Chapter Six — Onto England

At its narrowest point along the white cliffs of Dover, the English Channel is just over twenty miles wide. In 1567, the first refugees fleeing the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, perhaps including the lawyer Jean Lettin III, landed north of Dover, near the coastal town of Sandwich, after boarding boats at Nieuwpoort, Flanders. That’s a sixty-two mile crossing over the cold, choppy waters of the North Sea. 

There’s a long history of invading armies, terrified refugees and retreating soldiers crossing the channel, including along the bloody World War II staging grounds at Dunkirk and Normandy. Sandwich is famous for several things, first as the landing place of the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43. The town’s culinary fame would come much later, in the eighteenth century, when an English nobleman, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, devised a snack that would allow him to have a meal without getting up from his gaming table. A servant brought him a slab of meat between two slices of bread, inspiring other players to order  “the same as Sandwich.”

A couple of centuries later, in the 1970s, as an undergraduate studying in the British Midlands, I made my first channel crossing on the Dover-Calais ferry, which took about forty minutes. It was winter break and I’d tossed on my backpack and was headed via train and hitchhiking to exotic Morocco, blissfully unaware that my ancestors had crossed these same waters four centuries earlier. Twenty years after my initial crossing, the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, allowing trains to roar under the seabed at ninety-nine miles per hour on a two-hour trip from London to Paris. 

In peaceful times, the English Channel was and is one of the busiest shipping waterways in the world. Since the fourteenth century, there’d been a lively trade between Flanders and Britain, including the shipping of raw wool and finished textiles back and forth across the North Sea. That history would provide the foundation for the Flemish refugee settlement at Norwich, England, which is where the Lettin family regrouped following the horrific implosion of civilized life in the Low Countries. 

Earlier in the sixteenth century, England had established itself as a safe haven for Protestant fugitives, and for that we can thank one man. King Henry VIII (1491 to 1547) was a contemporary to Luther, Calvin and Erasmus. His infamous dispute with the pope over the annulment of his first (of six) marriages inspired the English Reformation, his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, the British seizure of church properties, and his establishment of himself as the divine head of the newly formed Church of England. 

By the time of the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566 and the invasion the following year by the Duke of Alva, England was living under the long rule of Elizabeth I, the daughter of King Henry and Anne Boleyn. (Henry would later accuse Anne of treason and have her beheaded, clearing the way for his third wife.)  By the 1560s, Britain had already seen the brief reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI, and the ascension of his daughter, Queen Mary I, who reigned from July of 1553 to November 1558. 

Mary tried to reverse her father’s religious revolution and bring England back into the Roman Catholic fold. In that effort, she burned 280 religious dissenters at the stake and married Philip II, the Hapsburg monarch and Spanish king who ruthlessly put down the Dutch/Flemish Revolt. During the five-year reign of “Bloody Mary,”  early Protestant refugees had fled England and the “stranger churches” they formed were shut down, only to be revived in short order under her successor, Queen Elizabeth. 

One of the reasons that Norwich opened its city gates to the refugees in 1567 was that its Anglican bishop had himself been a British refugee in Zurich under Mary’s reign, which predisposed him to lend a helping hand to the Flemish strangers. Another reason was Norwich was a town in economic decline. It had abandoned buildings and was much in need of some entrepreneurial spirit, something it got from desperate textile workers fleeing the horror that was unfolding in Flanders and neighboring provinces. 

So how did Jean Lettin III, a lawyer in Malines, make his way to Norwich, and what kind of reception did he get? As the seagull flies, it’s 175 miles from Malines (now Mechelen, Belgium)  to Norwich, England, with about a hundred of those miles crossing the North Sea. Today, the ferry trip from Zeebrugge, Belgium, to Hull, England, a port city north of Norwich, takes a little over thirteen hours. The quickest way to make the trip is by train via London. That way, you can leave Mechelen at 6 pm and fall into bed at a hotel near the Norwich train station before midnight.

Judging from the letters of the Flemish strangers, the typical family escape strategy from the Inquisition was for the fugitive husband to make his way to England, and then arrange for their wives and children to follow.  Some of the refugees in 1567, perhaps including some of the Lettins, booked passage on a sailing ship piloted by a captain named (appropriately enough) Wulfaert Boeteman, who brought families from Nieuwpoort, Flanders to Norwich via the coastal town of Yarmouth. That’s 111 miles heading north across the channel, then another twenty miles up the River Yare to Norwich. 

There were other options. Many Dutch merchants were based in London in the second half of the sixteenth century. There was a lively trade, including a bustling smuggling business to escape paying duties, so it’s likely that human cargo was also snuck onto the British Isles through these pirate routes. At any time during these years, there would be dozens of Dutch ships in Plymouth, England. Fifty years later, it was from this harbor that the Pilgrims famously headed out for the New World, where they founded Plymouth Colony, the second British outpost in the New World, after Jamestown.

One way or another, we know that a family of Lettins found their way to Norwich. 

Jean Lettin III appears in British historical records on a list of the members of the Dutch Church in Norwich, England in 1568. There are hundreds of people on this list, which includes their occupation, where they were from, when they arrived, and who they lived with in Norwich. Here’s my ancestor’s entry:

Letten, Jan, wool comber, Flanders, 1567. Wife and young son, one servant. 

Name spellings were fluid,  especially during this transition from French to Flemish to English. My ancestral search has taken me back to a town in northern France in the 1400s, when a man named Gehan Lettin served as a functionary for the dukes of Burgundy, who then ruled over the Netherlands. The evolution of the name from “Lettin” to “Letten” to “Lattin” would continue for another couple centuries.  We see this in the Revolutionary War records of my eighteenth century American ancestor,  David Lattin, who served with the Connecticut Militia in the 1770s. His records include a note on an envelope clarifying the fact that David “Lettin” and David “Lattin” were, in fact, the same person. 

Two hundred years earlier, in Norwich, we can deduce a few things from these twelve words:

Letten, Jan, wool comber, Flanders, 1567. Wife and young son, one servant. 

“Wool comber” was by far one of the most common occupation listed in this church registry. Others included weaver, cap maker, carpenter, shoemaker, merchant, sailor, tailor, fuller (one who cleans wool) and a single bookseller. Those who are not listed with family members are identified as bachelor, spinster or widow. 

What separates Jan Letten is the fact he is the only wool comber who is listed as having a servant in his household. This tells me that he was a man of relative means, and that his real trade was lawyer, a profession he would not be entitled to practice in England, and one that may have drawn attention to him. I suspect that many of these “wool combers” may have been that in name only, or they were forced to practice in that lowly trade because they had no other job options. 

Wool combing was the time-consuming craft of using wooden and metal combs to fluff up and separate the fibers from sheep fleece, getting the raw fleece into a condition in which it could be spun into yarn and thread and then woven into fabric. These were the arts that had allowed the cloth towns of Flanders to prosper under the dukes of Burgundy in the “Golden Age” of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, Britain specifically allowed these refugees to settle in Norwich for the express purpose of establishing this textile trade in England. Or, as William Charles Moens puts it in his nineteenth century history of  The Walloons and their Church at Norwich, “The strangers had obtained license from the Queen to exercise the making of Flanders commodities of wool in her Majesty’s dominions.”

Today, it’s impossible to read the story of the Flemish immigrants without thinking of the plight of refugees fleeing political and economic oppression in Mexico and the Muslim world. The debates in sixteenth century England are remarkably similar across nearly five centuries. Who should be allowed to enter? Those in greatest need, or those with skills we need or who will take the jobs we disdain. Will these immigrants take wanted jobs away from the rest of us? And what about all the “animals” and “criminals” flooding our borders? 

By 1568, the year that the list of church members in Norwich was put together in a government effort to keep tabs on the refugees, there were 1,132 Flemish-speaking strangers and 339 Walloon or French-speaking strangers in the walled city. One year later, in November of 1569, that number had nearly doubled. There were 2,866 strangers in Norwich, including 792 men, 681 women, 261 servants, and 1,132 children. One of those children was the young son of the “wool comber” Jan Letten. Descending from this boy would be Richard Lettin, who would bring my family to the New World  eight decades later, in 1638.

As the number of refugees swelled, so did the slanders meant to demonize them. There were rising complaints that “the moste dysordered persons walked late in the streets of the citye dronken and of greate  dysorder.” 

In Spain, Philip II warned the British authorities that religious and political troublemakers were sneaking in amongst the strangers. Today, we call these people “radical Muslim terrorists.” This prompted officials in London in the fall of 1571 to note that “besyde a great multitude of good,honeste, and devote, poore, and afflicted people, there are at sondry  ports and cryckes into the realm” others who might corrupt the “naturall good subjects.”

Two years later, food scarcities may have caused the mayor to rule that no strangers should use “sweete barreled butter” in making their woolen goods, but only “ciuyll oyle” or “whale butter” in the making of textiles. No stranger baker should bake “anye manner of whight bread at all, but onely bread of meale.” Those wanting white bread were to “buye it at the Inglishe bakers.” Today, we say “Buy American.”

Despite these early warning signs of rising xenophobia, Queen Elizabeth I exhibited a welcoming spirit toward the Dutch and Flemish strangers during a visit to Norwich on August 16, 1578. To prepare for her visit, houses were repaired and the town decorated. A special presentation was made at an “artizans strangers’ pageant” on St. Stephen’s Street, where a forty-foot-long and eight-foot-wide stage was constructed to display the tools and techniques of the textile trade. Eight girls spun yarn on stage, while “a pritty boy richly apparelled”  addressed Her Majesty:

Most gracious prince, undoubted sovereign Queen;
Our only joy next God, and chief defence,
In this small shew, our whole estate is seen.
The wealth we have, we find proceed from thence,
The idle hand hath here no place to feed,
The painful wight hath still to serve his need. 

Later, in an address during the queen’s visit, one of the ministers of the Dutch Church, Hermanus Modet, delivered a formal address in Latin. The stranger preacher addressed the monarch as “O most excellent Queen, the nurse of Christ’s church,” praising her “zeal of godliness.” In thanking her for providing refuge, Modet declared, “The very calamity of godly men, and tears of the afflicted, the tears I say of faithful Christians, have thoroughly moved thee to defend and protect the miserable and dispersed members of Christ exposed to every kind of injury, frightened by a thousand deaths, with the safety and preservation as well of mind as body.”

Upon leaving the city, the queen presented the stranger churches with a gift of thirty pounds, and recommended to the mayor and the aldermen of Norwich that the strangers “should not be oppressed in any manner.”

Yet another kind of oppression — a viral one — was about to inflict the entire city of Norwich. Members of the Queen’s entourage from London apparently infected the city with a disease that devastated the community. Or, as it was put at the time, “the traines of her Majesty’s carriage being many of them infected, lefte the plague behind them, which so increased and contynued.” Over the next six months, in a grim reminder of the many perils of living in sixteenth century Europe, 2,335 English and 2,482 strangers died from the plague in the city of Norwich. It’s not clear how many members of the Lettin family were living in Norwich, and whether any of them died, during the six months that the plague devastated the city in 1578 and 1579. 

According to the Lattin family history passed down to me, two of the children of the Jean Lettin moved to London with their wives and children at some point between the family’s arrival in 1567 and Richard Lettin’s departure to the New World in 1638. Some Lettins are said to have been buried in London at St. Dionis Back Church and All Hallows Church, indicating that they tried to assimilate into English society. 

Those eight decades of my ancestors time in England began under the relative stability of  Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603. Today, the Elizabethan Era is remembered as a time that saw a flourishing of the arts, most notably the work of the playwrights Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Marlowe, who would become the lesser known of those literary giants, is a mysterious historical character — and one who played a minor role in a xenophobic drama that would chase the Lettins out of London and across the Atlantic. 

Born in Canterbury in 1564 to the wife of a shoemaker, Marlowe may have began his short career as a spy in the Protestant/Catholic intrigue that enlivened the succession of British monarchs in the sixteenth century. Legends abound about his true religious beliefs and sexual preferences, tall tales that emerged in an era when being an atheist or a homosexual could get one burned at the stake. Marlowe, who helped shape the work of Shakespeare, wrote such plays as The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus, based on the German legend of a scholar’s dealings with the devil. 

Some literary historians think Marlowe was the author of a vicious poem that attacked the Protestant refugees who’d left the Low Countries and were living in London in the 1590s. Just as The Jew of Malta reflected English anxieties about European Jews, the so-called “Dutch Church Libel” fed the demonization and scapegoating of these Calvinist strangers. The poem compares them to the Jews, expresses resentments about their economic success as refugees, and accuses them of secretly being Catholic, thus enemies of the English Reformation forces then controlling the monarchy. 

The poem, nailed to the door of one of the refugee churches in London, was one of several anti-immigrant handbills posted around the city in 1593. Its target is clear from the first line. The diatribe is addressed to “ye strangers” that  “inhabite in this lande.” It then warns them to “savegard of your lyves. Your goods, your children, & your dearest wives.”

It later laments:

Raysing of rents was never knowne before
Living farre better then at native home
And our pore soules, are cleane thrust out of dore
And to the warres are sent abroade to Rome,

Other lines claim that “with Spanish gold, you all are infected.” These are not noble men, but “men to be rejected.” 

And every merchant hath three trades at least…
& with our store continually you feast.

Profits from their work in England, the poem alleges, are sent abroad to “fight it out for Fraunce & Belgia,” referring to the Catholic enemies of the British crown. 

The poem ends with a call to arms, for true Englishmen to unsheathe their swords against the strangers “to shedd their blood” so they will “Fly, Flye & never returne.”

Authorship has been attributed to Marlowe because the unsigned play has several clear references to his works. Some scholars, however, have speculated that enemies of  Marlowe penned the poem to frame the famous author. 

After one of Marlowe’s associates was arrested for inciting violence against the strangers, the playwright was ordered to stand before a government panel that wanted to examine his possible role in the Dutch Church Libel. But ten days later, before he was able to face the Privy Council,  Marlowe was stabbed to death in a tavern. There are numerous opinions regarding his culpability in that libelous conspiracy, along with various theories as to the real reason he was murdered, including one scenario in which Christopher Marlowe faked his death at age twenty-nine and continued to write plays falsely attributed to William Shakespeare. 

Regardless of  Marlowe’s fate, the persecution of the Dutch and Flemish refugees continued in the opening decades of the seventeenth century, which saw the unfolding of the English civil war between forces aligned with monarchy and the rising British Parliament. Queen Elizabeth I’s death in 1603 ushered in two decades of English rule by James I, the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary’s unwise alliance with the French Catholic monarchy prompted a rebellion among the nobleman in that northern domain. The Scottish queen fled to England, only to be beheaded there in 1587 as a Roman Catholic threat to the Elizabethan throne. Her son, James, embraced the Presbyterian church as Mary’s successor as the king of Scotland. His royal and religious maneuverings positioned him to succeed the childless Elizabeth and assume the English throne. 

James is most remembered today for overseeing the publication in 1611 of a new authorized English translation of the Bible. That King James Version is still the text used by many American evangelicals, including by Protestant fundamentalists who seem to think it it was more-or-less written by hand of God. 

King James died in 1625. His second son, Charles, became the monarch of England, Scotland and Wales — beginning a tumultuous 24-year reign which resulted in the English Civil War and the flight of the Lettin family to the New World. Charles is remembered as a tyrannical monarch who believed in the divine right of kings and favored a Church of England that seemed too much like the Church of Rome. He married a Roman Catholic, the Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria of France, and supported the high church Anglican ecclesiastics of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury.  The archbishop’s church policy, known as Laudianism, along with his political views, did not bode well for refugees from the Low Countries nor their English-born descendants, including, apparently, one named enterprising young man named Richard Lettin. 

From the beginning of his long church career, Laud was more focused on reconciling the English people with the Roman Catholic Church than he was with forging ties with Protestant refugees fleeing France, Flanders or Holland. Reformist critics accused Laud of poisoning the English church with his “popish drugs and Romish innovations.” Laud sought to restrict the English-born children and grandchildren of the Netherlandish refugees from being baptized in the stranger churches, arguing that it was time for them to join the Church of England. He also sought to impose the rituals and liturgies of the Anglican church onto Presbyterian and other “nonconformist” churches. 

“Many of the stranger families left the kingdom,” writes Moen in his history of the Norwich refugees. “About a hundred and forty families emigrated from Norwich to Holland, which received them hospitably…But the greater number of exiles emigrated with their families to North America, and swelled the numbers of the little colony already formed in Massachusetts Bay.”

Another historian estimated that in the year 1636 more than 2,000 of the Low Countries refugees made “the exodus from Norwich to New England.” 

In the end, Laud did not fare better than the non-conforming refugees he sought to expel. 

He was accused of treason by the Long Parliament of 1640 and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he remained during the early years of English Civil War. Despite being granted a royal pardon by King Charles, William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded on Tower Hill on January 10, 1645.

According to Lettin family lore, some of my ancestors are buried just down the street, at All Hallows-by the-Tower Church in London. But not the ancestor who pushes our story forward, Richard Lettin set sail for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638, leaving behind the religious strife of the Old World, ready for a new start.  

My quest to understand what the Lattins may have faced during seventy years in England produced several documents indicating that some members of my clan crossed the North Sea more than a decade before the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566 and the invasion the following year by the Duke of Alva. 

Information compiled by the Genealogical Society of Utah and contained in a data base called “English Births and Christenings, 1538-1975” shows a Richard Letten christening his daughter, Agnes Letten, on March 22, 1553. The christening place was the ancient parish Church of St. James the Apostle in Pulloxhill, a tiny village in Bedfordshire, about forty miles north of London. Richard Letten is also listed as christening a son, Thomas, inside that Norman era church on November 14, 1566, showing that the family may have established itself in the region before the wars of religion tore their homeland apart. It’s unclear exactly what the relationship is between these “Lettens” and the Jean Lettin III and Richard Lettin of this saga.

Pulloxhill, founded more than a thousand years ago, was the original home of the family of John Bunyan, the famous Puritan preacher and author of the celebrated Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan was ten years old in 1638, when my ancestors left England and joined the exodus to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

Sorting out the family connections of the various Lettens who appear in these centuries-old English christening records is no simple task.  

A “John Letten” christened a son, Richard, in another Bedfordshire town, Salford, on September 23, 1565. Just over two years later, on November 9, 1567, he christened a daughter, Alice, in that same church, St. Mary’s Parish. Salford is only fourteen miles from Pulloxhill, so maybe the Lettens were working a farm  halfway in between. 

Is this John Letten in Salford in 1565 the same man as the “Jan Letten” who appears as a member of the strangers’ church in Norwich in 1568 with a wife, young son and one servant? It’s about 115 miles from Salford to Norwich, but there’s good reason to believe he’s the same guy. 

Perhaps the Richard Letten who christened his son in England in 1553 was an older brother of this John/Jan Letten. Perhaps this older sibling offered his younger brother shelter and was rewarded by having his little brother name his first child after his generous uncle. And was child, this “Richard Letten,” born in England in 1565, the father or grandfather of  “Richard Lettin” who sailed for the New World in 1638? 

Perhaps his father or grandfather, the lawyer who fled the Low Countries, was required to join one of the stranger churches to safeguard his immigration status. In 1567, in the midst of the wave of refugees pouring in from the Netherlands, government officials in England required that “all strangers…who professed Christ and and Gospel must join themselves to that church.”

“Obviously,” one historian notes, “the object was not to serve the spiritual needs of the Community but to facilitate the supervision of foreigners and to have some warrant that no elements which could be regarded as revolutionary…would find their way into the Community.”

According to the family history passed down by my Aunt Jennie, the Jean Lettin who fled Flanders died in Norwich in 1640. Several of his children and grandchildren settled in London for a time before one of them, Richard Lettin, set out for the colonies.

The fact that some of those who stayed behind were buried in two London churches, All Hallows Church and St. Dionis Back Church, shows that at least some of my Lattin ancestors were eager to assimilate into mainstream English society. They were not strident Reform church members or Protestants with Puritan tendencies. Refugees with those tendencies — or simply immigrants who were not eager or able to assimilate into English society — stuck close to a huge sanctuary that King Edward VI set aside for Dutch and Flemish refugees in London. That church, on Old Broad Street in London and known as Austin Friars, had been seized during Henry VIII’s reign from its previous owners, the Augustinians, a Roman Catholic religious order.

This sprawling church community had been founded back in 1253, when the Augustinian Friars, hermits affiliated with the Order of St. Augustine, established themselves in London. Under the secularization of Henry VIII, monasteries and other church properties were forcibly expropriated by the king. In 1538, the Austin Friars priory was dissolved and its possessions confiscated. Monks were evicted and some of the buildings were handed over to the king’s cronies. Monuments and tombstones were sold off. One building was used to store corn and coal. Another was turned into a horse stable.

Thomas Cromwell, the English lawyer and advisor to Henry VIII, built  a grand house in the monastery courtyard, which he briefly enjoyed before falling out of favor and losing his head. 

Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, assumed the throne in 1547, and through his regent continued the Protestant evolution in England, taking it along somewhat more Swiss-Calvinist lines, while being sure to retain the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and safeguard the role of bishops in governing the church. In the 1550 royal charter that turned Austin Friars over to the Dutch refugees, Edward proclaimed that the church had been “delivered from the tyranny of the Papacy” by his father. He was now turning over the keys “for exiles who for the sake of religion are broken with calamity and afflicted.”

At the time, London was densely populated. The church spire at Austin Friars was one of 120 that rose above the town. At the same time, there were still plenty of open fields in the city, and many of the principal streets had yet to be paved.  Refuse filled narrow streets, only worsening the plagues that periodically devastated the population. Street lighting was primitive, and crime flourished in the bustling  port town. 

There were rowdy, criminal elements everywhere, including among the Dutch and Flemish refugees. In helping to establish the Reformed movement in London, Edward and his counsellors were hoping that the moral teachings of the Protestants would be a civilizing inspiration for the new arrivals. In fact, in 1553 the government ruled that refugees from the Low Countries had to first be a member of Austin Friars before they could be granted citizenship in London. 

The Dutch/Flemish community was to mostly govern itself through the office of a superintendent and two ministers. One of them, Wouter Delensus, was born in Alkmaar and had been living in London since 1539. The other, Maarten Micron, the “small one,” was born in Ghent and had originally worked as a physician before fleeing first to Germany on account of his faith. He arrived in London in 1549. 

Micron, who fled to back to mainland Europe during the Catholic reign of “Bloody Mary,” emerged as one of the main Protestant critics of the Family of Love and  David Joris, an early associate of Hendrik Niclaes and himself a controversial pastor. Micron condemned the two sect leaders for promoting a “false liberty” who  “deceive the world under the amiable title of a certain peace.” They espouse a doctrine of free love and ignore “the difference of good and evil.”

Micron also condemned the Family of Love (see details in the previous chapter) for not clearly breaking away from the “impure sacrifices and ceremonies of the Romish Church” and “outwardly join themselves to all religious and wicked factions.” It’s clear from the attacks on the Family of Love in England from Micron and  other Protestant critics that this and other “libertine sects” were popular among the merchant scholars in the refugee community in London — perhaps including Richard Lettin and his lawyerly ancestors. 

The greatest calamity to hit the immigrant church unfolded just three years after it was established, in the summer of 1553, when the sixteen-year-old King Edward died and Mary, his half-sister, the Roman Catholic daughter of Henry VIII, assumed the thrown and briefly restored papal power.

Some foreign and English-born church reformers fled to the European mainland during the five  years Bloody Mary held power. Others laid low until Queen Elizabeth took the throne and resumed the Protestant reforms in 1558.

The  Dutch/Flemish church community in London grew in the 1560s. There were approximately 500 members at Austin Friars in 1561, but nearly 2,000 by the end of the decade. In the 1570s, the refugees in London and Norwich sent money and volunteer soldiers to help the Prince of Orange battle the counter-Reformation forces in the Low Countries. 

During the long Elizabethan period, which continued into the early years of the seventeenth century, the refugees from the Low Countries were allowed to remain as long as they charted a moderate course through the turbulent religious and political waters of the era. They had to oppose the papists and their Hapsburg allies in Madrid. Merchants among the refugees were forbidden by Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Council to conduct any business with the Kingdom of Spain. At the same time, they had to show allegiance to the British throne and at least nominal respect for bishops representing the newly minted Church of England. 

Elizabeth and her advisors clearly differentiated between the Calvinists and the Anabaptists, who were seen as the anarchists of the Reformation, a radical movement that did not bow down to the authority of church or state.  The Netherlandish immigrants in Norwich, London, Sandwich and elsewhere were given an extraordinary amount of autonomy —  more freedom of religion than native-born communicants with the Church of England. At the same time, the refugees had to submit to a certain amount of oversight by local Anglican bishops. 

There were a series of minor conflicts over local church autonomy in the final decades of the sixteenth and opening decades of the seventeenth centuries. This story is told in great detail in a book published in 1950 to mark the 400th anniversary of the community that grew out of Edward VI’s decision to turn the Augustine monastery over to the refugees.  “By the very nature of things,” writes church historian J. Lindeboom, “London was bound to be a meeting place of preachers with unorthodox tendencies, exiles unable to find another place of refuge on account of their heterodox views.”

London, then and now, was a city filled with temptations. Church records show to what extent the Austin Friars shepherds tried to keep their flock from indulging in sinful tendencies once they arrived in England, a place where many felt — for better or worse — torn loose from the ties of tradition. There were “numerous cases of unfaithfulness, adultery and bigamy, of immorality, drunkenness and dissoluteness, of quarreling, calumny and fighting, of deceit in business dealings and trade.”

In 1570, for example, objections were raised regarding the marriage of a man named Pieter de Brune, who was said to have promised himself to another woman back in Ghent. De Brune denied those claims, pointing out that the Flemish woman back home was “a lady of easy virtue.” The groom-to-be was required to sign a notarized statement that the woman across the North Sea was a prostitute, and wait until the lady in Ghent had three months to reply to that allegation. 

There were no mention of any members of the Letten clan in this history of the Austin Friars community, but Lindeboom does tell the story of one immigrant in 1576 who was in a somewhat similar situation to my ancestor — the  Flemish lawyer reduced to working in Norwich as a woolcomber. 

“There was a former Augustine monk, who had fled from Ypres and found employment as a woolcomber. It is messy work which he will come to dislike in the long run. The Sandwich Community writes that he is better suited to work connected with some kind of study and asks London to have him taught bookbinding.”

At the same time, there were limitations placed on the occupational options of learned refugees. In 1590, a decree by the Common Council of London forbade foreign school teachers from working as scriveners, which had been the trade of three generations of Lettins back in the Low Countries.  

Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, followed by the accession of King James to the crown, altered the delicate royal arrangement with the refugees. While he would be famous for centuries for sponsoring his still-popular King James Bible, the new monarch also saw the importance of keeping bishops in ultimate command of church affairs. James offered the following short-hand explanation for this policy, remarking in the face of Puritan demands for greater local church autonomy, “no Bishop, no King.”

In 1619, the Norwich community complained that the local Anglican bishop ruled that the immigrant church members must kneel when celebrating communion, a posture seen as “papist”  by some  Reformed church communicants. That same year, King James re-imposed the old prohibition of eating meat on fasting days and fixed fish-days, prompting some Reformed church members to remark that the ruling “smells of the old dough.”

But it was the elevation of the aforementioned Archbishop Laud to the seat of Canterbury in 1633 that caused the greatest distress to the Dutch and Flemish Protestants in London.  In May 1637, the year before Richard Lettin left for the New World, Archbishop Laud and King Charles I ordered “the Walloons and other strangers in my diocese,” to report to their local Anglican parish. It had, he argued, been more than eighty years  since King Edward gave the refugees their own parish. It was time for them to join English society, or go elsewhere. 

For Richard Lettin and thousands of other people of the Low Countries, that elsewhere was at the other end of a perilous journey across the North Atlantic. As we saw in Chapter One, Richard would make that  pilgrimage to the New World, where he’d met his second wife, perhaps named Christina. Together, they’d bring two sons into the world, Josiah Latting and Thomas Lattin, founding Lattingtown and establishing our clan on these shores.

The British Isles would be a respite for our wandering tribe, providing a haven that would allow us to regroup for a couple generations before heading west, forever west.  My family would make our way to California, where we would run out of real estate and find that we — or at least I — had no where to go but to finally stop and look within.

That story will unfold soon. But before turning to the maternal side of my family, to the Russian Jews and the Kubey clan, and then to my own family of origin, let’s linger for a few pages in Norwich, England, the town that first welcomed the Lattins, and remember another woman, who, like Christina, was almost forgotten in this all-too-patriarchal ancestral saga.

That woman would be Mother Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic whose life and teachings have been rediscovered, once again, by a new generation of Christians looking for lost gems in their own religious tradition. She lived in Norwich, then a bustling commercial and religious center of English life, where she had a series of visions sometime in the spring of the 1373.  But her spiritual insights were not rediscovered for three centuries, when they were first published in 1670, around the time Richard Lettin was ending his long life, half of it lived in America. 

Julian’s book, titled “Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,” is thought to be the oldest surviving book written in English by a woman author. 

Right now, in the 2020s, Mother Julian is having a moment. Maybe it’s because she, like us, survived a horrific pandemic that killed untold millions of people. She was born in Norwich in 1343 and died sometime after 1416, living the second half of her life as a hermit in a sealed room attached to St. Julian’s Church in Norwich. She was an “anchoress,” the name for a Christian woman who withdraws from the world to live a life of prayer and mortification. Julian’s self-imposed isolation may have also saved her life as she lived through a time when at least two waves of the Black Death wiped out more than half of the population of England.

Those plagues, and the social and economic tumult they sparked, inspired a bloody period of political uprisings in England. Chief among them was the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, when angry mobs stormed government buildings in London —  vandalizing buildings, burning law books, murdering politicians and demanding an end to their serfdom. Relatively speaking, the events of January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. were a picnic. 

Julian’s mystical experience occurred on May 13, 1373, during her thirtieth year, when she was so ill that she went temporarily blind and was given her last rites. Her deathbed visions, or “showings,” were written down in the immediate aftermath of the experience. Twenty years later, she composed a lengthy commentary on her revelations, giving scholars a rare opportunity to study her literary and spiritual development over two decades. She appears to have had what we now call “a near-death experience.”

By the end of her life, Julian had become a respected spiritual authority and counsellor to her religious community and assorted acolytes who came to her hermit’s cell, speaking to her through a barred window. In medieval times, Norwich was one of Europe’s most religious cities, holding space for dozens of churches and religious houses within its municipal walls. Benedictine and Bridgettine  nuns preserved Julian’s two manuscripts, which were mostly forgotten during the centuries-long tumult of endless wars and religious battles between Protestant sects and the Roman Catholic Church.  

It’s worth noting here that Mechelen (from where the Lettins fled) and Norwich (where we found refuge) were both known for hosting a large numbers of single women living together in communities known as “beguinages.”  These communes of Bequines, as their members were called, date back to the crusades, when the women left behind organized themselves into self-supporting communities. Unlike in convents, which often drew from wealthier families, women who joined a beguinage did not take lifelong vows of poverty, obedience or chastity. Some beguinages were affiliated with Dominican and Franciscan orders and cultivated intense forms of mysticism. 

Little is known of Julian’s life before her illness, her revelations, and her decision to become an anchoress. She never became a nun, and some of her biographers have speculated that she may have been a lay women or widow who lost her children during one of the plagues that tore through Norwich. We don’t even know Julian’s name at birth, and it’s assumed that she became known as Mother Julian after she made the decision to live in isolation behind a church with that name. 

Whether or not Julian ever gave birth herself, she is fondly remembered by feminist theologians for her reflections on the nature of motherhood, especially in a spiritual, symbolic sense. Many of the world’s religions use images of childbirth and motherhood to describe mystical experience. Buddha advised us to “learn to love the whole world as a mother loves her only son.” But this maternal imagery permeates Catholicism with its cultish devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Many medieval writers compared the labor pains of childbirth to the torturous death of their savior. Julian was not unique in her obsession with the bloody vision, seeing the womb of humanity in the wound that Jesus endured when a Roman soldier thrust a sword into his side. In her delirium, Julian’s sees God gazing into Christ’s wound, describing it  as “a fair and delectable place,” then reveling in the “dear and precious blood and water which he suffered to be shed for love.” Then, in Mother Julian’s vision,  Mary, the mother of Jesus, becomes the Universal Mother, almost like Christ herself. 

“So our Lady is our mother, in whom we are all enclosed and born of her in Christ, for she who is mother of our savior is mother of all who are saved in our savior; and our savior is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”

Mother Julian was an extraordinary woman for her time, but I must confess that her pronouncements about the blood of Christ are not my cup of tea. That said, there is still much in her writings that I do find inspiring, or at least comforting. Her decades-long effort to understand her visions, finally written down in the Long Text, echo a sentiment that reverberates across the centuries, from Jesus of Nazareth to Lennon and McCartney.

 All we need is love. 

“And from the time it was revealed,” Julian writes, “I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after and more…it was said: What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you?Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same.”

Her writings reveal psychological insights often that sound surprisingly modern.

 “During our lifetime here, we have in us a marvelous mixture of well-being and woe,” she tells us. In the end, Julian advises, “Do not accuse yourself that your tribulation and your woe is all your fault; for I do not want you to be immoderately depressed or sorrowful. For I tell you that whatever you do, you will have woe. And therefore I want you wisely to understand the penance which you are continually in, and to accept that meekly for your penance. And then you will truly see that all your life is profitable penance. This place is prison, this life is penance, and he wants us to rejoice in the remedy. The remedy is that our Lord is with us, protecting us and leading us into the fullness of joy.”

For writer Carol Lee Flinders, and for this writer, Julian’s greatest appeal is the primacy she places on personal experience. “She knows, and she knows she knows — not because of anything she has read in books, even holy writ, but because she has experienced it firsthand: her own ‘showings’ are for her the ultimate touchstone of belief. Her confidence is extraordinary and contagious.”

Flinder’s essay on Julian of Norwich, one of seven women mystics she profiles in a book titled Enduring Grace, is as a bridge to the four final chapters of this book. We now turn to the story of my mother’s ancestry, to the functions and dysfunctions of my family of origin. When thinking or writing about our own families, about our own mothers and fathers, there’s always the temptation to write from a wounded place. That’s fine, but Julian reminds us that sorrow or bitterness cannot be the end of the story. 

“In the parable of the servant and the lord, Julian tells us that no matter how benighted our actions, every one of us longs to be good and do the right thing,” Flinders writes. “That in itself takes us a long way toward learning to forgive ourselves and others, but the teaching of the motherhood of God takes us even further, for it maintains that every human relationship finds its fulfillment in the mystical experience. And what of the inadequacies we all feel toward those we love and who love us? the blame that keeps wanting to be put someplace? Never mind. All will be well. We can forgive our mothers, our fathers, our sons and daughters, our partners and lovers, even ourselves, for all will be well!”

**************

Author’s note:

A paperback edition of Running from Religion is available exclusively from the author. This 195-page edition includes fifteen photos and other illustrations. It costs $25, which includes shipping via USPS book rate in the United States.

Venmo your payment to @Don-Lattin, and please include your mailing address. If you’d like to send a paper check, or have other questions, please contact the author at don@donlattin.com

Chapters 1-6 of this ancestral memoir have been posted for free at lattinancestors.com. To read Chapters 7-10 and the conclusion, please support the author’s work by buying a copy. That way, you won’t miss Chapter 7, “Jewish Gangsters in the Ancestral Closet,” the wildest chapter in this saga of history and heresy.