Nonconformity
Nonconformist was a minister or member of the Church of England who, for conscience’ sake, would not conform to what the law required in worship. For a century the quarrel seemed to be about small things: a white surplice, a square cap, the sign of the cross in baptism, kneeling at the Lord’s Supper. To the Nonconformists it was never small. The question beneath the cloth was who rules the worship of Christ’s church, Christ by His Word or the crown by its law. John Geree drew the balance they tried to keep:
He highly esteemed order in the House of God; but would not under color of that, submit to superstitious rites, which are superfluous, & perish in their use. He reverenced Authority, keeping within its sphere; but durst not under pretence of subjection to the higher powers, worship God after the traditions of men. John GereeThe Character of an Old English Puritan (1659)1
Hooper and the Livery of Antichrist
The controversy began in the reign of Edward VI. Daniel Neal, the eighteenth-century historian of the Puritans, writes that “the controversy that gave rise to the Separation began in this reign, on occasion of bishop Hooper’s refusing to be consecrated in the Popish habits.”2 John Hooper, named bishop of Gloucester in 1550, called the vestments “the livery of Antichrist.” He yielded at last to the pleading of his fellow bishops, wore them at his consecration, and laid them aside afterward.3 Five years later, under Mary, he was burned at Gloucester. No one could say that the first Nonconformist was a man of small courage.
Why did a garment matter? Brown explains that to Hooper and men like him, the robes of the mass were what a flag is to a nation: “It was the outward and visible sign of a system which, in their souls, they had cast away from them.”4
The Vestiarian Controversy
Elizabeth’s Injunctions of 1559 required all clergy to wear “such habits and garments and such square caps as were most commonly or orderly received in the last year of the reign of Edward VI.” The returning exiles were dismayed. Thomas Sampson, soon dean of Christ Church, Oxford, asked Peter Martyr: “Should we not rather quit the ministry of the Word and Sacraments, than that these relics of the Amorites should be admitted?”5 Even bishops who enforced the law disliked it. Jewel wrote to Heinrich Bullinger in 1566:
The contest about the surplice is not yet at rest. I wish that all, even the slightest vestige of popery might be removed from our churches, and above all from our minds. But the Queen at this time is unable to endure the least alteration in the matter of religion. John Jewelto Heinrich Bullinger, 15666
The principle at stake was the sufficiency of Scripture. Brown summarizes it: “The puritans, on the contrary, maintained that in discipline as well as in doctrine nothing should be imposed as necessary which could not be proved from Scripture.”7 The bishops called the vestments “things indifferent.” The Puritans answered that if they were indifferent, no man should be deprived of his ministry for refusing them. Some spoke with more heat than wisdom. One Manchester curate preached “that the surplice is a rag of the pope and a mighty heresy in the church and he who maintains it cannot be saved!”8 That went too far. But the conviction underneath it was sound.
In 1566 Archbishop Parker issued his Advertisements, which described themselves as “temporal orders, mere ecclesiastical,” yet voided every preaching license dated before March 1, 1564.9 On Tuesday, March 26, 1566, the clergy of London were summoned to Lambeth. A minister dressed in the approved habit stood before them as a model. The chancellor told them, “Ye that will presently subscribe, write Volo. Those that will not subscribe, write Nolo. Be brief: make no words.” Parker reported to Cecil that thirty-seven refused, “of which number were the best and some preachers.”10 They were suspended on the spot. Neal records the anguish of those who gave way, crying, “We shall be killed in our souls for this pollution of ours.”11
The Yoke of Subscription
The next weapon was the pen. When John Whitgift became archbishop of Canterbury in 1583, he required every minister to subscribe three articles: the queen’s supremacy, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and a declaration that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to the Word of God. Many ministers could own the first two but not the third. Brown counts the result: “In Norfolk alone, 64 parish ministers were suspended, and in Suffolk 60. In the six counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Lincoln and Sussex, no fewer than 233 of the clergy were placed under interdict.”12 Neal judged that at one point “a fourth part of all the preachers in England were under suspension,” and that for “not wearing a white surplice, for not baptizing with the sign of the cross, or not subscribing to certain articles that had no foundation in law.”13
A generation later, Bradford described what this meant in the villages of the north:
The worke of God was no sooner manifest in them, but presently they were both scoffed and scorned by ye prophane multitude, and ye ministers urged with ye yoak of subscription, or els must be silenced; and ye poore people were so vexed with apparators, & pursuants, & ye comissarie courts, as truly their affliction was not smale. William BradfordOf Plimoth Plantation, chap. 114
In 1593 Parliament passed the statute Puritans remembered as the Act against Puritans. Anyone over sixteen who refused for a month to attend church, or who was present “at any unlawful assembly, conventicle, or meeting, under colour or pretence of any exercise of religion,” was to be imprisoned until he conformed. If he would not conform within three months, he must “abjure the realm and go into perpetual banishment,” and if he returned, he would suffer death.15 The same spring three Separatist leaders were hanged (see The Separatists).
Under the Stuarts
James I demanded conformity after Hampton Court, and his canons of 1604 renewed the requirement of subscription. Under Charles I, Archbishop Laud went further. Hulse writes that “one of his first acts as archbishop was to encourage games and pastimes on the Lord’s Day which antagonized the Puritans.” Ministers who would not read the Book of Sports from the pulpit were suspended. The Star Chamber dealt with critics in public. Alexander Leighton, for a book against the bishops, was sentenced “to have his ears cut off, his nose slit on both sides, be branded in the face with a double ‘S S’ (sower of sedition), be twice whipped, be placed in the pillory, and then be subject to life imprisonment!”16 Many Puritans left for New England. Those who stayed waited, and in the 1640s the tide turned. Laud himself went to the block in 1645.
Black Bartholomew, 1662
The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought the bishops back, and with them the sharpest test of all. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister, before the feast of St. Bartholomew, to declare publicly “his unfeigned assent and consent to the use of all things contained and prescribed” in the Book of Common Prayer.17 Ministers ordained by presbyters had to be ordained again by a bishop, and all had to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant.18 The Sunday before the deadline, the ministers of London preached their farewell sermons, “and such a passionate zeal for the welfare of their people ran through their sermons as dissolved their audiences into tears.” Neal continues:
At length the fatal St. Bartholomew came, when about two thousand relinquished their preferments in the church, or refused to accept of any upon the terms of the act of uniformity: an example hardly to be paralleled in the Christian world! Daniel NealThe History of the Puritans19
August 24, 1662, was a Sunday. The ejected lost their homes and their income at once. They “were driven from their houses, from the society of their friends; and, what was yet more affecting, from all their usefulness.”20 The laws that followed, called the Clarendon Code, pursued them further. Beeke notes that “the Conventicle Act in 1664 banning nonconformists from preaching in the fields or conducting services in homes was followed in 1665 by the Five Mile Act, which prohibited ejected ministers from coming within five miles of their former parishes or any city or town.”21 John Bunyan spent twelve years in Bedford jail.
Richard Baxter, who laid down his ministry before the deadline, later wrote An Apology for the Nonconformists Ministry to explain why he and his brethren kept preaching when the law said they must not. He insisted that they suffered for the gospel, not for a garment:
It is not a little of our peace, that if we suffer, we be not found Preaching about Ceremonies or shadows, but Preaching that Gospel, which at our Ordination we solemnly promised to preach. Richard BaxterAn Apology for the Nonconformists Ministry22
To silence themselves, he argued, would be to abandon the work to which God had consecrated them. They meant to “suffer without resisting or reviling,” and could do it the more easily “while we suffer not as evil doers, but for preaching the Gospel of Salvation.”23 Relief came only with the Act of Toleration in 1689, which, Hulse writes, “marked the end of the Church of England’s claim to be the single all-inclusive Church of the English people.”24 The same year the Particular Baptists publicly owned the Second London Confession, which they had first issued quietly in 1677.
Why It Mattered
It is easy to smile at men who lost their livings over a surplice. But the Nonconformists were not fighting about tailoring. They were confessing that Jesus Christ is the only King and Lawgiver of His church, and that His Word, not the will of a monarch, must govern how He is worshiped. That conviction would be written into the Westminster Confession (21.1), which teaches that God “may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men.”25 The Nonconformists paid for that truth with their pulpits, their homes, and sometimes their lives. Because they did, the church in the English-speaking world learned again that conscience bound by the Word of God is free.
