Mistress Bradstreet (9 page)

In actuality, Mary executed no more people than her popular father, or even her successor, Elizabeth, but she managed to compress her actions into a highly efficient five-year killing plan that haunted the Protestants of Dudley’s generation.
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If they had any doubts about her crimes against Protestants, they could refer to one of the best-sellers of the time, Foxe’s famous
Book of Martyrs
(1563). This scholarly Englishman had meticulously recorded the victims’ shrieks and cries, concentrating especially on their last words, their joyful acceptance of their martyrdom, and their death agonies. Thus it was easy for anyone of Anne’s generation to become an expert on the suffering of Protestants at the hands of their Catholic enemies.
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This project was helped along by the fact that the detailed woodcuts in
Martyrs
allowed children like Anne to study the experiences of these martyrs long before they could read. Both of Anne’s parents, in accordance with Puritan thinking of the time, undoubtedly encouraged their children to identify with and imaginatively reconstruct the torture these men and women endured and even seemed to embrace. To Anne it must have been appealing that female martyrs could be just as brave as men. In one famous woodcut three women surrounded by flames gaze up at the sky. Out of one’s pregnant womb an infant emerges, perfectly formed and beautiful. Although the baby hovers in the air in the woodcut, his escape is clearly short-lived, as the executioners stand poised to pitchfork him into the flames. His mother remains serene and untroubled, however, as do her companions. The flames themselves appear orderly and rather lovely, carrying little destructive force, as though the artist were suggesting that in martyrdom you could find peace, symmetry, and even happiness.
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Anne embraced this particular moral of Foxe’s gory tome—that if you could remain connected to God, you could withstand any kind of pain. If faith could convert anguish into a mark of special fortune—evidence of being chosen by God—then this was one reason the martyrs not only seemed to relish their suffering but also, astonishingly, went out of their way to court it. “One good man bathed his hands [in the flames] so long, until such time as the sinews shrank, and the fat dropped away. . . . All this while, which was somewhat long, he cried with a loud voice, ‘O Lord, receive my spirit!’ until he could not open his mouth.”
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Exhilarating though it may have been to dream of such brave feats, it must have been difficult for a Puritan child like Anne to sleep at night. Her father made sure she understood that the threat of flames could not be relegated to the barbaric past. The Dudleys did not believe in false comfort but felt that Anne needed to be prepared for her own potential confrontation with the stake. You needed to practice envisioning torture, this logic went, in order to develop the spiritual muscles necessary to withstand temptation. No responsible parents wanted the threat of earthly flames to terrify their children into renouncing their religion. Such a sin could only result in the eternal fire of damnation, and which fire, after all, was worse?
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The agony of being burned was common parlance in Anne’s world. Preachers commonly employed the tortures of hellfire to inoculate their flocks against sin. Most men and women of her parents’ generation had witnessed at least one stake burning and told family and friends what this was like. Once the first layer of the victim’s skin was singed and the nerve endings were deadened, the epidermis would begin to ooze blood, then water, then it would pucker and char and pull so tightly that even the mouth would be sucked back into a terrible wide-open howl and the fingers would curl into claws. Although some of the lucky ones died of smoke inhalation, for most of the people Dudley and his friends watched burn, release came only once they had become so hypovolemic, or deprived of blood and water, that their hearts gradually shut down, pumping what little blood was left only to vital organs. It was, perhaps, the extremity of such anguish that led one famous Protestant preacher to strike a prophetic note, delivering a terrible metaphor as the flames overtook him: “We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
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The contemplation of such a horrific death could only underline Anne’s feelings of vulnerability as a Puritan in England, even though such fears were overblown. In case any Puritan thought it might be safer abroad, the propaganda mill made sure everyone understood how dangerous it was for Protestants in Catholic Europe. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, had turned the full force of its fury against Protestants in the 1540s. Even though the pope himself had tried to restrain the Inquisition’s excesses, it was notorious for its sadistic executioners who dedicated themselves to inventing ghastly deaths, from dismemberment to yet more fires. Anne would also have known that in 1578, many years before she was born (and when her father was only two years old), these same Spanish Catholics had set Protestant Antwerp alight and, in a three-day killing spree, disemboweled, raped, and grotesquely butchered at least seven thousand people. Four years earlier, French Catholics had tricked Protestants into attending an August wedding feast in Paris and then, in the famous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, slaughtered them with such ruthless dedication that Protestant corpses clogged the streets, bobbed in the Seine, and spilled out of houses and windows until the city became a slippery, impassable mess and the stench drove those who were left to flee or to lock themselves indoors in the sweltering heat.
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These sorts of stories led most English Puritans to believe that if you ever did have to escape from the tyranny of Anglican miscreants and actually leave the island, it would be better to brave the wilderness of an uncharted world than endure torture at the hands of papists. Europe seemed a poisonous continent that upstanding Reformed English people should avoid at all costs.

Surprisingly, Anne was far from shocked at the degree of violence she heard in these stories. Puritans, too, were notorious for their rough predilections. Angry dissenters broke cathedral windows and looted Catholics’ houses. In Angoulême, France, extremist Protestants had starved Catholics and then roasted them at the stake.
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Puritans believed they needed to strike immediately and mercilessly against those who rejected the truth of the Reformation. Enemies could be anywhere. The history of Catholic “pollution” still littered the country. What Anne hated was the triumph of papists and the death of “true believers,” not the idea of bloodshed itself. To her, murder for the sake of your religion seemed reasonable and eminently praiseworthy. Decades later she would call for Puritans to “sack proud Rome and all her vassals rout / . . . / And tear [the beast’s] flesh and set your feet on’s neck.”
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Though she had no direct experience with warfare, her mind-set was understandable; she had inherited the ideal of glorious vengeance from her father and his family. Her grandfather (Dudley’s father) had raced off to fight the Spanish, never to return. In 1597, when her own father had galloped toward “godly” battle to drive the Spanish out of France, he had earned “a Commission” as a military captain in Elizabeth’s army even though he was only twenty-three years old. Few honors could have made Dudley, Dorothy, and their children more proud.
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To Puritans, even Sempringham, located in the stronghold of a Puritan county, was not free of the papist taint. The manor had originally been the home of the only order of monks to have sprung up in England, the Gilbertines. Even worse, Gilbert, who was responsible for founding this Catholic order in 1131, had grown up right in the town of Sempringham and had worshiped at the little church that still faced the manor house. This squat Norman edifice with jagged dogs’ teeth zigzagging inside the arches, although partially in ruins, was a disturbing reminder of the enduring presence of imported heresies.

As for the manor itself, it was not actually one grand structure but an ancient collection of tumbled-down monastic buildings. The whole busy household—the pages, cooks, grooms, ladies-in-waiting, menservants, and Theophilus’s family—lived on top of the ruins of English papists. Before the Dudleys arrived, the monks’ farm buildings had been converted into living quarters, but they were still inevitably Gilbertine; the manor house had been newly constructed, but out of stone quarried from the monastery. Although it is unclear whether the Dudley family lived in the manor or in the freshly built outbuildings, the fact remained that all of the structures of their new home were created from the relics of a shameful past.

Early in his tenure as steward, an uneasy Dudley had urged his new employer to stretch the estate’s resources by renovating the house even further and purging it of any remnants of the monks. Dudley oversaw the project, masterminding the design in the hope that he could erase evidence of the manor’s Catholic heritage. Fresh walls went up. Workers hammered down boards. But even these improvements could not hide the troubling evidence that for four hundred years the Gilbertines had sung their Latin rites, genuflected, and rattled through their rosary beads right on the grounds of this present-day Puritan stronghold.

IF DUDLEY COULD NOT FULLY CLEANSE
the manor, there was certainly nothing he could do about the overall condition of the English church or the country. In 1625, five years after the Dudleys had arrived at the earl’s residence, the climate in England grew tense. King James had died, and his son, Charles, had ascended the throne. Although Charles was ostensibly a Protestant, there were ugly rumors about the new king’s Catholic sympathies. He had spent much of his adolescence in Catholic France, marrying, to the horror of Puritans everywhere, the daughter of the papist French king, the princess Henrietta Maria. Anne and her family worried that the young ruler would prove to be another cruel tyrant like Mary. Perhaps stakes would be planted in the ground and Protestants would once again stream up to heaven in a black funnel of smoke.

Charles confirmed Puritan fears by leaning heavily on the advice of a cleric who was famously hostile to Puritans, Bishop Laud. Laud actually wanted
more
decoration in churches and greater formality during worship services. As the months passed and Charles fought with the Puritan-dominated House of Commons and pressed for greater tolerance of Catholics, Dudley and other Puritans became increasingly worried.

Puritan anxieties were further provoked by Protestant losses overseas. In Germany, Lutherans and Calvinists had succumbed to the Catholic House of Austria. Protestants in France, the Huguenots, had been vanquished in their last battle and were subject to a Roman cardinal. So, although John Cotton continued to preach his strain of Puritanism, maintaining that the “lilies” could continue to live among the “thorns,” his congregants could not help but believe their days in England were numbered.

By 1627 widespread disease, political dissension, and famine caused by extreme weather combined to create a crisis, at least to Anne’s father, Arbella, and Isaac, who stepped up their efforts to promote the idea of a massive Puritan migration. But seventeen-year-old Anne did not contribute to the planning process. In later years her only memory of this time period is how reluctant she was to leave England and how she would have to be “convinced” to accept life in “a new world.”
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Her reluctance to consider this idea may have been brave evidence of her capacity to form her own opinions, as her father and Arbella were among the people she admired most in the world. But such independent thinking did not make her life particularly comfortable when the political storm clouds of 1628-29 swept onto the horizon.

Laud declared that Puritan ministers who disagreed with the royal policy of inclusiveness were required to permit “mixed communion.” For people like the Dudleys this principal was sheer anathema. Dudley did not want to drink from the same cup as a non-Puritan, nor did he want his family breaking bread with a sinner who had not professed a true, pure faith in God. Charles did nothing to ease the tension by appointing Bishop Laud first to the powerful position of Bishop of London and then to the elevated post of Archbishop of Canterbury, making him the head of the Church of England.

Even worse, many of the leading Puritan preachers whom Anne’s family most admired were being forced out of their pulpits. Clearly the king had appointed Laud expressly for the purpose of rooting them out. A few years later, the minister Thomas Shepard would complain that Bishop Laud “threatened me if I preached anywhere.” He, like many Puritan ministers, was forced to hide like a criminal from the authorities, scurrying about the country to avoid imprisonment, fines, and other forms of persecution.
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At last even the reluctant John Cotton began to be swayed, although he still preached that the “Godly” should not abandon their mission of reform even if they left the country. This marked a new development in Puritan thought that would eventually usher in the birth of the settlements in New England. In the past, men like Dudley and Simon had conceived of themselves as “the saving remnant” of the island; it was their duty to remain in England and reform the country and the church from the inside out. But now, for Dudley and his fellow dissenters, already well versed in the history of religious persecution and victimization, it seemed that Charles’s hostility toward Puritans could only escalate. Short of deposing the king, which seemed impossible, the only chance for “true” English Protestantism to survive was to transport all of the “believers” away from harm. Unlike the Pilgrims, these men declared that they would remain a crucial part of the English church, but at a safe distance. Thus Anne’s father and friends arrived at the hard-won decision that they would carry the pure church with them, away from Old World corruption, saving England by preserving her religious ideals from papism. After all, as Thomas Shepard said, looking back on these years and his own decision to leave the Old World, “It seemed that even God himself was emigrating.”
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