"A grotesque delusion": An anti-Pilgrim sermon at Exeter Cathedral, Exeter (September, 1920)

The 1920 Mayflower tercentenary is notable for its religious character, particularly its non-conformity. Many of the people who led the way in organising the tercentenary celebrations were members of the Free Church Council, made up of Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, and other non-Anglican Protestants. Anglicans were heavily involved in interdenominational and civic celebrations, ensuring that Mayflower commemoration was very much a national event, but this did not stop many non-conformists from viewing the tercentenary as uniquely significant for them.

Given the generally non-partisan tone taken during the tercentenary year, it was unusual for any member of the Anglican Church to engage in criticism of the Pilgrim Fathers. Even more unusual was the kind of outright venom evident in a sermon given at Exeter Cathedral by the then Dean of Exeter, Henry Gamble. The high profile of the venue and the speaker make it all the more unusual.

The Dean began by addressing the notion, popular amongst many members of the Free Churches, that the Pilgrim Fathers were “apostles of spiritual liberty”. This, he stated bluntly, was nothing more than a “grotesque delusion”. Far from being fired with the love of the New Testament, the Pilgrims were imbued with the penitential spirit of the Old, where sins were punished without mercy and God was a force to be feared more than loved. Those who continued to denounce Archbishop Laud as a persecutor would do well to see him in light of the persecution practised by his contemporaries in New England, where non-Puritans were shunned and exiled, and Quakers were actually hanged. Although even the Dean was too polite to say it, many who were seeking to celebrate the Pilgrim Fathers were the very people who would have suffered persecution in their New England.

The Dean went on to puncture another over-inflated belief: that the Pilgrims were the root of America’s liberal tendencies. Far from it: the Pilgrims and their Puritan brethren, like the American advocates of Prohibition, had tried to impose righteousness by force. This tendency to enforce standards of godly behaviour and to police men’s souls was and remained more prevalent amongst Americans than amongst the liberty-loving English. The Dean’s interpretation turned on its head the prevailing idea that America embodied all that was good and liberalising about English traditions. The Dean argued instead that only the most intolerant of religious men had left these shores, and they had done so to become “relentless persecutors” themselves.

While the Dean allowed that the Pilgrims had many admirable qualities, he did not seek to enumerate them, only to point out that “sweet reasonableness” was not among them. The real lesson to be learned during the Mayflower tercentenary was that liberties needed to be guarded from all kinds of tyranny, including the spirit of “persecuting Puritanism”.