“People, Plague, Culture and Controversy in John Davenport’s London, 1617-1635”

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Francis J. Bremer

Over the past years I have spent an increasing amount of time researching and considering the life of John Davenport, my attention to the task increasing as I have been able to wrap up other projects. Every now and then I have interrupted my travels in the world of John Davenport to share some snapshots taken along the way – discussing aspects of Davenport’s life and times as I have come to understand them at a particular point in time. Today, I want to share a very early version of what will become a chapter in my study of Davenport, one dealing with his career in London in the 1620s and early 1630s.

Before getting into the heart of the matter, however, I want to make a few preliminary comments. First, it is in the nature of the historical profession that we visit, revisit, and visit yet again the foreign country that is the past, and that on each trip we see things anew. Today’s talk is a report on work in progress. Later reflection may well modify the version that appears in print.

Secondly, for those who are not familiar with Davenport, let me offer a brief recap to put today’s talk into context.

John Davenport was born in Coventry in 1579 and baptized at the church of the Holy Trinity. During his youth, that city had a reputation as a center of hotter, more radical Protestantism, and in 1611 King James reprimanded the local authorities for not cracking down on the practice of parishioners receiving communion while standing. Davenport’s father and his uncle Christopher, both of whom were aldermen of the city, had been among those who refused to kneel for the sacrament. As a boy, John was educated at the Free Grammar School in the city and then, in 1613 matriculated at Merton College, Oxford. A year later he transferred to Magdalen Hall. Cambridge has frequently been portrayed as the nursery of puritanism, at the expense of neglecting Oxford’s role. In fact, during the sixteenth century there was a strong and important reformed presence at Oxford. Laurence Humphrey, president of Magdalen College from 1561 till his death in 1589, was a forceful opponent of clerical vestments who made his college a nursery of puritan ministers so that, as one historian put it, Magdalen became, “metaphorically, the city on the hill.” The reform spirit waned at Magdalen College following Humphrey’s death, but Magdalen Hall, where Davenport studied, was also a college with a strong puritan reputation. It is likely that it was during his student days there that Davenport experienced a religious conversion.

Two years after matriculating, without having received his degree, Davenport accepted a position as chaplain to the Hilton family in the northern England county of Durham. During his brief stay there, Davenport preached regularly to the castle residents. He lashed out at Catholicism and the threat it posed to England (especially in the north), and warned of the need for individuals to reform themselves and their lives, though also cautioning his listeners against the Arminian belief that behavior could contribute to salvation. In March, 1616, he left Hilton. It appears that the following year he married Elizabeth Waley or Wooley at Eaton Socon. Late that year he was ordained deacon by John Overall, the Bishop of Coventry and Litchfield. In January 1617 he was ordained priest by Overall. Which brings us to the subject of today’s lecture.

Since Overall rarely visited his diocese, preferring to stay in London, it is possible that the ordinations occurred in the nation’s capital. Certainly, Davenport was in the city around that time. London was a city that contained within its walls ninety-seven parishes, with others serving the expanding communities outside the walls. Someone like Davenport could hope to become a rector or curate serving one of those parishes, to be hired as one of the growing number of lecturers hired to satisfy the burgeoning appetite for sermons, or to serve as a preacher at one of the Inns of Court where the nation’s future lawyers were studying. The very size of London made controlling its various religious elements a challenge for the authorities, and this itself made it an attractive destination for some.

Puritanism had a long and varied history in London. Some of the earliest advocates of fast-paced reform in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI had been located in the capital. During the Marian persecutions puritans like John Winthrop’s uncle William maintained an underground religious existence in which they could continue to worship as they believed proper. During Elizabeth’s reign clergymen like John Field took the lead in organizing petitions to Parliament and coordinating the ties between regional clerical conferences. The government allowed the existence of so-called Stranger Churches – congregations of foreign nationals who were allowed to worship in accord with the forms of their native faiths – and these provided Londoners with a chance to observe more thoroughly reformed systems at close hand. This is not to say the various monarchs and church authorities approved of puritan influence in London. But the very size of the city and the fluidity of its population made controlling the various religious elements a challenge which few in authority were inclined to take up.

Some of the best and the brightest puritans found positions there. Some parishes had the right to choose their own clergy. Additional opportunities were to be found in lectureships, since lecturers did not have to perform the ecclesiastical ceremonies and thus could avoid some Episcopal supervision. By 1628 there were almost as many lectureships as there were parishes. Sabbath sermons and supplemental lectures were scheduled in such a way that it was possible for those especially eager to hear the preached word of God to attend three or even four sermons on certain days. The close proximity of the parishes meant that zealous laypeople could easily find a church where the religion presented met their personal preferences.

The ability of London puritans to largely go their own way had much to do with the character of the men who served as Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many of whom were either sympathetic to reform or not inclined to exert themselves to enforce conformity. The support of prominent laymen also protected godly clergy. This would, however, change when William Laud became Bishop of London in 1628.

The same factors that made close supervision of its inhabitants impossible, makes it difficult to clearly trace Davenport’s earliest activities in the city. In October 1617 he was discovered lecturing without a license at St. Mary Aldermanbury and was suspended from his functions by the London Consistory Court. Based on a presentment to the same court in 1622, he also appears to have taught school for a time in the parish of St. Martin in the Fields. Cotton Mather wrote that Davenport had served as an assistant to an unidentified London divine. This probably is a reference to the fact that in January 1618 he was appointed curate in the parish of St. Michael’s Huggin Lane.

In June 1619 Davenport was chosen curate and lecturer at the London parish of St. Lawrence Jewry. St. Lawrence was one of about a dozen London parishes which had control of the advowson and thus could select the man who would serve as the parish minister, though the individual chosen had to be licensed by the proper ecclesiastical authorities. Such choices were made by the parish lay vestries. Davenport had apparently attracted the attention of prominent lay supporters of the reformed cause, and at least one person has suggested that Sir Edward Conway (who had a reputation for assisting Warwickshiremen) helped to influence the parishioners of St. Lawrence in their choice of Davenport. As curate Davenport was expected to preach on Sunday afternoons and to also provide a weekly lecture which originally was offered on Wednesday evening and then moved to Thursday. We have no direct knowledge of his preaching at St. Lawrence, but Cotton Mather recorded that he had a reputation for writing out his sermons beforehand and delivering them “with a gravity, an energy, and acceptableness whereto few ministers have ever arrived; indeed, his greatest enemies, when they heard him, would acknowledge him to be among ‘the best of preachers’.”

Davenport’s success had a lot to do with his preparation, something puritan clergy took very seriously. His contemporary and friend William Gouge was said to “read fifteen chapters in the Bible every day, and when he lay awake in the night his course was to meditate of what he had read in the day-time, so deceiving the tediousness of his waking, and depriving himself also sometimes of the sweetness of his sleeping hours, though by a better and greater sweetness.” Davenport himself was praised as “a hard student” as well as a “great preacher.” According to Cotton Mather “his custom was to sit up very late” at his studies, and then craft sermons that were illuminated by but did not flaunt his learning. The results were evident. Hugh Peter recalled that as a young man he went to London “to ripen my studies” by listening to Davenport among other prominent preachers.

St. Lawrence was close to the Guildhall, the commercial center of London, and many of the city’s leaders attended his sermons. Some of these same men were also promoting overseas expansion, and Davenport soon developed connections with many of them. By the early 1620s he had demonstrated an interest in the colonization of the New World, and in November 1621 he was selected to preach the first of a series of endowed sermons to the membership of the Virginia Company. In May of 1622 he was voted into the membership of that colonial enterprise.

At the same time, Davenport was nurturing important connections with fellow puritans who played a key role in the life of London and the nation. Though puritan influence at court had declined since the days of Elizabeth when figures such as the Earl of Leicester and Sir Walter Mildmay had often interceded to assist clergy who had encountered difficulties with church authorities, there were still powerful figures who were patrons of the reformed cause, and Davenport was able to profit from the support of such individuals, particularly that Sir Edward Conway and the Veres. Sir Edward was England’s Secretary of State in the 1620s. Sir Horace Vere’s importance at the English court was based in part on his position as the commander of English volunteers in the Netherlands. He had established close relations with the ruling house of Nassau and had been made Governor of Brill in 1610 and Governor of Utrecht in 1618. His position became more significant with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, and his early successes on the battlefield buoyed the Protestant cause and stimulated hopes that England might enter the lists more aggressively. Sir Horace was known as sympathetic to the religious reformers and chose puritans for chaplaincies with his forces. His wife, Lady Mary Vere, maintained strong connections with puritans.

Richard Sibbes, one of the most prominent puritans of his generation, described the Veres “as exemplary in all religious causes.” Samuel Clarke, the seventeenth century biographer of many of the puritans, wrote of how Lady Vere “‘brought her Religion and Devotion home with her, and did not leave them in her Pew behind her… as too many do.’ There were devotional exercises twice daily, with each ending with the reading of a psalm. Sermons were repeated to the family and servants every Sabbath and she examined the staff to see that they took on the preacher’s message.”

Davenport was part of this circle by the mid-1620s if not earlier. Lady Vere was not only avid in her attendance on sermons in London, but entertained Davenport and other clergy, as well as members of the court at her home in Hackney. Such connections likely contributed to Davenport’s further advancement. The vestry of St. Stephen’s on Coleman Street chose him to be vicar of the parish in October 1624. This was one of the most densely populated of all London’s parishes, and one that included the rich and powerful (eight Lord Mayors of London lived on Coleman Street during the early seventeenth century), and a burgeoning poor population crowding the tenements in the parish’s alleys. Sir Maurice Abbot, a merchant, a leading member of the Drapers Company, and a prominent member of the Virginia Company, who was also the brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, was a prominent member of the parish and played a leading role in Davenport’s selection. But some had doubts about the clergyman’s suitability. Archbishop Abbot himself indicated that Davenport “was reported to be factious & popular, & to draw after him great congregations and assemblies of common and mean people,” and Abbot had his own candidate for the post. More significantly, Edward Syndenham, who served King James I as a page, had a grievance against Davenport, and the king instructed London’s Bishop George Montaigne to look into his suitability.

Davenport sought to enlist the aid of Lady Vere and her kin. He implored Sir Edward Conway to assure Montaigne and the king of his orthodoxy. He expressed his belief that his difficulties stemmed from the fact that over a year earlier he had encountered Sydenham at Lady Vere’s and “reproved him for swearing.” He also suggested that his success in the ministry over the previous six years had “caused some to look upon me with a squint eye, and hearken to my sermons with the left ear, and, by all means, to endeavor my discouragement and disgrace, insomuch that I am traduced (as I hear, and fear) to his Majesty as a puritan, or one that is puritanically affected.” This he strongly denied, pointing out that as curate of St. Lawrence for five years he had used the sign of the cross when he baptized infants, administered the Lord’s Supper wearing the surplice, and used the appointed forms set out in the Prayer Book.

The objections were overcome and Davenport was inducted into the living in November. The following Spring he received his BA and MA from Oxford. Hardly was Davenport settled into the living when London was confronted with a major outbreak of plague. The winter of 1624-25 was unusually mild and wet. The Thames flooded in February and Westminster Hall was inundated with over three feet of water, conditions which provided a breeding ground for the epidemic. By April there were twenty-six deaths recorded in the city and its suburbs. Concerns that the city might be on the verge of a major outbreak of plague led to the postponement of the pageantry marking the accession of Charles I. In mid-June the law term was adjourned. On July 2 Davenport joined with the city’s other clergy in leading his parish in the first of many days of fast appointed to beseech God’s mercy on England. Over the summer thousands fled the capital, so that, as one observer put it, “if one shop be open, sixteen in a row stand shut up together.” “Death walks in every street,” and so great was the toll that “many church yards (for want of room) … are compelled to dig graves like little cellars, piling up forty or fifty in a pit.” Another diarist noted how “God swept away whole families, and taking fifteen or sixteen out of some houses, leaving one or two in the house.” William Kiffin, was a young man at the time and later recalled how “that great plague … in the city of London … swept away my relations and, being myself but nine years of age, left me with six plague sores upon my body. Nothing but death was looked for by all about me.”

Many of the clergy succumbed to concerns for their own lives and joined the exodus, leading one who stayed to complain of his peers that “many physicians of the soul fly the city, and their sick patients want those heavenly medicines which they were tied to give them.” It appeared to many that the puritan clergy showed the greater dedication in remaining in the city. William Chibald, rector of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in Old Fish Street, was one of those who remained. The plague struck his household. He lost to the disease “a good servant and good child, and a good curate, my faithful helper in the ministry.” As a result of the quarantine regulations, he was therefore “shut up in my churchyard, and by this means I may not … go abroad, either to the house of God to teach my people, or to my friends’ houses to see how they do.” So he took up his pen and wrote A Cordial of Comfort (1625), which was rushed through the press to counsel those who could not hear him preach.

There were others who stayed as well, including William Crashawe, rector of Whitechapel, who wrote about how he walked ‘hourly through the valley of the shadow of death, burying forty, fifty, sometimes sixty a day.’” Some of the clergy who stayed at their posts died. Davenport, who survived, was one of those “worthy ministers” who had “been and are [so] zealous in praying and preaching for repentance and perseverance that their throats are grown horse, their bodies weak, and their health impaired.” Before this particular outbreak of the plague subsided, over 35,000 had perished in London and its outlying parishes, 350 in the parish of St Stephen’s alone. In April, 1626 the vestry of the parish voted a gift of thanks to Davenport for his services “during the time of the visitation of sickness.”

In the previous year Davenport had begun to involve himself in the crusade to advance international Protestantism that would be a central theme through the rest of his life. His first such effort involved one of the most significant puritan reform initiatives of this period. Throughout England there were many churches once belonging to religious orders that had been dissolved at the Reformation, where the right to appoint a clergyman (impropriation) was owned by a private citizen or group. The Feoffees for Impropriations was a group organized by Davenport and others to raise money for the purchase of such rights of impropriation. The group would then appoint godly, preaching divines to the livings. Tired of waiting for the government to establish preachers in all the parishes of England, these puritans were taking their own steps to establish a godly kingdom.

The Feoffees initially included the clergymen Richard Stock, rector of All Hallows, Bread Street; Richard Sibbes, preacher at Gray’s Inn; Charles Offspring, rector of St. Antholin’s; and Davenport. When Stock died that year he was replaced by William Gouge. They were joined by four lawyers and four prominent London laymen. Others, such as the clergymen Hugh Peter, John Vicar, and Thomas Foxley were closely associated with the group, soliciting contributions and proffering advice. Between 1625 and 1632 the Feoffees raised over ₤2,000 for the purchase of impropiations as well as additional funds for special projects. Around 1628 they agreed to supervise a special endowment for supporting additional lecturers at St. Antholin’s parish. Almost two hundred Londoners combined to raise over ₤1,500 for the purpose. The Feoffees would nominate and the parish vestry choose six morning lecturers, who, if they performed as expected, would after a few years be placed in parishes around the country controlled by the Feoffees. Davenport committed considerable time to the enterprise since the Feoffees met two or three times per term (referring to the three legal terms of the English calendar) usually in the home of one of the clergy or in the chambers of one of the legal members. They were also active outside of their meetings. Davenport, for example, solicited Michael Robarts to seek the help of Archbishop Ussher in establishing a lectureship near Oxford.

In 1627, Gouge, Davenport, and Sibbes joined with Thomas Taylor to write a circular letter to raise funds for a different cause, the relief of protestants who had been dispossessed by the Thirty Years War. Taylor was another prominent member of the puritan clerical brotherhood. A graduate of Cambridge who had attacked Archbishop Bancroft’s campaign for conformity in a sermon preached at the university church, he had subsequently become chaplain to Sir Edward Conway. In 1625 he accepted the call to be curate and lecturer of St. Mary Aldermanbury, where Conway’s son-in-law Sir Robert Harley was a parishioner. This was the parish where Davenport had preached without a license a few years earlier, and it was in the same area of the city as St. Lawrence and St. Stephen’s.

It was that same concern for the cause of international Protestantism that led Taylor to join Davenport, Sibbes and Gouge to address the problem of the refugees of the Thirty Years War. Not only were puritans critical of King James’s refusal to intervene in that struggle on behalf of his son-in-law Frederick, the Elector of the Palatine, and the Protestant cause in general, but they were distressed by the failure of the government and the church to do anything to alleviate “the lamentable distress of the two hundred and forty godly preachers with their wives and families of about four score desolate widows and sundry thousands of godly private persons with them cast out of house and home, out of their callings and countries, by the fury of the merciless papists in the upper Palatine, whose heavy condition is such as they are forced to steal up their exercises of religion in woods and solitary places, not without continual fear and danger of their lives, and whose grievous want is such as they would be very thankful for coarse bread and drink if they could get it.” The London preachers sought private contributions to help these “fellow feeling members of the same body of Jesus Christ,” assuring potential donors that they knew “a sure and safe way whereby whatsoever is given shall undoubtedly come to their hands to whom it is attended.”

Davenport’s concern for international Protestantism led him to become involved in another, related cause, as a supporter of John Dury’s efforts to unite Christendom. Dury was the son of a Scottish minister who had been banished in 1606 and settled in the Netherlands as minister to Scottish and English Presbyterians in Leiden. The younger Dury studied and traveled on the continent and, following his own ordination, became committed to the ideal of uniting Protestants and ultimately all Christendom. In 1627 he was minister to the English Company of Merchant Adventurers in Elbing, Poland, and there he met and befriended Samuel Hartlib and Jan Amos Comenius. Hartlib was a kindred spirit in his commitment to religious unity, and the two also embraced the idea of creating a utopian community. Hartlib moved to London in 1628 and became the center of an international correspondence network for the exchange of views not only on religion but also science and all other areas of knowledge. Dury and Hartlib were both attracted to the efforts of Comenius to promote universal educational reforms that included new schools, new teaching methods, and even a new language.

Davenport became involved in these efforts shortly after Hartlib moved to London. With first hand experience of the ravages of the conflict on the continent, Hartlib would have been attracted to the effort to raise funds for the Palatinate refugees and may have helped to organize the distribution of the relief. Hartlib and Davenport also committed themselves to provide spiritual as well as material aid to continental Protestants, planning a publication campaign to make religious literature more available. In an undated document from about this time to be found in Hartlib’s papers, a group of individuals including Davenport, Richard Saltonstall, Brampton Gurdon, John Humfry and Sir Richard Knightley “in brotherly love and the tenderest bowels of Christian compassion” pledged varying amounts of financial support “in regard of the bleeding estates of our brethren in other reformed churches … to translate or compose such seasonable treatises as their present necessities require.”

Davenport’s commitment to advancing the causes of international Protestantism and religious unity was recognized by Dury, who commended him as being “earnest and judicious in this work.” By the end of the decade Hartlib was serving as Dury’s English agent in organizing support for these efforts as well as for the educational reforms of Communius. Among those whom he reported to be “very able and sufficient for all manner of controversies” and being “very stirring and wondrously active to promote any cause that tends for the advancement of the Kingdom of Christ” were John Cotton of Boston, Philip Nye, and John Davenport.”

Some of these same causes were undoubtedly discussed in gatherings of London ministers at Sion College. Sion had been founded under the terms of the will of the puritan clergyman Thomas White, who died in 1624. A dissolved medieval hospital was acquired and transformed into a complex which included an almshouse, a library, and chambers for students. All of London’s clergy’s were made fellows of the college. To further White’s goal of helping the clergy to “maintain … love in conversing together” the endowment provided for four Latin sermons a year to be preached to the gathered fellows, who would then remain together for a dinner. The college was an example of the use of conferencing and dialogue to strive for greater religious understanding and unity. The library was also a significant resource for the clergy, and a place where informal contacts could take place. In the 1640s Sion College would become a vital center for the city’s Presbyterians, and it is likely that in the late 1620s and the 1630s it was an important place for puritan clerical conferencing.

The issues that concerned Davenport during this period -- the support of international Protestantism and the promotion of godly preaching – were among the themes that he addressed from the pulpit of St. Stephen’s and elsewhere. Both fellow clergy and laypeople came to hear Davenport preach. Hugh Peter moved to the capital “to ripen under the influence and example of Richard Sibbes, …, William Gouge, and John Davenport.” In March of 1629 Sir Thomas Wroth invited Sir Robert Harley to a “Lenten dinner” and suggested that they could “go together to Mr. Damport’s in the morning, where I will provide a seat for you.” Robert Keayne, a London merchant who later migrated to New England, took notes on sermons delivered by Davenport at St. Stephen’s, once on the plight of Protestantism and on another occasion on the dangers of pride. Keayne was an avid sermon gadder and on other occasions he attended St. Stephen’s to hear Richard Sibbes, Cornelius Burgess and Henry Scudder preach from that pulpit.

As a young apprentice who had survived the plague that had stripped him of his family, William Kiffin had little interest in matters of religion until, one day, “wandering up and down the streets, and passing by St. Antholin’s church, I saw people going in, which made me return and go in also.” Thomas Foxley was the morning lecturer that day and hearing him preach “provoked in me a desire to hear some of them called puritan ministers.” Kiffin began to look out for such preachers, and listened to, among others, John Norton. Then, “after some time, … I heard Mr. Davenport, in Coleman Street. … This sermon was of great use to my soul. I thought I found my heart greatly to close with the riches and freeness of grace which God held forth to poor sinners. I found my fears to vanish, and my heart filled with love to Jesus Christ. I saw sin viler than ever, and felt my heart more abhorring it.” Kiffin began to acquire and read treatises by other puritans such as Thomas Goodwin and Thomas Hooker, among others, embarking on a spiritual pilgrimage that would eventually lead him to adopt Baptist teachings and to become a prominent preacher himself.

Other varieties of puritan experience can be found among the London laity. One family of seekers was the Dyers. William Dyer, a member of the Fishmonger’s Company, married May Barrett in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in 1633. We don’t know much about the early life of the couple, but the fact that they migrated to New England and played an important role in the evolution of New England puritanism makes it safe to assume that they were among those who were actively engaged in the spiritual world of the city. It is even possible that they were familiar with John Davenport, who for a time in the early 1620s taught school in that parish, and that they listened to him preach at St. Stephen’s. But judging from the views they would espouse in Massachusetts, they were likely to have been drawn to the preaching of those clergy who placed greater emphasis on the ongoing work of the spirit in those who had been saved.

Robert Keayne also utilized the city’s many religious resources. Born in Windsor, where his father was a butcher, Keayne had been apprenticed at the age of eight to a London merchant in the Cornhill district. In 1615 he was admitted to the membership of the Merchant Tailor’s Company and two years later wed Elizabeth Mansfield, a union that made him brother-in-law to the clergyman John Wilson. In 1622 Keayne was admitted to the London Artillery Company, a private group that regularly trained and gathered for social occasions. As a member of that company, he listened to various clergy preach the annual company sermon, including Thomas Sutton (1623) and William Gouge (1626). In 1629 he heard John Davenport urge support for the Protestant cause in the Thirty Year’s War. But this was no more than the tip of the iceberg. In a volume containing notes on sermons he heard between June 1627 and June 1628, he recorded over sixty sermons by a variety of London clergy that included Sibbes, Gouge, Davenport, and Thomas Taylor, and visiting preachers such as his “brother Wilson” and John Cotton of Boston. It was common for him to hear two sermons on a Sunday – such as on July 15, 1627, when he heard Davenport at St Stephen’s and then walked to the Cornhill district to hear “Mr. Malthouse” – and on at least two occasions he found a way to hear and take notes on three sermons.

In July 1628 the situation for London puritans began to change with the installation of William Laud as Bishop of the diocese. It may have been impossible to totally regulate the religious life of the metropolis, but Laud was certainly committed to trying. The new bishop clearly found much he believed needed attention, but the strength of the puritan cause made him initially proceed more cautiously than his later reputation might suggest. In fact, his concern for the more radical expressions of puritanism made him willing at first to deal mildly with some of the more established and moderate clergy. Thus, in 1631, William Gouge would write to Laud reminding him that “Dr. Taylor, Mr. Davenport, Mr. Foxley, My. Prime and many other ministers,” including Gouge himself, had benefited from Laud’s “backwardness in taking advantage from private accusations against ministers.”

This did not mean that such clergy could get away with anything without paying the consequences. One of the first steps Laud took as bishop was to call the four authors of the circular letter for support of Palatinate refugees before the High Commission. Always jealous for his king’s power and authority, Laud evidently saw this as an effort by a private, and puritan, group to conduct foreign policy, as well as an implicit criticism of the government’s own actions, an example of clergy meddling in affairs that were none of their concern. In keeping with a policy of dealing moderately with such leading puritan clergy, the four were merely reprimanded. But the episode clearly demonstrated both Laud’s close oversight of what was happening in his diocese and his willingness to use the machinery of church justice to put an end to puritan efforts.

At about the same time the bishop began to crack down on lecturers, whom he referred to scornfully as the “people’s creatures,” who “blow the bellows their way” and were often guilty of “sedition.” He suggested that the king issue orders that all Sunday afternoon lectures be turned into catechizing sessions, that lecturers be required to read the church service before their sermons while wearing the prescribed surplice, that corporation lecturers not be allowed to preach unless they held a living in the town which would require them to conduct services as set out in the Prayer Book, and to suggest to all the bishops that they arrange to have faithful ministers present at lectures to report on unorthodox preaching and seditious utterances. In December 1629 King Charles promulgated these ideas as instructions to the two archbishops.

The growing pressure to conform to disputed practices, and the introduction of new innovations, placed greater pressure on the puritan community in London as well as throughout the kingdom. Many puritan clergy had been willing to accept some ceremonial practices which they felt should be reformed if doing so was the price to be paid for holding on to their positions and being able to minister to their flocks. But they also believed in the fundamental value of the Church of England and were proud to be members of what Sibbes called “the sacred communion of the truly Evangelical Church of England.” Davenport had expressed this to Alexander Leighton in a letter in which he asked if, given the state of reformed Protestantism throughout Europe, it were “not better to unite our forces against those who oppose us in fundamentals than to be divided among ourselves about ceremonials?” In general he was willing to perform his functions as the authorities stipulated. Similarly, in 1632 Davenport preached against separation and sent a copy of the sermon to John Lathrop, who was pastor of the separatist congregation in London that had been founded by Henry Jacob.

By 1631, however, the situation was changing. Laud was ready to come after some of the puritans he had previously ignored. In January of that year the bishop called upon Davenport to answer a number of complaints that had been made against him by the curate at St. Stephen’s, Timothy Hood, charged that included failure to wear the surplice, permitting non-parishioners to receive the Lord’s Supper, allowing communicants to receive the sacrament while standing, and a dozen other lesser matters. Davenport’s answers appear to have calmed the waters for the time being, but Laud had clearly targeted him. This was around the same time that Gouge wrote to the bishop reminding him of how Laud had treated Davenport and others with consideration in the past, a reminder clearly prompted by a realization that things had changed.

During the Easter Term of 1632, Attorney General William Noy, at Laud’s prompting, filed charges against Gouge, Davenport and the other Feoffees before the equity side of the Court of Exchequer. The first salvo in this attack had been fired two years earlier by one of Laud’s associate, Peter Heylin, who had preached a sermon against the group at Oxford. Heylin had charged, and Laud agreed, that the purpose of the group was to subvert the established church by taking control of numerous parish livings. The Exchequer case dragged on for a number of months. In February 1633, with “the business of the feoffees being to be heard the third time at the Exchequer,” Davenport wrote on a leaf of his Great Bible his prayer “that God would assist our counselors in opening the case, and be pleased to grant that they [the authorities] might not get no advantage against us to punish us as evil doers.” Two days later the Barons of the Exchequer ordered the Feoffees dissolved, but the individuals involved were spared imprisonment and deprivation. Thankful, Davenport promised “1. to be more industrious in my family. 2. to check my unthankfulness. 3. to quicken myself to thankfulness. 4. to awaken myself to more watchfulness for the time to come ‘in remembrance of his mercy.’” But thankful though he may have been, it had to have been clear to Davenport, Sibbes, Gouge, and the other puritan clergy of the city that a new regime was coming and that they would no longer be free to continue as they had been. In a meeting with John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and other leading puritan clergymen, Davenport became convinced that conforming to the new Laudian agenda would be to turn his back on God and the cause of reform. Conformity was no longer negotiable – puritans could no longer accommodate themselves to the changing nature of the Laudian church, and the new bishops were not willing to compromise even if the puritans had been willing.

In 1629 Davenport’s interests in religious reform and overseas expansion had drawn him into the new Massachusetts Bay Company. He played an important role in the early years of that venture, but was not yet willing to emigrate to America himself.

Recognizing that Laud was determined to root him out from St. Stephen’s, Davenport departed for Amsterdam, where a faction in the English merchant church there wanted him to share the post of pastor with the elderly and ill John Paget. There was a history of English puritans seeking refuge in the Netherlands, where they could easily return to England if the religious situation improved. Paget, who had earlier prevented Thomas Hooker from joining him in the ministry of the Amsterdam church, fought Davenport’s appointment. Davenport had reached the conclusion that only children whose parents were godly and practicing Christians should be baptized, and this was at the center of his dispute with Paget, but the controversy also revealed Davenport’s commitment to the principle of congregational autonomy and the importance of lay participation in the governance of a church.

Denied a post in the Amsterdam church, Davenport spent a few months at the Hague, where Elizabeth Stuart, the Queen of Bohemia, held her court. It was in the Hague that the Davenport’s son John was born and baptized. The family then moved on to Rotterdam, where Davenport shared the pulpit with Hugh Peter. That English congregation had been reorganized by Peter with members subscribing to the type of written covenant that would become common in New England. Members, including women, cast their votes for the congregation’s clergy.

Davenport soon realized that English pressures on the Dutch authorities would soon curtail the independence of the English congregations in the Netherlands. He concluded that the type of freedom necessary to build a godly kingdom could only be found in America. Returning in disguise to London, he met with friends in St. Stephen’s and elsewhere in London to plan emigration. Contacts with aristocratic friends such as Lord Say and Sele and the Earl of Warwick guaranteed the potential colonists title to land in the Warwick Patent. Lady Vere agreed to watch after the Davenport’s young son while they made the dangerous journey and until they became settled.

In 1637, Davenport embarked on the ship Hector, initiating the next chapters in his life, and the roles that he is best remembered for. But the man who founded the New Haven Colony, opposed the Half-Way Covenant, fought to establish what would become Yale, and sheltered the regicides, was a man who had been shaped by his London experiences. There he learned to appreciate the varieties of puritanism. There he became a convinced defender of congregationalism. And there he began his life-long commitment to the cause of international religious reform. As is the case when we talk about John Winthrop, John Winthrop Jr., or any other member of the founding generation, his story is one that is rooted deeply and lived out in an English context.