Women's Attraction to Puritanism

Abstract

In 1566 when the Puritan ministers John Gough and John Philpot were suspended from their pulpits and banished from London for their refusal to wear the white outer robe, or surplice, marking their special holiness as priests of the church, a crowd of more than two hundred women gathered at London Bridge to cheer them on as they left the city. As Gough and Philpot crossed the bridge, the women pressed bags of food and bottles of drink on them, all the while “animating them most earnestly to stand fast in the same their doctrine.” That same year, when John Bartlett was also ordered to step down from his pulpit in London for refusing to wear the surplice, sixty women assembled at the home of his bishop to protest the suspension. Such demonstrations of women's support for Puritan ministers were not isolated events. As the historian of Elizabethan Puritanism Patrick Collinson asserted, “it was the women of London who occupied the front line in defence of their preachers, and with a sense of emotional engagement hardly exceeded by the suffragettes of three and a half centuries later.”