Elizabethan Familists and English Separatism

Abstract

This essay examines the extensive attention received in the England of the 1570s by the small religious sect calling itself the Family of Love and professing allegiance to the continental mystic, Hendrik Niclas; it also examines why the Elizabethan establishment became, for a time, so disturbed about the Familists. A rough indicator of the attention is found in the Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in English, 1475-1640, where the individual entries for Niclas and other Familist writers outnumber all other separatists before 1600, including such men as Robert Browne and Henry Barrow. (In another comparison, they outnumber the entries under Martin Marprelate also.) The establishment's concern was evinced in several ways. The Family was written or preached against by three members of the bench of bishops, besides lesser clerics; matters relating to it were discussed by the privy council on thirteen different occasions between June 1575 and January 1581; and on October 3,1580 it was the exclusive target of a royal proclamation.Until the past decade or so, the attention aroused by the Familists in Elizabethan England has not been much reflected in the writings of modern historians. Those interested in the Family itself have dealt largely with its continental developments. They have described the sect Niclas founded at Emden in 1540, with its emphasis on personal religious experience, spiritual rebirth and the close fellowship of the faithful, and they have traced its growth in the Low Countries and contiguous areas.