• 1 Richard L. Greaves, ‘The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity’, Church History 52.3 (1983), (...)

1Forty years ago, Richard L. Greaves published an article in Church History outlining the role of women in early puritanism, particularly in their clandestine underground activities. He drew attention to women members of separatist or Independent churches from 1568 onwards, to women who provided domestic sanctuary for puritan ministers, to female patrons and authors, and to women who were fined and imprisoned for their puritanism. He concluded that more research was needed into the ways in which women sustained the puritan movement from the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign until the outbreak of the English civil war in the 1640s.1

• 2 Joanna Moody, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605 ( (...)
• 3 Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London, Methue (...)

3Much writing by women has also been lost, partly because women’s writing was not considered to be as important as that of men, or because at their deaths some women asked for their manuscripts to be destroyed. A good example of loss is provided by the puritan Lady Margaret Hoby of Yorkshire, who created a range of religious work including meditations, a testament, a commonplace book and sermon notes, yet only her diary from 1599-1605 has survived.2 In contrast, the London artisan Nehemiah Wallington created a similar range of manuscripts, which have been widely studied and which are now kept in the British Library amongst other archives.3

• 4 H. Blodgett, ‘Savage [née Henry], Sarah (1664–1752)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography https (...)

4Such documents were sometimes shared within family or wider networks. An example from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is provided by the spiritual writings of Sarah Savage, the daughter of the nonconformist minister Philip Henry, which were circulated within her family.4 Some of her original manuscripts remain in family ownership today and others are in archives, including the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

• 5 Patricia Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings, 1600-1700’ in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English So (...)

5Finally, it was rare for a woman to publish a book in her own lifetime and approximately 1% of English books printed in the seventeenth century had a female author.5 Often such works were prepared for the press by a male relative or cleric, so we must also be alert to the ways in which women’s writing was modified in print by men in order to present a form of female piety that was worthy of emulation.

• 6 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart E (...)

6With these challenges in mind, this article will consider examples of women who sustained puritan traditions within their family and religious networks in the early Stuart period. Some of their lives were celebrated in print, often by puritan clerics and this served to domesticate puritanism and make it more respectable after the early challenges that it had posed in Elizabeth’s reign. Yet there were still moments of tension, and women’s puritanism is often revealed at points when they were involved in the rituals of the life cycle – at baptism, marriage, and death.6

• 7 Anne Laurence, ‘A priesthood of she-believers: women and congregations in mid-seventeenth century E (...)
• 8 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-century England (Berkeley, Universi (...)

7Women’s involvement as activists outside the home naturally mirrored what has been termed the fortunes of English puritanism, with phases of conflict with authority and periods of accommodation. There was thus a marked change after 1640, when differences in opinion about theology and church polity became much more hardline amongst puritan groupings. The 1640s and 1650s saw renewed challenges to the status quo from women, who acted as spiritual leaders, particularly in Independent congregations and the religious sects. Yet even in this revolutionary period, no one argued for a church ministry by women. Anne Laurence has attributed the prominence of women as religious and political leaders in the 1640s (including the Leveller Katherine Chidley and the preacher Mrs Attaway) to their shock value in ignoring the Pauline injunctions to remain silent.7 Phyllis Mack has identified no more than 300 women who acted as preachers, writers or evangelical missionaries throughout the 1640s and 1650s, so their numbers were relatively small.8 Nevertheless, the accusation that any particular religious group attracted a majority of women could be used to undermine the authority of its leaders. At the same time some clerical authors stressed the respectability of puritan women in order to distance them from the activities of the religious sects.

• 9 Peter Lake, ‘Defining Puritanism – Again?’ in Francis J. Bremer (ed.), Puritanism: Transatlantic Pe (...)

8How then can we identify women as puritans and how can we examine their religious experiences within family life? Peter Lake has described puritanism as a certain style of piety, while Patrick Collinson considered that rigorous sabbath observance and religious fasting were both hallmarks of that puritan style.9 Puritan women were therefore very visible to their contemporaries, because of their participation in these communal activities, which allowed the godly to exclude the ungodly from their company. The ultimate expression of this exclusion can be found in the Independent or separatist churches, which were set up by English emigrants to Germany and the Low Countries in the early seventeenth century and then later in New England. Entry to these churches often required a member to provide evidence of the lively working of God on their religious belief and references to these spiritual struggles often only emerge in funeral sermons or other publications marking the death of a believer.

• 11 John Earle, Micro-Cosmographie, or, A Peece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters (Lond (...)

11John Earle, the future bishop, had satirised puritan women like Bell in 1628 in his hostile characterisation of A Shee-precise Hypocrite, who “over flows so with the Bible, that she spills it upon every occasion, and will not cudgell her maides without Scripture.” His description was part of the fashion at the time for writing ironic pen portraits or stereotypes based on the classical characters of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. Earle originally entitled this piece A Shee-Puritan, but it was changed for the press and nowhere in the final version does he use the word puritan, but his readers would have recognised his intentions. Earle’s puritan hypocrite is a tradesman’s wife and a nonconformist, who prefers preaching to prayer, and on Sundays walks five miles to hear a preacher, when she could go to her parish church. Nothing angers her more than the fact that women cannot preach, although she makes up for that at her dinner table when she talks against sense and Antichrist.11

• 12 John Geree, Katadynastes: Might Overcoming Right (London, 1649), dedication, sigs. A2^r-A3^v.
• 13 William Gurnall, The Christians Labour and Reward (London, 1672), pp. 124-155. For household religi (...)
• 14 Tom Webster and Kenneth Shipps (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634-1638 (Woodbridge, Boydell a (...)
• 15 Diane Willen, ‘Women and Religion in Early Modern England’ in Sherrin Marshall, Women in Reformatio (...)

12In contrast, Mary, Lady Vere was described approvingly in 1649 by one of her admirers, the cleric John Geree, as “an ancient mother in our Israel,” which was a distinct accolade that had earlier been used of Elizabeth I. Geree also praised Mary’s long service to God “after the way that hath been called Puritanism.”12 These two descriptions by Earle and Geree lie at the extremes of the activities of puritan women and raise wider questions about how we label women as puritans, if they were not activists. We learn from Vere’s funeral sermon preached by William Gurnall and printed in 1672 that she had a longstanding reputation as a supporter of the International Calvinist cause. As a wife and then a widow, she made her home a model of household religion; she worshipped in private and with her family and servants, she also employed puritan chaplains and instructed her five daughters and her servants in religious learning.13 Funeral sermons were stereotypical in the sense that they were intended to demonstrate the benefits derived from living a godly life, but a diary written in the 1630s by one of Lady Vere’s chaplains, Samuel Rogers, confirms her rigorous observation of household religion at an earlier stage in her life.14 Diane Willen reminds us that this level of household devotion was always confined to a minority who had both the resources and some literacy.15 Having the time to pray, catechise and meditate would have been another consideration.

• 16 Jacqueline Eales, ‘Mary, Lady Vere (1581–1671)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography https://ww (...)
• 17 Earle, Micro-cosmographie, unpaginated, character number 45.

14As a woman of high status, Mary Vere was undoubtedly the acceptable face of puritanism. She was the sister-in-law of the Secretary of State, Sir Edward Conway, and the widow of Sir Horace Vere, a hero of the Dutch wars. She was also the mother-in-law of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the commander in chief of Parliament’s New Model Army during the civil wars. She retained the admiration of the Presbyterian dissenters after her death in 1672 at the age of 91.16 In contrast, Earle’s She-Precise Hypocrite is of a different social class and manner altogether. Earle imagines her dressed in a ruff made from pages of the Geneva Bible, a translation favoured by puritans. She is tainted by antinomianism counting “nothing [as] vices but superstition and an oath, and thinks adultery a less sin than to swear by my truly.”17

• 18 A transcript of this document is provided in Jacqueline Eales, ‘Sir Robert Harley, K.B., (1579-1656 (...)

15Because the term “puritan” originated as a term of abuse, it is naturally difficult to find anyone, man or woman, who claimed to be a puritan at the time. Puritans were more likely to refer to each other as “the godly” and even as “the elect” in a reflection of the Calvinist theology of predestination. We do, however, have an unusually positive character of a puritan from 1621, which is the counterpoint to Earle’s satire on the Shee-Precise Hypocrite. This character survives as a draft addressed to Sir Horace Vere by the leading puritan gentleman and member of Parliament, Sir Robert Harley, after another member had viciously attacked a proposed law for Sunday observance in the House of Commons. Importantly, it pre-dates the later debates from the mid-1620s about Arminianism, and from the 1630s about the innovations in church ceremonies and decorations introduced by Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Robert Harley’s “character” thus demonstrates that puritanism was not entirely quiescent during the Jacobean period. He makes no mention of theological debates about predestination and election, but his Presbyterian leanings are revealed in his attack on Lordly Bishops. His rejection of ceremonies also appears in his condemnation of the use of the sign of the cross at baptism, which he and other puritans regarded as a superstitious gesture with no effect on faith.18

• 19 Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at (...)
• 20 Jacqueline Eales, ‘Brilliana, Lady Harley (bap. 1598, d. 1643)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biog (...)

16Harley later married Mary Vere’s niece, Brilliana Conway, who shared his religious convictions. The Harleys’ eldest son, Edward, credited his parents equally for being “noble, wise and above all, godly” and instructed him “in the fear of God.”19 Brilliana’s letters written between 1638 and 1643 to Edward at Oxford University and later as a Parliamentarian soldier, do demonstrate her deep disapproval of the innovations of the 1630s. Moreover, the debates in Parliament in the early 1640s encouraged her and her family to believe that the English Church would finally be fully reformed. In June 1641 she rejoiced at the progress in the Long Parliament of the Root and Branch bill to abolish episcopacy, which her husband had promoted in the House of Commons.20

• 21 William Harrison, Deaths Aduantage Little Regarded, and the Soules Solace against Sorrow (London, 1 (...)

18The implication of Harley’s “character” was that if earthly law conflicted with God’s commands, a puritan would follow the Bible and his conscience to defy the law of Man. In a patriarchal society, there were obvious conflicts for women, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, if their religious beliefs differed from those of their husbands. From the Reformation onwards, Protestant reformers had advised wives that they must obey their husbands unless their commands were against those of God. But this advice inevitably raised concerns that religious plurality would undermine patriarchal authority. Unusually, the account of the godly life and death of the Lancashire gentlewoman, Katherine Brettergh, published by two local ministers in 1606, approvingly discussed two occasions when she corrected her husband, first for being angry on the Lord’s Day and second for collecting rents from a tenant who could not afford to pay “for then,” she said to him, “you oppress the poor.”21

• 22 Canterbury Cathedral Library and Archives, X4/5 fo. 161v.

19For women, the working of the puritan conscience and the primacy of the Bible are often revealed during life-cycle rituals, particularly at birth and death. This is evident in a court case of 1603 involving the wife of Thomas Starr, a clothier, of Ashford in Kent, who refused to participate in the ceremony of churching, the official Prayer Book ritual marking the return of a woman to the parish community after childbirth. She told the church authorities that “her conscience would not suffer [allow] her to do so, because she never read in the Scriptures of any such kind of churching in women.”22

• 23 Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 195-229.
• 24 Ibid., pp. 133, 345.

20Reading this statement against Harley’s character, we can immediately identify Mrs Starr as a puritan by her joint appeal to both her conscience and to the Bible as justifications for defying the authority of the church and state. As David Cressy has noted, refusing to be churched was a particularly female form of protest against the Book of Common Prayer.23 The rituals for baptism and marriage in the Book also provoked challenges from puritan women, and church court records contain sporadic cases of women refusing the sign of the cross at baptism. David Cressy cites the case of Elizabeth Cantrell in Norwich, for example, who was excommunicated in 1597 for withdrawing her baby at the crucial moment of signing. Puritans also objected to the use of the ring at weddings, and John Earle described his Shee-precise Hypocrite as marrying “in her tribe without a ring.”24 It was possible, of course, to find a puritan minister who would not carry out these prayer book rituals, and this aided many puritan laity to escape the attention of the church courts, which makes it difficult for us to assess the extent of lay objections.

• 25 The practice of using puritan baptismal names in Cranbrook is discussed in Patrick Collinson, ‘Cran (...)

21Mrs Starr, like so many who were prosecuted by the church courts, also remains a relatively obscure figure. She was probably called Susannah, but like Mary Vere, Sarah Savage and Susanna Bell, we are able to place her in a wider context of family and community commitment to puritanism. She came from Cranbrook in Kent, where there was tradition of using peculiar or puritan first names amongst some families in the 1580s and 1590s. The parish registers there reveal that three of her children were called Nostrength, Moregift, and Suretrust. 25In this parish, her nonconformity was seemingly tolerated by the minister. It was when she moved to a new parish that she was prosecuted.

• 26 Lorraine Flisher, ‘Cranbrook, Kent, and its Neighbourhood Area, c.1570-1670’, (PhD dissertation, Un (...)

22One of her many sons was the surgeon, Dr Comfort Starr, who emigrated in 1634 to Massachusetts, where he was amongst the founders of Harvard College. This was part of the Great Migration to the New World in the 1630s, and Comfort Starr was joined on this journey by his wife, children and sister, Truthshallprevail. Susannah and her husband Thomas probably joined them a few years afterwards. One of Susannah’s grandsons, also called Comfort, later returned to England to take an active role as a puritan minister during the Cromwellian period.26

• 27 William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622).

23With Susannah Starr we can see the growth of traditions of puritanism within families that persisted through several generations, and which were sustained by women as much as men. Mothers had an active role as the first educators of their children, and the puritan clergy addressed this audience by writing catechisms aimed at giving children a religious education. William Gouge, the minister of Blackfriars in London, was one of the most popular of these authors. His conduct book Of Domesticall Duties, published in 1622, is the epitome of patriarchal advice to women to fear and reverence their husbands and to behave at all times in a modest and pious manner.27

• 28 Matthews, Calamy Revised, pp. 229-30.

25Guy also illustrates her care to teach the Gouge children the principles of religion as soon as they were able to understand them, stating approvingly that some of her children “so profited, as before they were three years old, they were able distinctly to answer all the questions of a Catechism which her husband published.” Of her thirteen children, six sons and two daughters survived to adulthood. One of her sons, Thomas, was a cleric, who like his father William, supported Parliament’s Presbyterian initiatives during the civil wars.28

• 29 Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in (...)
• 30 Nicholas Guy, Pieties Pillar: Or, A Sermon Preached at the Funerall of Mistresse Elizabeth Gouge (L (...)

27According to Guy, Elizabeth read some scripture daily, which gave her the spiritual authority to answer readily any question about the history and doctrine of the Bible. Studies by Kate Narveson and Femke Molekamp emphasise that female literacy agency and interpretation was grounded in their responses to the Bible.29 An intimate knowledge of the Bible also gave women considerable spiritual authority. At a time when the majority of women could not both read and write, Elizabeth also spent “much time” reading English divinity books, “whereof she had a pretty Library’ and she wrote prayers and directions for devotions ‘with her own hand.”30

• 31 Anonymous, Imitation and Caution for Christian Woman: or, The Life and Death of that Excellent Gent (...)
• 32 Samuel Clarke, The Second Part of the Marrow of Ecclesiastical History: Containing the Lives of Man (...)

29Nicholas Guy’s funeral sermon for Elizabeth Gouge, for example, was the first to be published at the death of a clergyman’s wife and it would become a model for such sermons for other clergy wives. It was recommended in print in 1659 as one of a number of books about women that showed “much provocation and encouragement to holiness.”31 Harking back to puritan lives before the civil wars was also part of a wider trend in reclaiming puritan women as respectable matrons, as ancient mothers in Israel, after the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. In 1650 the Presbyterian minister Samuel Clarke reprinted the godly life of Katherine Brettergh, who died in 1601, in The Second Part of the Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, and Mary Vere’s funeral sermon was reprinted ten years after her death in 1683 in Clarke’s posthumous publication The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in This Later Age. The portrait of her reproduced here from Clarke’s work shows her in later life as a modest widow with her neck obscured by a broad ruff engraved by the Dutchman Frederick Hendrik van Hove.32