THANKSGIVING

It is Generally understood that Thanksgiving Day, which is a national holiday in the United States commemorating the harvest reaped by the Pilgrims [puritans] of the Plymouth [Massachusetts] Colony in 1621, after a winter of great starvation and privation. In that year Gov. William Bradford proclaimed a day of thanksgiving, and the feast was shared by all the colonists and the neighboring Native Americans. Members of the Wampanoag tribe—who brought gifts of food as a gesture of goodwill. Although this event was an important part of American colonial history. It is important to note a little known fact, there is no evidence that any of the participants thought of the feast as a thanksgiving celebration. Two years later, during a period of drought, a day of fasting and prayer was changed to one of thanksgiving because rains came during the prayers. Gradually the custom prevailed among New Englanders to annually celebrate Thanksgiving after the harvest.

But this is only the surface of the story, this story is one of blood, torture, and religious persecution, and stems back well before the landing of the Mayflower in the new world in 1620.

The concept of religious persecution was not a new one to England, Queen Elizabeth reestablished the Protestant religion in England. In 1559, Cranmer's [revised] Book of Common Prayer became the law of English liturgy. The mass was outlawed, and Englishmen were compelled to attend the Anglican Church or pay a shilling. Catholics were forbidden to even hold Catholic literature. The government ordered the destruction of religious images in churches. In 1581, Parliament passed a law that conversion to Catholicism would be punished as high treason. Over 100 priests and 60 laymen were executed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

English persecution under the reign of Elizabeth, however, did not confine itself solely to the Catholics. The Puritans also felt the heavy hand of the state. John Whitgift, her minister in the Canterbury see, subjected Puritan preachers who refused to support the state religion to such intense religious inquiry that it was compared to the worst stories told about the Spanish Inquisition.

The Protestant historian William Lecky (1838-1903) summarizes the situation in his book A History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (1865):

When he resided there as Viceroy the Scottish Parliament, at the urgent request of James VI [soon to be James I of England], enacted a new laws of unprecedented severity against Dissenters.He, amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek and seeing them writhe while their knees were beaten flat in the boots. [Burnet, i. 583; Wodrow, III. v. 2] In this mood he became King; and he immediately demanded and obtained from the obsequious Estates of Scotland as the surest pledge of their loyalty, the most sanguinary law that has ever in our island been enacted against Protestant Nonconformists.

John Brown, a poor carrier of Lanarkshire, was, for his singular piety, commonly called the Christian carrier. Many years later, when Scotland enjoyed rest, prosperity, and religious freedom, old men who remembered the evil days described him as one versed in divine things, blameless in life, and so peaceable that the tyrants could find no offence in him except that he absented himself from the public worship of the Episcopalians. On the first of May he was cutting turf, when he was seized by Claverhouse's dragoons, rapidly examined, convicted of nonconformity, and sentenced to death. It is said that, even among the soldiers, it was not easy to find an executioner. For the wife of the poor man was present; she led one little child by the hand: it was easy to see that she was about to give birth to another; and even those wild and hardhearted men, who nicknamed one another Beelzebub and Apollyon, shrank from the great wickedness of butchering her husband before her face. The prisoner, meanwhile, raised above himself by the near prospect of eternity, prayed loud and fervently as one inspired, till Claverhouse, in a fury, shot him dead. It was reported by credible witnesses that the widow cried out in her agony, "Well, sir, well; the day of reckoning will come;" and that the murderer replied, "To man I can answer for what I have done; and as for God, I will take him into mine own hand." Yet it was rumoured that even on his seared conscience and adamantine heart the dying ejaculations of his victim made an impression which was never effaced.[Wodrow, III. ix, 6.]

On the fifth of May two artisans, Peter Gillies and John Bryce, were tried in Ayrshire by a military tribunal consisting of fifteen soldiers. The indictment is still extant. The prisoners were charged, not with any act of rebellion, but with holding the same pernicious doctrines which had impelled others to rebel, and with wanting only opportunity to act upon those doctrines. The proceeding was summary. In a few hours the two culprits were convicted, hanged, and flung together into a hole under the gallows. [Wodrow, III. ix, 6]

The eleventh of May was made remarkable by more than one great crime. Some rigid Calvinists had from the doctrine of reprobation drawn the consequence that to pray for any person who had been predestined to perdition was an act of mutiny against the eternal decrees of the Supreme Being. Three poor labouring men, deeply imbued with this unamiable divinity, were stopped by an officer in the neighbourhood of Glasgow. They were asked whether they would pray for King James. They refused to do so except under the condition that he was one of the elect. A file of musketeers was drawn out. The prisoners knelt down; they were blindfolded; and within an hour after they had been arrested, their blood was lapped up by the dogs.[Wodrow, III. ix, 6.]

While this was done in Clydesdale, an act not less horrible was perpetrated in Eskdale. One of the proscribed Covenanters, overcome by sickness, had found shelter in the house of a respectable widow, and had died there. The corpse was discovered by the Laird of Westerhall, a petty tyrant who had, in the days of the Covenant, professed inordinate zeal for the Presbyterian Church, who had, since the Restoration, purchased the favour of the government by apostasy, and who felt towards the party which he had deserted the implacable hatred of an apostate. This man pulled down the house of the poor woman, carried away her furniture, and, leaving her and her younger children to wander in the fields, dragged her son Andrew, who was still a lad, before Claverhouse, who happened to be marching through that part of the country. Claverhouse was just then strangely lenient. Some thought that he had not been quite himself since the death of the Christian carrier, ten days before. But Westerhall was eager to signalise his loyalty, and extorted a sullen consent. The guns were loaded, and the youth was told to pull his bonnet over his face. He refused, and stood confronting his murderers with the Bible in his hand. "I can look you in the face," he said; "I have done nothing of which I need be ashamed. But how will you look in that day when you shall be judged by what is written in this book?" He fell dead, and was buried in the moor.[Wodrow, III. ix. 6. Cloud of Witnesses.]

On the same day two women, Margaret Maclachlin and Margaret Wilson, the former an aged widow, the latter a maiden of eighteen, suffered death for their religion in Wigtonshire. They were offered their lives if they would consent to abjure the cause of the insurgent Covenanters, and to attend the Episcopal worship. They refused; and they were sentenced to be drowned. They were carried to a spot which the Solway overflows twice a day, and were fastened to stakes fixed in the sand between high and low water mark. The elder sufferer was placed near to the advancing flood, in the hope that her last agonies might terrify the younger into submission. The sight was dreadful. But the courage of the survivor was sustained by an enthusiasm as lofty as any that is recorded in martyrology. She saw the sea draw nearer and nearer, but gave no sign of alarm. She prayed and sang verses of psalms till the waves choked her voice. After she had tasted the bitterness of death, she was, by a cruel mercy unbound and restored to life. When she came to herself, pitying friends and neighbours implored her to yield. "Dear Margaret, only say, God save the King!" The poor girl, true to her stern theology, gasped out, "May God save him, if it be God's will!" Her friends crowded round the presiding officer. "She has said it; indeed, sir, she has said it." "Will she take the abjuration?" he demanded. "Never!" she exclaimed. "I am Christ's: let me go!" And the waters closed over her for the last time. [Wodrow, III. ix. 6.]

Thus was Scotland governed by that prince whom ignorant men have represented as a friend of religious liberty, whose misfortune it was to be too wise and too good for the age in which he lived. Nay, even those laws which authorised him to govern thus were in his judgment reprehensibly lenient. While his officers were committing the murders which have just been related, he was urging the Scottish Parliament to pass a new Act compared with which all former Acts might be called merciful.

JAMES ASCENDS THE THRONE OF ENGLAND, THE BLOODY HANDS OF THE KING WHO WOULD CREATE A BIBLE,

In 1603 Queen Elizabeth I Died, her sucseser was her nephew (son of Mary Queen of Scots, who was beheaded by Elizabeth) James the VI of Scotland [James the I of England] who among his many faults, preferred young boys to adult women. He was a flaming homosexual. His activities in that regard have been recorded in numerous books and public records. Also among his cheif faults was his lack of religious tolerance. Under the reign of King James I [the King who created the Bible that still bears his name] The persecution continued. James I (1566-1625), hated the Puritan sects with a manifold hatred, theological and political, hereditary and personal. He regarded them as the foes of Heaven, as the foes of all legitimate authority in Church and State, as his great-grandmother's foes and his grandfather's, his father's and his mother's, his brother's and his own. he adopted harsh measures against the puritans, They were imprisoned, scourged and pilloried. Some of them even had their ears cut off and their noses split.

As an example, one woman who insisted on keeping Saturday as the Sabbath was imprisoned for 11 years. In fact, it was continued religious tension between the Puritans and the established church that led to the revolution in the mid-17th century, which ultimately ended in the execution of his son Charles I.

It was because of there rejection of James's theory of the "Divine right as king", That caused the King to come out openly and condemn the Puritan Religion and it' s translation Bible:

The Puritans had to meet secretly for there religious services, and were hunted continually by the authorities--and when caught, thrown in jail or killed.

By 1607, they could no longer take the persecution, and made their escape to Amsterdam, Holland, and a year later moved to Leyden where they established their congregation.

The Pilgrims left England for America to escape religious persecution. They landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on December 1620. Plymouth became the first permanent European settlement in New England. This painting depicts the first sermon on shore.

Britain's King James, hearing of the Pilgrims' arrival in Leyden, sent a letter of protest to the town authorities. Jan Van Hout, secretary of the City of Leyden, gave a polite reply, but made no effort to either expel the Pilgrims or help King James capture them.[John Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and Their Puritan Successors, (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1896), pp. 120-121.]

The Pilgrims took advantage of Holland's laissez-faire government to set up a small publishing house. Working near the limits of the long arm of King James, William Brewster With the help of Reynolds, a master printer, and his young assistant Edward Winslow, set up and ran a printing press where the Puritan’s produced between 15 and 20 tracts and books anonymously. These pamphlets and books were then secretly smuggled to England. King James's government ruled these pamphlets as treasonable Unfortunately, the Dutch could not withstand the pressure from the English government forever and were compelled to shut down Brewster's press in 1619. Yet they refused to arrest Brewster himself.[Sherwood, p. 123.]

After living in Leiden for more than ten years, some members of the group voted to emigrate to America. The voyage was financed by a group of London investors who were promised produce from America in exchange for their assistance. On September 16, 1620, these Separatists were part of a group numbering 102 men, women, and children who left Plymouth, England, for America on the Mayflower. On November 21, the Mayflower dropped anchor in the sheltered harbor off the site of present-day Provincetown, Massachusetts. On December 21, after an exploratory voyage along Cape Cod, the Pilgrims landed and disembarked from the Mayflower near the head of the cape and founded Plymouth Colony.

Thus the Puritans that went to New England had first hand experience of religious persecution. One would expect them to be more tolerant of dissent, as they knew what it was like to be on the wrong end of the religious stick. Alas, it was not the case at all. The Puritans in New England were equally zealous in persecuting dissenters. Those who taught deviant doctrines were mutilated (such as having their ears chopped off) or hanged. Catholics and Quakers were also severely persecuted by the Puritans in New England.[Haught, Holy Horrors: p117-124]

Although they were victims of religious persecution in Europe, the Puritans supported the Old World theory that sanctioned it, the need for uniformity of religion in the state. Once in control in New England, they sought to break "the very neck of Schism and vile opinions." The "business" of the first settlers, a Puritan minister recalled in 1681, "was not Toleration, but [they] were professed enemies of it." Puritans expelled dissenters from their colonies, a fate that in 1636 befell Roger Williams and in 1638 Anne Hutchinson, America's first major female religious leader. Those who defied the Puritans by persistently returning to their jurisdictions risked capital punishment, a penalty imposed on four Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Reflecting on the seventeenth century's intolerance, Thomas Jefferson was unwilling to concede to Virginians any moral superiority to the Puritans. Beginning in 1659 Virginia enacted anti-Quaker laws, including the death penalty for refractory Quakers. Jefferson surmised that "if no capital execution took place here, as did in New England, it was not owing to the moderation of the church, or the spirit of the legislature."

At least four Quakers were hanged by the Puritans for their beliefs. The Puritans were also responsible for the execution of twenty people for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. [Haught, Holy Horrors: p117-124]