Anna Scott
speaker
160 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Anna Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so, you know, things went backwards and forwards for quite a period. And there was a lot of jeopardy if you were on the wrong side at that time. So people were travelling across to Europe, for their own safety when they felt that they perhaps were under threat. And then as the Protestants returned, they would travel back. And so this pendulum was swinging throughout this period.
And when James came to the throne after Elizabeth, some of the Puritans, those leading church people who would describe themselves as wanting to reform the church, really thought that he would come along, come down from Scotland, and help give them what they needed to make the church change.
And so he came to the throne in 1603, but it became clear after a conference that they had the following years that he wasn't going to support them in that way. And he actually said about some of these protesting Puritans that he would, the quote was, he would harry them out as a land or else do worse if they wouldn't conform to what he wanted. So that really set it out for them.
He wasn't going to be as tolerant of their views as they had hoped that he would be.
Yes, absolutely, because I think there wasn't the type of scientific reasoning for things at that time. God was your reference point for explaining all of these things that were happening in the world. And although we tend to think, yes, there's a really strong religious reason for all of these things, there were economic reasons as well.
But the economic reasons are often related to God or to religion. So there was plague around at that time. There had been a series of poor harvests. There was some enclosure of land going on so that rurally people that had owned land or had access to land, that was lost to them.
And so it was affecting people's jobs and consequently affecting their prospects, affecting their wealth or their ability to earn money. And some of those types of things were at the time blamed on retribution from God or needing to change things to try and respond to why things were going badly. And that's how people would explain things to themselves.
So in the context of England at that time, there were reasons why people perhaps came to the conclusion that it would be better to move on. And this applied to the pilgrims that we're talking about and, as we'll hear later on in the story, to some of the other people who were on the Mayflower ultimately.
So we might think, okay, they'd heard about Amsterdam. They'd heard about these churches maybe by accident, but there was a connection. There was a connection with the place. And that's through one of the leading pilgrims, one of the most famous pilgrims, William Brewster. And he's the man who lived in Scrooby, in the manor at Scrooby.
He had been educated to some degree by being sent to Cambridge University. And a lot of the leading men at that time who were involved in these debates around religion and what they should be doing in terms of the church and in terms of their own church and beliefs had also been educated at Cambridge University. It was an important network.
But subsequent to that, he'd actually joined Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State to Holland, Sir William Davison. He'd been there himself. He'd been to Amsterdam. He'd seen what it was like. And so he had a sense of what was happening over there. And that had to have informed their opinion on what was going to happen. I also mentioned that there were two separatist groups in the Scrooby area.
And the Gainsborough group, led by a priest called John Smith... who himself had been kicked out of the church as well, that that group had gone over to Holland slightly earlier. So there were groups going over and they would have been in touch and they were finding out about what life was like over there from these other contacts who'd also travelled in that direction.
Okay, so Leiden happened a year after they got to Holland. There's loads of things that happened on the way for them to get to Holland. So although you said it's not far across there, it was a bit of a saga for them getting over there.
Yeah, that's fine. I mean, some of the men ended up off the coast of Norway en route to Amsterdam. So it was not as easy as they hoped. However, once they got to Amsterdam and they were all reunited because the men had been split up from the women in a...
bit of a crisis while they were trying to escape because as well the other thing about leaving a country to go to another country what makes that easy is if you've got permission to go and they weren't allowed they didn't have permission to leave they didn't have what we would now they didn't have a passport in the way that we we would have they didn't have that permission and they were actually hiding from the authorities and escaping illegally
so that was a challenge for them but yeah when they got there i think it's useful to understand the context of the fact that over in england they'd been debating the rights and wrongs of how to organize themselves into a church and these debates didn't stop when they got to the netherlands When they got over to Amsterdam, they were actually, I guess you could say they were falling out.
The debates were challenging for them. And so the man who had led them to Amsterdam, the preacher Richard Clifton, who had been the minister at a church in a village called Babworth, not far from Scrooby, before he was sacked, he had taken them across there. But then there was a rift, there was a break, and there was disagreements among the elders.
And so the group we know became the Pilgrims on the Mayflower moved to Leiden under the supervision of John Robinson, who had been Clifton's assistant.
That's a difficult question to answer. There are some catalogues of names of people at the time who they knew were from England. They were families, so there were a fair few people. And when the group escaped from England on a boat that had come from Gainsborough up the River Trent out into the Humber, there were a few people that got on the boat in Gainsborough. about 12 people.
And then by the time they got to their rendezvous in the Humber, there were 80 of them. So they'd pick people up on the way. So we know that that's how many people there were in that particular escape attempt. So I would think some of those people then were the ones who moved with Robinson, who had come from some of the villages around here. And a lot of the people were related here.
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