Scholars who study the sixteenth-century religious movement known as the Family of Love were once united by a single methodological problem. There were two Families. The one appeared in salacious detail in printed works with titles like 1578's The Displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques; the other existed between the lines of the historical record. The first promised to reveal crooked beliefs and sinister deeds behind a veneer of orthodoxy; the second, like the cuttlefish, tended to “trouble the water.”Footnote 1 Faced with the problem of two Families, historians and literary critics have understandably concluded that members were deeply secretive, concealing their true identity for fear of imprisonment and possibly even execution.Footnote 2
The search for the real Family of Love has given us an exceptional book, Christopher Marsh's The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630. We now understand that devotees of Familist religion were, for the most part, pillars of their communities. Acting as church wardens, executors, yeomen, and town councilmen, they were hardly the sex-crazed boogeymen of popular print. They certainly had no intention of replacing the status quo with some sort of Anabaptist utopia, as had been attempted years earlier in Münster. What is more, Marsh says, their neighbors “shared an unspoken willingness to tolerate religious deviants whose outward conduct remained acceptable.”Footnote 3 All's well that's better left alone.
But were Familists really deviant in their private faith? Scholars since Marsh have tended to assume that conformity to English society hid the group's opposition to English religion.Footnote 4 This view, informed as it is by the polemic and by the more sensational statements of the Family's Dutch founder Hendrik Niclaes (or HN), should be balanced with an appreciation for the hazy outlines of early modern lived religion. Alec Ryrie, for example, has characterized English religion in general as a “blurred spectrum” in which a restless “search for authenticity” largely bypassed the typical confessional boundaries that matter so much to the historian. “Indeed,” he writes, “there are so many individuals who resist easy categorization that the categories become suspect.”Footnote 5
This article proposes that the religion of English Familism, like Ryrie's Protestantism, was more complex and diverse than is often recognized. In doing so, it extends David Como's recent work on seventeenth-century Familism into the period of the group's inception under Elizabeth. For Como, the fierce struggle between Stuart antinomians, or “Familisits” as they were sometimes called, and their more orthodox peers belies a shared, though often convoluted, religious worldview. His work meticulously reconstructs “enormous swathes of intellectual, cultural, and even personal terrain” that tied antinomians to their more mainstream contemporaries.Footnote 6 Yet, when it comes to the original English Familists, Como refrains from making a similarly bold claim, alluding rather to the prior existence of a “classic,” “self-conscious,” or “strictly Familist” movement that “centered inordinately on the person of Hendrik Niclaes.”Footnote 7 But, as we will see, Elizabeth's Familists were not immune to the larger religious culture in which they swam.
My search for the Family of Love concerns exactly the last type of source one would expect to use as a register of authentic belief: the confessions of English Familists and apostate members before local authorities. As scholars of new religious movements well know, such documents are deeply political and rarely offer a straightforward or even honest account of life inside the movement.Footnote 8 Marsh, too, acknowledges the futility of “extracted confessions” for comprehending the nature of the Family of Love. These narratives, he says, “owe their existence to anti-Familist feeling, and therefore reveal more about the relationship between the Family and hostile elements within the wider society than about the nature of the fellowship itself.”Footnote 9
But the “fellowship itself” may be an ideal. To dismiss controversy as a distortion of true belief invites the scholar to search for a reality behind the echoing recriminations. Does such a reality always exist in a meaningful way? Confessions are distortions of the past, just as memory itself is a distortion of the past. Also, like memory, confessions figure less as stable snapshots, chronicling forsaken doctrine and former misdeeds, and more as sites of contestation and creation. Apostate narratives, like the one given around 1580 by the ex-Familist Leonard Romsye, could aid puritan anti-Familists in establishing the legitimacy of their own religious platform in complex and unexpected ways. Other narratives, notably the confession of Henry Orinell from 1579, reveal an effort to blend Familist sympathies with more mainstream Protestant ideals. Though forced to betray their religion in print, we will see that informants like Orinell nevertheless conveyed a great deal between the lines of their official testimonies. Extracted confessions are of course problematic sources, but for those involved they provided a unique opportunity to fashion religious identity through the ritual of telling.
Though laced with a tantalizing array of heretical beliefs, the confessions explored below reveal a preoccupation with religious authenticity emanating from both sides. Familists were united with their Protestant detractors in praising “plain dealing” as an antidote to the sort of backbiting that supposedly marked their opponents’ tactics. On both sides of the controversy, then, the scholar is confronted with a polemic which refused to see itself as polemic. Avoiding rather than engaging in controversy was truly Christian, and, ironically, both Familists and their enemies indulged this axiom in an attempt to outmaneuver the other side.
This was more than just politics. Like Como's account of Stuart antinomianism, Elizabethan Familists shared with their bitter enemies a complex religious terrain which is in no way neatly separable from the clamoring recriminations of public dispute. In what follows, I enumerate some of the ways in which surviving Familist confessions worked beyond their manifest purpose of limning the depths of heresy. I also show that these confessions communicated a nuanced and complex religious worldview not just in spite of but sometimes in tandem with their polemical purpose.
I. Mischievous Information
For two days in October of 1580, seven members of the Family of Love in Wisbech were questioned by the bishop of Ely, Richard Cox. Those interrogated included two glove makers, John Bourne and William Staton, the yeoman John Titterington, the barber John Rayner, John May, who was an “oatmeale maker of good abilitie,” a widow from Emneth named Margaret Colville, and, finally, an elderly and infirm George Reeve. Of the seven, Cox spent the most time on Bourne, the suspected leader of the group, who held in his possession a veritable library of outlawed works by the Family's Dutch founder Hendrik Niclaes (alias HN). According to the manuscript, Bourne had just enough time to squirrel a few of Niclaes's books into his kitchen chimney and behind a wool chamber in his shop before the bishop's forces closed in.Footnote 10 It would later come to light that the Wisbech Familists had been forewarned of the commission's approach in a letter from their more prominent brethren in the court of Elizabeth I.Footnote 11
The resulting confession is a condensed narrative of conversion, from Bourne's initial coolness before the authorities, through the passion of his repentance, to the calculated recitation of orthodox belief which finally marked his apostasy. Like other confessions from the period, this one functions more as a performance of authenticity—“from my hart,” Bourne says—than as a window into authentic belief.Footnote 12 The crooked doctrine and alleged misdeeds of the Wisbech group had, after all, appeared in earlier Familist confessions and would appear again, verbatim, in a confession given by Bourne's apprentice Leonard Romsye that same year. Confessions followed a script, and captives like Bourne no doubt felt considerable pressure to play along. Their use to the scholar of religion thus remains an open question.
Daniel Carson Johnson has noted the all too common tendency of nineteenth-century informants to drift “from the biographical and contextual histories to which they are supposedly tied.” In some cases, apostates even “go all the way,” leaving the historian with an entirely fictional account. Faced with this difficulty, the challenge is rather to envision the social context or “politics” of the confession—the whirl of conflicting incentives, contestations, and implicit expectations surrounding the event—“as something generative, something that does more than simply transform lived experience into apostate narrative.”Footnote 13 In the sixteenth century, the nominal transparency of such narratives enabled the anti-Familists who published them—many of whom risked appearing quarrelsome and puritanical to their peers—to fashion themselves as heralds of unbiased information. Confessions like Bourne's played to this impression by depicting the move into apostasy as an abrupt moment of clarity rather than the hard-won consequence of magisterial influence.
As I will discuss, these confessions aided the polemical purposes of religious authorities while at the same time providing ex-members with an opportunity to establish their credibility to informants. Though it had existed for some twenty years before Bourne, English Familism was developed primarily in the mid-1570s as the translated writings of the Dutch “homo novus,” Hendrik Niclaes, began circulating around London and the Isle of Ely. Familists were first and foremost a community of readers, huddled around prophetic volumes with titles like Evangelium regni: A joyfull Message of the Kingdom, The first exhortation of H. N. to his Children, and Terra Pacis: A true testification of the spirituall lande of peace.Footnote 14 Central to their belief, and to Niclaes's printed doctrine, was an emphasis on the essential righteousness of the devout elder, imagined as a sort of spiritual resurrection. Familists referred to such a process as becoming “Godded with God”—an expression which aroused suspicions that Familist elders were perfectionists of the foreign, Anabaptist variety.Footnote 15 Such attention is not surprising. If the obsession with faith alone over fallen human righteousness was the foundation of an emergent Protestant consensus, then Familists appeared to fall well outside that consensus.
But it would be a mistake to reduce English Familism to Niclaes's continental spiritualism. English followers had their own religious heritage to contend with, and theirs was a movement in transition. Surely the fellowship's worldview had been, and would largely continue to be, a composite of homegrown semi-Pelagianism, evangelical thought, and their Dutch prophet's “varied menu of commands.”Footnote 16 But Familists were not slavishly dependent on Niclaes's doctrine, just as they were not particularly enamored with aspects of the Reformed faith as they understood it. Instead, they were immersed in the loose organism of English religion—folding the Protestant fabric and combining previously remote concepts to suit their worldview.Footnote 17
Such nuance, of course, was of little interest to authorities, like Bishop Cox, who saw in the Family a chance to rehearse their expectations about radical religion. The sociologist Stuart Wright has referred to the modern apostate narrative as a “ritual of denunciation” in which the transition from past crimes to present satisfaction hinges on a successful performance of condemned beliefs and practices.Footnote 18 The narrative is therefore less about the novel information it conveys than it is about the establishment of its speaker as a compelling and reliable voice. Similarly, the Wisbech confession is as much about Bourne as it is about the Familist errors it sets out to expose. At first, Bourne is defiant. In Cox's words, he was first “very obstinate and wilfull, and would confesse nothing.” When he did speak, “no relenting nor plaine dealing [could] be founde in him.”Footnote 19 A more insecure Bourne soon emerged in the course of the investigation. He now seemed unsure of his beliefs and gestured toward his innocence, confessing to Cox that he had only the faintest idea that Niclaes's opinions were controversial in the first place. Rather, he had assumed that “both the magistrates of the realme and also the learned divines for the most part had favoured that opinion.”Footnote 20
Before long, Bourne was on his knees asking Cox and the others to pray for him and pardon his “former errours.”Footnote 21 As dissembling slid into truth telling, the other alleged Familists followed suit, each signing their name to a canned statement of acknowledgment and confession. This was followed by a list of articles drafted by the Dry Drayton minister Richard Greenham and subscribed to by each of the Wisbech members. Over the course of the bishop's 1580 manuscript, heterodox doctrine was ferreted out, clarified, and balanced by corresponding right doctrine. The purpose of each article was not only to assert orthodox belief in the context of the members’ apostasy but to contrast such belief with its corresponding Familist heresy. So, for example, the right opinion that life follows death is set against the “wicked & damnable opinion . . . that everlasting life is in this life, & that it is nothing but a peace of conscience which they enjoy who are perfectly obedient to the doctrine of HN.” In similar fashion, the alleged Familist belief that Christ was a mere allegory of the spiritually awakened person was balanced with the “literall truth” of Christ's life and sacrifice on a “materiall crosse.”Footnote 22 In the course of his ritual denunciation, Bourne's ideas were lifted out of the matrix in which they had appeared compelling, parodied, and rendered absurd. The reader, like Bourne himself, was subjected to a ritual of dawning realization and reform.
Confessions like Bourne's were part of a larger campaign to display and ultimately purge Familist heresy. Anti-Familists of the 1570s repeatedly charged Niclaes's elders with working “subtilly in corners” to “insinuate unto the simple sort, & feed them with many outward promises.”Footnote 23 Among these promises was the inclusion of one's name in Niclaes's Book of Life. The so-called book was believed to hold the identities of the “good willing” whose upright behavior and true belief ensured their membership in a “third Church,” which, according to one confession, might one day stand amidst the rubble of the English and Roman churches.Footnote 24 The implied eschatology could be interpreted as sedition, especially when taken alongside the claim, made by Bourne's apprentice in 1580, that his coreligionists were planning open rebellion.Footnote 25 A third confession from that year, this time signed by the two courtier Familists who most likely warned Bourne of the commission's approach, asserted that members of the Family of Love had not only lied about their religious faith but earnestly believed that there “ought not to be any majestarts amongest crystyans.”Footnote 26
The perception that the Family's agenda was political as well as religious ensured that its members risked grave consequences if discovered. Familists faced lengthy imprisonment after a 1580 royal proclamation charged temporal and ecclesiastical officers with the task of rooting them out. Niclaes's books were to be burned and his followers “committed to prison,” there to receive “such bodily punishment” as fitting wicked heretics.Footnote 27 John Knewstub, a Suffolk preacher and author of A confutation of monstrous and horrible heresies taught by H.N. and embraced of a number, who call themselves the Familie of Love (1579), warned that Familism, if left unchecked, would undoubtedly “goe straitly and directly to the overthrowe of the cōmon wealth.” Citing Deuteronomy, he went so far as to advise the earl of Warwick to put hands upon Niclaes's disciples and put them to death.Footnote 28 Though an extreme reaction, Knewstub's counsel in the confutation later contributed to the drafting of a bill in Parliament that, if passed, would see “professors of the Famylye” whipped, branded with the initials HN, and, upon the third offence, “adjudged a felon.”Footnote 29 For a number of weeks in February of 1581, the bill met with considerable controversy. The lawyer and parliamentarian Thomas Norton reported that the bill represented a confusion of realms in the eyes of its conservative opponents, for it “made heresie felonie, and so layed a temporall paine to a spirituall offense.” For those who supported the bill, Niclaes's doctrine was admittedly a spiritual offense, though one “also tending to sedition and disturbance of the estate.”Footnote 30 For whatever reason, the bill never passed. In fact, Familism as a whole soon faded out of the public eye.
In addition to aiding the polemical purposes of anti-Familists, testimonies like Bourne's helped these same authorities rescue their identity in the public eye. Christopher Carter suggests that the decline of Familism as a cause célèbre after 1581 owed less to a sudden downturn in membership than to the ascendency of conservatives at court who chose to focus instead on the disobedient Puritans in their midst. In an ironic twist, Knewstub was for a time deprived of his living as a consequence of his nonconformity.Footnote 31 The tables continued to turn as the decades wore on. In the early 1590s, a disgruntled Thomas Rogers stood before Knewstub and others at Bury Saint Edmunds to accuse the latter's Presbyterian ally, Laurence Chaderton, of acting no better than “H.N. the familist.”Footnote 32 Knewstub, who was understandably horrified by the comparison, responded by abruptly excluding Rogers from the godly conversations at Bury. It was, however, too late to suppress the association altogether. Archbishop Richard Bancroft was also to compare puritan agitators to Niclaes, this time citing the famous Presbyterian controversialist Thomas Cartwright, who, like HN, would have “al things turned topsie turvie.”Footnote 33 Doubtless Knewstub, who had labored in the 1570s to paint English Familists not merely as papists and sectarians but as the “true puritans,” later regretted contributing to the blurring of polemical categories.Footnote 34
These were not the only indignities Knewstub was to suffer in the wake of the anti-Familist campaign. Around 1581, one “Lenard Ramsey”—who may have been none other than Bourne's apprentice “Leonard Romsey”—presented authorities with seventeen articles “tawght secretly” by Knewstub and the Bury preachers James Gayton and John Handson.Footnote 35 Gayton and Handson were to leave town in 1582 amid public accusations that they favored nonconformist, puritan ideas.Footnote 36 Ramsey's charges went a step further, however, accusing all three men of an outlandish mixture of Docetic and Arian Christology, libertinism, and perfectionism. All three were said to deny that Christ had a corporeal body, affirming instead that he had a “fantasticall body,” but was yet, paradoxically, “a meare creature” and a “man as others be.” The New Testament was an allegory. The virgin birth was a fable. They lived without private property, practiced fornication with the “unmaried woman of theyr owne relygion,” and secretly believed that England would be better off without rulers. They held to double predestination but clarified that the elect could not sin while the reprobate faced “deathe eternally.” Finally, they considered it lawful to dissemble before anyone “unlesse he be of theyr owne sect.”Footnote 37
Ramsey's charges were a tangled collection of heterodox opinions: internally inconsistent and, given the assertive orthodoxy of Knewstub's earlier writing, probably baseless. They do, however, testify to the precarious position of those authors like Knewstub who took up their pens to display the Familist heresy in the late 1570s. Niclaes's English followers knew this and were not above threatening their opponents with the loss of their reputation if they persisted in their attacks.Footnote 38 If “Ramsey” was indeed the same glover's apprentice who confessed his associations with Bourne and the Wisbech group in 1580, then the subsequent attack on Knewstub, the undisputed leader of the anti-Familist movement, may have been revenge. Familists also understood the fragility of the anti-Familist platform on a deeper level and in some cases sought to frame their defense as the humble supplication of conformist Protestants against a ruthless, though unwitting, faction of the popish Antichrist.Footnote 39
Against this background, confessions by supposedly repentant Familists gave opponents the opportunity to fashion themselves as plain dealers by locating potentially mischievous information in what was thought to be an unassailable source. In defending the right of magistrates to “compel men to delare their thoughtes,” Knewstub's predecessor John Rogers accused Familist leaders of hiding behind “poore country people.” This strategy, he surmised, “is not so consonant to Christian piety.” Rather, “truth and playne dealing is best.”Footnote 40 This was not to suggest that the less distinguished members of Niclaes's fellowship were unreliable—only that, knowing all too well the depths of their own depravity, Familist intellectuals refused to show up for questioning. Rogers returned to this theme while discussing a reputedly Familist confession from 1561. The testimony, first published by Rogers in 1578 and printed again in 1579, was given by Robert Sterte and Thomas Chaundler, two men supposedly “hatched” and “instructed” by Familist elders in Surrey.Footnote 41 As was the case with Bourne, Sterte and Chaundler were said to possess “wavering heads” and “inconstant minds,” though, Rogers added, “they have reformed some of these grosse matters since.”Footnote 42 When a Familist elder wrote to Rogers in 1579 to contest the two men's knowledge of the Family's doctrine, the response was revealing. In Rogers's words: “Since they have bewrayed your doings, in secret you regard them not . . . you are ashamed of them now that they have disclosed your secret conference.” The point was not that Sterte and Chaundler were erratic and thus untrustworthy sources of information; rather, their status as duped simpletons was a reliable testimony in itself. Again, the refrain from Rogers: “Plain dealing would have put men out of doubte, seeing you know what they were.”Footnote 43
The refusal of Familist elders to acknowledge their own, to take responsibility for Niclaes's heady mysticism, and to openly converse with the skeptics was a consistent motif in Rogers and Knewstub. The assumption was that the marrow of Familist belief was little more than a pastiche of old heresies. Niclaes's message (and the “secret conference” of his English elders) was nothing, they promised, that had not appeared in a more sophisticated form in Arius, Pelagius, Priscillian, and a host of others. As might be expected, more educated members of the Family vehemently denied these charges. Christopher Vitells, the translator of the printed books shoved in Bourne's kitchen chimney, refused to credit Rogers's claim that he had moved in Arian circles before settling for the quasi-Arianism of Niclaes. Aghast, Rogers responded with the testimony of one Jone Agar, an “old mayde” alleging to be Vitells's cousin. According to Agar, Vitells not only denied the divinity of Christ but, worse, chided such Protestant heroes as Bishops Ridley and Latimer for giving their lives in the service of Jesus, a mere “good man.”Footnote 44
The Essex preacher Robert Sharpe, who recanted alongside other Familists at Paul's Cross in 1575, likewise admitted that his former affiliates prospered among “simple deceaved men” by repackaging “divers damnable heresies of the Arrianes, Pelagians, and Anabaptists.”Footnote 45 Sharpe was a reliable source, Rogers added in a footnote to the affair, and of no small account with the Family.Footnote 46 His testimony, like Agar's, was proof positive that Niclaes's patchwork doctrine could not survive the light of day.
In the eyes of its enemies, then, the Family of Love was adept at making “sweet pretences of a holy life . . . to shadow horrible blasphemie.”Footnote 47 A chameleon faith, its strange doctrine was well suited to dazzling the poor country people of England. Confessions purported to record the move from confusion to clarity, and anti-Familists saw fit to shepherd these narratives into the public arena where they might not only edify the concerned citizen but dissolve under scrutiny.
Most informants were happy to play along. A good number of the surviving confessions—from the Surrey confession of 1561 to the Wisbech confession of 1580—followed a recognizable progression, starting with an initiation into Familist practice. Sterte and Chaundler, for instance, revealed to Rogers's audience the strategies by which new members were tempted to join the movement, from the indulgence of meat, drink, and other “good vitualles” to the constant “feeding” of disciples with the promise of future revelations.Footnote 48 Sharpe admitted in 1575 that he had, at first, been “induced” by the Family's mysterious vocabulary and was soon “moved” by the novelty of their religious ideas.Footnote 49 After these captivity narratives, confessions regularly fragmented into a litany of alleged heresies. Sometimes, as was the case in the Wisbech confession, the transition from narrative to “especiall pointes of hereticall doctrine” was also bridged by an agonizing display of regret.Footnote 50 After realizing, for example, that Niclaes's mysterious speech was little more than an attempt to conceal his heresies, Sharpe acknowledged that he had “gyven so great offence” and was “hartily sorye.” He vowed, finally, “never to meddle, with these, or any other such Bookes, or with that secte hereafter.”Footnote 51
The ritual of denunciation played out in a less theatrical, though still impactful, form in the confession of Bourne's apprentice, Leonard Romsye. The information Romsye conveyed to the minister Thomas Barwick in 1580 was nothing new. In fact, the litany of alleged heresies was lifted in large part from Bourne's earlier testimony. Where the Wisbech Familists had been required to profess “that Christ is both god and man, and not obedience and service in the Love,” Romsye now alleged “that Christ is neither god nor man but obedience and service in Love.”Footnote 52 What set the latter confession apart was the extent to which the speaker focused on the seductive appeal of Familism. It is clear from his testimony that Romsye had mostly flirted with the Family of Love and was now more preoccupied with his status as an apostate than he had ever been with his status as a willing initiate in the cult of Niclaes. References throughout are to “their disciples,” “their religion,” and “their fantastical spirit.”Footnote 53 Furthermore, Romsye understood the expectations of the anti-Familist community and joined Knewstub in speculating that “their rebellion is to be looked for er it be longe.”Footnote 54 This was mischievous information indeed, and it is hard to escape the impression that the speaker knew what he was doing.
Romsye recounted his indoctrination in detail to Barwick. Seeing his spiritual potential, he says, John Bourne took him aside one day, “promisinge me after other words that yf I would swear unto him not to bewray him, he would shewe me a way unto lyffe which many kynges and princes had desired to se and could not.” He was then handed one of Niclaes's translated books and asked to put together a written evaluation of the doctrine contained therein, signing the manuscript when he had finished. In turn, his signature would be transmitted to Homo Novus himself, who would record it in the famed Book of Life. The reader registers the excitement of a humble Wisbech apprentice at having his identity immortalized in the Netherlands. Familists, Romsye mused, are of “an infinite number” and are stretched throughout “all countres in Christiandome.” He added that his master had contemplated leaving his glove making profession altogether to join this international community in the “service of love.”Footnote 55
Talk of membership in an illustrious collective that had long eluded kings and princes was, Romsye said, “the usuall manner of entertayning their disciples.” Another was to intimate a utopian future at the culmination of the great Familist rebellion when all people would be governed by the spirit of love and over which there would be “no magistrate prince nor pallace upon the earthe.” In Romsye's skilled hands, the Familist worldview seemed less about humble obedience to a hostile state and more about power, pure and simple. Even in prison, he supposed, Familists lived like kings.Footnote 56
The alluring detail which infused Romsye's captivity narrative involved the reader in a tale which was as compelling as it was horrifying. Narratives like Romsye's are a reminder that apostate confessions were more than just “formal essays or expository compositions designed to lay out in systematic terms their author's principle objections.” The litany of heresies, though long, was never the point. Rather, as Daniel Carson Johnson has written, apostate confessions “are stories, and as stories they are to do more than simply berate and condemn; they are to entertain.”Footnote 57
“Lenard Ramsey” soon levelled many of the same charges against Knewstub himself: perfectionism, dissembling, sedition, and interpreting biblical truth as fable. Left unadorned, lists of heterodox doctrines were dangerously reversible. The performance of apostasy, however, was clearly important to both the confessor and the confessing party. Throughout the sixteenth century in England, right belief was celebrated for its authenticity, transparency, and accessibility.Footnote 58 Apostates were not so much corrected as they were released from a labyrinth of errors that had led them astray. As agents of clarity, the likes of Knewstub and Rogers did more than supply the correct answers; they stood as witness to the triumph of plain truth.
II. Henry Orinell's Information
Though Romsye's investment in the Family was undeniably fleeting, it is not hard to imagine other Familists for whom the role of informant was deeply uncomfortable. Apostates were and are liminal figures. Their ex-member authority is conditional on a convincing reenactment of precisely those associations from which they want desperately to disassociate. In the sixteenth century, this liminality was also owing, perhaps, to a more pervasive set of anxieties. In a recent study, Brooke Conti detects an ambivalence lurking at the heart of early modern English confessions. On the one hand, she says, we know that religious experience in the period could be remarkably complex. As a host of revisionists have told us, typical religious distinctions between Protestant and Catholic, Conformist and Antinomian, always appear “more straightforward and clear-cut to the historian than they did to those immersed in the press of events.”Footnote 59 On the other hand, Conti proposes that early modern confessions existed in a “public realm that tended not to allow for much nuance and that understood religion as an either/or proposition.”Footnote 60 Caught between private experience and public expectation, confessing individuals needed to translate their belief into terms fit for public consumption.
But could such an effort at translation fulfill, at the same time, the undisclosed terms of the person confessing? In other words, could Familist informants, plunged into a deeply uncomfortable situation, make a virtue of necessity? As noted in the previous section, it is a consistent tenet in the literature on religious apostasy that the goal of the confession is seldom to accurately relay past events. Instead, these narratives reflect the attempt to reform one's life and move forward through the act of telling. In making this claim, apostate theorists like Daniel Carson Johnson draw from the work of other scholars interested, more generally, in the nature of autobiography. Writing in the 1980s, Jerome Bruner proposed that, far from recapitulating lived experience, autobiography gradually shapes the very identity which creates it. “In the end,” he says, “we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives.”Footnote 61 Because the ritual of telling works to banish liminality and establish a coherent self, the truth of the narrative is secondary. The focus is instead on what Bruner calls the “rightness” of the account. Though factually incorrect, an account can still be right, he says, “by certain criteria of narrative or of psychological adequacy.” Beyond formal considerations, there are also “internal criteria relating to how one felt or what one intended, and these are just as demanding, even if they are not subject to verification.”Footnote 62 These internal criteria open the possibility of narratives working not only, as Conti would say, within the “terms available for their expression” but also in accord with less straightforward conceptions of identity that are perhaps only incidentally related to the authority's narrative demands.Footnote 63
While some narratives, like Bourne and Romsye's, lent credibility to the anti-Familist platform, others took on a life of their own. Below I examine the account given by Henry Orinell to the anti-Familist writer William Wilkinson in 1579 and thereafter published as part of Wilkinson's A confutation of certaine articles delivered unto the Family of Love. Orinell was not immune to the politics of apostasy, and it is no surprise to find that elements of his story seem like convenient fictions. At the same time, however, Orinell was clearly engaged in the sort of self-fashioning described by Bruner. There is a sense in which the informant's story was “right” even if it was, to use Johnson's formulation, entirely absque facto.Footnote 64 I propose below that the facile anti-Familism of the 1579 confession, expressed in the required litany of heretical doctrines, belies Orinell's adherence to feelings and intentions which were akin to the emergent ethos of the English Family of Love. Seen in this light, the document stands as a remarkable example of the fashioning of a complex self through the act of telling—a self that dances across the otherwise unbridgeable chasm between heresy and orthodoxy.
What do we know about Henry Orinell? According to the information given to William Wilkinson in the late 1570s, he had been living in Willingham, Cambridgeshire, in 1555. That autumn, he, along with his friend William Raven of Saint Ives, travelled south to Colchester—a town which both men considered a safe haven for healthy evangelical ideas tucked away from the “popish pitch” of Marian England. There, at an alehouse, they encountered Christopher Vitells, a one-time joiner and current promoter of “the doctrine of a man, who lived as he said beyond the seas an holy life and an upright conversation.”Footnote 65 The man beyond the seas was of course Hendrik Niclaes. As time went by, the Family's reputation grew, and when Vitells later appeared in Orinell's own Willingham, Orinell says that he knew well enough to steer clear of him.
Like Vitells's supposed cousin Jone Agar, Orinell spoke from the position of an outsider. He was, in Wilkinson's words, “a livyng witnes,” not an apostate. Marsh's archival research into Orinell's background complicates this status. For starters, at the time he gave his account to Wilkinson, Orinell's daughter had recently married an English member of the Family of Love, John Creake. Creake would later, in 1588, also act as the executor of his father-in-law's will. What's more, Orinell's traveling companion in Colchester, William Raven of Saint Ives, “was indisputably a member of the fellowship,” at least in his old age, when his will detailed a close relationship with known English Familists. Also important is the conclusion of Orinell's account: “This is very true.” According to Marsh, the uncomplicated statement was likely a coded admission of Familist belief. “This seemingly innocuous expression,” Marsh testifies, “was not a common one, but is found with conspicuous regularity in the writings of the Family of Love.”Footnote 66
So, at the very least, Orinell's characterization of his involvement with the Family is misleading. What was presented in Wilkinson's confutation as a passing acquaintance was, in truth, an enduring familiarity with the fellowship. Even if the question of Orinell's actual adherence to Niclaes's doctrine is set aside, the tale he told Wilkinson had the effect of placing Familist heresy at a comfortable distance from the very real Familists he undoubtedly knew and cared about.
Orinell's depiction of the movement is a near caricature. From the rejection of infant baptism to the acceptance of Catholic works righteousness, his testimony relied heavily on an existing stock of anti-Familist rhetoric. The usual cast of heresies is present in itemized form. Not only, he says, was Vitells's doctrine in 1555 Pelagian in flavor, but it was boldly perfectionist. “The godly sinne not (sayth hee),” and thus they need not pray, as ordinary Christians do, for divine mercy.Footnote 67 Beyond the charges of perfectionist doctrine, Orinell's Vitells also rejected the divinity of Christ, the Book of Common Prayer, and the evangelical conviction that the pope was Antichrist. In keeping with the theme of works righteousness, Orinell reported that, for the Family, anyone who had not themselves fulfilled the Law “is Antichrist, & so are there many Antichrists.”Footnote 68 Finally, as if to drive home the point that the new religion was little more than a collage of clashing bad ideas, Vitells was said to endorse the baptism of adults to the exclusion of those who had yet to amass their “yeares of discretion.”Footnote 69
Orinell was not alone in his reliance on a prepackaged cult of Niclaes. In 1608, the ex-Brownist Henoch Clapham published a farcical dialogue in which a young seeker encounters a Familist on his travels. Resting in a local alehouse, the seeker and the Familist discuss the nature of sin and human perfection. Increasingly drunk and assured that his Familist piety renders him impervious to lust, the disciple of Niclaes suddenly assaults a “cherry-cheeked damsel” named Tannikin to prove to his companion that he is free of “any carnal lusting.”Footnote 70 Horrified by the display of religious hypocrisy, the seeker runs at last into the open arms of the moderate English Church, personified in Clapham's dialogue by the character Mediocritie.
Orinell's account of an alehouse debate in Marian Colchester may have functioned in a similar way: as a digestible Familist morsel to satisfy the tastes of Wilkinson and his audience.Footnote 71 This may have simply been in keeping with the terms available. A close look at the confession, however, especially its position within Wilkinson's framing of the account, suggests an additional motive. Orinell appears here not simply as an expert informer but as a heroic Marian Protestant. While he may have been cornered by Wilkinson and forced to protect his Familist identity by informing on others, he also clearly benefited from the identity that was fashioned between the pages of Wilkinson's confutation.
Why a probable Familist like Orinell would want to be seen in such terms—whether out of a simple desire for social advancement or perhaps something else—is an important question. Given what we know about the Family of Love in Elizabethan England, it is not beyond reason that Orinell's response would have registered, at least to the ears of some Familists, as a testament to the religious identity of the fellowship's more enlightened members. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that more educated English Familists, unlike their Dutch founder Niclaes, conceived of themselves as ideal protestantes, carrying the torch of an evangelical faith now under siege by zealous pretenders. Orinell's testimony stands, therefore, more as a performance of Protestant orthodoxy than as a straightforward rejection of Familism, nodding all the while to a more nuanced faith beneath the surface.
Wilkinson had framed Orinell's account of the “first springing” of the Family of Love by painting a dramatic picture of England under the Catholic leadership of Queen Mary. For their sins, he suggested, the people of England had brought upon themselves a great spiritual famine. The Gospel, having made considerable strides under Edward VI, was now buried deep underground, and good Christians, fearing the reach of the “Popishe Sinagogue,” dared not “confesse Christ openly.”Footnote 72 Amid this turmoil, Wilkinson held up the town of Colchester in Essex as a beacon of light; it was a “a sweete and comfortable mother of the bodies, and a tender nourse of the soules of Gods children.” This town, Wilkinson continued, “was the rather at that time frequented, because it aforded many godly and zealous Martyrs, whiche continually with their bloud watered those seedes, whiche by the preaching of the worde had bene sowne most plentifully in the hartes of Christians in the dayes of good King Edward.”Footnote 73 To support this claim, Wilkinson pointed his reader to the discussion of Colchester in John Foxe's 1563 Acts and Monuments. Foxe was also Wilkinson's source for the ensuing discussion of the various Pelagian heresies that contended for the hearts and minds of Christian refugees in the Essex town. Among these enterprising false Protestants, Wilkinson located the nascent Family of Love. “A more lovely name,” he admits, though no less dangerous for their denial of “the most blessed and comfortable doctrine of Predestination.”Footnote 74
At this point in the confutation, Wilkinson introduced Orinell's account, “subscribed with his owne hand.” The facile characterization of Familist heresy which followed stood in stark contrast to the picture of heroic, Foxian Protestantism also present between the lines. In fact, Orinell's confession was laced with details calculated to align its author's own life history with the broader sweep of the English Reformation. Facing the restoration of Catholicism under Mary, Orinell assured his reader that he had no choice but to flee so that his “conscience should not be entangled.” There, in a Colchester inn, he encountered other like-minded individuals who, he continued, “came thether to conferre concerning the safetie of their conscience.”Footnote 75 The accent on conscience in the opening paragraphs of Orinell's confession fit nicely with Wilkinson's summary a few pages later, where Vitells's Familist descendants were exhorted to embody the honest repentance of Simon Peter rather than the insincerity of the sorcerer Simon Magus.Footnote 76
More significantly, Orinell's confession called to mind the Protestant refugees whose stories were told and retold in successive editions of Acts and Monuments. Foxe reported, for example, that the would-be martyr Thomas Hinshaw endured ecclesiastical molestation with “upright conscience, & entangled himself with none of their ceremonies.”Footnote 77 Only nineteen or twenty years old at the time of his capture in Islington, Hinshaw was one of the lucky ones. Queen Mary died before he did. Others fled abroad in the 1550s, but “no doubt many there were at home within the realme which dyd flee no lesse from place to place, to keep their conscience free.”Footnote 78 The Suffolk carpenter John Cooper sheltered some of these poor Protestants who “tavailed for conscience,” and in Essex, the aging Edward and Appline Grewe settled in Colchester to “kepe a good conscience” until Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558.Footnote 79
After witnessing Vitells's antics before an audience of the Colchester godly, Orinell says that he considered consulting “Bishop Ridley & M. Latimer” to further “satisfie” his conscience. He never made the trip to Oxford, however, as he instead conferred with “some man” in the “meane season.”Footnote 80 The “man” mentioned at this point in Orinell's narrative remains a mystery, though the casual reference to the two Oxford martyrs is somewhat easier to explain. Around Michaelmas 1555, Ridley and Latimer were in custody awaiting execution for heresy. Had he made the long trip to Oxford sometime after September 29, Orinell might have arrived just in time to see the two men burned at the stake in what was to become one of the most affecting scenes of Foxe's entire narrative. While still in custody, Ridley—and perhaps to a lesser degree the aged Latimer—remained in contact with the Protestant community outside. Their advice for English Protestants hoping to maintain their integrity in the face of what must have seemed like unremitting persecution was no doubt highly prized.Footnote 81 Once again, we see Orinell incorporating himself into the fabric of Foxe's mythic narrative. This time, however, the fleeting reference to Foxe's Oxford martyrs had no obvious purpose in the context of the narrative, short of establishing Orinell as a member of the hounded community of saints.
By locating his younger self in Marian Colchester among the ranks of refugees and martyrs, Orinell was able to rescue a religious identity that had been in jeopardy. He may have felt torn between the Familism he knew and perhaps even practiced and the Familism of public discourse. Wilkinson also benefited from Orinell's testimony, securing the support of Bishop Cox for his polemic against the Family of Love.Footnote 82 Yet the two men were not always on the same page. Wilkinson's main source was a segment in the Acts and Monuments on the “Martyrdome and burnyng of x faythfull and blessed Martyrs, v men, and v women . . . at Colechester.” Foxe here reproduced the testimony of two men: the “wicked priest” Thomas Tye and Steven Morris (rendered as “Norish” in Wilkinson), a papal Judas who “wrought his malice against the people of god.”Footnote 83 The former figure, we learn, was engaged in a plot to purge Colchester of its Protestant rebels, which culminated in the burning of William and Alice Mount and their daughter, Rose. Morris, for his part, named a further set of rebels in London, including three men whose names appear in Wilkinson's 1579 publication: Henry Harte, John Kempe, and John Barry. The first was a prominent advocate of justification by works, known as a “freewill man.” The other two, though not mentioned as such, likely followed Harte in his opposition to predestination.Footnote 84
Foxe himself had little interest in Harte, Kempe, and Barry in 1563, except to note that they were “good men” whose reputations were tarnished by the Catholic priest Morris's “mischevous information.”Footnote 85 Wilkinson, however, ignored this bit of marginalia, taking portions of the priest's testimony at face value. While he did admit that Kempe was “by this popish priest slaundered,” he nevertheless condemned Harte as a perverter of godly discourse in Colchester.Footnote 86
Wilkinson's reinterpretation of Foxe might go unnoticed if not for its contrast with Orinell. Rather than leaning on the testimony of either Tye or Morris, Orinell referred his reader to one of Morris's targets, John Barry, who was supposedly present at the Colchester debate with Vitells. According to Orinell, Barry had travelled from a nearby town alongside two women with the intent of reasoning “with the joigner about the Divinitie of Christ, whom Vitells denied to be God.”Footnote 87 Barry could hardly have anticipated the depths of Vitells's depravity. Refusing to be reasoned with, Vitells instead mocked his opponent by repeatedly parroting his statements until “he put Barry to silence & blankt him.”Footnote 88 Orinell shared Barry's horror at the display, and it is clear from the narrative that he admired Barry as the beleaguered hero of the Colchester proceedings.
Orinell's pat rejection of Vitells's perfectionism is not, like most everything else in his confession, as straightforward as it at first seems. If Barry, following Henry Harte, was an opponent of predestination—and there is good reason to believe he wasFootnote 89—then it may just be possible to locate Orinell's religious sentiments somewhere between the triumphant solifidianism of Foxe's martyrs and a nagging disquiet over the doctrine of predestination as inimical to good fellowship.Footnote 90
True to his status as witness to the event, Orinell refrained from explicit statements of his own belief. Other Familists did not remain silent, however. A correspondence from 1579—the same year as Orinell's confession—between anonymous members and the anti-Familist John Rogers stakes out precisely this ideological territory. Rooting their claims in William Tyndale's 1528 Obedience of a Christian Man, the Familists blamed Rogers's “licentious doctrine of predestination” for the disobedience of otherwise good English citizens. To admit the power of sin is one thing, they implied, but to take away all hope of regeneration is quite another. Is not the goal of life to be good?Footnote 91 As to any final determination on the question of God's eternal decree, the Familists who responded to Rogers demurely avoided comment: “Wee like not to contende therin, nor desperatly to seeke libertie of life thereby, neither foolishly to serch for things therein above our capacities.”Footnote 92
The same letter, signed simply “your lovers and friends, FL,” went on to cite Philippians 2:5: “Let the same minde be in you, that was in Christ Jesus.”Footnote 93 The purpose of the citation was to refute Rogers's claim that Christ's righteousness was his alone. FL insisted “that the Apostles taught the perfection to be attained in this life,” before commencing with a complex and somewhat convoluted discourse on the topic.Footnote 94 Perfection was possible, he thought, but came only through participation in the mind of God. “The power thereto is not in us, but in him.”Footnote 95 Christ-like perfection also consisted of the acknowledgment of one's fallen state (“wee daily confesse ourselves to be most myserable sinners”) alongside the recognition that all people, however righteous, are “altogether unable to perfourme the lawe.”Footnote 96 To have the mind of Christ was not, therefore, to fulfill the Law, as Christ had done, but to cultivate a simplicity of spirit and—most importantly to the beleaguered FL—an overall distaste for slanderous disputation.
Against the backdrop of FL's complex discussion, the treatment of Vitells's perfectionism in Orinell seems cartoonish and absurd. It is instead John Barry, the voice of reason at Colchester, whom we see quoting Philippians 2:5 in the process of making an important point, which, sadly, Orinell left unclear.Footnote 97 Vitells is said to have interrupted Barry at this juncture, putting an end to the debate by repeating the passage from Philippians ad nauseam in an attempt to mock his opponent. We can only guess what Barry's point would have been, though his use of Philippians comes after the “especiall pointes of hereticall doctrine” espoused by Vitells, including the belief that “Christ is not God” and the contention that Familists, having conquered sin, need not confess themselves “miserable sinners.”Footnote 98 Perhaps Orinell's Barry, not unlike FL, was contesting both of these points by recourse to Philippians. He did, after all, manage to get as far as verse six (“Christ Jesus, who beyng in the forme of God thought it no robbery to be equall with God &c”) before he was “blankt” by Vitells.Footnote 99 Verses five and six also opened up to a discussion of humility, in which Christ, though equal with God, nevertheless shunned self-aggrandizement and embraced the role of servant.
Thus, we know that Orinell partly concealed his familiarity with the Family of Love, that he shrewdly located his identity in the midst of Foxe's Protestant martyrs, and, finally, that he possibly sympathized with more moderate, albeit heterodox, strains within the larger Protestant ethos. The overall perspective of the narrative, which led at least one historian to identify Orinell as an “orthodox Protestant,” was no doubt intentional.Footnote 100 Orinell hoped to appear in Wilkinson as more than a non-Familist; he wanted to be a Marian Protestant in the style of Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Of course, given the context of Wilkinson's confutation, defaming the Family was the price of admission for Orinell's hoped-for transformation. Within the flat repudiation of Vitells's Familism, however, lies concealed a deeper affinity with the Family of Love as the group existed in the 1570s.
Orinell was not an apostate like John Bourne or his eager apprentice Leonard Romsye. He never transferred his total dedication from one movement to another diametrically opposed movement. He was not, like Robert Sharpe, atoning for his previous religious affiliation through his condemnation of the cult of Niclaes before an audience at Paul's Cross. Maybe he was flexing his Familist credentials in the only way he could, given the terms available: through an identification with the spirit, if not the letter, of the movement. As a result, two representations of English Familism emerged in the course of his narrative: one fit for popular consumption and another rooted in the “rightness” of genuine conviction. This splitting of the narrative played across the oppositional framework already in existence by 1579. Anti-Familists accused their enemies of concealing their more radical faith, and Familists claimed to represent the heart of English religion buried under the rubble of puritanical posturing. Orinell was playing the informer, to be sure, but he was also playing the poor exile.
III. Martyrs, Plowmen, and Poor Exiles
Orinell's performance of Protestant orthodoxy reflects an attempt to manage not only his own private identity but perhaps also the identity of the “real” religion of Love as he had come to understand it. Writing to Rogers in 1579, anonymous Familists lamented that the enemies of God “have alwayes martyred Gods holye ones,” adding that “the very same doctrine which those Martyres have taught, the dame doth H.N. teach.” Allusions to the bravery of martyrs and poor “outsevered” exiles were indeed common features between Niclaes's Elizabethan followers and Foxe's heroic Christianity.Footnote 101 Like Foxe, the surviving writings of English Familists celebrated their religion as a simple faith under siege—a notable shift in emphasis from the lavish and clandestine mysticism of Niclaes.
The plain plowman, with its connotations of rustic simplicity, populated English print well after Langland's introduction of the character in the fourteenth century. Mike Rodman Jones, who has looked most closely at this phenomenon, argues that sixteenth-century references to the plowman “were both echoing Tyndale's writing and Protestant pastoralism more generally, and aiding in the development of the ‘Plain-speaking Englishman,’ the self-fashioned identity that was to mark literary history for years to come.”Footnote 102 In the period following the printed polemics of Wilkinson, Rogers, and Knewstub, members of the Family of Love wrote the first of two contributions to the “plain-speaking” genre: An Apology for The Service of Love. The short text came in the form of a dialogue by a citizen, a countryman, and an exiled member of the Family whose “dwelling place is yet uncertain on earth, though often times in the wilderness.”Footnote 103 The purpose of the dialogue was to demonstrate the commonalities between true English religion and true Familism—seen now through the clear eyes of the simple and forbearing countryman rather than through the darkened lens of the anti-Familist contingent.
The same anonymous writer likely also gave us in 1589 the “playne Plowman” of Temporis Filia Veritas.Footnote 104 This time, however, the plowman was neither the Catholic dreamer of Langland nor the Protestant crusader of Hugh Latimer's sermons but an exile “whose Religion was unknowen . . . suspected & bruted for an Heretiq.”Footnote 105 Fashioned from the mold of Folly, he was the fool who spoke wisdom to the skeptics, steering clear of doctrinal conceit and living out the life of a simple Christian.
More than the apology, Temporis Filia Veritas stages what was undoubtedly a Familist dream come true: a parliamentary forum where each religious representative, including the plain plowman, could “speake freely his mynd.”Footnote 106 The text's epigraph from Ecclesiasticus 11:8 exhorted the reader to avoid hasty judgments and “let men tell out ther Tales.” The verse was a favorite of English Familists and had appeared in at least two other sources from the 1570s.Footnote 107 Here, before the monarch and lords temporal and ecclesiastical, the plowman had the opportunity to promote his religion of good conduct over and against the lawless backbiting which had forced him into hiding. The text is notable for its awareness of the earlier attacks against the Family of Love, recycling Rogers and Knewstub's desire that truth “seeketh no corners” and castigating those disobedient spirits—this time, the Puritan—who “gathered together their conventikles” and “preached false and sedicious doctrine.” Most of all, the plowman promised that his religion, if adopted, would ensure that good citizens were no longer “belyed slaundered, persecuted, and imprisoned.” A letter appended to the close of the dialogue further grieved for those honest Christians facing “feare of Persecution,” “Tyranous handling,” and “most cruell death” at the mercy of their enemies.Footnote 108
Orinell, then, was not alone in his desire to keep both his conscience and his plain English faith. As one member acknowledged: “Certain of our familie have been convinced, subscribed, and recanted, and have promised nevermore to professe H.N. nor his doctrine.” The effect, he reasoned, was to hold ordinary citizens to an unfair standard by lifting their wholesome, unadorned faith into the lofty realm of sophistical reasoning. “You will allowe by like reason that every simple man that heareth a doctor preache, should be compelled to deliver forth all his divinitie, or els to be committed to straight prison.” Is this plain dealing, he asked?Footnote 109 A second anonymous writer, this time citing Sterte and Chaundler's 1561 confession, demanded that those responsible for the dissemination of such information explain why it was such an “odious matter” to be a simple member of the faith. “I wish from the bottom of my heart, that all the Lordes people were simple,” he intoned; then, presumably, “persecuting for conscience cause” would come to an end.Footnote 110
Members accused anti-Familists like Rogers of committing a double crime: of prejudicing the conscience of the individual just as they had prejudiced the literal sense of scripture. They pointed out the ways in which their opponents effectively misread the Family of Love by interpreting its members out of context, without, as one member put it, a “paterne of Love” to guide their discernment. As far as Niclaes's works were concerned, Rogers and his ilk fared no better in the eyes of Familist writers, marshalling “three or foure lines, and then pass[ing] over tenne or twelve.”Footnote 111
From glosses on scripture and the works of Niclaes to the confessions, Familists balked at the expectation that ideologically-charged material could faithfully capture the spirit or “paterne” of a religion. In place of confessions like Bourne's or Romsye's, they had offered their own printed confession of “the belief of the Good-willing in England” in 1574, promising that there had been “no man cōpelled thereunto.”Footnote 112 Forced to instead answer for confessions like Sterte and Chaundler's, Christopher Vitells finally threw up his hands in 1579: “Seeing you will needs slaunder us, we will in the patience of Christ bear that.”Footnote 113
Breaking the fourth wall, the character of the countryman likewise warned the apology’s audience not to rush to judgment in the case of Sharpe's incriminating confession. Sharpe, he cautioned, may have been instructed “by others, and by such means, mought perhaps be constrained to over-reach himself as it were unawares.”Footnote 114 In other words, the expectations of his accusers conditioned, or “constrained,” Sharpe's perception of his former involvement, distorting the testimony he gave at Paul's Cross.Footnote 115 Under considerable pressure, he had been guided into a misreading of his past.
The politics of apostasy, which have so interested scholars of modern new religious movements, were not unknown to the Family of Love. The words of the pseudonymous FL are striking: “With what mind a man beholdeth another, in such forme he appeareth.”Footnote 116 But beyond distorting the truth, confessions served as a forum for the fresh articulation of ideas about the nature of both English Protestantism and religious authenticity more generally. The ideas implicit in a testimony like Orinell's undoubtedly reflect an attempt to make a virtue of necessity—to find meaning in a polemical atmosphere. Read between the lines, such testimonies also point to a blurred spectrum of attitudes and worldviews which bleed through the clear boundaries of the religious historian. The Family of Love appears to us today fractured between appearance and reality, tongue and heart, though the essence of the movement, from Bourne through Orinell, may well have existed somewhere in between.
