The problem was his theology. Attersoll was a Puritan. The label is a difficult one, covering a multitude of opinions, not all consistent with one another. It was coined in the sixteenth century as a term of abuse (an Elizabethan equivalent of ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘extremist’) to refer to Protestant zealots.18 Those marginalized as Puritan by some were happily accepted as mainstream Protestants by others. They are characterized as hair-shirted ascetics who wanted to ban Christmas and close theatres, yet some of the most theatrical figures of the Elizabethan age – courtiers such as Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and Sir Walter Raleigh – were associated with the term.
Attersoll’s Puritanism was theologically absolute, and politically conservative. In 1606 he had published his first book, The Badges of Christianity. Or, A treatise of the sacraments fully declared out of the word of God. It was a critical examination of the role of various Christian rites based on a detailed examination of biblical principles. His idea was to purify religious ritual of a residue of Catholic tradition and restore it to the role ordained in the scriptures.
Like most rural communities, the villagers of Isfield were solidly anti-Catholic. However, it was nationalism, not religion, that fed their hatred of ‘papists’. Isfield was just a few miles from the south coast, which had been in a state of alert for over half a century, in constant expectation of a Catholic invasion that might well have happened but for the famous defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. But on matters of religious practice, many wanted to keep the rituals that dated back to the Catholic era. Saints’ days and sacraments were woven into the pattern of their lives. They enjoyed church ales (parish fund-raising events during which potent home brews were sold) and tansy cake. They were reassured by visitations of the sick and ‘churching’, a service for accepting the mother of a newborn back into the congregation after her confinement. Such ceremonies provided them with ‘comfort and consolation’, as Attersoll grudgingly acknowledged. But he believed comfort and consolation could never come from the cosy familiarity of empty pageants. It must come from reading the scriptures, intense self-examination, and devout prayer. He disapproved, for example, of the Catholic ritual of applying ‘extreme unction’, healing holy oil, even though it was still common practice and widely believed to cure illness. No ‘material oil’ could heal them, he protested, only the ‘precious oil of the mercy of God’.19 Illness was even to be welcomed. ‘Sickness of the body is a physic of the soul,’ Attersoll said.20
Life for the villagers was tough enough without having to put up with this, and around 1610 they attempted to oust their austere rector. ‘The calling of a Minister, is a painful and laborious, a needful and troublesome calling,’ Attersoll lamented.21 Nevertheless, he was not prepared to go, and appealed for help to Sir Henry Fanshaw, another scholar and his mentor at Cambridge, who had since become an official in the Royal Court of Exchequer.
The manner of Fanshaw’s intervention is unknown, but it was successful, and Attersoll would continue as rector of the parish for decades to come. Perhaps as a snub to his parishioners, and probably encouraged by the appearance of King James’s Authorized Version of the Bible in 1611, he devoted more time than ever to biblical analysis, producing a number of hefty tomes over the next eight years: The Historie of Balak the King and Balaam the False Prophet (1610), an exposition on the Old Testament Book of Numbers that continued The Pathway to Canaan of 1609; A Commentarie vpon the Epistle of Saint Pavle to Philemon (1612); The Neuu Couenant, or, A treatise of the sacraments (1614); and a massive combined edition of his expositions on Numbers, the Commentarie vpon the Fourth Booke of Moses, in 1618. This was prolixity even by Puritan standards, in the case of the commentary on St Paul’s letter to Philemon, five hundred plus pages arising from just one in the Bible.
He was working on the Commentarie vpon the Fourth Booke of Moses when his daughter Mary appeared at his doorstep, carrying his infant grandchild Nicholas. Attersoll was unlikely to have welcomed the interruption, particularly as he may have been expecting the Culpepers to provide for his widowed daughter. Sir Edward Culpeper had innumerable properties scattered across his Sussex estate, including many close to Attersoll’s parish. Any one of these would have provided a comfortable home for Mary and her fatherless boy. Perhaps such offers had been made, and Mary had declined them in preference for her father. If that was so, the decision was one both he and she would come to regret.
Whatever the circumstances of Mary’s arrival in Isfield, Attersoll had no option but to accommodate mother and child in the cramped rooms of his ‘cottage’ and assume responsibility as Nicholas’s guardian. Being but a ‘poor labourer in the Lord’s vineyard’, the extra cost of having to provide once more for a daughter and now a baby must have a put a strain on Attersoll’s finances, and exacerbated the bile that had built up over his material circumstances.22
There is no mention of Attersoll’s wife at the time Nicholas was in Isfield, suggesting that he was a widower and had been living alone. He had at least one son, also called William, but he was at Cambridge at the time of Mary’s return to the household, preparing dutifully to follow his father into the Church. The university fees and maintenance costs would have added a further strain on the old man’s fixed income.23 This must have made the presence of a child in the midst of Attersoll’s cloistered, scholastic world all the more disruptive.
He certainly did not like children. ‘We see by common experience, that a little child coming into the world, is one of the miser-ablest and silliest creatures that can be devised, the very lively picture of the greatest infirmity that can be imagined, more weak in body, and less able to help himself, or shift for himself, then any of the beasts of the field.’ Looking at an infant, all he could see was the image of men ‘through sin & their revolt from God fallen down into the greatest misery, and lowest degree of all wretchedness’.24
Nevertheless, the care of children was a theme of great concern to him, because it related not only to the children of parents, but also to the children of God. Protestantism was a rebellion against the father-figure of the Pope (whose very title was derived from ‘papa’, the childish word for father). Some Protestants saw this as a liberation, allowing every Christian to find their own way to Christ, carrying the Bible and their sins with them, like Bunyan’s burdened hero in The Pilgrim’s Progress. But it worried Attersoll greatly. He saw ‘godly’ Protestants as being like the Israelites of the Old Testament, escaping the tyranny of the Pope just as the Jews had thrown off the tyranny of the Pharaoh. But the Jews had needed their Moses to guide them to the Promised Land.25 This is what drew Attersoll to the study of Numbers, the fourth book of the Bible, and the penultimate section of the ‘Pentateuch’, the five books said to have been dictated directly to Moses by God. Numbers told the story of the Israelites in the Sinai desert, and Attersoll noted how, as they gathered there, they ‘murmured’ against Moses. Led by Korah, Datham, and Abi’ram, they became idolatrous, conspiring and threatening to destroy, as Attersoll put it, the ‘order and discipline of the Church’ – his intentionally anachronistic term for the religious organization around the Tabernacle, the portable structure used by the Israelites as their place of worship during the Exodus.26 ‘Thus … the wicked multitude usurped ecclesiastical authority,’ Attersoll railed, ‘and endeavoured to subvert the power of the Church-government, and to bring in a parity, that is, an horrible confusion.’ The wicked multitude of his own parish had done the same thing, as had others across the country. All around there were rebellions and usurpations, and there was a social as well as religious need for figures of authority. ‘Magistrates and rulers are needful to be set over the people of God,’ he wrote. They are the ‘father[s] of the country’.