Soon after More and Darrell returned to the Midlands from their struggle in the North, the published account of the dispossession of the ‘Boy of Burton’, Thomas Darling, appeared in print. It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 6 June 1597, apparently seeming innocuous to its censors – who must have felt foolish when their colleague Samuel Harsnett was excoriating the book in the High Commission hearings ten months later. It was not through oversight that they passed it for publication, however. Its authors and publisher, John Oxenbridge, had been equally (and rightly) convinced that the book ought to be processed through the usual channels and could be published legally without fuss. It was a type of publication that had been seen and allowed before and it did not seem to them, as it did not seem to its licensers, subversive. Yet the official Anglican histories of the Darrell case – Strype, Heylyn and so on – regard such publications as The most wonderfull and true storie as transparently sinister propaganda, created and issued as part of a plot to pervert English culture and convert the nation to presbyterianism by stealth. Were they right? Why might such a book have been licensed, and only later denounced as seditious, recalled and its printer imprisoned? An examination of the story of the ‘Boy of Burton’ can help explain.

A Society of Friends: The Burton Godly, Paget and Essex