Bruen



John Bruen (1560–1625) was an English Puritan layman, celebrated in his time for piety. In his youth he was the spoiled son of a very wealthy man. On the death of his father in 1587, Bruen's character changed completely. Thenceforth, Bruen was up every day at 3 or 4 a.m. and engaged in prayer and Bible study. Bruen prayed and read the Bible seven times each day. He destroyed his backgammon table by pitching it forcefully into the fireplace. He marred his deck of cards and proclaimed games to be the work of the devil and an idle mind. He made it a point to walk the one mile to church each Sunday, gathering the tenants of his properties and arriving in a large cluster for service. His charitable works were notable: he offered the homeless a place to sleep within his own home, the wool of his sheep provided clothing for the poor, the mutton their food. Corn from his fields fed those who came to his door for comfort.

However there was another side to Bruen. In the winter of 1613 seventeen of Bruen's students and servants were arrested for destroying roadside crosses in Cheshire. Seven of the vandals appeared before the Star Chamber in London. The outcome of the trial resulted in a 500 pound fine, an expense that Bruen covered for his followers. While those charged with the crime denied Bruen’s involvement, it was clear to all that the event was planned at one of his conventicles at Stapleford Hall.

The principal source for Bruen’s life and the principal reason why he has been accorded such significance is the contemporary biography by William Hinde (1568/9–1629), curate in the parish of Bunbury, and Bruen’s brother-in-law. This was published posthumously in 1641 by Hinde’s son, Samuel, himself a clergyman. Whether the text had been mislaid, simply overlooked, initially under-valued, or held back during the intervening twelve years is not clear. However, 1641, the date chosen for its eventual publication, was significant in various ways, especially when seen in the wider context of events in Cheshire: including events which were to lead to the Civil War. Hinde's account of Bruen's life cannot be taken as an unbiased and isolated account.

Puritanism in Chester
"Puritanism" is difficult to define precisely - there was no Puritan church, denomination or organisation. The term "Puritan" is in many ways akin to the term "Fundamentalist": it refers to views and beliefs rather than an organisation. Puritans were dissatisfied with what they saw as the limited extent of the English Reformation and with the Church of England's toleration of certain practices associated with the Roman Catholic Church. Originally, "Puritan" was a pejorative term characterizing certain Protestant groups as extremist: in 1564. Archbishop Matthew Parker used it (and "precisian") with a sense similar to the modern "stickler". Puritans wanted: no "foreign" or "Popish" practices, preaching rather than ceremony, no church heirarchy, a church run by the people and the Bible as the source of all truth - often interpreting it in extreme ways. In such extreme cases they had narrow and severe interpretations of their beliefs, were highly intollerant of anyone who believed otherwise, condemned heresy (which included catholicism), any sports on a Sunday and frowned upon singing in church. Puritans had no objection to making money: the rise of middle-class trade occurred chiefly among Protestants, who viewed money as a gift from God but also believed in being industrious. A monk's vow of poverty was seen as:


 * "madness, a superstitious and wicked presumption, being that they sell this poverty for a work of perfection … which will much prevail for satisfaction and merit before God".

Following the Reformation "enthusiastic" protestantism developed only slowly in Chester. The City contained no notable protestant laymen, and overseas trade was not with ports where protestantism was entrenched. However, grow it did.

During the 1560s and 1570s there were attempts to promote "good behaviour" in church and some agitation against the Chester Mystery Plays, but the turning point came only in the 1580s, when Bishop William Chadderton (1579-95) established monthly exercises, dominated by puritans, and encouraged clergy to attend. Among the participants was the Revd. Christopher Goodman, who returned to Chester in 1584 and soon gathered influential support among the laity. Goodman was to be the driving force behind the banning of the Chester Mystery Plays. Active at the Cathedral at the same time were Prebendary John Nutter as a preacher (who's religious views swung from one extreme to the other depending on the best way to make money and whose family would later provide one of the Pendle "witches", Alice Nutter) and Thomas Hitchens as a lecturer.



In 1583 the corporation established a weekly Friday lecture at St Peter's, which became a centre of puritan preaching. After Goodman associated himself with St Bridget's it too displayed puritan leanings, and in other parishes, Holy Trinity for example, there were complaints about incumbents who failed to preach regularly. The growing attachment to puritan teachings was both reflected in, and encouraged by, the Corporation's eventual concern with personal behaviour. It repeatedly attempted to curb excessive drinking and vice, attacking "church ales", "Welsh weddings", unlawful games, bowling, football, and bull and bear baiting. A short piece printed in the Manchester Times in 1870 quoted from Jefferson's Book about the Clergy and described the "church ale":


 * Of the Church-ale, often called the Whitsun-ale, from being generally held at Whitsuntide, it is necessary to speak at greater length, for it is a far more important institution than the bid-ale or clerk-ale. The ordinary official givers of the church-ale were two wardens who, after collecting subscriptions in money or kind from every one of their fairly well-to-do parishioners, provided a revel that not infrequently passed the wake in costliness and diversity of amusements. The board, at which everyone received a welcome who could pay for his entertainment, was loaded with good cheer; and after the feasters had eaten and drunk to contentment, if not to excess, they took part in sport on the turf of the churchyard, or on the sward of the village green. The athletes of the parish distinguished themselves in wrestling, boxing, quoit throwing; the children cheered the mummers and the morris dancers; and round a maypole decorated with ribbons, the lads and lasses plied their nimble feet to the music of the fifes, bagpipes, drums and fiddles. When they had wearied themselves by exercise, the revellers returned to the replenished board; and not seldom the feast, designed to begin and end in a day, was protracted into a demoralising debauch of a week's or even a month's duration. The Manchester Times (26 February 1870)

In 1583 the authorities banned Sunday trading and exhorted Cestrians to attend church whenever sermons were preached and twice on Sundays and holy days; the Corporation set an example by attending services with due formality - mostly at St Peter's. Opposition to Mayor Henry Hardware's interference with the Midsummer Watch Parade in 1600, however, suggests that the citizens' enthusiasm for high-minded reforms was limited. From 1610 to 1612 successive mayors ordered strict observance of the Sabbath, encouraged the corporation to attend sermons at St. Peter's, and took control of the races on St. George's Day in order to prevent misbehaviour. A distinctive lay puritan temper thus steadily developed before 1620, and it was not effectively countered by openly conservative opinion or by outright recusancy.

Clerical support for puritanism in Chester is not easy to measure. William Barlow, dean at the Cathedral in 1603-5, was a prominent and strongly anti-puritan member of the Hampton Court conference in 1604, but Bishop Richard Vaughan (1597-1604) sympathized with many puritan opinions. The next bishop, George Lloyd (1604-15), a former divinity lecturer at the Cathedral, was an active preacher and apparently a moderate who tolerated puritan clergy in Chester. Lloyd's portrain hangs in the "Puritan Room" at the Grosvenor Museum and his supposed residence, Bishop Lloyd's House, still exists in Watergate Street, but has been much altered over the years.



His successor, Thomas Morton (1616-19), however, was of firmly Anglican views and pressed the puritans to conform. His task was made more difficult by the ministrations of Nicholas Byfield, a Calvinist polemicist and a powerful preacher, who was rector of St. Peter's 1608-15, where his congregation included the well known puritan gentleman John Bruen of Bruen Stapleford, a supporter of private prayer meetings in the parish. Byfield was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, but did not emerge with a degree. He intended to exercise his ministry in Ireland; but on his way there he preached at Chester, and was prevailed on to remain as one of the city preachers, without cure.

Morton's successor was Bishop Bridgeman (1619-1652) who was at first lenient towards puritans but initialised suspensions against the puritans Thomas Paget, John Angier and Samuel Eaton. Paget was later exiled to Amsterdam (where he lived off the profits of his family slave-trading). By the late 1630s, Puritans were in alliance with the growing commercial world, with the parliamentary opposition to the royal prerogative, and with the Scottish Presbyterians with whom they had much in common.

John Bruen
John Bruen (1560–1625) was the son of a Cheshire squire of Bruen Stapleford; the elder John Bruen was three time married. His union with Anne, the sister of Sir John Done, was childless, but his second wife brought him fourteen children, of whom Katharine, afterwards the wife of William Brettargh, and John, who, although not the eldest born, became by survivorship his heir, were noted for the fervour of their Puritanism. The Bruen family of Stapleford first emerge in the 13thCent when Robert le Brun is named on a deed of 1230, but seem to have had little impact on history until the 16th Century.

Early Life
When John Bruen was young he was sent to live with his uncle Dutton, where for three years he was taught by the schoolmaster James Roe. The Dutton family had by charter the control of the minstrels of the county and traditionally held the Minstrel Court in Chester. Young Bruen became an expert dancer. He wrote:


 * "At that time, the holy Sabbaths of the Lord were wholly spent, in all places about us, in May-games and May-poles, pipings and dancings, for it was a rare thing to hear of a preacher, or to have one sermon in a year."

Hinde gives a slightly different slant on Bruen's youth, and paints him as a virtuous character who shunned:


 * "the common and cursed sins of the time as base lying, wanton and wicked swearing, rioting and revelling, drinking and gaming, or that fleshly sin of fornication with which so many of our young gentlemen have now blasted the beauty and glory of their youth, blemished their names, polluted their souls and defiled their bodies"

When about seventeen John Bruen and his brother Thomas were sent as gentlemen-commoners to "St. Alban Hall", Oxford (later Merton College), where they stayed about two years. He left the university in 1579, and in the following year is said to have been married by his parents to Elizabeth (d. January 1595), a daughter of Henry Hardware, who had been twice mayor of Chester (1559/60 and 1575/6), and whose son (Henry Hardware II) was to become famous for his disruption (in 1599-1600) of traditional activities such as the Midsummer Watch Parade. Bruen at this time hunted, and with Ralph Done kept fourteen couple of hounds. Richardson, one of the principal commentators on Bruen states that:


 * He returned home at his father’s bidding to enter an arranged marriage with a young widow, Elizabeth Cowper, whose father was one of the aldermanic elite of Chester, and a Puritan reformer noted for the suppression of the medieval mystery plays in the city.

This statement is problematic given the date of 1580, the Chester Mystery Plays were suppressed in the the 1560's and 70's, but there is little evidence that any Cowper was involved in the suppression of the plays.

Later Life
On the death of his father in 1587 his means were reduced; he cast off his dogs, killed the game, and disparked the land. Just why he had this sudden change of character is not clear

The record now get somewhat confusing. His first wife died suddenly, and after a time he married the "very amiable and beautiful" Ann Foxe (c.1544-1606), whom "he first met at a religious meeting in Manchester". According to George Ormerod's history of Cheshire Anne was the daughter of John Fox. Her children were: Katherine baptized Feb 7 1601, Abigail Apr 3 1603 buried Apr 26 1603, Jonathan Jan 6 1605 buried Jan 13 1605, Obadiah Dec 25 1606, Samuel, Joseph, Margaret Dec 8 1616, and another unknown child. If the last four children are accurate, Anne would have died after 1616, not in 1606. Many sources cite Anne as the daughter of John Foxe (1516/17 – 18 April 1587) the author of "Actes and Monuments" (popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs), an account of Christian martyrs throughout Western history, but which particularly emphasises the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the 14th century and throughout the reign of Mary I. Widely owned and read by English Puritans, the book helped to mould British popular opinion about the Catholic Church for several centuries. Unfortunately, Anne was not the daughter of John Foxe of the Book of Martyrs, but the daughter of John Fox of Pilkington, Lancashire.

For a year John and Anne dwelt at her mother's house at Rhodes, near Manchester. He then returned to Stapleford, and again his house "became the abode of many scions of gentility". Bruen's second wife supposedly died after ten years of married life, and the widower "broke up his household with its twenty-one boarders and retired to Chester, where he cleared the debt of his estate, saw some of his children settled, and maintained the poor of his parish by the produce of two mills in Stapleford, whither he returned with his third wife, Margaret".

His children were brought up strictly, and his choice of servants "fell upon the sober and pious". One of these, Robert Pashfield, or 'Old Robert,' though unable to read or write, had acquired so exact a knowledge of the Bible, that he "could almost always tell the book and chapter where any particular sentence was to be found". The old man apparently had a "leathern girdle", which served him as a memoria technica, and was "marked into portions for the several books of the Bible, and with points and knots for the smaller divisions". It is not clear from descriptions whether the "points" were on the outside of the "girdle", or on the inside as in a Cilice - although mortification of the flesh might well have been considered a "Popish" practice by the puritans.

Bruen in summer rose between three and four in the morning, and in winter at five, praying for a while before waking the rest of the household with a bell at six. He read prayers to the household twice a day. His own personal seasons for prayer were seven times daily. On the Sunday "he walked from his house, a mile distant, to the church, and was followed by the greater part of his servants, and called upon such of his tenants as lived on the way, so that when he reached the church it was at the head of a procession". His entourage rarely went home to dinner after morning prayers, but remained in the church untill after the evening service, spending their time reading sermons which had been written down. He maintained a preacher (with pulpit) at his own house, and afterwards for the parish. According to his biographer, Bruen's house became celebrated, and a number of "gentlemen of rank became desirous of sojourning under his roof for their better information in the way of God, and the more effectual reclaiming of themselves and their families". William Perkins (1558–1602), a puritan theologian, called Bruen Stapleford, "for the practice and power of religion, the very topsail of all England".

According to his biographer, John Bruen had "an implicit belief in special providences" (extraordinary "divine intervention"), "judgments", witchcraft, &c. He kept a hospitable house, and was kind and charitable to the poor of his neighbourhood and of Chester. He refused to drink healths even at the high sheriff's feast. Towards the end of his life his prayers were twice accompanied by "ravishing sights". He died after an illness, which was seen to be mortal, in 1625, at the age of 65. Parts of this seems like the creation of a legend after his death.

Iconoclasm
To the Puritans, Divine law as laid down in Scripture, above all in the ten commandments, prohibited false worship, everything that represented or smacked of idols, and the idol-service of banned or banished images. Objects and forms of behaviour that contravened the Decalogue prohibitions against serving other gods or worshipping images, must be done away with. A cross on a church steeple, as much as a husband telling his wife "I thee worship", both came to seem, to the purest of the purifiers, contraventions of that law. In 1614, Ben Johnson (c.11 June 1572 – c.16 August 1637) would parody this with his character "Zeal-of-the-land Busy" who smashes the wares of a woman selling ginger-bread men as "merchandise of Babylon".

Bruen removed the stained glass in Tarvin Church, and defaced the sculptured images found there.

During the English Civil War, Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich described the events of 1643 when troops and citizens, encouraged by a Parliamentary ordinance against superstition and idolatry, behaved thus:


 * Lord what work was here! What clattering of glasses! What beating down of walls! What tearing up of monuments! What pulling down of seats! What wresting out of irons and brass from the windows! What defacing of arms! What demolishing of curious stonework! What tooting and piping upon organ pipes! And what a hideous triumph in the market-place before all the country, when all the mangled organ pipes, vestments, both copes and surplices, together with the leaden cross which had newly been sawn down from the Green-yard pulpit and the service-books and singing books that could be carried to the fire in the public market-place were heaped together.

William Prynne
William Prynne (1600 – 24 October 1669) was an English lawyer, author, polemicist, and political figure. He was a prominent Puritan opponent of the church policy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. In theology, Laud was accused of being an Arminian and opponent of Calvinism, as well as covertly favouring Roman Catholic doctrines. On all three grounds, Laud was regarded by Puritan clerics and laymen as a formidable and dangerous opponent. Like many Puritans abhorring decadent celebrations, Prynne was strongly opposed to religious feast days, including Christmas, and revelry such as stage plays. On 31 May 1630 Prynne obtained a licence to print ihis book against stage-plays, and about November 1632 it was published. "Histriomastix" is a volume of over a thousand pages, showing that plays were unlawful, incentives to immorality, and condemned by the scriptures, Church Fathers, modern Christian writers, and pagan philosophers. By chance, the queen and her ladies, in January 1633, took part in the performance of Walter Montagu's "The Shepherd's Paradise": this was an innovation at court. A passage reflecting on the character of female actors in general was construed as an aspersion on the queen; passages which attacked the spectators of plays and magistrates who failed to suppress them, pointed by references to Nero and other tyrants, were taken as attacks on the king, Charles I.

William Noy as attorney-general instituted proceedings against Prynne in the Star-chamber. After a year's imprisonment in the Tower of London, he was sentenced (17 February 1634) to be imprisoned during life, to be fined £5,000, to be expelled from Lincoln's Inn, to be deprived of his degree by the University of Oxford, and to lose parts of both his ears in the pillory. Prynne was pilloried on 7 May and 10 May.

On 11 June he addressed to Archbishop Laud, whom he regarded as his chief persecutor, a letter charging him with illegality and injustice. Laud handed the letter to the attorney-general as material for a new prosecution, but when Prynne was required to own his handwriting, he contrived to get hold of the letter and tore it to pieces. In the Tower Prynne wrote and published anonymous tracts against episcopacy and against the Book of Sports. In one he introduced Noy's recent death as a warning. Elsewhere he attacked prelates in general (1635). An anonymous attack on Matthew Wren, bishop of Norwich brought him again before the Star-chamber. On 14 June 1637 Prynne was sentenced once more to a fine of £5,000, to imprisonment for life, and to lose the rest of his ears. At the proposal of Chief-justice John Finch he was also to be branded on the cheeks with the letters S. L., signifying 'seditious libeller'. Prynne was pilloried on 30 June in company with Henry Burton and John Bastwick, and Prynne was handled barbarously by the executioner. He made, as he returned to his prison, a couple of Latin verses explaining the 'S. L.' with which he was branded to mean 'stigmata laudis' ("sign of praise", or "sign of Laud").

Calvin Bruen
Ormerod, in his " History of Cheshire," writes that:


 * "Tarvin was for a long time after John Bruen's death, the seat of Puritanism, and that his son, Calvin Bruen, was brought into trouble on account of his attention to the famous Mr. Prynne, when conveyed through Chester to the castle of Caernarvon."

Puritanism

 * The Culture of English Puritanism 1560-1700;
 * Early modern Chester 1550-1762: Religion, 1550-1642;
 * RATCLIFFE, John (-d.1633), of Northgate Street, St. Oswald's, Chester, Cheshire;
 * Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe;
 * John Bruen of Stapleford (1560–1625) and his Biographer (Richardson);
 * Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560-1660;