Francis Marbury
After serving two short jail terms, he was ordered not to return to Northampton, but disregarded the mandate and was subsequently brought before the Bishop of London, John Aylmer, for trial in November 1578.
During the examination, Aylmer called Marbury an ass, an idiot and a fool, and sentenced him to Marshalsea prison for his impudence.
After two years in prison Marbury was considered sufficiently reformed to preach again and was sent to Alford in Lincolnshire, close to his ancestral home.
Making good on his promise to curb his tongue, he preached uneventfully in Alford and with a growing prominence was rewarded with a position in London in 1605.
[10] These more extreme non-conformists wanted to "abolish all the pomp and ceremony of the Church of England and remodel its government according to what they thought was the Bible's simple, consensual pattern.
[10] As a young man Marbury was considered to be a "hothead"[11] and felt strongly that the clergy should be well educated, and clashed with his superiors on this issue.
[12] He spent time preaching at Northampton, but soon came into conflict with the bishop's chancellor, Dr James Ellis, who was on a mission to suppress any nonconforming clergy.
[14] He disregarded this order, and was then brought to trial in the consistory court of St Paul's in London before the high commission on 5 November 1578.
[23] His daughter Anne Hutchinson would make a similar threat towards the magistrates and ministers at her civil trial before the Massachusetts Court, nearly 60 years later.
[24] For his conviction of heresy, Marbury spent two years in the Marshalsea prison, on the south side of the River Thames, across from London.
[25] In 1580, at the age of 25, he was released and was considered sufficiently reformed to preach and teach, and moved to the market town of Alford in Lincolnshire, about 140 miles (230 km) north of London, near his ancestral home.
[5][28] Marbury is thought to have been the teacher or tutor of young John Smith, who became an early explorer and leader in the Jamestown Colony in Virginia.
"[35] Without employment, he tended his gardens and tutored his children, reading to them from his own writings, the Bible, and John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
[36] While this suspension from preaching was thought to be short by historian Lennam, his daughter's biographer, Eve LaPlante, wrote that it lasted nearly four years.
[34] Whichever the case, by 1594 he was once again preaching, and from this point forward, Marbury resolved to curb his tongue and not openly question those in positions of authority.
[34] Following this final suspension, both his fame and fortune rose, and at one point Marbury became lecturer at St Saviour, Southwark.
[40][41] London was a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, and active playwrights of the time were William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, whose plays were performed just across the river.
[42] Marbury took on additional work in 1608, preaching in the parish of St Pancras, Soper Lane, travelling there by horse twice a week.
His widow resided for a time at St Peter, Paul's Wharf, London, but about December 1620 she married Reverend Thomas Newman of Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and died in 1645.
"[35] Author T. N. S. Lennam described the work as a "lusty, occasionally very coarse, short interlude in which the morality material is dominated by rather imitative farcical episodes more elementally entertaining than didactic.
A leading minister of the time, Reverend Robert Bolton, expressed a considerable respect for Marbury's teachings.
[51] His daughter Anne married William Hutchinson and sailed to New England in 1634, becoming a dissident Puritan minister at the centre of the Antinomian Controversy, and was, according to historian Michael Winship, "the most famous, or infamous, English woman in colonial American history.
An online source giving the ancestry of Agnes Lenton[59] is incorrect based on Walter Davis' research published in the New England Historic Genealogical Register in 1964.
