Roy’s daughter, Ezabeau, was a widow, and she appeared before the elders to emphasise that she did not ‘want to do anything against the will of her father and mother, but she would very much like them to be content for they have already forbidden one match’. In this case, the elders determined that the potential bridegroom Jehan should return to his home in Metz, where he could obtain a letter from his parents and friends. However, Jehan ­complained that ‘things were too advanced to go so far and that it would cost him a lot of money’. The company were not impressed by this show of resistance to their fatherly advice: ‘he gave us enough to understand that they did not want any counsel but their own’.47 However, both parluy fut Conseilles des ministers dudyt lieu de se Retirer en ce pays pour le plus seure Jusques a ce que ses parens soient acoisses’, November 1565: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 122–3. 47  ‘dadmonester sa fille a cause quelle se vault marier contre son voloir et de celuy de sa mere scauoir a vng jouene homme nomme jehan gramer que nul ne cognoit et qui na nul tesmoinage’; ‘Respondit que elle ne veult point faire contre la volunte de son pere et de sa mere, mais elle vodroit bien qui se contenteront, car il leur ont desia empesches autre partye’; ‘la chose estoit bien avances pour aller sy loing et quil cousteroit beaucoup dargent’; ‘Il donnoit asses eut [struck through] a entendre quil ne voloient croire autre conseil que le leur

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ents and the elders continued to care for their children abroad, in a continuing performance of their respective parental duties. Nicholas le Roy returned before the consistory in November 1565 on behalf of his daughter ‘Ezabeau and her husband, newly come from Metz and as poor as Job, begging the Church to give them some assistance for he could not’. The elders determined to assist the prodigal daughter, and ‘decided to give them some silk tissue in the name of the Church to make buttons, which is their trade’.48 Parental duties and children’s resistance did not end when they had reached adult status however, as the case of Ezabeau le Roy and her husband Jehan Gramer indicates. Fractious relationships between grown children and their parents were also a matter of investigation for the elders. In October 1571, Alixe, the wife of Nicholas le Roy, brought a complaint against Philipine Seneschal, her daughter-in-law, for having called her a murderess and a thief and crying out that she should be hanged.49 Alixe and Philipine were called before the consistory with their husbands, together with the neighbours ‘who were offended by this quarrel’. Philipine was admonished for the scandal she had given to the neighbours and the Church and, after having sought forgiveness from her mother-in-­ law, the neighbours and the consistory, she promised to live ‘in better edification’ in the future. As for Alixe, the company instructed her to ‘no longer provoke her children to anger [but] to support them as much as possible and as reason requires’. The elders demanded of Alixe an emotional control not explicitly asked of Philipine. It was the duty of a parent to be loving and forgiving towards wayward children. The company asked Alixe to do away with ‘all enmity, division, and bitterness … [and] love and support one another, that they love their children as should a mother and father without giving them occasion to lose their courage’.50 propre et quil estoient desia promis ensemble’. 31 October 1561: Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 85. 48  ‘recomandy sa fille Ezabeau et son mary quy estoient Revenu de metz, et sy tres poure que Job priant que leglise leur volut faire quelque assistence, car luy na pas le pouuoir De les asister, Il fut advise que on leur feroit auoir vng papier de soye au nom de leglise pour faire des boutins quy est vng de leur mestier’, Johnston, Actes du Consistoire, 121. 49  10 October 1571: Oakley, Actes du Consistoire, 24. 50  ‘en meilleur edification’; ‘ne plus provocquer ses enffans a couroux de les supporter autant que sera possible et que la Raison le porte’; ‘toutte Inimitie division et Rancune … quilz sayment et supportent les uns les aultres Quils ayment leurs enffans comme porte le debvoir de pere et de mere sans leur donner occasion de perdre le courage … vivre plus

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As the concerns of the Le Roy parents and the elders suggested, marriage negotiations were complicated in this cross-channel Calvinist community, where a continual influx of new arrivals to the community could not always be immediately vouched for. Here, the elders’ extended networks could be vital in vetting individuals who were not known locally, or else, like Jehan Gramer, marriage candidates might be expected to procure such testimonials for themselves. The consequences of poor vetting could be very serious indeed for young people and their families. In December 1571, the case of Rachel le Sueur, then 14, and Nicolas du Chemin came before the consistory. Rachel’s mother, the wife of Henry le Sueur, explained that the couple had been ‘well mistaken and deceived by the fancy talk of the said Nicolas and by the sweet promises that he had made to their daughter’. Rachel’s own testimony revealed ‘that two years ago [when she was twelve] when there had been talk of marrying her to Nicolas du Chemin, who solicited her strongly to have him in marriage. She did not want to consent but by the insistence and persuasion of her father and principally her mother she agreed’. Perhaps the couple forced the marriage because they felt that the young girl, in an unfamiliar location, was best married for her personal safety, as well as the attractive financial arrangement Chemin promised. However, the newly married couple remained less than two months in the household of her father before Chemin took her to his own house, There, Rachel testified: for 15 days he beat her and mistreated her so badly because he said that she had left a door open. The said Nicolas, continuing to beat her, she could no longer endure it and left to go to the house of her father. Her mother, not wanting to support her, sent her to one of her neighbours but instead of going home she fled to Didier Bonart. The reason why he had taken such hatred to her and why he had mistreated her was however that her father and mother had the means to earn his living, so he said.51

cristiennement quilz nont pas fait et de nourrir paix ensemble’. 28 October 1571: Oakley, Actes du Consistoire, 30. 51  ‘au bout de 15 iours apres il la batoit et maltraictoit fort rudement pour cause a ce quelle dict quelle avoit laisé ung huis ouvert. Ledict Nicolas continuant a la batter elle ne le peult plus endure et le quicta se retirante en la maison de son pere. Sa mere ne la volant soutenir la renvoia avec une de ses voisines mail elle au lieu de retourner en sa maison elle sen fuit sur Didier Bonart. La cause pourquoy il la print en haine et pourquoy il la maltraictoit estoit pourtant que son pere et sa mere luy avoient esté les moiens de gagnier sa vie comme il disoit’, 12 December 1571: Oakley, Actes du Consistoire, 41.

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The Company punished the parents publicly ‘that they married their daughter against all order and policy as much ecclesiastical and political as civil’ to an excommunicated man, and moreover they had not listened to the admonitions that the company had given them. However, the marriage now made was expected to last. Just under two years later, in September 1573, Chemin was back before the elders because he refused to accept Rachel as his wife because she had committed adultery. Whether this was with Bonart or another was unclear. Now, the elders urged them and the parents to get the couple back together and live together peacefully.52 The welfare of the community’s future generation was fraught with difficulties in an environment when individuals could not be vetted and known in the usual close-knit manner. The evidence of the sixteenth-century consistory acts demonstrates how children’s lives were shaped both by typical challenges of their social context but also by the unusual distribution of family and social networks. The exceptional mobility of the congregation required a particular paternal governance of a whole community, which infantilised congregation members to a series of ever-changing elected father figures. The elders continued to remind church members of the responsibilities of families, enforcing through their decisions the duties of both parents and children to each other. We can perhaps also interpret misdemeanours as evidence of challenges, confrontations and resistance by children and youth to the, perhaps exceptional, strictures of parents and elders within this community. In conclusion, the circumstances of the displaced and dispossessed Calvinist communities tested traditional familial hierarchies and often necessitated the delegation of practical supervisory roles of young people to others within the wider community. These contexts also made letters and consistory acts function as powerful performances of emotions between those recognised as adult members of the community and their young charges and as important historical repositories for scholars today. Calvinist community documentation and letter-writing about and between parents and children articulated connection, cohesion and intense feeling; and practised their duties and responsibilities in new forms. Letters and acts both reflected and enacted a wide supervisory network, where parental and especially paternal responsibilities were often entailed upon the entire faith collective to supervise, protect and care for the community’s children, its future hopes, and its dreams for long-term survival.  30 September 1573 and 29 October 1573: Oakley, Actes du Consistoire, 125, 127.

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Bibliography Backhouse, Marcel F., The Flemish and Walloon Communities at Sandwich during the Reign of Elizabeth I (1561–1603) (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten, 1995).  Barclay, Katie, Reynolds, Kimberley, and Rawnsley, Ciara, eds. Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). Broomhall, Susan ‘Authority in the French Church in later sixteenth-century London’ in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall, 131–149 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). Broomhall, Susan ‘From France to England: Huguenot charity in London’ in Experiences of Charity, 1250–1650: Revisiting Religious Motivations in the Charitable Endeavour, ed. Anne M. Scott, 191–212 (Farnham, Ashgate, 2015). Broomhall, Susan ‘Beholding Suffering and Providing Care: Emotional Performances on the Death of Poor Children in Sixteenth-Century French Institutions’ in Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, eds. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds and Ciara Rawnsley,  65–86. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). Broomhall, Susan ‘Cross-Channel affections: Pressure and persuasion in letters to Calvinist refugees in England, 1569–1570’ in Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika (eds.), Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, (London: Routledge, 2019) Broomhall, Susan. ed.,  Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008) Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (London: Routledge, 1999). Crawford, Patricia,  Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Dekker, Rudolf,  Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland: From the Golden Age to Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 2000) Diendendorf, Barbara B., ‘Give us back our children: Patriarchal authority and parental consent to religious vocations in early counter-reformation France’. Journal of Modern History 68 (1996) 265–307. Evangelisti, Silvia, and Cavallo, Sandra,  A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, vol. 3: Early Modern Period (1450–1650), (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2010). Goose, Nigel, and Luu, Liên, eds., Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). Grace, Philip, Affectionate Authorities: Fathers and Fathers Roles in Late Medieval Basel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Grell, Ole Peter,  Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996). Grell, Ole Peter, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603–1642. (Leiden: Brill, 1989).

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Gwynn, Robin D.,  Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001). Jarzebowski, Claudia, and Safley, T.M. eds., Childhood and Emotion across Cultures, 1450–1800 (London: Routledge, 2014). Jarzebowski, Claudia, ‘Childhood’ in Susan Broomhall (ed.),  Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, 214–217. (London: Routledge, 2016). Johnston, Elsie, Actes du Consistoire de l’église française de Threadneedle Street, Londres. Vol. 1, 1560–1565. Quarto Series, 48 (London: The Huguenot Society of London, 1937). Luu, Liên, ‘Natural-Born versus Stranger-Born Subjects: Aliens and their Status in Elizabethan London’ in Nigel Goose and Liên Luu, eds.,  Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England, 57–75. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). Miller, Naomi J., and Yavneh, Naomi, eds., Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Oakley, Anne M., ed.,  Actes du Consistoire de l’église française de Threadneedle Street, Londres. Vol. 2, 1571–77. (London: The Huguenot Society, 1969). Olsen, Stephanie, ed., Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). Pettegree, Andrew, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Spicer, Andrew,  The French-Speaking Reformed Community and their Church in Southampton, 1567–c. 1620. (London: Huguenot Society, 1997). Verheyden, A.L.E., ‘Une correspondance inédite adressée par des familles protestantes des Pays-Bas à leurs coreligionaires d’Angleterre (11 novembre 1569 – 25 février 1570)’, Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire 120 (1955), 95–256. Vigne, Randolph, and Gibbs, Graham C. eds., The Strangers’ Progress: Integration and Disintegration of the Huguenot and Walloon Refugee Community, 1567– 1889: Essays in Memory of Irene Scouloudi. (London: Huguenot Society, 1995).

A Web of Crosses and Mercies Interlaced: Breakdown and Consolidation of Family Patterns Amongst Loyalist Anglicans Under the Pressures of Civil War Fiona McCall Abbreviations BL Bod CCED CSPD DCL DHC ERO ESRO Harl LMA

British Library University of Oxford, Bodleian Library Clergy of the Church of England Database Calendar of State Papers Domestic Durham Cathedral Library Devon Heritage Centre Essex Record Office East Sussex Record Office British Library, Harleian Manuscripts London Metropolitan Archives

F. McCall (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_7

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LRO ODNB Rawl SHC Tanner TNA WR

Leicestershire Record Office Oxford Dictionary of National Biography University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Manuscripts Somerset Heritage Centre University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner Manuscripts The National Archives A.G. Matthews (ed.), Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948)

‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’, wrote Tolstoy. A central theme of the family stories collected by John Walker in the early eighteenth century is how civil war turned loyalist clerical families, happily conforming to a patriarchal pattern for family life, into unhappy ones, ‘shipwrecked’ in a variety of ways by their misfortunes.1 This chapter examines first the promulgated ideals and memories of prewar family life amongst this social group, before considering the part civil war trauma played in undermining them, arguing that while the rigid paternalistic model they followed could not help but undergo change in view of the acute disruptions suffered, the relative impact on individual families depended much on their initial wealth and status and the chances of fate and war. While most found their previous order of life extremely compromised, with events having a negative impact on some families down to subsequent generations, for many group loyalties and identities were ultimately strengthened by their experiences, and existing family patterns reinforced and integrated towards a more affective model of family life.

Well-Ordered Families In the early seventeenth century, clerical prescriptions for a happy family life associated it with a regularity of outlook and a craving for unexceptionality. In 1633 royalist clergyman Matthew Griffith outlined what was expected in Bethel, a kind of manual for running a Godly household, quoting from Exodus, Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them. Make this tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you.2 1 2

 Bod, MS J. Walker.  Exodus 25:8.

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Pattern and order were a theme close to the heart of orthodox churchmen of the time. A ‘well-ordered’ family, wrote Griffith, ‘hath both an orderly head and orderly members, having mutuall relation to each other’, before explaining the biblically-justified rules of behaviour for each family member. Parents were to provide their children good example at home, and to chastise them ‘when they doe amisse’, ‘we must not suffer them to have their owne wills’. Children were to have ‘awfull regard’ of their parents, bowing to them and remaining uncovered before them.3 If we are to believe John Aubrey, before the Civil Wars children commonly stood or knelt in their parents’ presence, with parental beatings common.4 In both human and divine parent, chastisement was seen by Anglican theologians of the time as an act of love, ‘Though he deal more roughly with us, yet … his Heart melts towards us’, wrote John Hales.5 Although Bernard Capp, Anthony Fletcher, and Rosemary O’Day have highlighted the danger of confusing prescription with practice, and Griffith himself remarks that a man might travel from ‘coast to coast’, before he find a truly well-ordered family, such prescriptions seem to match the depictions of pre-war family life in documents later sent to John Walker for the publication now known as the Sufferings of the Clergy.6 In his autobiographical account written in 1660, Barnstable vicar Martin Blake, born in 1593, related that as a child he found his father’s discipline ‘very harsh’, a ‘severe way of education’ then ‘most in use’, alternating ‘betwixt Love and Fear’.7 ‘Holy Counsels’ were ‘very frequent’, seconded with his parents’ ‘virtuous example’; if ‘any of us came short’ it was ‘imputed rather to our own neglect then their want of Care’.8 The sons of George Pierce, rector  Matthew Griffith, Bethel, or a Forme for Families (1633), pp. 7–8, 365, 367.  John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O.L. Dick, (Harmondsworth, 1962), pp. 25–6. 5  John Hales, Golden Remains (1711), p. 186. 6  A. Fletcher, ‘The Protestant idea of marriage’, in A. Fletcher, P. Roberts (eds) Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.  181; R.  O’Day, Women’s Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies (Harlow, 2007), pp.  8, 141; J.  Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women: Unbridled Speech (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. xviii; Griffith, Bethel, p. 8; John Walker, An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers and Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England (London, 1714). 7  For the role of fear in early modern childrearing see S. Tarbin, ‘Raising Girls and Boys: Fear, Awe and Dread in the Early Modern Household’, in S. Broomhall (ed.), Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 106–30. 8  Bod, MS J Walker C5, fo. 142r (hence cited as WMS C5.142r). 3 4

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of Tiverton, emphasised their father’s private devotions intended to provide a model transmitted from generation to generation, ‘He constantly kept morning and Evening Prayers, and left a charge with his children after Him to do the like’.9 Household ritual was perceived as existing within the framework of the Church: Peter Samwayes’ twice-daily prayers ‘both at Church and in his Family’, a token of his ‘zeal’ for observing the Church of England’s ‘Rule and Orders’.10 Richard Reynolds, rector of Stoke Fleming in Devon, according to his son-in-law John Croker, structured family life with prayers morning and evening, never returning to his chamber at night until he had led the family in thanks for the mercies of the day.11 Croker’s long account, written around March 1704, depicts the running of Reynolds’ large clerical household as a major management operation, involving ‘children’, as distinct from ‘family’, encompassing at least as many servants: Reynolds ‘usually kept 4 or 5 men servants, and his wife as many females’.12 The women lodged ‘besides his wife’s chamber’, the males in an outhouse, with physical violence resorted to if necessary to keep them in line: Reynolds once broke the head of a manservant found emerging from the maidservants’ chamber.13 Harsh treatment perhaps, but interpersonal violence was then common, and Reynolds would have had in mind the exacting standards parishioners expected of clerical households, the boundaries of which are shown in the reported breaches presented as evidence to remove clergy in the 1640s: John Jegon of Halsted in Essex who seldom prayed or read the scriptures with his family; William Dunkin, vicar of Ramsgate, said to have preached that children were not always bound to obey their parents; Hampshire rector Peter Waterman who allowed his family to blaspheme and entertained card players in his house; Thomas Lawrence at Bemerton in Wiltshire, who paid a poor fi ­ ddler sixpence to play music for his children to dance to after evening prayer on the Sabbath. John Morden of Fowlmere in Cambridge was judged not to ‘govern his family well’ after three maidservants left his house pregnant.14  WMS C8.29r.  WMS C4.132r. 11  WMS C4.36v. 12  See N.  Tadmor, Family & Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2001), p.  20 on the early modern concept of the household-family. 13  WMS C8.36v, 38v, 39. 14  M.  Eisner, ‘Long-term historical trends in violent crime’, in Crime and Justice 30 (2003), pp.  83–142; BL Add MS: 5829, fo. 9r; 15,672, fo. 44; 22,084, fo. 141v, 144v; WMS C7.113. 9

10

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Happy clerical families obeyed the rules, and provided a relatively severe and formal model of societal expectations for family life. Although scholars have quite rightly challenged arguments that early-modern parents were uncaring, within the semi-public discourse of the Walker accounts, family affection was not over-stressed.15 It appears rather as a gendered concept, connected with relationships with women: Richard Reynolds’ daughter Sarah, John Croker’s wife, ‘had from her infancy been his dearling’; Martin Blake’s father’s discipline was ‘sweetned’ by the ‘discreete indulgence’ and ‘tender love’ from his mother, so that he was balanced ‘betwixt Awe and Encouragement’.16 A copy of a letter written by Amias Hext, rector of Babcary in Somerset, whilst held prisoner in Bridgwater after the first civil war, listed amongst the pleasures debarred to him, the company and comfort of his wife and children. Next on Hext’s list was: ‘the fellowship and comfort of my parishioners’.17 On the whole responsibilities towards the extended social circle, and reciprocal affection offered by them in return, seem to have meant as much to Walker’s correspondents as emotion within the nuclear family.18 Pre-modern households were not private but ‘public political institutions’, argued Patrick Collinson.19 This was especially true of clerical households, where the parsonage family was the hub of a much wider local community, with permeable boundaries between the two: John Croker described Richard Reynolds’ family three times a week providing warm, substantial, nourishing dinners to those ‘under publick almes’, towards whom the behaviour of Reynolds’ own children was required to exemplary: not suffering ­‘family’ or ‘children’ to ‘taste of a dinner’, till the poor had received theirs. On Sunday afternoons local children came to the parsonage to be catechised; his wife, the daughter of royal physician Dr Butler, practised medicine on her poorer neighbours.20 Reynolds’ paternalistic overlordship incorporated arbitration in his parishioners’ family disputes: a quarrel between a father and son threaten15  Tarbin, ‘Raising Girls and Boys’, p.  106; Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent– Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1983). 16  WMS C8.48v, 138r, 142r; TNA PROB 11/541/207, will of John Croker, clerk, Woolfardisworthy, Devon, 1714. 17  WMS C1.192r. 18  See WMS: C1.44r; C2.133r; C8.82v. 19  Quoted in A.  Flather, Gender, and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), p. 7. 20  See Aubrey, Brief Lives, pp. 147–9; WMS C8.39.

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ing parricide was resolved in a public house by making the son ‘submitt himself on his knees to his provoked father’.21 When the son later became a parliamentary army captain and summoned Reynolds before him in the very same chamber, Reynolds ‘expostulated’ with him for his ‘ingratitude’ like a father chastising his own son for insubordination. Patriarchal disobedience was anathema amongst Walker’s correspondents, who also spluttered with outrage over ‘traitorous’ parliament-supporting servants and damnified nonconformists with samples of their filial cruelty to parents.22 Only a vocation towards a divine parent could over-ride the expectations of an earthly father, as seen in the elaborate justification Martin Blake provided for defying his. His father thinking of ‘disposing me some other way’, writes Blake, this ‘Cast me … into a great sadnes’. I believed I might not disobey my father’ but ‘knew not how to overcome that secret impulse’ within him. An abortive attempt to set off alone for Oxford led, despite his ‘foolish’ and ‘unwarrantable’ disobedience, to his desire for a university education being granted; however in choice of marriage partner he acquiesced with his mother’s wishes.23 Blake’s narrative steers a path between respect for parental authority, criticism of its severity, and a carefully-calibrated justification for filial defiance against expectations that children be passive clay for manipulation at their parents’ hands. More typically, a clerical calling signified conformity with parental expectations. The sons of clergy, often named after their father, also often followed them into the church, even the same parish if the advowson had been purchased to keep rights of presentment in the family.24 At Orcheston St Mary in Wiltshire, for example, four successive rectors named Giles Thornburgh served the church between 1588 and 1735, broken only by a 10-year gap from 1680–1690, when the last Giles was too young to qualify.25 Five members of the Collier family served Steeple Langford in Wiltshire between 1607 and 1733, preaching before an effigy of the first of them in the chancel.26 By the mid-seventeenth-­ century intermarriage with the daughters of the gentry had also become common practice for ambitious clergymen. Most of the bishops before the  WMS C8.38r.  WMS: C1.162r; C3.64r, 120r, 378r; C4.59r. 23  WMS C5.142r, 143, 145v. 24  M. Stieg, Laud’s Laboratory (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press/London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983), pp. 69, 74. 25  J.  Foster (ed.), Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714 (Oxford, 1891), www.british-history. ac.uk/alumni-oxon/1500-1714; http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/. 26  http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/; WMS C3.38r. 21 22

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Civil War had been ‘Sonnes of Ministers, or Lay-Gentlemen’, Thomas Fuller pointed out, in a strenuous effort to refute Lord Brooke’s extraordinarily snobbish claim that the Caroline bishops had been of such low-­ born antecedents that their promotion to high places had caused ‘swimming in the braine’.27 Before the Civil Wars a career in the Church appeared to be a relatively stable occupation. Having gained preferment, most incumbents stayed put.28 Mostly living in the country, away from the dangers of urban epidemic disease, and not infrequently marrying much younger wives, Church of England clergyman frequently had the long lives and families of the stereotypically large size we find in Jane Austen and other works of fiction.

The Impact of Civil War For loyalist clerical families, this picture of bucolic stability and conformity changed abruptly with the outbreak of the Civil Wars. Ironically, the unlooked-for stress of civil war and, for thousands of clergy, ejection from the living, led to unhappiness and family breakdown amongst those who had aspired to run the most orderly of households. This played out in a variety of ways, here grouped into five main themes: families riven by financial pressures; differences of religious or political outlook; families living apart; conflicts over morality and families separated by death. The evidence comes from the family memoirs collected by John Walker as well as other sources contemporary with the Civil Wars and the Restoration. I want to consider here the part civil war trauma placed on families in undermining and changing previous social assumptions over the longer term.

Financial Pressures With the prospect of sequestration from their living loyalist clergy families faced the loss of the family home and their main source of income. Children writing to John Walker remembered being cast out into the 27  Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain (London, 1656), Book XI, pp.  183–4; Lord Brooke, A Discourse Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie Which is Exercised in England (London, 1641), pp. 3–4. 28  I. Green, ‘Career prospects and clerical conformity in the early Stuart Church’, Past & Present, 90 (1981), pp. 87, 98; R. Hillyer, ‘The History of the Parson’s Wife’, unpublished M. Phil. (Kings College, London, 1971), pp. 286, 334.

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street, with food and personal chattels confiscated if they had not already been plundered by soldiers. Margaret Dugdale remembered that her impoverished family were ‘forced to go into debt for their very clothes’.29 At Painswick in Gloucestershire, according to Wiltshire antiquary Thomas Twinning, Mrs Wilde ‘was denied the liberty of boyling a Skillet of Milk’ for her Children, ‘tho she beg’d the favour upon her Knees’.30 Cornish vicar Henry Smith, his wife and five children, were left with ‘not soe much’ as the proverbial ‘Dish or spoone’, while Somerset minister Henry Owen’s daughter could still ‘call to mind’ that her father’s house was ‘plunder’d of every Utensil of any value’, the beds they lay on, and their ‘common wearing’ apparel; so the family were sent ‘as ‘twere naked into the world’, ‘to seek their Fortune’.31 Clergy often turned to extended family and social contacts to help fight sequestration or to succour them afterwards. Even the prominent Presbyterian Burgess family and the regicide John Bradshaw assisted less conformable relations.32 Some families were less forthcoming, even occasionally facilitating ejections.33 More commonly, family trouble followed ejection: where family members hid assets from sequestrators, there could be legal disputes when clergy tried to recover them.34 Or financially-strapped clergy made legal claims disputing wills that otherwise they would not have pursued.35 Exploiting the social capital remaining to them, clergy often borrowed money to help their families survive. But loans secured reluctantly were liable to be called in promptly. Edward Kelsall recalled how demands for repayment of bonds for several hundred pounds were made the minute his father John Kelsall and grandfather William Kelsall lost their case against sequestration from Audley in Staffordshire.36 Frances Basire’s uncle Richard Piggott lent her husband Isaac Basire £100 at the commencement of the Civil Wars. Security for the loan was provided by Sir Richard Lee entering into a £200 bond to Piggott, with a counter-bond of £400 from  WMS: C1.179; C7.28r.  WMS C8.165; Thomas Twining, Avebury in Wiltshire, the Remains of a Roman Work ... (London, 1723). 31  WMS: C2.224r; C3.214r. 32  WMS: C1.120, 246; C4.106. 33  WMS: C7.44; C8.53; C11.29. 34  TNA: C5/9/7; C3/436/65. 35  TNA: C5/383/107; C5/23/108. 36  WMS C7.131r. 29 30

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Basire to Lee. But Piggott called in the loan in 1652, with substantial interest, when Basire was in exile on the other side of the continent, and his wife unable to pay.37 Unpaid debts contracted in the interregnum often hung over clerical families long after the Restoration. Executors of wills were often more exacting over sums owed than the ‘friends’ who originally lent the money. When Lee died in 1664 his executors promptly sued Basire in the Common Pleas for the £400 counter-bond, threatening to make him an outlaw unless he paid within 10 days.38 Norwich prebendary John Spendlow was reduced to a ‘low’ condition during the interregnum, according to a later dean there, Humphrey Prideaux; the monument in Norwich cathedral to his wife, who died in 1656, states that she had ‘for a far better/Chang’d this present life’. After the Restoration, said Prideaux, Spendlow was arrested for debts contracted while under sequestration and, unable to pay, continued a prisoner until his death in 1666.39 Royalist accounts often complain about the difficulties of collecting tithes after the laxities of the interregnum, so even 10 years’ subsequent possession of the sequestered living might not recover solvency.40 According to his widow, Rutland minister Richard Hull, ran ‘much into debt’ to maintain his family; ‘the Living is but small and He did not injoy it long for He dyed in the yeare 1670’; after debts were paid ‘what Remained for his Wife and children was very Inconsiderable’.41 Robert Higgins wrote that his father William, archdeacon of Derby, survived the restoration by only a few years and did not have time to ‘Recover his Losses, nor to Provide for his Ruined Family’. ‘If any man provide not for his own, especially for those of his own houshold, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel’, quoted Dr Brune Rvyes, in a 1652 sermon.42 Careful, unsentimental long-term forward-planning in financial matters was the ideal where family was concerned; ‘called by St. Paul, “a laying up for the children”’, wrote Jeremy 37  C. Brennan, ‘The Life and Times of Isaac Basire’, unpublished Ph.D. (Durham, 1987), p. 201; DCL Hunter, fo. 10, No. 122. 38  Ibid. 39  ‘A supplement to Sir Thomas Browne’s Repertorium’, in Posthumous works of the learned Sir Thomas Browne (London, 1712), p. 50; WMS C2.148r. 40  WMS: C2.283; C4.118; G.C. Moore Smith (ed.), ‘Extracts from the papers of Thomas Woodcock, ob. 1695’, Camden Miscellany, 11 (Camden, 3rd ser., 13, 1907), p. 89. 41  WMS C2.178. 42  Brune Ryves, Two Sermons (1652), p. 9; 2 Corinthians 5:8.

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Taylor, in Holy Living.43 Running into debt was seen as the product of a prodigal or dissolute lifestyle, and regularly used by Walker’s correspondents to denigrate clergy ‘intruding’ into royalists’ livings. John Willmot at Kislingbury was characterised as a ‘poor’ drunken, uneducated and scandalous ‘lame fellow’ who ‘lay in the Kings Bench for Debt lately’, Shropshire intruder Mr Gilbert doubly damned for having a mother who sold ale and owing money to his tailor.44 The immoral actions of Theophilus Hart at Wappenham were ‘well known’ wrote John Newte, he ‘fell into many suits of Law, and Incur’d great Debts’, so that of an estate worth £300 per  annum not ‘1 foot’ was left.45 But similar contrasts between former incomes and later penury could equally be found amongst formerly-­ ejected royalists. Unless clergy were very long-lived, inherited debts were likely to impact their ability to ‘dispose’ of their children satisfactorily, including those of Brune Ryves himself, whose children, despite specific instructions to the contrary in his will, ended up suing each other over their respective legacies.46 The playwright Thomas Otway’s father Humphrey lost the living of Woolbeding in Sussex soon after Otway’s birth in 1652 and recovered it at the Restoration. As Thomas was precocious, and the only son to fund, Humphrey made efforts to get him educated at Winchester College and admitted to Christ Church College, Oxford. But circumstances changed abruptly when Humphrey died in 1671, and 19-year Otway’s university education ceased, plunging him into despair, The World was wide, but whither should I go? I, whose blooming Hopes all wither’d were, Who’d little Fortune, and a deal of Care?47

Parents should provide for their children, argued Jeremy Taylor, to defend them ‘against the chances of the world’ and to prevent exposure to temptation or ‘unworthy arts’.48 But for Otway, this proved impossible.  Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Dying (London, 1834), p. 158; 2 Corinthians 12:14.  WMS C2.211r; C4.22r. 45  WMS C4.54r. 46  TNA C 5/549/104 Ryves v Cooke, 1677; C 6/229/89 Cooke v Ryves, 1678; C 7/592/1 Ryves v Sewell, 1685; C 7/292/77 Ryves v Sewell, 1686. 47  The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J.C. Ghosh (Oxford, 1968), i, 4 & ii, 406, ‘The Poet’s Complaint of his Muse, or a Satyr against Libells’, lines 57–60, 76–9; Foster, Alumni. 48  Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Dying (London, 1834), p. 158. 43 44

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‘Oppressed by want and in search of a livelihood’, writes Ghosh, Otway turned to the stage for a precarious livelihood, eventually dying ‘helpless, friendless, very proud, and poor’, aged only 33.49 With ‘slender’ or non-­ existent marriage portions, daughters might consider themselves lucky if they married at all, like the daughter of Huntingdonshire rector William Knight, married off to an ‘old weaver, worth little or nothing’.50 A surprisingly number of children of sequestered clergy later experienced spells in prison for debt, including Edmund Elys, who wrote sadly to Archbishop Sancroft in 1680 from the King’s Bench prison, complaining of his ‘terrible great straits’, due to the ‘Injustice of my Debtors’ and the ‘inhumanity’ of his creditors.51 An overcompensating desire to re-assert social status, ill-matched to financial realities, played its part in some cases of insolvency. Henry Dell remembered that his grandfather Dr Henry Lockett, rector of Ruan Lanihorne in Cornwall, bequeathed the family land worth nearly £100 per annum yet after the Restoration they sold it all to repay debts contracted ‘to stop the mouths of those insatiable Sequestrators’; his father Richard hid from his creditors, according to eighteenth-century antiquarian John Whitaker. But Richard Dell’s extravagant post-Restoration lifestyle hardly helped; he was renowned locally for keeping a ‘brace of fine geldings’ ‘superior to any in the country’, horses so prodigious they were compared to demons by his credulous footman.52 Brune Ryves’ chequered interregnum career, involving (probably) a humiliating night-time eviction, living ‘on charity at Shaston’, and imprisonment, according to four Walker sources, must have made him all the keener, upon post-­Restoration promotion to the prestigious post of dean of Windsor, to reacquire for his children the trappings of their parents’ gentry origins. But in purchasing a manor for his eldest son, and expensive arranged marriages for his daughters, Ryves over-reached himself, compounding the problem by inadvisedly pumping in money to support the financial misconduct of his youngest son in his son-in-law’s woollen draper’s business, ignoring his own advice that leaving wealth to your children was an uncertain business: ‘thou knowest not whether that Child, will be a wise man, or a fool’.53  Ghosh, Otway, i, 11 & ii, 410, line 173.  WMS C1.132r. 51  Rawl letters 100, fo. 213; Tanner letters 37, fos 36r, 223, 231. 52  H.L. Douch (ed.)’.The history of Ruan Lanihorne, by the Rev. John Walker’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall ns, 7 (2, 1974), pp. 108–52; WMS C11.57. 53  TNA: C 5/549/104; C 6/229/89; C 7/592/1; C 7/292/77, ibid.; Ryves, Two Sermons, p. 31. 49 50

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‘The Education of Children after the getting of e’m, ought to be the nearest Concern of a Father’, wrote Thomas Otway.54 But sons coming of age under sequestration often found their career choices limited. While clergy with private assets like Thomas Turner and Gilbert Ironside still managed to send sons to the universities despite sequestration, for others like John Manby and William Bridges, their ‘indigent condition’ made this a ‘hardness’ to accomplish; with only a £108 estate left after compounding, none of Brune Ryves’ three sons went to Oxford.55 John Turner wrote that his father, vicar of Treneglos in Cornwall, considered his greatest loss the loss of his children’s education, making their ‘condition much the poorer in the world’: ‘wherein they did … even fetch the kid in his mothers milk’.56 Thomas Tyllot’s ‘calamities’ meant his children were ‘ill provided for’, some ‘to this very day in a very mean and low condition’, wrote his successor at Debden in Suffolk, excepting his son Thomas who fittingly served for many years as Registrar of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, administering relief to other poor clergy families.57 If a university education could not be afforded, then other avenues had to be explored. Law was a common choice: the antiquary James Wright, whose father Abraham had been sequestered from Oakham in Rutland, did not attend university, but trained instead as a barrister at the Middle Temple, despite classical erudition and literary talent evident in his later writings.58 The playwright John Wilson was called to the bar of Lincoln’s Inn in 1646 aged 19, the need for employment being pressing following the death of his father Aaron, vicar of Plymouth, after imprisonment three years earlier.59 For those with numerous offspring and few assets, particularly where fathers died early under sequestration, children’s opportunities were often limited. In 1650 Bishop Thomas Howell of Bristol followed his wife to the grave, leaving only £30 to each of their eleven children. Parcelled out as charity cases to various well-wishers, only two of his sons,  Ghosh, Otway, I, 301, The Cheats of Scapin, Act II, Scene I, lines 7–8.  WMS: C5.17, 303; C8.15; Foster, Alumni; Thomas Dring., A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen that have Compounded for their Estates (London, 1655), unpaginated; WR, p. 57; ODNB. 56  WMS C4.75; Exodus 23: 19. 57  LMA, Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, A/CSC/7A, Court Book, 1678–1708. 58  ODNB: James Wright. 59  The Dramatic Works of John Wilson, ed. J. Maidment, W.H. Logan (Edinburgh, 1874), viii; there were many other lawyers later active in the Sons of the Clergy charity in its early years, see LMA, A/CSC/7A, Court Book. 54 55

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George and Thomas, were university-educated, and joined the church. John and Arthur became merchants, according to a family pedigree. Henry and Elizabeth were reasonably prosperous, the former became a herald, the latter married ‘Jeffrey Banester of London Master of Musick’. The poet Katherine Philips adopted Charles, according to Anthony Wood; he later married a dyer’s daughter. But with no money to fund marriage settlements, more than half his surviving siblings remained unmarried, three sons and two daughters, Frances and Lucy; the pedigree lists only two grandchildren.60 After sequestration siblings did not necessarily have equivalent opportunities: children’s fates varied instead according to the degree to which each child was favoured by individual sponsors. Henry Collier’s children, according to his grandson, the philosopher Arthur Collier, ‘were dispersed’ to service, the army, or ‘bound to mean trades in London’. Only Arthur’s father, the youngest, ‘met with friends’, willing to send him to Winchester school, and was enabled to pass on his educational capital to his son, both eventually succeeding Henry as rectors at Steeple Langford in Wiltshire.61 What Morris terms the ‘abstruse’ satires of the poet John Cleveland, mentioning in ten lines, ‘things classical, biblical, topical, popular and political’, derived from a Cambridge education and fellowship denied to his younger brothers by Civil War and their father Thomas’s sequestration from the rectory of Hinckley in Leicestershire. According to an account from John Cleveland’s nephew, Thomas Cleveland had seven sons, ‘John, Joseph, Samuel, Thomas, William, Timothy and Richard’. Samuel was ‘killed in the Kings service’, Joseph in ‘frequent troubles for the same cause’, while William left Cambridge ‘because he would not comply with the times’; Richard, only 12 when his father was ejected, became a Liverpool merchant.62 Occupations resorted to from necessity brought mixed fortunes, relative to talent and the whims of fate. Richard Cleveland did well as a tobacco importer, later adopting Joseph Cleveland’s son John, who pros60  Rawl Letters 93, fo. 273; WMS C2.131r; TNA, PROB 11/291/841, will of Thomas Howell, late bishop of Bristol, 1650; Illustrations of the state of the church during the great rebellion’, Theologian and Ecclesiastic, 7 (1849), pp. 52–9; BL Harl, 4181, fo. 258; Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1813–20), iv, 806. 61  WMS C3.38r. 62  J.  Berdan, Poems of John Cleveland, (New Haven,1905), pp.  12–14; B.  Morris, The Poems of John Cleveland, Unpublished DPhil (University of Oxford, 1962), pp. 75, 79, 85; WMS C1.59r.

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pered enough to become MP for Liverpool in the early-eighteenth century.63 The younger members of the family of Devonshire royalist William Lane were less fortunate; although their father set them up in a business selling limestone to boats at Topsham near Exeter, ironically they had their equipment stolen by Charles II’s privateers; ‘that work was ruin’d’ related Lane’s son Henry.64 The financial disparities which resulted might provoke the envy of poorer siblings. Daniel Berry’s successor as vicar of Molland in Devon described the life-paths of Berry’s nine children after Berry’s early death in 1654, The eldest … Robert lives … near Biddiford and injoys a good estate … The second … John, receiv’d the honour of Knighthood from … King Charles the second, for his … services at sea … Anthony servd an Apprenticeship with a weaver of Molland …

He likened Anthony’s employment to that of a bondslave, from which he was miraculously ‘freed’ by his brother and made ‘Purser of his own ship’.65 John Berry had risen from poverty to become an admiral in the Restoration navy, and was quickly knighted, due to a capability apparent from his numerous citations in the State Papers. But the contrast between John’s great fortunes and those of his surviving siblings led to jealousies which surfaced after his death, childless, in 1690. Contesting Berry’s will in Chancery with his widow, possibly with an element of fantasy, Nathaniel, ‘mariner’ of Stepney, Robert and Elizabeth claimed for John an estate worth £20,000 or more, from a seemingly lavish lifestyle involving ownership of ‘divers rich goods’, furniture, books, military arms, plate, a chest containing £1000, jewellery, and 500 guinea pieces of gold. There was a ‘lemon coloured damask bed’ with ‘brussells hanging’ and ‘12 great damask chairs’. Berry’s widow Rebecca, they claimed, was concealing assets. Rebecca would admit to possessing only a few ‘small trifling’ items of old clothing ‘found scattered’ about the house. The case was still being contested in the Court of Exchequer 20 years later by two widowed legatees still importunate enough to continue fighting.66 63  WMS C1.59r; www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/ cleiveland-%28cleveland%29-john-1661-1716. 64  WMS C2.418v. 65  WMS C2.219r. 66  TNA: C 5/80/92, Berry v Freeman, 1690; E 134/11and12Anne/Hil20, 1712–1714.

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Ideological Choices Anxieties and conflicts over family finance remained the most characteristic lingering by-product of sequestration after the Restoration, but family divisions could also be ideological in nature. Historians of the Civil War have long noted the tendency for gentry families to cleave along factional lines; the same was sometimes true amongst the clergy.67 Most polarised were the Seddon family, where differences between two brothers hinged on contrasting relationships with the great regional magnate, the Earl of Derby, as well as religion. Peter Seddon, much the elder, was a zealous Presbyterian, ‘always obstinate’ against the ‘house of Derby in anie occasion’ back to the 1620s.68 Cheshire incumbent William Seddon, on the other hand, a college friend of the earl, was a ‘faithful companion in his troubles’ and said to have plotted to rescue the earl from execution in 1651.69 When royalist William lost his living, according to William’s son Edward, writing in 1704, he wrote to Peter in Lancashire thinking he would shelter his family. But Peter refused, and contact between the two ceased.70 There was little reason for relatives only loosely connected by association or kinship to influence each other’s opinion or share political views. Theologian William Cave, writing in 1707, remembered that his father, Leicestershire minister John Cave, was relying on two relatives in the House of Commons, Sir William Armine, and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, to support his case against sequestration. This was over-optimistic, given Hesilrige’s aggressive Independency, and Armine’s close association with Cromwell.71 Unsurprisingly, both kept away and he lost the case. With a large family of eleven children the influence of John Prince, rector of Little Shelford in Berkshire, was perhaps weaker on each than if they been fewer, and so, according to his grandson, some became Independents.72 Relationships might also be ambivalent or conflicted. Philip Leach’s son, a clerk to a local justice, was said to have initially rebuked his father,  See T. Royle, Civil War: the War in Three Kingdoms (St Ives, 2004), pp. 169–83.  D. Winterbotham, ‘Seventeenth-century life in the Irwell valley: the Seddon family of Prestolee and their neighbours’. Transactions of the Lancashire & Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 84 (1987), pp. 64–77; Lancashire Record Office, DDK 702/22, grievances against the Seddon family, c. 1660. 69  P.A. Whittle, Bolton-le-moors (Bolton, 1855), pp. 36, 48. 70  WMS C2.217. 71  D Costa, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the development of civil war in England, Unpublished DPhil (University of Oxford, 1989); ODNB. 72  WMS C5.16r. 67 68

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vicar of St Winnow in Cornwall, for his non-co-operation with authority. But when told to make out an order for his father’s imprisonment, the son apparently refused.73 Thomas Tournay’s father was ‘very young when his Father died’, so could not prevent him becoming an Anabaptist; yet family loyalties persisted, the son talking sympathetically of the unfairness of his father’s sequestration to Tournay’s successor at Wittersham in Kent who passed on his stories to Walker.74 More typical, at least amongst those of the next generation who wrote to Walker, was a high church outlook hardened by bitter experience: ‘God grant we may never more come under the yoak, and tyranny of Presbiterian, Independent or Phanatick’, wrote Andrew Needham from Gloucestershire.75 In monuments erected to their fathers, children of sequestered clergy repeatedly stressed their fidelity to the established church: Edward Lawrence of Beeby in Leicestershire (d. 1645) was remembered as faithful to his mother the Church of England, ancient, catholic and apostolic, Edward Fulham (d. 1695), as keeping alive the Church’s sacred flame.76 Families often had a strong and unified political and religious outlook, but this sense of joint enterprise behind ‘that just quarrel’ often became their undoing as sons and sometimes daughters became drawn into and identified with their fathers’ cause, some like the Byams and the Clevelands as combatants, others like the sons of Henry Watkins and Robert Bowber defending their fathers against sequestration or perhaps, like the eldest son of German exile Daniel Getsius, finding their own hopes of preferment blocked out of ‘spite’ for their fathers’ royalist delinquency.77 Even those working within the very different sexual mores of the stage instinctively combined these with their fathers’ political and religious prejudices: John Wilson’s popular comic character Mr Scruple in The Cheats (1663) satirises puritanism, while Thomas Otway, in ‘The Poet’s Complaint of his Muse’, conceives ‘Old Presbyterian Rebellion’, to be the ‘late dead Pander’ to the ugly witch ‘libell’, the ‘sworn Foe to King, his Peace, and Laws’.78 Antiquarian James Wright denounced parliamentary ‘rebels’ for attempt WMS C5.139r.  WMS C1.198–201. 75  WMS C1.228r. 76  John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester (London, 1800–4), iii, i. p 171; WMS C4.83. 77  WMS: C2.91r, 231r; C4.330v; University of London, Senate House Library, MS 475, Henry Watkins, sequestration papers, 1646–7, fo. 21v. 78  Wilson, Dramatic Works, pp. 1–110; Ghosh, Otway ii, 413, lines 285–6. 73 74

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ing to exterminate the memory of their forefathers, ‘that Posterity should not know that there ever was a better Generation of People then themselves’.79 College President Thomas Turner’s 1714 will reveals that to the end of life his identity remained tied to that of the established church; he was almost resentful not to have had the opportunity, like his father and brother, to suffer in its cause, I have lived in the constant Communion of the Church of England as by Law established and would have done so if it had not been … but prohibited or persecuted … so … I resolve stedfastly to continue and dye in it … the most Orthodox and regular the soundest and best part of the Christian Church …80

Barrister James Dixon thanked God that, unlike his brother Robert, rector of Tunstall in Kent, he had not ‘bowed to the Baal of those Times’, ‘but to this day have kept to the principles, not of my Father only, but of all our Fathers’, principles handed down to his daughter, the poet Sarah Dixon, whose poems commemorate traditional church festivals and the martyrdom of Charles I, ‘the Saint, the Patriot, and the Prince’.81 Looking back it was perhaps easy to overlook the difficult choices faced during the uncertainties of the interregnum, or the manifold attractions of its ­new-­fermented ideas. Some children of the clergy favoured flexibility of religious outlook over dogmatism: Sir John Berry, whose father Daniel, according to his funeral monument, had been ‘persecuted’ for the Church of England, in 1676 supported a nonconformist ‘fanatic’ for sheriff because he thought him best-qualified for the job.82 Exposure to a variety of ideas circulating during the interregnum gave Edmund Elys eclectic tastes in religion. He was judged by a contemporary ‘a person of good learning and integrity but not without some mixture of enthusiasm’, but also, to his contemporaries’ amusement, a strange fondness for Saint Teresa.83 79  J. Simmons, ‘James Wright’, English County Historians, ed. J. Simmons (East Ardsley, 1978), p. 48. 80  Rawl Letters 98, fo. 98r; TNA PROB 11/542/372, will of Thomas Turner, 1714. 81   WMS C1.39r; D.  Kennedy, Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2013), pp. 28, 55. 82  Memorial, St. Mary’s Church, Molland, Devonshire; CSPD, SP 29/385.178, 18 September 1676. 83  Bod, MS Smith 48, fo. 19v.

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In certain circumstances Catholicism might become a temptation. Only desperation could have made the Basire family send their son Peter as a child to his father’s native country of France; young, impressionable, and alone, he was easily converted. Upon return to England correspondence shows he was viewed with suspicion by the rest of the family and given improving Protestant literature to read including, on Sundays ‘nothing but (salvo tuo consilio) practicall divinity’, which he read with rather less enthusiasm than his father’s accounts of his travels. Although Peter formally abjured Catholicism to gain admittance to St John’s College, Cambridge in 1665, he never graduated and was not recognised in Isaac Basire’s will, suggesting a relapse.84 John Cosin resisted pressure to convert from high church Anglicanism to Catholicism in exile. So he was not best pleased when his only son converted, ‘His father does not look uppon him in the least’ gossiped Stratford Vicar John Ward after the Restoration, noting that Cosin preferred to leave his son in poverty than to maintain him out of his new, wealthy bishopric of Durham.85 Cosin had allowed his ‘lost sonne’ £50 per annum, but left him only a small bequest in his will ‘because he hath dealt very undutifully with mee his indulgent ffather and twice forsaken his Mother the Church of England … to my great greife … having not come to mee for better advice but wholly avoided mee’ for 4 years together.86

Family Estrangement Semi-destitute in France, Cosin had hardly been in the position to exert the sort of paternal control Matthew Griffith had envisaged in Bethel. The royalist pater familias found his authority much reduced after ejection, simply because he was so often absent, in exile, in hiding, in prison, or trying to scrape a living away from home, in places where a reputation for malignant royalism might be less well known. Some extreme wanderings separated fathers for long periods from their children; Robert Clarke of Andover, according to his daughter, was forced to ‘desert his own house’ and change habitation twenty-four times.87 The sons of George Pierce of  W.N. Darnell (ed.), The Correspondence of Isaac Basire (London, 1831), p. 240.  C. Severn,(ed.), Diary of the Reverend John Ward, A.M, Vicar of Stratford-Upon-Avon (London, 1839), p. 158. 86  TNA, PROB 11/338/417, John Cosin, will, 1672. 87  WMS C7.28r. 84 85

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Tiverton related how during the Civil Wars their father was several times carried about by soldiers from town to town, then ‘dispersed in to several Counties where He could meet with Friends, tho 200 or 300 miles asunder’. Over the next 14 years, he tried and failed to establish himself in positions in London, Kent, and Hertfordshire, serving finally in Bedfordshire until the Restoration.88 Large families dependent on the charity of local sympathisers were dispersed in several directions. A later incumbent at Hoby in Leicestershire related how the parish had divided up the impoverished children of their ejected rector Thomas Rawson by binding one to a lacemaker, tabling two more with a local widow and placing one in a hospital; two were kept by Sir Henry Hudson of Melton Mowbray, two more by another well-wisher.89 A post as a chaplain or tutor might be open to royalist clergy, but dependents were less welcome. Long separations turned into permanent arrangements based on fathers living apart from their children. James Crouch, according to his grandson, after imprisonment and service in the King’s army, ‘liv’d privately amongst his friends, where He cou’d find Entertainment’. But his contribution to the family household economy must have been minimal, for his children were said to have been maintained to adulthood by the ‘industry and hard labour of the Mother’.90 There is a vacuum where the patriarch’s presence should be in the heart of families in accounts of the Rawsons and the Gatfords, with only the fact that their wives get mysteriously pregnant indicating any role for the father in the troubled household.91 Sons in particular seem to have often suffered psychologically as a result. Edmund Elys reflected sadly on his father’s absence throughout the wars, later detailing his troubles at tedious length to Archbishop Sancroft as if seeking an alternative pater familias.92 Dionysius Venn gained a proxy in a local farmer who raised him and paid for his education.93 Thomas Otway, according to Maria Calderón-López, found in his patron Viscount Falkland the father ‘he always seems to have missed’.94 In their writings,  WMS C8.30v.  WMS C1.218r. 90  WMS C3.117r. 91  WMS: C1.218r; C4.56r. 92  WMS C2.471; See Bod Tanner letters: 28, fos 17–18; 37, fos 33, 231. 93  WMS C2.416. 94  M. Calderón-López, ‘“The truth disguis’d in obscure contraries”: Otway’s “message” in Don Carlos’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, 22 (1–2, 2007), p. 41. 88 89

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children of ejected clergy are strong on brotherliness, while themes of motherhood evoke the Church itself. But although fathers might be lavishly praised with an encomiastic list of virtues in Walker accounts, in reality the relationship was quite often fraught. It is striking that the Whole Duty of Man, written by the royalist Richard Allestree, begins discussion of the duties children owe to their ‘natural parents’ by stating that ‘too many children’ deride their parents’ infirmities.95 Some fathers were remote and uncommunicative: ‘this is all that I can say as to my Fathers sufferings’ wrote Henry Gandy, and ‘not from him, for I do not remember that I ever heard him speak of them’.96 Old fashioned-formality, frequent absence and consequent lack of familiarity cannot have made for an easy relationship, particularly if combined with a shameful poverty that left fathers unable to provide for their children or a temperament driven choleric by unhappy circumstance. Brune Ryves’ sons and son-in-law were so fearful of his ‘hasty and passionate temper’, and the risk of being ‘cast off’ if they provoked it, they preferred to leave him in the dark and lead him into poor decisions which exacerbated their financial morass.97 Thomas Otway’s plays are full of dysfunctional families ‘locked in murderous combat or beset with conflicting loyalties’, ‘unsatisfactory sons whose disobedience or rebellion is always punished’ writes Jessica Munns, ‘but not before the inadequacy, greed, and cruelty of the fathers had been revealed’.98 Although, as Calderón-López argues, we should not assume a direct corollary with Otway’s relationship with his own father from those in Venice Preserv’d or Don Carlos, Otway must have known that such plot devices would resonate with his audiences, loyalists recognising something of their own family conflicts in those they saw on the stage. Most striking is the character of Beaugard’s ‘red nosed’, ‘wicked and Poor’, ne’er be good Father’ father in Otway’s comedy The Atheist, a practical joker who disguises himself as a ‘Phanatique Preacher’, to receive Daredevil the atheist’s apparent deathbed confession, who reminds us of the shame many children of loyalist clergy may have felt at seeing their fathers’ reputations traduced by accusations of vice during the 1640s and  Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1704), p. 297.  WMS C2.344. 97  TNA, C 7/592/1. 98  Quoted in Calderón-López, ‘The truth disguis’d’, p. 45; W. Chernaik, ‘Unhappy families: the family and the state in Otway, Lee, Filmer, and Dryden’, Restoration and EighteenthCentury Theatre Research, 22 (1–2, 2007), p. 83. 95 96

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1650s. More than 60 years on, Daniel Horsmonden’s son was still livid at the ‘foule, false, and scandalous charge’ of drunkenness against his father published in John White’s Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests: ‘it can be nothing but the malice of the Divell that invented it’.99 But Otway also cleverly inverts stereotypical complaints of loyalist fathers about the behaviour of wastrel sons in counterpoint to interregnum puritanism. Nowadays, complained Richard Allestree in 1659, ‘there is ordinarily such a pride and headiness in youth’ that they would not hear the ‘counsels of their elders’.100 A lost generation of listless, discontented, ill-educated, poorly supervised and under-employed sons of sequestered clergy, some ex-loyalist combatants, were a magnet for trouble. At Aldham in Essex in 1651, long after Daniel Falconer’s ejection, a John and a Thomas Faulconer were charged at quarter sessions with assaulting clergyman John Westley, while in Bletchington in Sussex in 1653, Nicholas Pope, a pluralist who had lost his other living, was charged along with a Thomas Pope and a Nicholas Pope the ‘younger’ with assaulting James Bradford.101 Children of the clergy often learned about violence from experiencing it or witnessing it. Dionysus Venn remembered being hit at random by a fashionably-dressed sequestrator aged only seven or eight, Daniel Bailye threats of torture, the daughters of Christopher Baitson threats of rape.102 William Wake saw his father shot eleven times in the head in a Wareham street, seemingly connected in common trauma with the other young people he described at the scene: a poor boy commanded by the assailant to ‘make an end’ of his father, lying on the ground, and the maidservant wielding a corn pike who drove the attacker off, so that his father miraculously survived.103 Wake was later involved in the abortive Penruddock rebellion of 1655, along with two sons of Henry Collier of Steeple Langford, all three only very narrowly escaping hanging on the technicality of their articles of surrender and by providing material witness to convict others.104 99   WMS C3.157r; John White, The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (London, 1643), pp. 36–7. 100  Whole Duty of Man, pp. 297, 310. 101  WR, p.  151; ERO: Q/SR 351/25, 5 December 1651; Q/SR 351/48, 119, 6 December 1651 & 9 January 1651/2; ESRO: QR/101, fos 20, 45, 75; QI/EQ2, fo. 8v, 6 October 1653. 102  WMS: C1.35r; C2.337r, 416r; C3.114r. 103  WMS C1.143r. 104  W. Ravenhill, W., Records of the Rising in the West, A.D. 1655 (Devizes, 1875), pp. 20, 55, 90–2, 96, 103.

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Even bishops found themselves embarrassed by the way their children’s sexual morality deteriorated under sequestration. Correspondence in the Bodleian Library shows that Bishop Henry King’s son John, brought into contact by his father’s sequestration with mathematician and Surrey incumbent William Oughtred, seduced Oughtred’s youngest daughter Elizabeth and left her pregnant. It was 1646; a reputation for poor family governance would hardly help Oughtred’s insecure hold on his living. When John reneged on promises to marry his daughter, dissuaded by his haughty father who, having been severely mulcted by the sequestrators, needed an advantageous marriage for his son, Oughtred read in church from 1 Samuel, ‘Eli’s sons were scoundrels’ and begged the bishop to ‘take his sonnes sinne to hart, and work him to repentance’. He sent his own son George to remonstrate in person on his sister’s behalf. ‘Mr O hath bene counted a good scholer, and a wise man: he shewes but litle wit’ responded the bishop sarcastically, but he and his son do not emerge well from the affair. John was old enough to know better, and was quoted as ‘most unmannerly’ saying ‘If I lye with a whore doth it follow I must marrie her?’ The bishop accused Oughtred of entrapment, suggested Elizabeth had slept around, and talked of ‘discharging’ the parish of the child as if she had been a pauper. But Oughtred made the case ‘public throu out the land’, and John’s arranged marriage never took place.105 John Cosin’s daughters, with himself in exile and their mother dead, were left to fend for themselves in England; ‘Mary, the eldest, seems alone to have answered his expectations’, writes Osmond, describing Elizabeth and Frances, as ‘wanton’; the latter, in Cosin’s own words, ‘trepann’d’ by his secretary Thomas Blakiston, who ‘got another child added’ to her existing children; Anne was mentally unstable, and eventually abandoned by her husband Dennis Granville.106

Death and Despair Some clergy children grew out of their mind in response to their situation; Frances King blamed the early deaths of her brothers on despair.107 Giles Thornburgh’s depression was longer brewing. In the 1680s he wrote to 105  Rawl D 1361, fo. 389; M. Crum (ed.), The Poems of Henry King (Oxford, 1965), p. 20; J. Hannah (ed.), Poems and Psalms by Henry King (Oxford, 1843), p. lxxvii; ODNB: Henry King. 106  CSPD: 1654, p. 302; 1657, pp. 130–1; P.E. Osmond, A Life of John Cosin (London, 1913), pp. 317–9; G. Ornsby, (ed.), The Correspondence of John Cosin (Surtees Soc., 52, 55, 1869–72), pp. 218, 238, 241, 266, 316. 107  WMS C5.17.

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Archbishop Sancroft describing how his father’s ‘severe’ sufferings ‘for the best of causes in the worst of times’ had burdened him as soon as he came of age with the huge debts his father had contracted during the interregnum. Sancroft’s refusal to help him rectify this by allowing him to hold two widely-separated livings in commendam had ‘occacioned greate troubles of thought’ leading to ‘a sad, and deplorable distraction of minde’ making him ‘incapable of supplying any cure of soules’. In evoking his fears for the future of his ‘many children’ ‘whom I would not leave the pittifull objects of a reproaching, and deriding world’ we gain a glimpse into his own youthful experience of financial difficulty in a world which viewed material failure as evidence of God’s providential displeasure.108 Deaths of parents tended to be associated with worse outcomes for the children. A Walker account describes how Thomas Archbold, rector of Harvington in Worcestershire and his wife died, ‘oppressed with grief’, after being violently ejected from his parsonage and forced to shelter in a cowhouse. A petition to the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy in the 1680s laid bare the effects on the children of losing both parents. The children left behind describe making a ‘hardshift to Live By the Helpe of some ffriends … By their labour and Industry’, but were now ‘Brought to Extreame want and necessitated to Implore Charity to Keepe them from perishing’.109 Archbold’s daughters Mary and Elianor, described in 1687 as ‘ancient’, ‘poor’ and ‘unmarried’, were maintained by the Corporation well into the 1700s.110 The violent ejection of Thomas Wilde’s family from his living at Painswick in Gloucestershire, followed soon after by Wilde’s death, leaving ‘a distressed Widdowe and a most undone family’, unsettled his son Francis. After a friendless, transitory life in London, Francis developed pro-loyalist religious mania. In a post-Restoration petition for relief, he described how out of duty ‘towards GOD’ ‘according to supernaturall Informacion’ he had ‘in a propheticall way in Print’ asserted the King’s just right of return. For this he had been imprisoned in Newgate and appeared at the Old Bailey for treason, ‘to the overthrow of his estate’, and the ‘irreparable prejudice of his Person, by reason of an impediment of Deafness’ depriving him of subsequent employment. Thornburgh eventually recovered from depression, but Wilde’s obsessions continued,  Rawl Letters 101, fos 137–139, 1685 and 1688.  WMS E8.131r. 110  LMA, A/CSC/7A and A/CSC/8, fo. 9. 108 109

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for he had recently presented a new manuscript of ‘modern prophecy’ to the King.111 ‘I have layd before yow the sorrowfull legend of that fate that has fallen not only on myne but many other worthy famylyes’ wrote John Turner. Over and over Walker correspondents described how their families had been ‘ruined’ by sequestration and never recovered: ‘the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’, quoted John Croker, relating how Richard Reynolds’ children were mocked by those who had ruined their fortunes. Robert Bowber considered that his family ‘were in a manner all ruined’, with himself, the eldest son, ‘the greatest sharer in that calamity’. Sequestration lead to the ‘Utter Undoing’ of William Higgins’ ‘Children and their Posterity’ according to his son Robert.112 Yet difficult experiences did not automatically mean family breakdown: there were many stories in the Walker archive of family bonds becoming strengthened as a result, parents supported by the labour of their children, like the two daughters of a future bishop of Bristol and Chichester Guy Carleton, who with their mother ‘wrought at London for their livelihood’ while Carleton was in prison.113 The family of Norfolk minister Thomas Campbell were described all subsisting together in the frozen ‘depth of winter’, living on water and barley dumplings, ‘in a cold low room w ­ ithout any fire, but all imployed, he at his book, his wife and children knitting or spinning or other ways busy in earning a penny’.

Past and Present Each family constructed its own narrative to make sense of past experiences, and capitalised on past sufferings where needful. Pleading for relief from Sancroft from the King’s Bench prison in 1681, Thomas Godwyn described himself as ‘son of an Episcopall Family highly suffering for Loyalty and Religions sake’. Fathers’ input could be useful in the scramble for sons to find decent livings.114 ‘I chose rather to suffer a glorious misfortune than a gilded bait to wound my soul’ wrote George Bell from Darlington in purple prose to Sancroft, relating how he had ‘almost fainted with a continual contest with crosses’, his trial for his life at Durham ‘for  Francis Wilde, Prophecy Maintain’d (London, 1654); TNA SP 29/48, fo. 194, c. 1661.  WMS: C2.231r; C3.56; C4.75; C8.45r. 113  WMS C2.476r. 114  Rawl letters 100 fo. 213r, May 1681. 111 112

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the crime of Loyalty’, and the ‘load of poverty’ that had affected his children’s education. Preferment to his son would be like a haven after shipwreck, and ‘the disappointments of ill fortune’.115 Not everyone needed or wanted to live in the past. In a sympathetic political climate, some children of sequestered clergy, such as Sir John Berry, Richard Cleveland, and Sir Christopher Wren, prospered remarkably, often in career paths they might never have taken had their parents not been sequestered. Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, whose parents’ experiences form one of the most iconic accounts in the Walker archive, comes across in his letters as a vigorous forward-looking person who on the rare occasions he stopped to ruminate sought ways to reassure himself of the benefits of current misfortunes. It was good, he wrote, to ‘learn how to Want as well as how to Abound’, all ill Fortune ‘for indeed there is no such thing’, should be laid ‘at the Foot of the Cross’.116 Perhaps Francis had primed Peter du Moulin when he preached the 1672 funeral sermon for his father Thomas, ‘Could I now trace him in his several flights and shifts from place to place, with his wife and little children, during that long storm, you might see a web of crosses and mercies enterlaced’.117 The Turner family had indeed suffered. But they were well-connected and affluent, and Francis’ ideas of deprivation much above the ordinary run of clergy, whose more difficult experiences of trauma and blighted family lives feature in many stories contained in the Walker archive.118 Female dependents in particular had few avenues for making good past losses, revealed in the gulf between the rich city traders and lawyers who funded the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, and the crowds of ministers’ widows and children who in 1684 reportedly came daily to Thomas Tyllot’s chamber seeking relief.119 Families were broken or transformed by the experience of sequestration, as were the rigid patterns of family life which some, like Martin Blake, had already begun to question even before the Civil Wars. For Matthew Griffith and his family the consequences were particularly disastrous: having ended up in a bad place at the wrong time, defending Basing House in Hampshire, Griffith became the most bitter of royalists, alienating even his  Ibid., 59, fo. 329, 3 March 1682.  Ibid., 98, fo. 99v, 10 February 1691; 99, fo. 11r, 23 June 1692. 117  Peter du Moulin, A sermon preached ... at the funeral of the Very Reverend Thomas Turner ... (London, 1672), p. 20. 118  Rawl 98, fo. 99v. 119  LMA, A/CSC/7A, fo. 34r, 11 June 1684. 115 116

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own party.120 Griffith’s model of family life, like the man himself, was too rigid to cope well under the trauma of violent conflict. Late-seventeenth-­ century Anglican ideas of upbringing remained severe by modern standards: Jeremy Taylor saw children as living ‘under discipline’, advising parents to provide ‘frequent admonitions’ to them when young and husbands or wives for them later on.121 Francis Turner’s daughter, growing up in the 1680s, was expected to behave as a ‘little she Bishop to all young Virgins about her’.122 But Richard Allestree recommended kindness and affection between family members, Taylor a ‘tender-bowelled, pitiful, and gentle’ child-centred approach to children’s education.123 It was not authoritarianism but the bonds of mutuality, which Griffith had also spoken of, which worked best to ensure family survival in the face of social change; and for those ejected, whether beset by tensions, or subsisting in happy poverty, close family was often their surest support. Their wills and funeral monuments are testimony to that. John King, the wayward son of Bishop Henry King of Chichester, and Prudence, the dutiful spinster daughter of his successor Guy Carleton, are both buried, humbly, at the feet of their more famous parents.

Bibliography Manuscripts Bodleian Library MS John Walker, C1-5, C7-8, C11, E8.131r MS Smith 48, fo. 19v, Robert Burscough to Thomas Smith, 12 November 1692

Rawlinson Manuscripts Rawl D 1361, fo. 389, papers relating to Elizabeth Oughtred and John King, 1647 Rawl Letters, 59, fo. 329, George Bell to William Sancroft, 3 March 1682 Rawl Letters 93, fo. 273, Bishop Thomas Howell to his brother, 2 March 1650 Rawl Letters 98, fos 39, 98r, 99v, Turner Family correspondence  Calendar of Clarendon State Papers (Oxford, 1872), iv.638.  LMA, A/CSC/7A, fo. 34r, 11 June 1684. 122  Rawl letters 98, fo. 39. 123  Whole Duty of Man, p. 298; Taylor, Holy Living and Dying, p. 157. 120 121

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Rawl Letters 99, fo. 11r, Bishop Francis Turner to Thomas Turner 23 June 1692 Rawl Letters 100, fo. 213, Thomas Godwyn to Archbishop William Sancroft, May 1681 Rawl Letters 101 fos 137–139, Giles Thornburgh to Archbishop William Sancroft, 1685 and 1688

Tanner Manuscripts Tanner letters 28, fos 17–18, Edmund Elys to Archbishop Sancroft, 17 April 1688 Tanner Letters 37, fos 36r, 223, 231, Edmund Elys to Archbishop Sancroft, 1680–81

British Library Add MS 5829, Acts of the Committee of Scandalous Ministers in Essex Add MS 15672, evidence exhibited to the commissioners for examining scandalous ministers, in the county of Cambridge, 1643–4 Add MS 22084, Wiltshire sequestrations register, 1646 Harl 4181, fo. 258, Ancestry of the Howell family

Durham Cathedral Library Hunter Manuscripts, fo. 10, Basire Correspondence

Essex Record Office Q/SR 351/25, Essex Quarter Sessions Roll, 1651 Q/SR 351/48, 119, Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls, 1651–2

East Sussex Record Office QR/101, Quarter Sessions Roll, 1653 QI/EQ2, fo. 8v, Quarter Sessions Indictment, 6 October 1653

Lancashire Record Office DDK 702/22, grievances against the Seddon family, c. 1660

London Metropolitan Archives A/CSC/7A, Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, Court Book, 1678–1708 A/CSC/8, Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, Index to Court Books, 1678–1811

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The National Archives Chancery Records C 3/436/65, Byam v. Dyke, 1649 C 5/9/7, Manby v. Manby, 1648 C 5/23/108, Granger v. Granger, 1652 C 5/80/92, Berry v Freeman, 1690 C 6/229/89 Cooke v Ryves, 1678 C 7/292/77 Ryves v Sewell, 1686. C 5/383/107, Ryland v. Bushell, 1645 C 5/549/104 Ryves v Cooke, 1677 C 7/592/1 Ryves v Sewell, 1685

Exchequer Records E 134/11and12Anne/Hil20, Smith and Barnaby v Saltren & others, 1712–1714

Probate Records PROB 11/291/841, will of Thomas Howell, late bishop of Bristol, 1650 PROB 11/338/417, John Cosin, will, 1672 PROB 11/542/372, will of Thomas Turner, 1714

State Papers SP 29/48, fo. 194, Petition of Frances Wilde, c. 1661

University

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London, Senate House Library

MS 475, Henry Watkins, sequestration papers, 1646–7

Printed Primary Sources A supplement to Sir Thomas Browne’s Repertorium’, in Posthumous works of the learned Sir Thomas Browne (London, 1712) Calendar of Clarendon State Papers (Oxford, 1872) Allestree, Richard, The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1704) Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed. O.L. Dick, (Harmondsworth, 1962) Brooke, Lord, A Discourse Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie Which Is Exercised in England (London, 1641)

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Darnell, W.N., (ed.), The Correspondence of Isaac Basire (London, 1831) Dring, Thomas, A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen that have Compounded for their Estates (London, 1655) Du Moulin, Peter, A sermon preached … at the funeral of the Very Reverend Thomas Turner … (London, 1672) Fuller, Thomas, The Church-History of Britain (London, 1656) Green, M.A.E. (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series [of the Commonwealth] (13 vols., London, 1875–86) ——— Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II (28 vols., London, 1860–1938) Griffith, Matthew, Bethel, or a Forme for Families (1633) Hales, John, Golden Remains (1711) Moore Smith, G.C. (ed.), ‘Extracts from the papers of Thomas Woodcock, ob. 1695’, Camden Miscellany, 11 (Camden, 3rd ser., 13, 1907), pp. 49–89 Nichols, John, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester (London, 1800–4) Ornsby, G., (ed.), The Correspondence of John Cosin (Surtees Soc., 52, 55, 1869–72) Otway, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J.C. Ghosh (Oxford, 1968) Severn, C. (ed.), Diary of the Reverend John Ward, A.M, Vicar of Stratford-Upon-­ Avon (London, 1839) Ryves, Brune, Two Sermons (1652) Taylor, Jeremy, Holy Living and Dying (London, 1834) Twining, Thomas, Avebury in Wiltshire, the Remains of a Roman Work … (London, 1723) Walker, John, An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers and Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England (London, 1714) White, John, The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (London, 1643) Wilde, Francis, Prophecy Maintain’d (London, 1654) Wilson, John, The Dramatic Works of John Wilson, ed. J. Maidment, W.H. Logan (Edinburgh, 1874) Wood, Anthony, Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1813–20)

Secondary Sources ‘Illustrations of the state of the church during the great rebellion’, Theologian and Ecclesiastic, 7 (1849), pp. 52–9 Berdan, J., Poems of John Cleveland, (New Haven, 1905) Catty, J., Writing Rape, Writing Women: Unbridled Speech (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Douch, H. L. (ed.), ‘The history of Ruan Lanihorne, by the Rev. John Walker’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, ns, 7 (2, 1974), pp. 108–52

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Calderón-López, M., ‘“The truth disguis’d in obscure contraries”: Otway’s “message” in Don Carlos’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, 22 (1–2, 2007), pp. 38–55 Chernaik, W., ‘Unhappy families: the family and the state in Otway, Lee, Filmer, and Dryden’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, 22 (1–2, 2007), pp. 72–90 Crum (ed.), M., The Poems of Henry King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) Eisner, M., ‘Long-term historical trends in violent crime’, in Crime and Justice 30 (2003), pp. 83–142 Flather, A., Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007) Fletcher, A., ‘The Protestant idea of marriage’, in A.  Fletcher, P.  Roberts (eds) Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 161–181 Foster, J. (ed.), Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714 (Oxford, 1891), www.british-history.ac.uk/alumni-oxon/1500-1714 Green, I., ‘Career prospects and clerical conformity in the early Stuart Church’, Past & Present, 90 (1981), pp. 93–103 Hannah, J. (ed.), Poems and Psalms by Henry King (Oxford, 1843) Kennedy, D., Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2013) Matthews, A.G. (ed.), Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker’s ‘Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–60’ (Oxford, 1948). McCall, F., Baal’s Priests: the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Pollock, Linda, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) O’Day, R., Women’s Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007) Osmond, P.E., A Life of John Cosin (London, 1913) Ravenill, W., Records of the Rising in the West, A.D. 1655 (Devizes, 1875) Royle, T., Civil War: the War in Three Kingdoms (St Ives, 2004) Simmons, J. (ed.), English County Historians (East Ardsley, 1978) Stieg, M., Laud’s Laboratory (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press/London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983) Tadmor, N., Family & Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Tarbin, S., ‘Raising Girls and Boys: Fear, Awe and Dread in the Early Modern Household’ in S. Broomhall (ed.), Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 106–30 Whittle, P.A., Bolton-le-moors (Bolton, 1855) Winterbotham, D., ‘Seventeenth century life in the Irwell valley: the Seddon family of Prestolee and their neighbours’. Transactions of the Lancashire & Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 84 (1987), pp. 64–77

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Websites The History of Parliament, www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume The Clergy of the Church of England Database, http://theclergydatabase.org. uk/ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com

Theses Brennan, Colin, ‘The Life and Times of Isaac Basire’, unpublished Ph.D. (Durham, 1987) Hillyer, Ruth, ‘The History of the Parson’s Wife’, unpublished M.Phil. (Kings College London, 1971) Morris, B., The Poems of John Cleveland, Unpublished DPhil (University of Oxford, 1962) Costa, D., Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the development of civil war in England, Unpublished DPhil (University of Oxford, 1989)

Childhood, Family and the Construction of English Catholic Histories of Persecution Lucy Underwood

Between 1631 and 1660, one of the members of a convent of English women established in Louvain, Flanders, was compiling a ‘Chronicle’ of that convent based largely on the oral histories provided by herself and other members.1 Under the year 1625, Mary Copley wrote: ‘Upon the 11 Day of October… was professed Sister Helen Draycott… She was the daughter of Alban Draycott of Pensley [Painsley] in Staffordshire, but a younger brother, whose father had suffered much for his conscience, and was about twenty years continually prisoner in divers prisons of England, and at such time as this son was born he was prisoner at St Alban’s, and  She wrote anonymously, but has been identified by Victoria van Hyning as Mary Copley. Victoria van Hyning, ‘Naming names: Chroniclers, Scribes and Editors of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, 1631–1906’ in C.  Bowden and J.  Kelly, eds., The English Convents in Exile 1600–1800: Communities, culture, identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Van Hyning notes that Copley clearly used written sources as well, although she chose to emphasise oral history, pp. 88–90. 1

L. Underwood (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_8

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therefore had that saint’s name given him’.2 This anecdote, brief among some of the colourful stories the chronicler included, nevertheless illustrates how the consciousness of persecution was woven into English Catholic culture and how children and family were bound up with it. Alban Draycott received his very name from his family’s experience of imprisonment. St Alban, the third-century martyr for whom the town is named, was not only the first recorded saint in Britain, but was executed for having hidden and assisted a priest: the same crime for which lay English Catholics of the post-Reformation era were most likely to find their lives in danger.3 To his daughter Helen, the provenance of her father’s name was significant enough to be passed on to her religious community and thus recorded. Yet she was only three when her father died; her report is not a personal memory, but the relaying of family tradition, a collective memory. Helen was born in 1602;4 her father’s date of birth is not known, but between 1575 and 1578, Alban’s father John Draycott was in and out of prison for recusancy.5 In September 1578, ‘Mr Draycott and Mr Cotton’ petitioned to be removed from the Fleet, pleading the danger of plague. They were then ordered to be committed to ‘some convenient house within x or xij myles of London’, there to remain at their own charges, to be brought to church for sermons, to have ‘learned men’ to confer with them and to give bonds to remain in the appointed houses. If they had not conformed, they were to return to the Fleet in two months.6 St Alban’s is about 20 miles 2  A.  Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran: at St. Monica’s in Louvain (now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon) vol. 11548–1625, vol. 21625–44 (Edinburg, 1904) (hereinafter SMC) vol.2 p.35. 3  This connection was occasionally noted by English Catholic writers; for example, John Mush, who compared Marmaduke Bowes, the first person executed for priest-harbouring, to Alban: Mush, ‘Clitherow’, pp. 367–8. 4  According to the Chronicle’s record of her age at profession. Who were the nuns? Database gives Helen Draycott’s dates and offers a Draycott family tree: https://wwtn.history.qmul. ac.uk/search/search.php?uid=LA085"e=no&given=&religion=&surname=draycott& variants=on&cid=0&sdate=0&edate=0&loc= https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/ Draycott.pdf 5  APC 1575-77: p.13 (11/08/75), p.21 6/09/75 p.46 12/11/75, p.80 20/01/75-6, p.110 28/04/76 p.145 19/06/76 p.213 7/10/76. 6  APC 1577-8, p.  325 14/09/78. Draycott had been summoned on 7 October 1576 (APC 1575–77 p. 213) and could have been committed at that time. Mrs Draycott might have lodged in or near the Fleet, or made visits to London or Draycott could have had periods of leave from prison.

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from London, so could plausibly have been chosen and 1578 is possible as a birth date for Helen’s father. This chapter explores how childhood memories and oral family histories shaped the collective history of English Catholicism, influencing how English Catholics fashioned for themselves a history of persecution, faith and community. It engages with two rich sources on early modern childhood to explore how recollections of family and childhood contributed to English Catholic histories of persecution: the cultural space out of which the formal works of martyrology and history published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century by figures such as Challoner, Dodd and Lingard would emerge. The Chronicle of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain is composed in large part of stories of the nuns’ families; the stories of persecution, accommodation and resistance found there are the relaying both of individual childhood memories and family traditions. Their selection and arrangement reveals how, to Copley and her community, family, religious vocation, persecution and expatriation were interconnected. In the Responsa Scholarum of the English College Rome, aspiring students for the priesthood responded to a questionnaire which asked them specifically whether they had ‘suffered for the faith’. Building on previous work with this source, I use this unusually large dataset of 595 autobiographical texts to analyse their answers collectively and individually, asking how ‘persecution’ was interpreted, what was the relationship between individual and family experience and how events from childhood were integrated into the construction of religious identity. The collective trends seen in the Responsa may be compared with those of the Liber Primi Examinis, a similar set of records for the English College, Valladolid which survive from the years 1593–1623 for 309 entrants.7 Here, autograph texts do not 7  See A.  Kenny, ‘Introduction’ to Kenny, (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part One: 1598–1621 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.54) (published for the Society, 1962); Kenny, ‘Introduction’ to Kenny (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part Two, 1622–85 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.55) (published for the Society, 1963); E. Henson (ed.) Registers of the English College, Valladolid, 1589–1862 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.30) (Published for the Society, 1930); L.  Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent in post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Appendix A pp. 199–201; L. Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity and autobiography at the English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, Historical Journal 55:2 (2012) 379–74. Note that ‘Responsa Scholarum’ entries are here cited by the ‘Liber Ruber’ number by which they are arranged in Kenny’s edition, rather than by page number. Entries up to LR628 are in vol. 1, and subsequent to LR628 in vol. 2. The Responsa are in Latin; translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

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survive, but rather abstracts written down by the College’s staff; the students’ voices are more mediated and the texts less rich, but they offer comparable information. Where possible, the Chronicle and Responsa are correlated with other sources, illuminating how events may have been selected and interpreted by their writers.

Family, Vocation and Conversion The Chronicle of St Monica’s Convent is as much about the families of those who became nuns within it as about the Convent itself: indeed, the histories of the nuns’ parents is prominent in its stated aims. It is described as having been ‘faithfully written upon the relation of the persons themselves concerning their parents and their own coming and calling to holy religion, and for the more surety, after the writing it was again showed to the same persons, that they might see whether all was right written and nothing mistaken’ (SMC 1:24). Or again, introducing her biographies of the founding group of nuns, Copley wrote that she intended ‘… to say something of our Sisters’ descent and of their parents which ought chiefly to be remembered’ (SMC 1:80). Scholars of convent culture have noted how important family and genealogy were to Mary Copley and her fellow-­ nuns.8 And these family stories are the patchwork from which the Chronicle produces a history of English Catholicism; not a martyrology, because direct accounts of people executed for practising Catholicism are rare, but a history of persecution. By forming such a history from the stories of nuns about their fathers, mothers, grandparents and kinsfolk, Copley causally links the vocation of cloistered nuns with the endurance of those who lived in England: she opens her account of the family of the convent’s first superior, Jane (in religion Mary) Wiseman, by describing her ‘very holy parentage’ (SMC  1:80). Thomas Wiseman ‘suffered much for his conscience, his house being a receptacle for all priests and religious men’. He also ‘brought up his children not only very virtuously but also to learning of the Latin tongue, as well the daughters as the sons… Besides that, 8  Van Hyning, ‘Naming names’ & ‘Subsumed Autobiography’; C. Walker, ‘“Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letter-writing in early modern English convents’ in J. Daybell (ed.) Early modern women’s letter-writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). See also C. Bowden ‘Collecting the lives of early modern women religious: obituary writing and the development of collective memory and corporate identity’ in Women’s History Review 19:1 (2010) 7–20, on the use of obituaries to help create collective history in the convent.

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in his house was order kept resembling a monastery’; Wiseman used to have religious books read at mealtimes and also delivered to his children a weekly exhortation—as his daughter would later do as Abbess. Their daughters, in becoming nuns, showed ‘their fervour to God’s service… following the example of their most virtuous parents’ (SMC 1: 81–2). The household in England is approximated to the monastery in its piety, but the cloistered life of the monastery in exile is linked to the endurance of persecution at home.9 Similarly, Anne Clitherow—daughter of Margaret Clitherow who was executed in 1586—is described as having ‘followed well her holy mother’s virtuous steps, for she was a very good religious… ’(SMC 1:33) The overlap between monastic community and family is also emphasised in the Chronicle’s descriptions of Mother Margaret Clement, first Prioress of St Monica’s—to whose family the chronicler, Mary Copley, also belonged. As Victoria van Hyning has observed, the dying Mother Clement lived to see her two great-nieces (Mary and Helen Copley) professed and described them as ‘two pledges’ that she would leave on earth; her last prayer before the community (she ‘sang a devout song of Jesus’) is a kind of Nunc Dimittis in which the continuation of her family line in the monastery allows her to die in peace. Van Hyning further quotes another St Monica’s text—a biography of Margaret Clement—which claims the founding prioress’ mother, Margaret Giggs Clement, ward of Sir Thomas More, as the ‘grandmother’ of the community, thus also claiming a link to More the martyr.10 To the nuns of St Monica’s, though they were a community of celibate women, blood descent and family were centrally important to identity. The blood descent of individual nuns becomes part of their collective, corporate identity and inheritance (Giggs Clement is the ‘grandmother’ of the whole community). Van Hyning has argued that Copley’s anonymity promotes this corporate identity by presenting her chronicle—actually composed in the 1630s and using written sources to describe events commencing nearly a century before, in 1535 —as a timeless work: the community’s collected testimonies merely transcribed by a representative chronicler (rather than composed by a historian).11 Prominent in both the Chronicle and the Responsa is the theme of conversion; in earlier work I explored how and why a high proportion of  Cf Victoria van Hyning, ‘Expressing selfhood in the convent: Anonymous chronicling and subsumed autobiography’ in Recusant History 32:2 (2014) 219–234 at pp. 229–30. 10  Van Hyning ‘Expressing selfhood’ pp. 222–224. Copley used this text in composing her Chronicle: Van Hyning, ‘Naming names’ p. 89. 11  Van Hyning, ‘Naming names’. 9

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Responsa writers, particularly from the first 30 years of records (1598– 1630), described themselves as converts.12 The St Monica’s Chronicle also includes numerous conversion narratives, of both nuns themselves and their relatives. Childhood and adolescent recollections define many of the nuns’ own conversion stories; but here I wish to discuss how some of them described their parents’ conversions.13 These are both autobiographical recollections and records of family traditions: the women did not remember things which happened to their parents before their own birth, or in their absence, but relayed oral histories evidently passed among their families, and then passed on to the chronicler for inclusion in her written history—to be selected, arranged and interpreted by her. Catherine James was the daughter of Sir Henry James (SMC 1:161–2). Copley provides here the narrative of a double conversion: Sir Henry married a gentlewoman ‘of very puritan kindred and brought up so likewise’, who subsequently became a Catholic. Yet later the husband, according to the chronicle, ‘grew somewhat crazed in his wits, as it was thought’ (1:161) and began attending the Protestant church; this madness is not further elaborated, although we are told that James attempted to get his children to go to church and ‘kept them from their mother’ (1:162). Just as his turn to conformity is simply stated as an episode of mental illness, his re-conversion is given little further explanation: he ‘turned again and rose up from his fall becoming a Catholic’ (1:162), leaving ambiguity as to whether his conformity is meant to be understood as madness or as sin. He subsequently ‘fell into great trouble’ for his Catholicism, losing all his property and suffering perpetual imprisonment for refusing the oath of allegiance (1:162); Sir Henry was unusual in undergoing the full penalties for this offence—others prosecuted usually managed to buy their way out of full confiscation sooner or later. The Chronicle does not mention this, nor indeed specify the statute Sir Henry was indicted under, although it seems unlikely that the nuns of St Monica’s were unaware of the Oath of Allegiance statute and its penalties. As for his ‘madness’, the motives for James’ conformity are not known. It took place in May–June 1606, after some 7 years as a recusant convict and Hugh Bowler’s study of Sir Henry speculated that disgust over the Gunpowder Plot played a role. His act of 12  Underwood, ‘Youth, autobiography and religious identity’; Underwood, Childhood, Chap. 2. 13  See Underwood, Childhood pp. 31–50.

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conformity seems to have been spontaneous (rather than prompted by imprisonment or other official pressure), and he completed the entire complex proceeding in 10 days.14 None of this context—there are no dates given—is provided by the Chronicle. It reads as though Copley has indeed chosen to record the family’s experience as it was articulated through Sister Catherine’s memory, rather than contextualising it with information which would certainly clarify matters for the historian. Instead we have an impression of how such events seemed in a young girl’s memory, and what she (and her chronicler) picked out as the salient points when recording them for future generations. Catherine James’ mother, while her conversion is only briefly noted, receives heroic status in the narration of her husband’s lapse, perhaps because Catherine had first-hand memories of this episode. Lady James ‘who had followed him in good, would not also follow him in evil’ (1:161) and eventually ‘not being able to endure his mad proceedings towards her… got away from him’ to take refuge with her sister (1:161–2). Here she experienced further pressure, her relatives ‘bringing ministers to persuade her to alter her mind’ until they were convinced she would not do so, after which they still ‘kindly assisted her with temporal means’. Lady James seems to have left her children when she separated from her husband (legally the father would have had exclusive custody) but the narrative gives no hint of resentment at this, noting only that Catherine and two sisters were put to school in London until their mother (how is not explained) ‘got them away and took them to live with her’ (SMC 1:161–2). The focus is on Catherine’s parents: her own experiences—of resisting pressure to conform from her ‘mad’ father, of being put to school, of the process by which she came to choose a monastic vocation—are barely detailed. Perhaps Catherine James never did think much about the legal reasons for her father’s financial ruin and imprisonment; perhaps his conformist period really did appear to her as an episode of madness. The account in the convent chronicle does not give us the detailed, nuanced account of Henry James’ religious career that scholarly research can piece together; it does show how childhood memories could be worked into a history of persecution based around stories of families, patterned by themes of conversion, conflict, fall, redemption and endurance. 14  C.H.  Bowler, ‘Sir Henry James of Smarden, Kent and Clerkenwell, recusant’ in A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (eds.), Studies in London history presented to P.E. Jones, (London: Hodder, 1969) pp. 289–313.

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Anne More’s story of her mother’s conversion—detailed in its narrative, sparse on background information such as the protagonists’ names— has elements of a story told and re-told in the family, by which Anne transmitted a memory of events she could not remember. Anne More was professed at St Monica’s in 1628 aged 17 (2:62). The chronicle records the conversion of her mother: Mrs More (who is not named) reportedly ‘found out the true religion’ ‘even in her childhood by reading books’ but was prevented from converting by her family who arranged her marriage to a Protestant, ‘not Mr More, but one she had before him’. The catalyst for her open conversion was a sermon preached in the ‘great church at Wells’, when a preacher attacked Marian devotion (‘railed out of measure against our Blessed Lady’). As he preached ‘there was raised on a sudden such a terrible tempest as frightened them all, and three persons in the church were cast down to the ground and all of them marked in their bodies, some with half-moons and some with stars’. Meanwhile the devil was allegedly seen by some of the congregation next to the pulpit, and went on to break down a pinnacle on the church roof, while ‘the leads of the clock were all melted with the heat of the tempest and lightning’. This apparently supernatural weather event prompted Anne’s mother to be reconciled. More briefly, it is mentioned that she ‘suffered very much for her religion’ both ‘of her [first] husband’ and ‘insomuch that she lived long in prison at the king’s Bench in Southwark’. After her husband’s death, Anne’s father William More offered to marry her, ‘and promised if she would have him he would become a Catholic’. William More was in fact reconciled ‘on his deathbed’: the chronicle does not tell us how long this was after their marriage, or hint that his non-conversion in the interim breached his promise; the story is one of divinely-inspired conversion, leading to heroic endurance, which itself prompts another conversion. In recounting conversions influenced by spouses the chronicler reaffirms the centrality of family: marital bonds become the location and cause of conversions (SMC 2:60–62).

Family, Childhood and a Culture of the Persecuted The questionnaire which the Responsa Scholarum answered asked about conversion in its fifth question (Have you ever been a heretic or schismatic?); under the same heading candidates were asked about persecution: ‘Whether he has ever suffered anything for the faith?’ In 1658, the ques-

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Table 1  Answers to question ‘Whether he has ever suffered anything for the faith?’ Total Yes No Not ‘No’ but responsa answered describing persecution of family

Total 1598– 1658 1658– 1685

Not answered but describing persecution of family

‘No’ but describing conflict

Not answered but describing conflict

595 497

86 97 66 63

410 366

13 10

58 55

5 4

6 3

98

20 44

34

3

3

1

3

tionnaire was changed, altering the format of answers considerably, but the inquiry about persecution remained in part 1, question 4. I gave some attention to answers to this question in previous work, but this chapter will consider further how family and childhood figure in these assessments of persecution (or its absence). Quantification when a question, and its answers, are so subjective, may seem contrived, but can give important context for individual accounts and offer at least some sense of their typicality. Table 1 gives crude numbers for responses to this question. As they indicate, answers were by no means formulaic. They are framed by the question posed, but also by each writer’s interpretation of what ‘persecution’ meant; and in fact (not to get too existential) of what ‘he’ meant. Most respondents perceived the question on persecution as relating to their own individual experiences; 12 specifically stated that they had not suffered anything for their faith, but recounted elsewhere their parents’ hardships. Five respondents did answer ‘yes’ on the basis of being included in their family’s persecution.15 There was no question on possible persecution of parents; only parents’ religion and social status was asked. But some 84 respondents found it important to introduce under that heading various hardships which they attributed to persecution. Persecution of your family was not the same as persecution of yourself; but it was part of your autobiography.

 LR553; LR899; LR946; LR949; LR1053.

15

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Table 2  Types of persecution Imprisonment Captured en route Respondent Parents/ immediate family

19 22

22 n/a

Financial loss 2 32

Prosecution (other than fines) 4 5

Exile Unofficial

0 4

22 3

Table 2 illustrates that, when respondents specified the kind of ‘suffering for the faith’ they referred to, the two main elements are imprisonment and financial penalties. Imprisonment was recorded by 39 respondents. Over half of these were arrested in the act of going to the seminaries, most of whom were held in some sort of custody for a period afterwards—and all of whom, by definition, later made a successful journey to Rome. Their recollections illustrate that enforcement of the penal laws could affect adolescents or children as well as adults, although apparently not frequently: 15 people had been imprisoned at under 21 and 2 at under 14. The Liber Primi Examinis and other sources record various other incidents in which would­be fugitives at young ages were captured.16 They might also find themselves arrested along with adults through association in Catholic worship, as were Francis Miles (LR517, 1613) and James Griffiths (LR496, 1611), at ages 17 and 11 respectively.17 Or they might be affected by their parents’ imprisonment: Francis Mayson (LR553, 1616), asked his place of birth, wrote he was born ‘in the north parts of England in the city called Durham, in which place my parents had been thrown in prison for the faith, in which prison I was born, and brought up for the space of a few years’. For children to live with parents in gaol may not have been uncommon, but most did not record their parents’ imprisonment as persecution of themselves. Francis Mayson, understandably, did think his birthplace gave him a claim to have been persecuted, for he repeated this information under his answer to Question 5. Again, Francis did not remember his birth, but his parents’ relayed memories of their imprisonment and his birth were a major part of his self-identity.  Underwood, Childhood pp. 93–7.  Cf Underwood, Childhood pp. 42, 44, 60, 70.

16 17

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The offence likeliest to incur financial penalties was recusancy, the conscientious refusal to attend Protestant church services—many, though not all, Catholics were recusants, at least some of the time. Financial penalties are often reported in connection with social status: ‘my parents are gentry/noble (nobiles) but impoverished due to persecution’ is a statement that recurs (in various forms). Descriptions can be as vague as that, or quite specific. Thus Charles Cansfield (LR781, 1639) stated that since his parents’ death his brother, the heir, was paying ‘£35 or £40’ per annum out of his £500 income; in 1629, a John Cansfield (perhaps Charles’ father rather than brother) of Robert Hall, Lancashire (Charles Cansfield’s birthplace) was recorded as compounding for £30 pa.18 George Holtby (LR507, 1612) stated in 1612 ‘My father, because having been offered the Oath [of Allegiance] six months ago he refused it, having been despoiled of all his goods, was sent to perpetual prison, my mother with four children [is] living from the generosity of others’.19 The State Papers contain letters seized from Robert Holtby (father of George) when he refused the Oath of Allegiance in 1611 and was imprisoned.20 Very few respondents had personally paid fines, probably because they were mostly young men; exceptions were Robert Grosvenor (LR532, 1614), who had been charged recusancy fines soon after he came into his inheritance (aged about 22); and Thomas Reading, LR740 (1633) who had been fined when he was arrested for having converted his parents to Catholicism; this was, as he said, an ‘escape’ because by law he was liable to be executed.21 The Crown’s records of recusancy fines which eventually reached the Exchequer between 1584 and 1639 were kept by the Exchequer (now TNA E/401).22 Some few names from the Responsa collection, whose owners described their parents as having suffered financial losses, can be traced or probably traced here: Ralph Babthorpe’s (LR497) father’s 18  CRS 53 p. 322 (Northern Composition Books, 1629–32, printed from transcriptions made c.1708 of now-lost originals). 19  The Oath of Allegiance was imposed by James I in 1606; Catholics debated over whether the Oath only involved legitimate civil allegiance to the monarch, or whether it conceded power to the King over spiritual matters and was therefore unacceptable. 20  SP14/65/no.11. 21  Under the treason statute of 1581. The obvious explanation would be that he purchased a pardon, but the calendars of pardon rolls for 1617–1629 (the deducible time-window for the events Reading describes) do not mention him. The ‘fine’, rather than an official transaction, may have been a bribe to have the charges dropped before trial. 22  These records have been collected and analysed by Dr Simon Healy of the History of Parliament, from whose unpublished databases I gratefully cite: Hereafter ExRS.

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­ ayments are recorded from 1607 to 1613; payments are also recorded p from individuals whose details seem to fit the parents of William Simpson (LR771), William Fitzwilliams (LR891) and Andrew Stonehouse (LR574). This is a small proportion of the 32 people who record financial persecution of their parents, plus three who reported suffering financial penalties themselves. The parents of a further six respondents from the Civil War era can be identified as having had property sequestrated by the parliamentarians:23 those of Edward and George Wakeman (LR847 and 848, brothers); William Fitzwilliams (LR891, see above); Edmund Napper (LR893); John Blundell (LR933); John Baines (LR940). George Symeon (LR824) and George Cotton alias Blount (LR895) may be of the same families as those found in the sequestration records.24 This leaves between 22 and 19 families where these reported financial losses are untraced. What is represented in these responses? Were young adults recalling general complaints current among their parents which were not actually based on specific losses? Were there financial penalties extracted from Catholics which did not end up in the Exchequer or its records? Simon Healy’s work on the Jacobean recusant Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby, Yorkshire, indicates that there was plenty of money paid over by Catholics which never reached the Exchequer.25 While the Exchequer received £90 per annum in recusancy compositions from him, Cholmeley also paid out money to recover livestock distrained by local officials (the Sheriff and his officers), fees to informers and others not to confiscate livestock, bribes not to have his house searched and on one occasion £1000 to ensure his pardon for harbouring two priests (legally, a capital felony). In 1605–1606, Cholmeley’s recusancy cost him £142 in various ways, of which only £36 reached the Exchequer.26 As well as the minor persecutions which played out in the hinterland of local law enforcement and whose records are difficult to find, if they 23  Sequestration could be imposed on grounds of recusancy, royalism or both; some respondents made no distinction, reporting suffering ‘for king and faith’. 24  Calendar of the proceedings of the committee for compounding, &c., 1643–1660, preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office ed. M.A. Everett Green (5 vols., London, 1889–92, reprinted Nendeln, 1972), pp. 2982, 2793, 3057, 3047,1953, 3185, 3179, 2270, 2943,104, 330,345, 455, 1851. 25  Dr Simon Healy (History of Parliament Trust), ‘Persecution and toleration in Jacobean Yorkshire: the case of Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby’, unpublished paper. I am grateful for permission to cite. 26  Healy, ‘Persecution and toleration’.

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s­urvive, young people sometimes recounted other incidents which they perceived as persecution but may have little connection to the laws against Catholicism. Laurence Blundeston (LR534, 1613), for example, wrote that his father had once bought land from William Cecil (Lord Burghley, Lord Treasurer, d.1598), but was then unable to gain possession from Cecil’s heir (Sir Thomas Cecil, later Earl of Exeter) and lost much money; he got nowhere in his legal suit, Laurence reported, because of the status of his opponent and because he was a Catholic. The court of Chancery’s records contain a case between Nicholas Blonstone and Thomas Cecil involving land in Nottinghamshire.27 Blundeston seems to have bought the lease of the (Crown) property from Cecil on the understanding that it included authority to fell timber, and to have then sold it on; later the Court of Exchequer found the timber-felling to have been unauthorised and charged all the leaseholders. Blundeston thus found himself both indebted to the queen and obliged to compensate the man he had sold to, due—he claimed—to Cecil’s misinformation. Hence the Star Chamber suit against Sir Thomas. The files do not inform us what the final judgement was; what role Cecil’s status, or prejudice against Blundeston’s religion, played in any finding would be, of course, impossible to say. But the frustrated Blundeston might well have perceived it, and his son would have picked this up. Bearing in mind that Laurence (22 in 1613) was aged between 7 and 11 at the time of these events, his recollection is naturally simplified and impressionistic. A later episode recounted by Laurence is easier to pin down to confessional divisions: his father was imprisoned for 3 years for writing a book against the Oath of Allegiance and had his goods confiscated. The Acts of the Privy Council confirm Blundeston’s imprisonment around 1614, in a warrant to transfer ‘Nicholas Blonstone [sic]’, prisoner, from the Gatehouse to the Marshalsea prison (20 March 1613/1614); I have not found any record of a book attributed to him.28 One or two accounts appear to be a half-understood version of something, which may not correlate directly to any particular statute and would leave little trace in the records. For example, John Laithwaite (LR400) wrote in 1603 that his father adhering to the Catholic faith and having been much harassed by the heretics to lose all his possessions and resources, until at last by the benefaction  TNA C 2/Jas I/B21/31.  Acts of the Privy Council vol. 33 (1613–14) p. 388.

27 28

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of Henry Earl of Derby he was restored to his goods, under this condition however, that he should submit his will and judgement to the aforesaid Earl, who had the power to commit or dismiss him insofar as seemed good to him [the earl]. He remained at home quiet and safe from all the insults of the heretics with the Earl protecting him for the space of two years. Which being passed, he was thrown into prison at Lancaster by the order of the same.

Laythwaite senior was released, sick, after two months and died shortly after. John adds that his mother ‘after the death of my father persisting in the same faith, for more or less three years was afflicted with the loss of her goods and of her livestock, but at last was taken away from these troubles by death’. Henry Stanley, the fourth earl of Derby (1531–1593) was a prominent landowner and a powerful figure in Lancashire, serving as Lord Lieutenant of the county, a commissioner for ecclesiastical causes and a member of the Council of the North.29 His exercising an unofficial, semi-benevolent protective power over a local Catholic seems entirely plausible, but John Laythwaite does not tell us how or why this relationship was initiated nor what motivated Derby’s turn to severity. Laythwaite alleged that his mother subsequently had livestock confiscated. This was a penalty that could arise from recusancy, as Richard Cholmeley’s account books record.30 There is another reference to livestock confiscation in the St Monica’s Chronicle (2:200–1): the nuns, Anne and Bridget Gifford, were daughters of Walter Gifford of Chillington, Staffordshire (the Giffords were a well-known Catholic landowning family for several generations). But Walter ‘condescended to the time awhile’, which means he attended Protestant church services according to law. Yet he ‘maintained a priest in the house and assisted all the Catholics thereabout with spiritual help, and when their beasts were to be seized on for their conscience, all his ground was filled with them, to be saved till the officers departed’. The anecdote is revealing—about, for example, how prominent outward conformists functioned within Catholic 29  Knafla, Louis A. ‘Stanley, Henry, fourth earl of Derby (1531–1593), magnate’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2015). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/978019861 4128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-26272 30  See Healy, ‘Persecution and toleration’ and above. Healy’s main source for this is The Memorandum Book of Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby, 1602–1623 (North Yorkshire county record office publications XLIV) (Northallerton, 1988).

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communities and how law enforcement could be evaded. The vague ‘when’ does not tell us the date of this occurrence, or whether it happened once, twice or regularly every year; nor is it explained how Gifford ensured that the sheriff’s officials accepted all these temporary extra livestock as Gifford’s property. Dorothy Musgrove, professed in 1632, supplied an account that was both personal memory and family lore: ‘upon a time’, her parents’ house in or near Hexham was searched and while ‘finding nothing’ the searchers—one of them named as ‘Tarbox’ (sic.), stole a silver basin and ewer. Dorothy’s father John resolved to get it back ‘either by fair or foul means’ and went to confront the pursuivants ‘in the place… where they resided’. A fight ensued in which Musgrove was knocked down and blades were drawn. At this point his daughter, being then a little child, passed by that way as she was going to school, and, hearing a noise, knowing that her father was there with the pursuivants, went in to see what the matter was. Seeing her father lie along and they upon him, she went forth instantly and called for help. Whereupon a man that loved him and others came in speedily and rescued him out of their hands; but so soon as he was gotten on his feet none could resist him, but he made them perforce deliver the silver which they had stolen, and moreover to pay for the surgery of his fingers… (SMC 2:88–9).

It is not surprising that this encounter impressed itself firmly on the child Dorothy’s memory (she was less than 8 years old). But of course she did not ‘remember’ what happened in the house before she arrived; this, if anything, must be her father’s account: and it is notable that, for instance, the text emphasises that although they were ‘fearing he [Musgrove] would come to blows’, it was ‘one of them’ who ‘before he was aware, tripped his feet and laid him along, whereupon he [Musgrove presumably] presently drew out his dagger’ (Ibid). This kind of incident—a house-search resulting in no arrests, and a theft privately redressed by the victim—would be unlikely to make it into an official record. That Musgrove forced them to ‘pay for the surgery of his fingers’ could imply recourse to the law-courts, but the not-terribly-­ clear text could also imply cash extracted on the spot. I have not found a lawsuit involving Musgrove and Tarbox/Tarbock. Recusancy fines on lands of John Musgrave in Northumberland were paid between 1612 and

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1617.31 Dorothy’s story is in a sense one of successful resistance: not only did the Musgroves escape uncompromised from the house-search, but Musgrove retrieved his property and got compensation for his injuries. It follows another anecdote in which a friend who was a Justice ‘called him once, saying that he would tender him the oath [of allegiance, presumably], but that he knew… he would not take it’. So while another man ‘quaking for fear’ of the material penalties took the oath, Musgrove ‘for his courage and constancy escaped to have it once tendered him’ (SMC 2:88). Standing up to persecution, both morally and physically, enables Musgrove to escape its worst consequences (a carefully nuanced resistance—we are not offered an endorsement of revolt or rioting: Musgrove confronts the pursuivants not over the search of his house, but a theft committed during it and they allegedly start the physical fight). If Mary Copley shaped her material in order to suggest this moral, Dorothy Musgrove provided it, from her own memories and her father’s account of his dealings with Protestant authorities.32 The account also indicates how relatively young children could be aware of, and involved in, the effects of religious conflict. Dorothy was sent to live with her mother’s family (i.e., in fact, Mary Copley’s parents) at age eight; by which time she was already aware of issues like ‘the oath’ and her father’s refusal of it, had experienced house-searches and had taken an active part in a confrontation with pursuivants. She was integrated into a community whose self-identity was bound up with persecution, and she learned to play her part in preserving and communicating a history of oppression and resistance. Similarly, the description of Anne Stonehouse’s family in the Chronicle (SMC 1:187–9) shifts between episodes that could have been Anne’s own memories, and stories she had been told by her parents. It begins with an obscure reference to her grandfather: that when he died ‘the officers took away a house which he had bought, because he was a Catholic’. Again, the context and immediate causes are unclear, with Copley relaying Anne’s memories of her father’s description of his childhood memories. Copley’s informant could, however, recount in detail how her father, then a schoolboy, being ‘a very towardly youth’ began earning money by making 31  ExRS. A case in Star Chamber in 1608 involved a servant of John Tarbock, messenger of the Privy Chamber, who had allegedly been attacked by a Catholic in revenge for his part in prosecuting Catholics for hearing Mass: TNA STAC 8/16/15. 32  Dorothy Musgrove in fact lived several years with her uncle William Copley, Mary’s father; but this was some time after Mary had entered the convent. SMC 1:89.

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coloured straw hats. Impressed by his entrepreneurial spirit, ‘a man who had a good trade of working in jet and amber’ took Christopher Stonehouse on as apprentice (1:187). Stonehouse facilitated his master’s conversion; and on his master’s death took care of his son, ultimately sharing the business with him. It was then that Stonehouse began harbouring priests regularly. The Stonehouses, tradesmen and craftsmen, were far from peripheral to Catholic networks. The chronicle recounts, presumably via Anne, her father’s repeated imprisonments, including his confinement in a ‘dungeon’ whose previous incumbent had died ‘and in the night the rats and mice did so vex him with noise as if the dead man’s ghost had been thereabout’, which reads like Anne’s relaying of Stonehouse’s account of his own experiences and fears. Also described, presumably a story current in the family, is his arrest when ‘his wife lay in with her first child’, the ‘officers of justice… thinking that for the love of his wife and child and for not to be absent from them he would yield’ (1:188). The Stonehouse narrative acknowledges how influential Catholic networks could be: it was, apparently, ‘the priests’ who ‘provided [Christopher Stonehouse] of a wife, named Frances Smith, a good Catholic like himself’. It was also the priests who ‘provided [Anne] still of places in Catholic gentlemen’s houses’ (1:188); while employed at one of these, Anne Stonehouse decided on a monastic vocation. Notably, while gentry houses were the locations, in Stonehouse’s narrative it was the seminary priests themselves who were the linchpins and chief actors in Catholic networks. The account of Anne Stonehouse illustrates how a child from (at most) a ‘middling sort’ background could receive and pass on a history of Catholic endurance encompassing three generations. Both the Responsa Scholarum, in which young men were invited to consider themselves as victims of persecution, and the Chronicle of St Monica’s, which wove women’s memories into a single document designed to convey to posterity the heroism of oppressed English Catholics, remain dependent on individual choices to interpret their experiences in such modes. Whether certain incidents were reported as ‘suffering for the faith’ might depend on the subject’s perception. Twenty-five Rome respondents mentioned incidents of aggression or injustice by private individuals as a kind of unofficial persecution, some referring to events during childhood or youth; these included John Ravenhill (LR839 1646) who had ‘suffered hatred, insults, scornful names, and also sometimes had stones thrown at his back for the sake of religion’.33 Some also recorded verbal insults as  Responsa Scholarum Part II LR839.

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‘suffering for the faith’,34 while others were not sure: ‘Thus far the divine goodness has not granted me… to suffer anything in [the faith’s] cause, unless I am said to suffer when I reluctantly suffered childish taunts (which are thrown freely at Catholics by Protestants)’ wrote 20-year-old Frances Purcell (LR811) in 1644. William Caldwell (LR388, 1602) said he had suffered ‘nothing worthy of memory’ for the faith, only that his father had declared he would cut William out of his will if reports of his conversion proved true. John Capes (LR478 1600) answered yes, he had suffered ‘certain disturbances and troubles’, unspecified, on his conversion; but Thomas Gaunt answered negatively that ‘I have suffered little or nothing for the Catholic faith’ (LR475 1600). John Curtis (LR478 1609) gave a qualified positive: he ‘suffered nothing’—‘except those things which are suffered by all’. And these, being presumably common knowledge to his audience, are not specified.

Interpreting Family History If these texts create for English Catholicism a history of persecution and endurance out of the patchwork of childhood and family memories, they also show family histories being shaped to fit that framework. Van Hyning has discussed Mary Copley’s Chronicle as an exercise in ‘subsumed autobiography’ and how her desire to transmit a version of her family’s history shaped the historiography of her religious community, her spiritual ‘family’.35 Such concerns extend to the entry on Elizabeth Copley, Mary’s first cousin.36 Elizabeth, professed in 1624, was the daughter of Anthony Copley, brother of William. Anthony Copley had a chequered career, as a soldier fighting for Spain in the Netherlands, a provocatively Catholic writer, a supporter of the anti-Jesuit, self-proclaimed loyalist Catholic faction and finally as a conspirator in the Bye Plot of 1604, a plan to force James I to concede religious toleration.37 When arrested in 1604, Copley  LR422, LR695, LR707.  Van Hyning, ‘Expressing selfhood’. Van Hyning discusses in particular Copley’s emphasis on links to Sir Thomas More and on a tradition of learned women. The imaginative construction of monastic communities as families is seen, most obviously, in the way superiors are addressed as parents, as well as community members as siblings (‘sisters’ or ‘brothers’). 36  SMC 1:261–2. See the Copley family tree at https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/ Copley.pdf accessed 31/01/2019. 37  Discussions of Copley’s life and literary works include Susannah B. Monta, ed., A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic Response to The Faerie Queene (Manchester: Manchester 34 35

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gave information about his fellow plotters and as a result he was exiled rather than executed after his conviction for treason. After leaving England, he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, dying on his way back. His daughter and niece fit this ambivalent story into its place in the history of a persecuted community. In the Chronicle’s version, Copley is presented as fixated on worldly ambition, ‘gaining the favour of great men’, perhaps trying to escape his liminal status as ‘a younger brother and always a Catholic’; this led him to become involved in the Bye Plot. But the wording of the Chronicle suggests Copley was never a traitor, but always intended to be a double agent: ‘… whereof he unwisely made himself one of the accomplices, and when all the whole matter was revealed to him, he went and disclosed it to the Council, thinking to gain some great recompense for his labour. But they, seeing he had so far engaged himself in the matter, proclaimed him traitor…’. Thus Copley’s fault was not treason, but ambition and folly in drastically misjudging his plan to curry favour. This ‘exterior cross’, unfair (he was not really a traitor), but not undeserved (he brought the injustice on himself) ‘turned out… to his greater spiritual good’, when once banished he journeyed to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, Copley and his companion Ambrose Vaux were ‘knighted at our Lord’s Sepulchre’. This is his last act, since (we hear briefly) ‘in their return home he died by the way’. So the intrusion of actual treason into the narrative is explained away, and Anthony Copley’s story becomes one of edifying conversion of life and a caution against worldliness. Noticeably, the chronicle’s version of Copley’s life echoes the journey of the protagonist of his own poem, A Fig for Fortune. Copley’s Knight begins as one who has been unfairly (he feels) cheated out of temporal success and exiled from his worldly home, but who as a result finds the true faith and his destiny as a knight defending ‘Sion’, an allegory for the Catholic Church. Copley, having lost the game of worldly advancement, finds spiritual fulfilment at the pilgrimage site of the physical Jerusalem, where he becomes a knight. It is not improbable that A Fig for Fortune, published in 1596, was known to members of Copley’s family and of the St Monica’s community and hence Mary Copley deliberately shaped her uncle’s  biography to reflect his literary work. University Press, 2016), ‘Introduction’, 1–62; Clare Reid, ‘Anthony Copley and the Politics of Catholic Loyalty 1590–1604’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 43.2 (2012): 391–413; L.  Underwood, ‘Sion and Elizium: National identity, religion and allegiance in Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune’ Renaissance and Reformation 41:2 (2018) 65–96.

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Similar re-working is seen in the chronicle’s description of Mary Pole’s family (professed 1622) (SMC 1:241–44).38 Mary Pole was ‘daughter to Geoffrey Pole of the blood royal, for his father was brother to Cardinal Pole, of happy memory, and son of the worthy Countess of Salisbury, Margaret Plantagenet, daughter unto the Duke of Clarence, brother to King Edward IV’ (1:241). Other accounts of the Pole family have little more to say of Geoffrey Pole than that he was the family failure who, under questioning, accused his family of treason, thus helping to ensure the executions of his mother and brother; who attempted suicide; and who survived, with his descendants, in relative poverty and obscurity Meanwhile his mother, regarded as a martyr, and his brother the Cardinal, who publicly condemned King Henry’s schism and was later Mary I’s Archbishop of Canterbury, at least took the Plantagenet dynasty out in a blaze of glory.39 In the St Monica’s version, we are told that Cardinal Pole ‘stoutly withstood King Henry the Eighth in his wicked doings, when he broke off with the See Apostolic’. The accusations against the family, of plotting rebellion against Henry VIII and of communication with Reginald Pole (who had by this time rejected allegiance to Henry as well as Henry’s ecclesiastical policies) are simplified to ‘they suborned accusations against her that she [Margaret Pole] had relieved her son’ (1:241). Sir Geoffrey’s betrayal is not mentioned: only that he was condemned with his brother and mother, and that on her execution he ‘took such extreme grief…that he fell extreme sick, and was come even to the point of death…’. His wife obtained a reprieve of execution from the king, and his recovery from God by means of ‘five Masses…in honour of our Saviour’s Five Wounds’, and with his estates confiscated they lived on his wife’s inheritance (1:242). Copley then moves on to discuss Geoffrey Pole junior, father of Mary the nun, ‘a most constant Catholic, a harbourer of priests’ and in particular an incident when he forced the pursuivant who had come to arrest him to eat his warrant at swordpoint (1:242–3): again, an incident at which Mary was not present—it is presumably her father’s report that the chronicler relayed. So, through his granddaughter’s ver Aged 39 (SMC 1:244), so born in 1583.  Hazel Pierce, Margaret Pole, 1473–1541: Loyalty, lineage and leadership (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 128–40, pp. 181–3; Mayer, T. F. ‘Pole, Sir Geoffrey (d. 1558), alleged conspirator’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2008). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128e-22447 38 39

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sion of the family history, Geoffrey Pole becomes not the weak link who brought the dynasty down, but the link which connected these early resisters of heretical tyranny with the recusant communities of late Tudor England and the English monastic tradition which St Monica’s sought to revive overseas. One effect of the narration of family experiences, usually by those who were children or adolescents at the time, in both the St Monica’s Chronicle and the Responsa Scholarum, is the creation of a kind of ahistorical history. The accounts rarely include dates, precise locations or explicit references to the laws which authorise these incidents; sometimes even the protagonists’ identities are unclear. Still less do we get information on the local or national political context, something scholars who are interested in such must deduce. Catherine James’ narrative, for example, tells us neither that her father’s conformity occurred shortly after the Gunpowder Plot nor even that his condemnation to ‘praemunire and perpetual imprisonment’ was on account of the Oath of Allegiance. We are thus left with narratives of a generalised ‘persecution’ which seems to have no flashpoints, no particularised motives, even no specific laws. This may be partly choice, in that projecting a narrative of general official cruelty and Catholic suffering (rather than of fluctuating relationships often determined by politics and characterised by intra-Catholic dilemmas and disagreements) is precisely the aim of the writers of martyrology/persecution histories. Yet it is also a function of ‘history’ composed of family histories, from the pre-adult memories of people who at the time of writing could not check their recollections against written records or even against their parents’ more precise knowledge. Martyrology intends, in part, to place its protagonists outside and above their temporal context as witnesses to timeless truths and victims of the perennial forces of falsehood. In the English Catholic case, until modern times the palpable aim of recording martyrdom and persecution was to demonstrate English Catholics’ place in the cosmic reality of martyrdom; dates and places were important only for verification, and historical and political context engaged with only to demonstrate its ultimate insignificance to the main event.40 The free-floating narratives of St Monica’s and the Responsa both emerge from and contribute to this type of construction of English Catholic history. 40  Michael Questier’s current work on the writing of English Catholic martyrology until 1970 discusses extensively the centrality of the campaign for canonisation to the historiography.

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Family and Hagiography Just as the personal and family recollections of the Responsa draw on the genre of martyrology, so some martyrologies draw on the family-oriented life-writing displayed in the Chronicle and Responsa. The second biography of Thomas More to be published in English41 was written by Cresacre More, Sir Thomas’ great-grandson and it repeatedly draws attention to itself as a family history.42 Cresacre More opens by characterising his work almost as a domestic endeavour, written for the ‘spiritual behoofe’ of ‘my selfe and my Children’, described as ‘brookes’ derived from that ‘sea’ (Sir Thomas) and ‘twigs’ drawing sap from ‘the fruitfull roote of his noble excellencies’ (Sig A1r). After comparing his talent unfavourably with previous biographers, More adds that he writes the Life ‘as he, who only upon a naturall affection to his Ancestour, trusting chiefly of Gods ayde, and this Saint’s holie praiers, is emboldened to say somewhat thereof’ (sig A2r). He further emphasises his personal connection within the family one by adding that he himself was baptised on the anniversary of Sir Thomas More’s martyrdom, a date evidently noted within the family three generations on43 and also that he has inherited the family property; although the youngest of five surviving sons, his brothers are all priests or religious. Cresacre More’s hagiography frequently veers towards genealogy. He opens with praise of Sir John More, Sir Thomas’ father and reassures his readers that, though its most illustrious scion, Thomas More was not the ‘first of his house’, that is, his ancestors were gentlemen. John More ‘bare Armes from his birth, having his Coate quartered’, and it is only due to ‘king Henries seasure of all our Euidences’ that the family tree can be traced no further back. He also gives details such as the family name of Sir Thomas’ mother (Handcombe of Holiwell, Beds.) (sig B[4]r-v), and the current heads of both the Colte family, from which Sir Thomas’ first wife came, and Sir Thomas’ stepmother’s family. 41  William Roper’s biography was first published in 1626; Thomas Stapleton’s earlier work, in his Tres Thomae, was in Latin. 42  Michael Questier’s ‘Catholicism, kinship and the public memory of Sir Thomas More’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53:3 (2002) 476–509 explored the descendants of Thomas More as a network, which he argues became a group within the faction of English Catholics campaigning for episcopal government. Katie Forsyth ‘The Matter and Materiality of Thomas More’s Workes’ (unpubl. paper 2015) considered the role of family in that earlier memorialisation of More. 43  This also emulates Thomas Stapleton who notes in his own preface that he was born in the month and year of More’s martyrdom. Reynolds edn of Hallett’s translation of Tres Thomae p. xvi.

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Some narrative elements possibly reflect oral traditions within the family, as well as Cresacre More’s concern with his identity as Sir Thomas’ heir. Recounting More’s martyrdom, Cresacre More first describes ‘his onlie sonne, my grandfather’, John More, appearing to ask Sir Thomas’ blessing and only then rehearses Margaret Roper’s meeting with her father after his trial (sig.Vv2v-sig.Vv3r, quotation at sig.Vv2v); later, when he quotes Thomas More’s last letter conveying a blessing to his son, daughter-­ in-­law, their named children ‘and all that they shall have’, the author reminds his reader that he personally can therefore hope ‘to have some parte of his blessing’. In a later passage (sig.Yy[4]v-sig.Zx1r) he chooses to emphasise how the descendants of those grandchildren born after Thomas More’s death, and therefore not directly included in his blessing, have lost the faith, compared to the descendants of Thomas More junior who have kept it (i.e., Cresacre’s own line). This seems to be based on a syntactically odd reading of ‘and all that they shall have’, to refer to the offspring of the just-named children of John More; whereas a more natural reading would be that More’s blessing is conveyed to John, his wife, their children to date and any subsequent children. But Cresacre More offers a reading which enables him to interpret the family’s subsequent history, including defections from the Catholic faith, in relation to the martyr he presents as its defining figure; and also to privilege his own branch’s claim to be Sir Thomas’ spiritual as well as temporal heirs. The intertwining of these two, spiritual and temporal inheritance, is the driving force of his biography.44 The Abstracte of the life and death of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe was not written by a family member, but dedicated to one.45 The text is an abridgement of John Mush’s lengthy, unprinted True report of the life and martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow (c.1586) heavily focused on Clitherow martyrdom.46 It is dedicated to Anne Clitherow, Margaret’s daughter, who had become a nun at St Ursula’s convent in Louvain. The main text of the Abstracte is not explicitly concerned with Anne—although Margaret Clitherow’s children are mentioned, Anne is not foregrounded. 44  This assertion of More descendants being ‘heirs’ of Sir Thomas’ virtues is seen in other printed works dedicated to them, and in some references in correspondence: Questier, ‘Public memory’. 45  Mush, John, An Abstracte of the Life and Martirdome of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe (1619) (facsimile edition, D.M. Rogers, Ilkley, 1979). 46  Printed in J. Morris (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic forefathers related by themselves (3 vols., London, 1872–77), vol. 3 pp. 360–440.

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But in the dedication a concern similar to Cresacre More’s with relating biological and spiritual inheritance is seen. Anne, as the daughter of a martyr, is described as ‘nobly discended’ (sigA2v), Margaret’s spiritual status as ‘inriched with the crowne of Martyrdome’ (sig.A2v) substituting for social status (the Clitherows were mere tradesmen). This contrasts with Cresacre More, who having discussed at length his family’s gentry credentials, hastens to add that of course More’s virtues made his family ‘more to be respected’ and that its lack in their descendants would make it ‘base & of small reckoning’ (sig.B3v-sig.B[4]r). But in both  works spiritual and temporal ‘nobility’ are merged, with the former acknowledged (just) as taking precedence. The defining feature of worldly nobility is that it is inherited; Clitherow’s hagiographer, like More’s, plays with the notion that spiritual nobility is also. Of course, as a matter of theology, holiness cannot be inherited, but as a literary device it proves irresistible. The author of the Abstracte draws attention to the fact that Margaret was pregnant with Anne at the time of her conversion to Catholicism, and suggests that because ‘yow were the fruite of her wombe, at the same time when the grace of the holy Ghoste did call her vnto the union of the Catholicke Church’ there is ‘good cause to beleaue that parte of the abundant grace which was bestowed on your blessed Mother, extended it self also to you in her wombe…’ (sigA1v-­A2r): grace is imagined as being transmitted through the physical sharing involved in gestation. Anne’s life in the convent is ‘tracing [Margaret’s] steppes in a most contemplative course of lyfe’ (sig.A2v). Clitherow’s vocation is conceived with her mother’s conversion, and is the child of Margaret’s martyrdom. In this, the Abstracte echoes the St Monica’s Chronicle, which (as noted above) speaks of Anne as following in her mother’s footsteps. It should be observed, though, that Anne was never a member of St Monica’s: when the English sisters left St Ursula’s to found their English convent, Sister Anne remained behind, ‘because she wanted friends to allow her the means’ (SMC 1:33): with few funds, the new community could only afford to include nuns who brought a substantial dowry with them—generally provided by the wealthy, high-status kin the butcher’s daughter lacked. Yet Clitherow is made a virtual member of the community: she ‘assisted… much in the erection of this monastery… although she never came hither herself… she was a good agent therein by counsel and assisting of them’; Anne Clitherow also ‘rejoiced to hear of our good progress and increase here; for we used commonly to send our scholars before their clothing to see the English that remained there’ (SMC 1:33)

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(there were four including Clitherow). Her nationality allows the Chronicler to claim Anne for St Monica’s, and hence her martyred mother as part of the community’s genealogy, just as Thomas More is claimed via his adopted daughter, ancestress of Mother Margaret Clement. What is not touched on in the Asbstracte is Clitherow’s emotional loss caused by her mother’s execution when Anne was 12. English Catholic martyrologists (and martyrs) were aware that martyrdom meant bereaving one’s kin, and that it potentially violated temporal family obligations, whether those of parents towards children or of adult children towards ageing parents; they acknowledged and attempted to resolve the personal tragedy and the social rupture in various ways.47 Yet, ultimately, what was required was to transcend such emotions; to value spiritual gain above earthly loss; and to recognise martyrdom as an honour. An episode at another English Convent, the Dominicans at Brussels, illustrates this. ‘Handed down in the community’ was the story that when Lord Stafford fell victim to Titus Oates’ fabricated ‘Popish Plot’ in 1680, his daughter, Sister Mary Delphina happened to be reader in the refectory the week of her father’s execution, and Mother Prioress Barbara Boyle, wishing to have the account of it read at table to the religious, appointed another reader for the occasion. Sister Delphina begged so earnestly to be permitted to read it herself, that our Mother could not find it in her heart to withstand her. With wonderful, almost supernatural, composure, she read the whole of it through without betraying the least discomposure, but next morning it was found that her hair had become completely white. She was about twenty-­ two years old.48

Honouring Stafford’s martyrdom supersedes personal grief; Sister Delphina’s courage lies in transcending her bereavement. But of course, her heroism depends on there being grief to conquer—on the fact that she clearly found the whole experience traumatic, and what her resolve did not allow her voice or actions to express, is instead marked permanently on her body, in her whitened hair. Sister Delphina’s honouring her father’s martyrdom exactly as she would if there were no family connection is praiseworthy because there is a family connection.

 Underwood, Childhood, Chap. 9.  Passage quoted in A. Hamilton, preface to SMC vol. 2, pp. xii–xiii, citing the ‘old annals’ of the English Dominicans of Brussels. The original manuscript has not yet been traced. 47 48

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Family is not necessarily emphasised in hagiographies that have close kinship connections with their subject. The life of James Duckett, executed for trading in Catholic books in 1601, was, according to the manuscript, written by his son, a Carthusian monk (his name is not given).49 Aside from giving this information, though, the text does not dwell on the relationship, either to elaborate on Duckett junior’s identity as a martyr’s son or to emphasises the text’s authority as first-hand testimony. Only once does the author remind the reader of his presence in the events narrated, when he says that Duckett engaged in ‘a poor Taylers trade’, including making vestments, ‘church stuffe’ and ‘all necessaries for the alter’: ‘This only is my relation as far as I remember’, he writes, ‘for I have sen him busied with such like work’.50 The Life also gives an unusal amount of detail on Duckett’s series of imprisonments, the circumstances of each arrest and his wife’s efforts to obtain his freedom, much of which reads as though it came direct from Mrs Duckett; but this is made explicit only once, when we read that ‘of 12 years he was a married man som 9 years at times he lived a prisoner as his wife who best knew it hath often reported’.51 In this text, the author seems to exploit his privileged access to information, but to wish to render himself invisible. All we are told of the child’s experience of his father’s eventful life and violent death is that he knew his father was making vestments.

Conclusion Stating that family was important to English Catholic identity might seem a clichè, and further to reinforce a historiography that saw it as becoming a matter solely of family tradition, existing in little islands around the houses of old gentry families, insulated from the social, political and historical currents of British history. This was the impression of Catholicism eloquently captured by Evelyn Waugh: by the eighteenth century, ‘The Church survived here and there in scattered households, regarded by the world as, at the best, something Gothic and slightly absurd, like a ghost or 49   A complete version of the Life is found in an eighteenth-century transcription, Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives Ms.R941 pp. 623–[634]. Another MS in what seems to be a sixteenth-century hand is incomplete: Archives of the Archdioces of Westminster, A7 no. 74 (pp. 339–342). 50  BAA R941 p. 626, cf. AAW A7 no. 74 p. 340. 51  BAA R941 p.[631].

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a family curse’.52 This, a layman’s perception of English Catholic history in the mid-twentieth century, seems to have an echo in John Bossy’s thesis of the development of English Catholicism as ‘seigneurial religion’, though of course his analysis was more complex than the image summoned up by Waugh.53 Even so, Bossy’s interpretation no longer stands unmodified: although no one would deny the importance of gentry patronage and networks to early modern English Catholicism, research on Catholicism in parishes, in urban settings and among the middle classes has demonstrated that it did not become exclusively a ‘seigneurial religion’.54 Compilations like the St Monica’s Chronicle derive much material from narratives about and by members of gentry families, but they do not reduce English Catholicism to a series of aristocratic family trees. Non-gentry Catholics, such as Anne Stonehouse, also passed on their family stories to contribute to their own and their community’s self-fashioning. The centrality of family in these sources is not about the extent to which Catholicism depended on particular families, whatever their social status, but how individual genealogies created the symbolic ‘genealogy’ of English Catholic communities, the culture of a minority. What individual Catholic remembered about their childhoods, combined with what they had been told about their families, were central to creating the collective history which facilitates group identity. The telling of stories of persecution encourages individuals to look for and attribute value to such episodes in their own past, and such valued memories in turn promote oral (and written) traditions of this sort. Personal experiences combine with the read or heard memories of others, and thus English Catholic communities created a culture of the persecuted, a collective identity as a minority, which was to endure throughout the early modern period. Family history was a key ingredient; but blood-kinship was not essential to participation in this corporate history, as Mary Copley’s ‘adoption’ of individual sisters’ families to be ancestors of her whole community indicates. As any St Monica’s nun without the slightest connection to the Clements or Mores was encouraged through her community’s written history to see these archetypal English Catholic heroines as her ancestors, so  E. Waugh, Edmund Campion (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 3dn, 1961), p. 199.  Bossy, English Catholic Community. 54  See, for example, M.B. Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of parish and town 1558–1778 (Catholic Record Society, 1999); W.J. Sheils, ‘“Getting on” and “getting along” in parish and town: Catholics and their neighbours in England’ in Kaplan et  al., Catholic communities in Protestant states pp. 67–83. 52 53

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any Catholic could identify every story about someone’s parents’ house being raided as her story. To be a Catholic was to belong among the persecuted. The last word may perhaps go to Edmund Neville, whose answer to the ‘persecution question’ in his Responsa (LR438) illustrates eloquently how growing up as a Catholic in England created this identity and sheds light on all the half-answers and non-answers to this question among his fellow respondents. Born in 1563, Neville entered Rome in 1606. His father, John Neville, had supported the 1569 Northern Rising and consequently fled to Flanders, while his property was confiscated; his children were brought up mostly by a relative. Edmund Neville was ordained in 1608, entered the Society of Jesus in 1609 and died in 1646.55 No, Neville wrote, ‘I have never suffered any persecution directly either in person or goods; indirectly, however, I think I have borne much’. He had lost the inheritance he would have had had his parents not lost it ‘for the faith’ (not strictly true: it was the rebellion which caused his father’s losses). Otherwise, If to labour much; to keep vigil often; to live clandestinely; to have no permanent home; to flee from one city to another; to expect always the persecutions of ministers; to put up with injuries; to endure taunts; to have the care of four sisters… to visit poor Catholics afflicted in prisons without any help to give; to see the richer ones paying innumerable fines; to behold others oppressed with misery and want; to pass the servants of God hanging from the gallows, and finally to hear in silence sacred things, and God himself, derided with blasphemies can rightly be said to suffer something for the faith, then indeed I, not only in general but also in particular, have suffered something for the Catholic faith.

Bibliography Primary Sources Manuscript Archives of the Archdioces of Westminster A7 no.74 (pp.339–342). The National Archives, London  Anstruther Seminary Priests vol.2 p. 230.

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STAC 8/16/15 SP 14/65/no.11 Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives Ms.R941 pp.623–[634]

Printed J.R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, new series, (London, from 1890, reprinted Nendeln, 1967). E. Henson (ed.) Registers of the English College, Valladolid, 1589–1862 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.30) (Published for the Society, 1930). A. Kenny, (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part One: 1598–1621 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.54) (published for the Society, 1962); Kenny, ‘Introduction’ to Kenny (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part Two, 1622–85 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.55) (published for the Society, 1963). Mush, ‘Clitherow’, pp.367–8. True report of the life and martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’ J.  Morris (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic forefathers related by themselves (3 vols., London, 1872–77), vol.3 pp.360–440. Mush, John, An Abstracte of the Life and Martirdome of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe (1619) (facsimile edition, D.M. Rogers, Ilkley, 1979). A. Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran: at St. Monica’s in Louvain (now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon) vol.1 1548–1625, vol.2 1625–44 (Edinburg, 1904). CRS 53 p.322 (Northern Composition Books, 1629–32, printed from transcriptions made c.1708 of now-lost originals).

Secondary Sources G. Anstruther Seminary Priests vol.2 p.230. J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975). C. Bowden ‘Collecting the lives of early modern women religious: obituary writing and the development of collective memory and corporate identity’ in Women’s History Review 19:1 (2010) 7–20. C. Bowden & J. Kelly, eds., The English Convents in Exile 1600–1800: Communities, culture, identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). C.H. Bowler, ‘Sir Henry James of Smarden, Kent and Clerkenwell, recusant’ in A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (eds.), Studies in London history presented to P.E. Jones, (London: Hodder, 1969), pp.289–313. M.A.E. Green (ed.) Calendar of the proceedings of the committee for compounding, &c., 1643–1660, preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (5 vols., London, 1889–92, reprinted Nendeln, 1972).

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Dr Simon Healy (History of Parliament Trust), ‘Persecution and toleration in Jacobean Yorkshire: the case of Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby’, unpublished paper. I am grateful for permission to cite. These records have been collected and analysed by Dr Simon Healy of the History of Parliament, from whose unpublished databases I gratefully cite: Hereafter ExRS. A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (eds.), Studies in London history presented to P.E. Jones, (London: Hodder, 1969). Victoria van Hyning, ‘Naming names: Chroniclers, Scribes and Editors of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, 1631–1906’ in C. Bowden & J. Kelly, eds., The English Convents in Exile 1600–1800: Communities, culture, identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp.87–108. Victoria van Hyning, ‘Expressing selfhood in the convent: Anonymous chronicling and subsumed autobiography’ in Recusant History 32:2 (2014) 219–234. B. Kaplan, B. Moore, H. van Nierop, J. Pollmann (eds.), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Knafla, Louis A. ‘Stanley, Henry, fourth earl of Derby (1531–1593), magnate’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2015). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128e-26272 Mayer, T. F. ‘Pole, Sir Geoffrey (d. 1558), alleged conspirator’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2008). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-22447 Susannah B. Monta, ed., A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic Response to The Faerie Queene (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), “Introduction,” 1–62. Hazel Pierce, Margaret Pole, 1473–1541: Loyalty, lineage and leadership (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). Michael Questier’s, ‘Catholicism, kinship and the public memory of Sir Thomas More’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53:3 (2002) 476–509. Clare Reid, ‘Anthony Copley and the Politics of Catholic Loyalty 1590–1604’, Sixteenth Century Journal 43.2 (2012): 391–413. M.B. Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of parish and town 1558–1778 (Catholic Record Society, 1999). W.J. Sheils, ‘“Getting on” and “getting along” in parish and town: Catholics and their neighbours in England’ in Kaplan et al., Catholic communities in Protestant states pp.67–83.

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L.  Underwood, ‘Sion and Elizium: National identity, religion and allegiance in Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune’ Renaissance and Reformation 41:2 (2018) 65–96. L. Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent in post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). L.  Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity and autobiography at the English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, Historical Journal 55:2 (2012) 379–74. C.  Walker, ‘“Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letter-writing in early modern English convents’ in J. Daybell (ed.) Early modern women’s letter-writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). E. Waugh, Edmund Campion (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 3dn, 1961), p.199. D. Wood (ed.) The Church and childhood (Studies in Church History 31) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

Electronic Resources Who were the nuns? Database.

Religious Division and the Family: Co-operation and Conflict

Early Modern Child Abduction in the Name of Religion Joel F. Harrington

On Tuesday, April 13, 1762, Sara Maria Erffens gave birth to a baby boy in the Dutch village of Vaals, located at the modern three-country intersection of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. After a few days, when the moment of greatest danger for mother and child had passed, the aged midwife, Anna Olivier asked 24-year-old Sara, “How shall the baby be baptized?” Although herself Calvinist, the young mother’s husband, Hendrick Mommers, was a Roman Catholic. “None of your business”, came the sharp reply, “that’s a matter for my husband and he shall tell you”. The confession of interfaith children remained a matter of great controversy, well into the modern period, as we shall see. In this instance, Hendrick and Sara had apparently made a previous contract that all boys would be baptized in the father’s faith (in this instance Catholic) and all girls in the mother’s (Reformed). While bizarre to modern eyes, this compromise was in fact the most common course of events in such cases. Unfortunately things did not proceed so smoothly, since during the course of negotiating their wedding the year before, the couple had made three additional agreements: one promising the Catholic pastor that all J. F. Harrington (*) Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_9

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children would be raised Catholic, one promising the Reformed preacher that all children would be raised Reformed and one secret agreement between the couple that all children would be Reformed. Upon the birth of the child, eventually named Mathias Hendrick, a struggle ensued between the relatives and clergy of each parent, each eager to have the boy baptized in their church. In theological terms, the location or denomination of the baptism made no difference—there was only one Christian baptism—but among most people the choice determined the future faith of the child. When Sara’s father, Mathias Erffens, arranged for the child to be baptized in the Vaals Reformed church, Hendrick’s Catholic relatives mobilized. At the instigation of her family and the Catholic pastor, Hendrick’s sister Cunegonde, the child’s young godmother, went to intervene. When Cunegonde, who also had some kind of mental disability, burst into the Reformed church, she encountered a small group of people surrounding the baptismal basin, the boy held aloft and freshly sprinkled with baptismal water. Shoving her way to the front, Cunegonde snatched the child and attempted to flee the church with him, ending in a tug-of-war with the would-be Calvinist godmother. In the end, the would-be Catholic godmother was detained and arrested, triggering an expanding cycle of recrimination and violence in the tiny community. The tale of Cunegonde and her attempted kidnapping of her nephew is at the narrative heart of Benjamin Kaplan’s riveting 2014 microhistory.1 In it, Kaplan brilliantly illuminates the continuing vehemence of confessional conflict in everyday life, even in the midst of the so-called European Enlightenment. Abduction, or physical removal and attempted religious indoctrination of children—whether by parents, relatives, clerics or secular authorities—in fact grew more common, not less, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What had been treated as an issue of conscience during the sixteenth century, increasingly became the focus of governmental intervention, in turn spurring many private abductions in the name of religion. At the core of this phenomenon was the inextricable problem of interfaith, or mixed marriages, exacerbating both local and governmental animosities in a newly confessionally diverse era. Every post-Reformation religious authority, regardless of confession, forbade and condemned 1  Benjamin J. Kaplan, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

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mixed marriages, even equating such unions with rape, fornication and adultery.2 Many Catholic theologians supposedly perceived bi-confessional marriages as a graver sin than incest and in 1596 Pope Clement VIII actually condemned all Catholics who married Protestants as heretics. As late as 1741, Pope Benedict XIV denounced those who, “driven shamefully mad by an insane love, do not abhor in their souls…these detestable unions, which Holy Mother Church has always damned and forbidden”.3 The biggest concern—shared by friends, relatives and secular authorities—was the ultimate fate of any children that resulted from such unions. Protestant and Catholic pastors alike invoked the Deuteronomy passage “For they will turn thy sons from following me, that they may serve other gods”. The Jesuit Luis de Molina voiced the common belief that children of mixed marriage were in danger from the very beginning, suck[ing] in heresy with [mother’s] milk….They are taught to despise pope, bishops, and priests, and to say heretical prayers and catechisms; later they are matched with non-Catholic spouses; and so this cancer spreads insidiously to the children, children’s children, nieces [and] nephews in the 3rd, 4th, 5th…[and 10th] degrees.4

Protestant writers, by contrast, wrote confidently that mixed marriages were in fact part of a papist plot, also aimed at capturing the souls of offspring. The Lutheran theologian Philipp Müller underscored Paul’s call for Christian unity in his letter to the Ephesians: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (4: 5–6). “How can such contempt of doctrine and danger to conscience [in a confessionally mixed marriage] subsist in a community of love?” Like his Catholic counterpart Molina, Müller foresaw only perpetual conflict and ruin for the offspring: The one seeks God here, the other there: children should be led to the good by their dear mother, like chicklets to the sun and food; this she cannot do and the father’s teaching and will is hindered. The father would guide the 2  Dagmar Freist, Glaube—Liebe—Zwietracht. Konfessionell gemischte Ehen in Deutschland in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2018); Cecila Cristellon, “Due fedi in un corpo. Matrimoni misti fra delicta, carnis, scandalo, seduzione e sacramento nell’Europa di età moderna”, Quaderni Storici 145 (2014): 1–29. 3  Kaplan, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping, 21. 4  Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 287.

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children toward holiness, but the mother follows her heart no less than he, and speaks differently to them. What the husband calls God’s blessing is to the wife accursed. So each servant chooses the religion he fancies…and society is debased.5

Yet despite such universal clerical reprobation, legal courts of all religious denominations, guided principally by the canon law of marriage, grudgingly recognized such illicit unions as legally valid, as long as the prescriptions for consent and publicity had been followed.6 Religious authorities might refuse to solemnize a marriage but that blessing was not essential to the marriage’s validity. It’s difficult to know how frequently mixed marriages occurred in the century before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, but it appears not to have been an infrequent phenomenon. In officially Catholic Bamberg during the late sixteenth century, mixed marriages might have accounted for anywhere from a tenth to a third of all marriages.7 Describing his travels through German lands, Montaigne wrote that “marriages between Catholics and Protestants occur daily in the city [of Augsburg], with the party most desirous undergoing the will of the other. There are thousands of such marriages; our host was Catholic, his wife Lutheran”.8 Montaigne’s comment underscores the ambiguity of the term “mixed marriages”, sometime used to describe couples where one has converted to the other’s faith as well as couples who choose to maintain their separate faiths. This would seem an important distinction, but in most early modern thinking, even a converted spouse remained suspect. (And to be fair, many converted spouses did reconsider their decision upon being widowed). In late-eighteenth-century Oppenheim, the majority of women in mixed marriages converted to the religion of their husbands, overwhelmingly so in the case of Reformed and Catholic men, while roughly a 5  Dagmar Freist, “Between Conscience and Coercion: Mixed Marriages, Church, Secular Authority, and Family”, in David M.  Luebke and Mary Lindemann, eds., Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 106. 6  Judith Pollmann, “Honor, Gender, and Discipline”, in Raymond Mentzer et  al., eds., Dire l’Interdit: The Vocabulary of Censure and Exclusion in the Early Modern Reformed Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 32–33. 7  13–29%, according to Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 284. 8  The journal of Montaigne’s travels in Italy by way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581, translated and edited, with an introduction and notes by W.G.  Waters (London: Murray, 1903), 136.

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third of Reformed women marrying Lutheran men held to their religious convictions.9 As we might expect, marriages between Lutheran and Reformed partners were much more common than between Protestants and Catholics. In general, only 2–4% of mixed marriages in Oppenheim remained confessionally divided, which appears to be as reasonable an estimate as any for this later period in general.10 Even if we take the more expansive definition of confessional intermarriage, including households supposedly under one faith, it remains difficult to pin down its actual frequency in early modern Europe. Rates after Westphalia, for instance, varied widely, ranging from one in a hundred in some localities to one in four in others. An Osnabrück document from 1662 yields a figure of 13.5%; at other times the rate reaches 20%. A study of Belm from 1681 to 1740 yields a figure of 21.8% for the earlier period and 26.8% for the early eighteenth century, before a precipitous drop to 8.3%.11 In Dutch cities, too, mixed marriages seem to have increased in frequency during the early eighteenth century—aligning, not coincidentally, with the time of the greatest number of child abductions.12 Mixed marriage does not seem to have been common in France, but here too statistics are unreliable. Whatever their actual frequency, the main issue in mixed marriages remained the baptism and raising of children. Virtually every secular authority from the 1555 Peace of Augsburg on required parents to decide on the confession of their child at birth. Often this issue was stipulated in a marriage contract, with either the faith of the father or mother being specified—indicating which one felt the strongest about the issue. 9  Peter Zschunke, Konfession und Alltag in Oppenheim. Beiträge zur Geschichte von Bevölkerung und Gesellschaft in einer gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1984), 103. Based on 1216 mixed marriages between 1755 and 1798. Freist finds a similar pattern in Osnabrück. Dagmar Freist, “Crossing Religious Borders: The Experience of Religious Difference and its Impact on Mixed Marriages in EighteenthCentury Germany”, in C. Scott Dixon et al., eds., Living with Religious Diversity in EarlyModern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 246–247. 10  Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806 (Siegmaringen: Thorbecke, 1991), 192–193. 11  Dagmar Freist, “One Body, Two Confessions: Mixed Marriages in Germany”, in Ulinka Rublack, ed., Gender in Early Modern German History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 280. 12  In Utrecht the percentage of mixed marriages rose from 2/1% in 1680 to 7.2% in 1720. Bergen op Zoom saw a similar figure of 82% for 1736–95. In eighteenth-century Amsterdam, by contrast, only 2% of all marriages were mixed. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 283.

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Sometimes a compromise was worked out based on gender or birth order. For instance, both parents might agree to raise all boys Catholic and all girls Reformed or every other child Catholic or Reformed and so on. Without any legal contract, religion at birth defaulted to local custom or statutes, which varied widely. In some German territories, the children of mixed marriages were required to be educated in the officially established religion; other mandates and ordinances simply upheld local customs. In many localities—particularly in France and Scotland—the norm was that all children were expected to be raised in the religion of the father.13 According to several lawsuits before the Corpus Evangelicorum, the Protestant body established by the Peace of Westphalia to resolve such disputes, this was “the principle…accepted by both sides”, namely that children were to be raised in the religion of their father “unless he determines otherwise or has entered into a marriage contract”.14 As we will see shortly, though, the supposed absolute authority of patria potestas could be conveniently ignored when it ran counter to state wishes. Raising all children in the paternal faith was far more common than that of a few French localities, such as La Rochelle and Sauve, where children were typically raised in the confession of their mothers. In Friesland, some couples alternated confessions, baptizing the first child Reformed or Catholic and the next child in the other faith. In Poitou—and this stretches credulity in my opinion—daughters were supposedly kept completely ignorant of religion until their marriage, at which point they were expected to take the faith of their husbands. By far the most common custom throughout early modern Europe was that sons in a mixed marriage were raised in the religion of the father and daughters in the religion of the mother—as in the opening anecdote of Anna and Hendrick Mommers.15 There is evidence for this practice throughout the Holy Roman Empire, as well as in France, Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands. In one case from the bi-confessional city of Augsburg, the custom was even applied to a set of twins, with the boy being raised Lutheran and the girl Catholic.16 Basing confession on gender clearly helped replicate social roles for men and women, but it also maintained the demographic balance between faiths, since the number of  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 288.  Freist, “Between Conscience and Conversion”, 110. 15  Zschunke, Oppenheim, 105. 16  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 288. 13 14

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­ arriageable girls would be roughly the same as marriageable boys. By the m time adolescents reached “the age of discretion”—typically between 12 and 14—they were free to change faiths but in reality highly likely to remain within the religion of their formative years. As Benjamin Kaplan has noted, this compromise helped assure the safety of the status quo, which in the post-Westphalian world was more important than the prospect of potential confessional gains.17 Of course in the real world, people did not always abide by the terms of a written agreement or a local custom. Sometimes a parent just changed his or her mind. On November 18, 1766, the Lutheran Wilhelmina Steinmeyer and the Catholic Conrad Fischer signed a marriage contract, in the presence of witnesses, “made necessary by caution” so that the couple “could live in a pleasant marriage…considering that the groom and his future bride were not of the same religion”. On the question of children, the new couple agreed that “according to the customs of this territory (Osnabrück)”, daughters would be baptized and raised in the mother’s religion and sons in the father’s and that “neither [parent] would ever interfere in any way with the other”. Further, they “promised and pledged never to hinder each other in the exercise of religion, but to encourage one another, as the circumstances permit”.18 Eleven years later, the honeymoon based on mutual religious respect was clearly over. Wilhelmina appealed to the district governor to protect her and uphold the terms of her original marriage compact. “Having been insulted for her conscience”, she claimed that she had been forced to stand by “as her daughters, in flat contradiction of the marriage contract, were to be raised in the Catholic religion”. Her attempts “to soothe her conscience” resulted only in “discontent in the household” and her husband’s threat “secretly to abduct the children, [an action] for which there are plenty of available examples”. Conrad also brutally beat his wife on several occasions, forcing her to seek refuge in her brother’s house and temporarily abducted their daughters. Not surprisingly, the local Catholic priest supported the husband and dismissed Wilhelmina as a woman of dubious “public reputation”, who was also an outsider from another village. Initially the privy council of Osnabrück refused to even hear her complaint, advising “in this matter the wife should be instructed no longer to disrupt the domestic peace and to interpret a lawful castigation [by her  Ibid., 288–289.  Freist, “Between Conscience and Conversion”, 112.

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husband] as religious persecution”. Undaunted, Wilhelmina persisted in her demand that the terms of the original agreement be upheld. Eventually, the privy council concurred and ordered the couple to undergo a forced reconciliation before the local district fiscal officer. When this attempted solution failed, the presiding official blamed it on the “evil disposition” of the husband, who wants to convert his wife with a cudgel and force her to send the children to the Catholic school. He has pursued this mission for several years already and because the wife believed that their marriage contract supported her position and would be trouble in conscience if she acted against it, the wrath of the husband grew so great that in a few years she was obliged to flee from him.

Interestingly, it also turned out that during this time Conrad had also received frequent nocturnal visits from a Dominican monk, who “made Fischer believe that he was not obligated to adhere to the contract, God only knows for what evilly made-up reason, all of which Fischer explained to the [local] priest personally”. Apparently the Dominican in question had a record of stirring up similar trouble among other confessionally mixed couples. Upon learning of this intrigue, the privy council immediately ordered the monk to return to his monastery, since “he had disrupted communal peace with the aim of depriving the children of these marriages of rights guaranteed to them under the imperial constitution”. Fischer, summoned to the district court and threatened with punishment, finally relented and transferred his daughters from the Catholic to the Lutheran school. He was now a religious minority of one within his own household.19 The meddling influence of clerical figures, of all confessions, was a common denominator in virtually all child abductions or forced conversions. Cunegonde Mommers, like Conrad Fischer had apparently been persuaded by a Catholic priest to take matters into her own hands regarding the Calvinist baptism of her nephew. When the young woman’s actions resulted in various incidents of mob violence, local authorities blamed not her but the Catholic Father Bosten, whom they accused of manipulating a simple girl (and they eventually succeeded in having him transferred to a new post). Of course if the baptism had been set to take place in a Catholic  Ibid., 114–115.

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church, it’s just as likely that Bosten’s Reformed counterpart would have worked up his co-religionists into some kind of intervention. At the same time, most instances of children born to interfaith couples did not result in open turmoil or violence—typically because of an existing formal agreement or prevailing local custom. Baptisms could even be amicable ecumenical moments, sometimes including, for instance, both a Reformed godparent and a Lutheran godparent.20 Tensions between the respective families of interfaith couples did not disappear by the eighteenth century, but in most cases, the wishes of the couple were followed, if not respected. That said, familial and clerical pressure to convert children might continue well into the teenage years. Most legal authorities defined the age of majority, when a youth might choose his or her own faith, as 14 for boys and 12 for girls (the same as the canonical age for valid marital vows).21 One especially influential Protestant pastor in the north German village of Üffeln persuaded the Lutheran master of a 14-year-old apprentice that the boy must be liberated from his Catholic parents. When the master in fact abducted the boy and left him in the custody of the pastor, the youth immediately proclaimed his new faith in public, depriving his own parents of any claims on him. Two years later, in 1738, the same pastor so excited one member of his congregation that the man threatened his Catholic wife with a knife unless she and their child converted. Like many women under pressure to convert, she fled the jurisdiction with her child.22 Household servants of a different confession also frequently attempted to convert children and adolescents, leading some ecclesiastical authorities to forbid laypeople from hiring servants of a different faith.23 In 1700, the Catholic authorities of the Palatine-Electorate attempted to prevent Reformed midwives from the emergency baptism of infants in their own faith—a common concern throughout the empire.24

 Zschunke, Oppenheim, 97.  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 269. There was much dispute about this age among German Protestants and Catholics, with the latter claiming age 10 old enough and the former preferring 18. A 1650 Nuremberg imperial deputation came up with a compromise age of 15. Freist, Glaube—Liebe--Zwietracht, 109–110. 22  Freist, “Crossing Religious Borders”, 207. 23  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 254, 24  Freist, Glaube—Liebe--Zwietracht, 257. See, for instance, similar concerns in Oppenheim (Zschunke, Oppenheim, 102). 20 21

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Some religious authorizes also expressed concern about contamination and conversion through formal education involving the “wrong” confession. In Poland and France, many Catholics sent their children to Lutheran or Reformed schools, despite the objections of local pastors.25 The Socinian Academy in Rakow was particularly known for its confessionally mixed student body. Meanwhile, in France, Huguenot ministers attempted to stem the practice of some of their congregants, especially nobles, of dispatching their own children to Jesuit schools.26 The consistory of Nîmes summoned one mother to appear on this charge, yet she protested that the local Reformed college was “not as well regulated as is required” and that she had a sacred duty to “advance” her sons.27 When a youth attending a school of another confession in fact converted, the consequences could be quite public, even violent if coercion was suspected. In 1650, the conversion of 13-year-old orphan Pierre Coutelle triggered a riot in Nîmes. While attending a parity college, the Huguenot Pierre had been brought over to Catholicism by his Jesuit teachers, who quickly whisked him away first to a Catholic friend’s family and then the bishop’s palace itself—all far away from the boy’s Protestant guardians. Pierre’s guardians and family—as well as the entire Huguenot community—considered this nothing less than a kidnapping. Within a few days, a crowd of over 500 Protestants assembled before the bishop’s palace, stormed the building and seized the boy. Three of the bishop’s servants were killed in the assault, including one struck repeatedly with a hammer and then dragged a distance and stoned. Widespread shock over the “Coutelle affair” led the parity college to split into two separate institutions.28 In Germany, parity institutions and crossovers to other schools had always remained rare. The most common trigger to allegations of forced conversions or abductions of youths was the death of one or both parents. In such cases, the roles of meddling relatives and competing clergy became even more pronounced. In 1759, 12-year-old Maria Catharina Henin lost both her Reformed mother and her Lutheran father in the confessionally mixed town of Oppenheim. Although the girl had been baptized and raised in her father’s faith, upon her subsequent residence with her Reformed  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 255.  Zschunke, Oppenheim, 100. 27  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 255. 28  Ibid., 269–270. 25 26

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mother’s sister, Maria Catharina apparently converted to her aunt’s faith. The local Lutheran pastor Soeder immediately protested to his Reformed counterpart, named Pollich, who replied “finally in desperation, with the threat of arrest, imprisonment, and beating…that [she] must take refuge in the Reformed church and go over to it in order to bring [the child] away from the unchristian [literally anti-christian] Soederish band”. According to Pollich, pastor Soeder had picked [the girl] up multiple times at her mother’s house [and] pushed her through the streets to the Lutheran school, whereby great arguments, tumult, vile activities and scuffles might have arisen…and that he in general roused great unrest by going to [Reformed people’s] houses to recruit them is a known fact, that he sought to convince the Reformed Ehewaldin [mother] to raise her children in the Lutheran religion, and informed the Salatinin [woman] that she had come into a good Lutheran land and was required to attend its church services.

The Lutheran Soeder rejected his counterpart’s accusations as a truly vicious accusation…flowing from his murky, putrid and stinking source, written in a muddled, confused, and disorderly fashion…that I… would [curse and offend] the child’s uncles, aunts, godparents, and God, writes Herr Pollich in good German, with no regard whatsoever for the truth…the most esteemed High Office will itself also be graciously inclined to recognize the lame leap, the falsehoods and holes in the Pollich document.

The acrimonious exchange continued for another half year. Even Reformed pastor Pollich expressed surprise at the apparent similarity to long past confessional struggles: “when I take the example of the conversion of souls, I am forced to recognize [that] a spirit from ancient times, such as lived in the year 1586, must have lived on in him, and evilly informed him with its disgraces and vituperations”.29 29  “…endlich in desperation durch die gedrohete wacht, thurmstraff, schlagen und krottengefängnüß…daß es zur Reformierten Kirch offentlich seine Zuflucht nehmen und dazu übergehen müßen, um sich der widerchristlichen Soedrischen banden zu entübrigen…. ie mehrmalen aus ihrer mutter hauß geholet, über die gaß zur Lutherischen schul vor sich hergetrieben, wodurch grose händel, aufruhr, wüste thätlichkeiten und handgemeng hätten entstehen können…und überhaupt, daß er viele unruhen erwecke, allhier von hauß werben gehe, um Reformirten an sich zu ziehen, ist eine bekante sach, so hat er die Reformirte Ehewaldin zu bereden gesucht, ihre Kinder zur lutherischen Religion zu bringen, and der

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While religious animosities during the eighteenth century sometimes appeared to revive “ancient hatreds”, there was one important distinction from the early days of the Reformation, namely the increasingly decisive role of secular authorities in both instigating such disputes and determining their outcome. When the goals of meddling relatives aligned with those of the state, for instance, parental rights might be effectively voided. In 1758, 11-year-old Maria Anna Antonia Walpurgis was seized from her Lutheran mother and dragged kicking and screaming to the Mannheim Spital or orphanage, where she was handed over to the master and his wife to be raised as a Catholic.30 Before meeting her second husband, Maria Anna’s mother, Maria Josepha Theresia von Staritz had converted from the Catholic faith of her first husband to Lutheranism. At the urging of her husband’s relatives, who also withheld her patrimony of 10,000 fl. on that account, the local government of Pfalz-Neuburg—the recatholicized successor to the Calvinist Palatine-Electorate—intervened. When the mother and step-father were summoned to appear before the town clerk, Dietrich Gobin, Maria Josepha instead left her with the local Lutheran pastor for protection. The stratagem did her no good, as Gobin threatened to have Maria Anna arrested and brought in by force unless her step-­ father retrieved her. Gobin then took Maria Josepha, the mother, to a separate room and questioned her extensively about her daughter’s and her own faith, pressing her to convert and to leave her Lutheran husband. When the entreaties of Gobin and left her unmoved, she was placed under house arrest with her husband and daughter, with two guards posted inside their house. After a week of deliberation, Gobin summoned the family to appear and announced that he had decided to put Anna Maria under the tutelage of the state, where she would be raised in the Catholic faith. Immediately the girl erupted into tears, proclaiming, “I do not wish Salatinin, die jetzt der Posthalter zu [Gross-Gerau] hat, angelegen, sie käme in ein gut lutherisch land, zu deren abendmal solte sie sich auch verfügen…würkliche Läster Schrift aus seiner…trüben, faulen und stinkenden quelle gefloßen, daher auch eben so confus, verworren und unordentlich abgefaßt..daß ich…des Kindes oncles, tantes, Petter und Goth in Schimpf, Schaden und Straf gesetz, schriebt Herr Pollich so gut deutsch dahin, ohne sich der Unwarheit zu schämen…Ein hochlöbl. OberAmt wird auch hierbei die krumme Sprünge, das falsche und Leere in der Pollichishen Schrift…von Selbst hochgeneigt zu erkenne geruhen.. wann ich transmigrationem animarum statuirte, müste ich urtheilen, ein geist von uralten Zeiten her, von seines gleich, die anno 1586 gelebt, und sich durch die schänden und schmähen übel berathen haben, müste in ihn gefahren seyn”. Zschunke, Oppenheim, 97–98. 30  Freist, “One Body, Two Confessions”, 293–295.

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to be Catholic, I would rather die; why would anyone wish to take me away from my parents and make me an orphan?” Similar pleading from Maria Josepha and her husband fell on deaf ears. The destitute couple appeared to have no recourse. Fearing their own imminent arrest or forced conversion, they moved to Regensburg. From there the step-father, Joachim Peter von Staritz, appealed to the imperial Corpus Evangelicorum for help. He also took his story to the wider public, publishing a pamphlet that opened “In submission and duty I appeal to you…to help me obtain for my wife her legal patrimony and to free my poor daughter from the slavery of ‘forced conscience’ (Gewissenzwang). She is moaning and screaming for salvation”. Von Staritz shrewdly combined a father’s personal plea with an awareness of the larger political context of religious co-existence in the empire. His re-created dialogue appears excessively melodramatic, yet likely made its intended impact. In the presence of the Spitalmeister and his wife and the two city guard captains and a supreme council, she said in a moving and heart-piercing voice ‘Now, my dear papa! If it cannot be otherwise and I am to be torn from you with brutal force, I would like to thank you for all your love and faithfulness. I plead with you for the sake of Christ’s five wounds, I do not wish to become a Catholic, I would rather die’. She continued ‘if there is no one to help me, so go to the King of Prussia and ask him to free me from these cruel hands. I do not wish to be Catholic but Lutheran All bystanders…were shocked when hearing these words.

Von Staritz’s attempt to embarrass the government of the Palatine-­ Electorate clearly hit a nerve, prompting a swift counter-report with allegations of the mother’s loose behaviour during her first husband’s absence in manoeuvres and a portrayal of her as a generally unfit mother. Palatinate officials also confirmed that it was the state’s prerogative to assume tutelage if a parent attempted conversion before the child’s age of discretion, generally held to be 14. By the time the Corpus Evangelicorum was finally able to hear the case a year and a half later, von Staritz himself had died and Maria Josepha’s reputation had been effectively destroyed. More importantly—and apparently unknown to the parents—Anna Maria had escaped from the orphanage during one of her daily walks, supposedly with the help of non-Catholic accomplices. Her 9 months in custody had not weakened the girl’s determination. What became of her and her mother is unknown.

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The earliest and most explicit instances of state coercion in the conversion of children and youths occurred in England and France. In 1641, Cornelius Burges preached a sermon at the English House of Commons recommending that government authorities take away the children of Catholic subjects and raise them as Protestants.31 Although parliament hesitated to formally enact such a policy, the notion itself had in fact a long history, dating back at least to a 1583 suggestion of Lord Burghley, reiterated by Francis Walsingham in 1586. While several proposed bills along these lines during the early seventeenth century failed, secular authorities began using the Court of Wards to move orphans away from their Catholic relatives to Protestant sponsors.32 The number of children affected by this stratagem remained admittedly small, as did the number of Catholic children Jesuit propagandists claimed had been abducted with state support. Nonetheless, the policy proposed by Burges continued to be seriously debated throughout the king’s negotiations with his parliament between 1642 and 1648.33 As Lucy Underwood has observed, concerns about “the best interests of the child” consistently pitted the father of the household against the father of the kingdom, arguing in effect that bad (i.e., Catholic) subjects could not be good parents.34 In Catholic France, the government’s oft-proclaimed support for paternal authority was similarly ignored or undermined when it came to Huguenot fathers. As early as 1621, a few decades after the Edict of Nantes, a state court determined that the children of a Huguenot woman, murdered by her Catholic husband, should be raised Catholic, despite the mother’s explicit wishes. The justification: upon the father’s execution, authority over the orphans passed to the King (not to their Huguenot relatives). About the same time, a Huguenot father who had withdrawn his two sons (13 and 11) from a Jesuit college in Paris—claiming infringement on their “liberty of conscience”—saw them kidnapped by a Catholic priest on their way to a Protestant academy at Sedan. Rather than support the father’s claim on his own children, the court subsequently ruled that

31  Lucy Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 72. 32  Ibid., 73–91. 33  Ibid., 92–94, 102. 34  Lucy Underwood, “The State, Childhood and Religious Dissent”, in Hannah Crawforth and Sarah Lewis, eds., Family Politics in Early Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 191–210.

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his decision to send them to a Jesuit school was binding—and that he was moreover compelled to continue paying tuition for their schooling there.35 Beginning in the 1660s, French courts also made several rulings lowering the minimum age of child consent, in one instance to nine. Combined with coercive techniques to send orphans to Catholic families and schools, the new laws further enabled what Huguenots saw as the equivalent of child abductions of minors by Catholics. In 1663, the royal council went still further, decreeing that all children of mixed marriages with Catholic fathers must be raised Catholic. The same year another royal edict prohibited anyone who had converted to Catholicism from relapsing and in a declaration of 1669 extended the new rule to conversions before 1663.36 Coercive state attitudes during the seventeenth century had the broader effect of undercutting precedents of religious co-existence, encouraging violence and abductions by parents, relatives, clerics or state officials. In Montpelier alone, there were ten cases of child kidnappings for reasons of religion just during the first few years of the 1680s, usually performed by relatives or guardians following the death of a parent (and survival of a spouse of the opposite confession). The most famous chronicle of the French Reformed Church during the seventeenth century, l’Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, by Elie Benoist, records dozens of instances of Catholic trickery, coercion and abductions before 1685.37 A complaint formally registered with King George II of the United Kingdom, in his capacity as Elector of Hannover, similarly charged multiple cases of child abductions and forced conversions at the order of the Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück and other Catholic nobles.38 The most outrageous and infamous instances of forced child conversions came following the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Three-­ quarters of a million Huguenots were given 15 days to decide whether to stay and convert or to emigrate. Most cruelly of all, if parents did decide to leave France, they were required to leave behind all children having reaching the age of consent (by then defined as age seven). The year before, similarly forced emigrations had been mandated in the East Tyrolian towns of Defereggenthal and Dürrenberg, although in this  Benoist, L’histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, 2: 364–66; cited in Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 186.  Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 187. 37  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 290. 38  Freist, “Between Conscience and Conversion”, 109–110. 35

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instance the cut-off age for children to be left behind and raised as Catholics was 15. Subsequent Protestant expulsions, most infamously in Salzburg, similarly required children to be turned over to state custody. The number of confessionally orphaned children in that instance was so great that in 1752 four “conversion houses” were established to supplement the already overflowing orphanages.39 Of course the persistence of confessional conflict and the apparent increase in child abductions for reason of religion during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century runs directly counter to the popular narrative of secularization and toleration in the Age of the Enlightenment. This was Kaplan’s main point, and the supporting evidence from elsewhere in Europe, such as the German regions examined by Dagmar Freist,40 suggests that the phenomenon was by no means limited to Dutch lands. What changed during this period was not the relative prominence of vacillating parents, concerned relatives, meddling clerics—these were all standard components since the earliest days of the Reformation. What changed after Westphalia and the Revocation of Nantes was the state’s shedding of any pretence of equity and neutrality in matters of religion, as well as a new willingness to use legal means to create a desired confessional homogeneity. In Germany and elsewhere, even notarized marriage contracts specifying religious arrangements for children were regularly ignored when not convenient.41 Not just relatives, but cloisters, orphanages, schools and entire villages took part in officially sanctioned abductions for reasons of religion.42 This agenda of confessional hegemony in turn tipped the balance in the longstanding fallout from interfaith marriages (which despite many obstacles, continued to be common throughout the eighteenth century). Ancient claims of kinship and god parentage and sometimes even patria potestas could now be swept away if contrary to official policy. In 1715, a Catholic district magistrate charged with seizing the children of a recently widowed Lutheran mother complained of being accosted on his doorstep by the children’s Lutheran grandmother and a large throng of supporters.  Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 340, 384.  Most child abductions in Osnabrück, the Palatinate and the Electorate of Saxony occurred after 1648, and continued to be common well into the eighteenth century—a finding Freist calls “astounding”, and like Kaplan, believes offers strong evidence against the conventional tolerance narrative of the eighteenth century. Glaube—Liebe--Zwietracht, 456. 41  Ibid., 203. 42  Ibid., 222. 39 40

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“She said and I quote, that she would rather go to the market square with her grandson, whom she had raised, and have her [own] head chopped off than allow him to become Catholic”. She then threw the court order at the magistrate’s feet and shouted together with her daughter, “It’s a dog’s business and I shit on it!”43 A century earlier, the primal claims of a mother and grandmother might have met with more sympathy. In the post-­ Westphalian age of state confessionalism, the children’s fate was already sealed.

Bibliography Cristellon, Cecila. “Due fedi in un corpo. Matrimoni misti fra delicta, carnis, scandalo, seduzione e sacramento nell’Europa di età moderna”. Quaderni Storici 145 (2014). Pages 1–29. The journal of Montaigne’s travels in Italy by way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581. Translated and edited, with an introduction and notes by W.G. Waters. (London: Murray, 1903). Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). ———. Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). François, Etienne, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806. (Siegmaringen: Thorbecke, 1991). Freist, Dagmar. “One Body, Two Confessions: Mixed Marriages in Germany”. In Gender in Early Modern German History. Ed. Ulinka Rublack. Cambridge: (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pages 275–305. ———. “Crossing Religious Borders: The Experience of Religious Difference and its Impact on Mixed Marriages in Eighteenth-Century Germany”. In Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe. Eds. C.  Scott Dixon et  al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Pages 203–224. ———. “Between Conscience and Coercion: Mixed Marriages, Church, Secular Authority, and Family”. In Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Ed. David M.  Luebke and Mary Lindemann. (New York: Berghahn, 2014). Pages 185–212. ———. Glaube—Liebe—Zwietracht. Konfessionell gemischte Ehen in Deutschland in der frühen Neuzeit. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2018). Luria, Keith, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-­ Modern France. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005).

 Freist, “Between Conscience and Conversion”, 113.

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Pollmann, Judith. “Honor, Gender, and Discipline”. In Dire l’Interdit: The Vocabulary of Censure and Exclusion in the Early Modern Reformed Tradition. Ed. Raymond Mentzer et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Pages 29–42. Underwood, Lucy. Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). ———. “The State, Childhood and Religious Dissent”. In Family Politics in Early Modern Literature. Ed. Hannah Crawforth and Sarah Lewis. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Pages 191–210. Zschunke, Peter. Konfession und Alltag in Oppenheim. Beiträge zur Geschichte von Bevölkerung und Gesellschaft in einer gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt in der frühen Neuzeit. (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1984).

Raising Children Across Religious Boundaries in the Dutch Revolt Jesse Sadler

On 13 January 1605 the 20-year-old Pieter della Faille transferred his claims to his inheritance to his older brother Jacques, excepting only £50 Flemish intended for the house of the Franciscans he entered a year earlier.1 At first glance there is nothing unusual about the youngest son of a mercantile family entering into religious life at the height of the Counter-­ Reformation in Antwerp.2 Indeed, Pieter’s younger sister Suzanne entered the convent of Saint Elizabeth in Brussels around the same time. However, Pieter and Suzanne’s religious background makes these decisions quite remarkable. Pieter and Suzanne were both baptized and raised as Calvinists in Holland. Upon the untimely death of their mother in 1591, when Pieter and Suzanne were only seven and six respectively, the two young children and their seven older siblings were placed under the religious tutelage of Hendrick van den Corput, a Calvinist pastor in Dordrecht. Yet by the time that Pieter arrived in Antwerp around the end of 1600 at the  All values cited are either in pounds Flemish or Holland guilders. The value of the guilder was tied to the Flemish pound at a rate of £1 Flemish to six guilders. 2  Geert Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 1

J. Sadler (*) Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_10

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age of 16, all but one of his siblings had crossed the religious and political border dividing the Calvinist United Provinces from the Catholic Spanish Low Countries.3 Pieter lived a fascinating life caught up in the religious and political maelstrom into which he and his siblings were born. After more than 15 years of living as a Franciscan, Pieter converted to Calvinism and moved to Leiden to study Theology. By 1624 he served as the Reformed minister at Koudekerk, a small village east of Leiden, but 3 years later he dramatically announced his reconversion to Catholicism and challenged the theologians at Leiden to a religious debate. Returning to Brabant, Pieter published a book that recounted the details of his conversion and provided a theological defense of the principle articles of belief of the Catholic Church.4 Pieter later returned to Holland but this time as part of the Catholic ministry in Holland in which role he appears to have lived out his days.5 The extraordinary story of double conversion takes us well beyond the topic of this chapter on the adolescence of Pieter and his siblings, but it begs the question of how he ended up a Franciscan monk, how his younger sister became a nun and how three of his elder sisters eventually married into the elite of the Spanish Low Countries when all had been raised within the Reformed religion in the United Provinces. The turning point in the lives of the children was the death of their mother Cecile Grammaye in 1591. The death of a parent opened up the conjugal household to outside influence from both the guardians appointed by the deceased and the wider kinship group.6 In the specific case of the children of Carlo della Faille and Cecile Grammaye, Carlo’s fiscal and emotional inability to care for his children following Cecile’s death broke open the barriers of the patriarchal household, making it possible for his children to move away from his influence and placing them 3  For background on the children of Carlo della Faille and Cecile Grammaye, see Yves Schmitz, Les Della Faille, vol. 5, Branche des Comtes Della Faille de Leverghem (Brussels: Imprimerie F.  Van Buggenhoudt, 1974), 3–70; Yves Schmitz, Les Della Faille, vol. 1bis, Branche des Comtes d’Assenede, Seigneurs d’Eecloo (Brussels: Imprimerie F. Van Buggenhoudt, 1971), 3–14. 4   Pieter della Faille, Bekeeringe Petri de la Faille, predikant te Coudekerck, uuyt de Calvinistische ketterye tot het H catholyck gelovve (Leuven, 1628). 5  Schmitz, Les Della Faille, vol. 5, 37–41; Christine Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 142. 6  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 57–67; Erica Bastress-Dukehart, “Family, Property, and Feeling in Early Modern German Noble Culture: The Zimmerns of Swabia,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 1 (2001): 1–19.

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under the sway of their kin.7 The assistance of wider kin in raising and educating children was hardly exceptional, but the context of the Dutch Revolt and the religious divisions within the Della Faille family turned questions about the interests of the children into a religious matter.8 That Carlo and Cecile’s children moved across the political and religious boundary created by the Dutch Revolt in their adolescence demonstrates the porous nature of this border into the beginning of the seventeenth century.9 More generally, it highlights the creation of practical forms of religious toleration without the need to adopt any intellectual notion of toleration.10 Even in the midst of religious war, the significance that early modern mercantile families placed on the bonds of kinship opened up a space of toleration for the continuance of familial interactions and even the movement of adolescents across religious borders. * * * In 1573 Carlo della Faille, the fourth of nine children of the extraordinarily wealthy merchant Jan della Faille de Oude, married Cecile Grammaye, the daughter of Jacques Grammaye, Receiver General of the States of Brabant.11 The union of the two mercantile families took place against the backdrop of the political and religious turmoil threatening to divide the Low Countries.12 The marriage was Carlo’s second. Less than a year before his union with Cecile, Carlo’s first wife, Maria Celosse, passed 7  Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Gent, “In the Name of the Father: Conceptualizing ‘Pater Familias’ in the Letters of William the Silent’s Children,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2009): 1130–1166; Linda A.  Pollock, “Rethinking Patriarchy and the Family in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Family History 23, no. 1 (1998): 3–27. 8  The Grammaye family was also split between Calvinists and Catholics, but the Grammayes played a much smaller role in the lives of Carlo and Cecile’s children than the Della Failles. 9  This was especially true for families such as the Della Failles and Grammayes who immigrated from Flanders or Brabant to the United Provinces in the final decades of the sixteenth century. J. G. C. A. Briels, Zuid-Nederlandse Immigratie 1572–1630 (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1978); Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile; Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics. 10  Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 11  For background on the Della Faille family at the end of the sixteenth century see Wilfrid Brulez, De Firma Della Faille en de internationale handel van Vlaamse firma’s in de 16e eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academièen, 1959); Jesse Sadler, “Family in Revolt: The Van der Meulen and Della Faille Families in the Dutch Revolt” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015); Yves Schmitz, Les della Faille, 5 vols. (Brussels: Imprimerie F.  Van Buggenhoudt, 1965–1974). 12  Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt, (London: Penguin Books, 1985).

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away soon after childbirth, leaving two surviving children, Jan de Carlo and Cornelia.13 The two young children did not join their father in his new household but instead lived under the care of their maternal grandparents. Once married, Carlo and Cecile asserted their independence from their natal families. Though Carlo received a thorough mercantile education, he did not participate in his father’s trade that spanned from England to Italy.14 Instead, he provoked the ire of his father by suing for full payment of his maternal inheritance in 1575.15 Meanwhile Cecile broke from her father and older brother Thomas by converting to Calvinism. At some point between 1577 and 1579 Carlo, Cecile and their three young children moved to Dordrecht, then under the authority of Calvinist rebels. Though no extant sources discuss the couple’s motivation for moving, religion must have been a significant factor. All of their children born in Dordrecht were baptized and raised in the Reformed Church.16 In contrast, Jan de Carlo and Cornelia continued to be raised by their maternal kin as Catholics in Antwerp. Carlo’s dispute with his father over his maternal inheritance, his lack of mercantile activity and the move to Dordrecht all strained his relationship with his father. Jan de Oude made clear his lack of faith in his third eldest son in the testament he dictated days before his death in November 1582. The elderly merchant named Carlo’s older brothers Jan and Marten and his younger brother Jacques as his executors, placing Carlo’s paternal inheritance—estimated at £5000—under his brothers’ authority.17 Jan de Oude’s testament assumed a good working relationship between the executors and some level of deference from his children to follow its dictates. 13  Memory book of Carlo, Della Faille de Leverghem Archive, Private collection, Lozer, Belgium (hereafter DFL), inventory 16. 14  Brulez, Firma Della Faille. 15  Carlo’s mother Cornelia van der Capellen died in 1566. Lawsuit of Carlo against Jan de Oude, Lier, 16 May 1575, DFL 8; Lawsuit of Carlo against Jan de Oude, Antwerp, 19 and 21 May 1575, DFL 8. 16  The godparents of the children show Carlo and Cecile’s integration into the elite of Dordrecht. Memory book of Carlo, DFL 16; Schmitz, Les Della Faille, vol. 5, 12–14. 17  The accounts of the estate of Jan della Faille de Oude estimated the paternal inheritance of each of the nine heirs to be £5000 on 26 December 1583. DFL 12. For Jan de Oude’s testament, see Gisela Jongbloet-van Houtte, ed. Brieven en andere bescheiden betreffende Daniel van der Meulen, 1584–1600, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën: Grote serie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), cxliv–clix.

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Neither of these occurred, as personal disputes and the political and religious situation in the Low Countries divided Jan de Oude’s heirs. Jan and Jacques both held positions in the Calvinist government of Antwerp, and both fled to Holland in 1584  in fear of the approach of the army of Alexander Farnese. On the other hand, Marten proved to be one of the foremost loyalists during the siege of Antwerp, and he and his brother-in-­ law, Robert van Eeckeren, were named as almoners following the Spanish conquest in August 1585.18 Jan de Oude’s estate long remained under dispute between the politically and religiously divided siblings. Even a supposed final agreement from 1617—almost 35 years after Jan de Oude’s death—did not preclude the continuance of litigation into the next generation.19 The disagreements between the Della Faille siblings took many forms, and alliances between the siblings often changed, but Carlo consistently acted as the most disruptive force in the family.20 It would seem natural for Carlo to align himself with his Calvinist inclined siblings who resided in Holland, which in addition to Jan and Jacques included his younger sister Hester, who had recently married the merchant Daniel van der Meulen.21 Yet, this neat political and religious division of the siblings never materialized. Carlo’s inconstancy and his desire to undermine his father’s testament that limited his authority over his paternal inheritance angered and alienated all of his siblings at different times. Carlo’s siblings came to agree with their father’s assessment of his management skills. They attempted to protect the interest of Carlo’s children 18  The movements and political positions of the Della Faille siblings are widely discussed in the collection of letters sent to Daniel van der Meulen in 1584 and 1585. Jongbloet-van Houtte, Daniel van der Meulen. 19  Judgement of the arbitrators, Antwerp, 13 September 1617, DFL 8; Sadler, “Family in Revolt.” 20  Amicable administration and division of inheritance was both difficult and essential for the continued unity of the sibling group. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 63–65; Erica Bastress-Dukehart, “Sibling Conflict within Early Modern German Noble Families,” Journal of Family History 33, no. 1 (2008): 61–80; David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 247–256; Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 143–158. 21  Hester and Daniel van der Meulen were engaged and married in Holland while Daniel served as a representative for the city of Antwerp at the States General. Jongbloet-van Houtte, Daniel van der Meulen; Sadler, “Family in Revolt.”

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by minimizing the movable goods under his control for fear that he would squander the capital. Unsurprisingly, Carlo grew increasingly frustrated with his financial position as the division of his father’s estate dragged on. In November 1589 Jacques heard reports that Carlo was walking around The Hague in such a fury that people believed he had lost his mind.22 Most worryingly, Jan heard from a mutual acquaintance in April 1590 that Carlo was in a dangerous and potentially violent state and that he was prepared “to use any means to free himself from his wife and children.”23 Jacques blamed Carlo’s behavior on his money problems, but he ensured that someone was sent to Carlo and Cecile’s house in Dordrecht to check that all was well. * * * The available sources provide little insight into Cecile’s thoughts or actions concerning the behavior of her husband and the continual financial problems of their growing family. Nevertheless, the disarray of the household following her death shows her to have been a steadying force. In July 1591 Cecile experienced complications with her twelfth pregnancy. While Cecile’s first nine children lived into adulthood, a daughter born in 1587 only survived for 8 months, and she gave birth to a stillborn child in 1588. Her 12th pregnancy proved to be too much. Lying sick in bed on the evening of 17 July, Cecile made a codicil to the testament that she had made 7 years prior in Antwerp. In the presence of Carolus Battus, a family friend and well-known doctor, Cecile dictated the final modifications to her testament.24 Six days later, she passed away at about 8:00 in the evening having given birth to a stillborn child an hour earlier.25 Cecile’s death in childbirth removed her physical and emotional presence from the household, leaving her nine children—whose ages ranged from the 17-year-old Maria to the 6-year-old Suzanne—more directly 22  Jacques della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Haarlem, 21 November 1589, Daniël van der Meulen en Hester de la Faille, zijn vrouw, 1550–1648, Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken, Leiden, The Netherlands (hereafter DvdM), inventory 538a-117. 23  The letter from Jacob van Sloten to Jan ended up in the hands of Jacques, who sent a copy to Daniel. Jacques della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Haarlem, 20 April 1590, DvdM 538a-132–133. 24  Codicil of Cecile Grammaye, Dordrecht, 17 July 1591, DFL 16. 25  Carlo laconically recorded the date and time of the death of his wife in his memory book, DFL 16.

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under the care of their father. Yet, Cecile continued to have a large ­influence on the lives of her children through her testament and codicil, opening the household to outside influence that could counteract Carlo’s authority over their children.26 Cecile used the testament to make clear her desire to have her children raised as Calvinists and to appoint guardians who would look after their spiritual and financial well-being. Her testament and codicil provide the clearest evidence of her strong commitment to Calvinism. Through it she demanded that “my children be raised in the fear of God and in the true reformed Religion and faith.”27 In choosing the guardians of her children Cecile emphasized that their faith in the Reformed religion was uppermost in her mind. While her brother Thomas had been named a guardian in her original testament, Cecile replaced him with her husband’s brother-in-law Daniel van der Meulen in her codicil. Daniel was to serve alongside Carlo’s older brother Jan and Nicolas Mandernach, a merchant originally from Trier who now lived in Dordrecht. In addition, she placed Hendrick van den Corput, a Calvinist minister in Dordrecht who she referred to as a good friend, in charge of the religious education of her children. As she put it in her codicil, Hendrick was appointed to act for “the administration and education of her aforementioned children in the true Christian belief.”28 In a household with a strong surviving parent who worked in concert with the guardians, the transition from a two-parent to a one-parent household could be smooth.29 However, Carlo’s poor financial position and general instability combined with his ongoing quarrels with his siblings, two of whom were chosen to be guardians over his children, made conflict over the children almost inevitable.30 Initially, all of the chosen guardians refused the position except for Hendrick van den Corput. Jan and Daniel both cited the ongoing lawsuits concerning the estate of Jan 26  Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 27  Testament of Cecile Grammaye, Antwerp, 19 June 1584, 523 Kaerle de la Faille en Cecilia Grammaije, 10 Weeskamer te Dordrecht, Regionaal Archief Dordrecht, Dordrecht, The Netherlands (hereafter DAW), piece 1. 28  Codicil of Cecile Grammaye, Dordrecht, 17 July 1591, DFL 16. 29  One need only look to the example of Carlo’s own father. Brulez, Firma Della Faille; Sadler, “Family in Revolt.” 30  Lucy Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in post-Reformation England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29–34.

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de Oude in their refusals, but the disposition of Carlo appears to have been more significant. In his official request to be excused from the position of executor of Cecile’s testament Jan declared that Carlo “has adopted a particularly great hate and enmity against him that he still pursues with great bitterness through words and deeds against [Jan].”31 Eventually the magistrates of Dordrecht gave the city’s weesmeesters the authority to appoint guardians for Cecile’s children. After much discussion the weesmeesters decided to reinstate Thomas Grammaye as a guardian and have him serve alongside Daniel van der Meulen and Nicholas Mandernach.32 Even as the children’s uncles resisted the position of guardian, a wide variety of the children’s kin made clear their desire and readiness to promote their interests notwithstanding the difficulties they knew this would bring. Jacques’ letters to Daniel in the second half of 1591 often discussed the need to have strong guardians to protect the children from his brother’s rashness.33 Even before accepting his role as guardian, Daniel drew the ire of his brother-in-law by making inquiries into Cecile’s estate and the well-being of the children. While in Dordrecht for an extended period, Daniel reported that “he remains the same old Carel, obstinate and ignorant.”34 But Carlo’s poor behavior only served to spur his relatives to do what they could for the children. The feeling of familial solidarity extended to Carlo’s brothers and sisters in Antwerp. Despite the stark opposition of their firmly held religious beliefs, Marten came to conclude that “it would have been better for the children to have their mother rather than him, but God has ordered it differently and we must be satisfied.”35 Like Daniel and Jacques, Marten believed that “in sum we must do that which is necessary and the best for his children.”36 Doing what was best for the children meant in the first place protecting Cecile’s estate from Carlo’s mismanagement and ensuring that the guard31  Supplication of Jan della Faille to the magistrates of Dordrecht, 31 August 1591, DAW 523-9. 32  Declaration of the magistrates of Dordrecht, 18 April 1592, DAW 523-5. 33  Jacques della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Haarlem, 24 September 1591 and 4-5 November 1591, DvdM 538a-146, DvdM 538a-153. 34  Daniel van der Meulen to Marten della Faille, Leiden, 3 March 1592, DFL 4. 35  Marten della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 21 February 1592, DvdM 275-35. 36  Marten della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 10 December 1591, DvdM 325-7.

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ians secured it for the benefit of Cecile’s nine children. Following the official appointment of the guardians, Carlo lodged a protest against Cecile’s testament and codicil, claiming that as the father he alone should be in charge of the “administration and upbringing of his children.”37 The guardians countered by asking the magistrates of Dordrecht to force Carlo to pay them the full 10,000 guilders that Cecile brought to the marriage instead of dividing the estate in half between the children and the Carlo as would traditionally occur.38 The guardians wanted to limit Carlo’s access to his wife’s capital by securely investing it in land. Carlo vigorously opposed the guardians, and like Jan de Oude’s estate, the dispute dragged on. At least as late as 1609 Carlo argued that his wife’s testament and codicil should be made null and void.39 * * * Just as the guardians and Carlo’s kin worried about the consequences of leaving Cecile’s estate under Carlo’s control, they expressed equal concern about the day-to-day influence Carlo had on his children. The nature of the relationship between the children and their father on the one hand and the guardians and wider kin on the other differed by age and sex. The issues concerning Carlo’s four boys centered on education and whether, when and how they would acquire mercantile apprenticeships. Ranging in age between 11 and 7 when they lost their mother, the daily life of Carel, Jacques, David and Pieter was less directly affected by their mother’s death than their sisters. From at least February 1592 until the middle of 1595, the four boys attended the school of Cornelis de Rekenare in Dordrecht, where they lived and ate.40 More problematic, and in the end more consequential to the fate of all of the children, was the position of Carlo’s five daughters. Other than Suzanne, who was the youngest child, Maria, 37  Declaration of the magistrates of Dordrecht, 18 April 1592, DAW 523-5. Hardwick, Practice of Patriarchy; Pollock, “Rethinking Patriarchy and the Family.” 38  Statement of Thomas Grammaye, Daniel van der Meulen and Nicolas Mandernach against Carlo, 23 April 1592, Dordrecht, DFL 16; Philippe Godding, Le droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux, du 12e au 18e siècle (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1987). 39  Protest of Carlo before the Raad van Brabant, 1609, DvdM 65-2. 40  Unsurprisingly, the education of the boys did not proceed without controversy. Carlo was constantly late in paying De Rekenare, leading the teacher to sue Carlo and the guardians for 872 guilders he was owed for the boys’ tuition, room and board by March 1595. DvdM 71-4.

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Isabella, Cecile and Hester were all older than their brothers. Though the girls attended a school in Dordrecht, they fell more directly under the authority of their father. Concerns over Carlo’s ability to care for his children without his wife proved all too valid. The breakdown of Carlo’s household demanded an active response from Carlo’s kin that also opened up opportunities for Carlo’s children to express and act on their own wishes.41 The available evidence of the living situation of the children primarily comes from the eldest daughter Maria. As the eldest, she took the lead in communicating with those outside the household and in making decisions on behalf of her younger sisters. In October 1592 Maria secretly wrote to Daniel, her uncle and guardian, about the miserable state of the household. The letter itself is not extant in the archives, but the main tenor is clear from Daniel’s report of it to his brother-in-law Marten. “The oldest daughter wrote me a letter that fills my heart with woe when I think about the condition of that house. The children go around naked, and he will not yield a single penny.”42 The household was falling apart, but Carlo reacted violently toward anyone who sought to interfere with his children. Daniel warned Marten to keep the letter secret, because “if he learns that she wrote to me, he will undoubtedly mishandle her.”43 In the summer of 1593 Maria visited the house of Carolus Battus to inform her uncle “that they can no longer bear [Carlo’s] insolence, and that their lives are all placed in a thousand dangers every day.”44 If the guardians or kin did not act, “they would all be forced to leave when he is gone from the house.”45 Maria’s pleas spurred Daniel and the guardians into action, though they had to proceed cautiously in undermining Carlo’s paternal authority. In the beginning of March 1594 Daniel wrote to his 20-year-old niece, mixing economic concerns of the children’s maternal inheritance with the need to care for their proper upbringing.46 Given the 41  Sabean, Property, Production, and Family; Pollock, “Rethinking Patriarchy and the Family”; Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent. 42  Daniel van der Meulen to Marten della Faille, Leiden, 10 November 1592, DFL 4. 43  Daniel van der Meulen to Marten della Faille, Leiden, 10 November 1592, DFL 4. 44  Carolus Battus to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 22 August 1593, DvdM 314-4. 45  Carolus Battus to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 22 August 1593, DvdM 314-4. 46  Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, “Interest and Emotion in Family and Kinship Studies: A Critique of Social History and Anthropology,” in Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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circumstance Daniel “found it advisable that you and your sisters are placed with an honorable woman and after that to look for a place to live that would be to your contentment and the protection of your good name.”47 However, he was only willing to proceed with this plan if it had Maria’s approval. “But my resolution depends upon you, and I cannot do anything unless you all have already thought about and are willing to leave the house and be separated from your father.”48 Maria quickly responded to her uncle’s letter, approving of Daniel’s plan while also mimicking his language that intertwined economic and social concerns. She saw “no profit” in remaining with their father, who “still hardly gives us enough money to maintain the house, because he does not want to part with any money.”49 The timing of Daniel’s letter proved fortuitous in that Carlo had recently started to prepare to travel to Antwerp. “What he has in mind, only God knows,” but Maria believed that he planned to carry on his lawsuits against his brothers and executors of Jan de Oude’s estate.50 Her father’s trip to what Maria referred to as “enemy territory” (vyants landt) provided the perfect opportunity to free themselves from their father’s authority and move to a household that would better look after their needs and interests. Daniel worked with his fellow guardian Hendrick to find a suitable situation for Carlo’s daughters away from the corrupting influence of their father. However, before their plans could be put into place a crisis erupted. On the evening of 28 May 1594 one of Carlo’s elder daughters came to Hendrick’s house to inform him that her younger sister Cecile, her mother’s namesake who had just turned 17, had run away with a farm servant named Dierick Cornelissen Pharo. The couple had hoped to reach Roosendaal, where they planned to get married, but they were spotted in the village of Steenbergen, just north of Bergen op Zoom.51 According to letters Carlo and Hendrick received from Steenbergen 2 days later, the authorities had initially gotten ahold of Cecile and placed her in a house, where they planned to await word from her father. However, Cecile threatened to drown herself if she was separated from Dierick, and Dierick soon broke her out of the house and ran off again. The authorities quickly  Daniel van der Meulen to Maria della Faille, Dordrecht, 4 March 1594, DvdM 291-2.  Daniel van der Meulen to Maria della Faille, Dordrecht, 4 March 1594, DvdM 291-2. 49  Maria della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Rhoon, 7 March 1594, DvdM 273-1. 50  Maria della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Rhoon, 7 March 1594, DvdM 273-1. 51  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 29 May 1594, DvdM 401-10. 47 48

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found and arrested Dierick, but at the time of the writing of the letter, they had yet to find Cecile.52 Cecile’s attempted elopement proved to be a tipping point for all of Carlo’s daughters. Cecile convinced her father and the guardians to allow her to marry Dierick.53 As for her sisters, Cecile’s actions confirmed to all involved the dangers of keeping the girls with their father. Hendrick’s letter to Daniel that reported her disappearance did not disparage Cecile’s character. Instead, Hendrick’s blame fell squarely on the father for his inability to look after his daughters and his refusal “to board his children somewhere with honorable people.”54 Hendrick feared that one of the other daughters might do something similar “from impatience and inability to see a way out” of their current situation. It was more necessary than ever to withdraw the girls from Carlo’s household to avoid further “shame, loss, and sadness.”55 Despite Cecile’s clear wishes and the unimpeachable Calvinist credentials of the guardians excepting Thomas Grammaye, sending some or all of Carlo’s children to live in Catholic Antwerp was openly discussed from the end of 1593. In September of that year Marten asked for Carlo’s two eldest sons to be sent to Antwerp to obtain a good mercantile education. A few months later, after Daniel asked for advice on removing the daughters from their father’s household, Marten responded that they should wait until the children’s half-brother Jan de Carlo returned to Antwerp. Marten believed that Jan de Carlo could help care for his younger half-­ siblings, having proved himself to be a capable merchant while working for Marten in Venice.56 Daniel clearly entertained the idea of sending some of the children to Antwerp where Marten’s wealth and dense network, along with the presence of the children’s half-siblings, might provide more opportunities than the rather divided network of the children’s uncles in Holland. However, such a drastic step does not seem to have been seriously considered until Cecile’s elopement. 52  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 31 May 1594, DvdM 401-11. 53  News of the marriage of Cecile and Dierick is found in a letter from Jacques della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Haarlem, 22 June 1594, DvdM 538b-94. 54  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 29 May 1594, DvdM 401-10. 55  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 29 May 1594, DvdM 401-10. 56  Brulez, Firma Della Faille.

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The letters between Marten and Daniel concerning Carlo’s children avoided the issue of religion and concentrated instead on social concerns about what was best and most profitable for the children, leaving that which divided them to silence. Nevertheless, the religious upbringing of the children and the mother’s testament could not be ignored. Hendrick most vociferously laid out the religious argument against sending the daughters to Antwerp. He wrote to Daniel in October 1594 hardly able to contain his shock and disbelief that Daniel might allow his nieces to live with Papists. It would not only be “against the will and intent of their good mother” but also the duty that they agreed to undertake as the children’s guardians.57 They had sworn “openly before God and worthy men” to abide by Cecile’s clear desire “that the children be raised in the fear of the Lord and in the true Christian religion.”58 Hendrick also called into question the expected material benefits of sending the girls to Antwerp. What, he asked, could Marten and their half-siblings do for the children that Daniel, Jan and Jacques could not accomplish for their nieces and nephews in Holland? Despite Hendrick’s pleas about the duty of the guardians to abide by the testament of the children’s mother, in the beginning of 1595 Carlo and the lawyer François van den Brande escorted Carlo’s four unmarried daughters to Antwerp and placed them under the care of their uncle Marten.59 Marten and Jan de Carlo may have had religious motives for bringing the girls to Antwerp, but the girls’ exchange of Calvinist Holland for Catholic Antwerp was only possible through the approval of three decision-makers in Holland: the girls’ father, Maria and her sisters themselves, and their uncle Daniel. The fact that Carlo brought his daughters to Antwerp, and that Hendrick identified him as the original impetus shows that he approved of the move. Why he did this is less clear. He may have simply been ready to get the girls off his hands, or he could have seen the error of his ways, though this is less likely.60  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 19 October 1594, DvdM 401-15. 58  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 19 October 1594, DvdM 401-15. 59  Marten later told that he, Robert van Eeckeren, Jan de Carlo and Thomas Grammaye collaborated to bring Carlo’s daughters to Antwerp. Memory of Marten against the children of Carlo, c. 1618, DFL 19. 60  Carlo made a half-hearted attempt to get control of his daughters again in 1596, even claiming that he wanted to raise them as Catholics, but he soon became frustrated with his lack of success in the courts in Brabant and returned to his home in Holland. Request of Carlo against Marten before the Raad van Brabant in Brussels, 2 January 1596, DFL 8. 57

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Carlo’s daughters must have also had a say in the matter. In the lawsuit filed in 1617 that led Marten to recount the events of the girls’ journey to Antwerp Jan Sonnius, the husband of Carlo’s daughter Isabella, claimed that Marten brought her and her sisters to Antwerp against their will. However, all contemporary evidence is against this claim, which was made in the context of a dispute over whether or not Marten should be responsible for the girls’ room and board while they lived in his household.61 The sisters had long spoken of their desire to leave their father’s house. Daniel sought out Maria’s approval for removing them from their father’s house in March 1594, and so it is unlikely they could have gone to Antwerp without at least gaining Maria’s approval whatever protestations they made in the second half of the 1610s. A letter from Hendrick to Daniel provides another hint that the girls approved of the plan. Having heard Daniel’s opinion to his letter discussed above, one argument Hendrick put forward was that, while their desire to leave their father’s house should be taken seriously, they were not old enough to know what was best for themselves.62 Finally, Carlo could not have taken his daughters to Antwerp without the approval of Daniel as Hendrick knew well. Though no document records Daniel’s thoughts on the matter, understanding his perspective is key to interpreting how and why Carlo’s children moved to Antwerp instead of staying in Holland as their mother wished. In the first place, Daniel’s willingness to place the girls under Marten’s care gives proof to the strong bond that he had developed with his brother-in-law even as the two were split by the Dutch Revolt. More significantly, the decision demonstrates Daniel’s readiness to do that which Hendrick so feared, to place practical concerns, particularly the issue of possible marital partners for the girls, over confessional ones.63 In this instance, Daniel decided that the familial structures in Antwerp were more willing and able to support Carlo’s daughters than those in Holland. Whereas Marten gladly played the role of family patriarch by taking his nieces into his household, both Jan and Jacques failed to assist their nieces to the same degree, thereby abrogating their claims to leadership of the sibling group. Furthermore,  Marten, Jan de Carlo and Cornelia all charged the girls room and board, while Jan Sonnius argued that the girls had acted as servants during their time in Antwerp and so should have been paid. Memory of Marten against the children of Carlo, c. 1619, DFL 19; Account from Jan de Carlo and Cornelia for taking care of their half-siblings, 1619, DFL 16. 62  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 8 November 1594, DvdM 401-17. 63  Kaplan, Divided by Faith. 61

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Marten was assisted by Jan de Carlo’s inclination to take on the role of eldest brother to his half-sisters who he may have only met briefly if at all before their arrival in Antwerp.64 The situation is nicely summarized by Marten in his 1619 description for why he took Carlo’s daughters into his household. According to Marten, he did so out of love and affection so that they would not be lost in Holland like one of them was due to the bad housekeeping and threats made by the father. To prevent worse damage and scandal their brother and sister, with the friends on this side, and with the desire and good will of the children, found it necessary to bring them here, especially because none of the friends that were over there were willing to deal with the strange moods, threats, and bad governing of the father.65

Marten undoubtedly placed his motivations and those of Jan de Carlo and Cornelia in the best light. However, Daniel’s actions show that he agreed with this assessment. The best way to avoid further scandal such as that created by Cecile’s elopement was to remove the children from their father’s influence and place them within an alternative family structure provided by Marten and their older half-siblings Jan de Carlo and Cornelia. * * * As consequential as the move of Carlo’s four daughters to Antwerp in the midst of the Dutch Revolt was, it need not be permanent, nor did the girls necessarily have to give up the religion and connections in which they had grown up in Dordrecht. However, over the next 5 years all of Carlo’s children, excepting only the married Cecile, became firmly embedded in the social networks of Marten and their older half-siblings through the familial work performed by their relatives in Antwerp.66 Through their diligence in finding opportunities for Carlo’s sons and particularly in con64  Jan de Carlo traveled to Holland in June 1594 after returning from Venice. He visited his uncle Jacques in Haarlem and may have visited his father and half-siblings on his way down to Antwerp. Jacques della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Haarlem, 14 June 1594, DvdM 538b-87. Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean, “From Siblingship to Siblinghood: Kinship and the Shaping of European Society (1300–1900),” in Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900, ed. Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). 65  Memory of Marten against the children of Carlo, c. 1619, DFL 19. 66  Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen.

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tracting a favorable marriage for Maria, Marten and Jan de Carlo lived up to their claims to be heads of their respective sibling groups, while Jan de Carlo and Cornelia fully integrated their younger half-siblings into their sibling group.67 By the time that Pieter moved to Antwerp soon after Daniel’s death in 1600, Carlo’s children had abandoned the Reformed sphere in which they had grown up for Catholic lands that Maria had once referred to as “enemy territory.” According to the testimony of Jan de Carlo, Carlo’s daughters quickly adapted to their new environment. In April 1595 he reported to Daniel that his sisters were happy with their new lives in Antwerp. In fact, he wrote on behalf of his sisters who “have prayed” to have Daniel allow their brothers to be sent down to Antwerp. The girls believed that their brothers would profit by joining them in Antwerp. Not only did they fear that their father “daily pulls away his hand from them as if they were not his children,” but they also expressed concerns about the expense and lack of discipline enforced at their school in Dordrecht.68 Jan de Carlo supported this plan and wrote that if his half-brothers joined their sisters in Antwerp, he would be able to find apprenticeships for them in “Italy or somewhere in neutral territory.”69 Less than 4 months after their arrival in Antwerp, Carlo’s four daughters had become allies to those who wished to attract Carlo’s children to the Southern Low Countries. This turn of events must have grievously disappointed their former religious tutor Hendrick van den Corput. Daniel initially resisted the calls for Carlo’s sons to join their sisters in Antwerp.70 The concerns of Carlo’s daughters were partially addressed when their brothers left their school in Dordrecht and enrolled in a new one in Amsterdam in November. The change in schools also placed the boys closer to the orbit of their uncle Martin, as they came under the care of Jan de Wale, Marten’s factor in the blossoming mercantile city.71 At this 67  Sophie Ruppel, “Subordinates, Patrons, and Most Beloved: Sibling Relationships in Seventeenth-Century German Court Society,” in Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900, ed. Christopher H.  Johnson and David Warren Sabean (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). 68  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 3 April 1595, DvdM 271-1. 69  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 3 April 1595, DvdM 271-1. 70  Daniel van der Meulen to Marten della Faille, Leiden, 12 August 1595, DFL 4. 71  Jacques della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Haarlem, 27 February 1595, DvdM 538c-56; Brulez, Firma Della Faille.

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point, it was becoming increasingly apparent to Daniel that Jan and Jacques lacked the motivation to assist Carlo’s children to the same extent as their kin in Antwerp. In May 1596 Daniel praised Marten for all that he had done for their nieces and complained about the lack of help he received from his brothers-in-law, exclaiming that it “is distressing that men will not do more for each other.”72 Around the time that Daniel complained of the insufficiency of the support his brothers-in-law in Holland provided for their nephews, the guardians allowed the 15-year-old Carel, Carlo and Cecile’s oldest son, to travel to Antwerp to live with Jan de Carlo. Interestingly, Jan de Carlo sought to allay any fears about his religious motivation for bringing Carel and the other siblings to Antwerp. “Concerning religion, it will be handled so discreetly with him that I hope there will be no cause for him to fall into any torment or pang of conscience.”73 Had Carel’s sisters received the same consideration since their arrival in Catholic Antwerp? Jan de Carlo’s statement testifies to his understanding of the difficulties involved in the religious changes his younger half-siblings underwent in coming to Antwerp, but it provides few clues about the daily religious experience of the children. Other than this instance, the issue of religion and toleration of the religious beliefs of Carlo and Cecile’s children is not evident in the correspondence. Instead, the focus remained on the social position of the children and “to seek their advancement and profit.”74 For all the emphasis that the kin placed on the education and mercantile prospects of Carlo’s sons, taking care of his daughters and finding them advantageous marital partners proved much more consequential to the “advancement and profit” of the siblings. In part this was due to the educational, social and even mental deficiencies of Carlo and Cecile’s two eldest sons. Once Carel arrived in Antwerp, Jan de Carlo found him “very unpolished” and unprepared to work in Jan de Carlo’s office or to be sent out for an apprenticeship elsewhere.75 With little to recommend himself, his future, as well as that of his younger brothers, was largely tied to the social connections their older sisters could make.  Daniel van der Meulen to Marten della Faille, Leiden, 6 May 1596, DFL 4.  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 7 March 1596, DvdM 271-3. 74  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 7 March 1596, DvdM 271-3. 75  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 7 March 1596, DvdM 271-3. 72 73

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As early as the fall of 1594 Hendrick van den Corput had heard Marten intended to find a marital partner for Carlo’s oldest daughter Maria in Venice.76 After Jan de Carlo and Cornelia celebrated their own marriages in January and July 1596, they took the lead in finding a suitable match for Maria. According to Jan de Carlo, finding a marital partner for Maria would advance the “honor and reputation of the whole family, as well as the prosperity of the aforementioned children, because if the oldest marries well, the [prospects] of the others will be much promoted.”77 In July 1597 Jan de Carlo received a formal proposal for the hand of his younger sister from Piat della Faille. Piat was Maria’s first-cousin once removed; his father was Maria’s paternal grandfather’s younger brother.78 The proposed marriage would firmly bring Maria and her siblings into Marten’s trading network. Piat was a widower and had resided in Verona since 1577, where he acted as a servant in Jan de Oude’s and then Marten’s trade in the city.79 Piat proposed the union dependent on Maria’s ability to bring £1000 to the marriage. With any inheritance from Carlo in serious doubt and Maria’s maternal inheritance much below this figure the kin had to make to make up the difference. Over the 6 months between the reception of the proposal and the final confirmation that the union would take place in Cologne in April 1598, Jan de Carlo worked to procure the necessary funds for his sister. In writing to his uncles he presented such monetary assistance as a social duty of kin. He believed “that men through love are accountable as Christians to promote friends where there is opportunity.”80 Jan de Carlo and Cornelia proved their adherence to this ideal by providing £200 each for Maria’s dowry. Far less wealthy and settled than their aunts and uncles, Jan de Carlo and Cornelia nevertheless both agreed to invest quite substantial sums for their younger sister’s benefit with the understanding that it would 76  Hendrick van den Corput to Daniel van der Meulen, Dordrecht, 19 October 1594, DvdM 401-15; Howell, Marriage Exchange; Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–144. 77  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 6 December 1596, DvdM 271-5. 78  On the issue of cousin marriage, see Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen; David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe: A New Approach to Long Term Development,” in Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development, ed. David Warren Sabean, et al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). 79  Piat’s first wife, Catharina Charles, brought £1600 to the marriage and left him a surviving son. Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 1 August 1597, DvdM 271-7; Brulez, Firma Della Faille; Schmitz, Les Della Faille, vol. 1bis, 3–14. 80  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 10 June 1596, DvdM 271-4.

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strengthen the social standing of their sibling group as a whole. Both Marten and his sister Anna, who also lived in Antwerp, found the marriage so beneficial to the family that they both agreed to give £100.81 With the rather substantial sum of £600 pledged by Maria’s kin in Antwerp Jan de Carlo hoped to obtain the remaining £400 through Maria’s maternal inheritance and her aunts and uncles in Holland in time for the wedding to take place before winter set in. Maria was entitled to a one-ninth portion of her mother’s capital of 10,000 guilders, or about £185 3s. 8d., plus the profits and interest from the time of her mother’s death.82 However, no resolution over the disputed estate was possible within the allotted time frame, and Piat eventually settled on asking for Maria to bring £800 plus her inheritance.83 Jan de Carlo knew that he could expect nothing from his father. He and Maria were dependent on the good will of their aunts and uncles in Holland for the remaining £200. Jan de Carlo hoped that Daniel would pledge £100 like Marten and Anna and that he would help to get Jan and Jacques disposed to give the remaining £100. At the end of October Jan de Carlo wrote letters to his uncles Jan, Jacques and Steven asking for the remaining funds. Jan de Carlo repeated his arguments about the benefits of the potential marriage and the social duty of kin to help those in need. He called on his uncles to put aside their disagreements with his father and help to lift up their niece whose position was only made more pitiable by the depravity of her father.84 Despite the pressure Jan de Carlo placed on his uncles in Holland, only Daniel gave Maria any money, and he pledged £50 instead of the hoped for £100. Facing the possibility that the union could fall through, Jan de Carlo and Cornelia eventually agreed to make up the shortage themselves, providing a further £75 each.85 81  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 1 August 1597, DvdM 271-7. 82  A document from the Weesmeesterkamer in Dordrecht from 1603 shows Cecile’s estate had invested in land valued at 23,575 guilders. Whether Cecile’s children were ever able to collect the full value of their inheritance is unclear. Accounts of the inheritance of the children of Cecile Grammaye, 1603, DAW 523-8. 83  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 19 February 1598, DvdM 271-14. 84  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Jacques della Faille, Antwerp, 28 October 1597, DvdM 27111; Jan de Carlo della Faille to Steven della Faille, Antwerp, 28 October 1597, DvdM 27112; Jan de Carlo della Faille to Jan della Faille, Antwerp, 28 October 1597, DvdM 271-13. 85  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 19 February 1598, DvdM 271-14.

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It is impossible to know the exact reasons why Jan, Jacques, Steven and even Daniel did not live up to Jan de Carlo’s hopes. Disapproval of the marriage seems unlikely. There is no indication that Daniel found the marriage any less advantageous than did his in-laws in Antwerp. In fact, Daniel procured the passport that enabled Jan de Carlo and Maria to travel through the United Provinces to meet Piat in Cologne in April 1598.86 Instead, this can be read as the final step in Carlo’s children moving from the sphere of their kin in Holland to those in Antwerp. Jan and Jacques’ unwillingness to pledge funds for Maria’s marriage served as a continuation of the limited assistance they had earlier provided. Assistance from kin did not simply occur naturally.87 Daniel’s pledge of £50 can be seen as a middle ground. He accepted his continued duty to foster the well-being of Carlo’s children, even if it meant placing them among Catholics and loyalists, but it was primarily the responsibility of the kin in Antwerp to secure Maria’s marriage that completed Maria’s and her siblings’ move across the political and religious border created by the Dutch Revolt.88 Maria and Piat were married in Cologne on 15 April 1598 in the presence of Jan de Carlo and Jan de Wale. Maria’s marriage fixed the center of the social, religious and even political life of her and her siblings in Brabant and Italy. Soon after the newlyweds reached their home in Verona Maria wrote to her uncle Daniel, thanking him “whole-heartedly for all the friendship you have done for us in all manners.”89 Maria could only express joy and a deep sense of obligation toward Daniel for the events over the previous 3 years that led her from the house of her father in Holland to that of Marten and then her brother Jan de Carlo in Antwerp and then finally to her marital abode in Verona. * * * Maria’s marriage enabled her, alongside Jan de Carlo and Cornelia, to take a more active role in assisting her younger siblings and strengthening the bonds of their sibling group. Maria’s letter to Daniel asked if any of 86  Jan de Carlo della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 18 April 1598, DvdM 271-16. 87  Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen. 88  For a similar movement of kin across religious boundaries among the aristocracy, see Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Gent, “Converted Relationships: Re-negotiating Family Status after Religious Conversion in the Nassau Dynasty,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 3 (2014): 647–672. 89  Maria della Faille to Daniel van der Meulen, Verona, 22 May 1598, DvdM 273-2.

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her brothers were prepared to come live with her and Piat to work in her husband’s office, while Piat sent a letter to Jan de Carlo that expressed the same desire. Daniel agreed to send the 16-year-old Jacques to live with his sister and brother-in-law. Not much later Daniel sent Jacques’ younger brother David to work with Jan de Carlo in Antwerp, and Pieter followed soon after Daniel died from the plague in the summer of 1600. Thus, by the end of 1600 all of Carlo’s children resided in Antwerp or Italy excepting only the poorly married Cecile, who had been forced to beg from her relatives in Antwerp due to her and her husband’s poverty.90 The adult lives of Carlo’s children demonstrate the extent to which they fully integrated into the Catholic networks of their kin after leaving Holland. Pieter’s dramatic story has already been recounted. Aside from Suzanne’s entrance into a convent, there is a paucity of evidence on the religious beliefs of Pieter’s older siblings. Nevertheless, the lives of his sisters give little reason to doubt that they adopted Catholicism and political loyalty to the Spanish Low Countries. In 1605, with the financial assistance of Marten, Jan de Carlo and Cornelia, Hester married Pierre Everardi, a native of Brussels who served the Spanish government in Naples.91 After the death of Piat in 1610 and Pierre sometime before 1614, instead of using their freedom as widows to return to the land and religion in which they were raised, Maria and Hester left Italy for Antwerp where they married into the elite of the Spanish Low Countries and fostered close ties with Jan de Carlo and Cornelia. In 1612 Maria married Jan van der Speeten, a lawyer for the Council of Flanders and secretary of the magistracy of Ghent who was ennobled by the Spanish government in 1625. Maria’s younger sister Isabella married the lawyer Jan Sonnius, while Hester married Jean Vilain, a member of a noble family and bailiff of the city of Aalst.92 The movement of Carlo’s children across the border between the United Provinces and the Spanish Low Countries at the height of the Dutch Revolt would not have been possible without the strong bonds that continued to exist among kin of different religious confessions. Despite Carlo’s troublesome nature and household mismanagement, kin on both  Jan van Borne to Daniel van der Meulen, Antwerp, 18 February 1596, DvdM 325-32.  Jan de Carlo and Cornelia provided Hester with £200 each and Marten again gave £100. Memory of Marten against the children of Carlo, c. 1618, DFL 19; Account from Jan de Carlo and Cornelia for taking care of their half-siblings, 1619, DFL 16. 92  Schmitz, Les Della Faille, vol. 1bis, 3–14; Schmitz, Les Della Faille, vol. 5, 23–42. 90 91

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sides of the Revolt identified the interest of Carlo’s children with that of the whole kinship group. In particular, the case of the children of Carlo and Cecile highlights the significance of sibling groups and the strength of the ideal of sibling unity that passed on to create strong ties between aunts and uncles and their nieces and nephews. Jan de Carlo and Marten’s readiness to live up to their claims as heads of their respective sibling groups through the material aid they provided Carlo and Cecile’s children, alongside Daniel’s acquiescence to this aid, shows the construction of a space of religious tolerance that enabled individuals with conflicting religious beliefs to maintain strong bonds without needing to come to any positive acceptance of the other’s faith. Carlo’s children were active participants in the creation and use of this space by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by their kin in Antwerp over the religious faith their mother had hoped to impart to them. Their choice shows the possibilities but also the limitations of the practical forms of toleration created by kinship. The ingrained social logic of the family that overwhelmed the religious and political allegiance of their youth also facilitated their full adoption of their new environment later in life, making Pieter’s double conversion even more dramatic. The social bonds of kin could close off spaces of toleration as much as they could open them up.

Bibliography Bastress-Dukehart, Erica. “Family, Property, and Feeling in Early Modern German Noble Culture: The Zimmerns of Swabia.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 1 (2001): 1–19. ———. “Sibling Conflict within Early Modern German Noble Families.” Journal of Family History 33, no. 1 (2008): 61–80. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Briels, J.  G. C.  A. Zuid-Nederlandse Immigratie 1572–1630. (Haarlem: FibulaVan Dishoeck, 1978). Broomhall, Susan, and Jacqueline van Gent. “In the Name of the Father: Conceptualizing ‘Pater Familias’ in the Letters of William the Silent’s Children.” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2009): 1130–1166. ———. “Converted Relationships: Re-negotiating Family Status after Religious Conversion in the Nassau Dynasty.” Journal of Social History 47, no. 3 (2014): 647–672. Brulez, Wilfrid. De Firma Della Faille en de internationale handel van Vlaamse firma’s in de 16e eeuw. (Brussels: Paleis der Academièen, 1959).

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Godding, Philippe. Le droit privé dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux, du 12e au 18e siècle. (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1987). Hardwick, Julie. The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Howell, Martha C. The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). ———. Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Janssen, Geert. The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Johnson, Christopher H., and David Warren Sabean. “From Siblingship to Siblinghood: Kinship and the Shaping of European Society (1300–1900).” In Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900, edited by Christopher H.  Johnson, and David Warren Sabean. (New  York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 1–28. Jongbloet-van Houtte, Gisela, (ed.) Brieven en andere bescheiden betreffende Daniel van der Meulen, 1584–1600. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën: Grote serie. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986). Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Kooi, Christine. Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Medick, Hans, and David Warren Sabean. “Interest and Emotion in Family and Kinship Studies: A Critique of Social History and Anthropology.” In Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, edited by Hans Medick, and David Warren Sabean. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 9–27. Parker, Geoffrey. The Dutch Revolt. (London: Penguin Books, 1985). Pollock, Linda A. “Rethinking Patriarchy and the Family in Seventeenth-Century England.” Journal of Family History 23, no. 1 (1998): 3–27. Ruppel, Sophie. “Subordinates, Patrons, and Most Beloved: Sibling Relationships in Seventeenth-Century German Court Society.” In Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900, edited by Christopher H.  Johnson, and David Warren Sabean. (New  York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 85–110. Sabean, David Warren. Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700– 1870. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ———. Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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When They Come of Age: Religious Conversion and Puberty in Fifteenth-Century Ashkenaz Ahuva Liberles

I For many years, on the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av—the day of fasting dedicated in the Jewish tradition to grieving over the destruction of the Holy Temple and Jerusalem—Rabbi Israel Isserlein son of Petachya, the great fifteenth-century Rabbinic leader, residing in Wiener  Neustadt, would tell of the persecutions and destruction that had occurred  much

I thank Pinchas Roth, Ephraim Shoham Steiner and Sophia Schmitt and the volume editors for reading different stages of this paper and sharing their input with me.

A. Liberles (*) The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel A doctoral research fellow at the I-CORE Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSOC) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva, Israel © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_11

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closer to home, known as the “Wiener Geserah” (Viennese persecution).1 On 3 May 1420 members of the Jewish community of Vienna and Lower Austria were arrested by the duke of Austria, Albrecht V. The duke confiscated their assets, and prohibited the resettlement of Jews in Vienna. Eight hundred Jews were deported and sent down the Danube River to the east on rafts.2 Others were forced to choose between death and conversion to Christianity, and some wealthier Jews were tortured to reveal their hidden valuables and treasures. Over 200 Jews remained loyal to their Jewish faith and were burned at the stake. The fate of Jewish children differed from their parents, as historian Martha Keil shows in her research on the Austrian Jews baptized in the aftermath of the 1420/1421 events: “the children were spared the burning at the stake; some were handed over to monasteries where they were more useful than others.”3 Isserlein shared in great detail with his senior students how he had lost his mother and his uncle, Rabbi Aaron Blümlinn, in this violent attack. Both family members died while rejecting baptism, after being arrested and tortured along with other highly esteemed members of the Jewish community of Vienna.4 Yet, Isserlein suffered another loss, one he did not make 1  See: Joseph ben Moses, Leket Yosher, ed. Jacob Freimann (Jerusalem 1963) I:112. Discussing recent disasters on the fast day of the ninth of Av originated from the Babylonian Talmud tractate Berakhot 13a. 2  For an extensive literary survey of the historical background and presentation of the sources of the events, see:  Martha Keil, “What Happened to the ‘New Christians’? The ‘Viennese Geserah’ of 1420/21 and the Forced Baptism of the Jews”, in  Philippe Buc, Martha Keil, John Tolan (eds.), Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe:  The historiography legacy of Bernhard Blumenkranz.  (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016), pp.  97–114; Samuel Krauss, Die Wiener Geserah vom Jahre 1421. (Wien-Leipzig: W.Braumüller 1920); Shlomo Eidelberg, Jewish Life in Austria in the Fifteenth Century: As Reflected in the Legal Writings of Rabbi Israel Isserlein and His Contemporaries, (Philadelphia PA: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1962). 3  Contemporary eye witness abbot Martin von Leibitz, translation by Keil, ‘The Viennese Geserah’105, where a Latin transcription can be found in footnote 34. This article stems from the meticulous work of Martha Keil in the aforementioned article, to trace and recover what happened to the converts from the Viennese riots of 1420/1421. 4  After studying under Rabbi Shalom of Wiener Neustadt, Blümlinn spent most of his life as Rabbi of the city Krems on the Danube. A famous illustrated legal wedding contract “Ketuba” from Krems dating 1391 was given, according to some scholars, to Blümlinn’s daughter, Zemach. see: Arthur Z. Schwarz, “Eine illuminierte Kremser Kethubah aus dem Jahre 1392,” Archiv für Jüdische Familienforschung, Kunstgeschichte und Museumswesen 1 (1913), pp.  23–25, Ido Noy, “The Fleuron Crown of Mrs. Zemah Daughter of Rabbi Aaron: Concepts of Royalty, Nobility and Virginity among Ashkenazi brides in the late Middle Ages,” Chidushim, Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 21 (2019), pp. 84–113. Later, Blümlinn left Krems with his family due his nomination

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public as often. His orphaned cousin, son of Aaron, was baptized as a child under duress, sharing the fate of other children from the 1421 Viennese persecution.5 Although descending from one of the most privileged Jewish families in Austria6 and even though he was forced into his new religion, the former Jewish child stayed faithful to Christianity as an adult.7 Some historiographic attention has been drawn to Christian theological debate concerning the encouragement of Jewish children to convert without parental consent, as part of the medieval missionary attempts toward the Jewish minority in Christian Europe.8 The reasons brought by theologians to condemn child missionary efforts focused on the prevailing sense that Jewish parents had a natural right to raise their own children according to their own beliefs while understanding the opportunity at hand to convert the pliant children before they were wrongly educated by the Jews.9 This question troubled historians of Jewish history as well, who sought to understand Jewish reactions to the threat of missionary, child in 1418/1419 as chief rabbi of Vienna which he served until his death in 1421. After Blümlinn’s death he was usually referred to in writings of his fellow rabbinic scholars and by his nephew Isserlein as Rabbi Aaron the holy, symbolizing his ultimate sacrifice. Israel J. Yuval, Scholars in their Time: The Religious Leadership of German Jewry in the Late Middle Ages, (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1988 [Hebrew]), pp. 59–71 5  It is more than probable that the forced baptism of the orphan took place after the death of his father, during the persecutions of 1420/1421, although we do not have written evidence dating this conversion. We do know that his case was discussed before 1427  in a responsum discussed in this article (see footnote 17) and so the time line fits this scenario. 6  For a detailed survey on the Blümlinn family, see: Arye Maimon and Yacov Guggenheim, Germania Judaica, 3.1, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1987): 679–685; Yuval, Scholars in their Time, 59–62; Eveline Brugger, “Hetschel und wer noch? Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der Juden in Herzogenburg im Mittelalter,”  in Günter Katzler and Victoria Zimmerl-Panagl (eds.), 900 Jahre Stift Herzogenburg Aufbrüche  – Umbrüche  – Kontinuität. Tagungsband zum wissenschaftlichen Symposium vom 22.–24. September 2011, (Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen: StudienVerlag, 2013), pp.119–137. 7  Years later, when Aaron’s daughter, Zemach, died, Isserlein ordered her sons the path of mourning and the converted brother was not among the mourners. Leket Yosher, Hilchot Smachot, p. 21. 8  On medieval canon law concerning forced baptism on children, see: Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, (Toronto  [Ont]: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1991), pp.  695–697; Ulrich Horst und Barbara Faes de Mottoni, “Die Zwangstaufe jüdischer Kinder im Urteil scholastischer Theologen,” Münchner Theologische Zeitschrift 40.3 (1989), 173–199; Peter Browe, Die Judenmission im Mittelalter und die Päpste, Rome 1973; for the late medieval period, see the comprehensive research of Christine Magin, “Wie es umb der iuden recht stet”: Der Status der Juden in spätmittelalterlichen Rechtsbüchern, (Göttingen Wallstein Verlag, 1999), pp. 185–193. 9  Aviad  M.  Kleinberg, “A Thirteenth-Century Struggle over Custody: The Case of Catherine of Parc-aux-Dames,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 20 (1990): 51–67; Jessie Sherwood, A Convert of 1096: Guillaume, Monk of Flaix, Converted from the Jew, Viator

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abduction and conversion. Simcha Goldin claimed a connection between an affectionate and even overprotective attitude toward children in their medieval Jewish communities due to their physical and spiritual vulnerability. This derived, according to Goldin, from a constant parental concern that their children might be abducted to be raised as Christians.10 Elisheva Baumgarten highlights other reasons for childcare in high medieval Germany and France, in her research on mothers and their younger children. Baumgarten makes a comprehensive comparison between the Jewish society and their Christian neighbors  concerning childcare and motherhood, her premise being that in many instances these two communities actually functioned as one, while in other issues the inner structure of each society led to different attitudes, rituals and practices. Writing about converted children and adolescents of late-medieval European Jewry is still in its infancy.11 Most of the Hebrew sources from the Holy Roman Empire in the premodern period are found in rabbinic legal work (Responsa and legal rulings), written by learned men and addressed mostly to learned men. Children are rarely discussed in these 39:1 (2008): 1–22; On fifteenth century papal law denouncing child baptism without parental consent, see: Keil, ‘the Viennese Geserah’ , 104–106. 10  Joseph Bamberger, Ha’apifior hayehudi. Letoldoteha shel ’aggadà mime’ habenaym be’ashkenaz [The Jewish Pope. History of a Medieval Ashkenazic Legend] (Ramat-Gan: BarIlan University Press, 2009, Hebrew). 11   Simcha Goldin, “Jewish Society under Pressure: The Concept of Childhood,” in: J.P.Goldberg and F.Riddy (eds.), Youth in the Middle Ages, (Rochester, N.Y. : Boydell & Brewer, 2004) pp. 25–43; William Chester Jordan claimed a connection between the rebellious liminal stage of adolescence and the many conversion of Jews to Christianity in the, middle ages. Jessie Sherwood limited this assumption by claiming that it was to the benefit of the conversion narrators to emphasize that the conversions were legitimate, therefore stressing the older age of the converted heroes. Similarly, she showed that concepts concerning adolescents have changed throughout the centuries and the rebellious attitude of teenagers in modern times should be questioned to fit to the medieval cycle of life. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner paved a different path by examining the connection between adultescents, struggling with religious doubts, and a serious consideration of conversion and the tragic outcome of suicide in medieval England. See: Efraim Shoham-Steiner., “‘Vitam finivit infelicem’: Madness Conversion and Adolescent Suicide among Jews in late twelfth Century England,” in: Merrall Price & Kristine. T. Utterback (eds.), The Constructed Jew: Jews and Judaism through Medieval Christian Eyes, (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013), pp. 71–90; William Chester Jordan, “Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research Agenda,” in: Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, eds. (Notre Dame, 2001), 77–93; Jessie Sherwood, ‘Rebellious Youth and Pliant Children: Jewish Converts in Adolescentia’, in: Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (eds.), Medieval Life cycles: Continuity and Change (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols 2013), 183–209.

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sources,12 even less ink was spilled over orphaned children, which is all the more reason to give a closer look at the documents at hand.13 In this chapter I attempt to shed light on different ways converted orphaned children were perceived by adult society.14 Due to the legal nature of most of the premodern Jewish sources at hand, I will, in this article, address these questions mostly from a legal point of view. In the first part I will examine two cases brought before Jewish medieval courts and one theoretical legal discussion—all three were recorded in contemporary rabbinic responsa (written decisions and rulings by rabbinic scholars in response to questions addressed to them). Following the examination of the Hebrew documents I will discuss two archival documents from Austria concerning a converted child from the Viennese persecutions of 1421. Analyzing sources from “both ends,” that is, from a Jewish and Christian origin, will complement the following discussion: What was the religious affiliation, in Jewish legal writing, of the Jewish children who were forced into baptism in 1421? At what point were the young converts considered responsible for their religious status regardless of the violent consequences that led them into a new religion? What threshold must he or she cross in their birth religion and in their adopted religion for their conversion to be seen as complete? Did any of these children find their way back to Judaism and to their Jewish families15 and if not, why? 12  Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 13  On medieval children in Jewish medieval society, see: Simcha Goldin, “Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie im Mittelalter zu Kind und Kindheit,” Jahrbuch der Kindheit 6 (1989), 211–56; “Jewish Children and Christian Missionizing,” in Israel Bartal and Isaiah Gafni, eds., Sexuality and the Family in History: Collected Essays [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1999), 97–118; Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Attitudes Toward Childhood and Children in Medieval Jewish Society,” Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times 2 (1985), 1–35; Israel M. Ta-Shma, “Children in Medieval Germanic Jewry: A Perspective on Ariès from Jewish Sources,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 12 (1991), 263–8; Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, (New Haven CT: Yale University Press 1998); On children and childhood in early modern Europe, Tali M. Berner, Al Pi Darkam: Yaldut veYeladim be’Ashkenaz, (Shazar, Jerusalem 2018); on Jewish orphaned children in medieval western Europe: Rebecca Lynn Winer, ‘Family, community, and motherhood: Caring for fatherless children in the Jewish community of thirteenth-century Perpignan’, Jewish History 16 (2002), pp. 15–48,  14  I thank Prof. Elisheva Carlebach for discussing the outcome of child conversion in the fifteenth-century religious violent acts on European Jewry with me. See Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750, (New Haven CT: Yale University Press 2001) 141–147. 15  For an up to date survey on Jewish family life and the historiographical work that has been done in this field, see Elisheva Baumgarten, “The Family,” in Robert Chazan, ed., The

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II Sometime before 1427, a sum of 30 Gulden formerly belonging to the deceased Aaron Blümlinn stood at the center of a legal dispute. Rabbi Simon and Rabbi Merklein, son-in-law of Aaron Blümlinn and head of a rabbinic court, claimed ownership over the money, although the natural heir was Aaron’s converted son.16 Yaakov haLevi Molin (“Maharil” 1375– 1427),17 the famous scholar from the Rhineland, replied to this claim stating that according to earlier Jewish legal authorities,18 a Jewish court can expropriate the inheritance from a convert as a fine or punishment,19 as “he shall not live amongst the gentiles yet enjoy the fruit of his Jewish heritage,” even though by biblical law a convert can in fact inherit from his Jewish father.20 However, Maharil excluded the present case from the overall ruling concerning converts and their Jewish heritage, due to the circumstances leading to his conversion and because of his young age: Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 6—The Middle Ages: The Christian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 440–462, 892–893; see also: Elisheva Baumgarten, “Judaism,” in Don S. Browning and Marcia J. Bunge, eds., Children and Childhood in World Religions: Primary Sources and Texts (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press: 2009), 15–81. 16  Husband of Blümlinn’s daughter Zemach (note 5. Concerning her death, footnote 8); Maharil implied in his above responsum that Merklin’s profession as head of a rabbinic court made him an even more trustworthy guardian. Yitzhak Satz: New Responsa of Rabbi Yaacov Molin – Maharil (hebr.) (Jerusalem 1977), no. 166, pages 234–235. This responsum is discussed in: Keil, ‘The Viennese Geserah’, 107–108. 17  Apparently, the dispute was not brought before Isserlein due to his family connection. 18  Eliezer ben Yoel HaLevi of Bonn, cited in Sefer Mordechei, Kiddushin. section 492 and in Isaac ben Moses, Sefer Or Zarua, Vol. 3, Bava Batra section 103–5; Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Nahalot 6.12; Meir ben Baruch, Sheelot u-Teshuvot ha-Maharam, Prague edition, No. 928; Asher ben Yehiel, Shut haRosh, ed. I. Yudelov, Jerusalem 1994, No. 17 §10; On papal reactions to the confiscation of the inheritance belonging to apostates, see: Bernard Rosenzweig, ‘Apostasy in the Late Middle Ages in Ashkenazic Jewry’, Diné Israel; Studies in Halacha and Jewish Law 10–11 (1984), 51–53; Simcha Goldin, Apostasy and Jewish Identity in High Middle Ages Northern Europe, (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2014), pp. 68–73, for a discussion of the above mentioned responsa, see pages 12–16. 19  On rabbinic courts in medieval Ashkenaz see: Rachel Furst, ‘Striving for Justice: A History of Women and Litigation in the Jewish Courts of Medieval Ashkenaz’, Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2014, pp. 20–71. 20  Oded Irshai. “The Apostate as an Inheritor in Geonic Responsa: Basics of Decision Making and Parallels in Gentile Law” Shenaton Ha-Mishpat Ha-Ivri: Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law:(1984–6) 11/12: 435–61.

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Since the boy was forced into conversion as a minor, he is a complete Israelite whose deeds for the rest of his days are inadvertent and not deliberate, as an infant captured and subsequently raised among gentiles21

According to Maharil, the Jewish affiliation of a child coerced to be baptized was not impaired. Therefore, he should not be fined nor should he lose his rights for his inheritance, “unless he reached the age for commandments (mitzvot) and had not return to Judaism.” In Maharil’s mind this status which “overlooks” the child’s current way of life had an expiration date. When crossing the threshold of majority, if the child did not willingly return to the Jewish flock, he was fined by the Jewish court and his right to the inheritance was lost, “which would then allow the next heirs to collect the inheritance.” In the case of Aaron’s son, time was the ultimate solution, as Maharil reveals that the child had turned 13 by the time this dispute came to its verdict and had not returned to Judaism.

III A second case was brought before Nathan, who was the rabbinic leader of the Bohemian city of Eger (today Cheb, The Czech Republic) until the expulsion of Jews from the city in 1430.22 In one of his last rulings in a legal dispute, Nathan addressed a claim for the inheritance of a woman who was murdered in the religious persecutions 8 years prior to his ­ruling.23 Here too the natural heir of the money in question was a 16-year-­old who 21  Maharil took this legal term from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate ‘Shabbat’, page 68b. Compare to the famous French twelfth-century scholar, Rabenu Tam and his ruling concerning an infant who was converted with his mother. Mordechei, Sanhedrin, number 717. See Discussion in Simcha Goldin, Apostasy and Jewish identity 114–115. 22  Later, Nathan immigrated to the holy land in 1432/1433 and died there shortly after his arrival. See: Yuval, Scholars in Their Time, 172–183; Germania Judaica 3.1, 273. 23  Evidence piles up for me to date this case back to 1421: In this reply Nathan refers to Rabbi Yochanan Treves, adding the words “of blessed memory” after his name. Yochanan died in 1429, which leaves us with a short time slot to date this responsum between 1429– 1430 after which Nathan was expelled and soon left for the holy land. Nathan emphasized that it has been 8 years since the mother was murdered, bringing us to 1421. Moreover, in the letter he uses the term Kedosha (lit. Saint/holy) specifying that the mother died as a Jewish martyr, and while rejecting baptism. Furthermore, the use of the term Geserah, used in the responsum to describe the event when the mother was murdered, was only used in this period, to my knowledge, to describe the persecutions in Vienna in 1420/1421. Joseph R. Hacker. “Rabbi Yochanan Treves in Italy and a Talmudic Academy in Padua in the 15th century.” Zion 73.4 (2013), 471–500 (Hebrew).

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was converted to Christianity as a child, after his mother was murdered and had not returned to his Jewish brethren. Due to the many similarities between the two inheritance disputes, we can usefully examine the former ruling by Maharil and that of Nathan of Eger, revealing not only a consistency between the leaders on some aspects concerning young converts but also a difference of opinion regarding the impact of coerced child conversion on later adult life.24 Similar to his friend and colleague Maharil, Nathan specified the age of 13 as a threshold between the period before and after the child “comes of age.” But unlike the former ruling, Nathan ruled that after the baptized child turned 13, if he did not return to Judaism, then his actions are perceived by Jewish law as deliberate: And if a man should think to say: but they were coerced [to be baptized] and young and so they do not deserve the penalty [of losing their inheritance] … [I say] that even if one was a minor that was coerced and came of age and did not repent, we should consider his actions willful (mezid karinan) since he did not return [to Judaism]. As it is in the case before us; It has already been 8 years since the Geserah and as we hear the minor is now 16. As he has not returned [to Judaism], the authority is in the hands of the court to confiscate his wealth.25

The outcome for the immediate inheritance may be identical for both young converts. Yet, in the aforementioned ruling, Maharil gave a crucial role to Jewish education as a main component in maintaining or returning to a Jewish religious affiliation as an adult. Having been deprived of the right to be educated as a Jew, the convert should not be held to the same level of responsibility for leading a non-Jewish life as a Jewish adult who converted to Christianity, nor is the baptized child fully responsible for not returning to Judaism after coming of age. “His deeds for the rest of his days are Inadvertent and not deliberate (kol yamav beshogeg).”26 To emphasize this notion Maharil used the Talmudic prototype of an infant 24  On the relationship between Nathan and Maharil, see: Yuval, Scholars in Their Time: 186–188. 25  MS Oxford Bod. Mich. 84 fol. 185r. The responsum was first published in: Shlomo Spitzer, “Teshuvah me’et Rabenu Nathan Igra be-din meshumad im yoresh et aviv,” Moria 7:1 (1977) 5–6. The high-lights in the text are mine. 26  Yitzhak Satz: New Responsa of Rabbi Yaacov Molin – Maharil (hebr.) Jerusalem 1977, no. 166.

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kidnapped by Gentiles, never being aware of his Jewish obligations. Nathan’s ruling lacks this consideration. According to Nathan’s approach, crossing the threshold age of 13, the coerced convert is seen as an apostate responsible for his religious choices, regardless of the violent background he had suffered from or the lack of Jewish education or Jewish environment that could have encouraged him to return to Judaism. With that said, the ruling by Nathan could be seen as “tough love.” Maharil concluded his verdict by explaining the harsh aftermath of Jewish life in Austria after the massacre and expulsion from Vienna and its surroundings and encouraged that the 30 Guldin be given as charity to poor students. Maharil seems to treat Aaron’s converted son as a closed deal, burning the bridge for his return, a position that would later be criticized by the convert’s cousin, Isserlein. Nathan, on the other hand, holds the grown child to his actions and sees him as what he is, a convert (and not a sinful Jew who needs only repentance as Maharil ruled), yet as long as the child is not of age, Nathan leaves the convert an opportunity to return to Judaism and to retrieve his heritage. Nathan ordered that prior to receiving the money, the new heir must swear under severe oath and give his written consent before witnesses that if the converted child will decide to return to the Jewish religion, the heir would give him his inheritance down to the last penny.27

IV When Isserlein had already succeeded his uncle Aaron Blümlinn and became the most influential rabbinic authority of the Holy Roman Empire, the fate of baptized Jews and their Jewish families preoccupied him time and again.28 In his best known and unique Halachic work—Terumat  MS Oxford Bod. Mich. 84 fol. 185r.  The variety and frequency of issues covered by Isserlein in his rulings concerning converts and their Jewish communities high-lightens that converts and conversion were an in separate part of Jewish life: calling a son up to the Torah in his apostatized father’s name, Terumat Ha-Deshen 21; atonements for returning apostates to Judaism, Terumat Ha-Deshen 198; invalidating a marriage becoming interfaith, Terumat Ha-Deshen 209, 219; dismissing the need for a levirate marriage to a converted brother, Terumat Ha-Deshen 223; divorcing a convert, Terumat Ha-Deshen 228, 237, Pesakim uKetavim 42, 43,138, 197; accepting an apostates testimony, Pesakim uKetavim 221, 223; concerning the dowry of a converted Jewess, 267. On lending an apostate money with interest: Leket Yosher, 2:15; on music played on Shabbat by a convert during the dance for the bride (Mecholot habetulot), Leket Yosher 2:140. 27 28

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Ha-Deshen29—Isserlein wrote up a plausible case scenario about a father and mother who were murdered in the great massacre. Their children aged five, six and seven respectively were taken to be baptized and raised by Christians, their whereabouts later unknown. By presenting this case study Isserlein wished to lay down his major considerations dealing with the legal status of children who were coerced to be baptized, through a legal concrete discussion over their inheritance rights according to Jewish law. After stating the case study, Isserlein, without mentioning Maharil by name, paraphrases his approach: And what he had answered: due to the fact that these children have grown amongst the gentiles and had not returned…the laws of complete apostates [torat meshumadim gmurim] should apply to them and they shall not inherit.

This opinion was brought forward by Isserlein with some criticism that children who were tempted to be baptized as minors are not to be seen as complete apostates. Isserlein dealt with the well-discussed term “coercion,” legally defining, that any means of temptation or seducement exerted on a minor is an act of coercion: “Since they were truly compelled to convert, they are Israelites in all matters because they were small, and tempting a minor is coercion.”

 Terumat Ha-Deshen (the work is named after a daily practice in the Jerusalem Temple and it is using the numerical value of Deshen 354 which is the number of responsa in this work) was formed in a different manner than other responsa collections known to us from this period. Isserlein used complex cases that he had dealt with in the past, sometimes combining a number of cases and making adjustments of the facts in order to lay down his ruling on these critical issues. It is not a fictional book, and we can easily trace many original cases that Isserlein used to build his case study, thanks to other contemporary responsum by Isserlein and his rabbinic colleagues, or by juxtaposing with archival sources. For more information on the book and how to use it methodologically, see: Abraham Berliner, “Rabbi Israel Isserlein” MGWJ 18 (1869), 273; Tirza Y. Kelman, Ha-shimush beposkim Ashkenazim besefer Beit Yoseph, Hilchot Nida u’tevila kemikre mivchan, unpublished Master Thesis, Ben Gurion, Beer Sheva 2012, 45–72. For the above discussion we can without effort find the similarities to the two cases we discussed earlier. Isserlein felt the urgency to create a legal framework for the problem of apostatized children, since this issue was not uncommon in his time and consisted of many legal unclarities. 29

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By using the strong term of coercion (o’ness) also used in the case of sexual rape,30 Isserlein emphasized the victimized state of the converted children. This broadened the definition of coercion to include any action of seduction and encouragement to convert to which a minor was exposed. The Jewish affiliation of all children converted without their parents’ consent had been affirmed in Isserlein’s legal ruling, his cousin included. Next, Isserlein asserted that the question of inheritance was a key component in preserving the option that these young victims may find their way back to the Jewish brethren while confiscating their inheritance would seal the door upon their return. He explained that “a person longs for his inheritance and his heart might harden upon its denial.” Isserlein expressed his personal hopes that the detachment of baptized children from Judaism was not final nor absolute, acting through his professional authority as rabbi and adjudicator to entice them back to Judaism with the help of their inheritance: Of course, it is plausible that maybe their spirit will awaken when they will achieve better understanding [bnei havana yafa], and return to the religion of truth. Therefore it is good that Simon, [uncle of the young converts] will be guardian of the inheritance until the court decides if there is hope for their return…So that if the children of his brother will come out of the gentiles that they are embedded in- they can receive their inheritance. But if they stay in their filth after they have grown, he [Simon] will inherit….

We have examined three different rulings concerning the financial heritage of the baptized children of the 1421 persecutions. The three adjudicators agreed that, as opposed to other apostates who were legally excluded from the Jewish brethren, the coerced baptized children held the legal status of full Jews until they grew older. The first two rulings set the age of 13 as the threshold for losing the inheritance.31 Isserlein left out in this case a specific age for crossing the 30  This Talmudic expression from Yevamot 33:2 originally related to sexual coercion but was already used by R.  Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg (Teshuvot Maharam, Cremona Edition, #82) to discuss the religious affiliation of a daughter who may have been coerced to convert as a minor after her parents were murdered in a religious persecution. On the similar terminology to discuss both sexual and religious violence in medieval Germany see: Rachel Furst, “Captivity, Conversion, and Communal Identity: Sexual Angst and Religious Crisis in Frankfurt, 1241,” Jewish History 22. 1–2 (2008) 179–221. 31  In another responsum Maharil discusses the age barriers listed in the Mishna, tractate Nida 45:2, emphasizing 13 as the age for legal punishment (onashim), regardless of other

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threshold of religious responsibility, after which these children should be held legally responsible for their religious status.32 Indeed, they must be grown in order to lose their inheritance. But, perhaps, excluding a specific age from Isserlein’s theoretic discussion implies a different perspective on coming into religious responsibility. If so, this suggests an approach whereby it is not enough to measure majority by the date of birth nor by physical developments.33 Only when the children will achieve better understanding will they be capable of renouncing the life they had grown up in and choosing a Jewish path. Such a fateful decision about one’s life must be made out of awareness and the ability to take personal responsibility. This decision requires ripeness of the mind, and it is not possible to speed up or impose on this individual process, but rather wait for it. In the meantime, the child’s Jewish inheritance awaits, in the hope that the baptized child will again choose his Jewishness.

V Eveline Brugger found a fascinating case in the archives, of a Jewish boy converted to Christianity from the home town of Blümlinn’s family, Herzogenburg on the Traisen River, 45 kilometers west of Vienna.34 The content of the documents concerns the boy, Matthias, receiving a sum of features of puberty. Teshuvot Maharil, (Venice edition) no. 51; for an ongoing scholarly discussion on the role of age 13 in Judaism and religious obligation see my final footnote in this article. Age  13 as a revised age barrier  in Jewish and Christian legal writings in 15th century is further examined extensively in my doctoral thesis.  32  Compare with Isserlein’s response in Terumat Ha-Dheshen, no. 223, concerning another legal issuer which stemmed from the conversion of Jewish children: the need undergo a ceremony to detach a marital bond between a widow and a converted brother-inlaw,  an ancient custom known in Judaism as Chalizza. See: Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1961), 70–71. 33  The discussion on whether age or physical signs of puberty should determine the end of childhood and the entrance to majority goes back in Jewish writings to the first centuries AD.  See: Tosefta, Hagiga 1:3, Moses Maimonidies, Mishne Tora, Hilchot Ishut, 2:10. Translations and discussion by Elisheva Baumgarten, “Judaism,” in Children and Childhood in world religions. 55–56. Interestingly, in the Saxon code of law (written 1245), only when the age of a person is unknown should his majority be judged by physical features. See: Dobozy, Maria (ed.) The Saxon Mirror: A “Sachsenspiegel” of the Fourteenth Century, p. 81. 34  Germania Judaica 3.1,  551–553; Samuel Krauss, Die Wiener Geserah, 26–28. For a well-established survey on the Jews of Herzogenburg from the middle of the fourteenth century to the expulsion in 1421 based on archival documentation, see: Eveline Brugger, Hetschel und Wer noch? 119–137.

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money that was set aside for him when baptized until his coming of age. In this case, the sum of money belonged to a Christian who saw himself responsible for the future of the child, none-other than duke Albrecht V who was, as historians Eveline Brugger and Martha Keil emphasized, the same man who murdered Matthias’s parents, coerced the child to be baptized and had left him behind while his Jewish community was expelled from their homeland.35 The first document was composed a number of months after the events of 1421, on St Benedictine’s day (21/3/1422).36 In the document provost Erhart from the convent of St. Andrä (Augustiner-Chorherrnstift) affirmed in the name of his monastery, that they had received a sum of 50 pounds in Viennese pfennig to keep for the boy (chnaben) until he reaches the age of majority (wan er vogtper wirt). If the child should die before coming of age, the sum will then return to its owner, Duke Albrecht V “unserm gnedigen herrn hertzog Albrechten hertzogen ze Osterreich.” Martha Keil emphasized in her discussion on this document that Duke Albrecht saw himself as responsible for the child’s upbringing and livelihood, almost as if he were his guardian, since “the ducal measure not only aimed at the salvation of the children’s lives but predominantly at the salvation of their souls.” Along with financially supporting this baptized child, Keil proves the financial support given by the duke to other adult men and women converts from the 1420/1 persecutions.37 A second document concerning Matthias was kept in the monastery archive of Herzogenburg.38 Its contents is an affirmation given by the grown child to the local provosts. Nine years had gone by since the child was brought in to the canon regulars of Saint Augustine, St Andrä on the Traisen. On 15 January 1431 Matthias was no more referred to as a boy, rather as “Matthias the new Christian who was born in Herzogenburg” (neu kristen von herzogenburg pürtig). The convert confirmed that he had  Keil, The Viennese Geserah, 107; Eveline Brugger, Hetschel und Wer noch? 136.  The document is currently kept in the Austrian State Archives in Vienna: HHStA, Familienurkunden, Nr. 438 (21-3-1422); Keil, The Viennese Geserah, 106–107; Brugger, Hetschel und wer noch?, 135–136. I thank Eveline Brugger and Birgit Wiedl for the transcript of this document. 37  Keil, The Viennese Geserah, 105. 38  Archive of the monastery of Herzogenburg, StAH, A.n.167 (1431 I 15). Online: http://monasterium.net/augias/viewer.xql?lang=eng&imagedata=/mom/service/ augiasviewer&archive-id=AT-StiAHe&fond-id=StAndraeCanReg&charter-id=1431_I_15 (accessed 20 February 2019). 35 36

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received the 50 pounds along with other benefits, thanking the original benefactor Duke Albrecht V (herczog Albrechten herczog ze Osterreich und meins genedigen herrn). Matthias confirmed that the time has come and so the money was fully transferred to him, by the provost Ulrich who succeeded provost Erhart.

VI When Walter Pakter discussed medieval canon law and the Jews in his book from 1988,39 he analyzed the differences between the two legal systems, and two sets of values influential on and affected by the different judicial systems of each religion, acting not as equal yet in one shared space. Pakter discussed a variety of issues such as the status of slaves and servants or questions concerning family life. When an issue concerning a convert arose, these two systems intersected.40 Most interestingly, juxtaposing perceptions concerning coming of age and the completion of the religious affiliation of coerced baptized children of the Viennese persecutions, we have seen here that questions concerning coming of age and the completion of conversion mirror each other and show a greater common ground. In two of the Hebrew sources the age 13 indicated a watershed in the way the victimized children were perceived by their Jewish communities. Before the children came of age, they were not yet fully Christian, as the true will had not yet fully been revealed, and the mind was not ripe to make a decision with such fateful consequences. This approach is also reflected in the archival documents we have discussed, regarding Matthias of Herzogenburg, as the money and possessions were put aside for the young convert until his coming of age which completed his conversion. Although we cannot verify his precise age based on the documents, we should consider that perhaps at about the time Matthias had lost his right to his Jewish inheritance, he had gained the rights to his Christian wealth. Like Isserlein who tied not only the coming of age but the increase in knowledge and greater understanding to the question of religious responsibility, Matthias specified that he was brought up and educated in Christian faith with enduring and loving care by provosts Ulrich, Erhart and Peter. By this Matthias emphasized that he had not only aged in his

 Walter J. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, (Ebelsbacham Main 1988).  Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 67–81.

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years, but also, in knowledge and understanding, as he was sent to school and received a Christian education.41

VII Renouncing baptism, whether chosen or forced, was not permitted by canon law and could have deadly consequences, yet was chosen by some adult converts.42 While at least in theory, the possibility of returning to Judaism and receiving their inheritance persisted as long as convert were underaged,  there are no actual cases, known to me so far, of orphaned children from 1421 or throughout the premodern Holy Roman Empire, who chose to return to Judaism before or after they came of age. We can only wonder if these children remained Christian because they had no living parents to fight for the return of their children. In some medieval conversion narratives, it is the parent of the child who acts as an agent, fighting to retrieve the abducted child.43 But in the cases of 1421 41  Mich egenanten Mathiam liepleich innegehabt und inkristenleichen gelauben gezogen habent und mich gen schuel lassen durich zucht nutz und meiner eren willen. 42  On renouncing baptism and returning to Judaism in Jewish medieval law: Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Returning to the Jewish Community in Medieval Ashkenaz: History and Halakhah,” Turim, Studies in Jewish History and Literature Presented to Dr. Bernard Lander, Vol. 1 ed. M. A. Shmidman, New York 2007, pp. 69–97; Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Returning Apostates and Their Marital Partners in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Yaniv Fox and Yosi Yisraeli, eds., Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World (London: Routledge, 2017), 160–176; On the return to Judaism of women after forced conversion, see: Gerald J.  Blidstein, “The Personal Status of Apostate and Ransomed Women in Medieval Jewish Law,” [Hebrew] Shenaton ha-Mishpat ha-Ivri 3–4 (1976–77), pp. 35–116; Edward Fram, “Perception and Reception of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz and Pre-Modern Poland,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 21 (1996): 299–339; compare with the fascinating and tragic case of a renounced convert from Spain, analyzed in: Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Emese  Kozma, “Schedules of Penance for repentant apostates in Austria and Germany in the 15th Century: Publication of a Responsum from MS Oxford 784 fols. 25b–26a,” in Dov swartz and Gila prebor, eds., The Evolution of the Hebrew Book through the Ages: in memory of Yehoshua Barzilai, Alei Sefer 24–25 (2015), pp 189–214. 43  Jessie Sherwood, ‘Rebellious Youth and Pliant Children’: 183–209; Aviad Kleinberg, “A Thirteenth-Century Struggle over Custody” 51–68; Tamar Herzig, ‘“For the Salvation of This Girl’s Soul”: Nuns as Converters of Jews in Early Modern Italy.’ Religions 8:11 (2017), 1–12; Tamar Herzig, “The Hazards of Conversion: Nuns, Jews, and Demons in Late Renaissance Italy.” Church History 85:3 (September 2016), pp. 468–501; I discuss these and other questions concerning parenthood and conversion in my forthcoming doctoral thesis.

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and other baptized orphans, there were no parents alive to fight for these children before they came of age. Since the Viennese Geserah ended with the expulsion and scattering of many Jewish communities from the duchy of Austria, it may be that extended family did not have access to further knowledge about the whereabouts of their converted young relatives. Or perhaps it was the issue of inheritance that kept the new heirs or other family members from searching and regaining guardianship over their converted family members?

VIII In her discussion of the converted monk and commentator Guillaume of Flaix, Jessie Sherwood followed the later writings of the aforementioned convert to better understand how the Jewish boy who was abducted and baptized during the violent attacks on the Jews in 1096 became so thoroughly Christian. Guillaume attributed a successful conversion to undergoing baptism in one’s youth, followed by an ongoing devotion to studying the new religious path. He himself excelled in Christian theology and Latin studies soon after he arrived at the monastery at about the age of six, and quickly forgot the little Hebrew he knew from home.44 More crucial to his successful conversion, Guillaume stressed the importance of full detachment and an absolute social break between the baptized child and his Jewish family, community, language and religion.45 As Guillaume after the riots of 1096, so in 1421, orphaned children acclimated in monasteries and nunneries through full detachment from their former Jewish lives, lacking Jewish education and receiving a thorough Christian education instead, where some remained even after coming of age.46 For a fascinating debate on conversion and family relations in Jewish medieval Cairo, see Moshe Yagur, Religious Identity and Communal Boundaries in Geniza Society (10th–13th centuries): Proselytes, Slaves, Apostate. Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017. 44  Sherwood, Guillaume. 13–14. 45  Sherwood, Guillaume. 15. On the key role of detachment for a successful religious conversion, see: Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, (New York, Doubleday, 1967), pp. 50–51; Chaviva Levin, “Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Europe Encountered and Imagined, 1100–1300” (PhD diss., New York University, 2006) 244. 46  Two baptized young girls had later had become head of the nunneries of Himmelpfort and Sankt Magdalena. Keil, ‘The Viennese Geserah’. 105; Perhaps Matthias shared a similar fate.

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A number of scholars have called for further research on a change of assumptions concerning age boundaries and the  obligation to perform religious rituals in both Jewish and Christian texts. These developments demonstrate social and religious changes taking place within Jewish and Christian society.47 We have seen above that the age 13 was inserted into the legal discussion on the religious affiliation and personal responsibility of the baptized children. I hope to continue and place in a broader context the current discussion on the baptized children of 1421 so it can serve as a small contribution towards a greater understanding of children and their path to adulthood in premodern Jewish and Christian society.

Bibliography Primary Sources Meir ben Baruch, Sheelot u-Teshuvot ha-Maharam, Prague ed., ed. Moshes Arye Blakh (Budapest 1895). Israel Isserlein, Terumat Hadeshen/Pesakim uKetavim (Venice, 1519). MS Oxford Bod. Mich. 84 fol. 185r. Joseph ben Moses, Leket Yosher, ed. Jacob Freimann (Jerusalem 1963). Yitzhak Satz: New Responsa of Rabbi Yaacov Molin – Maharil (hebr.) Jerusalem 1977. Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, Urkunden St. Andrä an der Traisen: StAH, A.n.167 (1431 I 15). Vienna, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv: HHStA, Familienurkunden, Nr. 438 (1422 III 21). Asher ben Yehiel, Shut haRosh, ed. I. Yudelov, Jerusalem 1994.

Secondary Sources Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Abraham Berliner, “Rabbi Israel Isserlein” MGWJ 18 (1869). 47  Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990), 25–29; Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children. 90–91, 186–189; Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 83–101; Ta Shma, “The Earliest Literary Sources for the Bar Mitzvah Ritual and Festivity” (Hebrew), Tarbitz 68 (1999): 587–98; Roni Weinstein, “Childhood, Adolescents and Growing-up in the Jewish Community in Italy During the Late Middle Ages,” (Hebrew) Italia 11 (1995), 77–98; Kathryn A.  Taglia, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood: Baptism, Communion and Confirmation” in Constance M.Rousseau and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds.) Women, Marriage and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, eds. (Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), 255–288.

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Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, New York, Doubleday, 1967. Tali M. Berner, Al Pi Darkam: Yaldut veYeladim be’Ashkenaz, (Shazar, Jerusalem 2018). Gerald J.  Blidstein, ‘The Personal Status of Apostate and Ransomed Women in Medieval Jewish Law,’ [Hebrew] Shenaton ha-Mishpat ha-Ivri 3–4 (1976–77), pp. 35–116. Eveline Brugger and Birgit Wiedl, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in Österreich Band 4, (Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen: StudienVerlag, 2018). Eveline Brugger, ‘Hetschel und wer noch? Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der Juden in Herzogenburg im Mittelalter.’ In: G. Katzler and V. Zimmerl-Panagl (eds) 900 Jahre Stift Herzogenburg Aufbrüche  – Umbrüche  – Kontinuität Tagungsband zum wissenschaftlichen Symposium vom 22.–24. September 2011 (Innsbruck-Wien-Bozen: StudienVerlag 2013), pp. 119–137. Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500– 1750 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Shlomo Eidelberg, Jewish life in Austria in the XVth century: as reflected in the legal writings of Rabbi Israel Isserlein and his contemporaries, (Philadelphia: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1962). Edward Fram, “Perception and Reception of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz and Pre-Modern Poland,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 21 (1996): 299–339. Rachel Furst, “Captivity, Conversion, and Communal Identity: Sexual Angst and Religious Crisis in Frankfurt, 1241,” Jewish History 22. 1–2 (2008): 179–221. Rachel Furst, “Striving for Justice: A History of Women and Litigation in the Jewish Courts of Medieval Ashkenaz”, Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014. Simcha Goldin, Apostasy and Jewish identity in High Middle Ages Northern Europe, (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2014). Simcha Goldin, “Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie im Mittelalter zu Kind und Kindheit,” Jahrbuch der Kindheit 6 (1989), 211–56. Simcha Goldin, ‘Jewish Society under Pressure: The Concept of Childhood,’ in P.J.Goldberg and F.Riddy (ed.s) Youth in the Middle Ages, (Rochester, N.Y. : Boydell & Brewer, 2004), pp. 25–43. Arye Maimon and Yaacov Guggenheim, Germania Judaica, 3.1, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1987). Joseph R. Hacker. “Rabbi Yochanan Treves in Italy and a Talmudic Academy in Padua in the 15th century. Zion 73.4 2013, 471–500 (Hebrew). Tamar Herzig, ‘“For the Salvation of This Girl’s Soul”: Nuns as Converters of Jews in Early Modern Italy’, Religions 8:11 (2017): 1–12. Tamar Herzig, “The Hazards of Conversion: Nuns, Jews, and Demons in Late Renaissance Italy.” Church History 85:3 (September 2016), pp. 468–501. Ulrich Horst and Faes de Mottoni B., Die Zwangstaufe jüdischer Kinder im Urteil scholastischer Theologen, Münchner Theologische Zeitschrift 40.3 (1989), 173–199.

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Oded Irshai. “The Apostate as an Inheritor in Geonic Responsa: Basics of Decision Making and Parallels in Gentile Law” Shenaton Ha-Mishpat Ha-Ivri: Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law 11/12 (1984-6) 435-61. William Chester Jordan, ‘Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research Agenda’, Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, Notre Dame, 2001, 77–93. Ephraim Kanarfogel, ‘Attitudes toward Childhood and Children in Medieval Jewish Society’, Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times 2 (1985), 1–35. Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Returning Apostates and Their Marital Partners in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Yaniv Fox and Yosi Yisraeli, eds., Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World, London: Routledge, 2017, 160–176. Ephraim Kanarfogel, ‘Returning to the Jewish Community in Medieval Ashkenaz: History and Halakhah,’ M.A. Shmidman (ed.) Turim, Studies in Jewish History and Literature Presented to Dr. Bernard Lander, Vol. 1 (New York: Touro College Press, 2007). Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). Martha Keil, “What Happened to the ‘New Christians’? The ‘Viennese Geserah’ of 1420/21 and the Forced Baptism of the Jews”, in Philippe Buc, Martha Keil, John Tolan (eds.), Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe: The historiography legacy of Bernhard Blumenkranz. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016), pp. 97–114. Tirza Y. Kelman, “Ha-shimush beposkim Ashkenazim besefer Beit Yoseph, Hilchot Nida u’tevila kemikre mivchan”, unpublished Master Thesis, Ben Gurion, Beer Sheva 2012. Aviad Kleinberg, “A Thirteenth-Century Struggle over Custody: The Case of Catherine of Parc-aux-Dames,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 20 (1990): 51–68. Samuel Krauss, Die Wiener Geserah vom Jahre 1421, (Wien &Leipzig: W. Braumüller, 1920). Chaviva Levin, “Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Europe Encountered and Imagined, 1100–1300” (PhD diss., New  York University, 2006). Christine Magin, “Wie es umb der iuden recht stet”: Der Status der Juden in spätmittelalterlichen Rechtsbüchern, Göttinger Philosophische Dissertationen D7 (Göttingen Wallstein Verlag, 1999), 185–193. Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, (New Haven CT: Yale University Press,1998). Walter J. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, (Ebelsbacham Main 1988). Bernard Rosenzweig, ‘Apostasy in the Late Middle Ages in Ashkenazic Jewry’, Dinei Israel 10–11 1984, 51–53. Arthur Z. Schwarz, ‘Eine illuminierte Kremser Kethubah aus dem Jahre 1392’, Archiv für Jüdische Familienforschung, Kunstgeschichte und Museumswesen 1 (1913): 23–25.

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Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990), 25–29. Jessie Sherwood, ‘A Convert of 1096: Guillaume, Monk of Flaix, Converted from the Jew’, Viator 39:1 (2008) 1–22. Jessie Sherwood, ‘Rebellious Youth and Pliant Children: Jewish Converts in Adolescentia’, in Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (ed.), Medieval Life Cycles: Continuity and Change (Turnhout, Brepols 2013), 183–209. Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, (Toronto, [Ont.]: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1991). Shlomo Spitzer, ‘Teshuvah me’et Rabenu Nathan Igra be-din meshumad im yoresh et aviv’, Moria 7:1 (1977) 5–6. Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Rebecca Lynn Winer, 15 ‘Family, community, and motherhood: Caring for fatherless children in the Jewish community of thirteenth-century Perpignan’, Jewish History 16 (2002) 15–48. Moshe Yagur, ‘Religious Identity and Communal Boundaries in Geniza Society (10th–13th centuries): Proselytes, Slaves, Apostate’. Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017. Israel J. Yuval, Scholars in their Time: The Religious Leadership of German Jewry in the Late Middle Ages. (Jerusalem: Magnes 1988 [Hebrew]). Ido Noy, “The Fleuron Crown of Mrs. Zemah Daughter of Rabbi Aaron: Concepts of Royalty, Nobility and Virginity among Ashkenazi brides in the late Middle Ages,” Chidushim, Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 21 (2019): 84–113. Joseph Bamberger, Ha’apifior hayehudi. Letoldoteha shel ’aggadà mime’ habenaym be’ashkenazHa’apifior hayehudi. Letoldoteha shel’aggadà mime’ habenaym be’ashkenaz [The Jewish Pope. History of a MedievalAshkenazic Legend] (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2009, Hebrew). Ta Shma, “The Earliest Literary Sources for the Bar Mitzvah Ritual and Festivity” (Hebrew), Tarbitz 68 (1999): 587–98. Constance M.  Rousseau and Joel T.  Rosenthal (eds.) Women, Marriage and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M.  Sheehan, (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). Roni Weinstein, “Childhood, Adolescents and Growing-up in the Jewish Community in Italy During the Late Middle Ages,” (Hebrew) Italia 11 (1995): 77–98. Kathryn A.  Taglia, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood: Baptism, Communion and Confirmation” in Constance M.  Rousseau and Joel T.  Rosenthal (eds.) Women, Marriage and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), pp. 255–288.

Conversion, Conscience, and Family Conflict in Early Modern England Bernard Capp

In 1520 the German Reformer Martin Luther published The Freedom of the Christian Man. The Protestant Reformation triggered by Luther raised profound questions about the spiritual freedom of both men and women, questions that resonated throughout Europe. In the event, Reformed states and churches did not give individuals the freedom to choose religious allegiance for themselves, and they demanded a level of personal commitment very different from the simple conformity required by the mediaeval Catholic Church. Tudor and Stuart England witnessed a bewildering succession of changes in what the state decreed was true faith and thereby created painful dilemmas for thousands of pious individuals and their families. If young men or women came to believe the state-approved church was false, how were they to reconcile their conscience with the duty they still owed their parents and their sovereign? And how were parents to reconcile their own conflicting moral obligations? Their natural desire to protect their children was now at odds with their wish to uphold parental and royal authority, and with their own understanding of religious truth. This chapter explores these issues as they played out in a B. Capp (*) University of Warwick, Warwick, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_12

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number of well-documented families in the seventeenth century. Many converts were wholly convinced of the new truths they had discovered but struggled to reconcile them with the duty they still believed they owed their parents. In the final case, by contrast, Richard Norwood’s remarkable story shows us a troubled young man uncertain where religious truth lay, and also unable to choose between the demands of faith and the pleasures of the world. For many adolescent converts, spiritual exultation was thus clouded by new anxieties. How would their parents react? How could they reconcile duty to their parents, laid down in the Ten Commandments and instilled from infancy, with their obligations to their new-found faith? Was loyalty to this new faith sufficient in itself, or did they now have a duty to try to convert their parents and siblings? Many parents, for their part, felt dismay and anger. Dismay at the sight of the son or daughter they had raised lapsing into heresy and risking both prosecution and damnation. And anger, because the child was repudiating their parental authority. Adolescent conversion was for them an act of gross disobedience and rebellion, a betrayal of filial duty. These strains and stresses created troubles for countless families in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, as in many other times and places. In the first age of the Reformation the context was usually conversion to Protestantism.1 Early in Elizabeth’s reign Laurence Chaderton, a Cambridge student from a staunchly Catholic Lancashire family, wrote home to announce his conversion to Protestantism. At the same time he asked his family for financial support to further his studies, which was more than a little naive. It provoked a predictably brusque response: his father disinherited him and ‘sent him a Poke with a groat in it, to go a begging withall’. In the event, Chaderton went on to a successful career which eventually saw him installed as the first Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.2 Once the Elizabethan Settlement was firmly established, we sometimes find other young idealists reverting or converting to Rome, disillusioned by a church they saw as a lukewarm Laodicea. Here too, parents might respond with fury. Some disinherited their ‘lost sons’, 1  Susan Brigden, ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, Past and Present, 95 (1982); Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, c.1500–1700’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 21 (2011). 2  Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Two and Twenty Eminent Divines (London, 1660), 168–9.

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branding their apostasy irreligious and undutiful. It was also disloyal to the crown, and for some parents duty to their sovereign outweighed the claims of family. In what may have been the most savage case of parental repudiation, the convert John Maxey was betrayed to the authorities by his own father when he returned to England as a Catholic priest in 1616. When Maxey died in prison the following year, his embittered father demanded that he be buried in the prison rubbish-heap.3 The proliferation of new churches during the civil war era created another host of divided families, divided across and also within the generations. In the case of the most successful new movement, the Quakers, many of the early leaders were remarkably young. James Parnell, known as ‘the quaking boy’, was a convert at 15, quickly emerged as a prominent preacher and pamphleteer, and died in prison when still only 19. Parnell had been disowned by his family, and spoke bitterly about how they had tried ‘to ensnare me … Reproached me with Lyes, and proved my Greatest Enemies’.4 Conversion often split families asunder. In the case of Anne Upcott, of St Austell in Cornwall, the issues were particularly stark because her father was the town’s minister, and one of her brothers was constable. It was a shocking subversion of age, gender, and family norms for a young, single woman, still living at home, to repudiate the authority of her father, a university-educated minister. The rest of the family united against her. One day Anne’s sister found her mending a waistcoat on the Sabbath and told her brother, who set Anne in the stocks, for hours, in the rain. A crowd of boys came to jeer, while her father and brothers looked on with scornful jests. Another brother told her that he would be constable next year, and would whip her to the next town and back if she did not submit. Anne remained steadfast in her new faith and went on to marry a fellow Quaker.5 As far as we know, Anne Upcott had few doubts about the course she must follow. Many other converts, by contrast, struggled to resolve the conflict between their duty to their parents and their duty to God. Both 3  Godfrey Anstruther, The Seminary Priests. A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, 4 vols. (Great Wakering, Essex: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1969–77), ii.213–14. 4  ODNB, Parnell; A Collection of the Several Writings Given Forth … from James Parnel (1675), 233–4. 5  Norman Penney, ed., Records of the Sufferings of Quakers in Cornwall 1655–1686 (London: Friends’ Historical Society, 1928), 17–19, 22; Joseph Besse, The Sufferings of the Quakers (London, 1753), i.116.

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were legitimate, both indeed required by the bible itself, yet they now seemed incompatible. Agnes Beaumont felt tormented almost to distraction as she was forced to choose between these rival demands. Her father John, a widower, ran a small farm in Restoration Bedfordshire, with Agnes keeping house. They lived alone. She had become a committed follower of the famous Nonconformist preacher John Bunyan, a connection her father resented on several grounds. When he ordered her to break with Bunyan’s church, Agnes agonised over how to respond. She felt a strong duty of obedience both to her father and to God and recognised there was no way to reconcile the two. Her eventual decision to stand by her faith triggered a highly emotional confrontation and battle of wills. When she disobeyed him by attending another church meeting, her father locked her out of the house, in mid-winter, and she passed a miserable night in the freezing barn. Desperate and broken in spirit, she yielded next day to his demands, only to be assailed by waves of guilt. By a tragic coincidence, her father died suddenly the following night, probably from a heart attack. Neighbours were aware of the domestic tensions, and his sudden death at such a moment prompted malicious rumours that Agnes had poisoned her father. The body was exhumed and examined by a coroner’s jury, and she faced the possibility of being burned at the stake for parricide. Agnes was terrified, though she later admitted having also fantasised about dying a heroic martyr’s death, an innocent suffering for her faith. In the event she was exonerated and lived to tell her story in a vivid and highly emotional account.6 The autobiography of the Quaker Thomas Ellwood (1639–1713) provides an equally vivid account of religious and generational conflict.7 In this case there was no disruption of gendered authority, but it created a similar crisis of conscience and a battle of wills that lasted far longer than the confrontation in the Beaumont farm. Ellwood was the younger son of an Oxfordshire squire, from an old but declining family. His father Walter, a short-tempered widower, was a Cromwellian Justice of the Peace. Young Thomas experienced a frustrating childhood and adolescence. A bright 6  Bernard Capp, ‘The Travails of Agnes Beaumont’, in Bronach Kane and Fiona Williamson, eds., Women’s Agency and the Law, 1300–1700 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 111– 24. The most accessible text is John Bunyan: Grace Abounding and other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. J.  Stachniewski and A.  Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 7  Thomas Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, ed. G.C. Crump (London: Methuen, 1900); ODNB, Ellwood.

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lad, he flourished at the local grammar school at Thame, but his elder brother enjoyed all the favours. Thomas was taken out of school, to save on fees, so that his father could send the elder brother to Oxford with the privileged and expensive status of fellow-commoner. That left Thomas with no prospects, and with nothing to fill his time. His sense of a life lacking purpose or direction may have played some part in preparing the ground for his conversion. Paradoxically, a bitter quarrel later broke out between his father and elder brother, who withdrew to Ireland and died there before the Restoration.8 It was by chance that Ellwood first encountered the Quakers, in 1659. One day his father took him to visit some old acquaintances, Isaac Pennington and his wife, who were now living about 15 miles away at Chalfont St Peter, in Buckinghamshire. Walter was astonished to find they were now Quakers, but they remained polite and friendly, and his initial reaction was curiosity. In December he paid another visit to learn more, taking all three of his surviving children. They stayed for several days, and during their visit attended a large Quaker meeting in a local farmhouse, where the prominent Quaker preacher Edward Burrough spoke to the assembly. Afterwards the Quaker leaders and the Ellwoods returned to the Penningtons’ house, where Walter argued with James Nayler about Calvinist predestination and universal free grace. Ellwood thought his father had clearly lost the debate.9 The Quakers’ ideas had no impact on his father or sisters, but they left Thomas deeply affected. Hungry to learn more, he made discreet enquiries about other meetings in the area, and a few days later rode over to attend one, taking his greyhound to make his father think he had gone hare-coursing. The meeting deepened his attraction to the new movement’s principles, and he soon became a committed convert. Becoming a Quaker involved far more than subscribing to a novel set of doctrines. For the Quakers, indeed, true religion was not about formal doctrines, still less about ceremonies. It meant recognising a divine inner light in every man and woman, however poor and lowly, and rejecting all worldly fashions and conventions. ‘Now was all my former life ripped up’, Ellwood wrote later in his autobiography. He soon disposed of the trappings of that old life, stripping the lace and ribbons from his clothes, and no longer wearing rings. And like other Quakers, he abandoned conventional forms of polite behaviour. He no longer addressed 8 9

 Ellwood, History, 1–9.  Ibid., 9–14.

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people as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, used ‘thou’ instead of the more polite and deferential ‘you’, and refused to bow, take off his hat, or kneel as a gesture of respect. Such practices were now the ‘vain customs of the world’.10 Family tensions surfaced almost immediately. A few days after his secret visit to the Quaker meeting, Ellwood decided to visit Isaac Pennington again for further discussion. This time he sought his father’s consent, which was not forthcoming. His father, by now deeply suspicious of the Quakers, denounced them as rude, subversive, and shameless. Thomas went anyway, hurrying off before his father could issue a formal prohibition. He stayed two nights and was able to attend another Quaker meeting at Wycombe. But as he made his way home, his mood grew sombre. The ‘Enemy assaulted me afresh’, he wrote—the Enemy being Satan, or more precisely false, worldly reasoning. He knew it was his duty to honour his father and obey his lawful commands. He felt ‘greatly troubled’ that he had already failed in this duty, and feared that any act ‘of wilful disobedience … would draw after it Divine displeasure and judgment’. But he could no longer obey his father’s commands or follow the conventions of the world, if they ran counter to the spiritual truths he had now discovered. He was fully aware of the likely consequences, ‘the danger I should run myself into of provoking my father to use severity towards me; and perhaps to be casting me utterly off’. His brother’s death had left Thomas the heir, which raised the stakes higher for both father and son; if he persisted with his new allegiance his father might disinherit him. But Thomas decided, like Agnes Beaumont, that obedience to God outweighed human duties and conventions, whatever the consequences. Years later, he recalled how the consequences had indeed proved dire when he addressed his father as ‘thee’ and stood before him with his hat on. His father’s ‘passion transporting him, he fell upon me with both his fists, and having by that means somewhat vented his anger, he plucked off my hat and threw it away’. Thomas soon slipped away again, setting off on foot to meet his new Quaker friends. He went, he wrote, still ‘under a load of grief’, and assaulted once more by the ‘Enemy’, with fresh doubts whether what he was doing could be either right or sensible. Could his new religious ideas really be sound if they were leading him to disobey the Fifth Commandment? But he reflected that parental authority was not absolute, and that in spiritual matters it could not outweigh conscience, which must be guided by God. Pondering the biblical text, ‘Children, obey your parents, in the  Ibid., 14–19.

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Lord’ (Ephesians 6:1), he decided that it was the final phrase, ‘in the Lord’, that carried most weight. These words had tipped the scales, he recalled, and he pressed on.11 Ellwood naturally tells the story from his own perspective. But youthful conversion was a distressing event for parents too, and Ellwood’s account gives us a glimpse of his father’s own turbulent emotions. Walter’s initial reaction was anger, but when he discovered that his son had slipped away, rage turned to grief. ‘Oh my son’, he cried, ‘I shall never see him more … he will run himself into danger, and may be thrown into some gaol or other, where he may lie and die before I can hear of him’. Thomas had confided in his sister, but she did not reveal where he had gone. Instead she sent a reliable servant to brief him on the situation at home and urged him to return home soon. He did—whereupon his father’s grief immediately gave way once more to rage and physical violence.12 The household remained tense for several months. There were many more beatings over Thomas’s use of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, but Walter found an ingenious solution to the issue of hat-honour, by snatching Thomas’s hats, one by one, and destroying them all. That served another purpose, too, for in this period it was almost unthinkable to venture outdoors without a hat. The social convention was so powerful that Thomas did not even recognise it as such. ‘I was confined to the house’, he recalled, ‘unless I would have run about the country bareheaded like a madman’. In King Lear, we recall, it is the sight of their old master hatless—‘Alack! Bare-­ headed’—that convinces his loyal followers that he is mad. To tighten his son‘s confinement, Walter also confiscated his money and any possessions that might be turned into money, ‘pretending that he would keep them for me till I came to myself again’. He would treat Thomas’s conversion as a temporary fit of lunacy. But another explosion followed one day when Thomas failed to attend family prayers on the Sabbath. Quakers did not regard Sunday as possessing any significance, viewing every day as a Christian’s Sabbath, and Thomas would now have regarded conventional family prayers as spiritually meaningless. His father responded by beating him around the head with a cane. Terrified that he would be killed, Thomas’s sister in desperation threatened to throw open the window and scream murder. This was the last time family prayers were ever held in the house, and it was the last violent assault. An uneasy truce took hold.  Ibid., 26–34.  Ibid., 35–7.

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Thomas now took meals in another room, with the servants, and his father tried to avoid even meeting him in the house, to prevent any fresh confrontation.13 Many Quakers had already suffered persecution and imprisonment under the relatively tolerant Cromwellian regime. The Restoration in May 1660 greatly exacerbated their plight. Thomas was among the hundreds of Nonconformists arrested and gaoled in the aftermath of the Fifth Monarchist uprising in January 1661. His father now feared for the safety of his wayward son and was anxious to protect as well as control him. He used his connections to have Thomas released from Oxford gaol and placed under informal house arrest to remove any chance of further troubles. But one day he looked out of the window and saw that Thomas had found a way to slip out. He set off in pursuit, whereupon Thomas quickened his pace, and they were soon both running across a large meadow. Thomas easily escaped, and after this farcical episode his father abandoned any further attempt to control him. Thereafter Thomas was often away, staying with Friends. Any communication between father and son was now indirect, through messages and letters written by or sent to one of the sisters. When Thomas was incarcerated in the London Bridewell in 1662, it was his sister who informed their father; he sent her 20s to cover his son’s expenses. Walter and his daughters had moved to London, where both sisters soon married, and not long afterwards he abandoned housekeeping and sold the family estate in Oxfordshire.14 Such tensions between young converts and their parents could shape relationships for many years or even a lifetime. Relations between the Ellwoods never recovered. Several years later, in 1669, Thomas decided to marry and he was both pleased and astonished when his father approved the match and promised to give him £200 on his marriage, and bequeath another £300. But when Thomas and his bride had a Quaker wedding, instead of an Anglican ceremony, his father refused to honour his pledge. He became ever more distant, and would not even reveal where he was lodging. If Thomas managed to track him down, his father would promptly move to new lodgings. In his later years, Walter appears to have run through his money and sometimes had to borrow from his son. The inheritance Thomas had once worried about losing had simply disappeared.15  Ibid., 37–41, 43; cf. King Lear, III.ii.60.  Ibid, 55–7, 67, 70–2, 100–1. 15  Ibid, 162–3; Thomas Ellwood, A Fair Examination of a Foul Paper (London, 1693), 20–1. 13 14

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While the core of Ellwood’s conversion drama lies in the father–son relationship, the sibling dimension is striking too. Thomas’s younger sister, dismissed by Edward Burrough as ‘light and airy’, was never tempted to follow his lead, but she did her best to ease his situation. She acted as mediator and conciliator, dressed his injuries, and cared for him when he fell sick. The elder sister had been away at the time, in London. When she returned home she was ‘troubled’ to find her brother a Quaker, having heard only bad things about the movement. But, Thomas recalled, ‘her affectionate regard for me made her rather pity than despise me’, especially when she heard how cruelly he had been used. She responded with puzzled affection and pity. Both sisters, he remembered gratefully, accepted that he was acting according to his conscience, and ‘carried themselves very kindly towards me, and did what they could to mitigate my father’s displeasure’.16 As all these cases indicate, conversion brought almost inevitable tensions between the idealism of the youthful convert and the family values of order, authority, and in some cases gender. Most converts, though committed to their new faith, still felt a duty to honour and obey their parents, as commanded by scripture, in everything they could. Many years later, a Quaker adversary accused Ellwood of having failed in this duty, a charge that stung and triggered a furious rebuttal: ‘He was my father, to whom I ow’d, and always paid Respect and Honour while Living, and whose Frailties, being dead, I desire to cover’. Ellwood insisted that he had received nothing from the sale of the family estate, had lent his father money without ever asking for it to be repaid, and had paid for medical care during his father’s last illness, and for his burial. He had done his filial duty, in everything that was compatible with his religious principles.17 The pain of wrestling with conflicting obligations, impossible to reconcile and spelled out graphically in the narratives of both Ellwood and Agnes Beaumont, must have been replicated in thousands of other cases. Many young idealists also recognised the likely material consequences of their actions. When Beaumont’s father locked her out of the house at night, in mid-winter, he vowed never to allow her back unless she renounced her new faith. Thomas Ellwood faced physical assault and the prospect of disinheritance, as well as persecution by the state. Converts created problems for brothers and sisters too, buffeted by their own conflicting emotions and loyalties.  Ellwood, History, 14, 35–6, 38, 40–1, 50.  Ellwood, Fair Examination, 20–1.

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Parents too reacted with mixed emotions, torn between anger, dismay, bewilderment, and concern. Ellwood’s father veered between fury at his son’s disobedience and distress for his safety. And parents were also conscious of their own conflicting moral obligations. They accepted they had a duty to protect and provide for their children, and to safeguard their spiritual welfare, using whatever methods might ‘rescue’ them from the heresies or delusions that had led them astray. And they recognised their obligation to obey and uphold secular authority. Many of these same elements can be found in another striking case, this time involving not only parents but employers and the local community. The central figure in this story was Richard Davies, born in Welshpool, where his parents still lived, but now an apprentice in Llanfair, Montgomery. Quakers were slow to reach these remote parts, and the Llanfair townsfolk had been fed hostile accounts by ministers, filling them with fear and suspicion long before they set eyes on a real Quaker. But when the first evangelist appeared in 1657 and engaged Davies’s master and mistress in lively argument, he was fascinated and impressed. When he resolved to follow the Quakers, his master remained fairly calm but his mistress reacted with fury, and a poisonous atmosphere pervaded the house. His ‘cruel mistress’, as he repeatedly calls her, would beat him around the head with a stick, and swore she would kill him, even if hanged for it. Word eventually reached his parents in Welshpool that their son had become a Quaker, and the news left them deeply distressed. The local minister told them their son was distracted and pressed them to arrange urgent medical treatment. When Davies went home for a family visit, there was a painful encounter. In line with standard Quaker practice, he refused to kneel to ask a blessing and kept on his hat. His father turned away in disgust and declared he would disinherit his son. ‘At length’, Davies writes, ‘my mother came tenderly to me, and took a view of me, looking on my face, and she saw that I was her child, and that I was not, as they said bewitched’. Her response echoed widespread rumours that Quakers might be changelings, or ­transformed, or possessed by demons. Clearly such wild reports were sometimes believed, or at least half-believed.18 The next day was a Sunday, and Davies decided to go to church and confront the minister who had reported him mad. When the service ended 18  Richard Davies, An Account of the Convincement, Exercises, Services, and Travels of Richard Davies (London, 1794), 6–7, 18–24. On anti-Quaker propaganda see Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985), Chap. 4.

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he stood up and publicly challenged him, whereupon the minister had him arrested and carried to prison. Many local people came to view him and another young Friend, mainly out of curiosity, he writes, ‘expecting that we were some sort of deformed creatures’. They too had been influenced by the minister’s propaganda. The two young prisoners were soon released, though Davies’s friend returned home to a rough reception: his father beat him with a staff and left him tied to a chain outdoors throughout a cold, frosty night.19 Back at Llanfair, Davies’s situation deteriorated further during the final years of his apprenticeship. While his master remained tolerant, his mistress became ever more vengeful. One day Davies and several other young Friends were holding a small meeting outdoors, with his master looking on, when his mistress arrived, accompanied by her sister, in a furious mood. Brandishing staffs, ‘the sister began to beat her brother my master, and my mistress set a beating of’ one of the other young Friends. Family divisions were descending into open warfare. Davies was deeply troubled by the breach he had created in two families. Like Beaumont, Ellwood, and many others, he fretted over his sin of disobedience, unable to deny that in defying his parents and employers he was clearly breaking the Fifth Commandment. He found some comfort and reassurance in Christ’s words recorded in the Gospel of St Matthew: ‘He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me’. (Matt. 10:37).20 Like Beaumont and Ellwood, he found that scripture, like conscience, was pulling in two opposite directions. In the immediately preceding verses of the Gospel, Christ says that he ‘has come to set a man against his father, and the daughter against her mother’. These were chilling and indeed shocking words, but they told converts that the turmoil and hardships they suffered were the price that true believers had paid down the ages. Davies moved to London after completing his apprenticeship, which freed him from his moral predicament. He reports that years later his former mistress came to regret her behaviour, and even asked forgiveness. She never became a Quaker but her change of heart and apology (if his claim is true) would have been psychologically comforting. It offered further reassurance that his conscience had guided him right.21

 Davies, Account, 25–6.  Ibid., 18, 33. 21  Ibid., 22. 19 20

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Davies, like Ellwood, was to have a long Quaker career that falls outside the scope of this essay. One later incident, however, is worth noting. Not long after the Restoration Davies went back to Welshpool, to visit his family, and was promptly arrested by soldiers. Several local magistrates proved surprisingly sympathetic, and a crowd of young men assembled with clubs and staffs, exclaiming, ‘What, shall a town’s born child be abused by such a base fellow as that was’ (referring to the arresting officer).22 Davies does not suggest that these young men had Quaker sympathies. Their behaviour seems more likely to reflect the contemporary view that communities should essentially police themselves, and be left alone to do so. Outside interference, especially by soldiers, could create a defiant sense of communal solidarity. Davies might be a Quaker, but he had been born and bred in the town, and the soldiers were viewed as oppressive outsiders. Wales, moreover, had begun to see puritan and Nonconformist influence take root, and by no means all local people would have welcomed the restoration of the Church of England. Not all conversion stories were so dramatic, of course, but the same basic elements were usually present. George Whitehead, another teenage convert, tells how his parents were puzzled and distressed when he announced his conversion to Quakerism, but gradually, over several years, came to terms with it. William Stout, a young apprentice who converted in 1686, tells us he worried that ‘I should incur the displeasure of my mother, brothers and sister and other my kindred, none of which was of that profession’. He resolved to behave ‘in a meek and gentle manner’, unlike many first-generation Quakers, and avoided disputes. He was also polite and respectful to those of other persuasions, acknowledging that they too were following their consciences. To his relief, his mother and siblings responded with the same moderation and accepted calmly his new faith and new behaviour. They remained a close-knit family.23 In all the cases considered so far, the youthful converts felt confident in their new faith, whatever moral and practical troubles they experienced in reconciling it with their family ties and obligations. But conversion was not always so simple or clear-cut. Many converts struggled with doubts, sometimes for years; some reverted to their former religious allegiance, or  Ibid., 43.  The Christian Progress of that ancient servant and minister of Jesus Christ, George Whitehead (London, 1725), 9; The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665–1752, ed. J.D. Marshall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 82–5. 22 23

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lapsed or relapsed into worldliness; and some went through a succession of conversions, as they fell under the sway of new ideas and other charismatic preachers. Lawrence Clarkson’s (or Claxton’s) restless search for spiritual truth led him into a succession of different faiths and eventually to the Muggletonians. And even there he remained unsettled.24 Perhaps the most intriguing case of a conversion experience that proved both protracted and erratic is the neglected story of Richard Norwood (1590–1675), the final subject of this chapter. Remembered today as the pioneer surveyor of Bermuda, Norwood had a long and picaresque life packed with incident. At various times, he was a fishmonger’s apprentice, a sailor, soldier, pilgrim, teacher, surveyor, aspiring playwright, and diver. But it was his spiritual troubles that dominate his autobiography.25 Norwood composed his narrative in 1639–40, with the heading ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief’. His struggle to find assurance that he was among the elect had gone on intermittently for decades. Several times he drew back from the idea of committing himself wholly to Christ, terrified that any lapse would prove that he was instead among the damned. Most spiritual autobiographies chronicle struggles with doubt and despair before the author finally reaches the safe haven of spiritual assurance. Norwood’s account differs in several respects. It records no such safe arrival, and it deals with the issue of conversion in several different senses. As a young man he wavered between Protestantism and Catholicism, and later toyed briefly with separatism. As a young man he also understood ‘conversion’ in simple behavioural terms, as the ­renunciation of worldly pleasures and a commitment to high standards of morality and religious observance. And he confessed that for him, unlike most spiritual autobiographers, worldly pleasures still held a strong appeal. Norwood loved fine clothes and plays and had a strong sex-drive. As a young apprentice, he admitted, he had indulged in ‘wantonness’ (though probably no more than heavy petting) and detailed several lapses, later scored out in the manuscript. He long remained addicted to masturbation, calling it the ‘Master sin’ he was unable to master. A further strand in Norwood’s narrative and nature is equally distinctive: a scientific cast of  L. Claxton, The Lost Sheep Found (London, 1660); ODNB, Clarkson.  The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda, ed. Wesley Frank Craven and Walter B. Hayward (New York: Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust, 1945), introduction. Substantial extracts are published in Stachniewski and Pacheco, eds., John Bunyan. ODNB, Norwood. 24 25

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mind often at odds with his religious emotions. As a young seaman he developed a strong interest in navigation and mathematics, which became central concerns for the rest of his life. His work on navigation, The Sea-­ Mans Guide (1637), was to pass through at least 18 editions, and his other publications included a treatise on trigonometry. Richard Norwood was the son of a gentleman-farmer of declining fortunes. Born at Cannix, near Stevenage, Norwood lived there to the age of 10, when the family moved to Berkhamsted. He remembered his parents as religious people, severe in their ‘Disposition and cariage’ towards him. Along with his teachers and local preachers, they had planted the ‘seeds of religion and the fear of God’, and he looked back on his early years with a degree of satisfaction. At the dame-school he attended, his teacher and her daughter praised his progress and told him that ‘God would love me, and that he did love me’. The child relished the praise, but he wondered how they could possibly know what God thought of him. It was the first glimpse of a questioning, critical cast of mind, and of the struggle between pride and self-doubt that runs throughout his work. Two years at a grammar school in Berkhamsted proved very satisfactory too. The local minister preached twice every Sunday and catechised the children, and Norwood recalled that ‘sometimes I seemed to my self to be indeed almost converted’. He was also diligent in private prayer even if, as he recalled, his prayers were always for personal favours and protection—to avoid a beating at school, for example, or not to get lost when sent on a long errand. There were other times when he doubted whether God existed, but overall he felt, looking back, that this had been a promising start in life.26 All this ended abruptly when Norwood was 12. His father had been forced to give up his estate, and after two years at Berkhamsted ran out of money. Norwood had to leave school, a bitter blow, and the family moved again to Stony Stratford. The town was full of debauched people, he reports, swaggering, brawling, swearing and drinking, and such became his new companions. He was often beaten by his parents for various misdeeds, spelled out in the narrative and also later scored out, and then at 15 he was sent to London to be apprenticed to a fishmonger. Norwood hated his stern master and his new trade and longed to escape. That desire was stoked further when mariners came into the shop with exciting tales of travel and adventure. Their stories planted in the lad an urge to see the world, and it was eventually agreed that he could serve his apprenticeship  Norwood, Journal, 3–10.

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on a ship owned by one of his master’s kinsmen. After only two short coastal voyages, however, it was cast away, near Yarmouth. Norwood eventually made his way back to London and managed to wriggle out of the apprenticeship. During this phase of his life, he recalled, he had little interest in religion. Instead he delighted in reading ‘vain and corrupt’ chapbooks such as The Seven Champions, playbooks, and Virgil’s Aeneid, probably in translation and largely, it would seem, for the sake of its wondrous travel tales. He also remembered ‘wantonness’ with his master’s daughter and lustful behaviour with two maids who served his aunt.27 Norwood had no money and had alienated his parents by abandoning his apprenticeship. Still eager to see the world, he decided to enlist in the navy and joined the Ann Royal. Before long he was advised that he would have far better prospects as a soldier, fighting in Flanders for the Dutch against the Spaniards. Norwood’s new career as a soldier also proved brief, however, terminated abruptly by the Dutch-Spanish Truce in 1609. Penniless and weakened by illness, he thought of returning to England but knew he could expect no support from his parents or friends. With the itch to travel still strong, he began to dream instead of travelling to see the wonders of Rome, living on alms. This episode is perhaps the most extraordinary part of the narrative. He learned that to be licensed to beg for alms he would need appropriate documentation and a letter of support from one of the English priests or Jesuits at Louvain. That in turn would require him to become a Catholic convert, make confession, and receive the sacrament. All this, he recognised, would be ‘very offensive to God’ and require him to ‘bid adieu to parentage, Education, freinds, country, Religion etc’. He agonised over such a fateful step but finally resolved to press ahead, telling himself that the feigned conversion would be temporary. So he made his way to Louvain, where he went through several weeks of ­instruction by a Catholic priest, made confession and received the sacrament. The priest secured for him a letter commendatory from a papal nuncio in Brussels, and he set off for Rome on foot, living on alms.28 Norwood made the second half of his long journey in the company of an Englishman he names only as Thomas, who wore a pilgrim’s habit. Naturally they often discussed religious matters, and Thomas admitted, intriguingly, that he still harboured religious doubts and was making his  Ibid., 13–17.  Ibid., 17–23.

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pilgrimage partly in search of the truth. He explained that if he died on the road God would surely look mercifully on one who had at least been seeking the truth. Norwood, eager for answers, listened attentively as Thomas spelled out the arguments in favour of Catholicism, and came closer to a genuine commitment to Catholicism. He admits that he was ready to be persuaded, telling himself that it was better to be sincere, even if wrong, than to dissemble. So he was half-convinced, and ready now to cross himself, tell his beads and recite the paternoster, ‘thinking it may be they do some good’. Arriving in Rome, he made confession and received the sacrament again. At Louvain these actions had been wholly fraudulent; now they were ‘almost in earnest yet not seriously but upon a doubtful and uncertain opinion, chiefly because others did so’. We can only guess how far this awkward formulation reflected his feelings at the time, and how far he was trying, years later, to put the best gloss on his behaviour. He lodged for a month at the English College in Rome, making plans for a further pilgrimage to Jerusalem. This seems to have been mainly to satisfy his still powerful lust for travel; he longed to see Mount Etna and the other marvels he had read about in Virgil. In the event he got no further than Naples, where some English merchants offered him a passage back to England by sea. At this point, he recalled, he had not wholly abandoned Protestantism for ‘papistry’, ‘yet I did of the two rather incline to that’. Throughout the voyage home he stayed away from the services held each day on board ship.29 Back in England Norwood was unwilling to face his parents, who now lived in London, and found refuge instead with an uncle in Oxfordshire. But before long he wrote to his father, seeking reconciliation, apologising for his disobedience in the past, and promising to mend his ways. In reality, he admits, he had no intention of doing so, and he said nothing of his Catholic leanings. To his surprise, his father urged him to come to London and promised to help him pursue a career at sea if that was still his wish. So Norwood moved to London, lodging with an uncle and aunt while he made preparations to go to sea. His devout aunt soon detected his Catholic sympathies, and asked her local minister, a Mr. Elton, to try to win him back to the Protestant faith. Their encounter failed abysmally. Elton railed at him for disobeying his parents, abandoning his vocation, and going abroad without his parents’ consent, and declared that all his misfortunes were God’s punishment for these sins. Norwood was stung into an equally  Ibid., 23–30.

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sharp response, and the meeting ended acrimoniously.30 But his father, now apprised of the situation, arranged a meeting with another minister, Edward Topsell of Aldersgate, remembered today for his works on zoology. Topsell treated the young man with ‘marveilous courtesy and familiarity’, asked about his travels, and tried to resolve his doubts. Topsell showed such ‘marvellous diligence, constancy, patience, gentleness meekness [and] love’ that over the course of a month Norwood was won back to the Protestant faith, and dreamed of starting a new life as a true Christian. But he could not quite commit himself. Though he longed to be a true believer, he could see little to enjoy in religion. He explains that at that time he understood religion in a ‘monastical’ sense, as something demanding ‘austerity of life, renouncing all the pleasures of the world’ and a commitment to solitude and prayer. He was still also beset by doubts. What if he failed to measure up to the demands of the godly life, as he feared was all too likely? He was well aware of the biblical texts that threatened divine wrath on those who fell by the wayside. And he still felt reluctant to give up the worldly pleasures he loved. ‘I often thought’, he recalled, ‘it is not best to make too much haste, lest I should return to my sinful delights. It will be better when the unbridled fury and heat of youth is somewhat assuaged’. Even if he did decide to convert while still ‘in the prime of my youth’, it would surely be prudent first to ‘take my fill a little and be a little satisfied in worldly pleasures before we part and must come together no more’. So, like St Augustine, it was a case of praying for chastity and continence, but not yet.31 These dilemmas were soon forgotten once Norwood went to sea. During the course of his two voyages to the Mediterranean he quickly lapsed back into his former worldly condition. Often seasick, he did not enjoy seafaring life and narrowly escaped both shipwreck and capture by Barbary corsairs. On one terrifying occasion, his ship keeled over in a storm, water poured in through the cook-house chimney, and the company believed they were all about to die. In such situations, sailors usually begged God to spare them. Looking back, Norwood recalled that his own response had been very different: instead of begging for his life, or pleading to be saved, he realised that he was about to discover the truth about 30  Ibid., 30–4. Edward Elton was Rector of St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey, 1605–24: J. and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, to 1751 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–7), ii.101. 31  Norwood, Journal, 34–6, 60, 64–5.

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the soul, and what the next world was really like. He would enter it more as observer than supplicant.32 Back in England after his second voyage, Norwood seems to have pushed religious concerns aside. He now spent much of his time at the Fortune playhouse. He loved the theatre and even began writing a play, a project abandoned after he quarrelled with the players. He then set up as a private tutor in navigation and mathematics, with considerable success. He also devised a diving-bell, which he used to raise a cannon that had been lost overboard. This exploit led in 1613 to an invitation to join an expedition to Bermuda, where it was hoped his expertise might help the settlers harvest pearls from the seabed. And in Bermuda he was invited to make a survey of the islands, a task he accomplished with dedication and skill.33 Religious worries, however, had already returned to haunt him. Already on the voyage out, Norwood had thought once more of starting a godly new life, in accordance with God’s will. But what was God’s will? Catholics, Protestants, and puritans all claimed the truth in matters of faith and worship, and he felt unable to decide which of them to believe, if any. A life of asceticism had no appeal, and he sometimes had ‘evil thoughts of God’, as a harsh and cold being who ‘allowed of no joy nor pleasure’. ‘I desired to shun the torments of hell,’ he recalled, ‘but was not much affected with the joys of heaven. I wished there were some midle estate between both’. Sometimes he thought there might be. In terms of moral standards, he tried to follow a middle way, avoiding gross sins, but found little satisfaction. He was still unable to overcome his sexual ‘master sin’, and he often came close to despair. But then, in a manner inexplicable even to himself, his feelings began to change. He now found deep satisfaction in reading St Augustine, William Perkins and scripture, whereas in the past, he admits, he had often found even the bible ‘unsavoury and contemptible’. There were several lapses back into sin and despair, but one day he experienced for the first time an emotional conversion experience and the longed-for sense of assurance that he was indeed among the elect. It brought him a transport of ‘heavenly rapture’, ‘joy unspeakable and glorious’. Overwhelmed, he turned avidly back to the bible once more, and over the

 Ibid., 36–9.  Ibid., 39–42, 51–3.

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following few months read through the entire Old Testament five times and the New Testament ten.34 A striking feature of the narrative is Norwood’s evolving conception of what conversion could and should mean. As a youth and young adult, he understood it as an essentially outward process; it would mean renouncing the pleasures of the world and deciding his confessional identity—whether to give allegiance to the Catholic or Protestant faith. This limited understanding helps to make sense of his assumption that he could simply decide whether to convert or not and choose whether to do so now or later. He saw conversion as an issue of will and strength of purpose and character, and of weighing up the practical arguments for and against such a step. It was only towards the end of his sojourn in Bermuda that he experienced a transformative inward experience that he could now recognise as a true conversion, with ‘heavenly raptures’ that brought an ‘undoubted assurance’ of being one of the elect. In most spiritual autobiographies, this dramatic episode of conversion, ecstasy, and assurance would have brought the narrative to a triumphant end. It had been a troubled odyssey. Alongside his difficult relationship with his parents, Norwood had faced a succession of dangers and temptations that he had overcome or resisted. There were the ruffians he ran with in his early teens; the disbanded soldiers who turned to highway robbery in Flanders, and almost ensnared him into joining them; the whores who tempted him at Naples, and the stage-players, astrologers, and magicians who tempted him back in London.35 But the narrative also pays tribute to those who had provided spiritual support in his childhood and youth, starting with his dame-school teacher. The most unlikely counsellor was a strong-water seller named Stranks, who travelled round Hertfordshire selling his wares. Norwood, aged about 12, rode several miles with him one day, and ‘he by his pious and Christian conference (which he used frequently) inflamed my heart with sundry good motions and purposes’. Not often do we associate liquor-sellers with spiritual guidance. A puritan widow who kept a shop in Stony Stratford, and let her children play with him, was another early influence.36 It was an aunt who began the process of recovering him from his quasi-conversion to Rome, and several ministers had helped too, through their sermons and private conversations, and  Ibid., 61, 64–7, 79–87.  Ibid., 20–1, 29, 41–2. 36  Ibid., 12–13. 34 35

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by giving him books. Norwood always remembered one sermon by Topsell, ‘wherein he treated of the certainty of salvation, that those which were truly converted and did once rightly partake of the Lord’s support could never totally fall away. Which … though I could not certainly believe it, yet I was partly persuaded that it was so’. That message helped him through many long days and nights of doubt and despair.37 For Norwood, sadly, the emotional conversion experience in Bermuda did not bring an end to doubt and despair. After his return to England in 1617, the doubts he had felt since adolescence resurfaced with still greater force. He often sensed that Satan was close by, or even inside him, goading him to evil deeds and blasphemous thoughts. Once more filled with despair, he sometimes feared he was not human but a devil in the shape of a man. Desperately seeking new answers, he toyed with the idea of joining a separatist congregation that met nearby, led by Henry Jacob. He also turned to several ministers for help but felt they soon lost patience with his endless anxiety and despair. His physical and mental condition deteriorated, and he became convinced that his lodgings were haunted. His was still a deeply troubled spirit.38 Norwood dated his narrative 1640, but it ends effectively around 1620. It gives no details of his marriage in 1622 and does not mention his journey to Virginia in 1623, or his return to Bermuda in the late 1630s with his wife and children. Instead, the final paragraphs convey a general sense that the spiritual troubles of his youth had never been overcome. He tells himself that his sufferings had been a ‘medicine’ that God had prescribed to cure his sin of spiritual pride. His afflictions, he concluded, had been ‘most expedient and profitable and a further pledge of Gods free grace and mercy to me in Christ’. The text ends with a poignant prayer, not a thanksgiving: ‘Leave me not to be tempted above what I am able, but give a comfortable issue with the temptation that I may be able to bear it’. That echoed Cain’s despairing cry to the Lord (‘My punishment is greater than I can bear’, Genesis, 3:13), and suggests Norwood recognised that his would be a lifelong struggle to find faith and assurance. He remained in Bermuda until his death in 1675, at the ripe age of 85.39 We have few glimpses of Norwood’s inner life in these later years. His return to Bermuda appears to have been prompted in part by the Laudian  Ibid., 36, 59, 100–1.  Ibid., 87–106. For Jacob see ODNB. 39  Norwood, Journal, 106–11. 37 38

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innovations in England. He saw the bishops as the ‘principal stirrers up’ of the troubles that had plunged the nation into civil war. Following events from afar, he intervened in 1646 with a pamphlet denouncing ‘pretended Ecclesiastical Magistracy’. Ministers, he insisted, should confine themselves to teaching and preaching, and leave disciplinary matters to the magistrate.40 After clashing with the clergy in Bermuda, he resigned his position as schoolmaster, living thereafter on his modest estate.41 Norwood’s conversion experience had brought greater depth and inwardness to his spiritual life, but what followed was a confusing kaleidoscope of grace, despair, faith, doubt, and assurance. His story reminds us that the spiritual storms of youth could sometimes rage for a lifetime. For Thomas Ellwood, Agnes Beaumont, Richard Davies and many others, by contrast, the experience of conversion had brought a powerful and lasting sense of spiritual assurance. It had also created family disruption, however, and the impossible challenge of reconciling spiritual obligations to God with their duty to honour and obey their parents. Parents were left with similarly conflicting emotions and moral obligations. In many cases, perhaps most, the family divisions that resulted were never fully healed. Ellwood’s conversion to Quakerism created a deep and lifelong rift between father and son. Beaumont’s spiritual defiance, traumatic for her, was equally stressful for her father, and may have triggered his sudden death. The stories told with painful honesty by the converts surveyed in this chapter, and others like them, throw vivid light on an important and often overlooked dimension of the conversion experience in this, and in every period.

Bibliography Anstruther, Godfrey, The Seminary Priests. A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, 4 vols. (Great Wakering, Essex: Mayhew-­ McCrimmon, 1969–77). Besse, Joseph, The Sufferings of the Quakers (London, 1753). Brigden, Susan, ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, Past and Present, 95 (1982). Capp, Bernard, ‘The Travails of Agnes Beaumont’, in Bronach Kane and Fiona Williamson, eds., Women’s Agency and the Law, 1300–1700 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 111–24. 40  Richard Norwood, Considerations tending to remove the present Differences (London, 1646). 41  Norwood, Journal, xi–li.

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Clarke, Samuel, The Lives of Two and Twenty Eminent Divines (London, 1660). Claxton (Clarkson), Laurence), The Lost Sheep Found (London, 1660). Davies, Richard, An Account of the Convincement, Exercises, Services, and Travels of Richard Davies (London, 1794). Ellwood, Thomas, A Fair Examination of a Foul Paper (London, 1693). Ellwood, Thomas, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, ed. G.C.  Crump (London: Methuen, 1900). Norwood, Richard, Considerations tending to remove the present Differences (London, 1646). Norwood, Richard, The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda, ed. Wesley Frank Craven and Walter B. Hayward (New York: Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust, 1945). Penney, Norman, ed., Records of the Sufferings of Quakers in Cornwall 1655–1686 (London: Friends’ Historical Society, 1928). Reay, Barry, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985). Stachniewski, John, and Pacheco, Anita, eds., John Bunyan: Grace Abounding and other Spiritual Autobiographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Stout, William, The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665–1752, ed. J.D. Marshall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967). Venn, J. and J.A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, to 1751 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–7). Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, c.1500–1700’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 21 (2011). Whitehead, George, The Christian Progress of that ancient servant and minister of Jesus Christ, George Whitehead (London, 1725).

Conclusion Tali Berner and Lucy Underwood

The essays in this collection have ranged over a wide field, chronologically, topically and geographically. While all the confessional communities studied were minority groups who experienced some kind of legal restriction or marginalisation, their situations and relations with majority or privileged confessions obviously varied greatly. This conclusion considers some of the issues raised in various chapters comparatively, asking how—without ignoring significant differences—we can advance our understanding of early modern childhood, family and religion by looking at childhood in religious minorities as a phenomenon. Religious changes, religious reforms, the reality of religious diversity, along with technological developments, changed religious practices and gave old practices new meanings and emphases. As previous scholars have noted, some of the greatest changes occurred in the realm of private and domestic devotion.1 1  Cf., for example, Forster (ed.) Piety and Family; J. Martin & A. Ryrie Private and domestic devotion in early modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

T. Berner (*) Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel L. Underwood (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_13

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Berner, McCall and Martin discuss the importance of domestic devotion as practised by Jews, loyalist Anglicans and Dissenting groups, yet what was central to such practices in these communities differed. In Jewish communities, children’s religious practice, both in the private and public sphere, relied heavily on actions and the use of props. Theoretical learning was mostly confined to the school. Visual as well as textual evidence testifies that children were expected to repeat gestures, hold props and take part in the heavily ritual-oriented religion. Among other groups, other forms of domestic devotion were prevalent: praying at home as a family was an important element in the lives of children of loyalist Anglicans, and teaching children prayers is mentioned as common among many denominations by Martin. Teaching catechism in the domestic environment was key to the survival of Dissenting groups, and an important element of the education of children. Children were taught the ‘true’ Catechism as home, while probably exposed to others in other settings. The use of visual images in domestic education became more common, partly due to the spread of print and a growing awareness of the effect visual images have on children. While prominent in mediaeval and early modern Catholic churches, Jews, as well as Protestants used them at home: the Dutch tiles mentioned by the Quaker Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck are only one example of such images. But religious practice was not confined to the domestic sphere, and children, especially among minority groups, were part of a larger community. Whether it was church- or chapel-going, attending a Friends’ meeting or praying in the synagogue, participating in communal prayer was probably the most common public act of religious devotion for children. Children began attending at a fairly young age: Martin’s findings that church/synagogue attendance began around age 4, corresponds to evidence from Jewish communities, which suggested that children between ages 3–5 were considered mature enough to endure the long service. Yet, while both Protestants and Catholics did not usually differentiate between boys and girls, Jewish sources suggest that participating in prayer in the synagogue was much encouraged for boys, and much less for girls. Children also took part in public rituals and sacraments. Holy Communion was highly important for Catholics and comparably so for most Protestants, though rejected completely by the Quakers. Children assisted in the process or reported their spiritual satisfaction in participating in the ceremony. The growing debate about baptism, its timing,

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importance and meaning, not only drew attention to this early childhood ritual, but might have also influenced Jewish circumcision rituals, and the participation of children in those rituals. Although more comparative work is required in order to draw conclusions about similarities and differences in religious practice, one can nevertheless conclude that although specific practices were different, and emphasis on practice versus learning and private versus public were different, religious minority groups used similar methods and tools to reach and incorporate the young. They also expected children to participate in both private and public (when possible) religious practice. Martin suggests that children had a positive experience participating in religious practice, and overall, although there are many cases of apostasy and conversion, children were usually incorporated into the religion they were brought up in. This is no small achievement for groups that were an often persecuted, or at least attacked, minority. One can attribute this success to the early incorporation of children into religious practice, increasing attempts to create learning materials specifically designed for children and a growing awareness of the needs and inclinations of children. While children and childhood are discussed in many texts, it is often hard to pinpoint what exactly the texts mean by a ‘child’. Can religious sources tell us something about definitions of childhood? Did different groups hold different definitions of childhood, both in terms of age, and of the nature of childhood? What can a religious perspective add to our understanding of the term ‘childhood’ in the early modern era? There are some indications of definitions of the ages of childhood for matters of religious education, practice and responsibility. As mentioned above, there is evidence that 4 was regarded as an appropriate starting age for attendance at public worship, in both Christian and Jewish communities: this in turn raises questions about perceptions of the spiritual life of infants below that age, which might be worth further study. At the other end of childhood is the question of, as it were, the ‘age of consent’: a perception that there was an age below which a person could not autonomously change religion. Persuading a child to do so below that age would violate parental rights of education or any legal agreements regarding it; above, it would be considered a conversion and the young person, as it were, ‘fair game’ for proselytising. There is evidence that the perception of ‘an’ age of confessional consent was common, but what it was varied. Different groups held different definitions. The lowest bar seems to be one defined from the outside: in their fight against the Huguenots, French

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courts lowered the age of consent to nine, and after the 1685 revocation of the edict of Nantes to seven. Yet, for the Huguenot side, this was a form of child abduction, which reminds us that the gap between age definitions enforced by legal authorities and the social understanding of childhood was great. Indeed, authorities did not always set the bar so low. Although Underwood mentions children and young adults between the ages of 11 and 21 that were arrested for their Catholic faith, this was not altogether common—and people arrested at these ages were often treated as children needing to be re-educated (even if coercively) rather than dissidents liable for punishment, a contrast seen most starkly in the events surrounding the ‘conversions’ Liberles describes. The Jewish parents had been executed; the children had been baptised and sent to school in convents or monasteries. They were not regarded as responsible for their Judaism, but as potential Christians to be trained.2 This was also an interpretative conflict between religious minorities and the state: minorities might celebrate the courage and conviction of children and adolescents in the face of persecution, like the groups of 10–12-year-old Quakers, or the 15-year-old preacher mentioned by Pullin, while authorities insisted on seeing only passive children who would be orthodox but for their parents’ miseducation.3 The gap between social emancipation and religious responsibility remained even when ages were self-defined: by the fifteenth century, Jewish legal authorities agreed that the age of religious maturity was 13, and made the Bar Mitzvah ceremony an important rite of passage. While this age appears as a turning point in the sources quoted in Liberles’s article, social emancipation was not usually assumed till the age of 18 or 21. One subject on which different denominations did not agree was the nature of children. Quaker theology emphasised the innocence of children: they believed that children were not naturally evil. In contrast, the puritans, as well as other Lutherans and Calvinists, placed a heavy emphasis on the effects of original sin in children. These beliefs had a strong influence on the upbringing of children: Quakers emphasised the need to seclude children from polluting influences around them, in a way similar to Catholic ‘Counter-Reformation’ parenting manuals,4 while puritans  Underwood, Childhood, Chaps. 3,4, 5 & 9, Liberles’s chapter in this volume.  Cf. ibid. Chap. 9. 4  O. Logan ‘Counter-Reformatory theories of upbringing in Italy’, in D. Wood (ed.) The Church and childhood (Studies in Church History 31) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 275–284. 2 3

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stressed the importance of education to redress the inherent inclination to sin. Ashkenazic Jews did not seem to take a clear stand on this issue: children were usually seen as a tabula rasa and therefore they invested much in early education that can steer the child towards the good. Therefore, while the outcome was similar—a stress on early education and catechesis—the reasoning and motives behind it were quite different. The religious diversity of early modern Western Europe seems to have brought with it a stress on the importance of early years of childhood, with religious responsibility seen well before the age of social adulthood. Several chapters in this book address the history of the family and family relations, demonstrating how the field can overlap with the history of childhood and youth. Certain elements are obviously comparable among different groups: for example, the potential disruption to family relations, both affective and legal or financial, caused by children (whether adult or pre-adult) changing religion. The nature and consequences of disruption differed, of course. Liberles’s chapter suggests that the physical separation of young Jews who had been baptised from their relatives was total: they were schooled in convents and monasteries, to provide for them materially while ensuring they internalised their new religion. This has its echoes in other instances of the state-initiated conversion of juveniles—physical separation is frequently the context and sometimes the assumed pre-requisite. Opposition to such attempts at conversion/education sometimes invoked precisely the damage this might do to affective family relations.5 In the case of late-mediaeval Ashkenazi Jews, because they were permitted self-­ governance in certain areas, the minority community attempted to protect itself by penalising such conversion (if persevered in to adulthood): the apostate/convert would lose inheritance rights if they did not return. Other minority groups do not seem to have tried such defensive measures; attempts to Protestantise English Catholic heirs, for example, assumed that Catholic families had no power to alter inheritance rights.6 Conversion to a minority religion might carry threats of disinheritance, as happened to Thomas Ellwood when he converted to Quakerism, while young English converts to Catholicism who went to train as priests de facto resigned their 5  L. Underwood ‘The State, childhood and religious dissent’ in H. Crawforth & S. Lewis (eds.) Family Politics in Early Modern Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 191–210 at pp. 204–5. 6  Underwood, ‘The state, childhood and religious dissent’; Underwood, Childhood, Chaps. 4–5.

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inheritance. Conversion might, or might not, affect family relations in other ways: Ellwood and other young Quaker converts, for example, rejected not only their parents’ religious belief, but other social norms of parent-child relations, conscientiously refusing to doff their hats to their parents or use the deferential pronoun ‘you’. Other converts might go to some lengths to assure parents that social and affective relations would (unless the parent broke them off) continue as normal.7 As Bernard Capp argues, however, the general desire to avoid presenting juvenile conversion as inherently in conflict with filial obligations cuts across confessional lines and may be seen as reflecting widespread early modern ideals concerning family bonds.8 Some studies in history of the family have taken the approach of studying interactions between the individual life-course and the family.9 Inter-­ confessional religious conversion was not a life-course event in that it was not a socially expected stage each individual was supposed to pass through—in fact, it may be regarded as a disruption of the normative life-­ course, since all early modern religious confessions made exclusive claims to truth, and therefore rejecting truth was not part of the desired human progression through life: it was an aberration from the divine plan. Conversions may, however, be studied as individual life choices which impinged on family strategy regarding inheritance, political advancement or marriage alliances. While it would be easy, however, to see how religion could be in tension with family strategy, and how religious commitment might be ­balanced with the family’s goals, it should not be overlooked that religion could itself be a family strategy. Life-course choices, parenting decisions, marriage alliances and so on could be oriented towards achieving the family’s religious goals. Adherence to a minority religion, especially if it was legally disadvantaged, would bring such strategies into sharper focus. Religious family strategy might include preserving the lineal family in a 7  See, for example, published texts such as Walter Montague’s letter in The Coppy of a letter sent from France by M. Walter Montague to his father... with his answere therunto (n.p., 1641) or Epistle of a Catholicke young gentleman... to his father a Protestant (Douai, 1623). 8  Bernard Capp’s chapter in this volume. 9  T. Hareven ‘Family history at the crossroads’ in T. Hareven & A. Plakans (eds.) Family history at the crossroads: a Journal of Family History reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. vii–xxi; see, for example, M. Moran, ‘Motherhood and the politics of family decisions in early modern Italy’ in Journal of Family History 40:3 (2015), 351–372.

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particular religious confession across generations, and contributing to the survival of the confessional community by transmitting its beliefs to members of succeeding generations. In Ashkenazi households, including children in religious rites and teaching them their significance furthered a family strategy of preserving its Jewish religion by forming a strong religious identity in children as young as possible, that could resist influence from a hostile surrounding culture. Sending English Catholic children to school overseas, where they would experience a Catholic instead of Protestant education had a similar aim, but involved separation from the family home, rather than inculturation within it. English Catholics, though, also experienced a re-orientation of religious practices into the home, something that has been highlighted by a number of scholars, including a heightened religious role for mothers and wives; this is comparable not only to Ashkenazi Judaism, but perhaps even more to the Sephardic crypto-Jews, for whom total prohibition of their prayers and practices within Spanish-ruled lands after 1492 produced a female-led, domestic practice of religion, as Cristina Galasso has argued.10 The communication of family traditions and histories was often part of a family strategy to preserve its religious identity, as indeed were the events reported—engagement in prohibited worship, endurance of imprisonment or financial penalty—and they were also strategies to preserve a given confessional community by means of the family. Awareness that several different religious groups used similar, family-related, strategies to survive in difficult circumstances in turn allows us to look at their differences, and thus to say with more confidence whether particular p ­ henomena are features of a particular religion, or of minority status, or (most likely) what combination of the two produced them. On the other hand, sometimes religious commitment must be seen as distinct from family goals, while impinging on them. For example, when couples made pre-nuptial agreements in which one or both parties agreed to have all or some of their children taught the ‘wrong’ religion, the family was accepting religious division as a strategy towards the goal of avoiding 10  C. Galasso, ‘Religious Space, Gender, and Power in the Sephardi Diaspora: The Return to Judaism of New Christian Men and Women in Livorno and Pisa’ in R.  Lieberman, L. Bernfeld, H. Davidson, C. Galasso, Cristina & D. Graizbord, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010), pp.  101–128; E.A.  Macek, ‘Devout Recusant Women, Advice Manuals, and the Creation of Holy Households “Under Siege”’ in A. Weber (ed.), Devout laywomen in the early modern world (London: Routledge, 2016) pp. 235–252.

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religious conflict. Religion itself could not be a family goal, because husband and wife would have had opposing ones. Yet these agreements sometimes broke down, because of the importance to one spouse of communicating true religion to and through his family. For religious minorities operating in situations of prohibition, rather than restriction or legal toleration, such agreements were not possible; yet sometimes parents still strove to transmit their own minority religion through the family. Despite different circumstances, there are similarities: the choice of schooling is one, and also the ultimate dependence of such strategies on the children’s active consent as they came of age.11 Looking at comparable challenges and strategies in the trans-generational communication of religion in disadvantaged minorities can open up fresh perspectives on the history of early modern families, family relations and religious plurality.

Further Research Bringing together studies of childhood, youth and family in various early modern religious minorities can facilitate further developments in the fields of both childhood and early modern religion. By contributing to the published work in these areas, this collection may make it easier for future scholars to make comparisons between different groups, times and places even in work focused on one community; it may also help to identify potential themes and primary sources for future comparative studies. ‘I cannot write much of it as it happened during my childhood, and as a girl I spent my time in the Heder [school]’.12 These words, from the famous memoir of the Jewish businesswoman Glikl (1646–1724), refer to her memories of the wars between Sweden and Denmark during the years 1657–1660. Nevertheless, one can argue that they reveal Glikl’s inherent attitudes towards her childhood memories or the value of her experience as a child as a whole. Luckily, this attitude was not shared by all her contemporaries, nor by modern scholars. In her 2010 article Paula Fass argued that in our modern contemporary society, childhood and memory are interconnected.13 Not only do we attribute a high value to our childhood 11  Several of the disputes outlined in Joel Harrington’s chapter revolved around which confession’s school children were sent to; cf. Underwood, Childhood esp. Chaps. 1–3. 12  Glikl, Memories 1691–1719, edited and translated by Chava Turniansky, (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2006), 271 (translated into English by Tali Berner). 13  Paula Fass, “Childhood and Memory”, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3:2 (2010), 155–164.

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memories, but we also search the past for memories of childhood and memories of children. This junction, between childhood, memory and religion is one area that deserves further research. The historical study of memory is a developing field. The book, Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (2013), is but one example of the increasing scholarly interest in forms of memory and remembering in this time period. While the study of personal memories is elusive and complicated, writing history based on childhood memories and the memory of children is even more complicated. Recent developments in modern neuroscience have led to new insights into the process of memory formation, calling into question the validity of childhood memories. Nevertheless, taking these limitations into account, and the unique characteristics of Early Modern memoirs and other egodocuments,14 the relatively few sources written by children, documenting children’s experience, or retelling childhood memories, should be further investigated. These documents will not only add the unique perspective of children, but might also stress aspects of childhood previously less considered as part of the experience of persecution and marginalisation, such as moments of laughter and play, material culture and relations with peers. With a comparative approach, they can be used to draw the larger picture of the experience of growing up as a part of a religious minority, highlighting the similarities and differences in the experiences of each denomination. The use of collections of persecution narratives strongly reliant on childhood memories by several authors in this volume invites comparison: how different, yet comparable, sources such as Joseph Besse’s A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, John Walker’s collections for his ‘Sufferings of the Clergy’, the St Monica’s Chronicle and the Responsa Scholarum deployed childhood and family memories, how individual and collective memory mutually formed each other and how these processes varied in different communities. In the field of religion, one potential avenue for research is apostasy, especially in relation to parent-child relations, and including both voluntary apostasies and those brought about by state intervention. Rather than being included in studies of conversion under ‘perceptions of’, apostasy could be studied more extensively in its own right: how different communities tried to guard against apostasy, how they portrayed and interpreted 14  Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann and others (ed.), Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013) 19.

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it, and how members of minority religions related to apostate parents, children and siblings.15 Different minority groups could be compared, while differing meanings of apostasy to minority and majority religions could also be studied; this might include how a particular confession regarded apostasy when it was in a disprivileged or a dominant situation. The approach of childhood and family highlights these questions, because the impact of conversion on family lay largely in the fact that it was also apostasy. The subject of confessionally mixed marriages has already been mentioned; this also could be a rewarding direction for further research. As well as questions of education, of children’s agency, of relations between family and church, we might examine how children related to the parent whose religion they did not share, both as children and adults. Outcomes— in terms of both religion and family relations—might be compared between societies where pre-nuptial agreements were common and where they were not; and also how outcomes were affected by the relative legal status of the parents’ religions (prohibited, restricted, permitted or dominant). Were children of mixed marriages more likely to attempt to convert a parent than those who had rejected a religion shared by both parents? State intervention in religious upbringing clearly offers potential for more comparative work. Joel Harrington’s chapter touches on this, Liberles’ indicates how the issue bridges the early modern/mediaeval ‘gap’, and Underwood’s previous work on the English state and the upbringing of Catholics invites comparison. Cross-confessional, trans-­national study of this type of intervention —its occurrence, justification and outcomes— could enhance our understanding not only of religion and childhood, but also the history of state formation, the mutual impact of theology and religious policy, beliefs about family and parental rights, and the complicated, non-linear history of notions of toleration and religious freedom. Just as individuals are formed by what happens during their childhoods, so the perception, treatment and experiences of children are fundamental to the formation of societies and communities. Some threads seem to run through history across chronological, geographical and cultural boundar15  There are some existing works on apostasy: for example, S. Goldin (trans. J. Chipman), Apostasy and Jewish identity in High Middle Ages northern Europe: are you still my brother? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); K. Sheppard, ‘Atheism, Apostasy, and the Afterlives of Francis Spira in Early Modern England’ Seventeenth Century 27:4 (2012) 410–434.

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ies; other elements vary. Therefore looking at how religious change and conflict affected children and families helps us to understand its nature and consequences. Comparing childhood and family in different confessional communities furthers our understanding of particular communities, but also of early modern childhood; similarity and difference illuminate each other. We hope that this book will contribute to that process.

Bibliography Primary Sources Glikl, Memories 1691–1719, edited and translated by Chava Turniansky, (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2006), 271. Walter Montague to Lord Montague in The Coppy of a letter sent from France by M. Walter Montague to his father... with his answere therunto (n.p., 1641) Epistle of a Catholicke young gentleman... to his father a Protestant (Douai, 1623).

Secondary Sources Paula Fass, “Childhood and Memory”, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3:2 (2010), 155–164. M. Forster & B. Kaplan (eds.) Piety and Family in early modern Europe: essays in honour of Steve Ozment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). C. Galasso, ‘Religious Space, Gender, and Power in the Sephardi Diaspora: The Return to Judaism of New Christian Men and Women in Livorno and Pisa’ in R. Lieberman, L. Bernfeld, H. Davidson, C. Galasso, Cristina & D. Graizbord, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010), pp. 101–128. S. Goldin (trans. J. Chipman), Apostasy and Jewish identity in High Middle Ages northern Europe: are you still my brother? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). T. Hareven & A. Plakans (eds.) Family history at the crossroads: a Journal of Family History reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). T. Hareven ‘Family history at the crossroads’ in T. Hareven & A. Plakans (eds.) Family history at the crossroads: a Journal of Family History reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. vii–xxi. Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann and others (ed.), Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). R. Lieberman, L. Bernfeld, H. Davidson, C. Galasso & D. Graizbord, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2010).

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O.  Logan ‘Counter-Reformatory theories of upbringing in Italy’, in D.  Wood (ed.) The Church and childhood (Studies in Church History 31) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 275–284. E.A.  Macek, ‘Devout Recusant Women, Advice Manuals, and the Creation of Holy Households “Under Siege”’ in A. Weber (ed.), Devout laywomen in the early modern world (London: Routledge, 2016) pp. 235–252. J.  Martin & A.  Ryrie Private and domestic devotion in early modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). M. Moran, ‘Motherhood and the politics of family decisions in early modern Italy’ in Journal of Family History 40:3 (2015), 351–372. K.  Sheppard, ‘Atheism, Apostasy, and the Afterlives of Francis Spira in Early Modern England’ Seventeenth Century 27:4 (2012) 410–434. A. Weber (ed.), Devout laywomen in the early modern world (London: Routledge, 2016) pp. 235–252.

Index1

A Aalst, 295 Adams, William, 150 Alban (saint), 223, 224 Albrecht V, 300, 311 Aldham, Essex, 211 Allestree, Richard, 210 Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando, Duke of Alba, 16 Amsterdam, Netherlands, 290 Andover, Isle of Wight, 208 Annette, 175 Ann Royal, 333 Antwerp, Belgium, 275, 287 Archbold, Elianor, 213 Archbold, Mary, 213 Archbold, Thomas, 213 Arden, Tabitha, 105 Armine, Sir William, 205 Armitage, Elkanah, 150 Armorer, William, 108 Aubrey, John, 193

Audley, Staffordshire, 198 Augsburg, 260, 262 Augustine of Hippo (saint), 335 Austen, Jane, 197 B Babcary, Somerset, 195 Babthorpe, Ralph, 233 Bailye, Daniel, 211 Baines, John, 234 Baitson, Christopher, daughters of, 211 Baker, Sarah, 107 Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany, 260 Banester, Jeffrey, 203 Banks, John, 116 Baptist Steele family, 153 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia Lessons for Children (1778–9), 145 Barker, John, 147 Barnstable, Devon, 193

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 T. Berner, L. Underwood (eds.), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0

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354 

INDEX

Basing House, Hampshire, 215 Basire, Frances, 198 Basire, Isaac, 198, 208 Basire, Peter, 208 Bateman, Phebe, 118 Bathurst, Elizabeth, 101 Battus, Carolus, 280 Beaumont, Agnes, 322 Becon, Thomas, 91 Bedfordshire, 322 Bell, Deborah, 116 Bell, George, 214 Belm, Lower Saxony, Germany, 261 Bemerton, Wiltshire, 194 Benedict XIV, Pope, 259 Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, 332 Bermuda, 331 Berot, Jacques, 173 Berry, Daniel, 204, 207 Berry, Rebecca, 204 Berry, Sir John, 207, 215 siblings of; Elizabeth, 204; Nathaniel, 204 Besse, Joseph, 99 Blake, Martin, 193, 215 Blakiston, Thomas, 212 Blandford, Susannah, 121 Bletchington, Sussex, 211 Blonstone, Nicholas, 235 Blümlin, Rabbi Aaron, 300 Blundestone, Nicholas, 235 Blundell, John, 234 Blundeston, Laurence, 235 Bonart, Didier, 186 Bosanquet, Mary, 152 Bossy, John, 249 Boudiffart, Chatelinne, 175 Bouvette, Jean, 183 Bowber, Robert, 206, 214 Bowdler, John, 143 Brabant, 276 Bradford, James, 211

Bradshaigh, Roger, 29 Bradshaw, John, 198 Braithwaite, Elizabeth, 109 Breton, Vincent, 181 Bridges, William, 202 Bridgwater, 195 Bristol, 99 Brugger, Eveline, 310 Bunyan, John, 322 Burges, Cornelius, 270 Burgess family, 198 Burrough, Edward, 323 Butler, Dr William, 195 C Calais, France, 170 Calderón-López, Maria, 209 Caldwell, William, 240 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 203, 320 Campbell, Thomas, 214 Cannix, Hertfordshire, 332 Cansfield, Charles, 233 Cansfield, John, 233 Capes, John, 240 Capp, Bernard, 104, 193 Cappe, Catherine, 149 Carey, William, 141, 149, 155 Carleton, Guy, 216 Carleton, Prudence, 216 Cartwright, Thomas, 85 Cary, Anthony, fifth Viscount Falkland, 209 Cave, John, 205 Cave, William, 205 Cecil, Richard, 137 Cecil, Sir Thomas, 235 Cecil, William, 235 Celosse, Maria, 277 Chaderton, Laurence, 320 Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, 323

 INDEX 

Chalkley, Martha, 118 Chalkley, Thomas, 118 Charles I, 11, 207 Charles II, 11, 204 Chemin, Nicolas du, 186 Cholmeley, Richard, 234 Christ Church College, Oxford, 200 Christen, Jane, 107 Chronicle of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, 225 Clarke, Adam, 137 Clarke, Robert, 208 Clarkson (or Claxton), Lawrence, 331 Clement, Margaret Giggs, 227 Clement VIII, Pope, 259 Cleveland, John, 203 Cleveland, Joseph, 203 Cleveland, Richard, 203, 215 Cleveland, Samuel, 203 Cleveland, Thomas, 203 Clitherow, Anne, 227 Clitherow, Margaret, 227 Cobb, Richard, 143 Collett, Elizabeth, 139 Collier, Arthur, 203 Collier, Henry, 203, 211 Collier family, 196 Collinson, Patrick, 10, 195 Convent of Saint Elizabeth, Brussels, 275 Copley, Anthony, 240 Copley, Elizabeth, 240 Copley, Helen, 227 Copley, Mary, 34, 223, 227 Copley, William, 240 Cornwall, 201, 321 Cosin, John, bishop of Durham son of, 208, 212 Cotton, George (Blount), 234 Coutelle, Pierre, 266 Cowper, William, 152 Cressy, David, 87

355

Croker, John, 194, 195, 214 Croker, Sarah, 195 Cromwell, Oliver, 11 Crouch, James, 209 D Dambryne, Jean, 174 Datter, Claude, 179 David, 283 Davies, Richard, 328 Davin, Anna, 131 de la Ruelle, Marie, 176 de le Court, Benoy, mother of, 172 de Lespine, Samuel, 181 de Medici, Catherine, queen and Regent of France, 14 de Montaigne, Michel, 260 de Rekenare, Cornelis, 283 Debden, Suffolk, 202 Dell, Henry, 201 Dell, Richard, 201 della Faille, Anna, 293 della Faille, Carel, 283 della Faille, Carlo, 276 della Faille, Cornelia, 278 della Faille, de Oude, Jan, 277 della Fallie, Isabella, 284 della Faille, Jacques, 275, 283 della Faille, Jan de Carlo, 278 della Faille, Maria, 283, 284 della Faille, Piat, 292 della Faille, Pieter, 275, 283 Denis, Jonas, 182 Dent, Joseph, 153 Desmadry, Jehan, 170, 176 Dewsbury, William, 109 Dixon, James, 207 Dixon, Sarah, 207 Doddridge, Mercy, 154 Doddridge, Philip, 147 Dordrecht, 275, 278

356 

INDEX

Draycott, Alban, 223 Draycott, Helen, 223 Draycott, John, 224 du Moulin, Peter, 215 du Puys, Jacques, 173 du Val, Martin, 172 Duckett, James, 248 Dudley, Mary, 148 Duffy, Eamon, 84 Dugdale, Margaret, 198 Dunkin, William, 194 Durham, 214, 232 Dürrenberg, 271 Dutch-Spanish Truce, 1609, 333 Dutton, Anne, 148 E Edward VI, 178 Eger, Bohemia, 305 Eli, 118 Elizabeth I, 13 Ellwood, Thomas, 101, 322, 345 Ellwood, Walter, 322 Elys, Edmund, 201, 207 Emmanuel College, 320 English College in Rome, 334 English Dominican Convent, Brussels, 247 Erffens, Mathias, 258 Erffens, Sara Maria, 257 Erhart, provost of the convent of St. Andrä, 311 Etheredge, Clemence, 153 Etheredge, Sarah, 153 Evelyn, John, 150 Everardi, Pierre, 295 F Falconer, Daniel, 211 Farnese, Alexander, 279

Fass, Paula, 348 Faulconer, John, 211, 212 Faulconer, Thomas, 211 Fiche, Jacques, 182 Fischer, Conrad, 263, 264 Fitzwilliams, William, 234 Fléel, Henry, 170 Fletcher, Anthony, 193, 204 Follows, Samuel, 139 Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, 194 Fox, George, 104, 133 Freist, Dagmar, 272 Friesland, 262 Frost, Jerry W., 102 Fry, Elizabeth (nee Gurney), 149 Fulham, Edward (d. 1695), 206 Fuller, Thomas, 197 G Galasso, Cristina, 347 Gallars, Nicolas des, 184 Gandy, Henry, 210 Gatte, Jehan, 181 Gaunt, Thomas, 240 Geneva, 179 George II, King of Great Britain, Elector of Hannover, 271 Getsius, Daniel, 206 Gifford, Anne, 236 Gifford, Bridget, 236 Gifford, Walter, 236 Gill, Catie, 106 Glaude, 181 Gleadle, Kathryn, 130 Gobin, Dietrich, 268 Godwin, William, 140 Godwyn, Thomas, 214 Goldin, Simcha, 302 Goulding, Bridget, 1 Grace, Philip, 173 Gramer, Jehan, 184

 INDEX 

Grammaye, Cecile, 276 Grammaye, Jacques, 277 Grammaye, Thomas, 203 Granville, Dennis, 212 Gratton, Ann, 118 Gratton, John, 118 Green, Betty, 153 Grenby, M., 142 Greville, Robert, 2nd Baron Brooke, 197 Griffith, John, 118 Griffith, Matthew, 192, 208, 215 Griffith, Rebecca, 118 Griffiths, James, 232 Grimshaw, William, 148 Grindal, Edmund, 75 Grosvenor, Robert, 233 Guestwick, Norfolk, 144 Guillaume of Flaix, 314 Gurney, Betsy, 144 Gurneys of Earlham Hall, 138 H Ha-Deshen—Isserlein, 307–308 Hains, Thomas, 111 Hales, John, 193 Hall, Alice, 120 Hall, Isaac, 120 Ham, Elizabeth, 141 Harris, Howell, 148 Hart, Theophilus, 200 Harvington, Worcestershire, 213 Hastings, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, 149 Hayes, Alice, 120 Hays, Mary, 139 Healy, Simon, 234 Henin, Maria Catharina, 266 Henry IV, 14 Hénuin, 170 Hervey, James, 147

357

Herzogenburg, Austria, 310 Hesilrige, Arthur, 205 Hexham, Northumberland, 237 Hext, Amias, 195 Heywood, C., 131 Higgins, Robert, 199 Higgins, William, 199, 214 Hill, Rowland, 141 Hinckley, Leicestershire, 203 Hindmarsh, Bruce, 132 Hoby, Leicestershire, 209 Holtby, George, 233 Holy Women (Taft, Zachariah), 146 Hondschoote, France, 170 Hopper, Christopher, 137 Horsmonden, Daniel, 211 Hoskins, Jane, 105 Howard, Mary (Maria Delphina), 247 Howard, Thomas, Viscount Stafford, 247 Howden, Hannah, 105 Howell, Thomas, bishop of Bristol, 202 children of; Arthur, 203; Charles, 203; Elizabeth, 203; Frances, 203; George, 203; Henry, 203; John, 203; Lucy, 203; Thomas, 215; William, 203 Hudson, Elizabeth, 110 Hudson, Sir Henry, 209 Hull, Richard, 199 Hutton, William, 138, 155 I Ironside, Gilbert, 200, 202 Isserlein, Rabbi Israel, 299 J Jackson, Thomas, 148 Jacob, Elizabeth, 120

358 

INDEX

Jacob, Henry, 338 James, Catherine, 228 James, Sir Henry, 228 James, Sir Henry, wife of, 229 James I, 14 James II, 13 Jay, William, 137 Jegon, John, 194 Jerusalem, 241, 334 Johnson, Samuel, 140 K Kaplan, Benjamin, 258, 272 Katzenellenbogen, Rabbi Pinchas, 43 Keach, Benjamin, 147 Keil, Marta, 300 Kelsall, Edward, 198 Kelsall, John, 198 Kelsall, William, 198 King, Frances, 212 King, Henry, bishop of Chichester, 212 Kippis, Andrew, 156 Knight, John, 99 Knight, William, 201 Koudekerk, Netherlands, 276 L La Rochelle, France, 262 Laithwaite, John, 235 Lamb, Charles, 144 Lane, Henry, 204 Lane, William, 204 Lawrence, Edward, 206 Lawrence, Sarah, 153 Lawrence, Thomas, 194 Le Den, Jenne, 172 Le Den, Thomas, 172 le Roy, Alixe, 185 le Roy, Ezabeau, 184

le Roy, Nicholas, 184, 185 le Roy, Susaenne, 171 le Roy, Wiliame, daughter of, 171 le Sueur, Henry, 186 le Sueur, Rachel, 186 Leach, Philip, 205 Lecoup, Marguerite, 174 Lee, Richard (Sir), 198 Legiere, Jehan, 180, 181 Leiden, Holland, 276 Lespine, Gefroy de, 181 Leurent, Jacquelinne, 174 Levene, Alysa, 130 Levia, Leona, 61 Levy, Barry, 119 Lewis Dillwyn, children of Lewy, 138 Lydia, 138 Lille, Belgium, 176 Lincoln’s Inn, 202 Little Shelford, Berkshire, 205 Liverpool, 203 Llanfair, Montgomery, 328 Lockett, Henry Doctor, 201 London Bridewell, 326 Louis XIV, 15 Loup, Joachin le, 181 Louvain, Belgium, 333 Low Countries, 8, 169 Lulier, Guillaume, 180 Luther, Martin, 319 M MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 78 Mack, Phyllis, 132 Madame de Mouy, 179 Manby, John, 202 Mandernach, Nicolas, 281 Mannheim Spital, 268 Marabut, Jacques, 181 Marchant, Pierre, 182

 INDEX 

Marie, 175 Marshman, Joshua, 144 Mary I, 242 Matthias (or Herzogenburg), 310 Maxey, John, 321 Mayson, Francis, 232 Merklein, Rabbi, 304 Middle Temple, 202 Miles, Francis, 232 Molin, Yaakov haLevi, 304 Molina, Luis de, 259 Molland, Devon, 204 Mommers, Anna, 262 Mommers, Conegonde, 258, 264 Mommers, Hendrick, 257, 262 Montpelier, France, 271 Morden, John, 194 More, Anne, 230 More, Cresacre, 244 More, Sir John, 244, 245 More, Sir Thomas, 227 More, William, 230 Morton, James, 110 Mount Etna, 334 Müller, Philipp, 259 Munns, Jessica, 210 Murray, Amelie, 152 Musgrave, John, 237 Musgrove, Dorothy, 237 Mush, John Abstracte of the life and death of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe, 245 N Napper, Edmund, 234 Nathan (of Eger), 305 Nayler, James, 323 Needham, Andrew, 206 Netherlands, 15 Neville, Edmund, 250

359

Neville, John, 250 New Testament, 144, 337 Newte, John, 200 Newton, John, 143 Niesen, Geertrude Deriks, 114 Norfolk, 139 Northumberland, 237 Norwich, 199 Norwood, Richard, 320, 331 O Oakham, Rutland, 202 Obelkevich, James, 137 Octavien (schoolmaster), 180 O’Day, Rosemary, 193 Ogilvie, William, 146 Olay, Donnèrque, 170 Olivier, Anna, 257 Oppenheim, Germany, 260 Orcheston St Mary, Wiltshire, 196 Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, Germany, 261 Otway, Thomas, 200 Oughtred, Elizabeth, 212 Oughtred, George, 212 Oughtred, William, 212 Owen, Henry, 198 Oxford, 196, 202, 326 P Painsley, Staffordshire, 223 Painswick, Gloucestershire, 198, 213 Pakter, Walter, 312 Paradise Lost (Milton), 143 Parnell, James, 104, 321 Parsons, John, 153 Pawson, John, 150 Payton, Catherine, 114 Pearson, Jane, 117 Pease, Robert, 150

360 

INDEX

Peel Castle, 107 Pemberton, Mary, 108 Penn, William, 13, 104 Pennington, Isaac, 101, 323 Pennington, Mary, 101 Pennsylvania, 13, 105 Perkins, William, 78, 336 Pfalz-Neuburg, 268 Pharo, Dierick Cornelissen, 285 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 105 Philips, Katherine, 203 Picart, Bernard, 60 Pierce, George, 193, 208–209 Piggott, Richard, 198 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan, John), 142 Plantagenet, Margaret (Countess of Salisbury), 242 Plennart, Martin, 175 Plymouth, 202 Pocock, William Fuller, 137 Poitou, France, 262 Pole, Geoffrey, 242 Pole, Mary, 242 Pole, Reginald, 242 Ponchel, Antoine du, 182 Pope, Nicholas, 211 Pope, Thomas, 211 Des Portes, Nicolas, 180 Price, Sampson, 93 Prideaux, Humphrey, 199, 200 Priestley, Joseph, 134 Priestley, Rev. T., 150 Prince, John, 205 Prosperi, Adriano, 87 Purcell, Frances, 240 Puschner, Johann Georg, 54 R Ramsgate, Kent, 194 Ravenhill, John, 239

Rawdon, Elizabeth, nee Hastings, Countess of Moira, 149 Rawson, Thomas, 209 Reading, Thomas, 233 Reed family, 155 Reningelst, Belgium, 170 Reynolds, Richard, 194, 214 Robinson, Crabb, 138 Roby, William, 148 Roches, Des, 179 Rogers, Thomas, 146 Rome, Italy, 232, 333 Ruan Lanihorne, Cornwall, 201 Rvyes, Brune Doctor, 199 Ryland, John, 142, 151n176 Ryrie, Alec, 77 S Sacheverell, Henry, 140 St Austell, Cornwall, 321 St John’s College, Cambridge, 208 St. Maria-Horebeke, Belgium, 16 St Winnow, Cornwall, 206 Salzburg, Austria, 272 Samm, Mary, 109 Samwayes, Peter, 194 Sancroft, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 201 Santunne, Guillaume, 180 Sas van Gent, Holland, 16 Sauve, France, 262 Schimmelpenninck, Mary Anne, 138, 142, 342 Seaman, Ruth, 120 Secker, Thomas, 134, 152 Seddon, Edward, 205 Seddon, Peter, 205 Seddon, William, 205 Seddon family, 205 Seneschal, Honoré, 180 Seneschal, Philipine, 185

 INDEX 

Senglier, Jacques, 182 Shadford, George, 137 Sherwood, Jessie, 314 Simpson, William, 234 1645 catechism, 22 Smith, Frances, 239 Smith, Henry, 198 Sollys family, 140 Sonnius, Jan, 288 Spanish Low Countries, 276 Spanish Netherlands, 15 Spendlow, John, 199 Spierling, Karen E., 87 Stanley, Henry, 4th earl of Derby, 236 Steele, Anne, 153 Steenbergen, Holland, 285 Steeple Langford, Wiltshire, 196, 203 Steinmeyer, Wilhelmina, 263 Stepney, 204 Stevenage, Hertfordshire, 332 Stoke Fleming, Devon, 194 Stone, Lawrence, 6 Stonehouse, Andrew, 234 Stonehouse, Anne, 238 Stonehouse, Christopher, 239 Stonhouse, Sir James, 149 Stony Stratford, Buckingharmshire, 332 Stout, William, 330 Strange, James, 7th earl of Derby, 205 Suzanne, 275 Symeon, George, 234 T Taft, Zachariah, 148 Taylor, Jeremy, 199–200, 216 Thornburgh, Giles, 196, 212 Threadneedle Street, London, 169 Threadneedle Street, London, Church in, 177 Tiverton, Thomas, 194

361

Token for Children (Janeway, James), 142 Tomlinson, Sarah, 105 Toovey, Rebecca, 110 Topsell, Edward, 335 Topsham, Devon, 204 Tournai, France, 183 Tournay, Thomas, 206 Tovey, Phillip, 152 Treneglos, Cornwall, 202 Trier, Germany, 281 Tuke, Esther, 119 Tuke, Sarah, 119 Tunstall, Kent, 207 Turner, Francis, Bishop of Ely, 215 Turner, John, 202, 214 Turner, Thomas, 137, 202, 207, 281 Twinning, Thomas, 198 U Üffeln, Germany, 265 Upcott, Anne, 321 V Vaals, Netherlands, 257 Valton, John, 138 van den Brande, François, 287 van den Corput, Hendrick, 275, 281 van der Meulen, Daniel, 279 van der Meulen, Hester, 279 van der Speeten, Jan, 295 van Eeckeren, Robert, 204, 207, 279 van Hyning, Victoria, 227 Vaux, Ambrose, 241 ven Plache, Cornil, 179 ven Plache, Jaenne, 179 Venn, Dionysius, 209 Venn, Henry, 141 Verona, Italy, 294 Vilain, Jean, 295

362 

INDEX

Voltaire, 114 von Staritz, Maria Josepha Theresia, 268 von Stariz, Joachim Peter, 269 W Wake, William, 211 Wakeman, Edward, 234 Wakeman, George, 234 Walker, John, 192, 193 Walpurgis, Maria Anna Antonia, 268 Walsh, John, 134 Walsham, Alexandra, 77, 102 Walsingham, Francis, 270 Walthamstow, Old Meeting at, 140 Ward, John, 208 Wardell, Deborah, 117 Ware, Herts, 150 Wareham, Dorset, 211 Waterman, Peter, 194 Watkins, Henry, 206 Watson, Margaret, 148 Watts, Isaac, 147 Watts, Michael, 134 Waugh, Evelyn, 248 Weber, Max, 112 Welshpool, Montgomeryshire, 328 Wesley, John, 133 Westley, John, 211 Weston, Mary, 108 Weston, Mary (Junior), 108 Westphalia, 261 Weymouth, Dorset, 151 Whitaker, John, 201 White, John, 211 White, Micheline, 82 Whitefield, George, 133

Whitehead, George, 330 Whitgift, John, 75 Whitrow, Joan, 106 Whitrow, Susanna, 106 Wienerneustadt, Austria, 299 Wilberforce, William, 155 Wilde, Francis, 213 Wilde, Mrs, 198 Wilde, Thomas, 213 Wilkinson, Elizabeth, 116 William Frederick, prince, Duke of Gloucester, 141 Willmot, John, 200 Wilson, John, 202 Wilson, Rachel, 120 Wiltshaw, Mary, 146 Winchester College, 200 Winchester school, 203 Windsor, 201 Wiseman, Jane (in religion Mary), 226 Wiseman, Thomas, 226 Wood, Anthony, 203 Woolbeding, Sussex, 200 Wren, Christopher (Sir), 215 Wright, Aaron, 202 Wright, Abigail, 110 Wright, Abraham, 202 Wright, James, 202, 206 Wycombe, 324 Y Yarmouth, Norfolk, 139, 333 Z Zwingli, Ulrich, 86