1

judgment, an insuperable difficulty to account for their rapid increase in so short a space of time, if we had no alternative but to attribute it to ordinary causes, say to the influence of the Marian exiles, who had returned home at the accession of Elizabeth imbued with the theology of Geneva and with the spirit of freedom which that theology generated wherever it was received. The leaven of their teaching and influence could not have been so great and so widely diffused as to spread the principles of Separatism among so numerous a section of the nation. It must have been circumscribed by the paucity of their numbers; and when in course of time these passed away, there were but few to take their place and carry on their work. But even if their successors had been equally numerous, equally zealous, their efforts to commend the doctrine of religious liberty to the great mass of the people would have been defeated by the inertness, ignorance, and brutality in which they were sunk. Very few of the latter could read, and it was believed by the ruling powers that the best way to make them contented was to keep them ignorant. In truth, when we consider the general condition of the people, the wonder is that Puritanism was not entirely crushed out while Elizabeth was on the throne. How, then, is the rapid growth of Puritanism to be explained? To answer this question we must mentally transport ourselves across the North Sea to the kingdom of the Netherlands or Holland.1

1 In the middle of the seventeenth century, according to Motley, the population of Holland was as large as that of England, and much more wealthy.— United Netherlands, vol. iv. p. 557.

Puritanism in Holland. The influence which this little kingdom, less than half the size of Scotland, and not one-fourth that of England, has exerted upon the historical development of Europe, and especially of our own country, in the matter of civil and religious liberty, has seldom, if recognised, been appraised at its true value.

In the brief notes which Professor Skeat has introduced at the commencement of his Etymological Dictionary, he takes credit for having been the first to point out with sufficient distinctness how great has been the indebtedness of England to Holland. "I am convinced that the influence of Dutch upon English has been much underrated, and a closer attention to this question might throw some light even upon English history. History tells us that our relations with the Netherlands have often been rather close. We read of Flemish mercenary soldiers being employed by the Normans, and of Flemish settlements in Wales, 'where' (says old Fabyan, I know not with what truth) they remayned a long whyle, but after, they sprad all Englande ouer.' We may recall the alliance between Edward III. and the free towns of Flanders; and the importation by Edward of Flemish weavers." After Antwerp had been captured by the Duke of Parma, a third of the merchants and manufacturers of the ruined city are said to have found refuge on the banks of the Thames. A final stoppage of the trade with Flanders would have broken half the merchants in London.1 Flemish weavers had come over with the Conqueror, then settled down in Norfolk, and suc1 Green's Short History, p. 381.

ceeded to so great an extent in developing the industry at which they wrought, that Norwich became the second city in the kingdom. These Dutch refugees came to this country, not only for purposes of trade, but because they were driven out of their own country by stress of religious persecution. During the period the Netherlands were overrun and laid waste by the butcheries of Alva, it is computed that between fifty and one hundred thousand refugees found an asylum in England. 1560 there were ten thousand, and in 1562 the number had reached thirty thousand.1

In

It was among the Flemish weavers that the preaching 、and doctrines of Wyclif caught hold and spread most rapidly, and during the persecution of the Lollards it is said more persons suffered death at the stake in Norfolk than in all the other counties of England put together.2 The martyrs who suffered under Mary were most numerous in those counties where Lollardism exerted its greatest influence, and in those counties it was

1 Green puts the number of refugees from the Netherlands at over 50,000. In the early part of the seventeenth century the population of London was not more than 130,000, and of these 10,000, were foreigners, mostly Walloons. In Norwich alone, as early as 1571, there were 3925 Dutch and Walloons, and in 1587 this number had risen to 4679, making a majority of the population.

2 Professor Thorold Rogers' Story of Holland, p. 51; The English Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, by W. H. Beckett. Religious Tract Society. See the two maps. It is idle, in the face of such facts, to say, as Mr. Froude does, that the Lollard movement was an untimely birth, and that it completely died out. This much is certain, that it spread at first among the Walloon settlers; and precisely in those parts-Norfolk and Suffolk and London-where these settlers were most numerous, there the Protestant reforming Puritan spirit was most active and vigorous.

that Puritanism flourished, and Separatism afterwards. sprang up.

The influence of Holland upon England.—These refugees from the Netherlands brought with them the arts and sciences for which their country had already become famous, and they taught them to a people entirely ignorant of them; for it must be admitted, says Mr. Thorold Rogers, that for a long time in the industrial history of modern civilisation the English were "the stupidest and most backward nation in Europe." Holland, on the other hand, was the instructor of Europe in the most advanced kind of agriculture, the most enterprising commerce. It was the pioneer in navigation and in discovery, in physical research, in medical knowledge and skill, and produced the greatest jurists and the most learned scholars of the seventeenth century. It was a centre of varied literary activity when England lay enveloped in the gross darkness of ignorance, and more books teemed from its presses than from all other parts of the Continent.

But the greatest service which Holland rendered to our own country in the sixteenth century was the dissemination of Protestant convictions and sentiments-the right of private judgment, the duty of toleration, and liberty of conscience. The Netherlanders became missionaries to the people wherever they settled down, instructing them in the truths of the Bible, quickening at once their intelligence and aspirations, and leading them into the love and practice of virtue, which seemed indeed lofty and austere when compared with the morals of our

own countrymen. The chief strongholds of English 、 Puritanism were London and Norwich, and these were just the two cities where the Dutch community and influence were the most widely represented. It was in Norwich, as we have seen, that Robert Browne gathered the first Separatist or Independent Church, a church mainly composed of people from the Netherlands, who at that time formed the majority of the population of the city.

Holland the birthplace of Puritanism.—It seems clear, then, from what has been thus said, that the origin of Puritanism, strictly speaking, is to be sought, not in England, but Holland. It was in Holland that it first made its appearance, and when it began to appear in England at first it found a prepared soil, both among the Walloon settlers and among the people who came under the leaven of their influence. There can be no question that this powerfully contributed to its rapid growth, and to its indefinite expansion.

The debt of England to the Netherlands has been elaborately shown and emphasised in a work1 to which reference has been already made, and the gist of which,

1 The Puritan in Holland, England, and America; an Introduction to American History, by Douglas Campbell, A.M., LL.B., Member of the American Historical Association. The praise which Mr. Gladstone bestowed upon this work, it may be remembered, drew an indignant letter from Mr. Goldwin Smith, in which he characterised it as a laborious and prolix disparagement of one of the most glorious periods of English history. The contrast is certainly drawn between Holland and England in a way which is decidedly unflattering to the latter; but the body of facts which Mr.