The London Dutch Refugees in Search of a Home, 1553-1554

Abstract

a small company set sail from Gravesend, September 17, 1553. Welcomed by the English after the death of Henry VIII as refugees from religious persecution in the Netherlands, they now, after the death of the boy king Edward and the accession of the Catholic Mary, were once more embarking on a voyage in search of a new haven and a new freedom of worship. Before they found their promised land, they were to sail through a watery wilderness and endure the bitterness of winter and the hatred of men. Whether one draws from this saga of the sixteenth century a lesson in Christian constancy or of Protestant bigotry, it stands as one of the most dramatic and heroic episodes of a colorful era. The long and lugubrious history of intolerance does not begin with the religious dissension of the sixteenth century, nor does it end with the ecclesiastical subsidence of the next. The episode described in this article will serve, with poignancy doubled and redoubled by Catholics and Protestants alike, as an example taken at a time when the ferment of modern ideas was surely and gradually, though as yet imperceptibly, forcing a new interpretation of religious truth and the rights of conscience upon the minds of men. The folk who thus sailed away in autumn were members of the Dutch church of Austin Friars in London, established under letters patent of Edward VI, July 24, 1550.1 Enjoying unprecedented freedom, they were all the more shocked by the sudden turn the accession of Mary brought to Protestantism. Representing the largest refugee community in England, this church had assumed responsibility for assistance to other groups and to their fellows still struggling against the Spaniard in the Low Countries. Several leaders of European fame were