"Bishops, Bailiffs and Bastards Bringing Ruin to England"

The Beaver
1629 - 1634

Landing at London in March 1629, Nathaniel Steele considers himself the luckiest man alive in England. Six months ago, Nat was ship’s factor in the Barbican, a bark running down to the Azores, when Sallee pirates captured the vessel. But for a hefty ransom, the twenty-three-year-old Londoner faced a life of slavery on the Barbary Coast.

Nat steps nimbly between the harlots in Cock Lane. His animated eyes pick out child cutpurses and footpads laying siege to Smithfield Market. A miasmic mist shrouds the grinding mills on the Fleet, a rank waterway adrift with offal cast into it by Smithfield’s butchers. Daily, too, the Stygian waters surrender three or four bodies disposed of like so many human beasts.

 

Cock Lane, near Smithfield Market (19th century)

 

Nat makes his way up Turnmill Street toward Clerkenwell Green, where the Knights of St. John built their priory in the 12^th century. The convent of St. Mary stood on the opposite side of the green. In 1381, Wat Tyler’s followers beheaded the Prior of St. John and put the vast pile to the torch. Two centuries later the nunnery was confiscated and its occupants driven off. Clerkenwell continued as a papist refuge, until three Catholics were hanged, drawn and quartered on the green.

Peasants' Revolt (Death of Wat Tyler) - Jean Froissart

In Nat’s day, the district has gained new notoriety as a haven for Puritan sympathizers. At Coleman Street just to the south, Puritans congregate at the Star tavern and in the Church of St. Stephen, where John Davenport, a charismatic young minister, walks a fine line between pulpit and prison.

Nat’s family is waiting to greet him at their house in St. John’s Lane. His father, Jeremiah Steele, fifty-two, is a cloth merchant and haberdasher. His mother, Agnes Steele, forty-five, is the daughter of a London apothecary. Nat is the middle of three sons. Richard, twenty-seven, works in the family business and is recently married. Thomas is twenty-two, a graduate of Cambridge University, who serves as a clerk in Clifford’s Inn.

Amid the joy at his homecoming, Nat discovers that the blow dealt his family by the Sallee pirates is disastrous. Jeremiah Steele was part owner of Barbican, the loss of the ship and payment of his son’s ransom burdening him with debt. A calamity compounded by the rot in England itself, where King Charles I believes he has a divine right to plunder every subject’s purse.

 

Charles 1 (1600-1649) - Sir Anthony van Dyck

Jeremiah and Agnes Steele are Puritans, with strong convictions and strong distaste for Anglican ceremonies and ritualism that tend toward Rome. Their sons share their faith in varying degrees. Thomas is most fervent, while Richard and Nat hold a middle course, accepting the tenets of Calvinism but remaining in good standing at the parish of St. Mary. Their presence in St. Mary’s epitomizes the hope of reforming the Church from within and checking the excesses of “bishops, bailiffs and bastards bringing ruin to England.”

 

Imagining Boston - 18