Stuart Lincolnshire (1603–1714)

John Smyth and the Gainsborough Separatists (1603–1608)

When Elizabeth I died in 1603, the Tudor era ended and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. The Stuart dynasty had begun, but the new king inherited a Church of England still divided over how far the Reformation should go.

John Smyth, a former preacher in Lincoln, came to believe that the Reformation had not gone far enough. At Gainsborough, he rejected the Church of England altogether, and by 1607 he and his followers had formed an independent Separatist congregation.

Breaking from the established church brought the Gainsborough congregation into direct conflict with church authorities. Under growing official pressure, members sold possessions and prepared to leave England for the Dutch Republic.

By 1608, Smyth and much of his congregation had crossed the North Sea to Amsterdam. The Gainsborough Separatists had moved from rejecting the Church of England to leaving England itself.

Boston, betrayal and the Pilgrim Fathers (1607–1634)

John Smyth's Gainsborough congregation was not alone in trying to leave the Church of England and escape overseas. In 1607, while Smyth's followers prepared for exile, another Separatist congregation centred on Scrooby travelled towards Boston in search of a ship to Holland.

Among the Scrooby congregation were figures who would later be remembered among the Pilgrim Fathers. Families travelled secretly towards Boston and arranged a ship to carry them across the North Sea.

Before the congregation could leave, the ship's master betrayed the passengers to the authorities. The passengers were arrested and their money and possessions confiscated.

The betrayal at Boston did not end the congregation's attempt to escape. A later departure succeeded, and the Scrooby congregation reached Holland in 1608.

Some members eventually crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower in 1620. An attempted escape through Lincolnshire had become part of the history of the Pilgrim Fathers.

The departure of the Scrooby congregation did not end Boston's part in religious migration. John Cotton became vicar of St Botolph's Church in 1612 and pressed for further reform while remaining within the Church of England.

Growing pressure from church authorities over Cotton's refusal to conform forced him to resign and sail for Massachusetts in 1633. Anne Hutchinson of Alford, one of Cotton's followers, crossed the Atlantic in 1634.

By 1634, religious disputes that had brought betrayal and arrest at Boston in 1607 had carried people from Lincolnshire first across the North Sea and then across the Atlantic.

The drainage of the Fens and the Fen Tigers' resistance (1626–1643)

Religious conflict was not the only source of tension in Stuart Lincolnshire. While families were leaving for Holland and New England, a different struggle was beginning in the Fens over land, water and royal-backed drainage.

In 1626, Charles I backed a large drainage scheme around the Isle of Axholme and neighbouring Hatfield Chase. The Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden cut new channels to drain wet common land and turn it into farmland.

The drainage threatened an economy already built around the water. Local families grazed cattle on common land, caught fish and wildfowl and cut peat for fuel.

Investors known as Participants received shares of reclaimed land in return for financing the drainage. Land used collectively for generations was being drained, divided and transferred into private hands.

As drainage took common land out of shared use, fenland communities fought back. In southern Lincolnshire, commoners attacked works connected with the Earl of Lindsey's South Forty Foot drainage scheme.

Around Axholme, communities later remembered as the Fen Tigers tore down fences, destroyed crops and damaged drainage works.

In 1642 and 1643, the Fen Tigers ripped out floodgates at Snow Sewer and damaged the Misterton sluice, allowing water to spread back across reclaimed fields.

They could wreck individual schemes and reflood drained land, but they could not stop reclamation altogether. By 1643, engineers had already altered parts of the Fens, while the struggle over land, water and common rights remained unresolved.

The Fen Tigers' resistance echoed an earlier Lincolnshire rebellion against authority. The Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 had brought tens of thousands together against religious change and government policy, but the rising was suppressed relatively quickly.

Resistance in the Fens proved harder to extinguish. By 1642, the struggle over drainage, common rights and authority was still continuing.

As conflict between King and Parliament broke into civil war, the Fen Tigers' resistance spilled over into the opening stages of the English Civil War in Lincolnshire.

Lincolnshire divides for King and Parliament (1642–1643)

In 1642, conflict between King and Parliament became civil war. Lincolnshire divided between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces, while some communities tried to remain outside the fighting.

Other communities found their choices shaped by whichever army controlled their district. Parliamentarian forces drew much of their strength from Boston and other towns in the south-east.

Royalist forces remained powerful across much of Lindsey and among important landowning families.

Lincolnshire's roads and river crossings made the county difficult to hold. Royalist Newark stood just beyond the western border and provided a base for troops crossing the Trent.

Parliamentarian forces could draw men and supplies from the Eastern Association, while Lincoln and Gainsborough stood on routes needed by both armies.

Gainsborough became a particular prize because its Trent crossing linked Lincolnshire with Yorkshire and the Midlands. On 28 July 1643, Parliamentarian cavalry including Oliver Cromwell defeated Royalist forces outside the town.

The Parliamentarian victory was short-lived. A much larger Royalist army under the Earl of Newcastle approached from the north and forced the Parliamentarians to withdraw.

By the summer of 1643, neither side controlled Lincolnshire. Royalist and Parliamentarian forces were fighting for the towns, roads and river crossings that would decide who could move troops and supplies through the county.

Winceby, Lincoln Castle and Parliamentarian victory (1643–1651)

In autumn 1643, Parliamentarian forces besieged the Royalist garrison at Bolingbroke Castle. Around 2,500 to 3,000 Royalist cavalry and dragoons marched east from Lincoln to relieve it.

Parliamentarian cavalry moved to intercept the Royalist relief force, and on 11 October the two forces met near Winceby.

The Battle of Winceby lasted barely half an hour. Cromwell's horse was shot beneath him during the opening charge, but he mounted another horse and returned to the fight.

Parliamentarian cavalry broke the Royalist formation and turned the retreat into a rout across the Wolds. The Royalist defeat at Winceby badly weakened the Crown's military position across Lincolnshire.

Bolingbroke Castle surrendered the following month, allowing Parliamentarian forces to press their advantage across the county.

Lincoln remained contested. Royalist forces recovered the city in March 1644, but in May the Earl of Manchester returned with a Parliamentarian army.

His troops captured the lower town before fighting their way up the steep hill towards the castle and cathedral close. After several days of fighting, Parliamentarian forces captured Lincoln Castle and secured control of the city.

Royalist Newark remained the main threat on Lincolnshire's western edge until Charles I ordered its garrison to surrender in May 1646.

Royalist forces briefly returned to Lincoln in 1648, but Parliamentarian troops drove them out and defeated the retreating force at Willoughby.

The Civil War continued elsewhere until 1651, but organised Royalist power in Lincolnshire had already been broken. Winceby had weakened the Crown's field forces, Lincoln Castle had fallen, and the surrender of Newark removed the main Royalist stronghold threatening the county.

Baptists, Quakers and independent congregations (1649–1660)

When Charles I was executed in 1649, the Civil War was nearing its end and England had done more than remove a king. The execution struck at the belief that royal authority was ordained by God.

The bishops who had enforced the old Church of England hierarchy no longer governed the national church. Protestant groups that had already worshipped outside the parish system now had greater freedom to organise openly, and new congregations spread across Lincolnshire.

Thomas Grantham, born at Halton Holegate near Spilsby in 1634, joined the General Baptists and was baptised at Boston in 1653 after personally professing his faith.

Grantham later became a pastor and helped establish General Baptist congregations across southern Lincolnshire.

Quaker meetings also spread through Lincolnshire during the 1650s. Quakers rejected an ordained priesthood and gathered for worship outside the parish system, adding another independent Protestant movement to the county.

By 1660, religious separation in Lincolnshire had moved far beyond the small Separatist congregations of the early Stuart years. Baptists, Quakers and other independent groups were now worshipping outside the parish system.

When the monarchy returned that year, the restored Church of England would once again try to bring Protestant worship back under its authority.

The Restoration and the survival of Nonconformity (1660–1689)

In 1660, the monarchy was restored after eleven years without a king, and Charles II succeeded his father Charles I. This return of monarchy became known as the Restoration.

The Church of England was restored alongside the monarchy, bringing renewed pressure on Baptists, Quakers and other Protestants who continued to worship outside the established church.

Protestants who refused to return to worship within the restored Church of England became known as Nonconformists. New laws punished worship outside the established church.

Thomas Grantham petitioned Charles II on behalf of Lincolnshire Baptists, but was imprisoned in Lincoln gaol in 1662. Quakers also faced fines and imprisonment for continuing to meet, yet their congregations survived.

In 1689, the Toleration Act changed the position of Lincolnshire's Protestant Nonconformists. Most could now worship legally outside the Church of England if they met the Act's conditions and registered their meeting places.

Catholics remained excluded. The new legal freedom quickly became visible in Lincoln.

In 1689, Quakers completed a permanent meeting house at Beaumont Fee. Congregations that had spent decades meeting under threat of fines and imprisonment could now worship openly in buildings of their own.

Newton, Wesley and the end of the Stuart dynasty (1655–1714)

As Lincolnshire's Nonconformists challenged established religious authority, another kind of questioning was beginning in Grantham.

In 1655, Isaac Newton (1643–1727), born at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham, began attending the King's School. His name, carved into a window sill at the old school, can still be seen today.

Newton later studied at Cambridge, but in 1665 plague forced the university to close and he returned to Woolsthorpe.

During the next two years, Newton made some of the breakthroughs that would define his scientific career. He experimented with light and prisms, developed new mathematical methods and formed major ideas about motion and gravity.

Some of Newton's greatest scientific work therefore took shape in Lincolnshire. Woolsthorpe Manor is now cared for by the National Trust and remains open to visitors.

The apple tree associated with Newton still grows in its orchard.

In 1687, Newton published the Principia, setting out his laws of motion and universal gravitation. Ideas developed during his years at Woolsthorpe had moved from a Lincolnshire farmhouse into European science.

Queen Anne (1665–1714) succeeded to the throne in 1702. She would become the last Stuart monarch, having no surviving child to continue the dynasty.

The fenland village of Epworth, scene of the earlier drainage riots, produced another figure whose influence would reach far beyond the Stuart period.

John Wesley (1703–1791) was born at the rectory in 1703, the fifteenth child of the rector Samuel Wesley and his wife Susanna.

In 1709, fire tore through the rectory and the five-year-old Wesley was rescued from an upper window shortly before the roof collapsed.

Susanna Wesley later called her son “a brand plucked from the burning” — an old biblical image for something rescued from a fire — believing that his survival had a purpose.

By the final years of Anne's reign, Stuart Lincolnshire had changed in ways that reached far beyond the struggles that opened the century.

Separatists had left for Holland and New England. Baptists and Quakers had established congregations of their own, while Nonconformists had won legal space to worship outside the Church of England.

Civil War had divided the county. At Woolsthorpe, Newton had challenged inherited ideas about the physical universe, while Wesley's childhood at Epworth pointed towards another chapter in Lincolnshire's religious history.

The struggle over the Fens also remained unresolved. Stuart drainage schemes had altered parts of the wetlands, but the larger transformation of land, water and common rights would continue into the eighteenth century.

Queen Anne died in 1714 without a surviving child. George I succeeded her, and the Stuart dynasty that had begun with James I in 1603 came to an end.