Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill 9780674065055

Citation preview

Godly Republicanism

Godly Republicanism PURITANS, PILGRIMS, AND A CITY ON A HILL

Michael P. Winship

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 2012

•

London, England

Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Winship, Michael P. (Michael Paul) Godly republicanism : Puritans, pilgrims, and a city on a hill / Michael P. Winship. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-06385-3 (alk. paper) 1. Massachusetts—History—17th century. 2. Massachusetts—Church history—17th century. 3. Puritans—Massachusetts—History—17th century. 4. Protestantism—Massachusetts—History—17th century. 5. Republicanism— Massachusetts—History—17th century. 6. Church and state—Massachusetts— History—17th century. 7. Puritans—England—History—16th century. 8. Puritans— England—History—17th century. 9. Church and state—Great Britain—History— 16th century. 10. Church and state—Great Britain—History—17th century. I. Title. F67.W699 2012 321.8609744—dc23 2011026557

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Contents

Introduction: An Old Man’s Tears for Godly Republicanism

1

1. The Rise and Bleeding Fall of Elizabethan Godly Republicanism

13

2. The Separatist Beginnings of Elizabethan Congregationalism and Presbyterianism

39

3. James I and a New Crisis of Antichristian Power

67

4. The Triumphs and Trials of the Lord’s Free People

89

5. Christian Liberty at Plymouth Plantation

111

6. Separatism at Salem?

134

7. The Appeal of Massachusetts Congregationalism

159

8. Designing a Godly Republic

183

9. A City on a Hill

206

10. Godly Republicanism’s Apocalypse Note on Usage Notes Acknowledgments Index

233 251 253 331 333

Godly Republicanism

Introduction: An Old Man’s Tears for Godly Republicanism

 W “

hat is become of the Primitive Zeal, Piety, and Holy Heat found in the hearts of our parents?” bewailed the New Englander Joshua Scottow in Old Mens Tears in 1691. Scottow, some sixty years after arriving in Massachusetts, mourned the disappearance of the founders’ “self-denyal, moderation, mortification.” Their “Soul lively Thirstings and Pantings after God and his Ways,” he lamented, had “Metamorphosed into Land and Trade breathings.” The “old Puritan Garb, and Gravity of Heart, and Habit” had been “lost and ridiculed into strange and fantastick Fashions and Attire.”1 As a consequence of this spiritual decline and worldly transformation, Scottow warned, an angry God had a covenant quarrel with his Protestant people in New England as he had with Europe’s Protestants, for much the same reasons, and just as he had in ancient times on many occasions with his people, the Jews of the Old Testament. God’s Old Testament quarrel led him to pound the Jews with plagues, earthquakes, invasions, and other tokens of his anger. In contemporary Europe, he expressed his anger by allowing the idol-worshipping Roman Catholics (for so most Protestants considered them) to reconquer large swaths of Protestant territory. In New England, God raged via the attacks of the Indians and their Catholic French allies on the northeastern frontier and 1

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via outbreaks of disease. Worst of all for New England, Scottow lamented, God raged via the revocation of Massachusetts’s royal charter in an English court in 1684. That revocation ended a half century in which the puritans of Massachusetts plotted their destiny relatively free of hostile English interference.2 Scottow’s tract was one of many in the second half of the seventeenth century that denounced New England’s spiritual declension from the founders’ heroic piety. Judging from the frequency with which it was reprinted, Old Mens Tears was also the tract that spoke most deeply to the New England mind.3 Thus it is important to note that for Scottow this fearful declension was more complex than a simple two-stage progression from religious zeal to worldliness. There was a critical intermediate political stage that both institutionalized and accelerated the decline of piety. That intermediate stage consisted of church rot, stemming from neglect of what Scottow called New England’s “primitive Constitution.” In their churches, Scottow charged, New Englanders were putting the “preference of mens politicks before Christ’s Institutes.” They were no longer following Jesus’s directives about church government, which puritans like Scottow believed were clearly recorded in the New Testament (others disagreed). Christ had intended each of his congregations to be little republics, each governed by a collective elected body called a presbytery. Radical puritans a century earlier in Elizabethan England had fought hard and unsuccessfully to have presbyteries installed in the Church of England’s parish churches in place of the top-down rule of bishops appointed by the monarch. Their failure led ultimately to the puritan migration to Massachusetts. Now the Massachusetts churches were abandoning their own collective presbyteries. Churches were dropping the sacred requirement of choosing two ministers, a teacher in charge of doctrine and a pastor in charge of discipline. Instead they relied on only one minister, contrary to God’s law. The office of ruling lay elder, who shared power with the ministers in maintaining watch over church members’ behavior, had practically vanished.4 Christ’s demands were burdensome. The dual ministries wore down congregations’ finances, and the ruling lay eldership wore down the men who had this thankless job. Yet those difficulties were no excuse to ignore

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a divine law, Scottow insisted. The ministers of the first Massachusetts generation had been heroic in their humility. They would have never agreed to minister without a clerical partner and without a ruling lay elder, “not looking at them selves sufficient alone to bear the formidable weight of a whole Presbytery.” The presumptuous present generation of ministers, as they discarded those divinely mandated restraints of group leadership, showed ominous signs that power was going to their heads. They were ceasing to preach to the people about the liberties (rights) Christ gave them, including participation in church government, and they were ceasing to visit, instruct, and thereby empower lay prayer groups in order that “all the Lord’s People might be Prophets, and that he would put his Spirit upon them.”5 Scottow reached far back into antiquity to convey the sinister implications of this increasing concentration of power in the Massachusetts churches. “Did not the practice of mens prudentials,” he asked, “prove the ruine of the Churches, and rise of Antichrist?” Antichrist was a satanic spirit of hatred against all of God’s laws, driven by an insatiable lust for power. The spirit of Antichrist arose in the very first decades of the ancient church after Jesus ascended into heaven, prompting more and more power to be concentrated in fewer and fewer church officers, while the liberties of lay people became correspondingly restricted. That ancient antichristian destruction of the churches’ restraints on power unleashed what Scottow called the “wild Boars of Tyranny.”6 The culmination of this rise of the spirit of Antichrist was the Catholic Church, ruled by Antichrist in the lawless succession of tyrannical popes, over whom the laity had no control. Antichrist’s spirit had been continued, puritans argued, by the non-elected bishops who ruled the Protestant Church of England. Massachusetts was intended as a refuge from Antichrist’s spirit. But a repetition of the primordial decline of the church was beginning to happen in Massachusetts itself a millennium and a half later, Scottow feared. The “Godly and Holy” creators of Massachusetts’s primitive constitution took care “to lay the foundations of Civil and Sacred Politie according to the Divine Directory.” Now the constitutional foundations laid by those godly “famous Patriots” were being ignored, and the laity were turning lax and worldly, while the ministers lusted after

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power. It was not just puritan piety that was in decline but puritan government. “New-England,” Scottow lamented, “is not to be found in New-England.”7

Godly Republicanism focuses on Scottow’s famous patriots, not their metamorphosed descendants. A study in applied sacred political theory, it is about Massachusetts’s republican civil and church governments created in the early 1630s and about the fear of tyrannical power that in large measure shaped them. Familiarity makes it easy to forget how extremely bold and ambitious Massachusetts was as an ideological project. Innovative, severe churches, virtually independent of each other, in which the laity enjoyed a great deal of power, were having their first test run at working hand in hand with a civic government whose leaders moved with unprecedented speed for a charter colony to make themselves completely accountable to the people. Churches and state were tied together by an unprecedented electoral franchise restricted to male church members. Singular though Massachusetts was, its defenders extolled their creation as the culmination of radical puritan reforming efforts stretching back to the Elizabethan presbyterians and as the ideal arrangement for churches and state alike. The ideological ambitions of the colony’s leaders were reinforced by the legal reading they made of their royal charter. It gave them, they argued, virtual independence from the English government, to the point where Massachusetts was being called a “free state” (republic) by the end of the 1630s. The boldness and ambitiousness of Massachusetts can be captured afresh by employing and expanding the insights of recent English scholarship. That scholarship has developed considerably since the last of the infrequent efforts to consider the creation of the civic and religious regimes of Massachusetts as twinned projects.8 Up until the last two decades, historians began their study of English republicanism in the mid-seventeenth century well after Massachusetts had been established. Since then, however, scholars have engaged in a vigorous and successful search for republican practices of self-government and republican assumptions during the Tudor and early Stuart monarchies, although the term “republicanism” itself was not employed at the time.9

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Puritanism has generally remained under the radar of that search, though not, as will be seen, because of lack of intrinsic relevance, either for English or American history. The early Massachusetts congregationalists and their English presbyterian forebears would have called their churches “biblical,” not “republican.” The use of the term “republicanism” has the advantage of drawing attention to important but neglected assumptions and webs of concern that tied puritanism to more overtly secular political phenomena. Many of the priorities and anxieties that lay behind these puritan churches and would-be churches—the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government—were shared with secular republicanism, and presbyterianism was compared to civic republics in this period. Puritan ecclesiastical republicanism precipitated and/or exacerbated political and religious controversies in which the fear of secular republicanism often played a part, while ecclesiastical republicanism, in turn, underwent its own mutations in reaction to those controversies. Two elements have encouraged the scholarly neglect of this ecclesiastical republicanism. One is the recoil from the excesses of earlier “Whig” historiography, in which puritanism was oversimplistically and anachronistically studied as the seedbed of modern democracy or other forms of modern secular political organization. The second element is disciplinary boundaries that fence off church government from political history. Historiographical excesses cannot be held against puritans, however, and present-day academic disciplinary boundaries are not necessarily helpful for studying a period when church and state were thoroughly intertwined. Just as the glory of God was widely considered to be the ultimate purpose of all civil polities, republican churches represented the pinnacle of all political theory, at least to their proponents. “The churche,” asserted the Elizabethan presbyterian Thomas Cartwright, “is governed wyth that kynde of government, which the Philosophers that wryte of the beste common wealthes, affirme to be the best.” The Pilgrims’ pastor John Robinson claimed that the church, once brought back to its proper New Testament form, was “the perfection of all polities [and] doth comprehend in it whatsoever is excellent in all other bodies political.”10

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This godly ecclesiastical republicanism was, by its nature, radical. It was radical in that the reforms sought by its advocates would have required a drastic and severely disruptive makeover of the Church of England’s government, finances, and legal system. It was even more “radical” in the then-current meaning of the term, one completely different from today’s: “foundational” or “fundamental,” as in, for example, the “original and radical constitution” of a government.11 Ecclesiastical republicanism sought to cut away all the mistakes and corruptions accumulated over the course of church history and recover the church’s original, “radical” New Testament order. Opponents of the puritans, however, viewed ecclesiastical republicanism as “radical” (in the modern sense) for a more sinister reason. Given the close relationship between church and state, they insisted from the Elizabethan period onward that radical puritans’ long-term goal was not simply to remodel the Church of England but to overthrow the English monarchy and install a republic. Radical puritans retorted that there was no contradiction between their devotion to a republican ecclesiastical polity and their devotion to England’s monarchy. They were the monarch’s best subjects, they insisted. They were the ones most committed to England’s religious and moral reformation and to the destruction of England’s most fearsome enemy, Catholicism, in all its forms, incipient, covert, and overt, while their form of church government was ideally suited to accomplish these goals. English monarchs, however, proved incapable of appreciating the loyalty either of the radical puritans’ agenda or their persons. Godly Republicanism traces the puritans’ consequent long arc of disillusionment with their sovereigns. Not only did Antichrist, from their perspective, grow increasingly successful in his unceasing efforts to pull the Church of England back into thralldom, but England’s monarchs themselves were increasingly coming under the power of his agents and were growing more tyrannical as they did so. By the end of the sixteenth century, the radical puritan struggle against Antichrist’s tyranny in the church was already becoming a struggle to resist his corrosive effects on the English state, and that twin struggle grew even grimmer in the early seventeenth century. The radicalized puritans who settled Massachusetts were veterans of fierce, unsuccessful political fights against what they saw as King

Introduction 

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Charles I’s accelerated descent into tyranny and toward Catholicism (while Charles saw himself as besieged by covert puritan republicans). Elizabethan and early Stuart godly ecclesiastical republicanism was not homogenous, either in tactics or in aims, and this variety, too, was to shape Massachusetts. The first and most radical of the godly ecclesiastical republicans were separatists. They were too impatient for the many blessings of New Testament churches and too fearful of the corruption they had to experience in the Church of England to wait for further reformation of that church. As a result, in the late 1560s they started to found their own illegal, loosely presbyterian-modeled churches, less than a decade after the ascension of Queen Elizabeth to the throne and the restoration of English Protestantism. The call of the gospel to separatists required them to renounce the Church of England entirely as a false, antichristian church. However, to more conservative puritans, the extreme step of separatism represented schism and sedition, besides being a blot on puritanism itself. Just as separatism was the black sheep of puritanism, it has been the black sheep of English and American puritan studies. Historians shun the semipenetrable rants of the sixteenthcentury founders; turn away with understandable disinterest from the convoluted, incessant petty infighting of their exiled Amsterdam successors; and tend to leave the Leiden separatists, who produced the American immigrants much later given the name of Pilgrims, to Mayflower enthusiasts.12 This scholarly disinterest is fueled by three assumptions. The first is that the separatists, a very small group, were inward-looking sectarians, with their backs turned to the larger struggle for national reformation that, in large measure, defined puritanism. The second is that their church government was no different than that sought by the most radical Elizabethan puritans. The third assumption, related to the previous two, is that the separatist Plymouth colony had no significant influence on Massachusetts’s congregationalism. That congregationalism, this assumption goes, was largely the result of existing or emergent trends in puritanism itself. None of these assumptions hold up well under close scrutiny. Many separatists retained a deep commitment to reformation. They eventually worked out their own form of church government in conscious opposition

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to the presbyterianism of Elizabethan radical puritans, which they detested as inadequately resistant to Antichrist’s tyranny. Massachusetts congregationalism did bear a relationship to larger puritan trends; otherwise, puritan immigrants would not have adopted it. Yet it was, to a great extent, an accidental, mostly unanticipated, and, from many perspectives, less than optimal outcome of the fluky presence in New England of Plymouth’s separatists in the 1620s. The result of this fluke was that a relatively well-financed, well-connected, and, in a few cases, highly influential group of puritans settled in Massachusetts and used Plymouth’s model of New Testament churches as the exemplar and catalyst for their own church order, with important long-term consequences on both sides of the Atlantic. Godly Republicanism reworks the narrative of Massachusetts’s creation by properly integrating the separatists and their complex, long, and extremely creative interaction with radical puritans into this narrative for the first time. A confluence of conditions in Massachusetts, its settlers’ novel participatory churches, their profound disillusionment with monarchy, and the latent legal possibilities of the royal charter that conferred the colony on them, made it possible for the immigrants to conceive of a new totalizing form of godly republicanism. That republicanism embraced the state as well as the church and was built on the colony’s unprecedented ability to create a rough approximation between the body politic and the body of Christ, the members admitted to the colony’s strict churches. As the colonists felt their way into their creation, they, or at least some of the most inspired ideologues among them, discovered in it profound possibilities for resolving age-old problems of decay and corruption in church and state alike. This discovery was facilitated by the fledgling polity’s increasing viability in the mid-1630s, a viability that confirmed its institutions’ divine mandate. With this confirmation came a new understanding of what the colony signified. It had become a critical part of God’s scenario for the end of time. It was a city on a hill, to use the biblical phrase, one fit for the world’s emulation, and a few prominent puritans in England were starting to do just that. A migration that started as flight from England’s anticipated divine destruction found itself, through trial and error, unexpectedly opening a new chapter in sacred history.

Introduction 

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While Massachusetts settlers were discovering what they understood to be the unprecedented efficacy of their biblically perfected church/ state establishment, the religious and political conflicts that had driven them to emigrate continued to escalate. In 1642, a puritan-led parliament took up arms against King Charles. Eighteen chaotic years of puritan rule followed in England and brought a tumultuous, not to say calamitous, closure to the aspirations of English godly republicanism. Massachusetts, in its role as a city on a hill, played no small part in that outcome. Yet a close examination of a contemporary republican harbinger and icon of the eighteenth-century “Age of Revolution,” Algernon Sidney (1623–1683), demonstrates that this closure of godly republicanism was not as straightforward as studies of the subsequent period suggest. Godly Republicanism’s first four chapters are set in England and Holland. Chapter 1 discusses how Elizabethan radical puritans envisioned that their republican churches would foster national reformation and work harmoniously with a militant limited Protestant monarchy and how they grew horrified in the 1580s when the antichristian tyranny of their enemies the bishops appeared to be infi ltrating the state. Chapter 2 explores the common origins of Elizabethan separatism and presbyterianism; how the two groups began to move apart in the 1580s as separatists began to create a distinctly “congregationalist” form of church government, in reaction to what they saw as the incipient tyranny of presbyterianism; and how the presbyterians, in the face of the separatist challenge, found hitherto unrecognized deeply hidden virtues in the Church of England. Both these developments were to have an important impact on Massachusetts congregationalism. Chapter 3 deals with the disillusionment of radical puritans in the early seventeenth century when it turned out that their new king, James I, was hostile to them, even as the Church of England appeared to be sinking faster into corruption and tyranny. Some radical puritans began to see the merits of congregationalism as a barrier to that tyranny. Others opted for separatism and fled the country. Chapter 4 then looks at how a tiny group of separatists and radical puritans in the 1610s started tentatively to work together and learn from each other in their shared pursuit of further reformation; how these tentative efforts proved more notable for controversy than for

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success; and how some among those groups concluded that reform was better pursued on the other side of the Atlantic. The next five chapters are focused mainly on the American side of the Atlantic. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 deal with the separatist Plymouth colony and its long-terms effects as example for, and catalyst on Massachusetts: how a failed attempt to install a radical puritan as pastor of Plymouth’s separatist church in 1624 determined the location of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; how the founders of the first Massachusetts church, at Salem, learned not only congregationalism from the Pilgrims but separatism; and how the separatism of the Salem church both shaped and catalyzed Massachusetts congregationalism. Chapter 8 focuses on the creation of Massachusetts’s secular government and how and why godly ecclesiastical republicanism became godly civic republicanism. Chapter 9 outlines a series of successfully surmounted controversies and challenges to the stability and church-state unity of the colony in the first half of the 1630s, the chief of which was Roger Williams’s not entirely intended radical separatist crusade. Weathering those storms constituted powerful affirmation that the colony’s novel republican ecclesiastical and civic forms were indeed divinely mandated. With that affirmation, some colonists began to interpret the New Testament perfection of their churches as a beacon for the rest of the world, announcing that the time was arriving for the final stages of God’s plot for his creation. What sort of guidance that transatlantic beacon provided is among the topics of Chapter 10, as the attention of Godly Republicanism shifts to mid-seventeenth-century English religious and political upheavals. The chapter’s arguments also suggest that the conceptual framework of an Atlantic republican tradition, conventionally dated from the 1650s, can be usefully pushed back to include puritanism and the founding of Massachusetts.

Godly Republicanism recreates one important strand of voices, perspectives, and confl icts that went into shaping the Massachusetts project, but it does not presume to be comprehensive. It interprets the actions and motivations of its actors in terms of their own debates and foregrounded values rather than in terms of underlying, more universal

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social and cultural categories. This particularistic and contextual mode of interpretation is not meant in any way to exclude or negate others. However, it does assume that it is generally a good idea to attempt to get an at least provisionally reliable handle on the explanations that actors gave for their behavior and on the articulated frameworks within which they made their claims before we attempt to explain that behavior and those claims within other frameworks. Religion in this period was understood to mean the worship of God. What happened in churches on Sunday was only a small part of worship, for, properly understood, worship meant obeying God’s commands in all aspects of life.13 Worship could be either true or false, depending on whether it was truly God who was worshiped and whether the worship itself was what God intended. If the worship was false, then it was idol worship and a violation of the second commandment. The most committed godly republicans regarded the political superstructure of the Church of England as itself an idol—republican church government or idol worship were their alternatives. “Theocracy” did not mean government by priests (church officers could not hold civil offices in Massachusetts) but a government that fully recognized the sovereignty of God over it, a status that, at least in the minds of their most enthusiastic partisans, the republican governments of church and state in Massachusetts had together realized.14 The main actors in Godly Republicanism, radical puritans and separatists, occupied a narrow band on the religious spectrum of early modern England. Actors elsewhere along that spectrum in Godly Republicanism are seen mostly from the perspective of this particular group. I have avoided the common practice of calling the Massachusetts congregationalists “nonseparating” congregationalists, preferring instead “puritan” congregationalists. What distinguished these congregationalists from separatist congregationalists was not a conviction that the Church of England itself was a true, legitimate church, it was the much more minimalist position that not all the parish churches under the umbrella of the false Church of England government were themselves corrupt to the point of being false churches. Whether this willingness, at least in principle, to acknowledge true churches scattered here and there among England’s parishes made these congregationalists nonseparatists, as they

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claimed, was a question that could provoke a variety of heated responses from more moderate puritans and separatists. A great deal of the complex and fluid dynamic between puritan congregationalists and those other groups has been, and continues to be, obscured by the use of a label that implies that the question has a tidy answer. The same problem exists, although to a much lesser extent, with another label that puritan congregationalists are sometimes given, “semi-separatists.” The scholarly underpinnings for some of Godly Republicanism’s claims are necessarily detailed and technical. In these cases, for the sake of readability, I have shifted those underpinnings to the notes.

chapter 1

The Rise and Bleeding Fall of Elizabethan Godly Republicanism

I

n 1570 Thomas Cartwright was Lady Margaret Professor at Cambridge University. A few years later he had become an impoverished exile in Germany, engaged in a bitter, printed quarrel with his predecessor in that professorship, John Whitgift. Cartwright was a militant puritan church reformer while Whitgift was a no less militant partisan of the Church of England’s status quo. In the course of this quarrel, Cartwright penned lines that enraged Whitgift. Those lines would be quoted approvingly in Massachusetts over a half century later, for Cartwright’s reforming goals were part of the colony’s legacy. “As the hangings [drapes] are made fit for the house,” Cartwright wrote, “so the common wealth must be made to agree with the Churche, and the governmente thereof with hir government.”1 What did Cartwright mean, Whitgift demanded, when he said that the government of England had to conform to the government of the church, like hangings had to fit a house? Cartwright wanted the Church of England ruled not by bishops chosen by the monarch but by presbyters, or elders, elected by their congregations. Was Queen Elizabeth supposed to be elected as well? Everyone who wanted good government, Whitgift claimed, knew that elections were a bad practice. Cartwright “would have all monarchies overthrowen,” Whitgift angrily charged. 13

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Cartwright pushed back just as hard. He was loyal to the queen, but elections, he claimed, were part of the “definition of a cytisen.” He warned Whitgift that “daungerous seditions and seperations from the commen wealth . . . have happened by abridginge the people off this and such liberties.”2 The ease with which Whitgift and Cartwright slid from clashing about church government to clashing about their country’s political system reflects the intimate bonds between religion and politics in this period. Both men agreed that true religion was necessary for a country to thrive and that the highest duty of government was to promote that religion. For presbyterians like Cartwright, those truisms made a presbyterian reformation of the grievously sick Church of England all the more urgent. To Whitgift and his allies, they made presbyterian “populist” church agitation all the more destabilizing and dangerous. The presbyterians’ opponents had the advantage of easier access to the power of the state, and they increasingly used that power to crush the presbyterians. The harder those opponents squeezed, the more presbyterians wondered whether the English civic “hangings” really did fit the religious “house.” That wondering would also be a part of the legacy the Elizabethan presbyterians left to the founders of Massachusetts.

God is English, Elizabethan reformers famously exclaimed, but only so long as England remained Protestant and faithful to Jesus’s commands. This quid pro quo was based on the widely accepted principle that any genuinely Christian polity, be it England or, later, Massachusetts, was comparable to Old Testament Israel. England, like Israel, had God’s true church, thanks to the Reformation. As Queen Elizabeth had demonstrated by snatching the country out of the clutches of Roman Catholicism in 1559, England had godly rulers who defended the church and enforced righteousness. Just like Israel, therefore, it would be blessed or punished to the extent that it followed or defied God’s laws. 3 Puritans warned incessantly that moral rot and political subversion were undermining God’s laws in this modern Israel. England was riddled with moral decay. “Every man followeth the pride, covetousnesse, whoredome, drunkennesse and lustes of his own heart,” lamented one

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puritan minister. “The streetes,” he bewailed, “are full of the cries of the poore” (“dying in the fieldes under hedges, and in Townes and Cities, at the dores” added another, in grim recognition of England’s rapidly growing, brutally poor population). When the English should have been minding God, they were attending sinful pleasures, as witnessed by the “Theaters, Parish garden, Tauvernes, streetes, fieldes, all full and prophanely occupied, and this chiefly on the Sabbath day.”4 While the devil masterminded England’s moral rot, his minion Antichrist directed its political subversion through the Catholic Church. In Rome the succession of popes assumed the mantle of Antichrist and plotted ceaselessly to set their will above the will of God, just as the spirit of Antichrist had done since the beginning of Christianity. England, as the most powerful Protestant country, was the focal point of hostility for Antichrist and his servants. The pope declared Elizabeth deposed from her throne in 1570; Catholics plotted against her life, sometimes on behalf of and with the connivance of Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scotland; Jesuit missionaries infiltrated the realm; and Catholic Spain encouraged uprisings in England’s colony Ireland. Only luck and bad weather foiled the Spanish Armada’s invasion of England in 1588. Antichrist threatened England from within as well as from without. England’s Catholics, who rose in rebellion in 1569, were a constant source of worry to Protestants. The most sinister of them were the “churchpapists,” Catholics who outwardly conformed to the Church of England in order to avoid civil penalties. Cartwright would have had England’s Catholics killed if they failed to convert after a period of enforced sermon attendance and interrogation. They were all “rotten members, that doe not onely no good, nor ser vice in the body, but also corrupt and infect others.” He was appalled that his debating opponent Whitgift would not commit himself to their automatic execution. Only in the 1580s had the Protestant struggle to wrench English hearts and minds away from their ancestral Catholic heritage advanced to a point where England could be meaningfully called a Protestant nation, although puritans found its Protestantism far from satisfactory.5 England’s Protestant elite generally agreed that this devilish and antichristian defiance of God’s laws could be defeated only by vigorous preaching of the gospel. Zealous ministers would break down their

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listeners’ resistance to God’s truth by fiercely pounding away on the pervasiveness of sin and God’s awful wrath against it in this world and the next. They would warn that salvation came exclusively to those whom God had predestined for it; that it came only by faith in Jesus; and that this faith had to be demonstrated by unceasing piety and obedience to God’s demanding laws. The ministers’ preaching would drive God’s word into their listeners’ hearts. Once lodged there, that divine word would reign “as a Prince, to rule the cogitations therof, captivating them daily unto the kingdom of Jesus Christ, through obedience to his most blessed will.”6 The good citizenry of England, rulers and subjects alike, predestined to be governed by God’s word in their hearts and not by their own wicked wills or Antichrist, would ensure that their modern Israel did not stray from the path of righteousness, as they followed the moral and spiritual instruction of their ministers. Yet the Church of England, puritans charged, erected huge roadblocks against effective preaching. First and foremost, its ministers were not up to that task. These hastily chosen men frequently lacked the ability to preach, among their many other failings. Unable to respond to the immediate spiritual needs of their congregations, they could do no better than read official sermons and prayers from the Church of England’s service book, the Book of Common Prayer. Puritans compiled long and angry surveys documenting the general incompetence of the parish clergy.7 Even if a parish managed to obtain a powerful preacher, the Church of England muffled his impact. The initial Protestant reformation of that church left it inadequately purged of its popish, idolatrous obstacles to the reception of the gospel. The Book of Common Prayer, the church’s liturgy, for example, was, by puritan standards, only an insufficiently worked over version of the Catholic mass book, spiritually dangerous in itself and no substitute for a rousing, heart-stabbing sermon. Surplices, the linen garments in which ministers were required to conduct services, were inherited from the Catholic Church and therefore “polluted and uncleane, not only by the contagion off the leprous man [the pope], but even by their owne disease.”8 Puritans disagreed among themselves whether the ceremonial remnants of popery contaminating the church were absolutely forbidden by God’s laws.9 But they agreed that those remnants thwarted the most

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basic purpose of church ser vices: spiritual edification. These vestiges of Catholicism did not serve to drive God’s laws into the hearts of church attenders. On the contrary, they had disastrous effects. They emboldened England’s Catholics to think that the Reformation was not going to be permanent, puritans charged, with some justification, and they led ordinary churchgoers to mistake these expendable ceremonial trappings for genuine worship. Puritan laypeople were grieved by their sight and formed an “evill opinion” of the ministers compelled to use them, thus depriving themselves of the ministers’ spiritual guidance.10 Religious seekers who were lucky enough to find a powerful preacher and were able to transcend the Church of England’s idolatrous distractions still had no guarantee that the church would keep them on the path of true spiritual progress. To ensure that they adhered to God’s laws, they needed the firm hand of church discipline, or government and guidance. The church had to sternly admonish sinners when they strayed, while holding in reserve the dire penalty of excommunication should sinners prove irreclaimable by other means. Discipline was a stiff task that needed to be carried out with fine precision and local knowledge, yet it was left in each sprawling diocese to the bishop. That task was impossible for a single man, which meant it was, in fact, not in the bishop’s hands but in those of numerous corrupt underofficers, in a complex system of ecclesiastical courts left over from the days of Roman Catholicism. In these courts, puritans charged, money brought absolution from most sins. Grievous sins were ignored while minor ones were punished. The dreadful, last-resort New Testament sanction of excommunication was issued promiscuously and, as a consequence, was “in no whit esteemed.” It was not any coincidence to puritans that the Church of England’s legal system had been lifted unreformed from Roman Catholic canon law, that “filthy quauemire, and poysoned plashe of all the abhominations that doe infect the whole realme.”11 Discipline was not simply an act of compassion to sinners. It was a wall around the church, a way to protect God’s holy institutions and community from the contamination of sin. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, for example, was a flash point for puritans in England, as it would be in Massachusetts. It was, or should have been, a valuable teaching tool

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for the saints. The Lord’s Supper was a sermon by other means, “playne preaching,” as Cartwright put it. It taught its partakers “partly that they be washed already from theyr sinnes, partly that they are of the housholde of God, and suche as the Lorde wyll feede to eternall lyfe.” A partaker’s fellow lay communicants preached as well by their example, for their faith and prayers inspired imitation and stirred up love and zeal. “Broken to pieces with joy; drunk with comfort,” exclaimed one puritan in his diary after a Lord’s Supper among fellow zealots.12 But the lack of discipline in the Church of England meant that the Lord’s Supper was too often a sermon whose message of redemption and spiritual communion with Christ and his saints was dangerously muted. Radical puritans regarded most of the parish participants in the Lord’s Supper as religiously ignorant and drenched in unrepented sin and corruption. These inappropriate communicants polluted what was supposed to be one of the most sacred rites of the church and invited God’s revenge for the “prophanation of his holie misteries.” Moreover, they made this “sermon” deliver a false message of salvation to most of its audience. Yet ministers rarely had the practical ability to keep unrepentant sinners, or even “church papists,” from taking the sacrament.13 Many English Protestants shared this cumulative critique of the Church of England—that the effectual preaching of God’s word was weakened by an inadequate ministry, insufficiently Protestant ceremonies, and inadequate discipline. Among serious Protestants, including some of the first Elizabethan bishops, there was widespread unhappiness about the terms of the settlement of 1559, which made England Protestant again— unhappiness that was mitigated only by the assumption that adjustments would follow. Elizabeth, however, did not value preaching—three or four preachers in a county were enough for her—and she effectively blocked any changes to the church’s ceremonies and government. The term “puritan” started out as an insulting way to describe zealous Protestant laypeople and ministers whose unhappiness with this settlement ran so strongly that they refused to conform to it.14 Puritan nonconformity could run shallow or deep, depending on its underlying principles. It could be based on the principle that while popish practices in the church were not actually forbidden by scripture, they were spiritually detrimental and should not be required. Or it could be

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based on the more uncompromising conviction that some or all of these practices, as well as those who engaged in them, violated God’s laws. Radical puritans, like Cartwright and the eventual founders of Massachusetts, took the further step of arguing that not only were these practices wrong but that the Bible outlined a comprehensive alternative system of laws for church government. Christ taught his disciples those laws in detail in the forty days between his death and ascension to heaven.15 He did his teaching off the record, but his intentions were revealed clearly enough in the terse descriptions of that government offered by Christ himself elsewhere and by various apostles in the later books of the New Testament. Once Christ’s laws for his church were known, it was self-evident to radical puritans that they needed to be obeyed in their entirety. How could anyone claim to be a member of Christ’s kingdom while failing to follow his or her monarch’s commands completely? For presbyterians, the petition “Thy kingdom come/ thy will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer was obviously a petition for presbyterianism. Hindering presbyterianism would mark a person as an enemy of the kingdom of Christ at the Last Judgment.16 But reinstituting what Cartwright called the “olde constitution of the Churche of God” was not simply a divine mandate; it was common sense.17 With presbyterianism in place, the Church of England’s abysmal failure as an instrument of the country’s moral and religious reformation would end, and England would become a Protestant utopia. The original New Testament churches that the presbyterians sought to reconstruct were effective at reformation where the Church of England fell short precisely because God designed his constitution to deliver results. Unlike the Church of England, New Testament churches were certain to have powerful preaching. In those churches, a minister’s life and doctrine were carefully examined before he was deemed fit to be a preacher. Ministers were not even ordained until they had received the consent of the congregation they were to serve, unlike in the Church of England, where they were ordained first and then turned out like wolves seeking flocks of sheep to devour. The New Testament arrangement guaranteed a rapport between the ministers and their prospective flocks. It was not possible in the New Testament churches for ministers to be in charge of

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more than one congregation, unlike in the Church of England, where negligent shepherds accumulated multiple parishes to boost their own wealth. Ministers of the New Testament were recognizable not by the popish garments on which the bishops of the Church of England were so insistent, but by their preaching, learning, and sound doctrine. They were not bound by the rites of a book of ceremony riddled with popish corruptions but could vary their prayers according to the spiritual needs of the moment in their congregations.18 The sacraments in the New Testament churches showed forth in their unsullied “ancient purity and simplicity.” Preaching always preceded the sacraments, to ensure their effectiveness, and they were accompanied only by simple undistracting biblical forms and rituals. The wicked never sullied the sacraments, for no one participated in them, except “with conscience.” The elders of each church ensured that no one took part in the Lord’s Supper who could not “render a reason of their hope” and who was not policed and guided by stern and effective church discipline.19 Discipline itself was the shining crown jewel of the New Testament churches. It worked because it was in concerned and local hands. Each church’s presbytery, its lay and ministerial elders, instructed, admonished, corrected, and punished, teaching the congregation all the while “to frame their wills and doings according to the law of God.” Excommunication was a measure of last resort, done with the consent of the congregation, and it was “greatly regarded and feared.” The New Testament churches thereby avoided the grievous pollution that presbyterians warned would bring down God’s punitive judgments on England.20 The staggering spiritual and moral effectiveness of the ancient New Testament churches was protected and preserved by the most critical difference between them and the Church of England. Those churches, following the will of Christ, had no bishops. Wherever bishops appeared, radical puritans argued, they were a disaster. It was the bishops of England, arrogant, corrupt, greedy, and grasping, claimed the presbyterians, who were the greatest obstacle to effective preaching in England. It was the bishops who, for money, licensed the inadequate preachers and gave them multiple livings. It was they who were the greatest obstacle to effective discipline, since they appointed the corrupt officials

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who ran the disciplinary machinery of the church and exploited that machinery for their own financial gain. Moreover, it was the bishops who thwarted the further reform of the church by punishing puritan ministers and whispering poison in good Queen Elizabeth’s ears that prevented her from realizing that the presbyterians were her most loyal subjects.21 It was not just continuous bad luck in choosing them that made bishops so lethal. Christ forbade the office of bishop in his divine constitution for a very good reason: it was intrinsically corrupting and antchristian. As Thomas Cartwright explained to his opponent Whitgift, “The Monarchie over the whole Church and over every particular Churche, and over every singular member in the Church, is in Christ alone.” Christ could not reign where one man, like a bishop, sought to. Therefore, any minister grasping for power over his fellow ministers was usurping Christ’s place, driven by “ambitious power.”22 So sinister was ambitious power, presbyterians warned, that it provided the wedge by which Antichrist initially crept into the church. Antichrist found his opening, they claimed, in the early days of Christianity, when a minister asserted primacy over the other elders in a single congregation and tried to rule it by himself. Soon some ambitious minister took a further step, falsely arrogating the name of bishop to himself in order to govern other ministers. Next came preeminence by a single minister in a single city, then power over the churches in a number of cities, then power over fellow bishops, and finally, in the form of the pope, power over the entire church. “The swelling waters of the ambition of dyvers,” summarized Cartwright, “coulde not by any bankes be kept in, which having once broken out in certaine places, afterwardes covered almost the face of the whole earth.” Cartwright’s associate Walter Travers, switching the metaphor, lamented, “So did Sathan in his misterie of iniquitie make these staires for the mounting of Antichrist: whereby at the last, he setled him as amongst the starres.”23 Scholars have noted that the presbyterians contrasted their emphasis on consensual government with the absolute rule and “tyranny” of the bishops of the Church of England.24 What needs to be stressed is not only that the presbyterians saw their divine government as in opposition to tyranny, but that in crucial ways they saw presbyterianism as a

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prophylactic against tyranny. Presbyterianism needed to be enacted because it was God’s New Testament mandate, but the reason God mandated it in the first place was that it provided a dynamic vehicle for actively resisting the corrupting effects of power. Though the New Testament remained silent on the point, the early presbyterian writers consistently emphasized that the divinely mandated consensual political structures of the New Testament churches were barriers to tyranny. “Common reason” alone, Cartwright claimed, in the absence of scriptural evidence, “also doth teach, that contraries are cured by their contraries.” Thus “to abolish the tyranny of the popish government, [it is] necessary to plant the discipline of Christ.” As William Fulke explained, “Tyranny is avoyded when no one man (contrarie to the ordinaunce of Christe) shall presume to doe anye thing in the Church, without the advise and consent of others that bee Godlye and wise.” God chose to diff use power in his New Testament churches, in other words, and not concentrate it, with the express purpose of avoiding tyranny. “One is easier to be corrupted,” warned Cartwright. For one man, such as a bishop, to decide matters of discipline, was in itself tyranny, according to Fulke. It was for this reason that Cartwright justified the power of synods over individual churches—the particular always gave way to the general; individual churches always gave way to many. Similarly, according to A Second Admonition to the Parliament, the right way to “to resolve all doubts and questions in religion, and to pacifie all controversies of the churches, [was] to passe from one or few to mo[r]e, and from mo[r]e, to mo[r]e godly and learned.”25 Presbyterianism was not only intended to shield against the overt tyranny of the bishops’ monarchical rule. It was intended to nip tyranny before it could become open. As the early history of the church showed, “ambitious power” was ready to burst its bounds even while ministers enjoyed parity and shared their power with lay elders. A Second Admonition to the Parliament bluntly raised the possibility that the elders would “usurpe authoritie over the whole churche whereby we might caste out the tirannie of the bishops, and bring in a new tyrannie of theirs.” Such a result, with the presbytery, not the bishops, tyrannizing over the laity, Walter Travers averred, would “reteyne still the same tyranny in the churche, chaunging only the persons.” Fulke agreed, “We must take heede that we open not a window to popish tyrannie.”26

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Christ reduced the possibility of the elders lapsing into “popish tyranny” by two mechanisms that “moderated” their “authoritye” and allowed their judgement to “be rightly accounted the judgement of the holy Church.” First, they received their positions with the consent, or “election,” of their churches, meaning male heads of families who had made “an open and cleare profession of the treweth.” Cartwright dismissed Whitgift’s objection that ordinary laymen were not qualified to choose ministers. They were the “people of God,” Cartwright replied, and therefore spiritual; as the apostle Paul said, “the spirituall man discerneth all things.” Nonetheless, as a precaution, these elections of elders would be monitored and supervised by a local body of ministers. Second, the church needed to consent to the elders’ decisions. That mechanism of consent, stated A Second Admonition, meant that the elders could not “usurp” authority over the entire church.27 Presbyterianism might seem an odd choice of government for a national church. It could be interpreted as an exercise in sectarianism, with its emphasis on local control, purity, discipline, and exclusion. Yet according to radical puritans, it was precisely this seemingly centrifugal sectarian localism, severity, and purity that would allow the Church of England to properly perform its duty as a national church. Why were there heretics in the country, Cartwright asked. Because there was no eldership to help a minister find them out, no trained ministers to convince them of their errors, and no effective church discipline to subdue them. Why was there fighting, drunkenness, fornication, and slandering almost everywhere? Again because there was no eldership and effective discipline to battle these sins. Why was the land overrun with beggars and rogues? Because there were no deacons giving out intelligent charity. Catholics would be subdued by the powerful preaching of the gospel, and should they not be converted, the elders were ideally positioned to spy on them. One minister claimed that presbyterian discipline would dramatically improve England’s military capacities. The Admonition to the Parliament waxed eloquent over the patriotic outcome of presbyterianism: “the Prince may be better obeyed, the realme more florish in godlines, and the Lord himself more sincerely and purely . . . served.” It was with utter confidence that Dudley Fenner cried out for the opponents of the presbyterians to “shew how they can more wysely instruct the people with doctrine, feede them wirh exhortation, rule their soules

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with spirituall power, chastize them with an holy rodde, and provide for their earthlye necessities: then the Lorde hath done.” An observer said sourly of the presbyterians’ sin-haunted reformist patriotism, “They put into people’s heads, that if discipline were planted, there would be no vagabonds, no beggars, a thing very plausible; and in like manner they promised the people many of the impossible wonders of their discipline.” So glorious were Christ’s kingdom and its consequences that these benefits made the commonsense practical objection to presbyterianism—the dire lack of the qualified preachers and godly laity needed to create competent presbyterian government in all of the more than nine thousand parish churches—irrelevant. Once the English began to take positive steps to institute presbyterianism, an influx of God’s supernatural power would complete the process.28 The political assumptions behind this mighty presbyterian motor of reformation—the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of oneman rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government—were identical to those of classical republicanism, first laid out in antiquity and then rejuvenated in the medieval and early Renaissance Italian city-states. Both continental and English presbyterians accordingly described and validated their polity in terms drawn from classical political theory. It was a “mixed” government, they claimed, neither exclusively monarchical, aristocratic, nor democratic, but a mixture. As such, it was approved by classical authorities as the best kind of government, since it avoided the excesses of each of those three. Presbyterians oscillated between describing this mixed government in its ideal and working states. In its ideal state, it was threefold, with Christ the monarch, the elders the aristocracy, and the congregations the people. In its day-to-day running, however, it was a twofold government, possessing an aristocracy of the elders and a democracy of the people.29 No one at the time would need to be reminded that such a twofold government was republican, or a “status popularis” (popular state), as one of its defenders acknowledged parenthetically. “Free state” and “popular state” were the common contemporary terms for a republic. One presbyterian neatly summed up this “popular state” characterization of presbyterianism in 1609: “It is usuall with our Protestant Divines . . . who implead the tyrannous usurpation of the Pope of Rome, to lay this

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as the ground of their arguments, that the government of the Church is not . . . to be welded by some one man alone; but rather (like the common wealthes of Athens or Venice) to be managed by the advice and counsel, of many grave and prudent Senators.”30 It is no strain to label what the presbyterians envisioned at the heart of England’s reformation as a godly republican church order. That order would be sovereign over the monarch’s subjects in its own sphere; it would allow no religious competition; and monarchs themselves would be subject to the wholesome lash of its discipline, including excommunication. Presbyterians, envisioning their godly republicanism as a dynamic attempt to prevent the corrosive effects of illicit power, would remain vigilant for the signs of abuse of authority in their churches. To avoid that abuse, they would have power diffused and insist on government by consent. In order to give Christ, monarch of his church, the unswerving obedience that he demanded of his subjects, those subjects on the earthly plane would need to be republicans—for Christ expected no less.

But what of Whitgift’s accusation that the reformation really desired by these radical puritans was the overthrow of monarchy? Whitgift was scarcely the only critic of ecclesiastical republicanism to see in it dangerous civic consequences. “If this fond faction be applauded,” warned Whitgift’s archbishop, Matthew Parker, “it will fall out to a popularity, and, as wise men think, it will be the overthrow of all the nobility.” Queen Elizabeth herself charged that presbyterianism was “most prejudicial unto the religion established, to her crown, to her government, and to her subjects.”31 To her cousin James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth wrote that the presbyterians were “a sect of perilous consequence, such as would have no kings but a presbytery, and take our place while they enjoy our priviledge.”32 This perception of a link between presbyterianism and hostility to monarchy had some justification. The city-state at the center of continental presbyterianism, Geneva, was a free state, as republics were then called. John Calvin himself, who helped write Geneva’s laws, distrusted monarchy, claiming that in the state as well as the church, “a system compounded of aristocracy and democracy . . . far excells all others.” Calvin’s

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Geneva successor Theodore Beza warned that “there has never been a single monarch (even if we take the best) who has not abused his office.”33 Nonetheless, Cartwright dismissed, quite sincerely, the accusation that presbyterians were anti-monarchical. So what if they went on about the danger of one person ruling the church? That claim had no secular implications. God had insisted on one kind of government for his church, but he had not mandated any particular kind of civic government. As the Bible demonstrated, monarchy was a form God approved in the state. In any case, England’s monarchy itself, Cartwright argued, was wonderfully suited to presbyterianism, for like presbyterianism, it was a mixed form of government. By that Cartwright meant that Elizabeth did not rule alone. Her privy council gave her advice, as did Parliament. She called parliaments only when she deemed them necessary, but nonetheless, their meetings and the laws they passed were an essential part of her rule. Thus, England was neither a democracy, an aristocracy, nor a monarchy, but a mixture of all three. Cartwright claimed that the “mixed estate is best bothe by the example of the kingdome of Christ, and also of this our realme.”34 Whitgift rejected Cartwright’s reading of the unwritten English constitution, and both Cartwright and Whitgift could find ample justification in treatises, statutes, and political practices for their positions. On the one hand, ultimately Elizabeth ruled and her subjects obeyed, as Whitgift argued in response to Cartwright.35 On the other hand, the increased importance of Parliament in the sixteenth century, the dependence of the English government for local cooperation very far down the social scale, and the particular challenge of a female monarch presiding over a male ruling class meant that Elizabeth could not rule simply by fiat. Moreover, the educated classes whose cooperation was vital to her had a participatory ethos of public ser vice and responsibility, derived in part from their humanist education. So vital was cooperation between monarch and people that there has been a rush of scholarship in the past two decades arguing that republicanism in one form or another underlay or circulated within this mixed monarchy. Patrick Collinson detected republican conceptions of the commonwealth underlying privy council decisions in the 1580s and, on a practical level, steering the operations of town governments. Literary

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scholars have discovered a rich vein of Ciceronian humanism running through the literature of Tudor and early Stuart England, which they identify with republicanism, and they note how authors deployed republican motifs in imaginative writing. Historians now expansively speak of a “gentry republic” in early Stuart England, “republican office holding,” and a diff used practice of “quasi-republicanism.”36 Critics, with justice, have accused this scholarship of a pronounced tendency to exaggeration, slapping the label “republican” on arguments for limited monarchy and resistance theory or on any sign of subjects being involved in the government of the country. Critics do agree that “republicanism” can be a valid analytical term during this period, but they have called for a more rigorous and restricted use of it.37 In that spirit of qualification, Patrick Collinson has called England a “monarchical republic.” He means that there were many constitutional and customary restraints on the monarch’s power, although the extent and nature of these restraints were continually under negotiation. As Collinson puts it, “Elizabethan politics and public life . . . brought into dynamic interaction, sometimes collision, two forces which were almost contradictory . . . monarchy with aspirations to be authoritative, even in some sense absolute; and a public ethic of civic humanism which emphasized the duty to the body politic, the commonwealth, shared, according to rank, degree and responsibility, by all of its members, who may be defined as adult males and householders.”38 The civic humanism that Collinson highlights stressed, above all, the right and responsibility of the body politic to offer counsel to the monarch on policy. Who had that right in England’s monarchical republic was a matter of dispute. Queen Elizabeth had a very narrow view of who among her subjects should offer her advice. Her privy council had a more elastic sense, depending on their need at any given time to mobilize public opinion in order to steer Elizabeth in the right Protestant direction. The hotter puritan members of Parliament felt that it was their duty and Parliament’s “liberty” to share their opinions on religion and on the queen’s responsibilities on the floor of Parliament, a duty for which the queen not infrequently rewarded them with spells in prison.39 Puritans outside Parliament widely took up the duty of counsel. Their activism stemmed partially from their broader Christian humanist

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inheritance and partially from the dynamics of a reforming movement that had a heavy degree of informed lay participation. It was the duty of all Christians, Cartwright claimed, to “enquire of the state of the Churches, and of the Ministers in all places.” Having inquired into the state of the churches, puritan laity felt obligated to make sure members of Parliament were well informed of the country’s religious needs and of the machinations of its Catholic enemies. Cartwright explained that it was the “commune duty off a cytisen” to vociferously call attention to the necessity of presbyterianism.40 Counsel in this Protestant monarchical republic, at least for activist puritans, amounted to, as Peter Lake has put it, “the emergent Protestant political nation, talking to itself and its queen.” Given the lively widespread conversation among these activists, there were moments in the 1570s and 1580s when someone like Cartwright might have envisioned England as heading toward consensual rule by a Protestant spiritual elite in the state, just as it should be doing in the church.41 It is not surprising that presbyterians claimed that the Protestant monarchical republic, with its principles of law, counsel, and consent, was a good fit with presbyterianism, and it is no less surprising that England’s monarchs never found this claim by their most unruly and demanding Protestant subjects convincing. The persistent fear of England’s most militant monarchists that radical puritans were dangerous closet republicans would eventually result in the quasi-republic of Massachusetts and the radical puritan-sectarian beheading of King Charles I in 1649, followed by England’s brief experiment in puritan republican rule. The political structures of Massachusetts itself, in a sense, would be a kind of formalization and amplification of the latent civic possibilities sensed by radical Elizabethan puritans.

The long puritan journey from church republicanism to civic republicanism started with the growing suspicion of Elizabethan puritans that their opponents, in the process of attempting to crush puritanism, were subverting the English monarchy.42 Or rather it was not so much the opponents themselves, but the spirit of Antichrist working through them and growing increasingly bold and determined to use any means possible to

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ensure that his grasp on the Church of England did not slacken. Presbyterians came to realize that the restoration of the church’s ancient republican constitution would be impossible without urgent consideration of how England’s own unwritten civic constitution did, or did not, work. This realization came slowly and in stages. Reforming ministers in the mid-1560s discovered to their horror and indignation that their brethren who had taken up bishoprics were proving false. The bishops, under heavy pressure from Elizabeth, would silence those ministers in the reforming faction if the latter refused to wear the legally mandated but popish clerical garments and administer other popish ceremonies which even many of the bishops condemned privately. Reformers were quick to portray the bishops’ actions in the worst possible light. The bishops’ willingness to defy the laws of God and suppress the gospel was popery in action and motivated purely by greed and sycophancy. The bishops were tyrannical followers of Antichrist who would lead the country back to the Catholic church. “Puritanism” emerged as a term of insult at the same time to describe the reformers who were busy labeling their opponents “popish.”43 Puritan protest over the church’s ceremonies in the 1560s was followed by a protracted push for presbyterianism by the most radical puritans in the 1570s. As a result of this agitation, when Cartwright’s opponent John Whitgift ascended to the archbishop’s throne of Canterbury in 1583, the new archbishop was determined, with the Queen’s encouragement, to put an end to puritanism in its entirety.44 Among puritan ministers, there were many different levels of dissatisfaction with the church’s ceremonies and government, as well as different levels of principled resistance. Ministers heading toward confrontation with their bishops always had to keep in the back of their minds that their skills were not readily transferable to other lines of work, except the wretched job of school teaching. Given the different levels of dissatisfaction within puritanism, a nimble archbishop might have considered a divide-andconquer approach. Conversely, the best way to convince more moderate puritans of the presbyterian argument that the office of bishop was intrinsically tyrannical was for a bishop to act like a tyrant. Whitgift was determined to use a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel on a very loose

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movement performing what was widely recognized as useful evangelical work and having powerful admirers. In his determination to crush puritanism, Whitgift was flying in the face of an increasingly institutionalized puritan culture of reformation. More and more laypeople were anxiously scrutinizing their souls to see whether God had predestined them for salvation, while organizing their households around psalm singing, Bible instruction, and regular family prayer. Friends and neighbors were conducting their own religious meetings and traveling in large groups to hear the most soul-penetrating puritan ministers. These laity were often the impatient shock troops for a comprehensive drive toward righteous Protestant government led by ministers, godly county leaders, justices of the peace, and town officials. That drive included improving educational facilities, providing better relief for the poor, creating employment, providing many more opportunities for piety, and hiring a town minister exclusively to preach. Hand in hand with the encouragement of righteous diligence and religion went an attempted crackdown on the multitude of sinful and popular activities that undermined these ambitions and kindled God’s wrath. In towns where puritans were starting to impose their will, riots were breaking out over maypoles, dancing, taverns, and over what to puritans were violations of the holy peace of the Sabbath by the pursuit of worldly or impious activities on Sundays. In this drive for puritan reformation, the push by radical puritans for presbyterianism was only one element and not universally shared, although there was broad puritan agreement that the Church of England needed to become much more consensual.45 Whitgift, by attempting to cow and intimidate all puritan preachers, would be treacherously choking off what puritans considered to be the reforming cutting edge of English society. Moreover, he would appear to be determined to drive the most zealous preachers out of the church just as the international struggle with Catholicism heated up and the Jesuits launched a new covert missionary campaign that would ensure Catholicism’s long-term survival in England. “Howe easily may [the Jesuit] with a worde or two of his mouth, reduce us simple people into Poperie, and consequently into rebellion,” lamented the “commonality” in a “supplication” to Parliament and the Queen for more preaching ministers in 1585.46 But Whitgift was undeterred by the size and controversial nature of the task before him. The sledgehammer he used took the form of a series

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of articles to which all ministers had to subscribe. The most contentious articles required agreeing that neither the Book of Common Prayer nor the church’s ministerial arrangements were against the word of God. Any minister who subscribed would be acknowledging that he had no valid reason to complain about the Church of England’s ceremonies and government, let alone resist or try to change them. Presbyterians would not be able to subscribe to these articles. But neither would the mildest of puritan ministers, preachers who were prepared to conform to all the conditions that the bishops demanded as long as they did not have to positively endorse them. In the face of heavy criticism, some of it coming from the queen’s privy council, Whitgift soon backed off from his wide-ranging dragnet. Most recalcitrant ministers were allowed to subscribe with conditions and mental reservations that took away the sting as well as a great deal of the effectiveness of the articles. Yet Whitgift continued to pursue ministers whom he regarded as particular troublemakers through the hitherto little-used ecclesiastical Court of High Commission. This Court had the power to imprison and could go on inquisitorial fishing expeditions by its use of the controversial self-incriminatory ex officio oath. People given the oath had to answer any question put to them, even with no idea what they were suspected of, or face imprisonment.47 Whitgift’s continuing assault had an important long-term consequence for puritanism: it brought the puritan lawyers into the struggle for reformation. Up to this time, presbyterian ministers had seen their struggle against the popish tyranny of the bishops as a religious one, framed in terms of a defense of the laws of God and the liberties of Christians. The lawyers argued that the bishops with their legal assault were transforming this struggle over the church’s constitution into a civic constitutional struggle. In the bishops’ campaign against puritan dissent, the lawyers argued, they were acting as tyrants in a civic as well as an ecclesiastical sense. The bishops were imposing the canon law, lifted from the Catholic Church, and their expansive subscriptions on puritan ministers in violation of parliamentary statutes. Their ex officio oaths, imprisonments, and fines violated the subjects’ liberties. Depriving recalcitrant puritan ministers of their livings amounted to illegal confiscation of their property. Holding their ecclesiastical courts in their own names and not the queen’s and refusing appeals to the queen’s other

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courts treacherously usurped the queen’s prerogatives (exclusive privileges and rights). The lawyers argued that a proper understanding of the relevant statutes revealed that ministers could not be compelled to either wear the hated popish liturgical garments or follow the Book of Common Prayer.48 Ministers were quick to repeat these arguments when brought before the bishops and their courts, and the illegality of the bishops’ drive against nonconformity became puritan conventional wisdom.49 This discovery of the bishops’ civic tyranny had broader implications. Puritans had always considered themselves Her Majesty’s most loyal subjects. They were the ones most faithful to the reformation that she had initiated and most hostile to the enemies of her and her realm, the Catholics. The puritans’ self-image had been somewhat complicated by the fact that by ignoring her church’s legal requirements, they routinely broke her laws. When they discovered that it was in fact their opponents who were the most egregious lawbreakers, all the pieces of the puzzle came together. Puritans, far from being subversive, were the upholders of English civic law and order, just as they were the upholders of the country’s Protestantism. The civil lawyer and member of Parliament William Stoughton, in the 1583 treatise that launched the puritan legal attack on the bishops, claimed he was making a “defense of her highnesse Lawes.”50 The puritan lawyers did not pull their legal concerns out of thin air. Whitgift’s tactics were rough and unconventional enough, at least when used against Protestants, to cause even Elizabeth’s Lord Chancellor Burghley to compare them to the Spanish Inquisition. But puritans had preexisting expectations about bishops in which to slot their arguably illegal behavior. In their antichristian effort to hold on to their popish power and the popish ceremonies in the Church of England, the bishops ran roughshod over the laws of England, the prerogatives of Her Majesty, and the liberties of her subjects, just as they ran roughshod over the laws and prerogatives of God and the liberties of God’s people. As a puritan put it, “Antichrist is such a one as will be lawlesse, subiect and lyable to no law, but will over-top and over-rule all lawes at his pleasure.” Like the pope, the bishops were seeking an absolute power that transcended law, menaced church and state, and would in fact lead the kingdom back to slavery and popery.51

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One of the most sinister ways in which the bishops deceived the queen (a sound Protestant, puritans believed, if only she could be separated from her wicked advisors) and threatened the liberties of her subjects was that they led her to consider herself to be more powerful than she actually was under English law, even while they were undermining her authority. The Court of High Commission was the most striking example of that inadvertent monarchical abuse of power. It was authorized to interrogate ex officio, fine, and imprison, like the old Catholic ecclesiastical courts, not by parliamentary statute but by the queen’s letters patent (a form of official proclamation). However, the use of letters patent to confer such powers, reformers confidently asserted, assumed prerogative rights that the queen did not in fact possess and would not attempt to use if she only understood the situation clearly. Her Majesty, claimed the secretary to the privy council and Whitgift’s determined opponent Robert Beale, never intended to “make any such innovation beside law.” Therefore, anyone employing those innovations violated both the law and the queen’s prerogative. The anonymous Unlawfull Practises of Prelates (1584) insisted that Archbishop Whitgift’s legal procedures had to come from Her Majesty’s authority and not his own, but it immediately added the qualifier “confirmed by the laws of this land, and not against them.” The High Commission acted only “under pretence of her Majesty’s prerogative,” claimed “A General Supplication made to the Parliament,” not her real prerogative. The puritan invocation of law and parliamentary statute was in the defense not only of true religion but of England’s mixed, limited, Protestant monarchy against an antichristian plot that threatened both.52 This alarm among Elizabethan radical puritans about a popish plot against England’s church, liberties, and limited monarchy has gone unremarked by most historians, who are very reluctant to fi nd any inherent link between puritanism and England’s constitutional struggles. That linkage appears ominously suggestive of the kinds of connections—puritanism and liberty, puritanism and democracy, and so forth—associated with the now-rejected Whig history, in which the past was studied not on its own terms but for its contribution to a more enlightened present and scholars were confident that puritanism was breaking a path to modernity. With the collapse of Whig history and its

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later variants came the collapse of efforts to link Calvinism to the rise of modern representative governments and, even further, the collapse of efforts to find any inherent link between puritanism and England’s constitutional struggles. “Legal/constitutional” and “religious,” it is argued, are two separate categories. At most, scholars generally might allow that these separate categories eventually “fused,” but only much later than the 1580s. The fusion, they claim, took place in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the late 1620s. By this time the fear that Protestantism, limited monarchy, and liberty were all coming under assault from a power-hungry “Popish and malignant faction” had so intensified and spread that alarmed, radicalized puritans, as always ahead of the curve, now took the drastic step of colonizing Massachusetts.53 The alarm of the late 1620s, however, over a popish menace to church and state was not in itself new; it was the mainstreaming of what had been radical Protestant experience for a half century. At no point in that previous half century had the categories of “legal/constitutional” and “religious” fused, for they had never been separate. Radical Elizabethan puritans were waging a constitutional struggle within the church. Yet the goals of church and state overlapped, and the puritans’ conception of England’s mixed monarchy, reinforced by self-interest and by their vision of how New Testament churches operated, ensured that their church struggles would get wrapped up with secular constitutional issues.

Presbyterian polemicists, when not attacking the other antichristian threats that abounded in the 1580s, were quick to broadcast warnings of the bishops’ plot against church and commonwealth. In 1588, a young, popular minister, John Udall, published a grim and at times savagely funny fictional dialogue between a corrupt bishop and a puritan named Paul (after the apostle). The dialogue was intended to demonstrate that the “Bishops and their unlawfull government” were “the cause of all ungodlines so to raigne and of the Papists so to increase in strength and number” in England. The bishop in the dialogue had a Catholic servant and advisor who warned his master that if the laws were properly understood, “not any cannon lawe woulde bee found good law in England.” Moreover, the wicked servant cautioned the bishop, the puritans could

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not have been prosecuted for their ceremonial nonconformity had not the bishops and their Catholic allies subverted the judges. The servant and the bishop plotted to ensure that Queen Elizabeth would not discover that puritans were her best subjects. The bishop, charged the puritan “Paul,” cared “neither for Queene, Country, nor [his] own soule.” Because of this book, Udall’s printer had his shop raided, his press sawn and hewed, and his fonts melted. Shortly thereafter, Udall allegedly told the vicar of Kingston that through his writing he would “geve the Bishoppes suche a blowe as they never had lyke in their lyves.”54 For his own protection, Udall was hustled off to a preaching position in the northern town of Newcastle upon Tyne through the good offices of the puritan Earl of Huntingdon, but not before he had published another underground tract advocating presbyterianism, A Demonstration of the Trueth of that Discipline which Christ hath Prescribed. This tract accused the bishops of being atheists in league with hell, and Udall issued a long-remembered warning that England faced a stark choice between New Testament churches and divine wrath: presbyterianism had to succeed in spite of “all the malice of all that stande against it,” or else “such a judgement must overtake this lande, as shall cause the eares that heare thereof to tingle.”55 Udall also found time to distribute the first of a series of tracts by the most notorious presbyterian, the mysterious pseudonymous Martin Marprelate (“mar prelate” meaning “stop/hinder the bishop”). The Marprelate tracts mostly consisted of skillfully savage, personal, and very funny attacks on the bishops, and these attacks have won them a minor place in the history of English literature. Their main author was probably Job Throkmorton, a member of the House of Commons.56 Marprelate, like Udall, wrapped his presbyterian militancy in patriotic civic concern, fired with alarm over the assault the bishops were making on England’s laws and constitution. According to Marprelate, the bishops were traitors unto “our lawes and priviledges” and “oppressours of the common libertie of her Majesties subjectes.” The canon law they relied on had been banished by statute, taking with it the ex officio oath (the “badge of Antichrists disciples”). Those who opposed the bishops “could do no lesse then we have done, except wee woulde betray the trueth of God, the lawes of this lande, and the doctrines of our church.” The bishops

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therefore should be resisted by “every true Englishman that loveth his Prince and the libertie of his countrie.” Like Cartwright, Marprelate vehemently denied that presbyterianism would require the “alteration of the civill state,” for both presbyterianism and England had mixed governments. Marprelate went on to suggest that under England’s “mixed” government, Parliament could introduce presbyterianism against the monarch’s wishes, which Elizabeth might have regarded as a very rough demonstration of Marprelate’s love for her.57 To the extent that constitutional theory can be extracted from Marprelate’s claim, he pictured England as a republic that delegated power to the monarch only as long as the monarch used that power in the interest of the commonwealth. Unsurprisingly, opponents of the presbyterians seized upon Marprelate’s assertion of parliamentary power as yet another example of presbyterian disloyalty.58 That assertion was the highwater mark, at least for audacity, of Elizabethan godly republicanism. It was also among the last gestures of a religious movement on the verge of collapse. Parliamentary efforts had failed to bring about reform, and by the late 1580s, puritans were losing some of their most important supporters in Elizabeth’s court. Those presbyterians who were determined to press on moved to direct action. In 1587 and 1588, secret informal presbyterian ministerial classes and synods began meeting. They debated how much, if any, respect and validity were to be accorded the bishops and non-puritan ministers of the Church of England and what was the appropriate extent of civil disobedience to the bishops’ commands. A synod at Warwick sketched out a vision of a religious revolution through irresistible although peaceable force. Presbyterian discipline, the synod resolved, would be practiced privately at first, among the “better informed.” Meanwhile, the “people” would be instructed. Through those means, presbyterianism would inexorably come into public execution—the ministers at the synod spent some time pondering the question of how to provide gainful employment for the soon-to-be-ex-bishops and their underlings, lest the land fill up with rogues.59 Meanwhile, Marprelate’s “bitter jests,” a presbyterian minister remembered a decade later, were “savoured among the people” and his books worn out “with continuall reading and handling of them.” The tracts sparked off a massive government search for Marprelate’s printing press and a propaganda counterattack. The authorities hunting for the authors

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of the Marprelate tracts came across evidence of the secret presbyterian organization in the autumn of 1589, and soon Cartwright and eight other leading ministers were under arrest. Udall himself was brought down to London to the High Commission in the winter of 1590 to find out whether he was the author of A Demonstration.60 The government, frustrated by its inability to find the Marprelate author(s), decided to make an example of Udall. In 1581, Parliament, as part of a crackdown on Catholics, had passed a law carrying the death penalty for printing slanderous or seditious words against the queen. The government decided to stretch this law to Udall by arguing that an attack on the queen’s servants, including the bishops, was an attack on the queen. Udall found himself on trial for his life at the Surrey assizes in July 1591. The court played fast and loose with procedures in its determination to get a conviction. Udall told the jury to remember that they were not going to decide “the life of a Seminary and Popish Priest, but that of a minister of the Gospell” (at least 119 Catholic priests were executed during Elizabeth’s reign). The jury, however, found that Udall wrote A Demonstration, and the court had already determined that execution would be the consequence of that verdict.61 For the government, the ideal next step would have been Udall’s recantation of his presbyterianism when faced with the awakening shock of pending execution—Her Majesty’s servants were not eager to carry out the judicial murder of a learned, fiercely patriotic Protestant minister with an international reputation and friends in high places. Even while the jury deliberated, Udall’s judges asked him to recant, but then, as later, all he was prepared to do was reaffirm his undying loyalty to the queen. He was sent back to prison; leading churchmen tried to convince him to submit. James VI of Scotland wrote letters to the queen on Udall’s account, and Udall, through his friends, had both the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh intercede with the queen for him. Raleigh sent back word that Queen Elizabeth regarded him as not worthy to live because of his presbyterianism.62 Udall died in prison while a deal for his release was being negotiated.

Death did not end Udall’s testimony against the bishops’ ecclesiastical and civil tyranny. His manuscript account of his trials appeared in print

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a half century after his death, in 1643. The account was published to demonstrate “that wheresover Episcopacy is, there will be Tyranny.” It was a timely message while Parliament, led by puritans, was fighting a war against King Charles I. So powerful was Udall’s spiritual charisma that he even made a posthumous personal testimony against the bishops. Word spread that when the coroner’s jury examined Udall’s cold corpse, blood trickled out, a widely acknowledged sign of unlawful death; God was spelling it out for the obtuse that Udall was one of his faithful martyrs. The long remembered story of this heavenly “testimony of the murderous illegall proceedings of the State” was fi nally prepared for publication not in England but in Massachusetts by Udall’s admirer the minister John Cotton.63 Another radical puritan, Cotton’s friend the renowned minister John Davenport also brooded over Udall’s death in the mid-1630s. Udall’s death had cursed England, Davenport concluded. Did he not predict that if England failed to accept the government of Christ, a judgment would overtake the country, such as would make the ears of those who heard about it tingle? And had that prophecy not come true? Before Udall’s death, Davenport noted, “Queene Elizabeth did many things woorthy of name and note. Yet after his death and ever since that time the kingdom hath bin on the withering hand . . . all things grow woorse and woorse . . . let the ages to come observe it and this present generation mind it, that on[e] great cause is this, we will not embrace nor seeke for the gouvernment of Jesus Christ over us.” Shortly after Davenport wrote those lines, he fled his accursed homeland to Massachusetts. There Cotton and other puritans, through pure churches, powerful preaching, strict discipline, a civil government guaranteed to be zealously Protestant, and ample checks on power in both church and state, were continuing and improving the reformation that had been aborted in England almost a half century previously.64

chapter 2

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n April 6, 1593, the ex- courtier, lawyer, and separatist leader Henry Barrow went to the gallows. Barrow had denounced bishops with even more rancor than John Udall, but having separated entirely from the Church of England, he denounced presbyterians like Udall with equal harshness. Barrow was condemned under the same law as Udall. However, he lacked Udall’s connections, and Archbishop Whitgift was determined to see him dead. A half century later in Massachusetts, John Cotton, after invoking Udall as a martyr, hastened to make it clear that Barrow was another case altogether. He led a prostitute- and gambling-filled life before what Cotton called his “reformation” (a term not necessarily implying genuine religious conversion), and his spirit remained rough and hot thereafter. God stopped his mouth on the gallows. The Lord did not usually choose such men to be notable instruments of reformation, claimed Cotton.1 Cotton’s dismissal of Barrow is echoed by the manner in which historians of puritanism dismiss separatism. By abandoning the Church of England, historians argue, separatists like Barrow opted out of the larger struggles of the Reformation for introverted, self-isolating groups. They were “doomed,” according to Murray Toulmie, “to a sterile isolation among the protestant radicals in England.” Stephen Foster claims that 39

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separatism “involved indifference or hostility to the basic Puritan goal of using the combined resources of church and state to Christianize and civilize the English people. . . . [Most separatists took] no interest in the state and assum[ed] that the church existed only for the tiny minority of the demonstrably elect.” At its logical terminus, separatism, in Patrick Collinson’s dramatic phrase, was “a curtain across the world so that it was no longer visible and apprehensible” and in it puritanism “flickered and died.” Separatists, Collinson claims, had lost sight of “all wider aspirations in the exclusiveness of a gathered sect.” Elsewhere he describes separatism not as a movement for reform but as “a rational adjustment to things as they were.”2 Yet a few years after Cotton in Massachusetts wrote Barrow out of the ranks of the godly reformers, the separatist William Bradford, governor of Plymouth some forty miles away, indignantly took pen in hand to write him back in. What if Barrow’s spirit was rough and hot, asked Bradford; so was Martin Luther’s. A famous and godly preacher, Edward Phillips, having heard Barrow’s preparations for his death cried out, “Holy Barrow, my soul is with thine!” The Earl of Cumberland, who had been present at Barrow’s execution, told Queen Elizabeth that Barrow and the associate hanged with him, John Greenwood, made very godly ends and had prayed for church and state. The queen then pressed the Oxford theologian and moderate puritan John Reynolds to give her his opinion of Barrow and Greenwood. Reynolds replied that had they lived, they would have been as worthy instruments for the church of God as had been raised in that age. The increasingly concerned queen, according to Bradford, asked Archbishop Whitgift why Barrow and Greenwood had to die. Whitgift told her that although they were the servants of God, they were enemies of the state. “Alas, shall we put the servants of God to death?” Elizabeth replied, and that was the reason, Bradford claimed, why no more separatists were executed in good Queen Bess’s reign. 3 Barrow, by Bradford’s telling, was scarcely an isolated sectarian reprobate; Bradford was proud to portray him as a bright beacon of holiness at the cutting edge of the English Reformation. Reynolds, Whitgift, and the queen would have been surprised to hear the words that separatist legend, as recounted by Bradford, put in their mouths—in one memorable face-to-face confrontation, Barrow compared

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Whitgift to the second Beast of Revelation, and elsewhere he predicted that Elizabeth was heading to hell.4 Nonetheless, there is much of worth in Bradford’s refusal to allow Cotton to write Barrow, and, by implication, Elizabethan separatism, out of the story of would-be reformation that brought Cotton to Massachusetts. Puritanism did not flicker and die in separatism. Separatism originally was nothing more than inchoate presbyterianism put into illegal practice, and the English presbyterian movement was, in many ways, an offspring of separatism. Barrow’s importance to the formation of Massachusetts was that he took what had been a separatist drift away from presbyterianism toward what was to be called congregationalism, clarified it, and defined it sharply as a deliberately anti-presbyterian church polity. He did so not because he wanted to draw a curtain across the world but because he regarded presbyterians as failures at reformation and presbyterianism itself as still drenched in antichristian tyranny. Presbyterians, in response, discovered unsuspected virtues hidden beneath the antichristian surfaces of the Church of England. In that Elizabethan back and forth between separatists and presbyterians lay the beginnings of Massachusetts’s own congregationalism, as well as some of its earliest religious conflicts.

The practice of English separatism and presbyterianism alike started with a group of angry and frustrated pious laity in London in 1566. They were seeking Protestant church ser vices where they would not be confronted by ministers wearing the rags of Antichrist, the legally mandated clerical surplices that had been inherited from the Catholic Church. Clerical conformity had not been rigorously enforced in London until that spring. Edmund Grindal, the bishop of London, had gone into exile in Catholic Queen Mary’s reign, and he had almost refused a bishopric afterward because of his reservations about conformity. In a sermon he once apologized to his listeners for offending their godly consciences by wearing the hated vestments, but, Grindal explained, he wore them that he might sooner abolish them.5 However, on March 26, 1566, Grindal, under pressure from both the queen and his superior the Archbishop of Canterbury, summoned 140

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ministers to his palace. When they arrived, the ministers saw before them Archbishop Parker of Canterbury, Bishop Grindal, the bishop’s chancellor, and, standing mutely to one side, a previous nonconformist puritan minister dressed in the legally mandated garb. The chancellor told the assembled ministers that they had to sign either “yes” or “no” to a statement promising to conform, without any discussion. Those who signed “no” would lose their jobs after a brief grace period. Thirty-seven refused to sign. A minister who signed “yes” wrote in his journal, “We are killed in our souls for this pollution of ours.” Angry demonstrations and fistfights broke out in some churches; women threw stones at one conforming minister and pulled him out of his pulpit. But Grindal held firm. Ministers who refused to conform lost their positions, while laity who refused to come to the polluted ser vices were starved for preaching and the sacraments, besides risking being called into the bishop’s courts for nonattendance at church.6 Some laity remembered that there had been a secret London Protestant congregation in the days of Catholic Queen Mary a decade earlier. Now that bishops were persecuting faithful Protestants again, laity and cooperative ministers began to hold their own unsanctioned ser vices, using the ser vice book written by the fiery Scottish reformer John Knox for the English church in Geneva. The ser vices may have started at a London church, Holy Trinity Minories, that successfully avoided episcopal supervision until the mid-1570s and appointed its own ministers. But the illegal congregation soon moved to private houses and even ships. The numbers attending the ser vices swelled. In June 1567, about a hundred were arrested after hiring Plumbers’ Hall for a ser vice; the sheriffs were unconvinced by their claim that they were a wedding party. Seventeen or eighteen were jailed, and seven leaders were brought before Grindal and the mayor of London for questioning.7 While it was the popish rags that drove the separatists out of the parish churches, what they set about to create on their own was inchoate presbyterianism. At some point, the separatist congregation ordained ministers, as well as elders and deacons, and offered the sacraments and practiced excommunication. Advanced Reformed Protestants on the continent in the 1550s had started to argue that biblically correct church government and discipline were so important that they comprised one of

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the three marks of a true church, along with the two that Calvin insisted on, correct preaching and correct sacraments. The presbyterian John Knox adopted the three marks for the Scots Confession of 1560. The London separatists held to these strict standards. “We will be tried by the best reformed Churches,” the baker William White told Grindal under questioning. The Church of Scotland was such a church, he explained, for it had those three marks, and “these be the notes by which the true church is known.” The congregation regarded themselves to have “the pure or apostolic religion” and were said to call themselves “puritans.” From these and similar underground roots the term quickly spread to be an insult applied to all nonconformists.8 The new separatist congregation suffered from periodic imprisonments and an utter lack of encouragement even from leading puritan nonconformists. To these nonconformist puritans, the Church of England, whatever its failing, was miraculously Protestant again, as was the monarch, and it was the most important Protestant church in Europe. Those were heavy considerations to weigh against a strict three-mark definition of a true church and against the drastic, illegal, and, to most people, seditious step of separation from England’s state church. When the English authorities sent some of the separatist ringleaders up to Scotland in 1568, John Knox himself told them that they were going too far; he now claimed that a true church needed only two marks, preaching and the sacraments. The disillusioned separatists returned to England, and at some point, the congregation fragmented into smaller groups, at least in part due to the pressure of persecution.9 A handful of closely related documents have survived from these early separatist congregations, and they show that these separatists were reformers as well as church purists. The documents announced the separatist goals of separation from idols and abominations and creation of congregations with the three marks of true churches, but they also warned that Catholics would not be freed from their delusions and the pope would not be banished from England as long as the government and ceremonies of the Church of England were left unreformed. One purpose of separation, they claimed, was to make the nonseparatists ashamed of their practices as their first step to abandoning them. A separatist petition to Elizabeth from 1571 emphasized this reforming zeal.

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The petition warned of the menace of “papists and newters, faulse brethren, and domesticall enemies”; attacked the canon law at length; and implored Elizabeth to emulate the Old Testament king Jehosophat. She should “cast downe all hye places of idolatrye with in her land” and send forth preachers of the gospel. It claimed that if she carried out these reforms, she would subdue her enemies and enjoy a prosperous reign, and that if she did not, God’s wrath would descend on the land.10 By the time the petition was written, all the surviving separatist ministers and perhaps most of the laypeople had returned to the Church of England. In the judgment of a separatist in the 1580s, pride, mixed purposes, and ignorance debilitated this first attempt at separatism and “caused the savour of the Lords work to stink in the nostrels of the people.” That return was not without tension; after making a public recantation of separatism, the ruling lay elder of one congregation hanged himself—like Judas, observed the separatists.11 Official repression and puritan criticism, along with internal conflicts, certainly helped drive separatists back into the Church of England. But there was pull as well as push. The separatists returned to the Church of England at the same time as a presbyterian drive to reform it arose. In 1570, Thomas Cartwright delivered a series of lectures on presbyterianism at Cambridge University. The lectures resulted in Cartwright’s dismissal from his chair as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and the beginning of an organized movement for presbyterianism within the Church of England.12 This initial presbyterian activism was deeply bound up with the earlier separatism. Two separatist ministers Nicholas Crane and William Bonham became active in London presbyterian agitation. Around 1571 radical presbyterian ministers started meeting together in London, as the so-called Wandsworth presbytery. They would plot the restructuring of the Church of England for two decades. The Wandsworth presbytery’s organizing genius was John Field, who had preached in 1568 at the mother church of London separatism, Holy Trinity Minories, as perhaps had another of the Wandsworth presbytery’s members, Thomas Wilcox. Both Wilcox and Field worked with one of the lay organizers of the separatist Plumbers’ Hall congregation, William White.13 With Wilcox, Field launched the public campaign for presbyterian reform of the Church of England in 1572. That year they illegally published

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the famous (or infamous) An Admonition to the Parliament, a fierce call for presbyterianism. An Admonition ushered in two decades of presbyterian polemics with a frank acknowledgment of its authors’ separatist roots. “We in England,” it warned, “are so far off from having a church rightly reformed according to the prescript of God’s Word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same.” After entirely dismissing the Church of England, like the separatists, the Admonition laid out the three marks of a true church. This passage, probably by Wilcox, emerged from the already-existing language of separation. Cooler heads registered the transition from separation to reform by handwriting “scarce” between “not” and “come” in the remaining copies of the first edition and adjusting the second edition accordingly. A church that at least had a sliver of the outward face of true reformation did not need to be entirely rejected. Wilcox himself retreated to Calvin’s two-mark definition of a true church, sacraments and doctrine, in a later publication.14 Presbyterianism within the Church of England, despite the rhetorical ferocity with which it was promoted, was never, when push came to shove, a nonnegotiable demand. The unreformed Church of England, for puritans who did not separate, remained a true church in spite of its horrendous corruptions and failures. The handwritten alteration to An Admonition’s separatist language did not come soon enough to avoid John Whitgift’s irate comments, and Whitgift accused Thomas Cartwright of maintaining what he called the erroneous opinions taught in the separatists’ conventicles. Cartwright answered him a year later. As a presbyterian committed to the reform of the Church of England, Cartwright agreed that separatism was wrong. Nonetheless, he did not deny that he shared the separatists’ opinions. On the contrary, he took offense at Whitgift calling their meetings conventicles (illicit gatherings). Perhaps drawing on insider knowledge, Cartwright claimed that the separatists had the two marks of a true church, preaching and the sacraments correctly administered; therefore, they were not conventicles. They were the church of God, albeit with some disorder.15 In view of the first separatists’ indeterminate relationship with puritans and the Church of England, Patrick Collinson has called them “semi-separatists.” But that label assumes that the current conventional depiction of separatism—adjusted to the way things were, introverted,

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nonreformist, and representing the flickering and dying of puritanism—is the norm against which the first separatists should be measured, and it is this normative standard for separatism that is problematic. The early separatists claimed they had separated from the Church of England; their opponents claimed they had separated; some went back to the Church of England; others remained separatists into the next century. It is correct, however, that these early separatists moved in and out of broader puritan circles. To give one striking example, Nicholas Crane was a separatist minister in the late 1560s; he subsequently became a presbyterian activist; and he ended his life in prison in 1588 after being arrested at a separatist meeting.16 After this common beginning, separatists and radical puritans would work a great deal harder at denying an overlapping identity, but on both sides of the Atlantic, they would not succeed in severing their umbilical connection.

Robert Browne (1550?–1633) might have been the first separatist to take steps, albeit hesitant ones, to set up formal barriers between separatism and presbyterianism. In the late 1570s, he was an imperious, energetic young puritan preacher with a swelling hatred of the bishops and growing impatience at any compromise with them. Based in Cambridge, he was casting about for a region where he could carry on further reformation with more success. Browne settled on the county of Norfolk, about a hundred miles northeast of London. Norfolk had strong Protestant sympathies. Its center, Norwich, was England’s second largest city and had a large contingent of godly ministers. Browne fell in with a circle around an old acquaintance, the nonconformist schoolmaster Robert Harrison. Browne and Harrison were among the 175 Norwich men who signed a petition to the queen in the early 1580s asking for presbyterianism.17 Browne, however, soon decided that the situation was too dire to wait for the government to reform the Church of England. What was called for was separatist direct action. If only because he left books behind him, with Browne we can speak of a programmatic separatism distinct from presbyterianism and therefore the beginning of a separatist tradition.18

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Much of that separatist distinctiveness was forced upon Browne by practical necessity. The puritan ministers of Norwich wanted nothing to do with separation, and the loyalties of Harrison’s group of laity to those ministers was strong. Browne needed a conceptual crowbar to lever the group away from the puritan clergymen, and in the process of discovering it, he started lever separatism away from presbyterianism as well. Puritan ministers often found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. They were under a divine command to declare the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27), and their most zealous puritan lay auditors expected them to do no less. That command meant practicing nonconformity and preaching against the dregs of popery remaining in the Church of England. The practical conundrum facing puritan ministers was that such practice and preaching easily brought conflict with the bishops and the loss of pulpits. Yet negotiating compromises to avoid official crackdowns alienated the ministers’ most zealous puritan auditors. In 1575, a new bishop, Edmund Freake, arrived in Norwich charged with the unhappy task of reining in puritan nonconformity. The consequence was fierce running skirmishes and, in 1578, a truce forced on the bishop by Elizabeth’s privy council in which the most godly ministers were allowed partial nonconformity in exchange for not attacking the ceremonies.19 While Bishop Freake did not get obedience, the ministers abandoned their duty to preach the whole gospel, regardless of worldly consequences, and it was on that point that Browne zeroed in. Browne argued that compromises like the Norwich one showed that it was impossible to be a true minister within the Church of England. Real ministers would not compromise with Antichrist. The fence straddling of puritan ministers therefore demonstrated that their godliness was counterfeit and that they were hypocrites talking out of both sides of their mouths. To the godly laity, they denounced the antichristian corruptions of the Church. Yet they worked out arrangements with the antichristian bishops that would allow them to keep preaching, and they even acknowledged that they would stop preaching, should a bishop so command them. Browne’s magnum opus, A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Anie (1582) is best known for its argument that churches should be set up without the government’s permission—and

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that argument got two of its distributors executed—but the bulk of the book is an attack on temporizing puritan ministers.20 Browne’s group of potential separatists in Norwich found his argument against the puritan ministers plausible, but came back at him with a puzzle that followed logically from it. How could those laity explain the source of their Christian faith? As the Bible said, faith came from hearing the word preached by one who was sent by God (Romans 10:14–17). If the ministers had awakened their faith, then those ministers had been sent by God, and therefore they were not false.21 Faced with this conundrum, the conclusion the group reached was that it was true, as the Bible claimed, that faith came by hearing the word preached by one who was sent by God. Where they had previously gone wrong was in assuming that ministers were the only preachers whom God could send. On the contrary, every Christian had a divine mandate to preach and edify. The word of God had come to live in these laity’s hearts not from the ministers’ sermons but from the prayer groups and pious discussions that were amplifying the word of God among the puritan laity across England. These gatherings, called “conventicles” by their enemies, were, and long remained, a staple of puritan culture, sometimes with clergy present and sometimes not. Jonathan Scottow, shedding his old man’s tears at the end of the seventeenth century for Massachusetts, remembered a golden era in the colony’s history when groups of men and women poured forth their “Souls Experiences each to other” and discovered “lively Characters of the same Grace, line for line appearing, as in those who were made partakers of the same sealing Spirit.”22 Browne succeeded in persuading his group of laity that it was their lay conventicles, not the puritan ministers, that had provided the spiritual foundations for what was to be their nascent alternative church movement. With Browne’s expansion of the spiritual role of the laity came an expanded understanding of their place in the church. In 1581, Browne’s group, following the practice of the earlier London separatist churches, created their own church by agreeing to a covenant. They pledged with each other and with God to walk together in God’s ways, with the understanding that if they did so, God would bless them, just as he had the ancient Jews when the Jews kept their covenant with him.23 The separatists then adopted a presbyterian model for their new church order, with one striking exception. In the presbyterian model,

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the elders governed and taught, and the people gave or withheld their consent. Browne and his group, by contrast, envisioned the people actively participating in the governance and teaching of the church. The laity could prophecy, which meant that at ser vices they, as well as the ministers, could pray, read scriptures, and preach. The laity would also take an active role in discipline. Ministers did not always need to be ordained by other ministers but could be ordained by the lay members of the church. Whereas Cartwright and the presbyterians envisioned their church government as a “mixed” republic, where the people consented to their rulers and their decisions, what Browne was envisioning was closer to a democracy, where the people governed directly. It is probable that earlier separatist churches, given that they were underground and voluntary, had a larger role for the laity in practice than presbyterian clerical theorists would have been pleased with, even though those churches claimed solidarity with presbyterianism. If so, Browne was making earlier separatist practice a formal element of his church.24 By damning the puritan ministry and retheorizing the role of the laity, Browne was creating formidable barriers between himself and the presbyterians. But he built up an even greater barrier in his depiction of the relationship of church and state. Puritans and earlier separatists saw themselves as reformers trying to prod England’s rulers to create a godly Israel. Browne, however, had little faith in a magisterial reformation. Church and state, he insisted, were almost inevitably opposed to each other. “We knowe,” he wrote, recalling the first centuries of the Christian church, “that when Magistrates [i.e., rulers] have bin most of all against the Church and the authoritie thereof, the Church hath most florished.” Browne depicted England itself not as straying Israel, the favorite puritan trope, but as the heathen land of Egypt. Accordingly, the only responsibility separatists had toward their nation was to flee from it, just as the ancient Jews fled Egypt.25 Separatism, by Browne’s argument, of necessity had to be exactly what modern historians have taken it to be: a sect, an introverted, self-isolating movement, divorced from the great effort of national reform that drove the puritans. However, Browne could not always keep the boundary between separatist Israel and English Egypt sharply defined. In spite of the severity of his attacks on puritans, Browne did not disavow all his ties to them. He and Harrison agreed that the puritan preachers were not irrevocably

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damned, for those preachers genuinely did good when they “did strive for reformation.” Although Browne and Harrison sweepingly condemned the Church of England, they denied that they ever meant that to imply that every parish congregation in England, no matter how puritandominated, was a false church or devoid of discipline. Despite his strong statements about the people’s say in church government, Browne once suggested that while the people gave input, “deciding of matters” was a job for the elders, as in presbyterianism. Elsewhere he assigned the role of government in the church to the elders, with the people’s role being obedience. Browne’s associate Harrison was being selective but not totally incorrect when he claimed that the presbyterians could not accuse the separatists of “swerving anything at all from this [presbyterian] government, which you woulde beare us in hande that you love.”26 When Browne tried too hard to make his new separatist church selfisolating, all he succeeded in doing was driving himself out of it. In 1582, persecution at home sent the separatists to Middelburg in the Netherlands (a day’s sail from Norfolk, with regular back and forth—the Netherlands were much easier to reach than London). Browne quickly fell out with his church over its lack of zeal for isolation. The congregation, Browne complained, failed to sufficiently bewail the “abominations” they committed while attending Church of England ser vices; they failed to condemn their brethren and sisters who willingly remained in England; and worst of all, they accused him of teaching false doctrine for maintaining that England was Egypt because of the wickedness of its people and because of the bondage in which the true church was held there.27 Browne left the congregation for Scotland at the beginning of 1584, got along no better with the Scots than he had with his own congregation, and returned to England in 1585. The Middelburg congregation faded into historical obscurity while small separatist groups in Norfolk continued on into the next century. Browne recanted of his separatism, insincerely, claimed some, and resumed his career as a minister in the Church of England. Browne on occasion was imprisoned for nonconformity, and he was widely rumored to abuse his wife. In his eighties, he struck a tax collector, for which he was hauled off to prison on a cart equipped with a featherbed, in deference to his age, and there he died.

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He left behind him the term “Brownism” as a synonym for separatism, in part because the opponents of separatism delighted in affi xing to that movement the name of an unstable turncoat.28

Although Browne and his congregation had taken the first steps toward congregationalism, the decisive separatist break with presbyterianism came with Henry Barrow (c.1550–1593). Barrow was a Cambridge graduate, nonpracticing lawyer, frequenter of taverns and whores, gambler, hanger-on at Queen Elizabeth’s court, and well-known character around London. One day, the story went, Barrow was walking down a street in London with a friend. Hearing the sound of a thundering puritan preacher coming out of a church, Barrow was drawn to enter, for sport. He got more than he bargained for, as the preacher’s harsh message turned his life around. As Francis Bacon, the famous politician, essayist, and natural philosopher, recalled, Barrow “made a leap from a vain and libertine youth, to a preciseness in the highest degree: the strangeness of which alteration made him very much spoken of.” Barrow retired to his home county of Norfolk for pious reflection.29 Through an encounter with a member of Browne’s circle in Norfolk, Barrow converted to separatism. 30 He formed a close association with the separatist minister John Greenwood and began producing a stream of tracts laying out the case for separatism with unprecedented concision, clarity, and vitriol. When Barrow visited Greenwood in prison in 1587, he himself was thrown in jail, where he spent much of the rest of his life. Nonetheless, Barrow continued to write from prison, and he served as the spiritual advisor for a congregation of London separatists, most of whom would eventually emigrate to Amsterdam after his execution in 1593. The same year, Richard Bancroft, a leading conformist scourge of puritans, lamented the “new frenzy of Barrowisme.”31 The Amsterdam church, with Barrow as its posthumous guru, was the main intellectual nerve center of separatism up to the 1610s, and while the Pilgrims slavishly followed neither Amsterdam nor Barrow, they never spoke of Barrow without the greatest respect. Barrow’s longest and most comprehensive book was A Brief Discoverie of the False Church, written and smuggled out of prison a page at a

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time and printed at Dordrecht in early 1591 (it ended up being very long). As the title suggests, most of the book was a fierce and occasionally slashingly funny attack on the Church of England, from its bishops to the radical puritans. While Brief Discoverie can seem like little more than a sprawling, random string of abuse, it was in fact sequentially organized around the various elements that, according to Barrow, made the Church of England a false church—the false membership, false ministry, false worship, false preaching, and false government and discipline.32 Brief Discoverie damned bishops and presbyterians indiscriminately. The “grosse wickednes” of the bishops and their supporters was “apparant and odious unto all men, in whome is any sparck of light or grace,” Barrow claimed, which did not stop him from describing their gross wickedness in great detail. Radical puritan ministers were no better; the only difference between them and the bishops was that they concealed their wickedness more effectively. They were “disguised hypochrites” and “ravening wolves.” Since they successfully duped most of the godly laity into rejecting separatism, these ministers were also the cunning means by which God sorted out the damned from the saved among puritans, divine instruments “sent of God in his wrath to deceave the children of death.” Salvation, Barrow asserted, was not possible within the Church of England.33 Barrow condemned English society as fiercely as he condemned the country’s church. The common schools provided “ungodly nurture” with an education based on “lascivious poets and heathenish philosophers.” English universities were “monkish dennes” filled with “Sodomites.” “The whole order of justice” was “perverted.” England’s rulers generally suffered from “incorrigible pride and wickednes,” while Queen Elizabeth herself tottered on the brink of “the wrath of God, and eminent danger, and inevitable destruction.” While the puritans grumbled that Elizabeth’s letters patent authorizing the Court of High Commission were unconstitutional, Barrow compared them to “King David’s commission or letters mandatory unto Joab, for the murthering of Uriah.”34 Like Browne, Barrow in A Brief Discoverie might seem to have been depicting England as a sixteenth-century “Egypt.” But Barrow was in fact describing not Egypt but a desperately corrupt Israel, as he made clear at the very commencement of Brief Discoverie. In his preface to the

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“Christian reader,” Barrow reminded his audience of how the “godlie yong king” Josiah rent his garments at Israel’s decline and at the imminence of God’s judgments and of how the prophet Jeremiah lamented the desolation and wrath soon to befall his land. Barrow and his readers, he warned them, lived in no less “dangerous (if not desperate) daies,” and Barrow, like Cartwright, was performing the common duty of a citizen in publishing his tract. “The zeale of the glorie of my God inforced me,” Barrow explained in Brief Discoverie’s preface, “as also the tender love and care of the safetie of this my contrie constrained me, to breake silence.”35 Barrow, like the presbyterians, was a reformer. Like the presbyterians, Barrow in Brief Discoverie raised the alarm against antichristian power. Barrow portrayed a crisis in England precipitated by the “monstrous antichristian power of the bishops” and their “devilish and antichristian” assertion of “absolute authority.” Like the presbyterians, Barrow argued that the “blasphemous High Commission” was “the very abisme and golph from whence spring and flow all these innumerable enormities [of the bishops], into every part of this whole land.” This “strange Romish spanish Court” with its “absolute power” over all the queen’s subjects was “the very bane and poyson both of the church and common welth.” Like the presbyterians, Barrow insisted that the High Commission was not only antichristian but “expresly contrarie, prejudicial, and repugnant unto the Crowne and prerogative royal, unto the great charter and lawes of the land.” Now all of England stood “in most servile subjection” to the bishops and “their apostatical and bloody throne and antichristian power.”36 In portraying a crisis of illegitimate, popish ecclesiastical power threatening Christian liberty and England’s limited monarchy, Barrow was at one with the presbyterians. But Brief Discoverie turned the presbyterians’ alarums over antichristian power against the presbyterians themselves, while blasting their alleged reforming zeal as nothing but con artistry. The result was that Barrow drove ahead where Browne hesitated. He turned separatist congregationalism into a consistently articulated reformist alternative to presbyterianism. Presbyterians located the ancient fall of the church into antichristian power as beginning when one minister began to assert control over other ministers. Barrow kicked that original crisis back a stage earlier.

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Presbyterianism itself, where the elders ruled and the people’s role in government became limited to consent, marked the ancient “primitive defection” from New Testament purity. The rise of bishops and eventually the pope constituted the subsequent “deluge of the Gentiles.”37 Accordingly, Barrow argued that contemporary presbyterians sought to revive not the primitive New Testament churches but those churches’ first clerical apostasy. He was writing at the very end of the classis movement, the covert gatherings of presbyterian-minded ministers in the late 1580s to plan reformation. What to presbyterians were legal meetings to discuss professional issues, including church reform, were to Barrow (and to the government, when it discovered them) sinister concentrations of illegitimate clerical power; Barrow called them “secrete classes.” Should the presbyterian classis system ever become legal, Barrow claimed, it would be revealed, too late, to be another clerical plot to oppress the people, like episcopacy itself. Synods would undercut the right of congregations to elect their ministers, since they would block any appointment of which they disapproved (which was an uncharitable but not unjustified reading of presbyterian texts). The people would be shut out of them, while the synods enjoyed “absolute power” over the churches. In the individual churches themselves, the presbyterians’ alleged checks on the ministers’ power would prove to be illusory. Lay participation would be effectively limited to the lay elders, whom the ministers would ensure were the “welthiest honest simple men of the parish, that shal sit for ciphers dombe [dumb] by their pastor and meddle with nothing.”38 It was urgent, for the good of England and for the good of the church, that the people protect what Barrow called their “liberty, power, and interest” not only from the bishops but from the incipient presbyterian synods. That urgency drove Barrow to a conclusion that became fundamental to later separatism and congregationalism. Radical puritans rejected the authority of the bishops. However, the benefit of having authoritative supervisory bodies like synods seemed obvious enough that they overlooked the problem that scripture provided little justification for them. For example, the 1584 Directory of Church- Government, the closest Elizabethan presbyterians came to a party platform, asserted that authoritative synods were “necessary and perpetuall” but also acknowledged that synodical authority over individual churches was “not expresly

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confirmed by Authority of the holy Scripture.” Before Barrow, separatists did not question the power of synods.39 Barrow, however, read his Bible the late 1580s in the midst of a profound struggle between raging, expanding antichristian absolute power and Christian liberty. In the light of that struggle, the silence of scripture on authoritative synods appeared compelling. Barrow wrote in Brief Discoverie that synods had no control over individual churches. Their collective wisdom could be very useful for the purpose of offering advice and counsel, but they could not command. Synods “were not instituted to plucke away the power or to execute the publicke duties” of any congregation. A synod had no power to excommunicate someone or remove a church officer or appoint one. If a church fell into error, the most that other churches could do was shun it until it repented.40 Barrow made no secret of the relationship of his discovery about synods, later adopted by puritan congregationalists, to the menacing constitutional landscape of the late 1580s. He warned that the incipient presbyterian synods and the Court of High Commission were much of a muchness, both manifestations of antichristian power. They were both, he claimed, equally “as new, strange, and antichristian, as prejudicial to the liberty of the saints, and to the power, right, and duties of the whole church, and as contrary to the gospell of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Should the presbyterian platform prevail in England, Barrow warned, “it wilbe a verie hard matter for the people ever to recover their libertie again.”41 The people’s liberty that the synods threatened was foundational to Barrow’s idea of New Testament church government. Presbyterians presented the role of the “people” in church government as little more than the power of approbation or disapproval, a theoretically important but usually residual supervisory power over an aristocratic government that basically ran itself. Barrow took Browne’s argument that the people had a share in the government of the church and turned it into the dynamic lynchpin of the struggle against antichristian power. For Barrow, it was the responsibility of every Christian, every male Christian anyway, to relentlessly police the conduct and doctrine of other members and of the church elders. “CHRIST hath given ful power and libertie to all and everie one of his servantes,” said Barrow, “to put in practise whatsoever he commandeth, as also to reforme, to reprove, censure and cast out

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whatsoever is found to be contrarie and repugnant unto his word, though al the powers in the earth or in hell withstand it.” Ordinary Christians not only had the responsibility to “Publikely” reform, reprove, and censure “any publike transgression of anie member of the church, or of the whole church”; they were also charged to listen carefully to the ministers and “discover and refute any error escaped or delivered in publike doctrine.”42 As was typical for puritans, Barrow did not conceive of Christian liberty as a privilege; it was a dreadful responsibility, with the wrath of God awaiting those who failed at it. All church members had “like interest in Christ, in his word, the publike doctrine, and ministration of the church,” Barrow warned; therefore, “shall all be held guiltie and punished for the publike transgressions and abuses of the church.” Ordinary church members should observe proper order and let the elders reprove errors and transgressions first. But if the elders failed to do so, “then may any one of the congregation, or any Christian whosoever; yea, he ought to reprove such transgression and error, unles he wilbe guiltie of betraying the faith of Christ, [and] of the destruction of the whole congregation, knowing the . . . the sodennes of the wrath of God for such things.” Indeed, the ancient decline of the church came about precisely because, according to Barrow, “the people first . . . neglected their dutie, and gave up their Christian libertie, power, and interest in al the Church affaires, the choice, ensuring, and deposing their officers, etc. into the handes of their presbitry.” 43 The reason why the Church of England was such a stew of corruption, Barrow argued, was because it had never been allowed to obtain this body of virtuous, active, ecclesiastical citizens. With one “blast of Queen Elizabeth’s trumpet,” Barrow lamented, England’s population of ignorant papists and gross idolaters were automatically transformed into “faithfull Christianes and true professors.” The corruption of such a population made it poor material for vigilant heavenly citizenship. Unsurprisingly, upon it the “hungrie priestes” descended, “to divide the pray [sic].” The Court of High Commission was the ultimate consequence of a lax Protestant citizenry.44 Presbyterianism would never produce that awakened citizenry. The presbyterians ostensibly wanted a purified church, at least of a sort that

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would enhance their own power. But, claimed Barrow, they did not want it badly enough to risk damaging their relationships with their patrons among the aristocracy and gentry or to risk confrontation with the bishops. Thus, their preaching of the word of God was inherently corrupt, he charged. They carefully tailored their sermons to denounce only “such sinnes as either these chief of their auditorie are not apparantly infected with, or els can endure to be weaned of.” Whoremasters, usurers, and adulterers would feel their lash, but those sorts of people, Barrow pointed out, did not seek the company of puritan ministers anyway, and they provided the ministers with no money or other material benefits. Puritan ministers carefully explained away or avoided mentioning the particular sins of anyone in their audience who was “riche and of authoritie or noble.” When their audience was godly, presbyterian ministers would “have a fling at the bishops in some eloquent Delphick darke speaches, such as may be retracted, or have a double construction.” The “sweet whistle” of puritan preaching was nothing more than “a goodly embroidered coverlet” with which the puritans “cover Jesabel’s bed.” The dire state of England, awash in corruption and the church no closer to reform than it had been in 1559, was proof enough that the milk of these preachers’ sermons was unwholesome. Barrow noted quite correctly and dismissed with scorn the standard puritan argument that responsibility for England’s sorry condition lay with the auditors who rejected the gospel, not with the puritan ministers who allegedly preached it faithfully.45 Barrow’s analysis of England’s problems did not resolve itself exclusively into wicked clerics. Those problems arose because the clerics formed an unholy alliance with England’s rulers. Clerics and rulers did not want the true church discipline of Christ for their own separate reasons. Princes and magistrates did not want discipline because they suffered from “incorrigible pride and wickednes.”46 The bishops and their followers were happy to indulge princes and magistrates in their resistance since they fed off the corruptions of the present church system. Presbyterians indulged them to preserve their lines of patronage. The ultimate problem with corrupt clerics, be they bishops or presbyterians, was that they hindered the application of genuine New Testament discipline to the group that needed it the most: England’s ruling classes.

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Thanks to conformist hostility and presbyterian temporizing, Barrow complained, those ruling classes enjoyed “immunitie from the order, government, and censure of Christ in his church.” Their immunity from censure would not cease if presbyterianism came in, for presbyterian ministers would not “molest or offend anie of welth or authoritie, live as they list.” Presbyterian ministers would use the power of excommunication against the powerful only “with a leaden heele.” Barrow was not attempting to draw a curtain across the world; he was charging that the presbyterians were too implicated in the world to effectively change it. His line of analysis has received qualified scholarly endorsement.47 In a properly reformed church system, by contrast, active lay Christians would ensure that ministers preached the whole word of God, however harsh that sounded to the wealthy and powerful, while rulers would feel the beneficial lash of spiritual censure. “O what a comfort were this to Christ’s poore lambes,” Barrow exclaimed, “to see the lion so humbled as to eate hay together with them in the mountaine of the Lord, and not to live off the ravine and spoile of the poore sheepe.” Under ecclesiastical pressure, magistrates would finally enforce the law of God, and England would escape God’s wrath. The medieval universities would be replaced by schools of the prophets, attached to local congregations, where the vain philosophies and lascivious poems of the heathens would be forever banished, and study of the Bible would replace the study of the corrupt theologians of the past. England would see its medieval church buildings, monuments to antichristian idolatry, torn down and the parishes, with their wicked compulsory tithes, patrons, and false Christians, replaced by voluntary and spontaneous congregations that existed only as long as they were sparked by true Christianity. In those congregations, the lowliest of Christians would keep alert eyes on the speeches and actions of their betters, and the men would be ever ready to apply censure and discipline when necessary. The rest of the population would be under the compulsory instruction of the churches and the righteous and carefully policed magistrates.48 Beyond these changes, England’s hierarchical social order would remain intact, but it would be transformed by its newfound holiness. Barrow’s enormous faith in the power-upending social impact of the practice of what he took

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to be genuine New Testament Christianity may have been more than a little unrealistic. But given that radical puritans invoked divine intervention to explain how their much more restrained reformation would come about, the difference between him and them in terms of realism was one of degree rather than of kind. The vehemence of Barrow’s attack on presbyterianism can be ascribed to many sources. Barrow was frustrated with the failure of reformation, while he resented presbyterian clericism and fiercely distrusted power. His rejection of synods might be explained in part by the fact that he was the first separatist polemicist to be confronted with presbyterian synod-like organizations in action. Whatever his sources, Barrow, with his steady insistence on the political autonomy of individual churches and the people’s power of government, was the first consistent exponent of what would later be called congregationalism. In a widely cited essay, Patrick Collinson warns of the dangers of reading the disputes between congregationalists and presbyterians of the 1640s back into an earlier, more fluid period. Stephen Brachlow takes Collinson’s argument a step further in a widely cited book and argues that “the breach between separatists and nonseparating radical puritans is not to be explained as a difference of ecclesiology, but as a difference of strategy, timing, and the extent to which each was willing (or unwilling) to disavow their allegiance to the church as constituted by English law.” Brachlow’s evidence for this claim does not bear up well under scrutiny, and Barrow would have been astonished to learn that for all his huffing and puffing, a scholar would profess to find no difference between him and presbyterians over church government.49 So would have presbyterians who, in response to Barrow, fumed over the “plaine contradiction between them and us . . . in the matter of discipline and Church government.” Much water remained to pass over the dam, but disputes between congregationalists and presbyterians were coeval with the emergence of congregationalism in the late sixteenth century, and inevitably so, since congregationalism emerged self-consciously in opposition to presbyterianism. Barrow’s accomplishment was to leave radical Protestants with two related but deliberately distinctive models of godly ecclesiastical republicanism. That was no small spiritual feat, and it was memorialized, ominously, by a ghostly

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enactment of Barrow’s execution appearing to mariners far out at sea at the same time as the real one was taking place, according to separatist legend.50

One energizer for Barrow’s sweeping attacks against the presbyterians would have been the search for polemical edge against them. Separatists and radical puritans were reaching out to the same audience of discontented, zealous laity, “gentle and tractable soules, which in deed beare a love to the truth,” as Barrow called them. These gentle and tractable souls were potential separatists, but the puritan ministers brought them into “such a conceit and opinion of these men’s sinceritie, great knowledg, and good consciences, that they . . . beleeve all true that they say . . . neither dare they beleeve the expresse Scriptures when they are brought to reprove their doings.”51 What better way to impress upon gentle and tractable souls the dangers of presbyterian ministers than to relentlessly present presbyterianism itself as a spiritually lethal fraud passing itself off as reformation? Presbyterians faced the exact same problem as the separatists in reverse. Since the early 1570s, presbyterians had been furiously denouncing the corruptions of the Church of England and warning of the dire divine consequences if reform did not take place. By the end of the 1580s, hope of reform was fading, so why should laypeople not draw the logical conclusion from presbyterian denunciations and separate? Individual separatists did not hide the fact that it was the preaching of puritan ministers that began them on their journey to complete separation. “There bee scarce any amongst [the separatists],” lamented puritan ministers, “which have not bin of some note in our Churches, for holy and sincere profession.”52 To ward off separatist inroads, the presbyterians had to learn how to convince themselves and anyone else drawn to separatism that, bad as the Church of England was, the pure New Testament Christianity they were seeking could be found within it by those who looked hard enough. This genuine Christianity proved that the Church of England was a true church. Anyone who separated from it was therefore guilty of the heinous sin of schism, ripping apart Christ’s garment.

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In the 1580s, presbyterians rapidly learned how to turn this necessary practice of accenting the positive in the Church of England into a high art form. Yes, the parish churches might be outwardly corrupt, presbyterians argued, but that outward corruption did not mean that they were totally corrupt, as the separatists claimed. Those parish churches had originally been gathered by faithful preaching in the misty days after the death of Christ and before the rise of the Roman Catholic Church, and their subsequent pollution did not totally cancel out their original purity. Why, for that matter, argue that the secret Protestant churches of Queen Mary’s day, which everyone agreed were true churches, had been dissolved when Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant Church of England was created? Why not say that this new church joined itself to them and was erected on their true foundations? In any case, Elizabeth did not make the parish churches Protestant instantly with the blast of her trumpet, as Barrow notoriously claimed. There had been six months of evangelical preaching before the Act of Settlement in 1559 that created Elizabeth’s church, time enough to produce faithful Christians to serve as the nucleus of the new church’s parishes. Indeed, even though covenants were not strictly necessary for a church, the Church of England had them, just like the separatists. In a few godly towns, the parish churches made covenants of repentance and commitment to walk in the ways of the Lord. Parliament itself entered into a covenant for renouncing popery and following the gospel when it protestantized the Church of England in 1559, and that covenant bound the entire land.53 Besides a spectral purity and spectral covenants, the Church of England contained an ethereal New Testament government, presbyterians argued, visible to those who could squint hard enough. It was true that the vast majority of parishes in England could not call their ministers, the presbyterians conceded, but had to take whomever the bishop and/ or patron decided to send them. Yet the “faithful” members of congregations fortunate enough to be sent godly preaching ministers would desire those ministers and “gladly receive them,” and their desire and glad reception was the equivalent of an overt presbyterian-style calling. Just as many parishes made a spectral calling to their ministers, they also enjoyed a spectral discipline. Making an optimal interpretation of the powers theoretically allowed the minister and church wardens of a parish,

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presbyterians argued that the parishes truly had the power of discipline, since ministers could exclude the wicked from the Lord’s Supper. The awkward fact that it could be next to impossible to utilize this power did not mean that it did not exist. Moreover, preaching itself, threatening God’s judgments against the wicked and promising his blessings to the godly, was the foundation of all discipline. Since many parish churches enjoyed sound preaching, they enjoyed the true root of discipline. Conversely, at least some presbyterians were prepared to agree that parishes where sound preaching was missing were not true churches.54 Diligent presbyterians could not only see the faint outlines of presbyterianism in the Church of England, they could also make the hated office of bishop more or less disappear. “Antichristian Bishops,” like those in the Roman Catholic Church, the presbyterians claimed, “held their preheminence, as from GODS LAW, which is unchangeable.” But English bishops “(for the most part) hold their superiority by no other right, then the positive Law, which is variable.”55 In other words, English bishops, unlike the pope, claimed that they held their offices not by divine right but by the law of the land. (By the late 1580s, some English bishops were starting to claim that their office was a divine one. Nonetheless, presbyterians clung to the argument well into the seventeenth century, even as it grew increasingly threadbare.) Since the bishops were merely the queen’s servants, their actions were merely civil, not spiritual. When a bishop ordained a minister, it was not a religious act; it was only a civil approbation mandated by law. A congregation’s calling, not a bishop’s approval, made a man into a minister. Similarly, godly ministers obeyed the bishops not because those ministers had sold out to Antichrist, as the separatists insisted, but out of respect to the bishops’ civil authority. Alternatively, godly ministers allowed the bishops to suspend and deprive them because the Church of England was a true church. As such, it had the right to censure, even if it gave that right to men who themselves had no right to it, and it must be obeyed. Moreover, what sort of example would innocent men set for evil men if they held themselves above punishment?56 There were further fine distinctions about the Church of England that separatists had mistakenly failed to make, according to presbyterians. They had not learned the subtle distinction between a government

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that was popish and antichristian and one that was only “popishly and corruptly administered” and the vital distinction between being the stair to Antichrist, which the English hierarchy was, and being Antichrist himself, who was the pope. In any case, there were biblical examples of true churches carrying the burden of antichristian government.57 With these severe rationalizations, presbyterians could convince themselves against the separatists that within the bloated, corrupt, putrefying body of episcopacy there were the ghostly breathings of real churches— more or less properly gathered congregations where the ministers were more or less properly called, churches which more or less evaded the official ceremonial requirements and where something more or less resembling real discipline was administered or at least lay dormant, waiting to be awoken. This conviction was not simply desperate rhetoric. Underlying it was a variety of puritan practices and experiences—evangelical sermons, the ceremonial flexibility possible under lax bishops, the relative legal autonomy a few fortunate parish churches enjoyed, and a wide range of informal practices—that kept creating and spiritually nourishing puritans. The ultimate affirmation of the existence of this ghostly true church for radical puritans was the fact that the Church of England kept producing godly people like themselves.58 The presbyterian arguments for the Church of England were heartfelt but exhausting, and they point to one large distinction between separatists and presbyterians: the separatists did not have to run through such patently uncomfortable selfjustifications and apologies for themselves. Presbyterians had good reason to be uncomfortable. The presence of puritans might have been solid evidence that a true church existed underneath the corruptions of the Church of England, yet puritans also knew that God would not allow his people to suffer long in such a deeply flawed church unless he had a serious quarrel with them. As hopes for church reform faded, the presbyterian martyr John Udall declared in a lamentation published posthumously over the affl ictions of the church, “It is the sinne of the Church, that causeth the Lord to spoyle the same of any blessing that she hath heretofore enioyed.”59 And what was that sin of the church—“church” in this instance meaning puritans who had not separated—that caused God to deprive it of

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any blessings? Presbyterian ministers writing a widely circulated manuscript treatise against the separatists in the early 1590s were frank on that topic. The “great sinne of our Ministers” was that “they doe not with so much zeale, and courage reveale and shew their dislike of [the ‘great corruptions’ of the Church of England].” The great sin of “our people” was that “they mourne not, nor seeke by all humble and earnest meanes to God, and the Magistrate for Reformation of them, as they ought to doe.” In that acknowledgment of ongoing sin lay the most important difference between the separatists and the presbyterians. “The Lorde will in his owne servants,” Udall ominously warned, “declare his anger against sinne.”60 Presbyterians felt bound by God to remain in a church whose soul-threatening corruption could easily become a testament to his anger against them for the sin of their failure to reform it. The presbyterian arguments for the true Christianity preserved in the Church of England would be one important presbyterian legacy handed down to Massachusetts puritans, who had otherwise absorbed much of separatist congregationalism. The guilt of remaining in a church as corrupt as the Church of England would be another.

The Bedfordshire minister Thomas Brightman was typically presbyterian in his contorted attitude to separatism. He feared that the Church of England was loathed by Christ because of its antichristian government and predicted it would suffer a dire punishment. Yet for the separatists to leave the church as if Christ was entirely absent was blasphemous. The separatists’ own conversions while still members of the Church of England demonstrated that Christ could be found in its preaching and its sacraments. Having found and then denied Christ in the Church of England, they would find him nowhere else. Nonetheless, the church was bringing evil on itself by plunging brethren like the separatists into such spiritual danger by its superstitions and errors.61 When Brightman set out to write a magnum opus in the mid-1590s, however, he set himself a more ambitious and consoling task than the dreary one of delineating the wraithlike forms of true New Testament Christianity in the Church of England. Rather, he would work out in exacting detail the hitherto unrecognized meaning of extraordinary

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prophecies in the last and most difficult of the Bible’s books, Revelation. One of Brightman’s notable discoveries was that the Church of England was prophesied by Revelation’s Church of Laodicea, which was neither hot nor cold and whose angels Christ would spew out of his mouth. The angels were the bishops, who quenched the heat of Calvinist doctrine with their antichristian government. Faithful witnesses, Brightman wrote, were to overthrow the bishops as part of a climactic struggle against Antichrist that Brightman believed would peak in the second half of the seventeenth century. But according to Brightman, Christ would not return to judge and end the world immediately or soon after this struggle, as was conventionally assumed. Rather, for long centuries before the Last Judgment, the New Testament presbyterian churches would enjoy peace and spiritual prosperity, and this community of republican churches would make laws for all the nations of the world (while the laity would never grow tired of listening to their ministers’ preaching, Brightman wistfully predicted).62 Brightman’s thick treatise was first published in Latin in 1609. Its bold, hopeful, learned speculation and searing attack on the Church of England ensured that it attracted fast, widespread attention. Four more English and Latin editions (all published on the Continent) appeared in the next five years. Puritan proto-congregationalists, who would become icons to the ministers of Massachusetts, quickly showered Brightman with effusive praise. For example, in 1610 William Ames hailed Brightman as one of the seven greatest puritans of his generation, while Ames’s associate Robert Parker called him a “great . . . light in the Church of God.” Non-presbyterian writers on the apocalypse picked and chose their way through his arguments, and these arguments were invoked by at least three future New England ministers. As early as 1619, a conformist denounced Brightman as the puritans’ “great admired Opener of the Revelation.” That same year, King James I discussed and dismissed Brightman in a theological treatise studded with attacks on puritans.63 To read Brightman with hopeful interest was not necessarily the same as being persuaded by any or all of his conclusions. William Ames, for example, showed no trace of Brightman’s influence in his own writing on the end of time. Before the 1630s, most puritans appear to have been like Ames. If the signs of the times, however, started to make Brightman

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appear more plausible, his treatise had a political peculiarity that could take on new relevance. As scholars have observed, for Brightman monarchs had next to no role to play in driving his godly scenario forward. On the contrary, Brightman noted that most of the churches that had faithfully kept God’s word (these were the Reformed churches) were to be found in “popular states” (republics) and that only one of them, the Scottish church, enjoyed the patronage of a monarch. By the time Brightman’s treatise was published, that monarch, now become James I of England, had made his hostility to English presbyterianism clear. Having sunk presbyterianism in England, James would shortly begin trying to dismantle it in Scotland.64 James’s abandonment of the churches that would reign at the end of time gave added credibility to another of Brightman’s predictions: it would be not be a monarch but the “popular state” of Geneva that would overthrow Antichrist at the climactic battle of Armageddon.65 Brightman not only offered radical puritans a hopeful way to think about a possible future at a time when they desperately needed it, he also delivered a muted message about the kind of civil polity through which this hope would be realized—republics, not monarchies, appeared to be the commonwealths in which the godly republican churches that might point to the fulfillment of Brightman’s prophecies thrived.

chapter 3

James I and a New Crisis of Antichristian Power

I

n the waning years of Elizabeth’s reign, radical puritans were hoping for more tangible relief than the consolation offered by biblical prophecies. The informally designated successor to the elderly Elizabeth was her cousin James VI of Scotland. Puritans thought they had good reason to look forward to his reign. In Scotland James presided over a more-or-less presbyterian national church; he had famously dismissed the English church ser vice as an “evill said messe in English”; he had provided encouragement to English presbyterians in the early 1590s; puritan sympathizers were among his advisors; and shortly before coming to the English throne, he reassuringly wrote that “he love[d] and hounor[ed] the learned and grave” puritans as much as their episcopal opponents.1 What English puritans did not know was that James was heartily sick of a lifetime of listening to Scottish presbyterians explain to him the limits of his power and that he gladly murmured meaningless encouragement to anyone, Protestant or Catholic, who might get him out of his impoverished kingdom to the rich pickings of the English throne.2 After James was crowned James I of England in 1603, radical puritans discovered his profound hostility to them. As a result of that hostility they found themselves plunged into a new crisis of illegitimate, antichristian 67

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power, this time with the monarch implicated in ways that Elizabeth had adroitly avoided. For a few radical puritans, congregationalism began to look appealing as a potential barrier against this worsening assault on church and state. Other puritans elected to take the more drastic option of abandoning the Church of England altogether, prior to abandoning the country.

James I was quick to strip the presbyterians and more moderate nonconformists of their illusions about him.3 A carefully organized puritan petitioning campaign resulted in the famous Hampton Court conference in January 1604. James, who was an amateur theologian, presided over this debate between puritans and their episcopal opponents, and he frequently interjected. The four puritans, chosen by James, cautiously raised relatively small issues, and their restraint allowed him to contemptuously represent puritan agitation as much ado about nothing. A few minor ceremonial adjustments (most of which were never carried out), a commitment to a new translation of the Bible, and a stern threat from the king—“I shall make [the puritans] conforme themselves, or I will harrie them out of the land”—were the only outcomes. “No Bishop, no King,” was James’s final constitutional judgment on presbyterianism at the conference.4 Worse was to come for puritans. As was customary, James called a parliament after he assumed office, and, as was also customary, he called a convocation, or synod, of the Church of England at the same time. What was not customary was that he authorized Convocation to draw up new, comprehensive canons, or laws, for the church. Representation in Convocation was heavily weighted to the cathedral chapters and to the bishops and their officers.5 It was a foregone conclusion that the new ecclesiastical laws would not be puritan friendly. And indeed they were not. The canons banned a whole host of puritan activities, usually under pain of excommunication. Among other offenses, the common puritan practice of parish shopping to find satisfying preaching was forbidden, and no puritan could refuse to take the sacraments from a non-preaching minister. Criticism of the discipline, ceremonies, or government of the church would result in excommunication, as would puritan shunning of non-puritans who refused to endorse

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this criticism. If puritan critics somehow avoided excommunication, ministers were to refuse them the sacraments anyway. Ministers would be excommunicated if they called fasts on their own authority, which meant no more communal imploring of God’s aid in reforming the church, nor could they perform exorcisms (showcases for puritan spiritual virtuosity) without a license from a bishop. Moreover, any unhappy puritan reading these canons who grumbled that Convocation consisted of “a company of such persons as did conspire together against godly and Religious professors of the Gospel” would be excommunicated. King James declared that he read the canons with “great contentment and comfort.” A puritan commented that if the canons were rigorously enforced, a doubling or tripling of England’s jail capacity would not be capable of holding the numbers who would be imprisoned.6 In practice, many of these canons were enforced only sporadically, if at all. One exception, however, proved a heavy blow against puritanism. Canon 36 required that any minister receiving a position would first have to make Archbishop Whitgift’s old subscription attesting that the government and ceremonies of the Church of England were scripturally sound. What gave this new version a lethal sting was that ministers would have to sign a statement that they were subscribing willingly and “ex animo” (from the soul). That requirement deliberately left no room for the mental reservations and qualifications that had previously made subscription just bearable to many scrupulous puritans and allowed them to practice their ministry with a relatively clear conscience. An initial sharp purge drove up to three hundred ministers out of their positions.7 The canons were enforced more sparingly thereafter, but their ax always remained ready to fall, and James did not grow more sympathetic to puritan concerns. On the contrary, his appreciation of the Church of England increased rapidly with familiarity. By 1616 he was hailing it as “most pure and neerest [to] the Primitive and Apostolicall Church in doctrine and discipline.” Unlike Elizabeth, he valued the talents of his bishops, and he gave them increasingly important secular roles in his government. Rather than make the Church of England more Scottish, as puritans had hoped, James started a heavy-handed effort to remake the Scottish kirk along English lines. That effort finally provoked armed rebellion in 1639.8

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James’s main concern in 1604, however, was not to see that puritan ministers scrupulously and continually obeyed all the canons but that they, unlike the fiercest Scottish presbyterians, recognized his power over them. A puritan minister who could bring himself to swear from his soul to the scriptural lawfulness of the Church of England’s government and ceremonies, did not draw attention to himself, and had a bishop who was either lazy or who appreciated the need for rousing Protestant preaching was often able to quietly pick and choose among the church’s ceremonial requirements. At the same time, militant, principled nonconformists were easy to expose and remove, assuming that they had not been already frozen out by the subscription requirement. The consequence of this calibrated pressure, as one historian puts it, was that “presbyterian pretensions among the clergy largely disappeared and reluctant conformists were won round to the Jacobean settlement.”9 One reason why reluctant puritans were won round was that the results were not entirely unfavorable to them. With the battle over church government and ceremonies finished, puritans found themselves with a flood of energy released to pursue other puritan ambitions. In the sixteenth century, puritanism had been defined primarily in terms of its political goal of church reform. Now it was defined primarily in terms of what was left over once that political agenda was gone: anti-Catholicism, moral reform, and evangelism; gluttonous sermonizing and strict Sunday observance; social piety with like-minded souls; and protracted, anxious self-scrutiny for signs of sin and salvation. The most prominent up-and-coming young puritan ministers of the period, men like John Davenport, Richard Sibbes, and John Preston, were conformists. Davenport, who would one day do a 180-degree turnabout and become the hard-line radical puritan founder of New Haven, famously announced in 1624, while he was still a conformist, that if to be a puritan meant objecting to the government and ceremonies of the Church of England, then he was not a puritan. Fifty years previously, people would not have understood why he felt impelled to make such an obvious statement. In this new environment, radical puritans might have a hard time holding down a pulpit, but they could serve as spiritual counselors and contribute widely read guides to practical piety.10 With reform of the church off the table and puritan energies channeled productively into piety and moral reform, one historian has claimed that

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“the early decades of the seventeenth century were probably the most hopeful years for the puritans since the heady days of the 1570s.”11 That hopefulness, of course, depends on whom the term “puritan” is being taken to refer to. Radical puritans had nothing to hope for in England except escalating conflict against Antichrist and his power, with the odds increasingly against them.

Those puritans who had participated in the earlier Elizabethan presbyterian struggles did not go willingly into this alleged Jacobean golden age of puritanism. In an effort to ward off the blow of the canons, puritans worked hard and successfully to elect a sympathetic House of Commons in 1604. One puritan strategy document called for “Able Lawyers” to write treatises and draft statutes. The canons kicked off six years of parliamentary struggle, assisted by much puritan prayer and fasting. During that time, the House of Commons repeatedly and unsuccessfully sent bills to the House of Lords seeking to undo the canons’ effects. Immediate goals aside, most of these bills were statements of constitutional principle affirming that the legislative powers of church synods were subordinate to common law and parliamentary statute. The most extreme parliamentarians wanted to deny Convocation House the right to make any ecclesiastical laws; the majority opinion at one point was that Parliament had to confirm all Convocation laws, and the final bill that passed the House of Commons in 1610, but not the House of Lords, was that Parliament would have to approve all canons that clashed with Magna Carta. While this Parliament’s House of Commons was widely considered “puritan,” support for these bills could stem from members with purely jurisdictional motives—parliamentarians keen to keep Convocation House in its place and common lawyers keen to ensure the subordination of the rival legal system of the Church of England.12 Parliament’s effort to assert some control over Convocation’s lawmaking ability was also an attack on James’s prerogative, since it would require him to share with Parliament his power to approve canons. The struggle over ecclesiastical law took place while wider unease grew in Parliament that James, drawn to absolutist ideals of a monarch’s power, had little fundamental respect for the integrity of Parliament and its liberties. In the 1580s, puritans had been lonely pioneers in the invocation of

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Parliament, law, and liberty against the menace of tyranny and unbridled power. Now they had ample company. The House of Commons in its famous “Apology” of 1604 told its foreign king, among its other concerns about his grasp of the unwritten English constitution, that His Majesty had been misinformed if he believed that the kings of England could make laws concerning religion “otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament.”13 The parliamentarians were constructing a case in which secular grievances, like impositions, purveyance, wardship, and monopolies, and puritan religious grievances, like the new clerical subscriptions and the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission’s heavy-handed attacks on nonconformity, belonged together. Both kinds of grievances, religious and secular, were equally the concerns of “true hearted English men” and “Common Wealth men” worried about true Protestant religion, the liberties of the subject, and the overreach of the monarchy.14

James’s campaign to tame puritanism and the resulting parliamentary backlash played a critical role in the development of Massachusetts congregationalism. A flurry of illegal puritan publications cheered the House of Commons on in its effort to rein in Convocation House’s power.15 Like the presbyterian tracts of the 1580s, and undoubtedly with the advice of “able lawyers,” these tracts routinely lamented that the nonconformists were victims of an illegal persecution. One tract even claimed that Parliament, not Convocation, was the “church representative,” since all the estates of the realm, not just the clergy, met in it. Therefore, Parliament’s laws were more properly called the “Church her Institutions” than canon law.16 Although the radical puritans’ fundamental legal arguments had not changed since the 1580s, their desperation had increased. As prospects for church reform grew steadily dimmer, the antichristian plot against true religion in England grew steadily more powerful and more brazen about its true aims. In the 1580s, while Archbishop Whitgift was conducting his anti-puritan campaign, only a few presbyterians seem to have regarded him as a covert Catholic. It was true that, in the eyes of puritans, Whitgift was imbued with a tyrannical antichristian spirit, but he did

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not answer directly to Antichrist in Rome. Whitgift treated Catholics far more gently than puritans simply because he knew that they were less of a threat than the puritans to his petty popedom. Both he and his puritan opponents agreed that they believed the same Calvinist doctrines of salvation, despite their profound differences on church government and ceremonies. The Elizabethan presbyterians warned that corruption in church organization led inevitably to corruption in doctrine, but by the end of the 1580s there was only a trickle of evidence to back up their claim.17 By the early seventeenth century, however, evidence that fundamental Protestant principles of worship and theology, as puritans understood these, were being subverted was coming in at an accelerating rate. Increasing bold anti-Calvinist ministers were denying that God had inexorably chosen the vast multitudes of the damned and the tiny handful of the saved before time. They were asserting instead a role for free will in salvation. By doing so, puritans charged, they blasphemed God and pointed their ignorant and naive listeners back to the Catholic Church, where they would cling to that church’s idolatrous activities and rituals in hopes that these could save them. Some ministers (often the same anti-Calvinists) were starting to argue that the ceremonies of the Church of England not only were not antichristian but that they had positive spiritual value, just like Catholic ceremonies. It was becoming more common to defend bishops as an integral part of the church’s divine constitution, instead of an administrative convenience for a monarchy. A few conformists even began to question the fundamental Protestant theopolitical principle that the pope was Antichrist. There was a “new sect of upstart Formalists,” lamented Samuel Hieron in 1605, “who judge our fore-Fathers, in their zeale to have gone to farre from the Romish Idolatry; and begine to paynt over the deformities of that whore of Babilon, and mince the mayne poynts of Popery.” Other nonconformists echoed Hieron’s concern. To radical puritans, the unprecedented effort to cripple their movement was inseparable from the growing number of Church of England ministers who were positively reveling in the unreformed, antichristian aspects of their church. These sinister trends were a package and “the preparing of a passage unto greater evills.”18 It was in order to prevent that passage to greater evils that a few radical puritans started conceptually experimenting with congregationalism.

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The most prolific and innovative author among the nonconformist pamphleteers was William Bradshaw (1571–1618). Bradshaw was something of a model puritan minister, very well connected among the godly and respected for his pastoral counsel and his theological acumen. Bradshaw’s admirers saw to it that his wide-ranging manuscripts covering a host of topics, including practical piety, biblical commentaries, theological topics, and the errors of separatism, reached the press. Bradshaw himself was an uncompromising nonconformist, and his response to the crackdown on puritanism was an outpouring of illegal tracts against the government and ceremonies of the Church of England.19 The most famous of these tracts was English Puritanisme (1605), which marked the mutation of presbyterianism into puritan congregationalism. English Puritanisme’s title page announced that it was presenting “the maine opinions of the rigidest sort of those that are called Puritanes” or, as the preface described them more succinctly, the “rigid Presbyterians.” The pamphlet’s “rigid Presbyterianism” was, in many respects, not all that different from the old Elizabethan variety. The divinely ordained government of each church consisted of a presbytery of ministers and lay elders, with plenty of checks to make sure that this presbytery did not abuse its power. The congregation had the “power and libertie” to chose the presbytery as well as to consent to its disciplinary actions. The elders would be “Monitors and overseers” of each other and the congregation, in order that everyone “be more warie of their wayes” and that no “Pope” emerge, even at the parish level.20 Where English Puritanisme became distinctly congregationalist was in its assertion that individual congregations had no higher church power above them. “Christ Jesus hath not subjected any Church or Congregation of his, to any other superior Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction,” Bradshaw announced. Or, as he put it in another treatise published that same year, A Protestation of the Kings Supremacie, “We confi ne and bound all Ecclesiasticall power within the limitts onely of one particu lar Congregation.” “Noe other Churches or Spirituall Church officers,” declared Bradshaw, “have (by any warrant from the word of God) power to censure, punish, or controul [particular congregations]; but are onely to counsel and advise the same.”21 With this succinct emphasis on the ecclesiastical autonomy of individual congregations, asserted not by a ranting, puritan-loathing separatist

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like Henry Barrow but by a radical puritan with impeccable credentials among the godly, English Puritanisme is usually taken as a critical founding document of what would become Massachusetts’s congregationalism. Over a hundred years after its publication, the prominent Boston minister Increase Mather hailed English Puritanisme as an “admirable little book” presenting “perfect Congregationalism.”22 Since Bradshaw’s congregationalism was puritan, not separatist, it differed from the congregationalism of a separatist like Henry Barrow in three important ways. The first was that Bradshaw emphatically did not envision power in the church being shared with the laity. The elders governed, according to Bradshaw, like earlier presbyterians, and the laity indicated their consent when necessary. The second was that even though God expected his church to have congregational government, Bradshaw was not prepared to implement that government without legal permission—puritans worked hand in hand with magistrates, not in opposition to them.23 The third difference between Bradshaw and Barrow, related to the second, was one more of tone and emphasis rather than doctrine. Henry Barrow stressed the vital supervisory role of the churches over the magistrates, since rulers were being continually seduced and corrupted by power. Bradshaw flipped that emphasis around and stressed the supervisory power of the magistrates over the churches. He spent a great deal of space in English Puritanisme and A Protestation describing the flood of magisterial civic power that would fi ll the vacuum left when the bishops’ ecclesiastical power was gone. Bradshaw emphasized that while churches could not call synods, a monarch could. Although synods on their own could not issue enforceable canons, the monarch could give those canons “life and strength,” and the monarch’s officials could enforce them. Earlier presbyterians stressed that congregations would choose their ministers under the supervision and direction of other ministers. Bradshaw, like the separatists, placed that power entirely in individual congregations. However, he also argued that civil officers had the obligation to punish and fine congregations when they “abuse[d] this power,” until they made a choice more to the magistrates’ liking.24 English Puritanisme and A Protestation were as much assertions of the power of the king and his officers as they were assertions of congregational autonomy.

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Bradshaw was not the first radical puritan to play up the authority of the monarch, although this could be a fraught topic.25 But he was the first to assert the ecclesiastical independence of individual congregations while doing so. Historians have tended to explain Bradshaw’s congregationalism in the context of this emphasis on James’s power. The Hampton Court conference had demonstrated the king’s profound conviction that presbyterianism and monarchy were incompatible, the argument goes. By restraining ecclesiastical power to single congregations and emphasizing the magistrates’ control over them, Bradshaw was attempting to convince James and the civil authorities of “rigid” presbyterianism’s utter harmlessness.26 Radical puritan congregationalism was a last-ditch tactical maneuver in desperate times to salvage what could be retained of presbyterianism. There is much in English Puritanisme and A Protestation to support this tactical interpretation. Bradshaw himself laid tactical cards on the table at the end of A Protestation. After repeatedly stressing how harmless to rulers puritan congregational churches would be, he requested their legalization. These churches would submit their “Lawes and Canons” to Parliament and the king for approval, and the civil authorities would see that the churches obeyed them. If king and Parliament wished to retain the bishops, “though to the great derogation of their owne authoritie,” the radical puritan congregationalists would live alongside the bishops and their churches in peace. Bradshaw swore that in return, the congregationalists would be unfailingly loyal. They would humbly “think our lives and all that we have too vile to spend in the ser vice of [James] and the Civill State under him.”27 Under Bradshaw’s scheme, the subjects of the king would have two legal systems of churches to choose between, the bishops’ and the radical puritans’. Puritan congregationalism as monarch-friendlier, tolerated presbyterianism, however, does not get to the heart of what drove Bradshaw’s innovations. Like the earlier presbyterians, his first goal was to crush the bishops, not live with them. James would have had to read English Puritanisme and A Protestation extremely carelessly to have found their overall arguments compatible with his ideal of absolute monarchy. In the unlikely event that he had any illusions on this score, they would have been dashed by a tract Bradshaw published a year later in 1606, A Myld

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and Just Defence of Certeyne Arguments, at the Last Session of Parliament.28 A Myld and Just Defence made it clear that when Bradshaw used the term “king,” he meant “king as restrained by law and Parliament.” This treatise provides critical political context to the congregationalist arguments of Bradshaw’s earlier tracts. The three tracts read together demonstrate that what was driving both Bradshaw’s congregationalism and his emphasis on the power of the civil magistrates was far more fundamental than a search for ways to reassure James of the harmlessness of radical puritanism. It was the conviction that Antichrist intended to subvert not only the English church but the English state and that his plot was dangerously far advanced. Congregationalism and a reawoken monarchy were the necessary Protestant responses. Legalization of congregational churches alongside those of the popish hierarchy was a fallback position for Bradshaw, should his efforts to alert England’s rulers to the danger they faced fail. Antichrist, as Bradshaw reminded his readers in English Puritanisme, had an insatiable lust for power. He began his assent in the early days of Christianity by promoting inequality among ministers. Any ministers asserting ecclesiastical authority over other ministers (the English bishops, for example) were “led by the spirit of Antichrist.” But the antichristian lust for power, Bradshaw warned, would not be satisfied by dominion over the church: Antichrist “doth in the hight of the pride of his heart make claime unto and usurp the Supremacie of the Kings and Civill Rulers of the Earth.” In England, Antichrist (through the English bishops) had advanced dangerously far toward accomplishing that latter civil usurpation. The bishops were grabbing for power within the English state. They served in civil offices, held courts, fined, and imprisoned in their own names, not the king’s, and administered the ex officio oath, which was “damnable, Tiranous, against the very Law of Nature, devised by Antichrist, through the inspiration of the Divill.” Bradshaw was sounding the alarm against Antichrist’s power for the benefit of England’s rulers as well as for its church. “The cause we maintaine,” he announced in the preface to A Protestation, “is for the King and Civill State, against an Ecclesiasticall State, that secretly, and in a Mystery . . . opposeth both.”29 Earlier presbyterians had made the same charge against the bishops. What was new in Bradshaw’s analysis was his depiction of how this web

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of corruption had ensnared the king himself. Bradshaw repeatedly insisted that James was the bishops’ illegally active enabler. It was “utterly unlawful,” Bradshaw warned in A Protestation, for a monarch to alienate and surrender any part of his supremacy to ecclesiastical officers. Those that did so, he said in English Puritanisme, were “the greatest Enimies to their owne Supremacie.”30 Bradshaw provided the details on how James was illegally alienating his supremacy in A Myld and Just Defence, after Bradshaw’s earlier and more discrete tracts had failed to elicit any royal response. In this tract, addressed to Parliament, Bradshaw made the conventional radical puritan argument that there was virtually no legal way to punish nonconformists and no valid body of ecclesiastical law in England. Moreover, there could be no such body of law until Parliament approved it.31 It was in the process of making this standard case that Bradshaw spelled out how James was betraying church, state, and crown to Antichrist and how the unwritten English constitution, properly understood, could put a stop to him. Bradshaw began by laying out the case against James relatively gently. The Canons of 1604 did not acquire legal force simply because the king passed them under his broad seal. Surely, Bradshaw acknowledged, the king may have agreed to them in general. But “no loyall and honest subject” would infer from this general agreement that the king would be so foolish as to intend to “authorize any perticular matter, devised and decreed, by the Synod, contrary to the holy scriptures, hurtfull to the rights, prerogatives, and dignities, of his Highnes Crowne; repugnant to any lawes, statuts, or customes of the realme, prejudiciall to his lords and commons in Parliament, or onerous to his people.”32 However, even if King James had specifically intended to authorize such evil laws, he lacked the power to do so, Bradshaw declared. He was not an absolute monarch. James only had such “grace and power” as had been vested in him by the laws of the realm. All canons that were intrinsically void by “the lawes, statuts, and customes of this kingdome” were beyond the power of the king’s prerogative to activate. If the king wanted new binding ecclesiastical laws, he had to go through Parliament to get them.33 There was a constitutional principle at work that went even deeper than the power of parliamentary statute to restrain the king, Bradshaw

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insisted. This was the principle, popularized in the sixteenth century, of the king’s two bodies. One of those bodies was his personal mortal body. The other was the enduring body politic, the people of England. The laws did not invest the monarch with his prerogatives simply for his own good, Bradshaw reminded Parliament, “but also for the good condition, and preservation of his body Politicke, which is the Common wealth.” Since the commonwealth, as one of the king’s bodies, had a “proper clayme, and interest” in that prerogative, the king could not impair his prerogative “to the prejudice of the body, without consent of the body. . . . Neither King John, nor any other King, could bring his Realme and people in thraledome, and subjection, but by consent in Parliament.” In short, James was breaking through his constitutional restraints while actively abetting Antichrist in his plot to bring England into thralldom, and Parliament had the constitutional duty and right to call him on it. Anti-popery and limited monarchy for Bradshaw, as for earlier presbyterians, went hand in hand. The bishops had blown “Foggs and Mists” before James’s eyes, Bradshaw charitably allowed.34 For Bradshaw, the main immediate virtue of congregationalism was that it could dispel the bishops’ fogs and mists. The bishops, finally seen clearly through the penetrating lens of congregationalism, would be exposed for the tyrannous, insatiable power grabbers that they were, and the reinvigorated monarchy would make sure that they received their just deserts. In A Protestation, Bradshaw vigorously stressed the need for King James and his servants to punish “by their civill power whatsoever they shall see amiss” in their churches, and he significantly added, “Especially in the Rulers and Governers. . . . For . . . no people are more hated persecuted and wronged . . . then the true Churches of Christ.” Bradshaw’s starkest emphasis on the subordination of ecclesiastical officers to civic ones—“there should be no Ecclesiasticall officer in the church so high, but that he ought to be subject unto, and punishable by the meanest Civill Officer in a Kingdome”—again focused on bishops, and it came immediately after his thinly veiled warning that James was acting like an enemy to the royal supremacy by giving power to the bishops. After restricting ecclesiastical power to particular congregations in A Protestation, Bradshaw immediately added that extending this power any further (to bishops, for example) was “an arrogating of Princely Supremacy” (a point that James blindly failed to see). 35

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In the process of defending princely supremacy in A Protestation, Bradshaw also emphasized that churches could not actively resist wicked civil authority. But Bradshaw’s conventional religious passivity in the face of secular power would have made little positive impression on James. He would have had to have been a singularly inattentive monarch not to have realized by this time that Bradshaw was using “king,” in the usual puritan fashion, as shorthand for “king in Parliament.” Bradshaw’s felt need to repeat in both his congregationalist tracts the presbyterian principle that a king could be excommunicated would not have put James any more at his ease. Elsewhere Bradshaw expressed his confidence that the “States and Inferiour Magistrates” of England wanted church reform. That left the king, under the sway of the illicit bishops, as the only constitutional opponent of religious reform.36 Were England’s constitution functioning as it should have been, the true churches of Christ would have nothing to fear from the power of the civil authorities, while the civil authorities would have nothing to fear from the power of the churches. The presbyteries would ensure that no “pope” arose at the parish level; congregationalism would remove the footholds for more ambitious ecclesiastical tyrants; and a limited monarchy reinvigorated by a Protestant Parliament with backbone would prevent individual monarchs from being seduced into lawless tyranny by the forces of Antichrist. Congregationalism and the struggle against an out-of-control monarch were, for Bradshaw, different parts of the same Protestant warfare. As will be seen, English Puritanisme, besides being one of the foundational documents of the principles of Massachusetts congregationalism, can be read as one of the foundational documents of the principles of the Massachusetts state.

A trenchant and concise work, English Puritanisme was often reprinted. It was not often cited, however, for it asserted its positions but did not elaborate them. And it left one critical aspect of the nature of church power unexplained. Standard presbyterian theory had it that the officers of the church were the direct recipients of Christ’s ecclesiastical power. Jesus gave them his keys of discipline directly. The critical proof text was Matthew 18:17, in which Christ instructed his disciples that if a

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“brother” trespassed against them and was not responsive to their private rebukes, they should “tell the church.” “Church” in this context, presbyterians argued, referred to the elders of the church, not the congregation. Therefore, Christ clearly intended the officers of the church to be the vessels of his power. The “people” consented to the elders’ rule of the church, but they did not share in it. Separatists, by contrast, argued that “church” in Matthew 18:17 meant the entire congregation and that power lay in the people.37 Bradshaw retained the standard presbyterian understanding of the power of the elders.38 But he thereby left an unresolved contradiction in his congregational theory. Bradshaw was arguing that Christ had conferred complete ecclesiastical power upon each church as a collectivity, laypeople and officers alike. That was why bishops could have no power over individual churches. Yet Bradshaw also insisted, like earlier presbyterians, that church government rested exclusively with the church’s officers, leaving the laity only the liberty of consenting (or not). He left unexplained how Christ could give this power to the church as a whole and to the elders exclusively at the same time. Bradshaw may have avoided the topic because confronting it would get him into murky waters. The separatists had dealt with this issue in a straightforward way. They claimed that the church’s officers were not the exclusive governors of the church, they were only the administrators of the church’s collective governing power. But for a puritan, that separatist argument was a recipe for “popularity,” the democratic anarchy of which puritans were regularly accused and that separatism embodied. Yet the issue of how divine power flowed through a congregational church did not go away simply because Bradshaw did not confront it. That task of confrontation was left to the other founding theoretician of puritan congregationalism, Henry Jacob (1562/3–1624). Jacob is a shadowy figure, emerging from documentary obscurity only when engaged in one of his frequent controversies. In the 1590s, he had debated separatists and joined in a grim theological debate between puritans and conformists over whether Christ had physically descended to hell after his death. He was one of the most uncompromising and energetic leaders in the petition campaign that led up to the Hampton Court conference and earned a brief stint in jail for his efforts.39

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Jacob also had been among the radical puritans who worked with great hopefulness to bring James to the throne. The meager result of the Hampton Court conference left him, like Bradshaw, with a bitter sense of betrayal (it had been doomed from the beginning, Jacob charged, by the lukewarm, cowardly puritan ministers arbitrarily picked to defend the cause and by the sinister manipulations of the bishops). The harshness of the subsequent canons compounded Jacob’s sense of betrayal. In reaction, Jacob published an angry, sprawling, urgent, and never reprinted call for reformation, Reasons Taken out of Gods Word, in 1604. In this treatise, Jacob, like Bradshaw, declared that ecclesiastical power was confined to individual congregations. He scoffed at “deep Politicians” who argued that this kind of church government was a threat to monarchy, and, like Bradshaw, he emphasized that the “meanest” (most insignificant) of the king’s officers could keep a church in “peace and concord of Religion.” The degree to which Bradshaw and Jacob collaborated, if any, is unknown, but they later shared the same illegal London printer.40 While depicting a congregationalism much like Bradshaw’s, Jacob took on the issue that Bradshaw dodged: the mechanism by which Christ gave his power to each individual church. Jacob read Matthew 18:17, “tell it unto the church,” differently than the presbyterians. It meant the entire congregation, not the church governors. He made that reading the basis of his congregationalism. Since the sacred power of the “keys” of discipline went exclusively to individual congregations, synods and bishops could have no power over them. Jacob explained in a later publication that he foresaw no change in presbyterian practice from this change—the enormous power that Christ gave each congregation became “actual” and “active” only when the elders used it. The elders would continue to make decisions and the people would continue to do no more than give their consent.41 But Jacob’s was a wedge reading of Matthew 18:17; not all laity might be inclined to accept the scholastic logic chopping by which Jacob gave power to the laity and then snatched it away from them to give it to the officers. Instead they might conclude that power was simply power, however much ministers tried to obscure that fact, and that congregational laity “actually” had it just as much as the elders. That reading would approach the separatist interpretation of Matthew 18:17. Jacob was opening a Pandora’s box of democratic anarchy, and his interpretation

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of this verse was one of reasons his treatise was immediately criticized. Exactly how Christ’s power arrived via a church to its ministers would remain one of the knottiest, unsettled, and most fraught theoretical issues in congregationalism.42 After publishing Reasons, Jacob received a sharp personal incentive to continue to explore how church power worked. Although he sensibly left his name off the title page of his book, he rashly put it at the end of the book’s preface. As a result, the bishop of London threw him into the Clink prison. Jacob got out in 1605 only by promising not to distribute Reasons anymore. It may not be coincidental that around this time, Jacob wrote a manuscript catechism in which he found a new, influential, and politically charged way to demonstrate that individual churches should be free of the oppressive hand of the bishops. In the catechism, Jacob, like the separatists, insisted that a covenant, whereby church members pledged to each other and to God to follow God’s ways together, was integral to the creation of a church. Jacob, however, used secular political theory, not only the Bible, to explain why. Covenanting, he said, was an act of “free, mutuall consent” among the “people.” Acts of consent, he pointed out, were precisely what created “Civill perfect Corporations” (“perfect” meaning complete and not dependent on a higher authority). Just as an act of consent created an independent civil corporation, it created an “intire Church and independent of any other.”43 “Independency” and “Independent” later became cognate terms for congregationalism, and later congregationalists sometimes stressed the contractual nature of their independent churches. For much the same reason that Jacob was attracted to contract theory, defenders of absolute monarchy and episcopacy loathed it. By locating the origin of political bodies in the consent of the people, it easily led to the conclusion that a monarch or a bishop needed the people’s consent in order to have the power to rule. Even more dangerously, it could lead to the conclusion that the people had the right to withdraw their consent from their monarchs and overthrow them. In 1606, the Church of England’s Convocation proposed a canon condemning contract theory.44 There is no surviving evidence that Jacob engaged in Bradshaw-type arguments about the limits of King James’s power. But his discovery of the contractual foundation of independent New Testament churches just as the king’s defenders were attacking contractualism demonstrates

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again the less than happy relationship between radical puritanism and the English monarchy. Certainly James I himself continued to see this relationship as an adversarial one. Jacob, like Bradshaw and puritans in general, was not prepared to set up churches illegally. In 1609 he published a request for toleration addressed to James. Improbably, a copy has survived with irritable marginal refutations directed to Jacob written by the king himself. James dismissed Jacob’s argument that the bishops menaced the crown and violated the kingdom’s laws. These claims, James charged, were threadbare calumnies, impudently bold assertions, and legal interpretations made only by “your puritane lawyers of the lower house [of Parliament].” He sneered at presbyterianism’s relative social egalitarianism, which turned church government over, James claimed, to shoemakers and constables. James scoffed at Jacob’s claim that toleration of radical puritanism would not harm the crown: “I founde the contraire experience in Skotlande.” He rejected out of hand Jacob’s request for toleration: “The too great toleration of you in queen Elizabeth’s tyme hath made you now to be prikkels in oure sides.” James suggested that if Jacob thought the foreign Reformed churches were so much better than the Church of England he should go off and join one. That last comment was prophetic in its own way, although not as James would have wished; the impetus for further English church reformation was in the process of moving outside of England’s borders, which was where it would remain until the 1640s, in the Netherlands and then America.45

The most extreme puritan reaction to King James and his 1604 canons erupted in the East Midlands. There, owing to a fluke, the canons’ heavy hand fell particularly hard—late that year in northeastern Lincolnshire James was indulging in his favorite pastime of hunting, only to be pestered by a group of puritan ministers. They were desperately seeking relief from having to subscribe from their souls that everything in the Church of England was biblically sound or else give up their ministries. In response to having his recreation disturbed, James ordered the local bishop to crack down hard on them. James’s annoyance set off a chain of events that in the long run brought together radical puritans and reformist separatists and created Massachusetts congregationalism.46

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The immediate result was to drive some nonconformist laity and ministers in the region to the brink of separatism. As one of them, the future governor of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford (1590–1657), recollected many years later, they concluded that “the lordly and tyrannous power of the prelates ought not to be submitted unto.” Richard Bernard, the enraged vicar of nearby Woksop, thundered from the pulpit that James was like the Old Testament tyrant Nebuchadnezzar. Bernard tested the separatist waters by organizing a covenanted group from a number of parishes to whom he gave the Lord’s Supper, and he brooded over whether he had the fortitude to endure martyrdom. He decided he did not and missed his chance to become mythologized as one of America’s founding fathers.47 Another minister, Richard Clifton, remembered around this time as a grave old man with a long white beard, went further than Bernard, all the way to separatism. He renounced his Church of England ordination in 1605 and began meeting with local nonconformists in the house of their financial and moral supporter William Brewster (1566/7–1644).48 Brewster had a distinguished past as secretary to the prominent Elizabethan diplomat William Davison, and he would enjoy a small-scale distinguished future as the ruling lay elder, preacher, and resident sage at Plymouth Plantation. Two other ministers leaning toward separatism, John Smyth and John Robinson (1575/6?–1625), returned to the region, and the local godly began to risk ecclesiastical fines to leave their own parishes and hear Smyth and Robinson preach. To drive back this rising separatist tide, radical puritans and the archbishop of York alike preached and held conferences, but to no avail. At the start of 1607, the disaffected group of radical puritans formally coalesced into an illegal separatist congregation around Smyth. Persuasion having failed to slow down the separatists, jail sentences followed. In response, the congregation decided to take refuge in Amsterdam, with Brewster providing most of the financing. Their first effort to flee failed when their sea captain betrayed them, but persistence paid off, and the congregation began arriving in Amsterdam in 1608.

Waiting for these new separatists in Amsterdam was Henry Barrow’s congregation. The congregation had arrived in fits and starts in the

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Netherlands in the 1590s as its members in England weighed the alternatives of imprisonment, hanging, or exile. Once in the Netherlands, they made some effort to establish themselves as the cutting edge of the larger Reformed world. They published their confession of faith in 1596, accompanying it with an angry preface denouncing England as Egypt, lamenting their martyrs, and predicting that God would raise another John Foxe to record their sufferings. In 1598 they released their confession again in English and Latin, this time with a preface addressed to the “famous scholers” and students in the Reformed universities of Scotland and Continental Europe. The separatists claimed that they published to further the “great work of restoring Religion and the Church decayed.” Their foray into putting the Reformation on the right track met with a thundering silence, which one separatist optimistically insisted was a demonstration that their case was unanswerable. An effort to get a more concrete response from the famous theologian Francis Junius was met with cold indifference.49 The separatists’ efforts to improve the Continental Reformed churches was hindered by their intense loathing for them. Barrow had charitably argued that Calvin’s “many errors and ignorances” might be forgiven since he was a first-generation Reformer. But Calvin’s “wretched disciples,” Barrow claimed, were “three fold more corrupted and perverted than he.” Barrow’s followers in Amsterdam were willing to concede that the Dutch churches, founded by Calvin’s wretched disciples, were true churches. But it was a close call. They had faulty discipline, virtually indiscriminate baptizing, and formal prayers and continued to hold their ser vices in medieval church buildings polluted by their previous ser vice to Antichrist in the bad old days of Roman Catholicism. The separatists’ loathing of the Dutch churches was so intense that they excommunicated a member who communicated at a Dutch church as a requirement of his job at a local grammar school. Dutch pastors, in turn, denounced the separatists. At some point around the turn of the seventeenth century, the separatists appear to have been banished temporarily from Amsterdam for writing scandalous libels against the local Reformed churches.50 When not attacking neighboring churches, the separatists attacked each other. Before Brewster’s group arrived, the Amsterdam church had

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endured a string of controversies over sexual misconduct, relationships with other separatist churches, the choice of officers, and the sartorial habits of the pastor’s wife. The quarrels increased upon the arrival of the soon-to-be Pilgrims. A dispute broke out over the issue of whether the use of an English Bible during church ser vices (as opposed to on-the-spot translation) constituted an intolerable quenching of the spirit. John Smyth, once in the liberating air of the Netherlands, began to attack infant baptism. Smyth’s position was rank heresy, even to most separatists. Smyth also started to question the restriction of allowing only ministers to deliver the sacraments. The appalled pastor Francis Johnson in an effort to reassert control against Smyth started pushing for more power for the church elders, against heavy resistance. Johnson continued to push even after Smyth and his followers left to start their own baptist church. Johnson argued, like presbyterians and against the separatist confession of faith, that “tell the church” meant tell the elders. The church split into two groups over the issue in 1610, with the church’s teacher, Henry Ainsworth, leading one group and Johnson the other. The separatists pursued each other into Amsterdam’s courts and into print. Their quarrel eventually managed to drive the Amsterdam church almost to the point of extinction. Johnson’s group went to Emden, Germany, in 1613.51 It is easy enough to picture separatism at this point as lost in a series of highly introverted, pointless sectarian quarrels, drawing, as Patrick Collinson puts it, a curtain across the world so that it was no longer visible and apprehensible. But the Amsterdam church can also be seen as a hotbed of turbulent creativity, and it had an impact disproportionate to its size. The church’s teacher, Cambridge-educated Henry Ainsworth, wrote highly regarded Old Testament commentaries. Smyth and his associate Thomas Helwys would shortly turn baptist and anti-Calvinist. Smyth died in 1612, but Helwys returned to England to form the country’s first general baptist congregation and to advocate general religious tolerance. A future minister, John Canne, published an annotated Bible that was frequently reprinted up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Returning to England, Canne became an important radical figure during Oliver Cromwell’s reign. Before the near-fatal struggle between Johnson and Ainsworth broke out, the congregation had been growing steadily from the roughly fifty original emigrants to around three hundred when

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Brewster’s contingent arrived. The Dutch authorities were concerned enough about the church’s growth that in 1607 they started a presbyterian church with an English pastor, John Paget, to serve as competition. Paget and the separatists refused to let their members attend each others’ church ser vices.52 Creative though the Amsterdam separatists’ hot disputes might have been, Brewster’s group was seeking a less contentious atmosphere.53 In 1609 they moved eighteen miles to the city of Leiden, famed for its university and home to an expanding textile industry desperate for povertywages workers. Robinson assumed the ministry of their church, and Brewster served as the ruling lay elder. Involvement in introverted separatist feuding had no appeal to Robinson. Perhaps he had already begun to set his eyes on a more ambitious goal: returning separatism to the position it had sporadically enjoyed, if only in the imaginations of its proponents, as the vanguard of the English Protestant reformation. That goal might have seemed more feasible now that radical puritans were starting to grasp the importance of congregationalist churches as bulwarks against antichristian power.

chapter 4

The Triumphs and Trials of the Lord’s Free People

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wo puritan friends had an unexpected encounter in the streets of Amsterdam in 1611. One, a nonconformist, had heard that the other had converted to Catholicism and gone to Rome. His friend replied that he would not travel to Rome unless he longed for fire and faggot, for he had in fact become a separatist. The separatist asked the nonconformist what the hope was for reformation in England. Not good, the nonconformist answered. He was not sure that bishops were absolutely forbidden by God, but the English bishops continued to hatefully put down the puritans, and they would bend all who refused to bow to them until they broke their consciences.1 The separatist commiserated. He encouraged his friend to get on with the business of English reform and to remember the example of the reforming Old Testament governor of Jerusalem Nehemiah. God had raised up many means to help reformation, he assured him. There were the puritans, the “forwarder sort of Ministers, and learned men in our Church of England.” But especially valuable were the separatists, “who by their diligence in the scriptures and advantage of their cause, are most strongly furnished against the Prelates, against their Antichristian jurisdictions, and Lordly livings.” Emphasizing again the bonds between separatists and puritans, the separatist shared with the nonconformist the stories 89

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later repeated by William Bradford of how prominent puritans and Queen Elizabeth herself were grieved at the death of Henry Barrow.2 The separatist persuaded the nonconformist not only that bishops were illegal but that a great many separatist opinions were correct. The nonconformist would not directly agree with the separatist that the Church of England was a false church, but he did agree now that separatists were neither heretics nor schismatics. “He is no heretique,” the nonconformist said, “that is sound in the faith. And he is no schismatique that separates onely from disorder and sin.” The conversation ended with the nonconformist wishing that the separatist would publish more tracts “to make their appearance powerfull at the time of every Parliament, til some good doe come thereof.” The separatist replied that he was “assured that the time shall come wherein God will honour some with the work of that good King Josias, in a larger measure for reformation then ever was seen in England.”3 The two old friends were fictional, the literary creations of a separatist publishing under the name of “Miles Mickle-bound.” Miles’s identity is as unknown today as it appears to have been to William Bradford.4 But the dialogue is clear evidence that even as the Amsterdam separatist congregation was in its most intense “curtain drawn across the world” phase, the reformist wing of the separatist movement had not disappeared. Unlike the earlier separatist reformer Henry Barrow, Miles Mickle-bound was respectful of puritans and sympathetic to their plight, but like Barrow, he shared the puritans’ goal of bringing about a national reformation in England, via the overthrow of the bishops. Indeed, Miles’s desiderata were about to take on an embryonic reality. In Leiden, moderate separatists and a handful of newly receptive radical puritans, in their mutual pursuit of reformation, were starting to engage in fruitful personal and religious interaction. They recognized their shared identity as the “Lord’s free people,” in John Robinson’s words, who had escaped the bondage of the bishops and were now actively resisting them.5 These separatists and puritans, through their interaction, would refine and increasingly harmonize their versions of congregationalism in the 1610s in ways that later bore substantial fruit in both England and America. The puritans published influential congregationalist treatises, and one set up an underground congregationalist church in London.

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Under puritan influence, the Leiden separatists started smoothing off the hard edges of their separatism, and they launched an ambitious ecumenical publishing venture. This interaction, productive though it was, was not free of stress, and it faced a steady intense stream of resentment and hostility from less accommodating separatists and puritans. By the end of the 1610s, some puritan congregationalists and moderate separatists, wiser from experience, concluded that the expansion of the Lord’s free people was better pursued on the other side of the Atlantic.

The new puritan-separatist dialogue began as a side consequence of the struggle between radical puritans and the bishops. Puritan congregationalism had started at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a multifaceted post-presbyterian strategy to neutralize the bishops and their power. Before long, supporters of the bishops started to push back. The resulting polemical fracas drew in the Leiden separatists and generated some of the foundational treatises of puritan congregationalism.6 The most notable episcopal pushback came with the publication of a sermon by bishop-to-be George Downame in 1608. Downame had an awkward past for a future bishop. In 1589 he had signed a petition in support of the presbyterian and eventual separatist Francis Johnson. In the years before the Hampton Court conference, he had been an acquaintance of Henry Jacob. When later trying to explain, or explain away, his puritan period, Downame less than heroically claimed that he had deliberately kept himself in a state of indecision about the Church of England’s ceremonies and government. He had been afraid that if he concluded that they were acceptable, he would alienate puritan friends like Jacob, whereas if he concluded that he had to oppose them, he risked his ministry. When the 1604 requirement for subscription to articles affirming the Church of England’s scriptural soundness made this fence sitting impossible, Downame decided to conform. Not so, claimed Jacob. Downame had not been a fence sitter; he was underground like Jacob in the unsettled period before King James took the throne, hiding out from the bishops. Another nonconformist challenged Downame to produce his writings and notebooks from that period, which, it was alleged, would tell a story different from the one Downame was peddling.7

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The sermon that this puritan turncoat published in 1608 was the first extended defense in English of episcopacy not simply as a legal mandate but as an “apostolicall and divine institution.” Episcopacy was not takeit-or-leave-it at the whim of the monarch or Parliament, as earlier conformists such as Whitgift had accepted, if reluctantly. Bishops were part of God’s plan for His church. While attacking presbyterianism in general, Downame pointed out differences between English and foreign presbyterianism and, for good measure, differences between old English presbyterianism and Bradshaw and Jacob’s congregationalism. The latter Downame described as “not far from Brownisme” and wondered why other presbyterians did not “disavow these new-found assertions, and protest against such schismaticall novelties.” Introducing a new wrinkle in anti-presbyterian and now anti-congregationalist literature, Downame argued forcefully that the apostolic churches were not single churches but episcopal dioceses. That claim would eventually generate scholarly trench warfare over the question of whether the “churches” in ancient Rome and Jerusalem consisted of single or multiple congregations.8 Downame was not entirely hostile to presbyterianism. He affirmed fellowship with the foreign presbyterian churches, on the principle that “silver is good, though gould be better.” Geneva, being a “popular state” (republic), Downame allowed, “could no more endure the government of a Bishop, then Rome after the expulsion of Tarquinius the regiment of a King.” The English, however, had no reason to put up with silver when gold was available, and Downame had no patience with his puritan exallies, who failed to recognize how good they had it in the Church of England. He attacked puritan ministers with gusto for making mountains out of matters of “small importance” and the nonconformist laity for encouraging their ministers and for despising conformists.9 Downame’s lucidly written tract created a scandal among the godly (“every word he speaketh, hath an appearance and promis of truth,” complained a nonconformist). William Jones, the London printer who had been publishing Jacob and Bradshaw, prepared a reply, perhaps by Bradshaw, but Jones was arrested and the press stopped. An anonymous reply appeared in Amsterdam in 1609, perhaps based on the London one.10 English merchants in the Netherlands with presbyterian sympathies were prepared to subsidize more substantial responses, however,

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and the worsening situation in England for militant nonconformists provided them with suitable authors-in-exile. One candidate was the minister Robert Parker (c. 1564–1614), whose son, Thomas, and grandson, John Woodbridge, both became Massachusetts clergymen. In 1607 Parker published a ferocious masterpiece of Protestant iconophobia, A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies, Especially in the Signe of the Crosse, in Amsterdam. This massive folio volume laid out in lengthy and lurid detail how any Church of England minister rash enough to make the officially commanded gesture of the sign of the cross damnably violated just about every law of God imaginable. Along the way, Parker violently attacked conforming ministers, non-preaching ministers, the ceremonies in general, and the persecution of nonconformists. After reading Parker, a conformist compiled a manuscript entitled “Seditious passages out of Mr Parkers booke, against his majestie, the state, and the settled government of the Church.” Parker fled to the Netherlands with the authorities in pursuit.11 William Ames (1576–1633) was another of those emigrating radical puritans; he would have been the clerical guiding light of Massachusetts had he not died before he could cross the Atlantic. Ames spent much of his childhood in a presbyterian household one village over from the Winthrop family. A gifted theologian, Ames lost his fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1609 after that college had an anti-puritan master forced upon it in a crackdown on nonconformity (Henry Jacob was involved in the intense agitation over the master’s election). In 1610 a future lay elder of the Watertown, Massachusetts church, Richard Browne, rowed Ames, disguised as a fisherman, to a ship waiting to carry him to the Netherlands. When Ames arrived, puritan English merchants hurried him off to a debate between a leading follower of the anti-Calvinist Dutch minister Arminius and several Calvinists opponents before Ames even had time to change out of his disguise. The Calvinists were faring badly in the dispute over whether God predestined humans for salvation or damnation, as the Calvinists insisted, or whether humans exercised some free choice in that outcome, as the Arminians claimed. Ames intervened for Calvinism. The contemptuous Arminian, not recognizing him as a scholar in his fishing costume, “rudely reflected on his red cap,

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canvas slops, and imaginary calling.” But he soon found himself retreating under Ames’s barrage of relentless logic and pristine Latin.12 Ames and Parker went to Leiden, where they lodged with Henry Jacob, who had probably arrived not much earlier, perhaps also with the help of the merchants, and they took their meals with members of Robinson’s congregation. It was a fortunate interaction. Robinson’s was no ordinary separatist congregation. Most separatist leaders maintained a stark apocalyptic view of the world, in which a tiny band of separatist saints resisted the overwhelming forces of antichristian ecclesiastical corruption. It was the particular genius of Robinson and his congregation to turn this standard separatist posture on its head. Robinson conceived of his church as a normal member of a normal European Reformed community of churches. While the Amsterdam separatist church counted communion with Dutch churches as grounds for excommunication, Robinson’s church accepted it. Robinson in 1610 announced that the difference between the separatists and the “best Reformed churches” were “few in number, and those none of the greatest weight.” While Barrow depicted separatist churches as near-democracies, Robinson talked in standard Reformed fashion of their combination of aristocracy and democracy, under Christ’s monarchy, and he praised their “holy presbyterial government.”13 Robinson, in his writings, never engaged in Barrowlike attacks on puritan ministers, the English ruling classes, or the universities. The Leiden separatists established good connections with the city authorities, with Leiden University, and even with the local English Reformed Church (which was officially a Dutch church). Robinson and his congregation had a positive influence on some Dutch Calvinists.14 The only anomaly in this generally sound Reformed world, into which the Leiden separatists fitted snugly, at least in their own opinion, was the false Church of England. Even as the puritan exiles were assembling in Leiden, Robinson had no hesitation expressing his high spiritual respect for individual puritans. “Hundreds and thousands” of people in the Church of England had “assurance of saving grace” and “eminent graces of God,” Robinson claimed when responding to ex-ally Richard Bernard’s scathing attack on separatism in 1610. Impressive though the puritans of the Church of England might be, however, that church itself was still a false church. “Never church in the world,” Robinson lamented,

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“in which so many excellent truths were taught, stood in such confusion both of persons and things, and under such a bondage spiritual, as that of England doth at this day.”15 The Leiden separatist church that welcomed Jacob, Ames, and Parker, besides being relatively broad-minded, was politically active and intellectually vibrant. One member was said to be particularly successful at smuggling books into England. A Norfolk separatist mariner, William Euring, brought copies of Robinson’s books to East Anglian puritan divines for their reactions and published his own separatist tract in Leiden.16 Another member, Thomas Brewer, a wealthy merchant, had good connections with prominent English and Dutch presbyterians. At least three members of the church, including Brewer, eventually wrote manuscript treatises on church government.17 By all accounts, this vibrant and dynamic church functioned harmoniously. Robinson, in one of his most eloquent passages, responding to Richard Bernard’s sneer that separatist churches were run by “Symon the saddler, Tomkin the tailor, Billy the bellowsmaker,” wrote, If ever I saw the beauty of Sion . . . , it hath been in . . . that heavenly harmony, and comely order, wherein by the grace of God we are set and walk: wherein, if your eyes had but seen the brethren’s sober and modest carriage toward another, their humble and willing submission unto their guides, . . . their tender compassion toward the weak, their fervent zeal against scandalous offenders, and their long-suffering toward all, you would . . . bless, where you purposed to curse.18

The two surviving recollections of the congregation by lay members echo Robinson’s laudation. “I served an Apprentise of ten yeeres in a society of as excellent Christians, and under the purest orders and most profitable meanes that (I thinke) in this fraile life can be obtained,” recalled Robert Cushman, who would briefly be a resident of Plymouth Plantation, “ . . . the things which passed there, made some impression in me, which I trust shall not be worne out whilest I live.”19 According to William Bradford, “Such was the true pietie, the humble zeale, and fervent love, of this people . . . toward God and his waies, and the single

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hartednes and sinceir affection one toward another, that they came as near the primative patterne of the first churches, as any other church of these later times have done.”20 Paeans like these to the Leiden church might be taken with a grain of salt on principle, but there is no record of internal discord in the congregation until after Robinson’s death. A great deal in the development of puritan congregationalism becomes explicable if it is assumed that outsiders like Jacob and Ames saw the congregation function in a manner not dissimilar to these self-descriptions. The dynamic harmoniousness of the Leiden congregation was a visible demonstration to these puritans that God intended Matthew 18:17 to mean “tell the entire church,” not only the church officers, as the presbyterians argued. The soon-scattered puritan anti-Downame think tank boarding with the Leiden congregation published sporadically and slowly, but it produced some of the key documents of early puritan congregationalism. Parker’s Latin response to Downame, De Politeia Ecclesiastica, appeared posthumously in 1616 and was reprinted in 1621 and 1638. Ames never wrote his own treatise against Downame, but he did put out a Latin translation of Bradshaw’s English Puritanisme in 1610. That translation was enough for the archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, to lament that Ames was not in England for some “exemplary punishment” and to attempt to get him removed from his new position as a military chaplain at the Hague. Eleven years later and no longer in English employment, Ames published a posthumous congregationalist response to Downame by his fellow Cambridge nonconformist Paul Baynes (c. 1573–1617), a widely admired preacher, spiritual counselor, and biblical exegete. Jacob’s attack on Downame came out in 1613.21 These responses to Downame, in the course of savaging him, displayed a fundamental ambiguity within early puritan congregationalism. Was this project, even while it was taking up separatist motifs, simply a clerical operation to salvage and adapt sixteenth-century presbyterianism to a new context? Or was it an effort to assimilate separatist congregationalism of the sort that seemed to be working in Leiden? Ames published the response of his Cambridge friend Baynes to Downame in Amsterdam in 1621. Baynes, whose contacts with separatists, if any, are unknown, took much the same approach to congregationalism

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as Bradshaw, who possibly had a hand in writing the treatise; it was strictly a presbyterian defensive maneuver against episcopal power. In the course of his attack on Downame, he explained carefully and methodically how Christ instituted single churches, not episcopal dioceses, and how these churches were not subordinate to any other churches, individuals, or groups of churches. But Christ communicated his power directly to the elders; “tell the church” emphatically did not mean “tell the congregation.” By way of supporting his arguments against the oneman rule of bishops, Baynes claimed that Parliament had the greatest authority in England and that in all but absolute monarchies, which England was not, a monarch could be deposed. Congregationalism and an aggressive insistence on limited monarchy were a comfortable combination for Baynes, as well as for Bradshaw and Ames.22 The Leiden refugee Robert Parker in De Politeia Ecclesiastica, in contrast, read Matthew 18:17 much as Jacob had. According to Parker, the verse demonstrated that individual congregations were the original receptacles of Christ’s power. Like Jacob, Parker tried to restrain the democratizing impact of that reading by arguing that churches transmitted the power to their officers, who had that power actually, while the church had it virtually. The argument sounded plausible enough to later New England ministers, and Cotton Mather at the turn of the eighteenth century hailed Parker as the “father of all the non-conformists in our age.” Parker, however, gave more power to synods than other congregationalists ever did, under the influence of Amsterdam’s militantly anticongregationalist English presbyterian minister John Paget.23 Although William Ames never produced a treatise against Downame, he made a much more sustained engagement with separatist congregationalism than did Parker and Baynes. Debating with his friend Robinson around 1614, Ames adapted one of the basic premises of separatist congregationalism to defend the spiritual validity of the Church of England parish churches. Ames, like earlier presbyterians, claimed that genuine New Testament Christianity really did exist within the Church of England. While much of his argument was inherited from those earlier presbyterians, he also demonstrated to his own satisfaction that scattered among the parish churches were genuine congregational churches. Since every individual true Christian had a covenant with God, when

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true Christians regularly worshiped God together in a parish church, their individual covenants created a collective covenant that was greater than the sum of its parts, and this covenant created a true church. Within the Church of England, such a church covenant would be likely to remain unarticulated and implicit, but it was, nonetheless, genuine. In other words, put enough puritans together in a parish where they could worship with some degree of freedom, and the result automatically was a true, covenanted congregational church. Ames’s discovery of implicit genuine church covenants within the rotting hulk of the Church of England provided a license for puritans to be both congregationalists and nonseparatists. It may have had an immediate influence on Henry Jacob, and it became an important subsequent puritan congregationalist defense against a blanket rejection of all of the parish churches within the Church of England.24 Ames did not start discussing church government in any detail in print until 1627, and then only in very short sections of much longer works of theology. But when he did, unlike Baynes and Parker, what he advocated was little different from a tightly organized separatist church like Robinson’s, although Ames made no mention of the separatists. Like them, Ames read Matthew 18:17 to give power to the “Church in common,” although the elders had the “cheife parts” in exercising it. Synods had no authoritative power over churches, although they could condemn, forsake, and reject them. Ames accepted other separatist practices as desirable, if not strictly necessary. Ames agreed with the separatists that spontaneous prayers were better than set ones, and the Lord’s Prayer was “an example or patterne,” not a “forme of words constantly to be observed.” Lay prophecy (expounding on scripture) was permissible, if done by “such as were of chiefe note and most approved.” Already in the 1620s, Ames threw his considerable authority into encouraging new English churches in Holland to begin with a written covenant.25 Henry Jacob was the fastest of the Leiden puritan refugees to respond to Downame, with his lengthy 1613 tract. Jacob built his reply around the spiritual imperative that the people always had to freely consent to their church government. Jacob might have had more impact as an activist than as a writer, for although he published prolifically, this work, like the rest of his, was never reprinted, and unlike Ames, Baynes, and Parker, he was rarely cited by name by later congregationalists.26

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The literary products of this anti-Downame group varied greatly in their emphases, but they did share one thing in common. They all described a congregationalism largely scrubbed of its origins in Henry Barrow’s intensely political vision of a network of vigilant “people’s” churches on hair-trigger alert to challenge virtually all existing social and religious institutions and Robert Browne’s urgent imperative to flee those institutions as Egypt. Congregationalism had been repackaged, at least on paper, as a normal part of the world of Reformed ecclesiological debate, which was what Robinson wanted. Although most of these books would have had to have been smuggled into England, any curious English minister with connections among nonconformists probably would not have had too much difficulty tracking one down. A conforming minister left an outraged description of how easily and effectively a blistering attack in English on Church of England ceremonies by Ames spread among the English godly in printed and manuscript form. The Latin anti-Downame tracts would have slipped even more easily through the customs agents. Parker’s De Politeia Ecclesiastica was even advertised in the 1628 London edition of the Frankfurt book catalogue. Ames embedded the theoretical gist of his separatist-inflected congregationalism and anti-episcopalianism in a Latin treatise of systematic theology. That treatise was first printed in Holland in 1627, but it was stultifyingly academic enough to be reprinted in London in 1629 and 1630. These tracts eased the way of at least a few ministers toward New England, while others were left unpersuaded.27

Besides his poor reprint record, Henry Jacob differed from his fellow puritan congregationalists in an ultimately more important manner. His admiration for the separatists was high enough that he was prepared to praise separatist congregationalism in print. The separatists were “very farre off from being so evil as commonly they are held to be,” Jacob announced in 1612, while denying charges that he himself had turned separatist. He acknowledged, however, that “in some matters they are stricter then I wish they were,” referring to their blanket rejection of the Church of England.28 A year later, Jacob was even more emphatic in his endorsement of separatist congregationalism. He claimed that the separatists “hold the substance of the true Church-government. They erre but in

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the Circumstances of order,” by which Jacob meant that separatist church officers excessively involved their congregations in the process of discipline.29 Jacob’s enthusiasm about encountering what he thought was true church government among the separatists finally pushed him in 1616 to break the most primordial puritan taboo. On principle, puritans did not cut their ties to the lawful rulers with whom they expected to work hand in hand in order to enact their long sought-after national reformation. Therefore, no matter how persecutory, how drenched in antichristian corruption the Church of England might be, puritans would not set up churches of their own without the authorization of the state. The one Elizabethan presbyterian who made such a suggestion has been dismissed by Patrick Collinson for that reason as a member of the movement’s “lunatic fringe.” William Bradshaw, even while explaining the dire necessity of congregationalism, called any endeavor to set it up without government approval “Seditious and sinfull.”30 It was this inhibition that Jacob shed after experiencing congregational churches erected without official permission. He would return to England and start a congregational church himself. This church, however, would represent something new, an irenic congregationalist third way between the separatists and the Church of England. It would commune with the underground separatist churches in England and Holland, loathed by puritans as schismatic false churches. Yet it would be willing to commune with any parish church (all of which were condemned by separatists) that could meet two conditions. The first was that the parish church would have to have enough puritan piety underneath its inevitable Church of England corruptions to make it “a true politicall Church.” That condition required “a company of true visible Christians associated together in one place . . . professing to serve God according to his will, in faith and order so farr as they knowe” (in other words, the parish church would have been transformed, at least in deep principle, into a covenanted congregational church by the individual covenants of its puritan members, as Ames had argued). The second condition was that Jacob’s church members would not have to be present at this parish church for any “meer humane tradition,” meaning that the minister was able, at least on occasion, to practice nonconformity. 31

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Jacob’s church would be the lynchpin of what would hopefully become a functioning network of English true congregational churches, some overtly independent of the bishops, some still laden with the chains of Antichrist. Although Jacob was trying something new, he appears to have seen it as a continuation of his presbyterian past, a logical, grassroots next step for the stalled English Reformation. While he certainly did not seek the authorization of the English state, he did seek the blessing of the “church.” Back in London in 1616, before creating his own church, Jacob conferred about his plans with old comrades from Elizabethan presbyterianism, including Walter Travers, John Dod, and Arthur Hildersham, as well as with the nonconformist minister Richard Maunsell (Maunsell had been the subject of a spectacular legal case in 1607 in which puritan lawyers tried and failed to get the High Commission’s sanction against him for his nonconformity declared illegal—King James I insisted that the survival of the English monarchy hung on Maunsell losing). Maunsell, and perhaps Dod, approved Jacob’s decision. Hildersham and Travers opposed it.32 The less-than-blanket presbyterian willingness to see what Jacob was doing as a continuation of the old puritan struggle ominously foreshadowed the intra-puritan quarrels that would break out over Massachusetts congregationalism. But Jacob was not deterred. He and a group of “well informed Saints,” at least one of whom would end up in Massachusetts, agreed to form a church. They did so in the manner of separatist congregationalism. They prayed and fasted; each made a profession of faith and repentance; and then they “covenanted togeather to walk in all Gods Ways as he had revealed or should make known to them.” A few days later, they gave notice to the London separatist church, the only other properly constituted English church in London by their standards, and ordained Jacob pastor.33 Jacob then published a confession of faith, in which he explained by what right he took the drastic step of creating a new, illegal church in London. Jacob catalogued the evils of the Church of England while acknowledging, unlike the separatists, that the puritanized parish churches struggling under the Church of England’s false government were genuine churches. He then announced that every genuine church, whether

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separatist or puritanized parish church, was “a spirituall bodie politike; and so it is a free congregation independent . . . by the common and free consent of the people independently, and immediately under Christ.” Jacob was literally declaring independence from the bishops, as well as from carping presbyterians like Travers and Hildersham who presumed that they had the spiritual authority to prevent Jacob from acting as Christ demanded. Having set up his free, independent church illegally, Jacob, in a quixotic puritan reflex, reiterated that the magistrates should supervise churches and appealed to James to “take this speciall oversight, and government of us” in place of the bishops.34 To at least some desperate nonconformists, Jacob’s congregation provided a satisfying solution to the burning question of how to serve God properly without entirely disowning the practically moribund Church of England. Members of Jacob’s church, besides holding their own services in private houses, took communion at Henry Roborough’s parish church. An entry in the Jacob church records from 1620 noted that a number of persons from Colchester joined the Jacob church and added that this was in spite of there having long been a separatist church there. The radical puritan Maunsell was impressed enough both with Jacob’s church and Robinson’s that he recommended a member of Jacob’s church to Robinson’s.35

In the encounter in Leiden between separatists and radical puritans, influence did not run only in one direction, from the separatists to the puritans. While Robinson’s congregation would have been respectful of the distinguished puritans like Ames, Parker, and Jacob who took their meals with them, they initially placed sharp limits on their religious interactions with their guests. The separatists were willing to have long and pious discussions, but they refused to participate with these puritans in the most elementary private spiritual rituals like praying and fasting, let alone share the sacraments with them, since the puritans had not renounced the Church of England entirely. This “rigid” separatism, as it was called at the time, rejecting even private worship with Church of England members because of institutional contamination, engendered hostility and resentment in puritans. Separatists themselves were

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not entirely agreed that this taboo on shared private worship was the appropriate boundary between separatism and the Church of England. Robinson and his congregation, while in England, continued to worship privately with puritans until they came under heavy criticism from other separatists. “Miles Mickle-bound” condemned the practice of rigid separatism, claimed it grew out of “prejudice and preposterous zeale,” and was attacked by other separatists for making that claim.36 William Ames, who struck up a friendship with Robinson, slammed him hard for his rigid separatism, and his criticism made an impact. Robinson sketched out progressively wider parameters for spiritual communion with members of the Church of England, and these parameters were to define practice in Massachusetts. In 1614, Robinson made his first gesture of spiritual outreach to puritans. He discovered a distinction between “public” and “private” church acts. Attending a Church of England service was to engage in spiritual communion with the Church of England itself, he claimed, and such communion was forbidden by the separatist confession of faith. Engaging in private religious devotion with a pious Church of England member, in contrast, involved no sin, since it involved no communion with the institutional church. In announcing his change on what had already been a controversial topic among separatists, Robinson described the quarrel between the separatists and the puritans as one between “brethren.”37 This was an assertion of shared identity that would have been inconceivable to earlier separatist ideologues like Barrow. Thomas Brewer, the wealthy and well-connected Leiden separatist, pushed Robinson to go further in Ames’s direction. Brewer made frequent trips to England. While there, he engaged in the forbidden practice of listening to Church of England sermons.38 Robinson’s reaction was to belatedly give his stamp of approval (the alternative could have been the excommunication of the wealthiest member of his church). By 1617, Robinson was justifying Brewer’s practice on the pulpit. He explained that separatists could occasionally listen to sermons by Church of England ministers, since anyone happening to be in a church building could hear a sermon. Doing so was not automatically an act of spiritual communion with a false church; it was like listening to a university lecture. The Leiden congregation, at least while it was still under the domination

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of Robinson and his lay allies, accepted this practice. As a further gesture of ecumenicalism, the Leiden church did not require prospective members to repent of their membership in the Church of England. 39 Since “rigid” separation has had little personal attraction for the scholars studying Robinson, they have not felt the need to account for his gestures toward the puritan mainstream beyond his admirable moderate disposition and the appeal of escaping from separatism’s suffocating narrowness. That explanation is correct, up to a point. Robinson did have a moderate disposition, and he did see spiritual value in extending separatist contact with puritans. He argued in Of Religious Communion that the separatists’ religiosity was out of balance. Their focus on correct church government led them to undervalue personal piety, hence the incessant turmoil in the Amsterdam separatist church. The Church of England’s puritan ministers were famed as guides to holiness, and spiritual communion with Church of England members would right the imbalance in separatist piety. It would allow the separatists to benefit from the “many excellent truths taught in divers of the assemblies [of the Church of England], and that with so great fruit in the knowledge, zeal, and other personal graces of many.” In view of Robinson’s appreciation of and outreach to puritans, some scholars have even called him a “semi-separatist” or an “Independent Puritan.”40 This reading of Robinson, however, is partial to the point of being seriously misleading. The Leiden separatists saw radical puritans like Jacob and Ames moving steadily in the direction of separatist congregationalism, and they viewed that movement as more significant than their own moderation. William Bradford, for example, remembered Ames and Robinson’s friendship chiefly in terms of its demonstration of separatism’s appeal. Bradford’s own identification of the Leiden church and subsequently the Plymouth church with the separatist tradition remained unbroken.41 In that respect, Robinson was no different than Bradford. Robinson would have vehemently denied that he had become a semi-separatist or independent puritan. He always argued that his innovations fell within the limits of Article 31 of the 1596 separatist confession of faith, “our Confession,” as Robinson called it, which forbade any spiritual communion with the Church of England in its public worship and administration.

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Robinson, from his own point of view, was simply refining the understanding of what did and did not constitute spiritual communion with the Church of England. No matter how moderate Robinson could be about matters he regarded as non-essential, he stuck to the fundamental separatist position that the Church of England was a false church, regardless of how puritan friends like Ames tried to cover up that falseness with their imaginary implicit parish church covenants. In spite of his own kind words about puritans, Robinson conspicuously refused to criticize Henry Barrow for Barrow’s extraordinary vituperation against them; the Lord gave fiery zeal to those of his servants whom he intended to use to bring about special reformation, Robinson explained, as the example of Luther demonstrated.42 While Robinson was clear about his separatist identity, he viewed separatism as a vehicle for reformation, not as a curtain drawn against the world. For him, it was axiomatic, as he put it, that only the “Lord’s free people,” like the Leiden separatists, could bring about the reformation of “public evils” and that the puritans, in their “bondage spiritual” to the bishops, had lost that freedom. Promisingly from Robinson’s perspective, even some radical puritans recognized and attacked the spiritual bondage of their fellow puritans. Robert Parker included a notable passage in De Politeia Ecclesiastica complaining of the passivity and silence of most English puritans. Acquiescent puritans were the bishops’ puppets, Parker insisted. Their continuing active presence in the Church of England served as an argument for the bishops’ alleged moderation and provided cover for the persecution of radical puritans like Parker who were still willing to fight back. What for these accommodating puritans was a necessary precondition for functioning in the Church of England during puritanism’s alleged golden age—keeping one’s mouth shut about the corruptions of the Church of England—was for Parker a de facto collusion with the bishops that only reinforced their power. A presbyterian tract that the Leiden separatists reprinted in 1618 came with a plaintive new presbyterian preface echoing Parker. The preface lamented that “we are in numbers few, and of those few very many timorous and fearefull of ensuing dangers.” Even those wh0 seemed heretofore “most forward for Church-reformation,” the preface complained, “are so declined, that they like not so much as to heare of that, that may . . . threaten

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the least hinderance of their worldly profit, or disquiet to their carnall peace.”43 Significantly for the Leiden separatists, almost all of those few radical puritans showing some spark of the Lord’s free people in them by their willingness to attack the bishops in print were also starting to recognize that congregationalism should be that free people’s church government. Who was to say how much further they might go in the separatists’ direction with some encouragement from the separatists? “Would the king but give toleration, and withhold from bodily violence against their persons and estates,” Robinson claimed, in his 1614 endorsement of private spiritual communion with puritans: “I doubt not, but we should have many thousands in the land concurring with us for substance of practice.” Through their spiritually beneficial interactions with puritans, separatists like Robinson could provide those puritans with “exhortation, and a provocation” for the “further manifestation of their faith, in withdrawing their feet from every evil way, and the planting them in the Lord’s house.”44 Moving closer to the radical puritans, for Robinson, was a critical way to get those puritans to move closer to the separatists. Jacob’s church offered a spectacular example of what the outcome might be. With the confidence that it was starting to have an impact on what was left of radical puritan activism, the Leiden congregation launched into the business venture for which it is best known today: publishing. That role began in 1616, when Robinson shepherded Robert Parker’s De Politeia Ecclesiastica through a local printer. Robinson added a preface to the book commending Parker’s critique of the bishops and defending separatism from the latter’s criticisms.45 The following year, the congregation’s ruling lay elder, William Brewster, and Thomas Brewer set up what posterity would call the “Pilgrim Press.” Brewer provided most of the funds, at great loss to himself. They were probably joined by Edward Winslow, a member of the congregation who had trained as a printer in London and who would eventually become governor of Plymouth colony and an advisor to Oliver Cromwell. Brewster and his helpers typeset the books in Brewster’s tiny house, but they may have farmed out the actual printing to someone with enough room to house a printing press. The press in its three years of operation issued at least eighteen books. The majority of the books were by puritans (the number of separatist books the press issued is a matter of dispute).46

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The output of the press was an expression of the comprehensive reformation in which the Leiden separatists saw themselves as participants. One of the puritan books was an abridged version of an attack by Ames on Arminius, whose free-will heresy Robinson also attacked; another was a long delayed refutation of the Catholic English Bible by Thomas Cartwright; and another a commentary of Cartwright’s on Proverbs. The press issued Dutch and English versions of John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s monument of puritan practical divinity, A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Tenne Commandments. Six of the puritan treatises were reprints of earlier presbyterian demands for church reform. Thomas Deighton, author of two of three new puritan publications, implored “my deere brethren of the Separation” not to allow “our adversaries” to divide them and assured them that they had separated not from their “holy mother” the Church of England but from a whore put in her place. Two books were by the Scottish minister David Calderwood, attacking James I’s tightening imposition of episcopacy and new, hated ceremonial requirements on the Church of Scotland. Calderwood visited Leiden after Scotland had become too hot for him and attended the separatists’ church ser vice. He declined to take part in the Lord’s Supper with the separatists, he politely claimed, only to avoid offending his Scottish brethren who still communicated with the Church of England. While most of the books went into clandestine distribution, the Latin titles were advertised at Europe’s largest book fair, in Frankfurt.47 As the press’s output demonstrates, the Leiden congregation saw themselves as standing side by side with their puritan “brethren” in the larger militant and learned Reformed community fighting false theology and antichristian episcopal hierarchy, be the latter of the Roman Catholic or Church of England variety, while seeking their own salvation using the collective wisdom of the contemporary communion of saints.

The Jacob church and the Leiden church and its press, between them, represented the cutting edge of the miniscule remains of radical puritan church reform in the 1610s. They inspired the presbyterian Richard Maunsell to predict that “moderate men” on both sides could heal the breach between the presbyterians and the separatists. Unfortunately, though, for the growth of this tiny network of separatist and radical

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puritan English churches, “moderation” was very much in the eyes of the beholders.48 King James did not regard the Leiden press as moderate when it came to his attention, for good reason. The press timed its publication of Calderwood’s attack on the Church of Scotland to coincide with the Synod of Dort, an international gathering of Reformed churches, including the Church of England. The purpose of the synod was to condemn the Arminians’ free-will doctrines, while the purpose of Calderwood’s book was to alert the synod about James’s popish changes to the Church of Scotland. James was already incensed that a Dutch theologian with English connections had recently published an attack on Downame’s defense of bishops. He ordered his ambassador to Holland, Dudley Carlton, to discover the identity of Brewster’s press and lean on the Dutch authorities to shut it down. Carlton succeeded at this task in 1619. For good measure, Carlton, suspecting that William Ames had a hand in the press, successfully blocked Ames’s appointment to the University of Leiden, sending him to the less prestigious and more remote University of Franeker.49 Radical puritans themselves hotly disputed what constituted moderation. Maunsell may have welcomed Jacob’s church; other puritans attacked it. Jacob published his church’s Confession in 1616 because of the heavy criticism his church came under—schism, novelty, separatism, and undutifulness to England’s rulers were some of the charges—and it was puritans who were spreading these accusations by word of mouth and manuscript. A fierce critique survives from one of those puritans, Thomas Cartwright’s old presbyterian associate from the 1570s, Walter Travers. Travers circulated a sweeping reproof in manuscript against Jacob’s congregationalism and against what Travers called his schism. Jacob and his church wrote a response in which they defended the independence of every church and complained that they were being slandered by being called schismatics and separatists. Travers wrote a further manuscript response in which he claimed to be speaking for a group of puritans. He brushed aside the Jacob church’s complaints of slander. The purpose of his reproof had been to call them to “returne unto the path of the lords obedience,” and a physician had to tell his patient the proper name and nature of his disease in order for healing to take place.

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Travers devoted the rest of the tract to a major demolition job on Jacob’s claim that no ecclesiastical assembly had authority over individual congregations.50 The clash between Travers and Jacob is the earliest surviving warning that congregationalism could provoke unbridgeable fissures within puritanism. Jacob saw himself as continuing the presbyterian reformation in the only viable way left by creating his own independent New Testament church apart from the parish churches. Travers saw Jacob’s almost solitary, extralegal action as a schismatic, intrinsically separatist betrayal of what had to be a collective reformation. By 1619, the previously enthusiastic presbyterian Maunsell had become as dissatisfied as Travers with the Jacob church. The New Testament churches the presbyterians were fighting for were supposed to sanctify England’s patriarchal social order, not upend it. Yet Jacob’s voluntary church, Maunsell concluded, was becoming excessively democratic and disorderly. Maunsell was unhappy that the church disregarded family patriarchy by accepting servants without their masters and wives without their husbands. What upset him even more was the extent of lay prophecy in the church, much greater than what Robinson allowed, if Robinson’s statements accurately reflect the Leiden congregation’s practices. Maunsell stirred up discontent among the more conservative members of the congregation over the issue and even induced some to abandon the church.51 Separatists were no more unambiguously open armed than presbyterians in their reception of Jacob’s church, although for different reasons. Could such a church, whose members worshiped with the idolaters of the Church of England, be a true church, even when its own practices were sound? There was initial communion between London separatists and the Jacob church. However, the London and Amsterdam separatist congregations fell into bitter disputes about admitting members from Jacob’s church without having them first renounce their membership in Jacob’s. They finally concluded that they should not. One separatist dismissed the Jacob church as merely a “schisme in Babell.” The Leiden congregation was the only separatist church in which communion with the Jacob church did not generate intense controversy.52 The Jacob church’s efforts to steer a new course between radical puritanism and separatism eventually generated controversy even among its

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own members. Over the coming decades, the Jacob church spun off separatist, baptist, and congregational churches and produced a number of the radical activists of the revolutionary 1640s. Its multidirectional fecundity was dramatic testimony to the electric instability of the boundary between puritanism and separatism.53

Fecund instability, however, had never been a radical puritan goal, which might explain why Jacob left his church in 1622 and made an engagement to emigrate to Virginia. Scholarly fable has him founding a city called Jacobopolis there before dying around 1624.54 By the end of the 1610s, the Leiden separatists also concluded that the reformation they sought to create with puritans was not possible in the Old World, and they began to consider Virginia as a destination. In the 1610s, the quest for effective reformist congregationalism had created important new connections between separatists and radical puritans. What was still unresolved was whether and to what extent these connections would be taken as signs of a new fusion or as new maneuvers in the old wrestling match between the two groups. That uncertainty would cross the Atlantic and play a major role in the creation of Massachusetts’s city on a hill.

chapter 5

Christian Liberty at Plymouth Plantation

T

hat the Pilgrims came to America seeking religious liberty is common American knowledge. Not so well known is the kind of religious liberty they were seeking, a tightly defined, not particularly tolerant, specifically Christian liberty, as befitted the lofty ambitions of a group of seventeenth-century Protestant zealots. A Christian’s liberty, John Robinson reminded the Pilgrims by letter after they had arrived in America, was “to serve God in faith, and his brethren in love.” Liberating Christ’s church from the shackles of Antichrist was the immigrants’ larger collective purpose. That liberation would culminate, as Plymouth’s governor William Bradford explained, in the restoration of the Christian church’s ancient order, beauty, and liberty.1 The quest for Christian liberty had stalled in England; the expansion of the ranks of the Lord’s free people would have to take place in the New World. Plymouth Plantation was an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking for a tiny group like the Leiden separatists on the outermost fringe of English religious life with extremely limited means. The initial odds of the separatists finding a site, raising money, crossing the ocean, and creating a settlement that would be economically and religiously appealing enough to draw in and hold puritans were next to nothing. This bold, unlikely project to expand Christian liberty would be both facilitated and hindered by 111

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the uneasy boundaries between the separatists and the puritans they hoped to attract. In the separatists’ successful effort to acquire the support needed to cross the Atlantic, they vigorously emphasized the convictions they held in common with puritans while muffling as much as possible their critical differences. Among the puritan financial backers the separatists eventually obtained, suspicion that they were not being totally frank about their religious beliefs doomed their aspiration to bring their much-needed pastor John Robinson to Plymouth. A subsequent opportunity in 1624 to create a Massachusetts avant-la-lettre congregationalist church at Plymouth ended badly, with a puritan separation from the colony’s separatist church. The Pilgrims’ intolerant reaction nearly sank the colony. However, it ended up laying the foundation for the creation of Massachusetts and the ultimate success of the Pilgrims’ religious mission.

Sometime in 1617, John Robinson and his ruling lay elder, William Brewster, had a lengthy conversation.2 Their topic was further reformation and the Leiden congregation’s place in it. Neither man was getting any younger. Robinson was around forty and Brewster ten years older, and Holland was not working out as they had hoped when they fled from England a decade earlier. Making a living was hard. Some people who came over had to return when their savings ran out, while others preferred to risk prison in England. The congregation’s children were losing their English, and the separatists were having no success getting the Dutch to reform their notoriously lax Sabbaths. The conversation turned to the vast and unpeopled countries of America, occupied, the two agreed, only by savage and brutish men, ranging up and down in a manner little different from the region’s beasts. If they could find a place there where they could practice their religion and if God allowed them to prosper, they could provide for their children and enlarge their country’s territory. More important, though, than material survival and the freedom to practice their religion was the possibility of becoming examples to their countrymen (in effect, a small-scale city on a hill), showing them how they could provide for themselves without the antichristian burdens they had to endure in England. Those countrymen

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would join the separatists, enjoy their liberties, and thereby enlarge Christ’s church. Robinson and Brewster brought their proposal for enlarging Christ’s church by emigration to the congregation, who were receptive. Robinson had often told them that those puritans who attacked the separatists would practice as they did if only they were in a place where they had liberty and could live comfortably. Some of the congregation’s sagest members, well versed in the travel literature, recounted in lurid detail the tortures practiced by Indians, but others pointed out that the twelve years’ truce in the war between Spain and the Netherlands was almost expired and that the Spanish, if past practice was any guideline, might prove as cruel as the Indians. There was much debate about the respective advantages of settling in Guiana or Virginia. After fasting and prayer, the majority of the men approved of the plan to settle in Virginia. Having agreed upon a location, the immediate challenge the congregation faced was getting across the Atlantic. The separatists needed permission for a settlement from the Virginia Company, permission from the king to practice their religion on English territory, and financial backing from investors, all of whom could easily reject them because of their separatism. To overcome those obstacles, the would-be Pilgrims had to create a severely toned down and misleading version of their separatist church convictions that might allow those convictions to pass for puritanism with people who were not that well acquainted with the intricacies of the English religious scene in Holland and would not give those convictions, as packaged for outsiders, too-careful scrutiny. The Virginia Company, fortunately for the separatists, was not inclined to scrutinize them carefully. The company desperately needed settlers, and one of its directors, Edwin Sandys, had personal connections with William Brewster. Robinson and Brewster, to ease their way, drew up seven articles for the company explaining their religious beliefs. The articles were intended to demonstrate that the Leiden congregation were religiously responsible Reformed Christians and loyal subjects of the king and to obscure as much as possible their conviction that the Church of England was a false church. The first article affirmed their consent to the confession of faith “published in the name of the Church of England,”

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along with the Reformed churches everywhere. That affirmation simply meant that both the separatists and the Church of England were (by the conventional interpretation) officially Calvinist. The second article affirmed that thousands in England, “conformistes and reformistes,” had saving faith and that the Leiden congregation desired to keep “spiritual communion” with them. It would take a reader aware of fine-honed separatist distinctions to catch that willingness to have spiritual communion with someone did not mean a willingness to worship at church with them. The fourth article affirmed that the king was supreme governor in his realm in all causes and that his subjects were duty bound to give him active obedience or, if he violated a law of God, passive obedience (disobeying, but willingly suffering the consequences). The fifth and sixth articles acknowledged that the king could appoint “bishops, civill overseers, or officers in awthoryty . . . to oversee the Churches and governe them civilly according to the Lawes of the Land.” Moreover, the articles acknowledged the authority of the present bishops “so far forth as the same is indeed derived from his Majesty.” It would take a sharp reader to notice that these final clauses did not recognize the bishops of the Church of England as church officers with spiritual powers; all they did was acknowledge the king’s right to give whatever title he pleased to the enforcers of the ecclesiastical laws that Parliament passed (the separatists were using an old presbyterian argument). The seventh article was a general statement of the separatists’ peaceful intentions: “Wee desyer to geve untto all Superiors dew honnor to preserve the unity of the speritt with all that feare God, to have peace with all men what in us lyeth and wheerin wee err to bee instructed by any.”3 The articles were not exactly forthright about separatist convictions. They were good enough, however, for Sandys and other members of the Virginia Company, who endorsed the plan to emigrate in principle by the end of 1617 and promised their assistance with the king. The king’s privy council, however, read Robinson and Brewster’s seven articles more skeptically than did the Virginia Company.4 Some of the privy council members sent a request through a prominent Virginia Company member, Sir John Wolstenholme, for more information on the Leiden congregation’s beliefs. Their concerns apparently involved the congregation’s obedience to the king and its conception

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of the ministry. Robinson and Brewster sent back two statements, one short and the other long. The short statement affirmed their willingness to take the Oath of Supremacy, which recognized the king’s final authority over religious matters in England, if necessary, and asserted their conformity with the French Reformed churches. Those French presbyterian churches, surviving as a harassed Protestant minority in Catholic France, enjoyed mostly good relations with the Church of England and had legal congregations in England. The longer statement noted some “accidental circumstances” wherein the Leiden congregation differed from the French churches.5 The separatist messenger who delivered the statements to Wolstenholme stood by as Wolstenholme read them with visible displeasure. Wolstenholme as a member of the Virginia Company wanted more settlers, but he was also a conventionally pious conforming member of the Church of England, not a puritan. His devotion to bishops ran deep enough that he left two hundred pounds in his will for repairs at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Wolstenholme would have been scarcely more sympathetic to the bishopless French Reformed churches, in whose cloak of respectability the separatists were wrapping themselves, than to separatism itself, and he tried to extract from the messenger an acknowledgement of the importance of a bishop in making ministers. The messenger, rather than fudging, stoutly argued that either a congregation made its ministers or the pope did, and the pope was Antichrist. To non-puritans like Wolstenholme, as well as to the privy council (whose members included the archbishop of Canterbury), bishops represented not Antichrist but order, decency, social hierarchy, and the ancient, time-honored traditions of the church. Wolstenholme replied that he would not dispute the point and that he would not show the letters to the privy council, lest he should spoil all.6 Fortunately for the separatists, the king had moved more quickly than his privy council. By the time their messenger took his principled but tactically reckless stand with Wolstenholme, the separatists had already gotten as much as they were going to get from James. According to a contemporary separatist account, the Leiden congregation applied for the king’s approval of their migration on three grounds: they would bring the gospel to the heathens; they desired to live in the king’s realms;

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and they wished to “make way for . . . others . . . whose consciences are grieved with the state of the Church in England.”7 The Virginia Company prevailed upon Sir Robert Naunton, the secretary of state, to make the separatists’ case to the king. In his role as secretary of state, Naunton vigorously promoted an anti-Catholic, antiSpanish foreign policy, and from his perspective, what better place for a small group of troublesome English hyper-Protestants than three thousand miles from England, building up embryonic British North America as a bulwark against the Catholic Spanish empire? Naunton appealed to James on behalf of the Pilgrims as dissenters who wished to “enjoy their liberty of Conscience under his gracious protection in America.” James replied that it was a “good and honest motion” and asked how the company intended to make a living. Fishing was the intention, James was told, and the king, being in one of his ponderously witty moods, replied, “So God have my Soule ’tis an honest Trade, ’twas the Apostles owne calling.” Later, however, he told Naunton to confer with the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London.8 The king and the two ecclesiastical dignitaries appear to have agreed that while they would not positively sanction the immigration, neither would they hinder it. Such, at any rate, was the separatists’ understanding of the permission they received. Wolstenholme informed the separatist messenger of that fact immediately after telling him that the letters the messenger had brought could have scuttled the whole deal.9 Further progress on the voyage was stalled throughout 1618, due to intense factional fighting among the Virginia Company’s directors. Meanwhile, Brewster and Thomas Brewer were engaged in their high-risk publishing activities. By the time the fighting in the Virginia Company had calmed down, the separatists had decided, on the advice of friends, to get a patent for a plantation under another person’s name. On June 19, 1619, the Virginia Company finally issued a patent to John Wyncop, a “religious gentleman” who wished to emigrate. Whether the separatists were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the king or of the Virginia Company itself by using Wyncop as a front is unknown. The secrecy itself was prudent, however, because at the end of July, King James learned about the press and Brewster’s role in it, and Brewster had to go into hiding. The separatists never used the Wyncop patent, however.10

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After two years of effort and nothing resolved with the Virginia Company, Robinson and the separatists started to explore a different and extraordinarily ambitious plan around the turn of 1620. Using Dutch connections, they would organize a separatist exodus from England and Holland of four hundred families (perhaps three or four times larger than the emigration that settled Massachusetts in 1630) under the auspices of the Dutch New Netherland Company and sail to the Dutch territory that later became New York. The separatists’ opportunity to go down in history as the founders of New York City fell through when the Dutch government refused to provide two warships to protect the venture from English attacks.11 While this Dutch door to America was closing, a new English door to Virginia opened. Thomas Weston was the leader of a group of around seventy London artisans and merchants who sought overseas investments. These “adventurers” had been engaged in unlicensed trade with the Netherlands until the privy council in 1618 ordered them to stop, and Weston had helped the separatists in their dealings with the Virginia Company. He showed up in Leiden in early 1620 with a Virginia Company land patent issued to an associate, John Pierce. The patent gave land for a settlement at the northernmost boundary of the Company’s grant from the king, in what is today northern New Jersey, near where the Pilgrims would have settled with the Dutch. Weston offered the Leiden congregation his group’s financial support, which, after much back and forth and adjustment of terms, the congregation accepted. The London adventurers provided money, and the immigrants agreed to work not for themselves but for the company, in which they had shares. In seven years, they would all divide up the profits, with the absentee adventurers taking half ownership in the land and houses on the plantation.12 When the time to depart actually arrived, the majority of the congregation found reasons to postpone emigrating. There was insufficient time to settle their affairs and insufficient space on the boat. News of the death at sea of over a hundred separatists from Francis Johnson’s congregation heading to Virginia could not have boosted enthusiasm for the journey. The majority who chose to remain in Holland agreed that they would emigrate as soon as it was feasible. In the meantime, they wished that Robinson stay with them. The congregation officially split into two

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churches, agreeing that the members of each would be accounted as members of the other. Brewster, as ruling lay elder, was in charge of the emigrants’ church. The soon to be divided church spent its last day together in Leiden at the end of July 1620 in fasting, preaching, and “powering out prairs to the Lord with great fervencie mixed with abundance of tears,” as William Bradford recalled in his history of Plymouth Plantation. Not only would the emigrants have to tear themselves away from the European world in which they had spent their lives, they would now have to leave behind them their beloved pastor and spiritual guide and the greater part of their religious community, with no assurance that they would ever see them again. “But they knew they were pilgrimes,” Bradford wrote, “and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.”13 The unwillingness of the majority of the church to emigrate left the planned colony with a major obstacle to its reformist goals. The colony’s church could not be completely functional in the absence of a minister to offer the sacraments. Yet how and when Robinson arrived was now left in the hands of Weston’s adventurers. Most of the adventurers, like most English people, had no attraction to separatism. John Robinson later indicated that puritans dominated the group. About five or six of the adventurers were “absolutely bent for us above any others,” meaning that they were inclined to separatism, while five or six were “our bitter professed adversaries,” perhaps meaning that they were conformists. The rest, thought Robinson, were sympathetic but under the sway of puritan ministers (the forward ministers, Robinson called them), “whose course so farr as there is any differance, they would rather advance then ours.”14 The Leiden separatists dealt with religious suspicion among the puritan majority of the adventurers by presenting themselves, in their customary way, as ordinary Reformed Christians, not as separatist extremists. Their church order, they claimed to the adventurers, did not differ in any important points from the French Reformed churches. The accuracy of that claim depended upon how “important” was defined— when communicating with the adventurers, the separatists did not think it important to point out that they disagreed with the French Reformed churches on the question of whether the Church of England was a true church.15

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Despite the separatists’ efforts to present themselves as ordinary Reformed Christians, a large number of the investors remained justifiably wary of them. The Leiden church wanted to set up a separatist colony, but most of the London adventurers wanted to set up a puritan one. Separatists and their sympathizers probably made up most of the emigrants that the London adventurers were arranging to send.16 Nonetheless, the emigrants left a large number of de facto hostages to the adventurers behind them in Leiden. Whether the rest of the Leiden church, including, critically, John Robinson himself, got to America, and on what terms, would be decided not by separatists but by the suspicious puritans who were bankrolling the emigration.

As events turned out, all the time spent trying to procure a patent proved unnecessary. Either due to navigational difficulties, or as a later story had it, the treachery of their sea captain, paid by the Dutch to keep them far away from the planned Dutch colony in New York, the emigrants ended up well north of the Virginia Company’s territory, in Massachusetts Bay. The Pilgrims belatedly procured a new patent from the Council for New England, on whose land they settled.17 Raw survival, not the expansion of the Lord’s free people, was the initial American challenge facing the immigrants. The separatists had declined to hire the ser vices of the explorer Captain John Smith, who was familiar with the New England coastline. Smith claimed they told him that “my books and maps were much better cheape to teach them, than my selfe.” The emigrants instead used the ser vices of Miles Standish, an English soldier who was on good terms with the separatists in Leiden and possibly a church member. They paid dearly for their choice over the first winter of 1620–1621, during which around half of the hundred or so passengers died. There were ten households left by the spring of 1621. Fortunately for the settlers, a brutal epidemic had lessened any danger from the local Indian tribes, although if Bradford is correct, the Indians’ shamans, in a large powwow in a dark and dismal swamp, did their best to bring about the plantation’s demise. Fear of the strength of the Narragansett Indians and news of the surprise Indian attack in Virginia in March 1622 prompted the settlers to build a palisade around their

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settlement and to place in its middle a stout fort with battlements and cannons on its roof.18 In the midst of their struggles, the Pilgrims set to work recreating their church. The fort doubled as the settlement’s meeting house. A visitor later in the decade described how each Sunday a drum would beat and the colonists would march in procession to the fort, led by Governor Bradford in a long robe and elder Brewster in his cape. The men were armed and they kept their weapons near them during the ser vices. Brewster preached twice on the Sabbath, successfully by puritan standards of excellence. He was “moving and stirring of affections, also very plaine and distincte in what he taught,” according to Bradford. Brewster excelled “in ripping up the hart and conscience before God, in the humble confession of sinne and begging the mercies of God in Christ for the pardon of the same.” Brewster also thought short extempore prayers were better than long ones, one way in which he differed from virtuoso puritan ministers. The separatists continued their old practice of ecumenical piety. One of the rare surviving identifiable early Plymouth books has the inscription “Edward Burchard his book given him by the Church at Plimmouth in New England 1623.” Significantly it is a devotional book by the puritan George Gifford, otherwise a vitriolic opponent of separatism.19 Initially the separatists’ New World reformation did prove attractive to at least some nonseparatists, as Robinson had predicted. A nonseparatist settler, William Hilton, found himself happy with Brewster’s preaching and the religious life of the colony after he arrived in 1621 as part of a group of around thirty-five mostly nonseparatist settlers. Hilton wrote to a cousin that year, praising the settlers as “for the most part very religious honest people, the word of God sincerely taught us every Sabbath, so that I know not anything a contented mind can here want.” Hilton probably would have approved Bradford’s decision to punish the nonseparatist settlers who attempted to celebrate Christmas (a pagan holiday, puritans and separatists believed) in 1621 by playing games in the street instead of working like the rest of the colonists.20 But the separatists’ would-be New World reformation suffered from a serious handicap. Good though Brewster was at rousing the shared piety of the puritans and separatists during the Sunday ser vices, he was a lay

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elder, not a minister. As such, Brewster could not offer the sacraments, and their absence created a serious spiritual drought. That drought could have been easily brought to an end by the arrival of Robinson. Robinson’s arrival, however, kept being delayed. As the years wore on, it became increasingly obvious to the church that this delay was deliberate policy on the part of the anti-separatist London adventurers. The first warning that the London puritan adventurers were hostile came in a letter to Bradford from Weston dated April 10, 1622. Weston told Bradford that he had sold out his share in the venture and warned Bradford that most of the adventurers, including some of the most religious, were opposed to sending any more people from Leiden.21 The next year, two ships, carrying around ninety settlers, arrived, doubling the population of the plantation. Only around thirty men, women, and children were from the Leiden congregation, and ten or so of the others were in a category by themselves. They were not sent by the company. They paid their own way and came on their “particular.” These “particulars” had agreed to obey the colony’s government, pay taxes, and stay out of the Indian trade, but unlike the other settlers, they worked for themselves, not the company, and they had no say in the settlement’s government. All the new immigrants, Governor Bradford wrote in his history of Plymouth, were full of sadness when they saw the poverty of the colony and the ragged, half-naked appearance of the settlers.22 The new settlers of 1623 still did not include Robinson. The London adventurers sent a letter apologizing for the small number of Leiden church members and especially for not sending Robinson “on whom you most depend.” “Farr be it from us to neclecte you, or contemne him,” they assured the colonists, without, however, explaining why they had not included Robinson. Bradford wrote back to the treasurer of the adventurers, James Sherley, emphasizing how much the Pilgrims desired and expected the members of their church and warning that they would not remain at Plymouth if they did not come.23 Robinson’s absence was not the only liability of the new group of immigrants. According to Bradford, some of the new particulars immediately began stirring up discontent and “privatly to nurish a faction.” Chief among the faction’s ringleaders was John Oldham, a trader with a tangled career of scheming ahead of him in New England until Indians

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beat his brains out in 1636. Much later, elderly men told the Massachusetts minister and historian William Hubbard that they remembered Oldham as being “seemingly” religious. Another settler in the colony who would become active in dissent was Roger Conant, from a puritan background. He was married into the Culverwell family, perhaps the most important puritan ministerial dynasty in England. Conant’s brother, a minister, would become a delegate to the famous puritan Westminster Assembly in the 1640s. This “faction,” as Bradford called them, spread discontent with the religious and economic management of the colony and told anyone who would listen that many of the adventurers in London shared their concerns. They drew some of the “weaker” members of the company to their side.24 As tensions rose between the old separatist settlers and the new particulars, conflicts on the other side of the Atlantic among the adventurers in London became overt. Those London conflicts were fueled by the absence of profits and by complaints from the colony about the lack of a minister and about the harshness of conditions. The meetings of the adventurers grew increasingly stormy. Some adventurers wanted to sell their shares, while others feared that this disgruntled group, vocally departing “in such a furie,” would do more damage to the venture by leaving than they would by staying.25 To entice discontented members to stay, the rest of the adventurers made two significant religious concessions at the beginning of 1624, both severe blows to the separatists. They promised that none of the adventurers’ funds would be used to transport any more members of the Leiden church, including Robinson, and that the adventurers would send a minister of their own choosing to the colony. Having carved reconciliation out of the hide of the separatists, the adventurers held “the loveingest and frendlyest meeting that ever I knew,” the group’s treasurer, James Sherley, burbled in a letter to Bradford. The treasurer went on to tell Bradford that the meeting sent for wine, which the adventurers all drank together amiably, and he expressed his regrets that the colonists could not indulge in the same pleasure.26 John Lyford, the minister the adventurers agreed to send, arrived around the beginning of April 1624, along with welcome supplies for fishing and salt making, clothing, and a bull and some cows. The London

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separatist, ex-member of the Leiden church, and ex–brief resident of Plymouth Plantation Robert Cushman assured Bradford by letter that Lyford was probably “an honest plaine man, though none of the most eminente and rare.” The colonists should use their own discretion about whether they wanted him as a minister. Lyford understood that he would not automatically be a church officer in Plymouth, although Cushman presciently worried that “custome and universalitie may make him forget himselfe,” meaning that unless Lyford were a congregationalist, he would revert to the conventional assumption among puritans that a legitimate minister automatically had the spiritual authority to minister outside a particular congregation. Cushman told Bradford that he saw no liability in sending Lyford over, except that he came with many children to feed. John Robinson at roughly the same time wrote a letter to Brewster in which he surmised correctly that the adventurers might send a “larned man” to the colony (a minister, in other words), and if so, all Robinson could advise was that the separatists warily decide what to do, like gladiators in an arena.27 Lyford was to have a brief but colorfully scandalous stay in the colony. Historians have disagreed among themselves wherein the scandal lay, but there is one thing about him on which they almost all agree: he was an “Anglican” and thus someone who, given his emphasis on ceremonial worship, would blend with separatists as unsuccessfully as oil with water. But Lyford, who had last ministered in Ireland, was in fact a nonconformist. His own religious identity as a puritan is a vital key for unlocking the significance of the uproar that he and the separatists mutually created in Plymouth.28 America was about to witness its first clash between puritans and separatists.

According to Bradford, Lyford’s initial presence in the colony was entirely positive. He arrived overjoyed: “He wept and shed many tears, blessing God that had brought him to see their faces; and admiring the things they had done in their wants, etc. as if he had been made all of love, and the humblest person in the world.” The colony supplied him and his large family with all their needs. Befitting Lyford’s status as a minister, Governor Bradford included him in his consultations with

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Brewster in the “waightiest bussineses” of the little plantation, whose total population, according to one contemporary, was 180.29 Lyford soon applied for membership in the church and was accepted. He made “a large confession of his faith,” which would have been expected. Moreover, he went on at length about his “former disorderly walking” in the impure Church of England. He had been “intangled with many corruptions, which had been a burthen to his conscience.” Now he “blessed God for this opportunitie of freedom and libertie to injoye the ordinances of God in puritie among his people.” Lyford made it clear that he had no sympathy for bishops: he renounced all universal, national, and diocesan churches and assured the church that he did not consider himself a minister until he had a new calling from a congregation. He joined Brewster as a regular lay preacher in the church. 30 Bradford recorded that Lyford’s acceptance by the church brought the leading men of the colony together and eased tensions. The leader of the particulars, Oldham, apologized for stirring up trouble and claimed he would no longer be an instrument for the separatists’ opponents in England. Oldham asked “that they would looke upon him as one that desired to close with them in all things.” Bradford thought that Oldham was moved by conviction, not hypocrisy. Oldham, like Lyford, was called upon “to counsell with them in all cheefe affairs.” Oldham’s sister, Lucretia, married a son of William Brewster in April 1624. Bradford claimed that “all things seemed to goe very comfortably and smoothly on amongst them.”31 Bradford’s story in his history, however, abruptly leaps from this newfound harmony to religious discord, with neither transition nor explanation. Oldham and Lyford, according to Bradford, unaccountably “grew very perverse, and shewed a spirite of great malignancie, drawing as many into faction as they could.” In June 1624, as a ship was preparing to return to England, Lyford was observed writing many letters and conversing conspiratorially with his “faction.” Bradford covertly rowed out to the ship and purloined or copied letters by Lyford, Oldham, and one of their associates. Lyford’s letters complained that the separatists would have the colony to themselves and that they intended the ruin of the particulars, distributed supplies unfairly, and generally mismanaged the colony. It was vital, Lyford insisted, that Robinson and the rest of the

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Leiden church be prevented from emigrating. Lyford advised the adventurers to send over more people and make them nominal company members, in order to take over the government from the separatists. A letter by an associate claimed that Oldham and Lyford intended a reformation in church and commonwealth and that Oldham and Lyford and their adherents were to join together and have the sacraments.32 Having obtained the dissidents’ letters, Bradford bided his time, to let the conspirators reveal themselves more fully and to identify their followers, or so he claimed in his History. Bradford continued to hold off tipping his hand even after Oldham pulled a knife on Miles Standish while being summoned to night watch duty, accused the separatists of being rebels and traitors, and had to be briefly imprisoned. Finally after some weeks, Lyford and his accomplices, with no warning, failed to attend the Sabbath ser vice. They met by themselves for their own worship, where Lyford administered the sacraments for the first time in the colony’s four-year history, by right of what Bradford termed his “Episcopall cal[l]ing,” (his calling by a bishop). Faced with alternative religious worship, Bradford summoned the whole colony to a court, and charged Lyford and Oldham with “such things as they were guilty of.”33 This abrupt, unexplained transition in Bradford’s account from weddings in April to drawn knives and ecclesiastical rebellion by the early summer is a jigsaw puzzle with a piece conspicuously missing. Fortunately, Thomas Morton, an Indian trader with no love of either puritans or separatists, later told a plausible story that fits the gap (he had probably arrived in New England by this time). Bradford would have been more than happy to omit the story, and it has indirect evidence to back it up. According to Morton, not only did Lyford join the church, the church intended to make him their minister. Before it did that, however, it insisted that Lyford first renounce the ministerial calling he received in England as “hereticall and Papisticall.” He consented. A “papistical” calling was one that was derived from the pope, via the Church of England bishops, and Lyford, like many nonconformist puritans, could have been quite sincere in rejecting it.34 But before calling Lyford to their church, the separatists wanted him to renounce his Church of England calling entirely, meaning that he was to acknowledge that he had not been a genuine minister while serving in

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the false Church of England. According to Morton, Lyford refused, saying that his Church of England calling as a minister was “lawfull, and that hee would not renounce it.” What reads in Morton’s account as Lyford’s rapid self-contradiction, denying and then affirming his Church of England ministerial calling, is almost certainly the result of Morton’s truncating a response he might not have fully understood himself but that would have made complete sense to any radical puritan.35 Both zealous puritans and separatists agreed that bishops, as offshoots of the antichristian papacy, could not give a minister a genuine calling. For both groups, such a calling would have been precisely as Lyford described it, heretical and popish. Puritans, unlike the separatists, however, believed that the puritan laity in a parish could give a genuine calling to a minister, either implicitly or explicitly, by their acceptance of him. That genuine lay calling that Lyford had received would be why he would have refused to have renounced his Church of England ministry entirely. The discriminating formula Lyford was invoking had been used by both presbyterians and congregationalists against separatists to defend their ministry and would become standard Massachusetts practice in the next decade. Ministers would repent for the sin of their ordination by a bishop, while they insisted that the valid call they had received to their English ministries from the people was to be respected. 36 Since separatists believed that the Church of England was a false church from top to bottom, they did not believe that any calling from Church of England laity could make a person a minister. All puritan ministers, therefore, according to separatists, derived their (false) calling from the bishops, regardless of their “unhonest excuse,” as John Robinson called it, of a calling from the laity. That is why Bradford could insist that Lyford was still acting as a minister on the basis of his episcopal calling despite Lyford’s rejection of that calling.37 With this dispute over Lyford’s ministerial calling, the road to him becoming minister to the Plymouth church was blocked. Lyford was unwilling to completely disavow his work as a minister in the Church of England and implicitly reject the Church of England as a false church, while the separatists were unwilling to accommodate his scruples. Instead, a debate broke out over whether the Church of England was a true church. In standard puritan fashion, Lyford and Oldham affirmed that it

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was, albeit with defective elements, and that affirmation effectively killed what little likelihood remained, if any, of Lyford ministering to the separatists.38 It would have been after Lyford failed his grilling that he and Oldham, in the eyes of Bradford, grew perverse and started displaying their spirit of great malignancy. But what Bradford claimed was perversity was probably anger and frustration. The separatists had rejected Lyford on grounds that must have seemed to the nonseparatists both trivial in themselves and nearly treasonous. Oldham was not picking words at random when he accused the separatists at knifepoint of being traitors and rebels, since that is what their blanket rejection of the Church of England, headed by the monarch, made them to many people. “Seditious sectaries” was how they were legally described. 39 What would have driven Oldham to his drawn knife and rash words was that the Plymouth separatists showed not the slightest willingness to accommodate settlers who did not entirely share their seditious, illegal religious principles. It is likely that the initial harmony Bradford recorded after Lyford’s smooth arrival stemmed precisely from the expectation that the colony would soon have a mutually agreed upon, functioning clergyman. Since it would not, because of separatist intransigence, there could be no easy resolution to a pressing spiritual problem about which Bradford conspicuously said nothing in his account. That problem was the colony’s sacramental drought. The London adventurers had already received complaints from the colony about the lack of sacraments, but John Robinson from Holland blocked the effort of the Plymouth separatists to solve the problem themselves. Brewster had written to him asking whether he could administer the sacraments in Robinson’s absence, and Robinson had written back in December 1623 saying that since Brewster was not a minister, he could not.40 With the adventurers unwilling to transport Robinson and the separatists unwilling to allow Lyford to become minister of the colony’s church, the prospect of the drought ending was nil. It was this apparently endless sacramental drought that drove the Plymouth puritans to separate in their worship from the Plymouth church. But it was not generalized discontent, as Bradford implied, that precipitated this action, it was the urgent need of a previously contented

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settler. According to the old witnesses talking to William Hubbard a half century later, the nonseparatist settler William Hilton, who had praised the religious life of the plantation in 1621, now had a baby, and he and his wife understandably wanted it baptized. Had Lyford been made minister to the church, some orderly way of proceeding to baptism could have taken place. Since the separatists had decided that a puritan nonconformist was not good enough for them, the Hiltons would either have to forego baptism for their child indefinitely, or they would have to defy the separatists. It was the baptizing of Hilton’s child, according to the old witnesses, that was the origin of the open quarrel between Lyford and the separatists.41 The nonseparatists’ sacramental church ser vice would have seemed to the participants like a completely justified reaction to the separatists’ spiritually callous, illegal rigidity. But it would have looked very different to the separatists themselves.42 From the separatists’ perspective, what happened with the nonseparatists’ Sunday ser vice was that a false minister with an antichristian calling administered false sacraments to a false imitation of a church. It was England’s spiritual corruption all over again and a giant step backward for reformation and true Christian liberty, besides potentially being an attractive full-service alternative to the separatists’ limited church for the less-committed colonists. After Bradford called his court, he accused Oldham and Lyford of plotting against the civil and ecclesiastical peace of the plantation. They denied the charges, whereupon Bradford read their purloined letters to the crowd. Lyford apologized profusely and begged forgiveness. Oldham remained vocally belligerent, although the pair’s sympathizers remained disappointingly unresponsive to his attempts to rally them. The court sentenced Oldham and Lyford to exile, with Lyford’s delayed for six months to see whether his contrition proved sound. After apologizing to the court, Lyford repented before the church, with many tears. It might be an indication either of how badly some separatists in the colony wanted a minister or of Lyford’s gifts as a minister or of both that the church permitted Lyford to preach again and that deacon Samuel Fuller and other “tender hearted men amongst them” said that they were willing to fall on their knees to have his sentence of banishment lifted. This support for Lyford may also be an indication that the decision to not call

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him as minister in the first place was reached after some serious disagreements among the separatists.43 Despite the show of separatist support, Lyford believed that his exile was a given. Facing the prospect of no position and with a large family to support, he took the risk on August 22, 1624, of writing another letter to the adventurers, secretly, he thought. In it he apologized for plotting against the colony, but he insisted that his charges were correct. He warned that he would have to leave “unless I receive better incouragement from you, then from the church (as they call them selves).” He had been trying to help “diverse poore souls here, the care of whom in parte belongs to you, being here destitute of the means of salvation.” The separatists found Lyford’s letter and wrote their own rebuttal.44 When the charges and countercharges arrived in England, Lyford’s friends rose up in arms about his treatment in the colony. The London adventurers called a special meeting at the end of 1624 to hear the case and resolve it. The meeting had two moderators, one chosen by each side. Lyford’s friends chose the lawyer John White, later active in the Massachusetts Bay Company, while the separatists chose the minister Thomas Hooker, who himself would emigrate to New England (Hooker was a friend of William Ames, who was a friend of Robinson’s). The meeting grew tumultuous when Edward Winslow, visiting London as the plantation’s agent, accused Lyford of acting knavishly. Lyford’s partisans threatened to prosecute Winslow for slandering a minister.45 Winslow, to back up his accusation, produced witnesses from Ireland. They gave a steamy explanation of why Lyford left his Irish ministry. While the explanation itself is known only from Bradford’s account, other sources confirm that Lyford had skeletons in his closet.46 In Ireland Lyford had been admired by puritans, or as Winslow put it to Bradford, he was in “the esteeme of sundry godly and zelous professours . . . who, having been burthened with the ceremonies in England, found ther some more liberty to their consciences”—the Church of Ireland, although under English control, was much slacker in enforcing conformity than the Church of England. Now two of those Irish puritans had a shocking tale to relate. A “godly yonge man” requested Lyford to assess the suitableness of a young woman for marriage before he became too involved. Lyford agreed but said he would need to have private

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conferences with her to get to know her better. After these sessions, Lyford gave his approval, and the marriage went forward. Sometime after the wedding the woman was “much troubled in mind, and afflicted in conscience, and did nothing but weepe and mourne.” It eventually came out that in Lyford’s private sessions, he “had overcome her, and defiled her body while hindering conception.” The woman’s husband and some of his godly friends paid a visit to Lyford. Lyford confessed to them, professed repentance, and left Ireland, partly for shame and fear of punishment and partly because “the godly withdrew them selves from him.” The moderators announced that these matters alone made Lyford unfit to be a minister and declared the issue closed.47 Edward Winslow brought the news of this stormy meeting back to Plymouth in the spring of 1625. The settlers did not notice his arrival, for they were busy sending John Oldham through a “bumme-guard,” two parallel lines of men who whacked Oldham’s bottom with the stocks of their muskets. Oldham had been rash enough to return to the settlement without permission and had again denounced the separatists as rebels and traitors. Winslow encouraged the bum-guard on before sharing his news about Lyford.48 At least a few people at Plymouth already knew that Lyford had a dubious sexual past, as a consequence of the discovery of his second letter to the adventurers. After the letter had been revealed, his wife Sarah found a parallel with previous behavior of her husband’s. She shared her concern with Deacon Fuller and other friends. Lyford, she revealed, had been a serial philanderer before and after marriage and had a bastard child, whose existence he had concealed from Sarah until after their wedding. When confronted about his infidelities, he would weep and use “great and sade expressions,” just as he had recently done in Plymouth, without, however, changing his behavior. Sarah was driven to share these episodes because she feared that God was about to send an awful judgment on her husband, banishing him to the wilderness in order that the Indians could rape her for his crimes.49 When the time came for the voluntary or involuntary departure of the Plymouth puritan dissidents, it is not clear how many people actually left. Oldham, Lyford, and Roger Conant, the well-connected puritan, moved a few miles up the coast to pursue their trade and fishing at Nantasket. Walter Hilton and his family left as well, but they were soon in New

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Hampshire. The only other disaffected person whose name is known was John Billington. He remained in the colony and was hanged for murder in 1630, after a long history of brushes with authority.50 Those who departed sent a letter to the separatists explaining their reasons for leaving the plantation and giving conditions for their return. Save for a demand to participate in the government of the colony, all of their concerns were religious. The letter accused the separatists of dissembling when they had claimed to the adventurers and in their petition to the king that they practiced the discipline of the French Reformed churches. The only way those departing would come back was if Plymouth Plantation practiced the French discipline in its entirety. This demand is not likely to have meant that the dissidents wanted the Plymouth church to elect its lay officers each year, to join itself to a French classis (church organization) on the other side of the ocean, or to otherwise fine-tune itself to the minutiae of French practice. Rather it meant that they wanted the Plymouth church to conduct itself like the French churches in England, which recognized the Church of England as a true church and acted in an appropriately fraternal manner. Moreover, the dissidents insisted that if Robinson and the rest of the Leiden congregation wished to come to the colony, they would have to reconcile themselves to the Church of England with a written recantation.51 These disaffected settlers were not “Anglicans” pining for a heavy dosage of ceremonials and hierarchy. The kind of church order they were demanding was one with which most radical puritans would have been completely satisfied. In principle, the disaffected settlers were the sort of people whom Robinson had predicted would practice as the separatists did once free of the restraints of England. All the evidence suggests Robinson would have been proved right if only the separatists had shown a bit more flexibility on the theoretical question of Lyford’s English calling. Bradford’s huff y reply asserted the right of every church to follow the scriptures and not be bound to other churches. “You derogate from the libertie we have in Christ Jesus,” Bradford told them.52

Bradford’s defiance to the departing puritans, in the normal course of events, would have been the last gasp of the separatists’ New World attempt to institutionalize true Christian liberty. The unenthusiastic

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London adventurers who already had one foot out the door took the opportunity of the Lyford controversy to withdraw. Winslow brought the doleful news back with him from London in 1625. A tactful letter Winslow carried to Plymouth from the adventurer’s treasurer, James Sherley, claimed that lack of profits was the real reason for the adventurers quitting the enterprise, “yet other things are pretended, as that you are . . . [separatists], condemning all other churches, and persons but yourselves.” William Hubbard elegantly referred to the departing adventurers as “more studious of their profit than the advancing of the religion of the Separation.” On March 1, 1625, John Robinson died in Leiden, victim of an outbreak of the plague that killed eight thousand people in the city. With a mountain of debts and their beloved pastor expired, the future of the Lord’s free people in New England appeared bleak to the Plymouth separatists. “To looke humanely on the state of things as they presented them selves at this time, it is a marvell it did not wholy discourage them, and sinck them,” Bradford wrote.53 The Plymouth colony’s mission to expand the ranks of Christ’s true church would go on to spectacular success, but that outcome was due, as fate would have it, to the colony’s expulsion of the dissident puritans. Some seventy miles north across Massachusetts Bay on Cape Anne a small plantation had been set up in 1623 by the Dorchester Company. The Company was led by John White, an entrepreneurial, widely connected moderate puritan minister whose associates included the ministerial brother of Roger Conant, the puritan who left Plymouth with Lyford. White and his associates intended their plantation to provide a permanent base, provisions, and religious instruction for the west country fishermen who fished off New England each year. By 1625 the plantation was floundering.54 White, at the prompting of Conant’s brother, invited Conant to take over the plantation. Conant agreed, but the Dorchester Company folded in 1626. Meanwhile, Conant discovered an adjacent tract with a good harbor for ships, the future Salem. The site, he wrote back to England, would be an excellent location for people seeking to establish a plantation on account of religion. White convinced himself that the site’s Indian name Naumkeag, was in fact “perfect Hebrew,” Nahum Keike, or the bosom of consolation, suggesting that the Indians had enjoyed contact

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with the Jews in the distant past. While the Dorchester Company shipped its servants home, White, encouraged by this divine sign, urged Conant and his companions to settle at Naumkeag and told them he would procure a patent for them from the Council for New England. Meanwhile, Lyford got an offer to minister in Virginia, which seemed a more promising prospect to him than the tiny settlement he was in. Lyford departed, taking some others with him, and died in Virginia in 1629.55 Lyford would soon be replaced, for in 1627 White and his fellow remaining adventurers threw in their lot with a puritan group of gentlemen and London merchants.56 This group was eyeing Conant’s little plantation as the nucleus for what would become the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Plymouth separatists would thereby get the economic dynamo, relatively speaking, that would pull them out of their debts, along with another opportunity to foster the puritan-separatist congregationalist union prophesied by John Robinson.

chapter 6

Separatism at Salem?

T

he puritan- separatist clashes at Plymouth ensured that Plymouth would find itself the neighbor of a much more important puritan colony. But does the religious impact of Plymouth on Massachusetts extend beyond that serendipitous outcome? The enormously influential twentieth-century historian of American puritanism, Perry Miller, argued emphatically that it did not: the first Massachusetts church, founded at Salem in 1629, and those that followed owed nothing to the neighboring colony of Plymouth. Miller’s 1933 book, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, reenergized academic interest in American puritanism, and in it Miller insisted that Salem “would have proceeded along essentially the same line had there been no Plymouth at all.” The ministers the Massachusetts Bay Company sent to Salem and the subsequent ones ushered in a new beginning for New England Protestantism, Miller claimed. These ministers, he asserted, were disciples of puritan congregationalists like Ames and Baynes, whom Miller termed “non-separating congregationalists,” to distinguish them from the separatists. They “went to Massachusetts fully prepared to realize there the teachings of Non-separating Congregationalism.”1 Later historians of Massachusetts have taken Miller’s dismissal of Plymouth as foundational, while adjusting and building on it in various 134

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ways. By the end of the twentieth century, the Plymouth church was being dismissed, in the words of one scholar, as “pathetically unimportant.” Plymouth is mentioned only a few times in passing in Stephen Foster’s 1991 magisterial history of Massachusetts puritanism, while its church does not even rate an index entry. More recent work on early Massachusetts congregationalism leaves the conventional post-Miller framework undisturbed.2 But is this standard amputation of the first decade of New England’s congregationalist history correct, or is it a fundamental distortion of both the history of Plymouth and Massachusetts and, more deeply, of the relationship of Robinsonian separatism to later puritan congregationalism? As will be seen, despite Miller’s impact on later historians, his reasons for dismissing Plymouth were consistently flimsy. There is a great deal of evidence indicating that Plymouth, far from being pathetically unimportant, was the exemplar and catalyst for Massachusetts’s congregationalism, with major short- and long-term consequences on both sides of the Atlantic.

From 1627 to 1629, the puritan enterprise that started with Roger Conant’s little plantation of Naumkeag underwent rapid transformation. A puritan alliance of London merchants and East Anglian gentlemen, along with the minister John White and a few other veterans of the Dorchester Company, founded the New England Company and got a patent for the Salem settlement from the Council for New England. In 1628 they sent the settlement supplies, settlers, and a new governor, John Endicott. Nothing is known about Endicott up to this time except that he might have been a soldier, spoke French well, and had a volatile temper and an authoritarian streak.3 Endicott’s most notable blow for reformation in his first year at Salem was to lead an expedition to Merrymount, the camp of the loose-living Indian trader Thomas Morton. The expedition hewed down Merrymount’s maypole and renamed the camp Mount Dagon, after the place of worship of the idolatrous Old Testament Philistines (Morton himself at the time was a prisoner of the Plymouth colony).4 In 1629 the New England Company went over the head of the Council for New England, making a direct application to the king for land. It

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then reconstituted itself as, or was absorbed into, the Massachusetts Bay Company. The Massachusetts Bay Company received a charter and land grant for what would become Massachusetts from the king himself that spring. The new company immediately commenced a much more ambitious emigration than that of 1628. Five ships loaded with supplies and around three hundred settlers departed between April and May. Three ministers were among the most vital supplies the company sent over, the first of seventy-six who would arrive in New England between 1629 and 1640.5 What is the evidence that these ministers were, as Miller insisted, nonseparating congregationalists? The purpose of what follows is not to argue against Miller’s case, per se, but to demonstrate the difficulty of conceiving of the Salem church without Plymouth. To begin with, there is no evidence that the Massachusetts Bay Company deliberately planned to send ministers with a congregationalist agenda or even with any specific church government agenda at all. The puritan ministers the company was using to vet prospective clergymen ranged from the conformists John White and John Davenport to the old Elizabethan presbyterian and committed nonconformist Arthur Hildersham.6 A vetting process whose referees ran such a wide gamut was not one in the ser vice of a clearly formed agenda about church government. The Massachusetts Bay Company, however, was also actively recruiting the renowned theologian and militant nonconformist William Ames, then teaching safely beyond the reach of the bishops at the University of Franeker in Friesland. Ames had picked up congregationalism from William Bradshaw and John Robinson, while rejecting separatism. If Ames had migrated, he would have set up a church at Salem similar in all but one crucial way to the one that was actually created.7 One clergyman pushing for Ames’s recruitment, however, was the prominent nonconformist John Cotton (1585–1652), the preeminent minister among the East Anglian and Lincolnshire puritans involved in the Massachusetts Bay Company. Cotton would later become a leader of Massachusetts congregationalism, but at the time he disagreed with its basic assumptions (the earliest date for Cotton’s acceptance of congregationalism is around the turn of 1632).8 Since Cotton did not agree with Ames about congregationalism, it can be safe to assume that he, like the Company in general, was not seeking to make the colony a congregationalist outpost. He was simply trying to find

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the best godly ministers he could for a very problematic posting. Ames, with his European-wide reputation as a Calvinist theologian, would have been a spectacular catch and an excellent asset for future recruitment, a “blessing and blessing bringer,” as an agent for the Company called him.9 Moreover, alternative modes of church government for most puritans at this time were strictly theoretical exercises; there was no remotely realistic prospect of the Church of England changing. No one would have been giving a lot of thought to the possibility that the Company, if not careful, might create something never seen before: a successful, militant, inflexible congregationalist network of churches whose example would stir up enormous amounts of trouble among English puritans from three thousand miles away.

But if the Company was not intending to send congregationalist ministers to Salem, did it stumble upon them by accident? They would have been difficult to find. In the late 1620s, we know for certain of only two, John Lothrop, the minister of the London Jacob church, and William Ames himself. Besides the Jacob church, there were no puritan congregational churches anywhere. After Massachusetts, the next one would be in Rotterdam in 1633, possibly given impetus by the example of New England.10 In the absence of specific positive evidence, there is absolutely no reason to assume that nonconformist puritan ministers in the 1620s or 1630s, either generally or individually, were congregationalists or “Amesians” (followers of William Ames), as one historian has recently ambitiously argued.11 Perry Miller’s assumption that friendship with or respect for Ames was presumptive evidence of support for congregationalism would have turned a great many puritans of all varieties into congregationalists. Ames’s A Marrow of Sacred Divinity, for example, included a brief exposition of his congregationalism, along with large amounts of Calvinist theology. The House of Commons ordered its publication in 1642, when most members were scarcely ready to make the leap from episcopalianism to the presbyterianism they later settled on, let alone congregationalism.12 By the time the boats were ready to sail for Salem in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company had signed up three ministers, Francis Bright, Francis Higginson (c.1586/7–1630), and Samuel Skelton (1593–1634).

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Bright was a conforming puritan who was to play no role in the Salem church. Higginson and Skelton, however, were both nonconformists and were to become that church’s founding ministers. Miller found “every reason” to assume that they were nonseparating congregationalists.13 What was the basis for his emphatic claim? Miller’s first argument ran that since Higginson, while still a conformist, attempted to bar notorious sinners and people ignorant of the fundamentals of Christianity from the Lord’s Supper, he already demonstrated “Congregationalist leanings.” But the desire to protect the purity of the Lord’s Supper from such people had always been widespread among puritans. It was shared as much among puritans who later became presbyterians in the 1640s, when the times allowed choosing, as among the much smaller number who became congregationalists.14 Miller’s second argument was a congregationalist-by-association one, growing out of Higginson’s acquaintance with the nonconformist ministers Thomas Hooker and Arthur Hildersham. Hildersham was friends with Cotton, whom Miller erroneously assumed was a congregationalist, while Miller also assumed that Hooker was a congregationalist (1631 is the earliest firm date). Therefore, Higginson must have been a congregationalist. It is true that after meeting Hildersham and Hooker, according to the Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather, writing seven decades later, Higginson was inspired to “study the controversies about the evangelical church-discipline.” He concluded that he could no longer in good conscience perform the required ceremonies of the Church of England. It was this decision that got Higginson in trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities and made him decide to emigrate. From Mather’s brief account, there is no reason to think that Higginson had advanced any further in his nonconformity than John Cotton.15 Miller’s case for the congregationalism of the other minister, Samuel Skelton, is slightly stronger on the face of it, but it was built on a truncated and misleading source. Samuel Skelton studied separatism before emigrating, perhaps in order to argue with local separatists in Lincolnshire, as had John Cotton himself. Cotton reminded Skelton in a letter in 1630 that Skelton had rejected the separatists’ arguments. Cotton also praised the piety of John Robinson and the Plymouth separatists to Skelton. Cotton’s stance of rejecting the separatism but not the separatists might reflect Skelton’s own attitude (it certainly reflected how puritans

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got along with each other, given their wildly different and passionately held opinions on how much conformity was acceptable). Skelton’s books shipped to Salem included scholarly and devotional works by the separatists Henry Ainsworth and John Robinson on topics other than separatism. But perhaps to prevent settlers from coming under Plymouth’s spell, his library also included three anti-separatist tracts. On the basis of a truncated excerpt from Cotton’s comments, Miller argued that Skelton had a personal commitment to nonseparating congregationalism, for which there is no evidence. Miller added a few congregationalist-byassociation claims to bolster his case.16 Skelton certainly could have picked up some of the rudiments of congregationalism in the process of disagreeing with separatism, and of course, Higginson conceivably could have learned something about congregationalism before emigrating. But those thins wisps hardly add up to convincing evidence of commitments to congregationalism. Skelton and Higginson’s backgrounds as a whole give plausibility to a highly relevant story that appears in no fewer than three seventeenth-century sources. According to the Massachusetts minister and historian William Hubbard, it was “affirmed by some who had more reason to be best acquainted” with Higginson that the old presbyterian Arthur Hildersham advised Higginson and the other ministers preparing to emigrate to agree upon their form of church government before they left. The ministers did not follow his advice, and they “were not precisely fi xed upon any par ticu lar order or form of [church] government” before departing. Hubbard’s claim was repeated by Cotton Mather, whose wording suggests that he might have gotten it from a different source. It also appeared in a book by an English minister, published in 1659. This widely sourced anecdote about the emigrating ministers’ lack of a plan for church government would appear to put a final nail in the coffin of Miller’s thesis about them being confirmed congregationalists before emigrating. Miller made no mention of it, despite the central place of two of its three sources in virtually any study of early New England congregationalism.17

The Hildersham anecdote is significant, among other reasons, for the generational gap it suggests. Hildersham came of age in the 1580s at the peak of presbyterian agitation against the bishops’ government, in which

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he was deeply involved.18 This was a time when real ecclesiastical change briefly seemed possible and there was every reason to think hard about what New Testament church government was and how it worked. Skelton and Higginson, two decades younger, came of age after the presbyterian movement had been crushed. They spent their adult lives in a church where bishops were accepted as a settled, if not necessarily desirable, fact of life to all but a handful of hope-springs-eternal radical puritans. This generational difference meant that Hildersham knew firsthand how complicated it was to attempt to work out church templates that both were viable and maintained some credibility as divine New Testament edicts. Skelton and Higginson, along with a great many other younger puritans and puritan ministers, did not, since they had no sustained experience in either attempting or debating alternative forms of church government. The immigrating ministers were certainly not planning to place the prospective Salem church under the jurisdiction of an English bishop if they could possibly help it. They would have known that the churches that developed out of the Genevan tradition, including separatist and puritan congregationalism, all agreed that the proper New Testament alternative to bishops was government by a presbytery of ministerial and lay elders. Thereafter, things would have gotten cloudy. They perhaps had some idea that the disagreements between presbyterians and congregationalists were all related, in one way or another, to how a presbytery was set up and to the nature and limitations of its disciplinary and sacramental powers. They might have also known that there were wide variations among the European presbyterian churches and that the various separatist and puritan congregationalists did not agree among themselves (although the varieties of puritan congregationalism were mostly theoretical exercises at this point). One consequence of the ministers’ lack of experience was that they might not see red flags among this multitude of conflicting details as quickly as someone like Hildersham when the time for setting up a church actually arrived. The inexperience of the emigrating ministers and of the Massachusetts Bay Company itself with bishop-free, plausibly New Testament church government is why it was so important that there already was a functioning church template in Plymouth awaiting the settlers.19 As

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Plymouth’s governor William Bradford told the story, when the fleet arrived at the end of June 1629, it brought scurvy with it. Salem’s Governor Endicott, hearing that the deacon of the Plymouth church, Samuel Fuller, was skilled in medical matters, wrote to Bradford requesting the deacon’s ser vices.20 Fuller traveled to Salem, and among his other ser vices to the Salemites, he shared with them Plymouth’s ideas on church organization. That sharing would have been the latest of many oral, written, and printed discussions and debates between members of the Leiden congregation and radical puritans. It was probably not a first for Fuller. He had been a deacon in the Leiden congregation since the early 1610s and helped organize the emigration to New England. He knew his congregation’s agenda and how puritans fit into it. Fuller owned the fourth largest library in Plymouth, with twenty-seven books inventoried at his death. Most of them were religious, and they displayed the broad-mindedness that both Robinson and the Pilgrim Press had promoted. Fuller could at his own leisure guide his scripture reading with treatises by learned Continental Reformed ministers like John Calvin, Peter Martyr, Wolfgang Musculus, and Theodore Beza and have his piety refreshed with puritan works by John Dod, Daniel Dyke, and Richard Greenham, along with separatist books. Before Fuller sailed to Salem, he could have browsed through his copy of Thomas Brightman’s A Revelation of the Revelation if he wished to speculate about a larger end time framework into which the Pilgrims and the puritans might fit.21 Given his background, Fuller was undoubtedly skilled at talking to puritans tactfully about separatist church government. He could explain how the separatists differed from the Continental Reformed churches only in “accidentals,” and he could praise puritan ministers, following Robinson’s example, as zealous preachers of God’s truth. Fuller might have made creative use of the famous puritan William Perkins, just as Robinson had done, to argue for the legitimacy of lay ordination. If he proselytized like another lay member of the Leiden congregation, Robert Cushman, Fuller would have told Endicott that the ministers in a true church were not “Lordly and Imperious”; that the “people of God” were the essential building material for a true church; and that these people made a covenant simply to demonstrate that they worshiped

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together voluntarily, “not by compulsion or accident.” He would have condemned the rigid separatists of Amsterdam and stressed the harmony of the Leiden congregation with the other Reformed churches. Fuller would have avoided describing the Church of England to Endicott with “termes of provocation” like “antichristian” and “false church.” He would have praised the preaching in the parish churches, while emphasizing that those churches unfortunately lacked “all the meanes to stablish, comfort, confirme and build up every soule in the wayes of God.” It may be relevant that Fuller was one of the Plymouth church members in 1624 who defended their would-be minister Lyford.22 Whatever approach Fuller took to emphasize the organic connections between separatists and the desires of radical puritans, he was smashingly successful. Endicott wrote an eff usive thank you letter to Bradford that mirrored the gushing reaction of Miles Mickle-bound’s fictional nonconformist when faced with an articulate and conciliatory separatist in 1611. “God’s people are all marked with one and the same mark,” Endicott wrote to Bradford, “and where this is, there can be no discorde.” Endicott acknowledged that he had held a negative opinion of the Plymouth separatists’ worship, from “common report.” But he had been wrong. Puritans and the separatists were “guided by one and the same spirite of truth.” Between them there “must needs be sweete harmonie.” In a sign of that newfound sweet harmony, Endicott rejoiced that he was by Fuller “satisfied touching your judgments of the outward forme of Gods worshipe.” But more than satisfied, Endicott claimed that the separatists’ worship was “no other then is warrented by the evidence of truth.” Fuller presented Plymouth church practices in such a way that Endicott was convinced that they were “the same which I have proffessed and maintained ever since the Lord in mercie revealed himselfe unto me.”23 Since Endicott’s life up to this point is almost a complete documentary blank, how deeply he had thought about church government is an unanswerable question. If Endicott were an acquaintance of the future Massachusetts minister Hugh Peter, which is far from certain, Peter might have discussed congregationalism with him, assuming Peter was already leaning to it when they were acquainted, which is not likely. Endicott was said to have “received much good” from Skelton’s ministry in England. If so, he might have picked up his negative impression of

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separatism from Skelton himself. If Endicott had been a soldier, he might have served in the Netherlands and become acquainted with the puritan English churches there, which, under Ames’s influence, were starting to use covenants, although they were otherwise organized along presbyterian lines. The only puritan congregational church at this time was the London Jacob church.24 Had Endicott been acquainted with that church, he probably would not have had such a negative preexisting opinion about separatist worship. It is as likely as any other explanation that Fuller’s powers of persuasion convinced Endicott that a hazy desire for the purity and simplicity of the New Testament churches had in fact been a desire for congregationalism. Zealous old Elizabethan presbyterians would probably have had the same positive effect on him. Later Massachusetts history would demonstrate that when Endicott took up a religious enthusiasm, he did so forcefully. Unfortunately, Bradford’s narrative and the date of Endicott’s letter as Bradford copied it are in confl ict. Bradford’s narrative implicitly placed the discussions between Endicott and Fuller in early July, since that would have been after the ships with their sick passengers had arrived and the nonconformists at Salem were planning their church. Bradford transcribed the letter’s date as May 11, before the immigrant boats had arrived. Endicott’s letter, however, is not the only evidence for direct Plymouth influence, and Fuller’s was not the only documented positive faceto-face contact between Plymouth separatists and Endicott’s immigrants by the summer of 1629. Endicott himself ended his letter to Bradford saying that he intended to see Bradford shortly, which suggests at least one meeting before the Salem church was formed. Cotton Mather, who was friends with Higginson’s son, wrote that the “Plymotheans” explained the scripture basis for their church order in “every particular” to the newly arrived immigrants, to the latter’s “great satisfaction.” An English puritan, William Rathband, claimed in the early 1640s that Plymouth’s peripatetic diplomat Edward Winslow told him that the Massachusetts churches approached Plymouth “to crave their direction in Church courses, and made them their pattern.” Winslow indignantly replied that the Massachusetts churches did not make Plymouth their pattern but took as their guide the New Testament churches, which the

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Plymotheans just happened to explain to “some of the chiefe of them” (Winslow’s comments might refer to the arrival of the Winthrop fleet in 1630 as well as to the Salem boats in 1629).25 Nor was Plymouth necessarily the only source for congregationalism in Salem. One of the anti-separatist books Skelton brought with him was an exchange of letters between the minister of the English presbyterian church in Amsterdam John Paget and the Amsterdam separatist church’s minister Henry Ainsworth, widely admired and cited for his scholarly Old Testament commentaries (Skelton brought one of those commentaries with him from England). Ainsworth’s letters, in the midst of their defense of rigid separatism, offered arguments for congregationalism. Endicott, Skelton, Higginson, and Plymouth visitors might be imagined sitting around a table in the governor’s house, discussing Paget’s book, with the visitors explaining where and why they did and did not agree with Ainsworth, while perhaps judiciously name-dropping William Ames and other puritan congregationalist acquaintances of the Leiden congregation.26 What was the effect of this Plymouth input in Salem? According to an account written forty years later, after the immigrant boats arrived, the ministers Skelton and Higginson announced their intention to create a “Reformed congregation,” meaning a church resembling the Continental Reformed churches, just as the Leiden separatists had always insisted their church did. To that end, the ministers consulted with Endicott, the “godly inhabitants,” and the “chief” new immigrants.27 July 20 was the solemn day of constituting the Salem church. Thirty people, a minority of the settlers, even of the male adults, assented to a covenant and confession of faith drawn up by Higginson. After prayers and preaching, the church members proceeded to the election of their ministers. They questioned Higginson and Skelton about their calling to the ministry. The ministers acknowledged a twofold calling: an inward one from God and an outward one from a company of believers joined in covenant. The covenantal context of the calling made it congregational, not presbyterian. In that outward covenantal calling of a minister, the clergymen went on to explain, every male member of the company had a “free voyce in the choyse of their officers.” The assembled covenanted company of believers, hearing these answers, “saw noe

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reason but we might freely give our voyces for their election.” They elected Higginson as their teacher, in charge of doctrine, and Skelton as their pastor, in charge of church government. Higginson, along with three or four of the “gravest members of the church” laid his hands on Skelton to ordain him, accompanied by prayer, and Skelton and the others did the same for Higginson. This type of ordination was standard congregationalist procedure, but presbyterians would have been appalled by laymen participating in such a sacred rite. The Salemite Charles Gott, writing to Bradford, his “worthy and much respected friend,” ten days after the Salem church’s founding expressed his hope that Bradford “and the rest of Gods people (who are acquainted with the ways of God) with you, will say that hear [sic] was a right foundation layed.” Two weeks later the church’s lay officers were chosen and ordained. Governor Bradford and others from the Plymouth church sailed from Plymouth for this later ceremony and acknowledged the new Salem creation as a genuine church by offering it the right hand of fellowship from their church.28 As the Plymouth church’s stamp of approval indicates, it is very difficult to interpret the Salem procedures as anything but the ritual creation of a congregationalist church, at least in the minds of those who designed the ritual. The taking of the covenant marked the formation of a polity with self-contained, independent ecclesiastical power. That polity then passed on its power to the ministers by calling them through election. The church affirmed the passing on of power by laying hands on the ministers in ordination. In the absence of any evidence that the Salem ministers arrived with a congregationalist agenda or with any specific church government agenda at all, the congregationalist founding of the Salem church is strong testimony to the vital role Plymouth played in the founding of Salem’s church. But for the clearest and most dramatic evidence of Plymouth’s influence and to understand exactly what kind of church at least some participants concluded was created at Salem on July 20, 1629, it is necessary to leap ahead almost eleven months.

On June 14, 1630, the members of Governor Winthrop’s fleet, newly arrived in their colony-to-be of Massachusetts, attended their first church ser vice on American soil, at Salem. For most if not all of them, this

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would have been the first opportunity to formally worship God in a setting free of the corruptions, pomp, and puritan-mocking sinners of the Church of England. Expectations must have run high. Higginson, the Salem church’s teacher, preached a sermon from Jesus’s question to the “multitudes” in Matthew 11:7, “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?”29 The immigrants certainly had not expected to see what happened next. When Salem’s pastor Skelton began to administer the Lord’s Supper, he would not allow them to participate, nor would he baptize the child of the immigrant William Coddington, who had been a member of John Cotton’s church in old Boston in England. The most zealous puritan ministers desired to keep unworthy recipients from the sacraments, but these immigrants were puritans, and some of them, probably including Coddington, were known to Skelton. Coddington, in his enthusiasm for finally participating in a New Testament church order, had even brought a testimonial to his piety from the Boston church with him. 30 What was wrong with the immigrants? It was not that Skelton suspected them of being unrepentant sinners. The problem was that they were members of the Church of England; consequently they, like virtually all other law-abiding subjects of the king, had never been members of what Skelton now deemed real churches—Skelton was measuring the immigrants by separatist congregationalist standards. As he explained at the time, in an argument that was quickly relayed back to John Cotton in England, Coddington was certainly a Christian and a member of the “Catholike” (universal) church; however, he was “no member of any particular reformed church.” Skelton was paraphrasing John Robinson in his terminology and qualifications; only members of specific individual true churches, not just the universal church, could share in the sacraments together.31 Cotton’s parish church did not make the cut. That church, which Skelton was now rejecting as false, was one of the most militantly puritan and successfully nonconformist in England, while Cotton was one of the most famous puritan ministers. Cotton had even received his calling to his church in about as properly a New Testament way as was possible within the Church of England. The godly party in town wanted him as their minister, and thanks to Boston’s peculiar privileges, the town council had the authority to elect him. Skelton,

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Cotton’s neighbor and associate in Lincolnshire, would have known all of that. Nonetheless, in spite of Cotton’s church being about as puritanized as a parish church could be, it was not a real church, although Coddington was a real Christian. To drive the point home, Skelton did permit a newly arrived member of Henry Jacob’s illegal London congregational church to take the Lord’s Supper, and he baptized his child. Robinson would have done the same.32 Skelton’s action is a smoking gun as regards the heavy impact of Plymouth on the Salem church. Neither Skelton’s practice nor his arguments had any precedent outside of separatist congregationalism. Puritan congregationalists in the Netherlands in the early 1630s, including William Ames and some ministers who would emigrate to New England, did not set such exclusive standards, either in theory or in practice. They would have recognized Cotton’s parish church as a true church and would have been willing to give his godly parishioners the sacraments on that basis. In the next-to-impossible event that they, like Skelton, refused to recognize Cotton’s church, they would have been willing to baptize Coddington’s child anyway on the basis of Coddington being a professing Christian, which Skelton refused to do.33 Cotton, as much as anyone in England, would have known Skelton’s pre-emigration convictions about church government, as well as those of the other immigrants. He was deeply taken aback when he learned that Skelton now believed that he had been ministering to a false church back in Boston in England all these years. In a testy letter, Cotton told Skelton that he knew where Skelton’s new conclusions came from. “You went hence of another judgment, and I am afraid your chaunge hath sprung from newPlimouth-men.” Cotton went on to rebut Skelton’s rejection of Coddington, relying heavily on old anti-separatist and non-congregationalist arguments. It would have been an odd approach to take if Cotton either had an attraction to congregationalism at this time or had any reason to expect that the settlers with whom he had recently been planning the emigration would strongly gravitate to congregationalism.34 As Cotton understood, to his alarm, what the founding of the Salem church a year earlier meant, at least to some of the participants eleven months later, was that they had created a de facto separatist congregational church. That outcome was unimaginable without Plymouth. As

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William Hubbard, writing a half century later, said, Skelton “imitate[d] and equal[ed] . . . that pattern of Separation set up before them in Plymouth.”35 In 1630, Fuller, back in Salem, wrote to Bradford that Salem’s governor Endicott was proving to be a second Henry Barrow. 36 If the Plymouth church did not play a large role in Salem’s separatist congregationalism, then, as Hubbard, who was in a good position to know, put it, “good wits, as they use to say, did strangely jump very near together, into one and the same method and idea of church discipline.”37 It seems easier to assume that Miller, with his extremely optimistic techniques for discovering supporting evidence, pointed a couple of generations of Massachusetts historians down a blind alley. Had Higginson and Skelton sat down under Hildersham’s tutelage to work out their church government before leaving England, the result probably would have been presbyterianism, as an English presbyterian insisted mournfully in the late 1650s, after two decades of clashes between presbyterians and congregationalists.38 The people of Salem would have called their ministers, but they would not have needed to make a special church covenant in order to do so. Higginson and Skelton would have ordained each other, untouched by lay hands. They and the ruling lay elder, although chosen by the congregation, would have made subsequent decisions in private and brought them, when important, to the congregation only for consent (a requirement that in itself, however, would have dictated a great deal of receptiveness to the laity’s opinions). Individual churches like Salem would have eventually shared their power with a gathering of elders that possessed genuine muscle. Visiting puritans from England would have easily been admitted to the sacraments. Absent Plymouth, much of the tension between Massachusetts puritans and their mainstream puritan counterparts in England might never have emerged.39

Certainly not all of those present at the Salem church’s foundational ceremony would have interpreted the event in the same separatist way as Skelton and Endicott. It was said that Higginson did not embrace Plymouth church discipline as fully as Skelton, but his capacity to define the nature of the Salem church ended with his death in August 1630.40 Nor would everyone present at the founding of the church have interpreted this event positively. Thomas Morton, who had lost his maypole

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to Endicott’s ax in 1628, told a curious story in a settling-of-scores book published in 1637. According to Morton, Endicott called a meeting of the colonists sometime in the summer of 1629 and presented them with a set of articles drawn up by him and Skelton. The gist of the articles was that “in all causes, as well Ecclesiasticall as Politicall, wee should follow the rule of Gods word.” The colonists were told that they each had to sign the articles or be expelled. Morton, in Salem after an attempt by the Plymouth colony to have him prosecuted in London failed, called Endicott and Skelton’s bluff. He asked them to add “So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the Lawes of the Kingdome of England.” They did not add that qualification, and Morton did not sign.41 It would make sense for Skelton and Endicott to feel the need to call this biblicist strong-arm meeting, assuming that it happened, while creating the Salem church. Skelton, Endicott, and others may have thought that in following Plymouth, they were following the Bible. But even the most ingenious puritan lawyer would have been hard-pressed to reconcile the Bible as it was being interpreted in Salem with the ecclesiastical laws of England. Moderate puritans themselves would not have been convinced that all of what was happening at Salem followed God’s word, while the rejection of all the familiar ritual landmarks of the Church of England would have been unsettling to many in the colony. The Book of Common Prayer was not used, not even in the pick-and-choose way that some puritans practiced, and there were none of the familiar ceremonies associated with the Lord’s Supper and baptism. The church denied membership to some “scandalous” persons, who undoubtedly assumed that church membership was a right they had as English people. It consulted with the schismatic, disloyal separatists at Plymouth on knotty questions of practice. The Salemite Charles Gott, writing to Bradford after the ceremony instituting the church, significantly noted that they had proceeded “notwithstanding all opposition, that hath been here and elsewhere.”42 Salem’s leaders did show a certain amount of flexibility about their new church. They softened their membership procedures for people not entirely persuaded by the covenant requirement. Nonetheless, before the process of settling the church ended, the moderate puritan minister Francis Bright had moved to another settlement, and two members of the colony’s governing council had been sent back to England for holding

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unauthorized religious meetings where they read from the Book of Common Prayer.43 After the expelled and loudly complaining council members returned to England, the Massachusetts Bay Company responded with the laissezfaire attitude it had shown all along to church government. It sent forthe-record letters to Endicott and the ministers, saying that the banished Salem council members were spreading stories in England of “innovations” in church and state and of “unadvysed and scandalous speeches” in “public sermons and prayers.” The Company hoped the rumors were false and expected Endicott to send them a full report so that the offenders could be punished. As far as is known, Endicott took no action, and the Company probably did not expect him to.44 They would have already known that sending nonconformist ministers to a colony where they could practice as they wished inevitably would have resulted in innovations and what to some listeners would have sounded like unadvised and scandalous pulpit speeches. The separatist congregationalist church order forming in Salem remained intact, leaving to the newly arriving immigrants of 1630 the challenge of whether and to what extent they were going to adopt it for themselves.

Those immigrants rose creatively to the shock of Skelton’s announcement that they had not come from true churches. They immediately launched into a month and a half of debates about the kind of churches they wanted in the midst of a horrendous mortality that claimed as many as two hundred of the thousand newcomers. The debates are known only from letters written by two Plymouth participants. One was Edward Winslow, who later told of how the immigrants had learned the pattern of the New Testament churches from the Plymouth congregationalists. The other was the lay physician Samuel Fuller, who had made such a strong impact in Salem the previous year.45 With a couple of exceptions, there is no evidence to suggest that the immigrants brought much, if any, commitment to congregationalism to these debates. It is significant that John Cotton, who was deeply involved in the planning of the immigration, did not write his reply to Skelton in the language of congregationalism. Cotton may have inadvertently

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helped the congregationalist cause, however. Before the emigrants left England, he gave them presumably later-regretted instructions to take advice from Plymouth and to do nothing to offend them. Governor Winthrop accordingly told the three members of the Plymouth church who were in the Bay that the settlers would do nothing without their advice and would regard their voices in the deliberations over church government “as their own.”46 Fuller wrote to Governor Bradford at the end of June 1630 claiming that secret enemies were among the immigrants but that more were friends. Fleshing out Fuller’s comments necessarily has to be impressionistic. One of the four arriving ministers, John Warham, might have been a secret enemy initially. Warham was one of two ministers sent with a west country group of immigrants organized by the moderate puritan minister John White. Warham, a nonconformist, argued against Fuller that the church could consist of a mixed people, godly and ungodly (like the parish churches of England). Fuller debated “till I was weary” (as a physician, Fuller also bled twenty members of Warham’s group to cure their fevers). Whether Fuller and Warham were debating if the Church of England was a true church or whether they were arguing about how to set up the churches of Massachusetts or both is not clear from this anecdote.47 Two other ministers have left no traces of arriving either as friends or foes. The opinions of John Maverick, the other west country minister, are a documentary blank and would remain so until his death in 1636. There is certainly no reason to assume he was a congregationalist at this time. The minister John Wilson was a nonconformist, but his preemigration opinions on church government are likewise a blank. His six closest ministerial friends before he emigrated ran from conformists through possible presbyterian sympathizers to the congregationalist Ames.48 If Wilson himself had preexisting strong opinions about church government, his late seventeenth-century biographer Cotton Mather did not record them in Wilson’s lengthy biography. Some of the friends to congregationalism can be identified. They included one minister, George Philips. Philips had made his own study of church government under the guidance of “old nonconformists” and apparently either emigrated as some sort of congregationalist or else quickly took to it. It is telling that multiple sources note his preparation and

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competency for congregationalism but not that of any other clergyman. Salem’s governor Endicott (“my dear friend, and a friend to us all,” Fuller called him) was proving to be a second Barrow, a characterization that gives a sense of the vehemence with which Endicott must have been conducting himself in argument. Skelton presumably was also taking a vigorous part (Higginson had become bedridden with a fever immediately after the Winthrop fleet arrived and would die in August). One of the immigrants, Richard Browne, had been a founding member of Jacob’s London congregational church in 1616, and he became an officer either in it or a separatist church. Browne was said to be a man of “good understanding, and well versed in the discipline of the Separation.” He was also said to be “very violent and passionate in his proceedings.” 49 Cotton’s instructions to take advice from Plymouth might help explain the disposition of the new governor of the colony, John Winthrop (1588– 1649), friends with a wide variety of ministers, including Ames. Fuller reported that Winthrop was a “godly, wise, and humble gentleman, and very discreet, and of a fine and good temper.”50 On July 25, Fuller and Winslow wrote back to Plymouth. Winthrop was convinced, they reported, that the high mortality rate meant that God was angry at the colonists. Action was urgent. Winthrop wanted the “best” to consider what needed to be done to assuage that anger. In this time of spiritual crisis, it probably mattered a great deal in terms of the outcome that the only group with any firsthand experience of starting churches were the local congregationalists. They would have emphasized what a momentous obligation it was to do this process correctly by biblical standards, and they would have had strong convictions about what those biblical standards were.51 In the same letter to Plymouth, Fuller and Winslow wrote that the “best” in Massachusetts concluded that they should found churches in a congregationalist manner. A fast would be held on July 30. At the end of the fast, the godly among the settlers would enter into covenant with the Lord and form three churches for their three respective settlements. The churches would not proceed rashly in choosing officers and would take only members who appeared “by confession . . . fitly qualified for that estate.” The immigrants wanted Plymouth to hold a fast the same day “beseeching God as to withdraw his hand of correction, so to establish

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and direct them in his ways.”52 The Plymouth church was undoubtedly happy to hold a fast, since God was clearly establishing and directing the immigrants in the way of covenanted congregationalism. On July 30, after fasting and prayers, the “godly persons” among the colonists formed three churches, Boston/Charlestown (the settlement of Boston had not yet hived off from Charleston), which would have John Wilson as its minister; Watertown, with the congregationalist George Philips; and Dorchester, with Maverick and Warham. Copies of the Boston/Charlestown and Watertown covenants have survived.53 Founding a church with a covenant, for those in the know, carried with it implicitly the rest of the broad theory of congregationalist government. The Watertown church reinforced the congregationalism of its minister by making Richard Browne the congregationalist its ruling lay elder. Within a year the Boston/Charlestown church left evidence that it too was operating in a congregationalist manner. The history of the Dorchester church for its first six years is, unfortunately, a blank, but that church, along with its surviving minister John Warham, moved to Connecticut in 1636 where it was conventionally congregationalist.54 In other words, there is good evidence that at least four of the five first churches on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Salem, Boston/ Charlestown, and Watertown, were broadly congregationalist, while the other, Dorchester, was founded in a congregationalist manner and has not left any evidence of ever being run differently. The basic pattern for Massachusetts’s ecclesiastical development had been set. Skelton’s refusal of the sacraments to immigrants from the English parish churches became standard Massachusetts practice, and there is good reason, both from common sense and more concrete evidence, to assume that this separatist practice was followed from the very beginning. Common sense would dictate that the three churches would not go to the trouble of setting up covenanted churches like Salem and then ignore the logic of the Salem covenant by admitting people from noncovenanted churches to the sacraments. The Boston church records the following winter appear to confirm the adoption of the Plymouth/Salem practice (William Hubbard claimed that the Boston church adhered as closely to Plymouth practices as did Salem).55 Either from the beginning or very soon thereafter, the colonists also adopted the Robinsonian

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separatist practice of refusing to take the sacraments when they attended ser vices in English parish churches.56 The rest of early Massachusetts congregationalism could have been learned from the almost-immigrant William Ames.57 Ames advocated church covenants, argued that the power of government, in some sense, lay in the people, and agreed that synods had no commanding power over churches. The earliest statements of church theory from Massachusetts take all these positions for granted.58 But there is no reason to assume that the commitment of the earliest Massachusetts congregationalists came from reading Ames, admired though he was. In these cases, Ames was only echoing Leiden/Plymouth separatist practice, and where he veered from Plymouth, in his emphatically more inclusive approach to the sacraments, the colonists ignored him. On December 12, 1630, John Humfrey, who was handling the colonists’ affairs in England, wrote to John Winthrop that he was sending him Ames’s newly published De Conscientia. The treatise contained Ames’s inclusive arguments about baptism and stressed the obligation of people who had voluntarily separated from corrupt true churches to remain in spiritual communion with them. Humfrey pointedly told Winthrop that De Conscientia had “manie thinges of especiall use and singularly helpeful for present direction and satisfaction.” He warned Winthrop that the colonists should not be “immaturely precipitate in their councels or actions.” It is hard not to read this gift, like Cotton’s letter to Skelton, as an unsuccessful effort to push the colony back in a more conservative direction after the Salem incident.59 From a speculative perspective, however, Plymouth was perhaps not absolutely necessary for Massachusetts to have become congregationalist. A counterfactual history can be fabricated in which the colony adopted congregationalism in Plymouth’s absence. Certainly some of the 1630 immigrants arrived with at least a strong openness to Ames-style covenanted churches, and others would have been familiar with Ames’s ideas. Over the next three years, at least six of the nine ministers who emigrated had become congregationalist before departing, including John Cotton, or had some kind of strong personal connection with congregationalism.60 Conceivably, even if Plymouth in the mid-1620s had collapsed and its inhabitants had been dispersed, the hypothetically

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presbyterian Salem church might have been eventually outflanked by an emergent hypothetically congregationalist majority. But we will never know. The evidence to support such an outcome is less than overwhelming, and how many of these ministers would have emigrated or would have made a commitment to congregationalism without the prodding of the Massachusetts example is unknown. John Cotton’s first datable embrace of congregationalist theory, for example, around the turn of 1632, apparently came via separatism and Massachusetts, not Ames and Holland, since it involved Robinson and Skelton’s restrictive conception of access to the sacraments, not Ames’s more expansive version.61 In any case, Plymouth did not collapse, and its representatives were at hand at critical formative moments to give what was perceived as vital guidance about New Testament churches to inexperienced colonists who do not seem to have had much pre-existing commitment to, or even knowledge of, congregationalism, individuals aside. The evidence-free argument still might be preferred that there was a widespread commitment to Ames-style congregational churches among the ministers and important colonists arriving in 1629 and 1630 and that all these immigrants added from local sources were the Plymouth sacramental barriers against the parish churches and their members. Nonetheless, even that argument leaves Plymouth with a major contribution to Massachusetts’s post-Amesian congregationalism. Those sacramental barriers up to 1630 had been the practical dividing line between Robinsonian separatist and puritan congregationalism. They were not advocated by contemporary puritan congregationalists in England or Holland, and their establishment in Massachusetts became a major source of intra-puritan bad blood. They played a large role, for example, in a debate that raged between Massachusetts puritans and a group of prominent English puritan ministers, including past and future leaders of presbyterianism, in the late 1630s. In 1636 the English group kicked off the debate by sending a letter to Massachusetts with nine questions about New England church practices. While the group was dubious about congregationalism in general, three of the nine questions had to do with the Massachusetts practice of the blanket sacramental exclusion of puritans arriving from the parish churches. That practice, one of the ministers soon angrily charged, was “against the Law of nature, and the positive

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Law of God, an injury to the faithfull and their seed, a wrong to the Catholike visible Church, that particular society, and the Pastors themselves that so debar them.” Later English puritan congregationalists emulated Massachusetts’s exclusionary practices against the parish churches, creating a running sore in England from the mid-1630s onward.62 Learning congregationalism from the “new-Plimouth-men” and not from William Ames also shaped Massachusetts’s internal history. Had the colony used Ames’s standards for baptism to begin with, and not stricter separatist ones, decades of fierce conflicts over that sacrament would have been avoided. Ministers and congregations in the second half of the seventeenth century would have been spared the necessity of fighting their way back toward Ames’s position while being depicted as betrayers of congregationalism by their opponents. Salem separatism itself was soon to provide a foundation for the colony’s first major religious dispute (see Chapter 9). On the positive side, at least for harmony within the colony, the attention the Salem incident received in England surely lessened the possibility that ministers in the future would emigrate without having studied up on congregationalist church practice and theory.63

There was one thing that the new immigrants, or at least their leaders, did reject from Plymouth and Salem in the summer of 1630. Salem’s pastor Skelton, like the Plymouth separatists, had indicated that there were no true churches among the parish churches in England. The new immigrants, or at least a majority of the leaders, deliberately rejected this bedrock separatist conviction. John Winthrop took care to record in his journal that when the Boston/Charlestown church ordained its teacher John Wilson in a congregationalist ceremony on August 23, “all” agreed that it was “a signe of Election and confirmation, not of any intent that mr Wilson should renounce his ministrye he received in Englande” (Wilson’s acceptance of a lectureship at Sudbury in England had been a semi-presbyterian event, with a calling from the godly in the town and an endorsement by neighboring ministers). That the church felt compelled to muster up a unanimous public affirmation of the spiritual validity of Wilson’s English ministry may suggest the heat of some of the debates that had taken place.64 The quasi-official Massachusetts position, outside

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early Salem, from then on was that there were true churches among the parishes of the Church of England, just as earlier puritan congregationalists like William Ames and Henry Jacob had insisted. Perry Miller and many of the immigrants’ contemporaries placed a great deal of emphasis on the colonists’ professed rejection of separation. Nonetheless, in spite of that rejection, and unlike previous puritan congregationalists, the new colonists agreed with the Plymouth separatists that no one coming from a parish church could take the sacraments at a Massachusetts church and that no one from a Massachusetts church should participate in formal worship at a parish church, although they could listen to sermons and spontaneous prayers. Whether this practical agreement with Robinsonian separatism was more significant than the mostly theoretical recognition of true churches among the parishes of England was a debatable question. And it was debated. For some, the affirmative gestures toward the Church of England were nothing more than fig leafs. William Bradford of Plymouth dismissed them as evasions. The colonists wanted the truth of separatist practice, Bradford felt, while avoiding the odium of the term “separatist.” The arch-separatist Roger Williams thought that what Massachusetts had created was have-your-cake-and-eat-it separatism; its colonists wanted to follow Christ without being willing to take up his cross. Neither were all English puritans persuaded by the colonists’ professed disavowal of separatism. The leading puritan minister John Ball charged that Massachusetts congregationalism amounted to an “unwarrantable course of voluntary separation” whose practitioners “make an unlawfull rent in the church, deprive themselves of the comfort of Gods ordinances, weaken the faith of many, cause divisions among brethren, and advantage the adversaries of true religion.” As another puritan, William Rathband, said of the Massachusetts congregationalists, “Though in the generall they professe to differ much from [the separatists], yet when it comes to reckoning we find it not so.” Some immigrants in 1630 had a similar reaction. They immediately returned to England and spread the charge that Massachusetts had turned separatist. That charge, probably along with Cotton’s indignant letter, came back to the colony with the first boats returning from England in 1631. More charitably cautious puritans warned of what seemed to be a “strong inclination”

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to separatism or spoke of “a greate alienacion in you of affeccion toward us.”65 These contemporary expressions of discomfort and disapproval highlight the limitations of the conventional adjective for Massachusetts congregationalism, “nonseparating,” instituted by Perry Miller. That adjective is an assertion, or perhaps an aspiration, as much as it is a description, and its accuracy would have been heatedly contested by some puritan and separatist contemporaries.66 In any case, at the end of 1630, Massachusetts congregationalism was not uniformly nonseparatist, however that term is defined, since Salem leaned strongly, at the very least, toward separatist congregationalism.

Up until Perry Miller, claiming that Plymouth played a major role in the creation of Massachusetts congregationalism would have only been to state the obvious. Modern Massachusetts historians dismiss the Plymouth church as pathetically unimportant, and had it been left to itself, that description would not be unjustifiable. Nonetheless, when the opportunity presented by the settlers of Massachusetts arose, the Plymouth church was primed and available to serve as exemplar and catalyst. Without Plymouth, the odds of Massachusetts’s puritans hitting upon their particular version of congregationalism are not entirely unlike those of monkeys typing Shakespeare. William Bradford said contently of his church in the late 1640s, after its practices had spread from Plymouth to Massachusetts to England, where they were being bolstered by the unanswerable arguments of the New Model Army’s guns, “As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sorte to our whole nation.”67

chapter 7

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he general disregard of the Salem incident by historians has left the most puzzling aspects of the creation of Massachusetts congregationalism unexplored: why would the movers and shakers of the Massachusetts Bay Company accept being excluded from the sacraments by one of their employees to start with; why would the colonists then make this exclusion of godly immigrants standard practice; and what sort of mental gymnastics allowed the colonists to claim that they were not separatists while acting exactly like them? Certainly, political expediency played a role in this convoluted process. The novel combination of separatist practice and nonseparatist affirmation of the Church of England would have helped to restrain pressure for outright separatism in Massachusetts without entirely alienating more moderate immigrants and English puritans. Although the combination was extremely risky in terms of the hostility that it was bound to generate among English puritan allies, overt separatism would have been far riskier. As the jaundiced comments by the separatists Roger Williams and William Bradford about the settler’ motives for their nonseparating congregationalism suggest, this practical consideration may not have been entirely absent from the thoughts of those who came up with the tightrope Massachusetts formula. 159

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Yet the colonists’ “non-separating” congregationalism was not simply or even chiefly political and pragmatic. It was an original response to Plymouth’s separatist congregationalism that drew deeply upon longexistent strains and unsatisfied aspirations in puritanism. Those previous strains and aspirations can be easily overlooked when considering the early immigration. The immigrants’ acceptance of Salem’s severely discriminatory practice happened at the very end of what is often viewed as puritanism’s golden age, when it was, in Patrick Collinson’s words, “the mainstream, ongoing thrust of the Protestant Reformation.” In that golden age, sympathetic bishops encouraged puritan evangelism, while in many parishes, puritan ministers, if discrete, would only occasionally have to abide by strict ceremonial conformity. During this golden age, there is ample evidence that moderate and radical puritans made a conscious effort to bury disagreements between themselves, the better to accomplish their shared pursuits of piety, evangelism, moral reform, and anti-Catholicism. The Massachusetts Bay Company itself was an impressive example of cooperation between moderate and radical puritan ministers.1 Yet in spite of that cooperation, Winthrop’s settlers set up a church order that effectively deemed virtually all puritans initially unworthy of the sacraments. The attraction of emigration is not in itself mysterious. For zealous puritans, there were ominous signs on the national, if not yet the parish, level that the Church of England was taking a drastic turn for the worse, and God’s wrath, in all probability, was bound to shortly follow. What does need to be accounted for is the relationship of that decision to leave England with this powerful, conflicted spiritual intolerance that induced these immigrants to give a newly conceived slap in the face to their more moderate brethren, yet all the while deny that they had separated.

Spiritual intolerance had always been fundamental to puritan nonconformity. Early Stuart nonconformists, such as those who sailed to Massachusetts, choose nonconformity out of heartfelt principle: the Catholictinged ceremonies and other remaining corruptions of the Church of England, including the pollution of the sacraments by the unregenerate masses, were “simply evil.” That is to say, they were evil of themselves,

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not because of the way that they might be misused or misinterpreted.2 Buried underneath the church’s evil, however, was genuine preaching of the gospel, resulting in the creation of genuine Christians. The puritan community was, to itself, incontrovertible evidence that conversion from sin and death to salvation was possible in the Church of England. Therefore, that church demonstrably still functioned as a true church. Separatists were guilty of the grievous sin of schism for giving full vent to their loathing of the same corruptions that radical puritans loathed by leaving the church. One of the more bizarre ways nonconformist ministers made their difficult case for the Church of England against the separatists was to stress by way of analogy how mired in sin and corruption a true church could be and still remain true. They compared the Church of England to a mangled, dismembered, mentally deranged person who was nonetheless still a person, or to a wife engaging in multiple adulteries who was, nonetheless, still married, or to the “Jewish church” at the time of Jesus, which was still a true church, in spite of its leaders’ advocacy of Jesus’s execution. So what if the process by which the Church of England made ministers was imperfect, asked the preacher Henry Smith; a man was still a man, even if the baby had been unnaturally brought into the world by “ripping of its Mothers belly.” A man would still be a man, suggested Thomas Cartwright, even if he had six fingers on one hand, three on another, and the hands coming out where the mouth should be.3 But how could a scrupulous nonconformist avoid crossing the boundary between the true worship of God still present in the Church of England and the legally mandated derangements, deformations, spiritual adulteries, and Jewish corruptions that nearly smothered that true worship? The boundary between true and false worship carried a dangerous psychospiritual shock, the more so since moderate puritans who persuaded themselves that strict nonconformists had delineated that boundary too severely could never be sure why they came to this conclusion. Was it out of genuine conviction that the nonconformists were too rigid and strict? Or was it because would-be moderates were weary of fruitless struggle and wished “to drinke at ease the pleasaunt waters of conformitie,” as the puritan congregationalist Robert Parker charged, even at the expense of the “burthen of an evill conscience.”4

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The danger of a moderate puritan being confronted by his or her “evil conscience” in the Church of England was real enough. Conformists and nonconformists alike told stories of godly ministers who conformed and were subsequently stricken with crippling horrors of conscience. The famous occasional conformist preacher “Roaring” John Rodgers, an inspiration to many New Englanders, was plagued all his life with anguished doubts about his decision to subscribe to the mandatory articles testifying to the Church of England’s scriptural soundness.5 Nonconformists might persuade themselves for the sake of charity that more moderate puritans were protected from the soul-destroying consequences of their participation in their church’s sins by ignorance or infirmity. But they would not be able to quiet their own consciences with such excuses if they were to join in the Church of England’s corruptions of worship. One way for nonconformists to avoid transgressing the boundary between true worship and corruption in the Church of England was to continuously and dynamically reaffirm that boundary and make sure that they placed themselves on the right side of it. They did so through an activity for which puritans were notorious: shunning, or the avoidance of sin and sinners. Shunning, from the outside, might appear simply as narrow censoriousness, an illustration of the contemporary witticism that puritans loved God with all their soul and hated their neighbors with all their heart. But for puritans, shunning was a dynamic, complex act of piety. Hatred of evil was as critical a part of puritan piety as love of the good, and puritan ministers taught the godly to avoid unnecessary contact with sinners. In part this avoidance was a defensive mechanism against the radioactivity of sin; those who did not actively avoid sin would be caught up in its contamination and the wrath of God that followed. Accordingly, shunning had to be accompanied by sincere mourning for the sins in question, or else God would tie the shunner up in the guilt of those sins anyway.6 Yet shunning was complete only when it was aggressive testimony against, as well as avoidance of, sin. It had to be an expression of righteous anger and an inducement to repentance and reform, a teaching ritual and an informal act of discipline, as well as a shield against the contamination of sin. The puritan congregationalist William Bradshaw

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rebuked puritans who shunned so discretely that those being shunned were not aware of that fact. Sinners, Bradshaw insisted, needed to be shunned in such a way “that they may perceive . . . that the eyes of men are set upon them as on a marke or a signe.”7 Shunning was, in effect, a theatrical situational separation. It allowed nonconformists both to protect themselves from the Church of England’s evils and to testify to conformist church members of the spiritual danger of those evils. Conformists left a litany of complaints about the disapproval showered on them by nonconformists. Some nonconforming laity would neither listen to nor take the sacraments from a conforming minister. Some walked out of a church if the minister appeared dressed in the hated surplice, while patrons like John Winthrop discouraged their ministers from wearing it. Some nonconformists refused to marry conformists. Nonconformists ministers even suggested that the godly shun each other when necessary as a way to induce the repentance that the failed discipline of the Church of England could not generate.8 Shun as they may, however, there was virtually no way for nonconformists to completely avoid church ser vices tainted by corruption. Even if they found a minister who managed to slip by with nonconformist practices, the Church of England’s inadequate discipline meant that they would almost certainly eventually share worship and the sacraments with ungodly persons who were, in their eyes, contagious vessels of sin and an offense to God. The presence of these ungodly people contaminated the sacraments, the minister, and the other participants, who acted as their enablers. The congregationalist minister Randal Bate suggested that the only sinless way to attend a corrupt Church of England ser vice was to openly protest. But he died in prison. For more cautious nonconformists, wouldbe guiltless survival in the Church of England required psychological, inward separation and, at least, mental shunning. A few nonconformist ministers, with various sorts of associations with Massachusetts, published suggestions for practicing this mental separation and shunning. William Bradshaw, a close friend of the advisor to the Massachusetts Bay Company, Arthur Hildersham, gave his advice in a book that grew out of a well-attended disputation he had with a separatist in a London house around 1610. The separatist charged that Church of England

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ser vices were idolatrous and could not be attended. Bradshaw in response distinguished between the idolatry of those ser vices and the true worship of God to which it was annexed. Attending such ser vices could be done safely, Bradshaw explained, provided that a scrupulous puritan was careful to be an observer of the idolatry, not an actor in it, and beheld that idolatry with grief. The idolatry of the other participants had to be suffered for the sake of the true worship taking place.9 Hildersham himself warned the godly that nonconformists who attended church ser vices laden with “corruptions in deed” ran the risk of making those sins “our owne.” How then to keep from being polluted in the Church of England? Hildersham assured his listeners that the ceremonies “can never defile thee” as long as the nonconformists being exposed to them vigorously engaged in two spiritual practices: “nourish in thy heart a sorrow for all such as are corruptions in deede, (specially in the worship of God) and professe also outwardly upon all just occasions thy dislike unto them.”10 Two important future New England ministers and friends of Hildersham, Thomas Hooker, and John Cotton gave their shunning advice in connection with one specific sin: taking the Lord’s Supper with the wicked. Hooker acknowledged that having to share the Lord’s Supper with “such as are either scandalously naught or openly profane” was a powerful and fearful incentive to stay away from ser vices. Nonetheless, nonconformists still had to attend them. It was the “shame of the church,” Hooker agreed, that such wicked persons were not excommunicated. However, the godly were not to take on the guilt of this state of affairs. Responsibility, Hooker insisted, lay not with them but with those who had “place and authority.” Nonetheless, Hooker warned, the godly could still be contaminated with sin at the Lord’s Supper through the presence of the ungodly. They would be safe only if they mourned for this state of affairs. Hooker assured his listeners that “God would accept” their laments.11 In undated English sermons, Cotton, like Hooker, addressed the fraught topic of how to safely take the Lord’s Supper. A participant had to rectify the pollution of this sacrament, Cotton explained, via the medium of faith. “Faith,” he said, “willingly desires that every Ordinance may be dispensed in purity . . . and as it desires the simplicity of the

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Ordinances, so it desires, that no impurity in it selfe may make them worse.” Thus the nonconformist, faced with the dismal sight of a sacrament being impurely dispensed to an impure congregation, would turn to God. By faith, said Cotton, he or she would implore God that God might pardon all those present at the Lord’s Supper. As a backup request, the supplicant was to ask “if not pardon [for the whole congregation], yet so as that they might not defile, nor make the Sacrament of none effect, to them that desire to seeke God.” The rest of the congregation might eat and drink their own damnation, as the apostle Paul frightfully warned (1 Corinthians 11:29), but at least they would not drag down the puritans with them. God was to be entreated to sprinkle the sacrament with the blood of Christ “that it might purifie the Ordinance to us.”12 This was the promise all four New England–associated ministers made to nonconformists in the Church of England: if they vigorously kept inward distance from the church’s corruptions and its ungodly members, maintained a wide-awake, unfeigned grief for both, and struggled to preserve contact with the true worship of God buried underneath those corruptions, then they could safely get on with the work of salvation for themselves and others within the Church of England. Bradshaw neatly summed up this perilous tightrope act when he asserted that it was necessary for nonconformists to “yeald to some things in appearance Antichristian, that they might with more libertie fight against Antichrist.” The process would have been exhausting in and of itself, but it was puritans who were being asked to carry it out. They were trained to constantly scrutinize and question the sincerity of their piety, no matter how strenuous. Thus the psychic demands of this inward shunning took on Sisyphean dimensions. Nonconformists could keep up a steady stream of grief and mourning throughout a church ser vice and vary it in intensity as the intensity of the ser vice’s corruptions varied, following their ministers’ recommendations, and they could hope afterwards that their mourning had been genuinely sincere. But they could never know with certainty that the sins of the church had not stuck. Hooker, from the freedom of New England in 1636, rejoiced that at Massachusetts church ser vices, the faithful could “come without feare and sitt without offense, and depart without discomfort.”13 It was a vivid portrayal by contrast of the effect that this conflicted participation in the Church of England had

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on early Stuart nonconformists: fear, offense, and discomfort. They were accruing a heavy pile of emotional baggage to take across the Atlantic Ocean.

The opportunities for fear, offense, and discomfort within the Church of England grew steadily throughout the 1620s. The earliest Jacobean nonconformists after the turn of the century had warned that the true worship of God within the Church of England was under assault. By the 1620s, those warnings appeared prophetic. English monarchs were abandoning whatever militancy they had possessed against Catholicism. King James took what was widely considered to be insufficient action to defend Protestantism in the savage religious warfare that broke out in Germany in 1618, and he tried to marry his son Charles to a Spanish bride in 1623, while loosening up restrictions on English Catholics. The result of this attempted “Spanish Match” was a broad avalanche of righteously Protestant criticism from puritan prayer groups all the way to the archbishop of Canterbury.14 James’s critics saw themselves as loyal patriots defending England and the Reformation. But what James saw was a new appearance of the enemy he had been struggling against ever since he had confronted the presbyterians of Scotland: populist, democratizing, anti-monarchical puritanism. The puritan populism of the 1620s was not in the blatant form of the presbyterianism of the 1580s, but it was just as intrinsically hostile to monarchs, James was convinced. One difference, however, was that by the 1620s, there was a rising cadre of anti-Calvinist ministers in the Church of England, ready to stroke James’s ego, assure him of his absolute authority as king, and eagerly fuel his growing suspicion that puritanism had much deeper roots than ceremonies and church government.15 Calvinist theology itself, still dominant in the church, was intrinsically puritan, popular, and anti-monarchical, these anti-Calvinists argued, even if it was espoused by bishops. The Calvinist insistence that God had unalterably predestined humans for heaven or hell before the beginning of time, this cadre of anti-Calvinists claimed, created a tangled knot of a terrifying conundrum that inevitably resulted in an emphasis on preaching in order to unravel it. That emphasis meant the neglect of the

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ceremonies of the Church of England. This neglect, in turn, encouraged “popular” spirits to challenge the very legitimacy of ceremonies. The spirit of popular rebellion against the ceremonies invariably culminated in a demand for popular church government—presbyterianism, in other words—and popularity in church government would invariably lead to the end of monarchy. The mysteries of the divine monarchy, like the mysteries of the British monarchy, should not be probed, these ministers argued, but accepted with a devotional reverence. Ceremonial worship, they argued, produced greater piety and more loyal subjects than did incessant preaching. Actual presbyterians were scarce on the ground by this point; nonetheless, the only way to rid England once and for all of the monster of puritan republicanism was to drain the vast, fetid Calvinist swamp in which it continued to lurk and await its opportunity. In 1622, James banned the preaching of predestination, and in the last years of his reign, he showed increasing favor to anti-Calvinist churchmen. Charles I, who ascended to the throne in 1625, was himself an antiCalvinist, unlike most of his subjects, with an intense attachment to ceremonial religion. He accelerated his father’s practice of promoting and protecting anti-Calvinists and ceremonialists (who were in the eyes of many English people little more than idolaters and crypto-Catholics). James’s appreciation of bishops was perhaps as much political as pious, but his son sincerely believed them to be the divine foundation of church government, and he would lose his head in 1649 for that conviction. Charles married the daughter of the French king, placing an idolater in the royal bedchamber, and under Charles prosecution of Catholics declined.16 By the late 1620s, concern for the direction of the Church of England was widespread (among Protestants—English Catholics were pleased). God warns before he strikes, the conforming puritan Jeremiah Dyke ominously preached to the House of Commons in 1628. Dyke drew his audience’s attention to a long list of warnings God had been sending England—floods, earthquakes, economic depression, military defeats, the ravages the Thirty Years’ War was inflicting on the Continental Protestant churches, and a recently caught fish that had swallowed a book written by an early English Protestant martyr. The most powerful warning God could send a country of his approaching wrath, Dyke told

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the House, was by leaving it. God was plainly leaving England, as witnessed by His English sanctuary being filled with idolatry, antiCalvinism, and popery.17 “God hath called you together to bee the publique Arke-wrights for the safety of this Church and state,” Dyke exhorted the assembled members of Parliament. His audience was receptive. The House of Commons was making increasingly urgent although futile efforts to halt the advance of anti-Calvinists in the church and showing a renewed interest in legislation that would return nonconformists to their pulpits. Members discussed taking a covenant to defend true religion to the death, while some were said to argue in private that episcopacy had to be abolished.18 But this last hope for building an English ark against God’s coming storm ended on March 10, 1629. Charles dissolved Parliament on that date and made it plain that he did not plan to call another one anytime soon. Shortly thereafter, the nonconformist Francis Higginson preached his farewell sermon in the large market town of Leicester before sailing to Salem to set up its church. God would chastise England for its sins with a devastating war, he predicted.19 Around the same time, Massachusetts’s soon-to-be governor, the lawyer and lord of Groton manor John Winthrop, started circulating a set of reasons for emigration. Some of those reasons were positive. Since the enterprise had the encouragement and prayers of so many godly ministers and lay people, it was “likely that [God] hath some great worke in hand.” The emigrants would strengthen God’s infant church in the New World, and there could be no “more honorable worke” than to help raise such a church. The emigrants would provide a bulwark against the Jesuits’ kingdom of Antichrist. By bringing the gospel to the Indians, they would “helpe on the cominge of the fullnesse of the Gentiles,” the conversion of the heathens that preceded the end of time. Winthrop’s negative reasons, however, balanced out the positive ones, and they echoed Dyke and Higginson’s sense of English malaise and impending disaster. England was plagued with overpopulation, economic decline, and corruption in the universities and law courts. God’s wrath against the Protestant churches abroad indicated that his wrath might soon be directed against England (that wrath would come speedily, Winthrop predicted in a letter to his wife). God’s wrath even loomed over one of the positive

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reasons for departing from England. The emigrants could prepare Massachusetts as a refuge for God’s people, Winthrop argued, who would “returne after the storme” to their “mother Churche.”20 Unlike Dyke, Winthrop avoided any direct public criticism of the Church of England; the Massachusetts Bay Company labored under the understandable suspicion that it was a front for nonconformists. A year after circulating these arguments, Winthrop and six other leaders of the immigration signed and published a statement affi rming their loyalty to the Church of England. They counted it an honor to call that church their mother, acknowledged that they received their hopes of salvation in her bosom, and “cannot part from our native Country, where she specially resideth, without much sadnes of heart, and many teares in our eyes.” 21 In a more private context, Winthrop was blunt about how he had come to think of his spiritual mother by the time of emigrating. He put down his thoughts in a draft of a letter to an unknown correspondent who had been arguing against emigration. The Church of England, Winthrop insisted, was virtually beyond reform. It was like Sodom in her pride and intemperance, like Laodicea in her lukewarmness (Christ spit the angels of the church of Laodicea out of his mouth, as the presbyterian Brightman had reminded his readers when making this same comparison), like the churches of Ephesus and Sardis in her sins, like the Turks and other heathens in her abominations, and like the Roman Catholic Church, the “Sinagogue of Antichrist,” in her superstition. If there was any hope that the hurts of the church could be healed, why were ministers constantly warning of the impending wrath of God, why did their souls weep in secret, and why could they not be comforted?22 John Cotton soon echoed Winthrop’s anger and sense of betrayal by the Church of England’s rulers in even more loaded language in the course of a sermon cycle he delivered in Boston, Lincolnshire. Cotton preached around the time of the departure of Winthrop’s fleet from Southampton, where he had delivered a published farewell sermon giving a drastically toned-down version of the same message. Cotton’s Boston audience would have included people about to leave or the friends, associates, and enemies of those who had just departed. Cotton delivered his sermon with an angry directness perhaps unprecedented for him,

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abandoning his earlier reassurances about how faith could purify contaminated church ordinances. The way to deal with corrupt ordinances, he now argued, was not to purify them but to separate from them, just as the emigrants were doing: “If we cannot enjoy the liberty of the Ordinances, but with sinne against our soules,” Cotton warned, if “we cannot have the Ordinances without impure mixtures of humane invention; then let them goe, rather then defile our owne hearts and hands with sinne against God.” To illustrate his point, Cotton invoked 2 Chronicles 13 about the Levites refusing to worship the wicked king Jereboam’s golden calves. He called the Levites’ action the “separation” between Judah and the “mother church” of Israel, and Cotton insisted that scripture laid the “sin” of separation on Jeroboam, not the separatists.23 There was nothing new in itself about endorsing separation from a corrupt church. What was startlingly new was that this time it was not a separatist making the endorsement but a prominent puritan deeply involved in the planning for Massachusetts. While the Church of England as a national church was undergoing major shifts, in most of the parishes themselves the Jacobean compromise that had allowed many local puritan communities to avoid sustained, hostile attention from the bishops was still largely in effect. Cotton himself was continuing to manage the complex negotiations and stalling tactics that had kept him in his position for so long despite being an uncompromising nonconformist, while the churches of Winthrop’s neighboring Essex did not collectively experience Bishop Laud’s anti-puritan heavy hand until after the Winthrop fleet had departed. Thus, when Cotton went on about the sin of defiling the ordinances, he was not talking about being personally required to bow at the name of Jesus, or to move the communion table to a Roman Catholic altar position, or to practice full ceremonial conformity, or to perform any of the other puritan-shocking ceremonial changes of the 1630s. The advance of the spirit of Antichrist was still largely at the national level, not the parish level, in the church. Nonetheless the ominous, rumbling noise of its advance was overwhelming, especially to puritans alert enough to that noise to be deeply involved in the migration. The inability of the 1628– 1629 Parliament to halt the spread of anti-Calvinism was followed by an

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official drive against puritan lecturers (ministers hired by towns and corporations to preach but not administer the sacraments) and a further clampdown on preaching predestination. Bishop Laud suspended Thomas Hooker, a popular and influential Essex preacher involved in the planning for Massachusetts, in December 1629, when Hooker refused to subscribe.24 There was every reason to expect that these attacks on the remaining churchly bulwarks that held back divine wrath would grow only fiercer and more effective. As a result of this ominous, rapidly gathering storm, Cotton was reinterpreting previous widely albeit uneasily accepted puritan practices of accommodation with the Church of England’s corruptions as intolerable cooperation with sin. The Jacobean compromise between puritans and their corrupt church resulted in a fair amount of local puritan leeway in an officially anti-puritan church, but it had always stirred up unease and guilt among nonconformists and even among wavering puritan conformists. The emigrants were fleeing with the knowledge not only that the Church of England was trembling on the verge of destruction but that the decadeslong strategy of yielding to Antichrist, the better to fight him, had been a disastrous failure. Antichrist was not retreating but becoming steadily more entrenched in England. And who was responsible for this failure? As the presbyterian martyr John Udall had warned forty years previously, it was the godly’s own sins that ultimately induced God to permit the decay of the Church of England. Presbyterians replying to separatists around the same time as Udall acknowledged that the greatest sin of puritans was not to mourn sufficiently for and testify against the corruptions of the Church of England.25 In 1630, with the ruin of the Church of England impending, all that the emigrating puritans had left from their compromises were, as Cotton put it, hearts and hands defiled by their enabling participation in idolatry and corruption. They had to do better in New England. “Whatsoever wee did, or ought to have done when wee lived in England,” Governor Winthrop preached to his fellow departing emigrants in 1630, “the same must wee doe, and more allsoe, where wee goe.” Winthrop followed his ominous “more allsoe” a minute or two further in his lay sermon with the most famous lines from seventeenth-century Massachusetts history: “Wee must

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consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us.”26 One reason those lines are so famous is that Perry Miller seized upon them over three hundred years later to offer a considerably more upbeat interpretation of the migration than flight from a country on the verge of divine destruction. For Miller, the lines demonstrated that the purpose of the colonization was to create a “working model” for a “complete reformation” that the colonists anticipated would be quickly adopted in “England and Europe.” Miller’s claim provided deep historical roots for Americans’ intermittent messianic sense of destiny. It was extensively disseminated and amplified, to the point where the emigrants were said to see themselves as “the hub of the universe,” “carrying a commission from God to cleanse the churches of Christ throughout the world.” In the 1980s, however, Theodore Dwight Bozeman pointed out at length that neither Winthrop nor any of the other emigrants in 1630 gave any indication whatsoever that they anticipated that the colony would serve as an exemplary transatlantic pattern.27 As Bozeman indicated, Winthrop would have been astonished to learn the sweeping, grandiose inferences that people three centuries hence were drawing from his city on a hill reference. For true Christians, being a city on a hill was not necessarily a positive experience. Like Winthrop, the prominent puritan minister Nicholas Byfield once preached, “Christians are like a City on a hill: they are such as all sorts of men easily take notice of.” Byfield then clarified why Christians were so visible: “Not that the men of the world are in love with Christians, but many times out of the hatred of the truth set they eies and thoughts upon them.”28 It was predominantly in this “hatred of the truth” vein, not a “hub of the universe” one, that Winthrop pictured his prospective colony as a city on a hill. The eyes of all people were upon his venture more in anticipation of failure than success. If the colony succeeded, Winthrop preached to his fellow emigrants, it might become a “prayse and glory,” but only for future colonies; “Men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘the Lord make it likely that of New England.’ ” Failure, on the other hand, would result in much more widespread transatlantic attention, and the odds of failure were formidable. Winthrop reminded his listeners that

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they had asked for God’s blessing on their venture. In doing so, they had made a covenant with him. If God delivered on his side by bringing them safely across the ocean, they would have to deliver on theirs. That obligation was where the ominous “more allsoe” standard kicked in. The colonists would have to live up to much higher standards of holiness than they had practiced to so little purpose in England. Should the colonists fail to do so, Winthrop warned, “the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us.” The colony’s subsequent collapse would “open the mouthes of Enemies” to make blanket attacks on puritanism, and Massachusetts, as a highly visible failure of the beleaguered puritan movement, would become “a story and a by-word through the world.”29 Winthrop’s “more allsoe” demand was realistic, besides being attuned to God’s wrath and the eyes of a hostile world. The beginning years of a colony were harsh and required exceptional cooperation and selfsacrifice. “Wee must delight in eache other; make other’s conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together,” Winthrop preached, “allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body.”30 But puritans never separated practical requirements from religious ones. It would have been taken for granted that just as the colonists in their daily interactions would have to show unprecedented holiness, in their worship they would have to show unprecedented purity and strictness, even if they were not sure yet what form that purity and strictness should take.

Perhaps this grim sense that only some indefinitely wide-ranging “more allsoe” requirement stood between the colonists and cataclysm helps explain why they reacted positively to Salem’s challenge. Despite their sins, the emigrants could not have anticipated that Salem’s pastor, following separatist Plymouth’s practice, would regard them as so ritually unclean as to refuse to give them the sacraments. Had William Ames been with the fleet, as the Massachusetts Bay Company had hoped, a sharp debate might have broken out between Ames and the leaders of the Salem church. Ames would have repeated his familiar argument that many English parish churches were implicitly real gathered congregations. They had puritan laity and godly ministers, a combination that

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was sufficient to generate implicit covenants comparable to the explicit covenants of congregational churches. Therefore, there would be no reason to keep pious English immigrants from the sacraments. Some people in the fleet probably would have known that argument. Ames had been making it at least as early as his debates with Robinson in the 1610s, Henry Jacob had used it, there was at least one member of Jacob’s church with the fleet, and the argument formed a basis of the subsequent Massachusetts claim that the parish churches of England were indeed true churches.31 Moreover, the godly members of Cotton’s English parish church to whom Skelton refused the sacraments had chosen Cotton as their minister and long enjoyed their own covenanted private worship group, following in an established puritan tradition. One member of the church even brought a testimonial with him, in the conventional Reformed manner.32 Should any members of the Church of England in 1630 wish to interpret their previous practices to mean that they came from an English parish church with an operative implicit covenant, the ex-Bostonians were ideally suited to do so. Why then did the new churches go along with Salem’s practice of putting a separatist wall around themselves, yet deny that this acceptance amounted to an endorsement of complete separatism? Political advantages aside, what the Massachusetts congregationalists were doing had an inner logic of its own. To separate without schism by avoiding and witnessing against what was false in the Church of England was a primordial but necessarily intensely guilt-laden puritan experience in England, always overshadowed by the possibility of fines and imprisonment. Its inadequacy was growing increasingly obvious in the 1620s as the Church of England sank deeper into corruption. With the formation of pure churches in Massachusetts and the parish churches and their ecclesiastical enforcers a comfortable three thousand miles away, the immigrants had the opportunity, as well as the obligation, to do this separationwithout-separating correctly. The place where this new possibility and expectation found its initial and clearest expression was in the covenant of each new congregational church. This covenant would be affirmed by the church’s founding members at the end of a day of fasting and prayer and taken by all subsequent members. It created a solemn pact between the members and

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God, and that pact, in turn, created an independent spiritual polity, dependent upon and ultimately answerable to no ecclesiastical authority except Jesus himself. The two-paragraph 1630 covenant of the Watertown church was an excellent example of what would become a regular practice in Massachusetts. The first, introductory, paragraph explained that the covenanters had made their hazardous journey in order to “serve [Jesus], without Fear,” a graphic acknowledgment of what serving him among the golden calves of England had been like. It added that they had held a day of “afflicting our souls” in order to discern God’s will. In the second paragraph, they covenanted with God “to renounce all idolatry and superstition, will-worship, all humane traditions and inventions whatsoever, in the worship of God” and, unlike in England, to “give ourselves wholly unto the Lord Jesus.”33 What is striking about this document is that there is almost nothing specific in it about gathering a church. The absence of overt congregationalism is even more curious because Watertown’s minister George Philips was a student of church government and possibly leaning to congregationalism before emigrating. But when the Watertowners wrote and signed their covenant, their emotional center of gravity was not the church they were forming but the renunciation of the golden calves, the idolatry, superstition, and human inventions, they had worshiped in England. Arriving in Massachusetts, they had received a slap in the face as Church of England members when they were denied the sacraments at Salem. They then solemnly agreed to a covenant that focused on sharp renunciation not only of the sins of the Church of England but of their participation in those sins, after over fifty years of puritan attempts to minimize and imagine away the guilt of that participation. By excluding the immigrants from the sacraments, the Salem church preserved its purity, while the immigrants’ encounter with what amounted to hypershunning drove home to them the sinful spiritual failure of the ordinary practices of English puritanism. Yet the Watertown covenant never suggested that the Church of England’s sins warranted a divine condemnation of all its parishes, as separatists argued. On the contrary, the covenanters claimed they came to Massachusetts for a “more full and free subjecting of our selves” to Jesus, not for an initial collective subjection. The covenanters, many of whom

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had lived in close proximity to Philips in England, and some of whom had been prosecuted for nonconformity, were depicting themselves as a sadder-but-wiser part of an already existing public community of saints.34 This covenant neatly summed up the internal logic of nonseparating congregationalism. The leaders of the Salem church seem to have plunged into separatism as a consequence of their experiences in the Church of England, under Plymouth’s guidance. For them, in retrospect, the community of saints in England, to the extent that it had been genuine, had been private. The Watertown covenanters, however, defined their earlier practice of piety as having a positive and continuing relationship, however fraught and tenuous, with the public worship that took place within the institutional boundaries of the Church of England. That church’s parishes, therefore, contained within them the true worship of God. Nonetheless, the new emigrants could no longer bear the burden of the sin-laden compromises they endured in order to access this worship, while the swift deterioration of the Church of England confirmed the wickedness of those compromises. The covenant affirmed both those positions. The covenanters’ position was more an experiential than a strictly logical one. It was comprehensible only to those in a position to give free vent to the fear, offense, and discomfort brought on by being nonconformist within the Church of England. In like manner, Massachusetts ministers routinely affirmed from 1630 onward that their ministries in England had been valid because they had received overt or implicit calls from their parishioners (the long-standing presbyterian argument, but not one that separatists would have made), yet they mourned for their sin in having accepted episcopal ordination.35 Surviving covenants from Massachusetts churches in the 1630s consistently demonstrate that rituals of repentance for what were now portrayed as the failed and sinful collective compromises of English puritanism remained foundational for new congregational churches. The Dorchester covenanters in 1636 bewailed their former pollution, while the Concord covenanters that same year vowed not to return to the human ordinances from which they had escaped; the Dedham covenanters in 1638 renounced their entanglement in the devices of Antichrist; the Mount Wollaston covenanters the next year renounced “all the Remnants

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of antichristian Pollution, wherein sometimes we have walked,” while the Woburn covenanters in 1640 “abhor[red] our selves for all our former defilements in the worship of God.”36 John Cotton in 1636 recorded that colonists regularly, both individually and at their church ser vices and fast days, professed their hearty sorrow for their “former pollutions, wherewith we have defiled our selves, and the holy things of God, in our former Administrations and Communions.” Insufficient mourning over those former pollutions, Cotton worried, led to spiritual apathy and restlessness. The minister Ezekiel Rogers expressed Massachusetts puritan congregationalism’s delicate balance of affirmation and abasement when he praised the “special presence of God” in the churches of England before covenanting with his would-be congregation to bewail before God their sinful partaking of those churches’ corruption and to walk from henceforth in the Lord’s ordinances.37 The spiritual quarantine that Skelton had instituted continued to accomplish what puritan shunning had always been expected to accomplish, but in a different context: it protected the purity of the shunners and their churches while successfully serving as a call for reformation and repentance to those new immigrants fresh from the corrupt parish churches who were being shunned. On a practical level, Massachusetts’s institutional shunning, Salem excepted, differed from the separatist variety only in that, by a razor’s edge, it was situational rather than absolute. Skelton had bluntly told John Cotton’s parishioner that he had not come from a true church while refusing him the sacraments. When the Massachusetts system had settled down, its spokesmen fudged where Skelton had been direct. They claimed that Church of England members were not automatically barred from taking the sacraments in Massachusetts churches, since they did possibly come from true churches; it was just that no travelers ever arrived, or could arrive, capable of demonstrating that their parish churches met the impossibly strict requirements that would allow the Massachusetts churches to feel comfortable allowing these new settlers to commune without first joining a local true church.38 Likewise, in principle, if a parish church in England sufficiently reformed itself to the congregationalists’ standards, a Massachusetts traveler could hypothetically join in worship at its ser vices. The saints of Massachusetts thereby

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managed to affirm their own past and their larger community of saints while atoning for and protecting themselves from the pollutions of both.

The novel, situationally separatist element of Massachusetts congregationalism was a creative response to the catalyst of local precedent and to the perceived abysmal state of the Church of England. What would account for the appeal to the immigrants of other aspects of congregationalism, as distinct from presbyterianism? One early immigrant provided an environmental explanation for that appeal. William Pynchon, a quietly heterodox presbyterian magistrate based in the remote outpost of Springfield, wrote in the mid-1640s that although the Old Testament Jews had a national church in their own land of “Canaan,” they practiced congregationalism in “heathen” countries; “Our case of New-England was much like theirs,” he concluded. It could very well be, as Pynchon intimated, that the Plymouth-stoked enthusiasm of Governor Endicott and his allies in Salem in 1629 for autonomous, self-creating, and self-sustaining churches seemed particularly convincing and perhaps comforting to the arriving ministers Skelton and Higginson, as well as others, as they discovered themselves in a vast region devoid of ecclesiastical superstructure, where the only other “people of God” were the pious separatists over fifty roadless miles away. In a similar vein, a historian has suggested that congregationalist rituals like the church covenants were a way for immigrants to rebuild community in a strange new land.39 Another powerfully appealing aspect of congregationalist “purity” to the settlers, one that had been stressed by William Bradshaw a quarter century earlier, would have been the totalizing way in which it shielded the New Testament churches from all the ecclesiastical forces hostile to them. Unlike presbyterians, congregationalists did not have to waste mental effort distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms of coercive higher church authority, since there could be no such higher authority. In England, both of Salem’s ministers had felt the heavy arm of the ecclesiastical courts. Higginson had been dreading a summons by the High Commission when he contacted the Massachusetts Bay Company about emigrating; as an extremely rough practical

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joke, the Company’s agents pretended they were from the High Commission when they showed up at Higginson’s house to offer him the position.40 Skelton and Higginson were hardly alone among immigrating ministers in having experienced what they considered to be episcopal tyranny. At least half of the seventy-six ministers who came to New England in the 1630s, along with an unknown number of laypeople, emigrated after runins with the ecclesiastical authorities, and many others must have been feeling increasing pressure. “Fugitive ministers beyond the seas” was how the English government characterized those departing clerics.41 The rituals creating the Massachusetts churches not only laid the churches’ foundations; they amounted to formal, loophole-free declarations of spiritual independence from the antichristian, persecuting government of the Church of England. Congregationalism’s sledgehammer approach to higher church power was demonstrably on the minds of influential ministers when they adopted it. John Cotton, one of the three most important ministers to immigrate, found congregationalism persuasive only after he came under ecclesiastical investigation in 1631. It fortuitously served as his principled basis for ignoring an ecclesiastical court summons, as he later explained. From the congregationalist injunction that “the Ministers of Christ, and the Keyes of the Government of his Church are given to each particular Congregationall Church respectively,” Cotton concluded that “neither Ministers nor Congregations [are] subject to the Ecclesiasticall jurisdiction of Cathedrall Churches.” Therefore, he did not need to obey the summons. Cotton instead went into hiding and then left for Massachusetts.42 Cotton’s friend John Davenport, another of those preeminent ministers, slowly yielded to Cotton’s arguments for congregationalism in 1633 after he came under investigation by Bishop Laud for preaching against Arminianism.43 In a manuscript written by Davenport shortly before coming to America in 1637, congregationalist autonomy served as a wrecking ball against pressure for conformity to the Church of England’s government and ceremonies. Since there were no churches beyond individual congregations, it was senseless to tell anyone to yield to episcopal authority and ceremonies for the “peace of the church”; it was no less

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meaningless for bishops to tell nonconformists that “they must obey the church,” and it was equally meaningless to label nonconformists “factious and disobedient children to their mother the church.” There was no mother church beyond the individual congregations to obey or disobey. “What is that church,” Davenport asked people who threw these arguments about obedience to higher ecclesiastical authority at him when he was a fresh convert to congregationalism. “They have not known,” Davenport claimed, “after many stammerings what answer to give.”44 Part of the appeal of congregationalism was that with its emphasis on the participation of the laity in church government, it would nip clerical oppression at its earliest stage, not only when it manifested as higher ecclesiastical authority. Thomas Hooker, the third of New England’s leading ministers, made one programmatic statement about the historical importance of congregationalism, in the 1640s. The great business of the Reformation, he claimed, was expelling the tyranny of kingly rule from the church. First went the pope and then the bishops. Finally, even presbyterian ministers were going to have to share their governing power with the people. To the anti-congregationalist charge that the people “through their ignorance and unskillfulnesse” lacked the ability to govern, Hooker echoed the Elizabethan presbyterian Thomas Cartwright’s defense of the godly laity’s fitness to elect their church officers, but with an apocalyptic twist. These were the times when the Bible’s prophecies were being fulfilled, Hooker claimed, and God had promised that he would give the people the capacities they needed. A comment by the late seventeenthcentury minister William Hubbard may not be unconnected to the appeal of congregationalism for Hooker: “After Mr. Hooker’s coming over, it was observed that many of the freemen grew to be very jealous of their liberties.”45 Ongoing concern about protecting the purity and liberties of the churches from unrestrained clerical power did not cease with the crossing of the Atlantic. In 1633, in one of the earliest documented debates about Massachusetts congregationalism, Salem’s minister Skelton and Roger Williams warned that Massachusetts’s newly instituted twicemonthly gatherings of ministers might eventually “growe in tyme to a Presbiterye or Superintendancye, to the prejudice of the Churches Libertyes.” Governor Winthrop, recording their concern, brushed it aside,

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claiming that all the ministers were clear that no church or person had jurisdiction over another church. What he did not do, however, was dispute the underlying premise: even in Massachusetts, ministers could become tyrants if not subjected to proper restraints, which, happily, congregationalism provided. “Nationall meetings” and national officers, John Cotton warned in 1639, “brought contentions into the church” and “made way for ambitions and servile pomp for shouldering out of gods ordinances and of godly men.”46 The congregationalist emphasis on restraining the power of the clergy while nurturing the liberties of the people and the individual churches may have been a strong element in its appeal to the laity. Perhaps some clergy accepted that emphasis as part of a total package: in the divine order of things, sacred power in independent churches had to flow through the congregation to the ministers, which did not mean the ministers could not and should not attempt to constrain and control that power as much as possible. Other ministers, after their experiences with the English bishops, might have agreed with Cotton that extensive institutional restraints on their power and power sharing with the laity were good things (those who did not were not likely to become congregationalists). Some ministers, as well as laity, might have also welcomed power sharing out of temperament, experience, and the belief that this sharing was part of the great restoration of the New Testament churches. While many New England ministers were later to get second thoughts about the degree to which congregationalism restricted them, a recent study has shown that for many other ministers throughout seventeenth-century Massachusetts, sharing power with the laity remained a matter of conviction.47 The need to protect the churches from clerical power even underlay Massachusetts church covenants. John Cotton repeated basic congregational doctrine when he stressed that a minister was powerless outside a church covenant. He “hath no authority over them that will not submitt themselves to him, and therefore cannot doe any act of power . . . to those that doe not call him.” Claiming power outside a covenant, warned the ministers Thomas Shepard and John Allin, was a “usurpation.” Richard Mather expanded on the same point and in the process, typically for radical puritans, spilled over into generalizations about how states should work. “It implyeth a contradiction in the very name of libertie or

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freedome,” he claimed in 1640, “that free-men should take upon them authoritie or power over free men without their free consent, and voluntary and mutuall Covenant or Engagement.”48 Mather’s easy progression from discussing church formation to discussing state formation points to the broader logic and necessities of the Massachusetts congregationalist project. As recent English history had painfully suggested, that project would fail unless it was supported by a complementary civil government, not one, as in England, that could easily succumb to the ungodly accumulation and abuse of power. In Massachusetts, radical puritans had an unprecedented opportunity to sculpt a civil government suited to their vision of godly republican New Testament Christianity. What they created was something even more unprecedented than their congregationalism: a godly republican state.

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assachusetts congregationalists, like earlier radical puritans, were well aware that tyrannical power could threaten God’s people through the state as well as the church. In early 1640, for example, John Cotton in his popular Thursday Boston lectures was preaching his way through the Book of Revelation, verse by verse. On March 13, after instructing his Massachusetts audience for some weeks about Antichrist’s lust for unlimited power, Cotton began discussing how rulers in general abused power. King Charles I was clearly his target. Yet Cotton spoke broadly enough about the seductive danger of power that modern theologians, business executives, and soft-porn publishers quote him with approval:1 Let all the world learn to give mortall men no greater power then they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . It is necessary therefore, that all power that is on earth be limited. . . . It is counted a matter of danger to the State to limit Prerogatives; but it is a further danger, not to have them limited.2

Two weeks later, Cotton moved on to a potentially much more explosive and even more timely topic: the right of the people to resist their 183

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rulers when they abused their power. The Scots, puritan in their religious sensibilities, had risen up in 1639 in revolt against Charles I, successfully so far, after he attempted to force Church of England–modeled ceremonies and government upon them. Legally they were traitors, but did Charles’s subjects ever have a larger right and duty to violently resist him?3 Cotton’s uncompromising answer would have gotten him a stiff jail sentence, if not worse, had he still lived in England. When Christian kings “take up a power against Law, and contest with the people of God,” Cotton told his listeners; when they “warre against the Saints, and religion, and Truth” or “Justice and happinesse,” their subjects, Cotton insisted, could “take up armes of defence” under their “Guides and Leaders” (as was happening in Scotland), “to the last bloud.” The people of God in New England should take up arms themselves if they were attacked, Cotton added, and under no circumstances should they come to terms with their invaders. For Cotton, King Charles’s assault on the Scottish saints was the sharply escalated but logical terminus to what had been over a half century of Protestant English monarchs taking up power against law and contesting with God’s people. Cotton’s endorsement of armed resistance was an equally escalated terminus to longstanding puritan unease about their monarchs’ goals. Another puritan terminus was Massachusetts itself.4 Three related political principles, starkly magnified, lay behind Cotton’s belligerence: rulers were prone to abuse their power; the people had the right and responsibility to supervise those rulers; and since in God’s eye the only people who ultimately counted were the saints, a Christian government’s relationship to God’s people was the ultimate test of that government’s soundness. Those principles were foundational to radical puritan convictions about church government, and they had often hovered somewhat incoherently behind radical puritan beliefs concerning England’s secular government. Since the 1620s, English monarchs had been sharply intensifying their long-standing quarrel with law and the saints. That monarchical hostility pushed inchoate radical puritan secular political ideals into more clearly defined form. The saintly politicians of Massachusetts in the 1630s found an opening, which they exploited to the hilt, to create

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afresh not just churches but a state. Through the filter of recent English experience, they applied foundational puritan political principles to their government as well as their churches: supervision of rulers, protection of the people’s liberties, and, especially, the protection and nurturing of those people who alone were the ones God cared about, His saints. The result was the fulfillment of the long-standing accusation of the puritans’ opponents: what puritans really wanted was a republic. However, it was not just a generic republic that these puritans had created. In order to best realize those foundational political principles, the Massachusetts puritans had created something new, a godly republic.

Godly republican state formation began on October 19, 1630. Massachusetts’s male adults that day stood in a clearing in the settlement of Charlestown for a civic meeting. They listened while John Winthrop proposed two changes to the government mandated in the Massachusetts Bay Company’s royal charter. That charter, granted by King Charles I in 1629, outlined a “democratic” organizational structure typical for a chartered joint-stock business company. It called for the freemen (stockholders) of the company to meet four times a year in a General Court to make company laws and admit new freemen. In one of those meetings, the court was to elect a governor, deputy governor, and court of assistants to the governor who would meet monthly to attend to the company’s business without the freemen. The freemen’s presence was not even strictly necessary at the General Court, since either the governor or deputy governor and six of the assistants was enough to constitute a quorum. In the short period of the Company’s operation in England, as few as a handful of the hundred or more freemen might show up at any given General Court meeting.5 The Company initially had a hard time recruiting suitable leadership for the migration intended for 1630. On July 28, 1629, the governor of the Company, Matthew Craddock, proposed a radical idea at a London meeting of the General Court. The Company’s government would meet not in London but in the colony. Unlike other American colonies, with the exception of tiny Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts would have no longdistance supervision. The colony’s local government and the Company’s

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government would be, for all practical purposes, identical. Craddock’s idea was that the creation of what amounted to colonial self-rule would encourage “persons of worth and qualitie” to migrate. A group of leading Company members, including Winthrop, offered to go to Massachusetts provided that an even more stringent condition was met: not only would the colony have self-government, but the Company’s royal charter itself would be physically taken to Massachusetts Bay. According to the Company’s records, the reason for this removal was to ensure that the “chief government” of the colony remained in perpetuity in America. It was also probably not absent from the considerations of Winthrop and the other emigrants that the charter’s location on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean would complicate any effort of the king’s servants to get it back. The measure passed on October 15, and five days later a new court of assistants was elected, with Winthrop as governor.6 Once in Massachusetts in 1630, Governor Winthrop, deputy governor Thomas Dudley, and eleven assistants quickly took on the responsibilities of running their new colony. The Court of Assistants served as the colony’s executive, parliament, and law court, while each of these magistrates served as a justice of the peace in his own community. The court arranged for the maintenance of the ministers, attempted to control wages and regulate trade, empanelled a jury to indict a man for manslaughter, and sent the Indian trader and anti-puritan maypole erector Thomas Morton back to England. With no freemen of the Company in Massachusetts, the Court of Assistants in its first three months ran itself as an autonomous, self-perpetuating board, as it was entitled to do under the terms of the charter.7 What Winthrop was proposing and what the assembled settlers on October 19 agreed to was that Massachusetts’s brief period of purely oligarchic or “aristocratic” rule come to an end. The settlers should put themselves forward to become freemen, or voters. The new freemen would not have the comprehensive powers given the freemen in the charter, however. The assistants, not the General Court, would continue to run the colony and make its laws. What the new freemen would possess was final say over who the assistants were. They would elect assistants “when there are to be chosen.” Any necessary elections were to take place in a yearly meeting of the company’s General Court. At the next meeting of

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the General Court in May 1631, it was explained that the freemen could add assistants or remove them “for any defect or misbehavior.”8 Unlike Skelton’s denial of the sacraments, the Court of Assistants’ willingness to sacrifice its autonomy has attracted a good deal of attention from historians. When explaining why Winthrop made his offer, historians fall into two groups. One group sees manipulative self-interest behind the decision while the other sees piety. The first group views the expansion of the franchise as the desperate action of “puritan oligarchs.” The colony’s leaders, this group argues, felt pressure from the other colonists to give them some form of political involvement. In response, the assistants violated the charter rights of freemen of the Company in order to restrict the new freemen to only the barest minimum supervision over the government possible.9 It is difficult to find supporting evidence, however, for this jaded interpretation of the assistants’ motives. There are no surviving indications that the “oligarchs” were responding to pressure from ordinary colonists, and such pressure would have been unusually precocious. Most of the settlers had been in Massachusetts only for a few months. Raw survival was the great preoccupation at the beginning of any colony, and no other chartered colony had given voting rights to its inhabitants within the first two years, let alone the first three months. Chartered English towns and boroughs were increasingly run by self-selecting bodies, so there would be nothing unusual about Massachusetts being run the same way by the Court of Assistants.10 Moreover, the new freemen were not the stockholders envisaged in the original charter, and the Court of Assistants was under no obligation to them. Rather than the grudging, restrictive response of pressured oligarchs, the Court’s offer was not out of line with the spirit of the charter. It extended to the colonists voting privileges to which they were not entitled, and the Court was under no obligation to define these new privileges expansively. Another group of historians takes a more idealistic view of the Court of Assistants’ offer. This group accepts that under the charter, the assistants were under no obligation to admit any more freemen. That they did so anyway was not due to hypothetical pressure from below, this group argues, but due to congregationalists’ theologically driven attraction to covenants. The Massachusetts immigrants had made a covenant

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with God to be a special people to him, but they could carry this covenant out only by making a covenant among themselves to form a new government, in the same way that they created their churches.11 Winthrop and the assistants possibly may have felt a sense of convenantal appropriateness as they offered to create a new body of corporate freemen in Massachusetts. As a primary explanation, however, this interpretation has as many evidential problems as the first one. There is no evidence that Winthrop and his associates imagined that they were doing anything so grandiose as making a new covenant and creating a government from scratch. The Massachusetts Bay Company had been founded by the free consent of its original members in 1629, and that existing corporation did not dissolve in 1630. The assistants were proposing to add what amounted at most to a new nonshareholding category of freemen for the company. Why then did they add the new freemen? In the late 1670s, William Hubbard, the General Court’s official historian, offered an explanation for this decision, one curiously overlooked by modern scholars. Hubbard wrote that in 1630 (when Hubbard himself was a nine-year-old immigrant), “it was supposed by some” that “ambition” would “naturally” incline men “to invade the rights and liberties of their brethren.” Making the assistants responsible to an electorate put a check on ambition and the abuse of power, much like congregationalism itself, thus “preserving the liberty of the people, and preventing any entrenching thereon by the power of the rulers.” Hubbard described the addition of the new freemen as providing a “foundation” for this goal of hemming in the rulers. The foundation of the “civil polity” itself, he noted, lay in the 1629 charter.12

Unlike modern interpretations, Hubbard’s invocation of the colonists’ fear of unchecked power has a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support it. That fear was a long-standing one among radical puritans. Recent political events had ensured that it would not be placed on a back burner in Massachusetts, either by ordinary colonists or by the colony’s leaders. In the 1620s, England’s monarchs, James I and Charles I, besides courting anti-Calvinists, grew increasingly disenchanted with the

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constitutional restraints they faced. Their disenchantment was due primarily to Parliament’s demands to have its endless and inconvenient grievances taken seriously in exchange for granting the monarch what tended to be inadequate amounts of operating money. James usually confined his disenchantment to theoretical statements about a monarch’s unlimited powers, but his son, Charles I, who assumed the throne in 1625, was a different case. Charles lacked James’s schooling in the hard give-andtake of Scottish politics, and he expected as a matter of prickly, insecure reflex that his subjects would obey, not question him. Grievances, to Charles, were much the same thing as disloyalty. What to Charles’s subjects was the lawful assertion of their rights, liberties, and religion against an increasingly aggressive, apparently Catholic-tilting monarch was to Charles a plot spearheaded by puritan republicans to strip him of his powers and perhaps to end monarchy altogether, while any royal concessions to those plotters only encouraged them. As a result, fears about the direction of England’s monarchy were widespread. A new term, “political puritan,” was coined to describe the activists defending English liberties against their monarchs.13 What little hope puritans had for Charles’s reign came from their connections with his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham was not an obvious figure for the godly to rally around, since he possessed insatiable greed, was ruthlessly unscrupulous in his efforts to gratify it, and had Catholic relatives. In February 1626, sensing the way the wind was blowing, Buckingham abandoned the puritans and threw in his lot with the rising party of anti-Calvinists at the famous York House conference.14 In need of money in 1626 for disastrous wars against Spain and France, Charles called a parliament, only to dissolve it to keep it from impeaching Buckingham. Still in need of money, late that year Charles demanded a notorious extraparliamentary massive forced loan from his subjects, with slender prospects of it ever being repaid. Ministers hostile to puritanism were happy to preach that he was entirely within his rights to do so. Charles’s legally dubious insistence on confiscating the property of his subjects practically invited the widespread protest that ensued. That agitation resulted in the jailing of seventy-six gentlemen, the dismissal of four Lords from their local offices, and the removal of Charles’s chief

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justice for failing to approve the loan. Buckingham was widely assumed to be the “evil counselor” who was behind the Forced Loan. He was also assumed, in the more lurid reaches of the English Protestant imagination, to be a Catholic agent, the murderer of James I, and a fit target for assassination.15 Thomas Scott, a “political puritan” and member of the House of Commons, wrote a manuscript treatise expressing the most extreme antimonarchical sentiments surviving from this period. Scott argued that kings had strictly limited authority and that Parliament had the right and duty to “do justice” by executing Buckingham, even against the king’s wishes. His position was not unlike Martin Marprelate’s claim in 1588 that Parliament could institute presbyterianism against the queen’s desire. But Scott, unlike Marprelate, wasted no kind words for his monarch. Charles, Scott argued, showed himself to be a “gracelesse Tyrant” when he cooperated with the duke’s “loanes and impositions and exacted ser vices contrarie to right and libertie,” rather than have the duke put to death. Charles was like King Saul in the Old Testament. Saul disobeyed God’s command to kill the king of the Amelikites, Agag, whereupon the prophet Samuel, a “Consciencious puritan,” reproved Saul and slew Agag himself. Parliament should follow Samuel’s example, for all “puritans” would refuse to “yeald obedience to Tyrannical and Lawlesse commands.”16 Scott in his outrage against Buckingham was getting violently close to the boundary between the conventional humanist and puritan commitment to engaged citizenship and republicanism itself. In the latter, the monarch was, at most, the expendable executor of the commonwealth’s will, especially as that will was expressed by activist “puritans.” Scott had been an uneasy episcopalian in the 1610s, but by the time he wrote against Buckingham, he had moved on to the more tyranny-proof presbyterianism as his churchly ideal (Scott returns briefly in Godly Republicanism’s final chapter). The Massachusetts puritans were to take an even longer conceptual journey in both their churches and their state than Scott, but for much the same reasons that Scott did.17 The Massachusetts Bay Company itself emerged out of agitation against the Forced Loan in Lincolnshire. This agitation has been called “one of the most effective protests against Crown policy in the entire

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pre-Civil War period.” The Earl of Lincoln, Theophilous Clinton, active in the organization of the Massachusetts Bay Company, spearheaded the protest. His confederates included the ministers-to-be of Salem and Boston, Samuel Skelton and John Cotton, and future Massachusetts assistants Atherton Hough, Isaac Johnson (the earl’s son-in-law), William Coddington, Richard Bellingham, and John Humfrey (another son-inlaw as well as treasurer of the Dorchester Company), along with future Massachusetts governor Thomas Dudley, who at the time was Lincoln’s steward. Dudley coordinated the Lincolnshire protest in 1627 while Lincoln was imprisoned for a manuscript pamphlet he had distributed and probably written himself against the loan.18 The Earl of Lincoln’s pamphlet shared an important characteristic with Scott’s treatise. Protests against the king’s behavior typically went at least through the motion of acknowledging his benevolent intentions and a harmony of interests between him and his subjects—as one member of Parliament put it in 1629, while savaging the king’s policies, the king’s “goodness is so clear, that we need not mistrust.” The earl’s pamphlet, on the other hand, assumed struggle, not harmony. The loan was part of a larger project to “suppresse Parlament,” Lincoln charged, and to rob the freemen of England of their liberties. To pay the loan would be to “make our selves the Instruments of our owne slavery,” and all those who cared for “the good of the common wealth” were refusing it. Both the pamphlet and the successfully disruptive Lincolnshire protest movement presumed an oppositional politics that would become familiar in the 1640s. It is surely not coincidental that, according to Thomas Dudley, plans for the Massachusetts Bay Colony commenced in conversations in Lincolnshire around 1627 between him and “friends,” during the height of resistance to the Forced Loan.19 A significant geographical connection existed between areas of strident protest against the loan and areas of puritanism. Future members of the Massachusetts Bay Company were among the London merchants who refused to pay it. John Winthrop kept his imprisoned neighbor, Sir Francis Barrington, informed of resistance to the loan in the heavily puritan Stour Valley region. “What times are these!” lamented the Suffolk minister John Wilson to Winthrop over this assault on property early in 1627. “No man knowes what is his owne, or whither that he hath, be not

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kept for the enemies of god?” Three years later, Wilson, Winthrop, and the Lincolnshire Forced Loan activists Isaac Johnson and Thomas Dudley would be the four founding members of the Boston/Charleston congregational church.20 The enemies of God, as Wilson called them, continued their hunt for money even after the Forced Loan. For that reason, Charles called another parliament in 1628. Wilson wrote a supportive electioneering letter to Barrington commending him and the rest of “those worthy Zelots and patriots” for their care of church and commonwealth. By 1628, Charles’s disregard for his subjects’ liberties, his laxity toward Catholics, and his active promotion of anti-Calvinist divines had made the fear of a popish plot against liberty and Protestantism widespread. Charles reluctantly agreed to a parliamentary Petition of Right that bound him to rule by law. The citizens of London celebrated with bonfires when Charles accepted it. The country rejoiced even more fervently when a disgruntled military officer killed Buckingham in August. Charles was horrified by the assassination and the rejoicing. The country was horrified in turn when Charles after the adjournment of Parliament promoted anti-Calvinist clerics whom Parliament had impeached and raised the anti-Calvinist and bitterly anti-puritan William Laud to the powerful position of bishop of London. Charles also made it clear that he interpreted the Petition of Right in a way that rendered its limitations on his power meaningless.21 Still in need of funds and unable to grasp that his subjects had a principled quarrel with him, Charles called Parliament again in 1629. Predictable chaos ensued. Charles adjourned it on March 2. In a desperate act, two members of Parliament held the speaker of the House of Commons in his chair to keep him from calling the adjournment, while the house passed three resolutions read to it by John Eliot. The resolutions denounced innovations in religion and warned of the threat that Charles’s financial designs on his subjects’ property presented to the “Liberty of the Kingdome.” Charles dissolved Parliament on March 10. He warned that he would not call another one until those whom he regarded as the ringleaders of parliamentary opposition had been punished and their followers had “come to a better understanding of us and themselves”—not conditions likely to have puritans waiting in anticipation. There was widespread concern that this session might be the last meeting of Parliament

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for an indefinite period. Eliot had leisure enough while subsequently imprisoned in the Tower of London to make his own copy of Winthrop’s arguments for emigrating to Massachusetts. That summer Charles told the French ambassador that the leaders of Parliament were puritans, which also meant, as he explained to the ambassador, that they were republicans and enemies of monarchs.22

The Massachusetts settlers’ dread of unchecked power did not dissolve in the salt air of the Atlantic crossing. One of the assistants present at the October 1630 meeting, William Pynchon, later discovered echoes of the “tyranny” of the Forced Loan in the effort of the Connecticut government to requisition a canoe of his without his consent. In 1644, Winthrop denounced government, “where a people have men sett over them without their choyce, or allowance” (which was the case initially in Massachusetts) as “Tiranye, and impietye.” The three ministers hired by the Massachusetts Bay Company, John Wilson, Samuel Skelton, and George Philips, who were present in 1630, all at various times before or afterward demonstrated their opposition to arbitrary government; they probably would have encouraged the expansion of the franchise. The “people” at this meeting of the General Court in October 1630 came mostly from regions of the greatest protest against Charles’s activities.23 In other words, deep-seated concern about the liberties of the people and the danger of arbitrary government was demonstrably widespread among those present at the 1630 meeting of the General Court. Thus there is ample reason to accept Hubbard’s claim about the determination to keep unrestrained power out of Massachusetts. The franchise was expanded, however cautiously, by a consensus that this expansion was necessary to avoid tyranny. The decision to create a new body of freemen and dilute the power of the assistants had nothing overtly religious about it, but it was scarcely coincidental that the settlers had just instituted a form of church government that drastically restrained and carefully monitored the power of church rulers and that the defenders of congregationalism insisted that all governments had to be founded on the consent of the governed. And while this decision was bound up with the tumultuous events of the 1620s, it was also not coincidental that radical

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puritans had been worrying about rulers breaking through the restraints on their power in church and state for over sixty years. Thereafter, the freemen pushed hard for further expansion of their role in the government, with the assistants offering only limited resistance. Annual elections of all the assistants and the governor commenced in 1632. In 1634 the General Court, at the instigation of the freemen after they read the charter, arrived at its basic permanent form, more or less in accord with the charter’s terms. The General Court, not the Court of Assistants, became the colony’s chief judicial court and legislative body, meeting four times a year, with the freemen represented by deputies from each town.24 But even the original revision of the Massachusetts government in 1630 made Massachusetts the only commonwealth within King Charles I’s realms where the freemen had final control over all of the officials who immediately affected their lives. In 1630, in other words, the Massachusetts colonists, left to their own devices, erected precisely what English monarchs from Elizabeth to Charles I suspected that puritans always wanted, a republican government.

One important and curious element of Massachusetts’s republican politics in the 1630s was the colonists’ determination to nip in the bud any hint of an internal monarchical threat to their new form of government. They were hypersensitive even to the remote chance of hereditary rule. Winthrop and some ministers, including John Cotton, for example, never lost the sense implicit in the 1630 restructuring of the government that the rulers of the country should have tenure in office for life, subject to good behavior, much like the elders of Massachusetts churches. On the other hand, some freemen as early as 1633 and 1635 are recorded as thinking that the governor should change every year and the assistants at least occasionally, lest these positions “be esteemed hereditary.” The freemen voted Winthrop himself out as governor in 1640 after alarm stirred up by ministers that the frequency with which he was reelected was planting the seeds of hereditary government.25 Yet even the Massachusetts men who supported provisional life tenure for rulers abhorred hereditary rule. Winthrop wrote a letter, which has since disappeared, to the puritan Lord Saye and Sele defending

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Massachusetts’s non-hereditary government and declaring that he “woude not be enthralled to advance other mens posterytie” (Saye responded with a vigorous defense of the importance of hereditary rule, provided that there were suitable constitutional protections against tyranny).26 John Cotton in 1636 insisted that “hereditary power and authority” was not a mandate of God but “standeth only by the civil laws of some commonwealths.” The commonwealth of Massachusetts, Cotton warned, would be subjected to “reproach and prejudice” if it were to give authority and power to someone whom God had not called to such a position merely on the basis of a hereditary claim. It was fit for ancient Israel to have evolved into a monarchy, Cotton allowed, but only because Christ the king was to have emerged from that lineage. Otherwise, “hereditary government by succession” was “not safe.”27 The Massachusetts aversion to hereditary rule may have represented an indirect critique of the upper levels of England’s stratified society coming from a migration drawn from its middling ranks. That aversion was also inseparable, however, from the disastrous interaction of puritan religious aspirations and hereditary, ungodly monarchs. Godly reformation and monarchy had proven a dysfunctional combination; reformation required republicanism. John Cotton, when writing up a proposed biblical law code for the colony in 1636, justified its elected government with scripture verses from the period of the Old Testament Jews’ premonarchical “republic.”28 But five years earlier the settlers had already formalized the religious underpinnings of their republic. On May 18, 1631, at the first yearly General Court, the officers and “people” approved a dramatic change in the qualification for voters and in the nature of the colony’s fledgling republican government. They decided that in the future, men who would be “admitted to the freedome of this body politicke” had to be members of local churches. In a period of six months, the basis of membership in the Massachusetts Bay Company had moved from purchasing shares to being a male settler to being a male church member. The new franchise was unique in Christendom until the New Haven colony adopted it in 1639.29 Being a freeman was a prerequisite for being a member of Massachusetts’s government. While England’s puritans conventionally considered themselves to be the realm’s most virtuous citizens, for the Massachusetts puritans to

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anchor the electoral franchise in church membership was a bold move. The English franchise was based on property, and even among the English godly, Massachusetts’s change to church membership was regarded as dangerous. Presbyterians, whatever their civil preferences, had always argued that there was no necessary relationship between church government and civil government. That claim had been central in their efforts to beat back charges that their republican churches proved their disloyalty to the monarch. As scripture demonstrated, they argued, the church existed under a wide variety of civil governments. Thus the Massachusetts requirement that the franchise be limited to “saints by calling” seemed to thrust the church illegitimately into the center of worldly power. To its godly critics, that religious requirement even smacked of Roman Catholic claims that the pope had final power over secular governments.30 There were good external and internal reasons to take this bold step of knitting the churches and the government so closely together in 1631. Over the previous winter, news had drifted into Massachusetts that political and religious affairs in England were “as you left them, and rather worser then any whit amended.” News also arrived of concern among the godly that the Massachusetts emigrants were becoming separatists. Pressure from England might intersect with local unhappiness. Many of the inhabitants of Massachusetts came as dependent household members, children, servants, and females. They had not necessarily had much input in their household’s decision to migrate, and children would soon grow up. Not all of those who came over of their own choice were necessarily deeply religious, and not everyone who was religious was necessarily convinced by congregationalism. Two people had already been banished.31 These potential threats to Massachusetts’s emergent church order provided strong practical incentives to limit the franchise to men who had demonstrated a commitment to it. Contemporaries acknowledged as much. As John Cotton put it, if “worldly men” were to become the majority in Massachusetts, “as they soon might do,” they would elect worldly magistrates who would “turn the edge of all authority and laws against the church and its members.” The only way to ensure that the government would not turn against Massachusetts’s radical religious

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experiment and break the colony’s covenant with God was to make sure that church members ran the government. Historians have regarded that pragmatic explanation as adequate.32 Yet the intentions behind the godly franchise and the possibilities discovered within it ran far wider and deeper conceptually than the defensive pragmatic concern to protect Massachusetts congregationalism, and those deeper intentions embraced positive, principled concerns and ambitions, secular as well as religious. The secular ambitions for this new kind of franchise were expressed immediately, in the terse explanation written in the Court record of May 18, 1631, of why the Court chose to limit the franchise to church members. It was “to the end [that] the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men.”33 “Honest” was a common self-appellation of puritans, for what could be a better demonstration of one’s sincerity and probity—one’s “honesty,” in other words—than godliness, as the Bible itself suggested (1 Timothy 2:2). But “honesty” also had political overtones, of which this group of veterans of the struggles of the 1620s would have been well aware. The “honest patriot” was an admired figure in that decade among political puritans, a stout Protestant who would follow his conscience and defend the public interest by opposing the arbitrary actions of the crown. The Lincolnshire anti–Forced Loan pamphlet had addressed itself to “all honest men,” while according to a member of the House of Commons in 1628, one mark of an “honest man” was imprisonment for refusing to pay the Forced Loan. Honesty made for a good, vigilant citizen; godliness produced honesty; and church membership certified godliness. John Cotton emphasized this relationship forcefully in 1636 when explaining the godly franchise. “None are so fit to be trusted with the liberties of the commonwealth as church members,” he claimed. “For the liberties of the freemen of this commonwealth are such, as require men of faithful integrity to God and the state, to preserve the same.”34 Since only freemen could be elected to office in Massachusetts, the godly franchise was a way of ensuring honest rulers as well as honest voters. Cotton rejected out of hand the conventional argument that someone could have the civic virtues necessary for magistracy without having been saved. Such men, Cotton said, even with the “best gifts and parts,”

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no matter how strongly they started, would eventually “turn aside by crooked ways.” Cotton or, more likely, his friend John Davenport warned in another tract that these unregenerate men might appear “civilly honest, and morally just,” but people could “have no assurance of their justice.” Since all men who had not been converted were “unrighteous,” they would create factions and pervert justice. Only “saints by calling” could be truly faithful to either God or man. The preacher of the 1638 election sermon to the General Court, Thomas Shepard, expressed this line of argument concisely. A governor who was not a church member would be “an enemy unto the strictness of churches,” and, he warned, “ruine church you ruine state.”35 Thus, according to dominant Massachusetts political theory, the only reliable source of civic virtue in rulers and ruled alike was godliness, and the only relatively reliable sign of godliness was membership in a church that took policing itself seriously. Expressed so baldly, the theory was novel. But, like the Massachusetts churches themselves, it had deep puritan and separatist roots. It echoed the confidence of Elizabethan presbyterians that they were the queen’s best subjects and their church discipline the best foundation for social, spiritual, and moral reformation. It echoed as well the separatist Henry Barrow’s insistence on the necessity for virtuous ecclesiastical citizens to keep a close watch over their civic rulers through the exercise of church discipline. Even the strictly religious goals of the godly franchise had conceptual ambitions that a pragmatic reading misses. Those ambitions can be recovered via the full meaning of what puritans understood by “the church.” It was standard doctrine that Christ had two churches. One was his visible church, consisting of all of the outward, ostensible believers in the world, damned and saved alike. The other was the invisible church, consisting only of the saints, the people whom God had predestined for salvation. In England, the crown regarded the issue of whom God had chosen for salvation to be God’s business alone, not the monarch’s servants’, be they bishops or civil officers. The membership of the visible church that the English government served and protected was coterminous with England’s population, saved and damned alike.36 Puritans recognized that the visible church, even in Massachusetts, would never be identical to the true invisible church. No matter how

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strict, it would always have people in it who appeared outwardly holy but were in reality among the predestined damned. Yet as scholars have noted, puritanism contained a powerful drive to whittle down the visible church toward the proportions of the invisible church. That drive could take the guise of the ubiquitous convention among English puritans of using the term “church” to refer not to the body of English people but to themselves alone. It could also manifest as the effort to install strict ecclesiastical discipline to keep out as many sinners as possible. In Massachusetts, membership restrictions and discipline were pushing the visible church far closer to the invisible church than it had ever been in England. The Massachusetts franchise was not simply a pragmatic defensive effort to build another wall around the churches; it was a positive attempt to make the political nation, like the Massachusetts churches, approach the contours of the invisible church. The only people in a visible church that God cared about were his chosen saints. They were also the only people he cared about in a country, as his willingness to spare the depraved Old Testament city of Sodom for the sake of ten righteous men demonstrated. The old presbyterian Arthur Hildersham in 1625 invoked that example while clarifying at a public fast during a plague outbreak that “the nation and people that we pray for, are Gods owne people, and such as beare His Name.” It was in this spirit of the ultimate fiery fate of Sodom that Hildersham’s friend John Cotton warned in England that the enemies of the godly were “publike incendiaries to a State.”37 Massachusetts had been created for religious purposes. A high proportion of its population, unlike in England, could be assumed to belong to the invisible church, and the colony had church mechanisms in place for approximately identifying those people. At this time, it was a political truism that the defense and nurturing of true religion was one of government’s chief obligations. Thus in the new colony, it was a small step from the position that the godly were the only people in a polity whom God cared about to the conclusion that the polity should revolve around God’s people. And what better way to ensure that outcome than seeing to it that only the godly could vote or hold office? The Massachusetts franchise, binding on rulers and ruled alike, in other words, purified the political nation of the ungodly as a positive

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religious step, not simply a defensive one. This purification was a major part of its appeal (residents who were not church members otherwise enjoyed the same civil rights). According to Cotton, the freemen regarded it as scripture mandates that church members should be ruled and judged only by God-fearing, righteous brethren (Exodus 18.21; Deuteronomy 17.15; Proverbs 29.2; Job 34:30). Those mandates required that the magistrates themselves had been found suitable for church membership. 38 The invisible church of the predestined saved should only have secular rulers over it who were themselves likely to be part of that church. Cotton’s invocation of the freemen’s support for the godly franchise makes it plausible that the initiative for this franchise came not only from leaders fearful of internal and external threats to the colony. The initiative also arose from “below,” from ministers and laity keen to carve out more exclusionary political space around what would have appeared to them already in 1631 as the great accomplishment of Massachusetts: pure visible churches, finally free from the corruptions and dross of the Church of England and moving ever closer, through the strictness of their membership requirements, to conformity with the invisible church. The franchise expressed much the same exclusive spirit as the clause in the 1636 Dedham town covenant restricting new settlers to those who would “walke in a peaceable conversation with all meekenes of spirit for the edification of each other in the knowledg and faith of the Lord Jesus” or the 1635 Boston town meeting resolution to admit only new residents who were likely to become church members. In Taunton, the minister Nicholas Streete tried to persuade his town to do the same as Boston. Or if the town must admit ungodly persons, Streete insisted, it ought to deny them land, that “they might be knowne to be but as Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the ser vice of them that were of the Church [Joshua 9:23].”39 Non–church members in republican New England were politically comparable to the slaves of the ancient Jews, at least in the imagination of the region’s most heated zealots. But even if non–church members could be envisioned by some overimaginative biblicists as potential slaves, that grimly repressive vision should not obscure relatively expansive numbers. In England in 1640 only around a third of adult males met the property requirements for

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voting. Massachusetts was far more generous. Probably well over a majority of men in the colony voted in the 1630s, even if the colony’s different filtering mechanism allowed for a strikingly different conceptual political universe.40

It might be argued that republican ambitions among Massachusetts settlers, despite the grandiose and even chilling religious aspirations that lay behind them, were bound to a very short leash. The Massachusetts Bay Company was scarcely the first of England’s chartered corporations, be they companies or towns, to describe itself with republican language. However, those other corporations would not have seriously considered themselves republics. They knew that ultimate power in their polities lay not with them but with the monarch. As the writer of an “apology” for the city of London put it, “It is beside the purpose to dispute whether . . . the government here [i.e., London] bee Democratical or Aristocraticall, for . . . London is . . . no free estate . . . endowed with . . . absolute power”—the extremely influential late sixteenth-century political theorist Jean Bodin used “absolute power” (or “the greatest power to command”) as a cognate term for sovereignty.41 Yet what London lacked was precisely what allowed at least some of the founders of Massachusetts to soar in their aspirations for their colony. The Massachusetts government enjoyed, as Massachusetts’s leaders were well aware, absolute power. Or as the Massachusetts Bay Company’s royal charter put it, the governor and officers of the Company had “full and Absolute Power and Authoritie to correct, punishe, pardon, governe, and rule” within the boundaries of Massachusetts. Whoever among King Charles’s servants wrote the charter pictured the government of the Massachusetts Bay Company meeting in London, where it could easily be put back in its place should it exercise its absolute power in a manner displeasing to the crown.42 Once that government was across the Atlantic, however, “full and Absolute Power” encouraged the colonists to nurture exceedingly ambitious conceptions of the autonomy of their godly quasi-republic. At a distance of three thousand miles it was extremely difficult for the English government to forcibly demonstrate that they were wrong.

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Not that His Majesty’s government did not try. A privy council order to return the charter reached the colony in June 1634. By September the colonists had heard that there were ships with soldiers preparing to sail to compel them to take a new governor and come under the discipline of the Church of England. The General Court, meeting that month, reacted aggressively. It passed orders to improve the forts in Boston harbor and elsewhere, strengthen the militia, and give Winthrop and three of the assistants power of commanders-in-chief in “any war that may befall us for the space of a year.” At least one letter writer to England anticipated war breaking out between the colony and England. If there was widespread questioning among the freemen about the wisdom and appropriateness of the magistrates preparing the colony for what would have been considered treason in any English court, that questioning left no trace in the 1635 elections, which produced only a very modest reshuffling of the Court of Assistants. News reached the colony in June 1635 that the great warship intended to bring their new governor over to them had fallen apart on its launching, ending the threat of invasion. 43 The willingness of the government of this four thousand–person colony to defy the king’s commands is usually treated simply as an expression of a doughty puritan spirit of resistance. But it was in fact the expression of underlying audacious legal arguments. “What the King is pleased to bestow upon us, and we have accepted, is truly our owne,” Winthrop wrote in 1637 in reference to the charter. He was echoing almost four decades of increasingly strident arguments about the absolute right of subjects to defend their property against the machinations of an arbitrary monarch. The charter and the privileges it bestowed were the property of the Massachusetts Bay Company and not subject to illegal seizure by the king’s servants or his courts. Thus Massachusetts was perfectly within its rights to fortify its defenses against the prospective arrival of those servants in 1634. When Governor Winthrop and the assistants asked the ministers’ advice in this sticky legal matter, they were told that evasion or playing for time (“avoide or protracte”) was the best policy but that they had every right to “defende our lawfull possessions.” When King’s Bench revoked the Massachusetts charter in 1637, the General Court ignored its demands to return the charter to England. In 1638 it politely warned the English government that should the General Court

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surrender the charter, the “common people” would regard themselves as independent of England.44 The autonomy that many of the colony’s political leaders discovered in what they considered to be an irrevocable charter was impressive. To them, it was self-evident that the laws of England stopped at the ocean’s edge, just as they stopped at the border with Scotland. It was no less obvious to them that they were therefore outside the reach of England’s legal system; the law courts of Massachusetts and England had nothing to do with each other, exactly like the courts of Scotland and England. The General Court in 1637 claimed that it was the final court of judicial appeals in Massachusetts (“one of the most principall rights of soveraigntie,” according to Bodin).45 The king was their sovereign, the colonists agreed, if only because the colony’s government rested on the charter he granted and because English citizenship was advantageous to them (by the 1640s, if not earlier, some colonists were claiming that the land they occupied had belonged to the Indians, not Charles, and since they had bought it from the Indians, they were free to declare independence from England, should they so choose). But in practical terms, the king’s sovereignty meant very little. The king, by the terms of the charter, had a right to a share of all the gold and silver mined in Massachusetts; geology kept this right from ever being tested. The charter specified that the colony could pass no laws repugnant to the laws of England. This restriction may have generated some qualms until the colonists remembered that any laws of England that clashed with the laws of God were presumed not to be genuine laws; the good puritans of Massachusetts, by definition, would not pass laws repugnant to the legitimate laws of England.46 The dominant attitude in the General Court appears to have been that Massachusetts was the rough equivalent of later self-governing members of the English Commonwealth, like Canada or Australia. The governor and assistants took oaths of allegiance to King Charles up until war broke out between him and Parliament in 1642, but there is no evidence that they regarded these oaths as committing them to any obligations beyond sending Charles his fair share of Massachusetts’s nonexistent precious metals. From 1634 onward, the freemen and non-freemen took oaths of loyalty to the colony and its government, with no mention of the king.47

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How early this expansive interpretation of the charter began to coalesce is impossible to know. It is unlikely that Winthrop, a lawyer, and his associates had given no thought to the legal implications that could be wrung out of the charter when they demanded to take it with them to Massachusetts in 1629. English courts had already shown that they were easily bent to the king’s will, Parliament was not going to be meeting any time soon, and Massachusetts was going to need every defensive tool it could get. Whenever the interpretation started, it is within this context of perceived charter-backed quasi-independence that the political development of Massachusetts needs to be placed. Plymouth Plantation, under the terms of the Mayflower Compact that the settlers drew up before disembarking at Plymouth, was a self-governing “republic.” But that document had no official status. Legally the colony depended on a charter granted by the Council for New England, to which it was subordinate. Plymouth’s freemen took an oath of loyalty to the king.48 Republican forms in an autonomous polity result, by definition, in a republic. Londoners could not imagine their city as a “free estate,” but the inhabitants of Massachusetts had no such conceptual inhibition. In his election sermon of 1638, the minister Thomas Shepard called Massachusetts a free state “where the government depends on popular election,” and other ministers echoed him; Massachusetts dissidents in the 1640s charged that calling the colony a free state constituted high treason. Winthrop used a similar cognate term for “republic” when he classified Massachusetts in 1637 as a “popular state,” where the people’s power was “unlimited in its own nature.”49 Massachusetts was a deliberate exercise by the saints in autonomous state formation, independent like its churches.

Early New England has been called a herrenvolk democracy, to emphasize that the English “master race” did not share the region’s political blessings with non-Europeans.50 However, the religious underpinnings and purposes of the Massachusetts polity, as well as the willingness of the most zealous settlers to exclude ungodly settlers or even conceive of them as church members’ slaves, suggest the conceptual inadequacy of that term. Massachusetts’s totalizing godly republicanism, made possible by the migration’s religious orientation and the colony’s charter and strict

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churches, was about benefitting the commonwealth by determining formal political participation not through bloodlines and/or ownership of property but through demonstrated Protestant zealotry and piety. It was even more profoundly about benefiting God’s people by keeping them and their institutions unthreatened and, no less important, unpolluted, by ungodly rulers, be they hereditary or elected. In both the state and the churches, the settlers were pushing long-standing radical puritan assumptions into uncharted territories, and how well and how long those assumptions would work together remained to be seen.

chapter 9

A City on a Hill

I

t was not a given in the early 1630s that the religious and civic components of Massachusetts’s godly quasi-republic would succeed together. Congregationalism had been birthed in defiance of the state in the sixteenth century, not in cooperation with it, and the handful of European congregational churches had accumulated a less-than-stellar record of stability and cooperation. Massachusetts’s civic government, while working out its relationship with the churches, would also have to start from scratch in attracting and holding its subjects’ obedience and loyalty. Even the physical survival of the colony was an open question, with low immigration and inadequate means of subsistence. While in this vulnerable embryonic condition, the colony underwent an unexpected crash course in the functioning of a godly republic. In 1634 it was hit with a religious crisis spreading out along the colony’s blurred line between separatism and puritanism over issues that were foundational to congregationalism: how did corruption and antichristian power work, and how were they best opposed? Tensions over these inherently ambiguous subjects had been boiling up among separatists and radical puritans over the last half century, and they were far from resolved in Massachusetts. The crisis pitted a charismatic young minister, Roger Williams, and the Salem church against most of the colony’s 206

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ministers and magistrates, and it produced two diametrically opposed outcomes. For Williams, Massachusetts’s experiment in congregationalism, as he understood it, proved a failure, and he started off on his journey as the famous solitary prophet of the individual conscience. For his opponents, the colony’s emergent congregationalist church-state establishment had managed to prove itself viable on its first major unanticipated shakedown run. Meanwhile, prosperity brought on by rising immigration resolved the immediate problem of physical survival. By the middle of the 1630s, Massachusetts, at least in the minds of some of its leaders, appeared to be on its way to institutional success. As its recent trials had demonstrated, its republican New Testament churches had shown that they could indeed successfully nurture and be nurtured by their complementary republican civic government. The reforming ambitions of the Elizabethan presbyterians had finally been realized. Or perhaps it was a much older epic struggle that had found a resolution. Christian liberty had finally received the biblically purified institutional vessels in church and state needed to give it dynamic protection from Antichrist’s lust for power in one small corner of the globe. As that story concluded, some puritans on both sides of the Atlantic were beginning to perceive Massachusetts as opening a new chapter in the sacred history of the world.

Much of Massachusetts’s accelerated institutional learning curve grew out of the ambiguous radical puritan/separatist foundations of the colony. The churches in Massachusetts were not exclusively “nonseparating” congregationalist, for they included the separatists at Salem. The colony’s official nonseparating congregationalism was itself probably in part a diplomatic formula for bridging the gap between puritan and Plymouth/ Salem congregationalism. As with any compromise, the formula was liable to attack from both sides. The pulpit at Salem potentially provided a public, privileged, and even obligatory space for an attack from the separatist flank, should someone feel the need to ring the old separatist alarm bell against radical puritan cooperation with Antichrist and his power. Roger Williams (c. 1606–1683), was precisely that person. Williams came to Massachusetts as a young minister seeking a community of

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reforming pure churches; he believed he had found that community, at least in embryo; and he then ended up in a position where he did his best to destroy it, albeit inadvertently. Williams fled Massachusetts for Narragansett Bay in 1636. He left the colony’s government considerably more capable of coercion than it had been when he arrived, and his own faith in community and reformation in the process of dissolving. Williams, besides being a minister, was a gifted linguist, and a protégé of the champion of English liberties Sir Edward Coke. Unlike many puritans, after his conversion he never wrestled with doubts about his salvation. But he struggled all his life to purge sin from himself and from his worship of God. While in England, Williams participated in at least some of the planning discussions for Massachusetts. In late 1630, he fled to the colony, pursued, he claimed, by Bishop Laud, and “perswaded against the Nationall Church and Ceremonies and Bishops.”1 The scanty surviving evidence suggests that Williams was introduced to congregationalist principles not from studying the tomes of respected ministers like William Ames but from the English puritan sectarian underground, from the London Jacob congregationalist church, and perhaps from the General Baptist offshoots of the Barrow separatists. In this harassed underground, adapting pure churches to the needs of an effective church-state establishment had not been a pressing concern, but warding off repression was.2 A new story was circulating around it about the decline of the New Testament churches and the rise and nature of antichristian power. Williams probably learned that story there, adapted it to a preexisting radical puritan narrative, and brought the result with him to Massachusetts. 3 Along with Massachusetts congregationalists and earlier presbyterians, Williams agreed that power-grabbing bishops had arisen in ancient times only as the spiritual sword of church discipline grew dull. With his fellow puritans, he agreed that the full measure of antichristian apostasy occurred in Rome. Where Williams differed was that for him Rome’s apostasy did not simply culminate in the popes. Its full measure included the fusion of church and state that occurred when the ancient Roman emperors, newly converted to Christianity, replaced the Christian sword of the spirit with the bloody sword of the magistrate to spread and protect Christianity. As a result, people became Christians not

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because they received the word of God in their hearts but because they felt the pressure of the state. Church purity inevitably vanished in that union of church and state. In the Christianized Roman empire, the true Christian churches, voluntary, separate from the world, and only consisting of visible saints, became buried under the inevitable corruption of a national church, and over a thousand years later they had yet to completely dig their way out; “Babel or confusion was usher’d in,” Williams lamented, “and by degrees the Gardens of the Churches of Saints were turned into the Wildernesse of whole Nations.” Better a heathen, Williams felt, than a false, coerced Christian (although both would end up in hell).4 Puritan congregationalists and even the most rigid of the previous generation of separatists envisioned that in their ideal polities, the magistrates would still herd an unwilling population to approved churches on Sundays to hear the gospel for their own good (the ancient Christian Roman emperors’ real gospel crippling failure, John Cotton later retorted to Williams, was their reluctance to execute heretics spreading false doctrines). For Williams, however, any time the rulers of a nation compelled people religiously, the result was the creation of a polluted national church. All national churches were the daughters of the Great Whore of Babylon, the Catholic Church, drunk with the blood of the saints shed by the persecuting kings who were the ten horns of the beast on which she rode (Revelation 17 was one of Williams’s most-pondered Bible chapters). Princes who conceived of their office as a “Christian” one, be they Protestant or Catholic, were the anti-type of Ammon, King David’s son, who raped his half-sister Tamar.5 Although Williams’s insistence on the separation of church and state was extreme, the framework of his narrative about the rise of antichristian power was puritan, and his hostility to the ten kings who served as the horns of the beast had a puritan political context. King Charles I himself, Williams wrote in 1633, was one of those horns. Two decades later Williams celebrated Charles’s execution.6 Creating a godly republic like Massachusetts was one outcome of radical puritan disillusionment with Protestant monarchical power; insisting that the state stay out of Christianity altogether was another. Williams while in Massachusetts has been called “the very soul of separatism.”7 But had he been so, he would not have created nearly as

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much trouble as he did. Williams was, in reality, a striking example of how undetermined the boundaries between separatism and puritanism could be. He was, in principle, a rigid separatist, believing that the parish churches were all the corrupt appendages of a national church with which there should be no communion at all. The logic of rigid separatism dictated that Williams reject the Massachusetts churches, just as the rigid separatist churches in London and Amsterdam had rejected the Jacob church as a false church, and for the same reason. The Massachusetts churches were false since they refused to formally disown the corrupt English parish churches. Yet Williams began his stay in New England not rejecting the Massachusetts churches but attempting to reform them. His hope in emigrating was that he would be able to gently steer the first flourishing community of relatively pure churches since New Testament times further along the continuum of puritanism to separatism to arrive at a comprehensive separation from the corruptions of the “world.” The Boston church chose him to be its teacher in early 1631 (John Wilson, Boston’s minister, had sailed back to England at the end of March to try to persuade his wife to emigrate). Williams made his acceptance conditional on the members of the congregation purging themselves comprehensively from their previous contamination in the English national church. They would do so by publicly repenting for having “communion” with the parish churches when they lived there (a demand that Robinson did not make in Leiden). Williams also shared, but did not insist upon, his view that the magistrates had no power in religious affairs.8 The Boston church declined Williams’s demand for rigid separation. He shifted his attention to the Salem church as a more promising foothold for reform. Salem’s teacher, Francis Higginson, had died in the summer of 1630, and the church offered his position to Williams. The offer prompted the Court of Assistants to send the town a testy letter, expressing surprise that the church would offer a person with such opinions their pulpit and asking the church not to proceed without consulting the Court. The Court’s surprise is not itself surprising. Almost by definition a puritan magistrate could not imagine that God would be pleased with a society in which the magistrates abandoned their duty to

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protect true religion, as Williams was advocating. What debates in Salem this ominous appearance of a “national church,” in the form of the Court’s letter, stirred up is anyone’s guess, just as it is anyone’s guess whether the town did confer with the Court of Assistants after receiving the letter.9 But whatever happened in Salem, that summer Williams moved to Plymouth. There he farmed and joined the Plymouth church, even though his separatist ideals were stricter than Plymouth’s. Williams preached without being made a minister, and he continued his efforts at refining the separation of the church from the world. He also attracted the suspicion of Elder Brewster, who saw in him the same unworldly hairsplitting spirit that had caused so much confl ict in the Amsterdam separatist church. Over sixty years later, Cotton Mather recorded how Brewster took advantage of a visit of Winthrop and John Wilson to Plymouth in 1632. Brewster had Williams air his new idea that the civil title “goodman” should be dropped, since no one who was not saved was a good man. Winthrop, according to Mather, successfully put a stop to that “little idle whimsical conceit.”10 While Williams was in Plymouth, the Massachusetts magistrates attempted again to wield their sword for the good of the churches. A deep division in the Watertown church near the end of 1631 led the magistrates to ask the church to consider whether it should remove its ruling lay elder. The church gave an answer that Governor Winthrop regarded as unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, both sides in Watertown appealed to Winthrop for assistance in resolving their differences. Winthrop, Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, and the ruling lay elder of the Boston church came to Watertown for a meeting with the church. Winthrop took the opportunity to dramatize how the state and churches should work together by inviting the Watertown factions to regard him and Dudley as magistrates. Watertown’s pastor George Philips made it clear that he did not want state interference and invited them to participate simply as members of a neighboring congregation.11 The magistrates brandished their sword again in October 1632 with more success, this time over the head of the seventy-one-year-old minister Samuel Batchelor. Batchelor was well acquainted with England’s jails as a religious dissident, and he had spent time in the Netherlands with

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his son, a militant puritan minister with connections among congregationalists. Batchelor arrived in Massachusetts in June 1632, having already formed a shipboard church with immigrants who traveled with him. He and his church moved to Saugus, which had neither church nor minister. Rather than take anyone’s advice on how to set up the colony’s fifth church, Batchelor simply continued his church and allowed the townspeople to join. On October 3, the Court of Assistants, in response to a complaint, forbade Batchelor from practicing his ministry except to his fellow immigrants, “for his contempt of authority, and till some scandles be removed.” The scandals evidently had to do with friction between Batchelor and Saugus residents, unhappy with him personally and unhappy with how he had created, or not created, their church. Although the Court lifted its ban the next spring, friction between Batchelor and the townspeople continued until Batchelor left the town in 1636, allowing Saugus, newly renamed Lynn, to finally create its church in proper congregational fashion.12 While the Massachusetts magistrates were starting to assert themselves in church affairs, Williams in Plymouth was deepening his understanding of an evil geopolitical entity he called “Christendom.” Christendom was that part of the world where the bloody sword of the magistrate polluted the purity of the Christian spiritual swords of discipline and scripture. One sign of this pollution, Williams began to warn others, was that the English monarchs sinfully thought they had the right as “Christian” kings to give Indian land to Massachusetts and Plymouth. Puritan settlement in New England, Williams insisted, was grounded in the very apostasy that destroyed pure Christianity over a thousand years previously.13 By mid-1633, Williams’s hope of reforming the Plymouth church faded, and he and some supporters were dismissed to the Salem church. “A man godly and zealous having many precious parts but very unsettled in judgmente” was Governor Bradford’s appraisal. At Bradford’s request, Williams left him a manuscript explaining the wickedness of “Christian” monarchs in giving away Indian lands. The manuscript included a description of Charles I as one of the ten horns of the Whore of Babylon’s beast.14 After Williams returned to Massachusetts, Governor Winthrop requested a copy of the treatise. In December 1633, the Court of Assistants

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met to discuss it. What particularly upset the magistrates was Williams’s apocalyptic dismissal of Kings James I and Charles I. The magistrates were upset on pragmatic grounds, not out of deep loyalty to their monarch. News had reached the colony earlier that year of charges laid in Charles’s privy council that the colonists plotted rebellion and continually railed against the Church of England. Williams’s treatise lent the charges credibility. Even assuming that Charles was one of the beast’s ten horns, Winthrop wrote to the Salem assistant John Endicott, Williams had no reason to raise that issue in New England. If Charles decided to seek soldiers in Antichrist’s war against the saints, Winthrop reasoned, he knew better than to come recruiting in Massachusetts. What was more, the colony could find itself in deep trouble if Williams’s opinions about the king got back to England. No less offensive to Winthrop was that these troublesome opinions were “maintayned and published by a private person.” Williams held no public office, in other words, and it was not his place to publicly stir up these issues (“published” in this context meant “to make public”). Winthrop told Endicott to get Williams to retract his errors.15 Williams, in sharp contrast to his later behavior, cooperated with Winthrop. He explained in a deferential letter to the governor that he had written the Plymouth treatise only for the “private” satisfaction of Governor Bradford and that he had written the Massachusetts copy only because Winthrop had requested it. Winthrop was free to burn any part or all of it. Williams showed up at the next court and “gave satisfaction of his intention and loyalty.” There the matter was left, according to Winthrop.16 Williams made it clear that he was not seeking to raise discontent; he might not privately agree with everything in church and state in Massachusetts, but he was not a dissident. He agreed with Winthrop that it was not his place as a private person to publicly raise his concerns. Williams’s studiously moderate reply was not feigned. For him the New England churches had grievous errors, but they were still true churches. They had instituted correct worship, and they set admirable, increasingly demanding admission requirements. Williams had not abandoned fellowship with the Boston church because it recognized the parish churches; he simply refused to be its minister. He was willing to join the Plymouth church although he disagreed with its policy of permitting its

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members to listen to sermons in English parish churches. His church of Salem perhaps had become a “rigid” separatist church for its own members by this time, barring even listening to sermons in the parish churches, but it still communed with the other, less strict local churches. Williams was, by his own lights, making some effort to get along in Massachusetts because he wanted Massachusetts to succeed. He was not yet an apostle of religious liberty in itself but an apostle of a community of pure churches, and he was doing his best to restrain his opinions in the interest of that cause. He was said to have claimed that he regarded the churches of New England as the purest in the world and Salem as the purest in New England.17

There were nine of these pure churches in New England by early 1634, in raw settlements scattered for about sixty-five miles along the coast from Salem to Plymouth, with twelve ministers in office. The churches ranged from the “rigid” separatists at Salem (if that is what they had become by this time) to the “moderate” separatists at Plymouth to the puritan congregationalist churches who recognized true churches among the parishes of England, all in communion with each other. Most of the churches scrutinized their applicants for an upright life and knowledge of Christianity, but the elders at Watertown (possibly) and perhaps elsewhere were breaking new ground by probing would-be members for signs that they had experiential knowledge of their conversions.18 In 1634 events conspired to upset this delicate mutual toleration, unleash Williams, and force the state and churches to work more closely together. Salem’s minister Skelton died in early August. Williams was a firm supporter of Skelton’s policies, even the more esoteric ones, like Skelton’s insistence that women wear veils in church (1 Corinthians 11:2– 16). It is not known exactly when Williams was ordained minister to replace Skelton, but it must have been immediately assumed that he would take up Skelton’s position.19 The new position gave Williams something he had never had before in Massachusetts: a public office. Williams in his new position made rigid separation a membership requirement (if Skelton had not already done so). He possibly required prospective members to repent for all previous

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communion with the Church of England.20 But, critically, he did not insist that Salem church break off communion with the other, laxer congregational churches. With Williams’s public ministerial office, however, came the public duty to broadcast the whole counsel of God, let the chips fall where they may. Williams was no longer the “private” man who invited Winthrop to burn his treatise. He was now, as he explained later when accounting for his subsequent behavior, in the calling of a “faithful watchman,” required, as Ezekiel 33 demanded, to warn of the sins that would bring the Lord’s wrath on the land or be held by the Lord personally liable for them.21 Events had maneuvered Williams into a position where his rigid separatist aspirations could easily clash with Massachusetts’s radical puritanism. While Williams became a public figure, the Massachusetts “state,” such as it was, was increasingly compelled to define and assert its authority. In response to menacing signals of invasion coming out of England, it drastically raised the overt loyalty it demanded from its residents. In April 1634, the Court of Assistants required that all non-freemen over the age of twenty take an oath that they would obey and support the government. The Court also modified the existing freeman’s oath at this time. Among other requirements, those men joining the approximately three hundred fifty freemen in the colony would swear by the “great and dreadful name of the ever-living God” to “maintain and preserve all the liberties and privileges” of the colony. Neither oath made any mention of an obligation to obey the king.22 In May 1634, power to legislate and serve as the colony’s highest judicial court passed from the Court of Assistants to the General Court, following the demand for more powersharing by the freemen. In September, the government, now possessed of greater popular legitimacy, made its unprecedented military preparations against the threatened English takeover of the colony and against the rumored return of the discipline of the Church of England discussed in Chapter 8. As part of these preparations, the Court also launched its most ambitious campaign to date of moral reform. This campaign followed standard Christian logic for the period: God’s frowns on the colony, manifesting as danger from England, came in response to sin, and the best

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way to ward off God’s anger was for the state to clamp down on sin. The Court forbade smoking except by solitary individuals in private. It banned “newe and immodest fashions” and the wearing of jewelry by both men and women. All adults were supposed to rebuke these sins and, if that failed, report anyone with clothes or hair that were “uncomely, or prejudiciall to the common good” to the magistrates. As part of the drive to appease an angry God, the Court called for a colony-wide day of public humiliation and fasting. The colonists were to gather in their meeting houses, confess and bewail their sins, and implore God’s protection in their hour of need.23 This state-sponsored drive for moral reformation was what pushed Williams into open opposition to Massachusetts’s “national” congregationalism. It did so, however, only because Williams agreed with the drive’s basic assumption. Although he firmly believed that it was antichristian for the state to interfere with religion, he believed equally firmly that public sins, including religious sins, received public divine punishment.24 In other words, Williams did not believe that the Massachusetts magistrates could punish deviant religious behavior but he did believe that God could and would punish Massachusetts for that behavior. Now that Williams was a public figure, it was his obligation to broadcast his diagnosis of New England’s religious sins, especially on so solemn a day as an official fast. On September 17, the day of the fast, Williams warned his Salem congregation of eleven antichristian and worldly public sins bringing public calamities in Massachusetts that had to be acknowledged and mourned. The list itself has not survived, but an idea of its contents can be gleaned from the complaints against Williams that followed. God’s worship in households was still polluted by ungodly people because godly masters of households were saying prayers with unconverted household members and saying grace at meals when unconverted persons were present. The colony’s government spiritually polluted itself when it gave oaths to the non-freemen, since they had not shown that they were converted by joining a church and an oath was a religious act beyond the capacity of unconverted men. It was a sin even for freemen, who were, in the judgment of charity, among the saved, to take the freeman’s oath, since God had not sanctioned taking an oath to a government. The sin of the antichristian

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royal charter that created Massachusetts had gone unrepented. Church members were still listening to sermons in the antichristian parish churches of England on return visits. Even the colony’s displays of monarchical loyalty were spiritually polluted, for the colony continued to fly the king’s banner of Saint George, with its idolatrous red cross.25 Williams claimed that his Salem listeners seemed to assent to the evil of most, if not all, of his catalogue of provoking sins.26 Certainly the evil of the cross prompted a quick response. Endicott had it torn out of the Salem militia’s ensign. He electrified some in the colony with his blow against Antichrist and alarmed others with his act of what could be called overt rebellion against the king. Deep fractures in the Court and among the ministers over whether the cross in the flag was idolatrous kept this issue from being resolved for over a year and made it impossible to single out Williams for punishment for raising the topic. But the magistrates had many other reasons to be furious with Williams. It was argued at the Court of Assistants’ November 1634 meeting that Williams had broken his promise to them to keep the peace by “teaching publicly” against the royal charter and by frequently calling the parish churches antichristian (the emphasis being on harping too much on this divisive point, not simply on raising it).27 But he was also now the minister, formally or informally, of the colony’s oldest and second largest settlement. And therein lay a dilemma for Massachusetts. It might seem obvious that any government with a healthy sense of self-preservation would silence Williams. No English governing body recognized an inherent right of citizens to criticize its actions, let alone attempt to undermine its legal basis. However, there was a major impediment to action. In the Massachusetts constitutional project, church and state were conceived of roughly as two equally important governments whose authority lay in separate spheres. Church elders could not serve in public offices; the churches could not give secular punishments such as fines and imprisonment; and while the state was supposed to protect the churches, it was not supposed to interfere spiritually with them. This cooperative but clear separation of church and state had always been a goal for radical puritans, and the oppressively “theocratic” nature of Massachusetts’s church-state establishment can be greatly exaggerated by historians.28

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Yet that separate-but-cooperative-spheres ideal was a legacy from Elizabethan presbyterians who had taken for granted that the churches would have authoritative synods capable of dealing firmly with a dissenter like Williams. Under congregationalism, the other churches had no power to compel Williams to do anything. In Massachusetts the magistrates, with the exception of their letter to Salem, had previously interfered in a church’s affairs only when invited, and no one at Salem was inviting their interference now. The Williams controversy was the first serious test run for a foundational and critical unresolved question about puritan congregationalism: was congregationalism, with its independent local groups of saints in hot pursuit of purity and salvation, compatible with the puritan goals of national reformation and religious unity? Could coercive ecclesiastical structures like bishops’ courts or presbyterian synods be adequately replaced by the voluntary cooperation of the churches and the civil supervision of godly magistrates? Williams’s principled resistance to religious coercion has worn well down the centuries. His willingness, however, to cast his minority viewpoints in terms of national spiritual crisis and the wrath of God showed little regard for the frailties of the ties that held together the congregationalist community that he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to join. John Cotton later acknowledged that many in Massachusetts agreed all or in part with Williams’s arguments about not hearing sermons in England and not allowing the magistrates to interfere with the churches.29 These opinions had been tolerated in Massachusetts, and the Salem church had been allowed to go its own rigid separatist way as long as no one who held such opinions mounted a pulpit, publicly denounced opposing points of view in terms of nonnegotiable national sins, and in the process disastrously confirmed the worst and not entirely unjustified suspicions of English puritans that Massachusetts congregationalism served as a cloak for separatism. At the end of 1634, the magistrates felt that they had nonreligious grounds to assert their authority against Williams; he had shown contempt against them in breaking his promise to remain silent. But they held back from this unprecedented use of state power against a minister and conferred first with the church elders. The elders did not wish the state to step in yet. They preferred to deal with Williams in a “church

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way,” according to Cotton, in the hope that “his violent course did rather spring from scruple of conscience though carried with an inordinate zeale then from a seditious Principle.” In other words, if they could tame Williams’s zeal, the issue of his seditious principle would go away, since he would no longer feel obliged to agitate his points so disruptively. As Cotton said later, it was Williams’s combination of “Doctrines and Practises which tended to the Civill disturbance of the Common-wealth, together with his heady and busie persuite of the same” that led to his conflict with the authorities.30 Seven months of complicated two-part maneuvering on the part of Massachusetts leaders followed, one part theoretical and the other practical. The theoretical maneuvering was a crash effort to figure out how this new congregationalist theocracy was supposed to work. In March the General Court asked the ministers to agree upon a uniform platform of church government and to “consider howe farr the Magistrates are bound to interpose for the preservation of that uniformity and peace of the churches.” The practical maneuvering was the effort to tame Williams’s inordinate zeal. This effort was sometimes carried out by the ministers in private conference with Williams and sometimes in the presence of the governor and assistants. On April 30 Williams debated the lawfulness of giving oaths to unconverted people with the other ministers before the Court of Assistants. By the end of the debate, according to John Winthrop, his fellow assistant and Salem church member John Endicott conceded that Williams was wrong on this.31 Williams himself was also attempting, in his own radical separatist way, to get Massachusetts out of the dilemma in which he saw it. At some point, he decided that the colonists could atone for the sin of their charter only by returning to England or by publicly confessing the charter’s evil. Since the former was not going to happen, Williams decided to start moving on a public confession of sin. He drew up a letter to King Charles, “humbly acknowledging the Evill of that part of the Pattent which respects the Donation of Land.” Williams wrote his letter, he claimed, with the approval of “some of the Chiefe of New-England,” but there is no evidence that the letter was ever sent.32 In July the General Court held a hearing not only for Williams but for the Salem church. Both Williams and the church were accused of contempt of

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authority for calling Williams to the ministry while he was under question by both magistrates and ministers for his dangerous opinions—the illegitimacy of oaths and of praying with unconverted people and Williams’s denial of the magistrates’ right to punish religious offenses were the dangerous opinions Winthrop recorded in his journal.33 The elders arrived at the hearing prepared by Williams’s extremism to throw their full weight behind what Williams called a “national” church or, from their point of view, to offer a demonstration that congregational churches had the capacity to work closely and cooperatively with each other and with magistrates. They had not sorted out a platform of church government (that would not happen until 1649), but they had agreed that the magistrates had a duty to supervise the churches, just as the earliest puritan congregationalists William Bradshaw and Henry Jacob claimed. Anyone who maintained opinions like Williams’s, whereby, according to the ministers, a church could sink into “heresy, apostacy, or tyranny,” could be removed from their church office by the magistrates, and the churches should request them to do so. The magistrates agreed with the ministers that Williams’s opinions were dangerous, while the ministers agreed with the magistrates that the Salem church had shown contempt of authority.34 Having gotten a green light from the ministers to proceed, the Court gave Williams and the church until the Court’s next meeting in September to “consider these things,” whereupon they would either offer satisfaction to the Court or could expect punishment. To put pressure on the church, the Court postponed a decision on a Salem petition regarding the town’s boundaries until the next session. The Salemites were told that this postponement was a consequence of their contempt for the magistrates in choosing Williams as their teacher.35 Williams was aghast to see the sword of the magistrate slashing at both him and his church. But since Massachusetts magistrates were all church members, he had a New Testament means of fighting back. With the approval of the Salem church, Williams wrote the other churches a letter explaining the magistrates’ sins. They had punished a church without following the proper New Testament procedure of admonishing it first through their churches, Williams charged. Even if the Salem church had sinned, the penalty they imposed on the town of Salem pun-

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ished people who were not church members. The magistrates’ unbiblical actions were an evil that would bring down the wrath of God. They needed to wipe away their sins with sorrow and repentance, and to that end, their churches must discipline them for their heinous breach of church covenant and disobedience against Christ. 36 If the letter worked and the churches disciplined their erring members, the sword of the spirit in Massachusetts would have beaten down the sword of the magistrate, and New England’s experiment in pure New Testament Christianity could be saved. These voluntary churches of committed Christians would have successfully spoken truth as a group to antichristian power, and congregationalism, for Williams, would have succeeded in performing its vital disciplinary supervision of civil rulers, much as Henry Barrow envisioned. Not a single church responded, however. The elders of the Boston church pocketed the letter rather than read it to the congregation.37 Meanwhile, all sorts of efforts were being made to wean the Salem church away from Williams and avert the collision it and the General Court were heading toward. Williams himself made a decision in August that prevented this collision. Five years of patiently compromising with insufficiently purified congregationalism were over. Williams’s effort to awaken the Massachusetts churches to their sins through brotherly persuasion and counsel had failed, and their lack of response to his letter demonstrated that their corruptions ran even deeper than he had realized. Throwing in the towel as a reformer, Williams, while sick, wrote a letter to the Salem church telling it that it would have to stop all religious communion with the other churches for what he called their “antichristian pollution,” or he would stop all religious communion with it.38 Forced by Williams’s separatist ultimatum to choose between him and the rest of the churches, a majority of the Salem church chose not to follow him. Williams set up meetings in his house for those who did. Meanwhile, the Court used a passive-aggressive approach to wean Salem away from Williams. In September it jailed Endicott for part of a day until he apologized for protesting its proceedings. It refused to seat Salem’s deputies to the Court until a majority of the freemen of the town apologized for Williams’s summer letter to the churches.39

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In October the General Court, grown by this time to include deputies from ten towns, tried Williams, with all the ministers present and occasionally participating. He was called on the basis of the two letters he wrote in the summer, the one to the other churches and the other to Salem. Since Williams saw nothing to apologize for in his letters, his conviction was a foregone conclusion, although the precise accusations against him were a matter of subsequent debate between him and John Cotton. The court records say only that Williams was convicted for the secular offenses of broaching opinions against the authority of the magistrates and for writing letters of defamation against the magistrates and the churches.40 He was sentenced to banishment. After the sentence, Governor Haynes rose from his bench to justify it. To Williams’s horror, Haynes cited a verse from the apostle Paul, Romans 16:17, concerning the shunning of ungodly church members: “Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them.” What Williams heard in Haynes’s justification was a horrifying confusion of categories: a magistrate citing a verse the Holy Spirit had dictated for the use of the churches to justify a civil penalty. No further proof was necessary to Williams that “Sathan hath abused their godly minds. . . . They make up a kind of national church, and . . . a Christian state and government of church and Commonweale.”41 Puritan congregationalism, for Williams, was demonstrably an unstable compound. It could not preserve its purity; it would be irresistibly pulled back into the orbit of national Christianity by the temptation of antchristian power. Complete separation from the world was the only way to preserve New Testament Christianity. Where Williams had hoped to find a community of pure congregational New Testament churches that had reversed the antichristian apostasy of the Christianized Roman empire, he discovered a fiendishly subtle emergent national church in the form of ostensibly voluntarily cooperating congregational churches bound together in reality by the menace of the magistrate’s sword. After a few years of banishment in Narragansett Bay, Williams abandoned the heavy burden of his search for uncontaminated New Testament churches altogether. Individual salvation was still possible, but the apostasy of the ancient churches had

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been complete. There were no true churches, separatist or otherwise, and genuine church worship would have to wait until God sent new apostles to found them. Williams, along with three other men and six women, was finally excommunicated from the Salem church in absentia in 1639 for denying that the churches of Massachusetts were true churches.42 Williams’s banishment did not mean the end of legal Massachusetts separatism, however. Winthrop wrote in his journal that after Williams’s conviction, the Salem church, currently without a minister, wrote a “humble” submission to the court. The submission disclaimed Williams’s errors and acknowledged the church’s fault for agreeing to his letter to the other churches. Winthrop did not list the errors the church disclaimed, but they would not have included separatism. The church’s internal post-Williams debate over separatism was only about the kind it wanted to follow. A minority were in favor of the moderate Plymouth/ Robinson position of hearing sermons in the “false” parish churches. The majority still wanted “rigid” Amsterdam-style separation to be the official standard of the church—Salem travelers to England were not to step foot in a parish church—and some of these rigid separatists were prepared to separate from the Salem church if they did not get their way. In April 1636 the Salem church sent messengers to all the other churches with a letter of query. The church wanted to know whether all its members should promise not to hear sermons in “any False Church” out of respect for those rigid separatist members who insisted on this point. If not, could dissenting rigid separatists who felt strongly enough found their own church? Failing both those options, could the dissenters be excommunicated?43 The elders replied to the Salem church that their dissenters’ position was not a fundamental doctrine over which people could be excommunicated—rigid separatism as personal practice was acceptable in Massachusetts. Nonetheless, they insisted, with Williams’s intolerance fresh in their minds, it could not become Salem’s church policy again because it would inevitably lead the church as a whole to conclude that the other Massachusetts churches were antichristian. For that same reason, the dissenters could not create their own church. The General Court would not permit it because their numbers were too small and their reasons too dangerous.44 Plymouth/Leiden separatist congregationalism

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could coexist with puritan congregationalism in Massachusetts, as it had since 1630; Amsterdam separatism, experience showed, had to remain the opinion and practice of individuals. When replying to Salem, the elders could be confident that the General Court would not hesitate to prevent Salem’s restless separatist saints from starting their own church. In January it had done just that in dealing with the old Elizabethan minister Samuel Batchelor at Saugus. He and the settlers who emigrated with him in 1632 requested dismissal from their church. The church granted it, on the assumption that they were leaving the town. Instead they started a church of their own in Saugus. The General Court stepped in and ordered them to depart.45 The Court’s blocking of new churches at Salem and Saugus provided some justification for Roger Williams’s concern that Massachusetts congregationalism was starting to lose the spirit of earlier congregationalism. The pure churches of Massachusetts, the voluntary assemblies of the saints that the earliest congregationalists had envisioned, were beginning to take on, however faintly, the characteristics of parish churches, the arbitrary, government-enforced joining of people for worship within legally mandated fi xed geographical boundaries. In June, Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, and the new governor of Massachusetts, Henry Vane, sent a stern order to the constable of Salem, ordering him to warn recalcitrant separatists holding “pretended church meetings” to “confine themselves to the laws and orders of this government, being established according to the rule of God’s word.” If they failed to obey, the government “by God’s assistance” would take “strict and speedy course for the reformation of these disorders.” The magistrates were firmly, albeit overly optimistically, announcing that they had the authority and ability to recognize and police true churches and were indeed able to keep congregationalism’s anarchic do-it-yourself streak under control.46

Massachusetts in the mid-1630s experienced other challenges that required the government to discover its muscles and flex them. Large-scale immigration commenced in that period, in response to the deteriorating situation for puritans in England. In 1635, Massachusetts had by far its largest immigration to date, with 2,000 newcomers swelling the

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population by 50 percent, to around 6,000. The influx of new immigrants, needing supplies and livestock, invigorated the colony’s economy and brought the question of its survival to an end for the time being. In response to this rapid growth in population, the General Court passed a number of nonreligious orders that provided the colony with increased institutional definition.47 In the autumn of 1635, the new town of Hingham formed a church that was not congregational but presbyterian. Hingham reinforced the lesson of the Williams episode and of the protracted quarrels in Saugus that religion was one of the institutional matters in which the General Court needed to be proactive. On March 3, 1636, it passed an order requiring that churches wishing to gather notify the Court and church elders, in order that representatives of both groups could attend the gathering and approve. Only members of approved churches could become freemen. The order ensured that Hingham would be the last, and perhaps only, legal church under the colony’s original charter founded on non-congregational principles.48 One of the things for which the assembled ministers and magistrates would be listening carefully at the formation of a church was the significant religious innovation possibly begun in Watertown. The Massachusetts churches no longer made the conventional Reformed assumption that persons knowledgeable in Christianity who conducted themselves as sincere Christians were indeed sincere Christians and “visible saints” for purposes of church admission. Now they wanted some glimpse of the process by which God had worked saving faith in their souls. The men who were to be the “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5) that formed the foundation of a church and all subsequent members would have to offer a public description of that process. The conversion narratives were the most ambitious expression to date of the old puritan ambition to collapse the distance between the visible church, consisting of the saved and the damned alike, and the invisible church of the saved, whose members were known with certainty to God alone. One newly accepted Massachusetts church member described her admission after giving her narrative as a foretaste of the joys of meeting the saints in heaven. This new daunting requirement resulted in up to half the adult population being excluded from the sacraments in the late 1630s, although Massachusetts

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spokesmen acknowledged that their new procedures were not foolproof and that hypocrites would still get into their churches.49 The new requirement also created another gap between congregationalists and more moderate puritans. English moderates criticized the requirement as uncharitable, unscriptural, and unreliable in terms of what it set out to accomplish, “taking a very few that can talk more than the rest,” as one minister dismissed it. But in terms of the relationship between the two groups of puritans, it mainly served to widen the fault line created when Massachusetts ongregationalists adopted, for practical purposes, although not theoretical ones, separatist standards of what constituted a true church. The more elaborate admission standards gave congregationalists one more reason to deny sacramental communion to puritans from the parish churches, and they gave moderate puritans one more reason to resent what they saw as the congregationalists’ biblically unwarranted quasi-separatism.50 To Massachusetts’s godly republicans, protecting the churches from pollution was all of a piece with protecting the state from it. At the founding of churches, the would-be living stones demonstrated to magistrates and ministers that they were fit to be citizens of both heaven and Massachusetts. New Haven, founded in 1639, was the only other colony in which conversion narratives were the general practice, and it was the only other colony to make church membership a requirement for the franchise.51

Around this time in 1636, with Williams and his aggressive propagation of an alternative congregationalism driven out, wholesome moral laws passed, churches and state working closely and successfully together, and Massachusetts growing rapidly, John Cotton, the most prestigious minister in the colony, took up a long neglected task. Some important puritan lords with New England landholdings had been thinking about emigrating. They had written to Massachusetts to share their concern about the colony’s government. It would not do as a basis for a future alliance, they claimed. It had swerved too far from English patterns; it was both too “popular” for the aristocrats and too theocratic. Massachusetts’s authorities may have hesitantly sat on the magnates’ concerns for

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over a year before Cotton penned his response, but now he was comfortable about politely and confidently brushing them off. He wrote to the lords that there was nothing to compromise over. Church and state, house and hangings, had been successfully sculpted into a harmoniously fitting whole, just as the Elizabethan presbyterian Thomas Cartwright had advocated.52 Cotton’s invocation of the great Elizabethan presbyterian was in effect a gesture of closure; the reformation for which the Elizabethan puritans had struggled had finally taken place, even if it was hard for the lords to make sense of the details from across the Atlantic. Thanks to the conflicts and challenges of the last two years, Cotton could imagine Massachusetts not simply as a straggling group of hanging-on-for-dear-life settlements, whose political survival depended entirely on the tender mercy of King Charles I, but as a state, a viable godly commonwealth, one willing and able to defend its liberties and privileges from outside interference and no less willing and able to define, supervise, and protect its own moral and religious standards. Godly republican magistrates and the first pure republican New Testament churches since the apostles’ time, the outcome of over a half century of radical puritan and separatist experience, were proving to be a workable combination, and by the very fact of being workable, they were validating the combination’s parts. As Cotton explained to the lords, not only was Massachusetts a success, it was a success because this republican system of church and civil government created a whole greater than the sum of those parts. Thomas Cartwright had horrified his episcopal opponent John Whitgift sixty years earlier when he asserted that the constitutions of presbyterian churches and Protestant England were in harmony. Cartwright had been groping toward conceptualizing a dynamic and mutually reinforcing godly interplay of New Testament churches and state when he made that claim. The Massachusetts settlers, at least in the mind of Cotton, brought that interplay to perfection.53 The key to the success of Massachusetts’s system was that once the right people were in the right places, a self-perpetuating dynamic emerged. J. G. A. Pocock has described classical, secular republicanism as wrestling with what he calls its “Machiavellian moment.” This moment occurs when a republican polity confronts the danger of its degeneration

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and attempts to remain “morally and politically stable” in the face of corruption and loss of virtue in a temporal stream “essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability.” Pocock, like a number of historians on the recoil from Calvinism-and-the-rise-of-democracy historiography, has denied, or is easy to read as having denied, that puritanism and republicanism were compatible.54 Yet Cotton saw the godly republicanism that Massachusetts had created in dynamic terms analogous to Pocock’s “Machiavellian moment,” with the crucial distinction that in Massachusetts the secular stability sought by classical republicanism came within a more ambitious religious framework. The Massachusetts colonists, by identifying the body politic as closely as possible with the body of Christ, had come up with permanent solutions to the age-old problems of decay that beset both state and church. Cotton explained this discovery of sanctified dynamic republicanism to his pious lords after they warned him that the colony’s alleged democratic tilt would “cast the commonwealth into distraction, and popular confusions” (a fate, the lords argued, that would be avoided by the creation of a hereditary upper house for people like them).55 In reply, Cotton trumped the classical model of balanced, mixed government with a godly one. The framers of Massachusetts aimed at three things, Cotton explained: “authority in magistrates, liberty in people, purity in the church.” Those three aims reinforced each other. According to Cotton, church purity “will preserve well-ordered liberty in the people.” Through edification and discipline, in other words, the churches ensured a responsible electorate. Churches and electorate together, Cotton claimed, ensured “well-ballanced authority in the magistrates,” meaning that the people and the churches would see to it that the magistrates remained godly through church discipline and through the teaching experience of elections (when Winthrop lost the 1635 election for governor, some voters explained that they did not simply wish to remove him but that “they would admonish him thereby to looke a little more circumspectly to himselfe”). The magistrates in turn, carrying out their conventional policing role, would help prevent Satan and Antichrist from unleashing spiritual decay in the churches and would keep disciplinary watch over the entire colony through the vigorous enforcement

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of strict laws. The result of this cooperation between churches, voters, and government was a self-sustaining loop of piety and virtue.56 Cotton was not alone in his high conceptualization of what the colonists had created in their churches and state. Cotton claimed that what he argued was “the best discerning of many of us (for I speake not of myselfe).” In 1639 Winthrop breathtakingly told Lord Saye and Sele that the church was not compatible with any other kind of government than Massachusetts’s. The magistrate Samuel Symonds rhetorically asked in a letter to Winthrop in 1647, “Is not government in church and common weale (according to Gods owne rules) that new heaven and earth promised . . . and the first fruites begun in this part New England?” A decade later, the minister John Norton wrote that Massachusetts’s civil government had been part of the divine master plan all along. When God had sent his faithful servants into the wilderness, he dispatched them not only for “a practical and more notable Testimony . . . to the Gospel Churchworship, and Politie in their purity,” but for “a pregnant demonstration of the consistency of Civil-Government with a Congregational-way.”57

It would be churlish to lean backward into the abyss of time and whisper intimations of the future into John Cotton’s ear as he penned his hardearned, conceptually triumphant description of Massachusetts’s godly republicanism—how within a year the colony would almost fall apart over a series of theological quarrels in which Cotton himself was an important source of contention and confusion; or how his prized innovation of the admission test of saving faith would create major and minor political and religious crises in New England for over a century; or how in less than fifty years the godly republicans of Massachusetts would neither rise in the armed revolt that Cotton advocated nor even display much open opposition when the English government vacated the colony’s charter and imposed crown rule.58 In any case, Cotton might not have paid heed to ethereal murmurings from a secular future, for he had his eye on prizes larger than his tiny colony and a profoundly different expectation of how time would unfold. When Cotton wrote his letter to the lords, he and others among Massachusetts’s more ardent church members had developed a fresh

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inkling about what their accomplishment in Massachusetts signified. The Massachusetts puritans had achieved an unprecedented recovery of New Testament Christianity; they had purged their churches of superstition; they had purged them, as much as was possible, of ungodly members, and they had purged them, they believed, of all traces of “lordly,” antichristian power. Just as the Elizabethan presbyterians thought would be the case, the successful recovery of New Testament Christianity was a momentous event in sacred time. Only the Massachusetts puritans had a more specific eschatological framework within which to place their accomplishment. The unprecedented purity of their churches, validated by the intimations of the churches’ practical viability, was a sign that the world was moving on to the next stage of sacred history, the coming of the glorious long-lasting peaceable reign of Christ’s churches predicted by Thomas Brightman, the millennial new heaven and earth that Symonds invoked in his remark to Winthrop about Massachusetts’s accomplishment. Around 1635, John Cotton wrote an enthusiastic, successful recruiting letter to his colleague John Davenport in exile in Holland, telling Davenport that “the order of the Churches and of the Commonwealth” in Massachusetts reminded Cotton of “the New Heaven and New Earth.”59 Around the same time, Cotton wrote an extraordinary letter to his in-law Anthony Tuckney, who assumed Cotton’s pulpit in Boston, England, after Cotton fled. The letter more than matched the confidence in Massachusetts Cotton expressed to Davenport and the puritan lords. He told Tuckney that if Cotton were in England, he would not dare to join in Common Prayer worship. Moreover, even if the ceremonies were removed, he would not dare to take the sacraments because of the ungodly members of English parish churches. Cotton urged Tuckney to follow Cotton’s example and shun the ungodly. He should shun partially to avoid their moral contamination: “I know not how you can be excused from Fellowship of their sins, if you continue in your place,” Cotton warned. But Tuckney should also shun because shunning was a teaching ordinance puritans were obliged to follow. If Tuckney did not shun his ungodly and deluded fellow church members, Cotton cautioned him, “I fear the rest will settle upon their Lees with more securitie”—“settle on their lees” was the phrase of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah when

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he predicted doom for the arrogant, spiritually complacent city of Moab (Jeremiah 48:11).60 To emphasize his points about England’s danger of imminent destruction and the necessary puritan response, Cotton brought up the same scripture example he had used to justify flight to Massachusetts in 1630: the Levites’ departure from Israel because of their refusal to worship the golden calves. Only now he significantly expanded his application of that passage. The Levites were not only justified in leaving, as Cotton argued before; they did their brethren more good by departing than by staying. They were like the goats of Jeremiah 50:8, Cotton insisted, who went before the flocks to lead them out of Babylon.61 What Cotton had called flight five years ago he was now calling leadership for England, executed through shunning-by-emigration and through the example of New England’s pure New Testament churches. By the time Cotton wrote his letter to Tuckney in 1635, some of Cotton’s friends, admirers, and correspondents among the flocks of England were indeed starting to follow New England’s goats. They realized that they had undervalued separatist writings; they had not understood Christ’s kingly role in his church correctly; Europe’s presbyterian nerve center, Geneva, still had human elements in its church government; and there was no mandate in scripture for authoritative synods. God was currently engaged in a great work for his church in perfecting its government, en route to the millennial New Jerusalem. On that road, the trampling of the forecourt of the temple, predicted in Revelation 11:2, was a reference not to the Catholic Church, as usually thought, but to the “carnal” Christians among the Protestants, with whom the New England churches were dealing so firmly. But most English puritans could not follow the New England goats with the same enthusiasm. “Those truths are very Spiritual,” sighed Cotton’s English friend the Cambridge University theological virtuoso Thomas Goodwin in 1635, “in so much that divers here of the godlier sort are not capable of them.”62 Since most of the English godly were not spiritually capable of understanding Massachusetts’s congregationalism, Goodwin and friends started taking matters into their own hands. They commenced practicing New England–style shunning in England, ostentatiously avoiding all but the sermons at Church of England ser vices. Soon they would set

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up their own congregational churches, while their dismayed brethren penned angry letters to Massachusetts about the never-to-be-healed divisions the colonists had stirred up within English puritanism. Although the original emigrants did not leave England with much of a blueprint for either their republican churches or state, by the mid-1630s the tiny republican theocracy of Massachusetts offered, at least in the minds of some of its most zealous and influential partisans, a pattern for all the world to emulate. It had become a shining city on a hill, for better or worse.63

chapter 10

Godly Republicanism’s Apocalypse

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t the beginning of the 1640s, John Cotton predicted that the Old World flocks would soon be collectively stampeding after the New England goats. By around 1655, the states and Christian princes of Europe, under irresistible supernatural influence, would have instituted congregationalism and overthrown Antichrist and Muslim Turkey. The example of their churches’ pure Christianity would have brought about the conversion of Jews and pagans across the globe. Thereafter, the churches of Christ would enjoy the millennium’s thousand years of peace before the climactic battle with Gog and Magog at the end of time. One of the most durable fictions built on Perry Miller’s original “city on a hill” argument was that the immigrants to Massachusetts anticipated that they would build the millennial New Jerusalem themselves. Puritans did not think like that; even at their most active, they retained a core of anxious fatalism, for they knew that God disposed as he wished. Thus while Cotton shared with his audience the timetable and wonders of the coming millennium, as these could be gleaned from the Bible, he also warned that the New England churches might not prove up to millennial standards of holiness.1 The plot into which godly republicanism fitted, Cotton believed, had already been written, but how the details would actually play out was anyone’s guess. 233

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The Massachusetts congregationalism exported back to England certainly did not work out as Cotton anticipated. A drive for church reform began in earnest after Charles I reluctantly called the Long Parliament in 1641.2 It accelerated after the Civil War broke out between the puritanled Parliament and Charles in 1642. Apocalyptic hopes were rising among English puritans, as it looked as if the times would finally allow a decisive blow against Antichrist. Congregationalists had established only a handful of churches in England by the early 1640s, but in their own minds, their role as the vanguard of Jesus’s impending millennial kingdom more than made up for their lack of numbers. The English congregationalists had a divine spiritual gale at their backs and the exalted model of Massachusetts to rely upon (“The greatest undertaking but that of our father Abraham out of his own country . . . [with] as holy and judicious Divines as this Kingdome hath bred,” their leading ministers called New England in 1644). The congregationalists hoped that more conservative puritans would come to realize that the Lord had delayed the completion of England’s reformation because he intended greater things than he had revealed to the Continental presbyterian churches.3 When that realization dawned, England’s godly flocks would gladly follow the congregationalist goats. As a potential national church order, however, English congregationalism was a nonstarter. It was too restrictive in membership and too democratic and lacking in superstructure to appeal to most puritans. England’s leading moderate puritan ministers, far greater in numbers than the congregationalists, coalesced in support for the presbyterian makeover of the Church of England that Parliament settled on in 1645, under the influence of its Scottish presbyterian allies. Moderate puritans often respected congregationalists, but they were not keen to tolerate congregationalism as an actively recruiting alternative to the presbyterianized Church of England. The last official negotiations between moderate puritans and congregationalists, at the end of 1645, floundered on the congregationalists’ unwillingness to compromise what they saw as the limitless right of Christians to separate from true churches for reasons of conscience and form their own legally recognized ones. For more moderate puritans, that stance meant the

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destruction of the religious unity that puritans had always assumed was an integral part of national reformation, for the sake of an illogical position—if the parishes had true churches, as the congregationalists repeatedly insisted, there was no need for the extreme, divisive step of separating from them and certainly not before the congregationalists knew what the finished reformation of those churches would look like.4 Meanwhile, puritan congregational churches, following the Massachusetts example, further antagonized moderate puritans by refusing any sort of sacramental communion with parish churches, regardless of how puritanized. Unsurprisingly, the distinction between separatist and puritan congregational churches, already blurry in New England, blurred further in England during this period. “Moderate separatism” was the formal presbyterian pronouncement on puritan congregationalism in 1650, with some justification.5 Congregationalists resolved their inability to come to terms with more moderate puritans by throwing their lot in with Oliver Cromwell and his sectarian-leaning New Model Army. In December 1648, the army, after crushing the king’s forces, purged Parliament, its ostensible master, of its moderate puritan majority. The purge protected congregationalism while removing the government support necessary to keep the presbyterian remodeling of the Church of England alive. As official presbyterianism withered away, congregationalists enjoyed government favor. They were also left dependent on an army with a much higher tolerance for unorthodox Protestantism than they possessed.6 The army’s crushing of presbyterianism left England desperately short of the ecclesiastical institutions that could carry out the national reformation sought by mainstream congregationalists as much as by moderate puritans. The various puritan/sectarian governments that followed the execution of King Charles in 1649 saw to it that parish churches continued to be supplied with ministers, and they improved the quality of the ministry. However, the bishops’ courts that policed morality and heterodoxy had gone with the bishops and now there was nothing to replace them; penalties for non-attendance at church had been lifted; and wildly unorthodox religious alternatives abounded for the dissatisfied and curious. Congregationally organized churches, as in Massachusetts, disciplined their members, but few people belonged to them, and the country’s legal system was incapable of picking up the enormous

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disciplinary slack. Puritan England in the 1650s, unlike Massachusetts, proved to be not so uncomfortable a place for sinners and the religiously unconventional or indifferent. In 1658, a group of Essex puritan ministers mournfully summed up the period of puritan rule as “hopes of reformation given and heightened, but soon disappointed, sadly turned into tears, confusions, and vast . . . evils.”7 In the 1650s, English puritan congregationalists still remained “nonseparatists” in a certain sense. Congregationalist ministers generally did not turn their backs on their moderate puritan brethren and the parish churches entirely. Congregationalists frequently worked with the much greater number of moderate puritans on areas of common interest like evangelism, raising ministerial standards, and trying to pass legislation that would enforce Calvinist orthodoxy. They were usually willing to become parish ministers. They would preach to their parish’s inhabitants, who were compelled to support them financially, while reserving their sacramental and disciplinary responsibilities for their own exclusive congregational churches, often gathered from wide areas and meeting in the same church building. This arrangement could be very awkward.8 In spite of congregationalist ministers’ arm’s-length attitude to their own parishes, however, they continued to claim, as they had for half a century, that they regarded at least some parish churches with godly members and non-congregationalist puritan ministers as genuine by congregationalist standards. Moreover, many congregationalists hoped, in principle, that their own pure gathered churches would be able to practice sacramental communion someday with these aspiring parish-based, moderate puritan churches. That desire, however, inevitably had an undertone of spiritual slumming (“less pure” churches, a large gathering of congregational churches endorsing this desire in 1658 called them; these churches were not “Babylon,” another conciliatory congregationalist granted, even though they still had “Babylonish” elements). A few congregational ministers took the next step of drawing up elaborate terms of association with neighboring moderate puritan ministers that held out the concrete possibility of regular sharing of sacraments.9 Meanwhile, Parliament was moving to rein in the more shockingly heterodox Protestant sects, albeit at a glacially slow place.10 Perhaps given sufficiently large amounts

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of time, the unexpectedly gaping fissures that crippled English puritanism in the 1640s and 1650s could have shrunk to manageable size, and something like a loosely unified puritan national church establishment capable of guiding reformation would have emerged. But in the absence of the puritan sacramental communion, first shattered by the Massachusetts congregationalists, that would have demonstrated and reinforced mutual trust, relations between congregationalists and more moderate puritans easily turned antagonistic. Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and his son Richard succeeded him as Lord Protector of England. Richard Cromwell was sympathetic to presbyterianism. Congregationalist alarm about the possible reappearance of a hostile presbyterian Church of England helped prompt the army to overthrow Richard in 1659. The puritan/sectarian political chaos that followed resulted in the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660.11 A vengeful, unprecedentedly persecutory and anti-puritan episcopal Church of England returned with Charles, and congregationalists neither wanted nor had any hope for a part in a national church establishment. In the dreary decades that followed, all they retained of the heady dreams that turned Massachusetts into a shining city on a hill in the 1630s was the steadfast, antievidentiary conviction, reflected in their Savoy Declaration of 1658, that Jesus would soon bring about the millennium.12

There is no indication that Massachusetts puritans regarded their republican civic government, however ideal in itself, as a viable model for England, unlike their church government. In terms of English political developments, Massachusetts was more a symptom than a cause, a dramatic expression of how inadequate some of the godly had found England’s constitutional arrangements by the 1630s (although a congregationalist minister preaching to London’s government in 1650 suggested that Massachusetts’s government, along with various European republics, was worthy of emulation).13 When the English Civil War broke out in 1642, English puritans were not trying to eliminate monarchy; they were trying to reform the church and make the political changes necessary to ensure that England’s mixed government of king, lords, and commons could not be threatened again by a badly duped monarch.

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These goals were sealed by the Solemn League and Covenant, a sacred oath to work for church reformation and to preserve King Charles and the liberties of his kingdoms. Negotiating with Charles about either church or state proved impossible, however, because he was committed to strong episcopal church government and remained convinced that all puritans were in their hearts republicans.14 Massachusetts found its way to a republic government consensually. England’s republic, however, was declared in 1649 unilaterally by a House of Commons that had been purged and stripped of its legitimacy for most English people by a sectarian, heretical democratizing army that was even more alarming than Charles himself. For moderate, armyloathing puritans, the one positive outcome of this dismal chain of events was that it spared their sworn commitment to Charles the crisis of having to accept that he was an impossible negotiating partner.15 Puritans of a congregational or sectarian bent, in contrast, rose to the occasion of the glorious providential overthrow of monarchy with a totalizing apocalyptic vision of godly republicanism: human kingly power was being cast down in church and state as a preparatory interlude for the coming rule of Christ the king. But the new English republic, unlike Massachusetts, was disastrously unable to find stable constitutional forms in the decade of its intermittent existence, let alone anything like Massachusetts’s dynamic and usually functional relationship between churches, electorate, and rulers. Most puritans remained, at best, sullenly resigned to the republic and/or to Cromwell and his usurping army. Meanwhile, “the body of the People,” as the leading congregationalist minister John Owen gloomily put it while pondering the difficulties of government by consent, was “darke and profane, and full of Enmitie against the Remnant [of the godly].” As Cromwell said, “I am as much for government by consent as any man, but where shall we find that consent?” Godly republicanism self-destructed in the political turbulence of the 1650s.16 With that self-destruction, the legacy of midcentury republicanism to subsequent political developments, the standard historical account goes, did not come from puritan zealots but from a group whom scholars in the 1940s labeled the “classical republicans.” These were a handful of Englishmen politically active from the midcentury up to the 1680s who

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made wide-ranging studies of the science of government, ancient and modern, with a strongly anti-monarchical bias, in search of the preservation of liberty. They were an inspiration to the Whigs of the eighteenth century in Europe and North America, a vital link in what J. G. A. Pocock has called the “Atlantic Republican tradition.”17 As described by modern historians, the new classical republicans bore little resemblance to the earlier and neglected “Atlantic” republicans of Massachusetts. They were by no means narrow scripturalists, and more important, they were all religiously avant-garde anti-Calvinists. Calvinism and classical republicanism, it is claimed, were incompatible, perhaps because of Calvinism’s “morally pessimistic predestinarian theology,” or because Calvinism posited too great a gulf between grace and nature, or did not leave enough room for human choice and consent, or was inherently rigidly intolerant. Godly civic republicanism, in the standard historical account, was thus an ephemeral phenomenon, an accidental by-product of the English Civil War with shallow roots and a fast death.18 Even if Massachusetts’s puritan quasi-republic should be acknowledged, it would still be nothing more than a historical oddity in terms of English history. Earlier puritans’ theopolitical juxtaposition of liberty and Protestantism against Catholicism and tyranny, while perhaps important and unduly neglected, would still be mostly a historical dead end, given the vastly different interests of the classical republicans. However, historians searching for republicanism in the Tudor and early Stuart periods did not find puritans because they were not looking for them, and perhaps the same is true here. Consider the classical republican with the greatest long-term impact, Algernon Sidney. His masterwork, Discourses Concerning Government, was a vigorous defense of the God-given right of a people to overthrow the usual outcome of monarchy, tyrannical governments. Discourses became one of the most popular books on political theory in the eighteenth century, inspiring luminaries of liberty as various as Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. A quotation from Discourses prefaced the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence. No less inspiring was that Sidney devoted and finally sacrificed his life to liberty’s cause. He fought for Parliament in the 1640s and occupied high government positions in the English republic intermittently

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in the 1650s. Sidney wrote Discourses around 1682, near the end of the Exclusion Crisis, the effort of Sidney and his fellow Whigs to bar Charles II’s Catholic brother James from the throne. Charles, as part of his successful campaign against the Whigs, had Sidney beheaded after a dubious trial in 1683 for allegedly plotting to kill him and for writing Discourses.19 How does Sidney’s religion tie in with his politics? The scholarly consensus is that he was no puritan but a proto-enlightenment figure, “tending to free thought,” with a “radically secularized political science of liberty” who employed divine revelation only to “vindicate conclusions reached by reason” and who believed in “separating religion and politics.”20 He is a striking example of the classical republicans’ distance from the biblically dogmatic, profoundly unsecular puritans, for whom separating religion and politics was inconceivable. If one reads Discourses operating on the assumption that Sidney must have been relatively advanced religiously, it is very easy to overlook the small handful of warnings that this general scholarly assumption is wrong. But Sidney in fact was a Calvinist, and his republicanism was godly, which is to say that for him, as for the saints of Massachusetts, world history revolved around the predestined saints’ struggles; divinely sanctioned republicanism was the form of polity best suited to support them in those struggles; and the saints themselves, with their supernaturally infused graces, were a republic’s ideal citizens. Sidney demonstrates that the Whig tradition represented not so much a clean rupture from the puritan theopolitics that stretched back to the Elizabethan presbyterians and created both congregationalism and Massachusetts but, in many ways, a selective, evolving adaptation of it. The key to unlocking the godly republicanism of Discourses lies in a far more obscure text, Sidney’s anti-monarchical manuscript, “Court Maxims Discussed and Refelled,” that was rediscovered only in the 1970s and published two decades later as Court Maxims.21 Sidney wrote Court Maxims around 1664–1665, while in exile in the Netherlands and dodging efforts by Charles II’s government to assassinate him. A few historians of political theory have engaged with the sections of this text that resemble Discourses, but other vital sections have proven pretty much conceptually indigestible to them, for good reason. Sidney was

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using in these sections the language, supposedly foreign to him, of radical puritanism. Court Maxims was an address to those whom Sidney called the “saints,” for the purpose of inciting them to overthrow Charles II and his wicked bishops. Sidney’s saints were religiously similar to the saints of Massachusetts. Sidney portrayed their conversion in the passive language of Calvinism as a divine and permanently transformative activity. The “spirit of God” led the saints “unto the knowledge of all truths necessary to salvation” and “plant[ed] faith in their hearts.” At that point, the elect received an “interior spiritual calling and anointing.” Once saved, always saved; Christ would cause the “spiritual seed” he had sown “to grow and prosper in the hearts of his elect,” who continued in “faith, prayer, and the exercise of the gifts God has given them . . . fearing nothing but sin.” Sidney’s saints enjoyed assurance of salvation. The spirit would “perpetually bring forth fruits of hope and joy.” As in Massachusetts, the saints prayed together, read and expounded scripture the better to learn the mind of God, and humbled themselves before God for their sins. Sidney’s one brief venture into ecclesiological theory in Court Maxims was congregationalist, and he is known to have sought the company of congregational ministers.22 For Sidney, the saints were frontline actors in the struggle between good and evil. That struggle would “never end till the powers of sin and death be destroyed and swallowed up in that victory, which the son of Man shall have over all his enemies on earth and in hell.” Sidney attempted at length to persuade the saints that as part of this apocalyptic struggle it was their God-given duty to kill Charles II and overthrow the idolatrous bishops.23 Had Court Maxims, drenched in overt Calvinist fervor, been published in the seventeenth century, it would not have endured as an inspiration to eighteenth-century Whigs but would have been written off as an example of the religious fanat icism of the midcentury “puritan revolution.” Yet Discourses, the work that was published and gave Sidney his posthumous repute, was a belated continuation of an even older political quarrel between puritans and their opponents. It was written seventeen years after Court Maxims, at the desperate end of the Exclusion Crisis. Charles II and the Tories were systematically crushing all resistance to

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Charles’s regime, claiming that the Whigs were fanatics attempting to restart the Civil War. While Discourses offered theoretical justification for resistance to this repression, it did so in the form of a line-by-line reply to Robert Filmer’s posthumous Patriarcha, published in 1680 but written a half century previous. Filmer argued in Patriarcha that subjects had to obey their rulers absolutely: monarchs derived their power not from the consent of the people but from God, as the example of Adam, the first king, demonstrated. Filmer started writing Patriarcha in the late 1620s, as a show of support for Charles I in the midst of the crisis over his arbitrary reign that produced, among other outcomes, Massachusetts. Filmer was an antiCalvinist and a friend of leading Laudians. He was also related by marriage to the presbyterian Thomas Scott of Canterbury. Given the closeknit world of the Kent gentry, he was surely aware of Scott’s vituperative and self-identified “puritan” assertions of the power of Parliament to try and execute the Duke of Buckingham, even over the resistance of the graceless tyrant Charles. Filmer composed Patriarcha in answer to opinions like Scott’s and to acts of resistance like the future Massachusetts’s emigrants’ Forced Loan protest. His arguments, if carried through in church as well as state, would have swept away presbyterianism and congregationalism just as thoroughly as they would have swept away parliamentary resistance to Charles’s rule.24 Since Filmer did not engage in theological controversies in Patriarcha, close engagement with him did not require Sidney to bring up his puritanism in Discourses. Yet he did, in a few brief passages that are easy to overlook in a very long book. Sidney called Calvin a “glorious servant of God” and claimed he was willing to take the “reproach” of being called a puritan and a Calvinist for arguing, in conventional puritan fashion, that the Sabbath was a perpetual divine law.25 As a self-identifying puritan and Calvinist, Sidney had not changed his opinion from the Court Maxims that humans had no innate capacity to be saved. “The nature of man hath been fruitful only in vice and wickedness,” Sidney warned. “The natural man is in a perpetual enmity against God,” he amplified, “without any possibility of being reconciled to him, unless by the destruction of the old man, and the regenerating or renewing him through the spirit of grace.” The actions of the “spiritual man,” by contrast, proceeded from God, “in so far as he is guided by his spirit.”26

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Although Discourses had the same supernatural scaffolding as Court Maxims, by responding to Filmer closely it necessarily focused on different parts of that scaffolding. Filmer had made his argument for absolute monarchy on the basis of God’s universal natural law—contrary to received wisdom, God made no natural law giving the people the right to consent to their leaders, Filmer claimed, and Sidney vociferously disagreed. Natural law was not the exclusive arena of the saints; it applied to everyone. Calvinists were quite prepared to acknowledge that pagans and those who were not among the saved had the capacity to know and obey it and even to show impressive moral virtue in distinguishing right from wrong and following right. If they had lacked this ability, all human societies would tear themselves apart, given the scarcity of God’s elect. Like all Calvinists, Sidney was also well aware that moral virtue without grace could not bring salvation. After praising the universal rights bestowed on all mankind by the law of nature in Discourses, Sidney insisted that the universal law of God was not to be confused with “God’s peculiar promises, which were not according to the law of nature, but the election of grace.”27 Sidney’s focus on natural law and moral virtue in Discourses was one key element in that treatise’s subsequent wide popularity. To put it crudely, Court Maxims was about why the tiny number of predestined saints should overthrow tyrants; Discourses was about why everyone else should join in. That focus allowed Discourses to be read as an almost, but not quite entirely, de facto deist treatise. God played a very large role in it, but Christ and the special privileges he bestowed on the saints played almost none at all. The supercharged Calvinist motor behind Discourses’ dramatic, ageless political-religious battle of liberty versus tyranny was almost entirely hidden. This seeming lack of specifically Christian focus, let alone the saintly bloodletting of Court Maxims, was to facilitate Discourses’ absorption into eighteenth-century Whiggery, besides contributing to the standard understanding of Sidney as a deistically leaning free thinker.28 Yet for Sidney, even in Discourses natural law was intimately bound up with the struggles of the saints. Given the right circumstances, the civic struggle between good and evil under the terms of natural law spilled into the religious war between the dev il and the people of God. The virtuous were always on the side of God’s natural law, Sidney

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asserted in Discourses, whether or not they were also among the saved. Conversely, princes and tyrants, be they pagan or ostensibly Christian, would almost invariably be on the wrong side. Such rulers, with no constraints on their power, easily became slaves to their own lusts. Wicked princes and tyrants would not only overthrow justice, “the rule,” as Sidney put it, “of civil and moral actions,” but, given the opportunity, they would attempt to overthrow the gospel, “which is the light of the spiritual man.” The opponents of God would flock to those wicked princes and tyrants in order to persecute true Christians more effectively. Bad political theory like Filmer’s led inexorably to the persecution of the people of God, and Sidney meant exactly what he said when he repeatedly placed Filmer among the damned on the evidence of his political arguments.29 This location of the wars of the saints within, or, rather, at the apex of, the broad political struggle between good and evil formed the critical link between Sidney’s Calvinism and the wide-ranging scope of his political interests. Sidney in an extraordinary passage in Discourses united the struggles of the saints with pagan civic struggles. He quoted the Roman historian Tacitus on the determination of the wicked pagan emperor Nero to destroy “virtue itself” by killing two of his virtuous pagan enemies. Sidney imagined the objection that these were “particular cases,” not demonstrations of Nero’s overriding intentions. In response he made an almost effortless stream-of-consciousness escalation of evil from Nero’s murder of virtuous pagans to the “slaughter of the prophets and apostles, the crucifi xion of Christ, and all the villainies that have ever been committed.” Sidney then invoked the universal principle of evil attempting to ruin mankind, pagan and Christian alike. It was only the “over-ruling power of God” setting bounds to this “rage” that had prevented mankind’s ruin. However, the reason God had set those bounds, Sidney claimed, leaping back into the emphases of conventional puritanism, was not to prevent the destruction of all humanity (most of humanity was eternally ruined anyway), but because God “resolved to preserve himself a people.”30 The destruction of tyranny was the cause of all mankind, no less in classical antiquity than in Christian Europe, in other words, but history was ultimately about the cause of saints like Sidney and the puritans.

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Just as the saints were the ultimate focus of history in Discourses, so were they the crowning point of militant republicanism. Sidney celebrated the saints’ republicanism in one dense, very long sentence in Discourses, a sentence with which saints in Massachusetts would have heartily agreed: “They who most precisely adhere to the laws of God are least solicitous concerning the commands of men, unless they are well grounded; and those who most delight in the glorious liberty of the sons of God, do not only subject themselves to him, but are most regular observers of the just ordinances of man, made by the consent of such as are concerned according to the will of God.” The subject of this sentence was those who enjoy the “glorious liberty of the sons of God”—the saints, in other words (the phrasing was taken from Romans 8, a paean to the privileges enjoyed by the born-again). As befitted a puritan precisionist, Sidney claimed that true converts “precisely adhere to the laws of God.” It was precisely that adherence that made the saints the best republicans. Just as they rigorously obeyed God’s laws, so would they faithfully adhere to the laws of man. However, those man-made laws had to adhere to the laws of God themselves, by being just and by being made with the consent of the people. Otherwise, Sidney warned tyrants, no one was less “solicitous concerning the commands of man” than the saints. John Cotton had made a similar argument when justifying the Scottish uprising against Charles I, although Sidney was strikingly more willing to envision murderous political initiatives by ordinary saints than Cotton was. 31 Sidney’s godly republicanism was, of course, not identical to the Massachusetts version. He was far more accepting of religious diversity, albeit provisionally.32 In the civic sphere Sidney’s mind ran far more often to natural laws than to ancient English privileges and liberties, while with his broad interest in political science, he was far more willing to acknowledge the inevitability of realpolitik. Yet the similarities between Sidney and the Massachusetts founders are as striking as the differences. For both, history was ultimately about the apocalyptic struggles of God’s chosen people; republics provided the saints with the best environment in which to flourish, while the people of God, whom, Sidney stressed, the magistrates should support and encourage, made the best republicans.33 Discourses was one historically

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contingent civic culmination of English radical puritan theopolitical discourse about the liberties of God’s people and the tyranny of their opponents. Massachusetts was another. Godly civic republicanism of either variety was not an inevitable outcome of this puritan theopolitical discourse. It was not an implausible one, however, and, credit where credit is due, it had been regularly predicted, not to say precipitated, by the puritans’ opponents. The Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift would have undoubtedly said to both Sidney and the puritans of Massachusetts what he said to Thomas Cartwright: “Libertie and tyrannie be too common in your mouth.”34 It was just as well for Sidney’s future reputation that references to his zealous Calvinist republicanism were few and far between in Discourses and easily overlooked. He wrote the tract in an increasingly diverse and commercial society, one steadily more likely to be suspicious of anything resembling religious “enthusiasm” and Calvinism.35 The ranks of those like Sidney, active in the heroic midcentury days of puritanism, when dogmatic religious zeal and certainty were virtues and king killing a divine mandate for the elect, were shrinking. To a younger generation, these religious “virtues” were more often seen as violations of the increasingly important cultural values of moderation, tolerance, and politeness. “Puritanism and water,” was how one nineteenth-century scholar characterized Whiggery. 36 Thus, if taken with no expectation of absolute closure, Sidney’s beheading on December 7, 1683, can serve as a suitable formal ending for this narrative of godly republicanism. In the manner of earlier radical puritans and separatists like John Udall and Henry Barrow, Sidney saw himself dying as a martyr to Protestant liberty at the hands of satanic tyrants. “I fall as a Sacrifice unto Idols,” Sidney announced in a paper he handed to the sheriff of London on the scaffold. In his paper, Sidney blessed God for allowing him to “be singled out” to die as a witness to his truth. His execution was part of a “plot to destroy the best Protestants in England.” Sidney prayed that God would preserve England from idolatry and that God would bless his people and save them. As if to reiterate that the age of godly republicanism was over, ten months after Sidney was executed, an English court vacated the charter by

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which Massachusetts’s General Court had kept the English government at arm’s length for a half century and on which it grounded its right to quasi-independence. The court’s chief justice told Massachusetts’s defense attorney that he was “counsell for a company of Rebells.”37

What followed on both sides of the Atlantic were four frightening and chaotic years. The ascent of Charles’s Catholic brother James II to the throne in 1685 made imminent the very triumph of absolute monarchy and Roman Catholicism that radical puritans had been dreading for a century. In 1686, James placed all of New England under a dictatorial royal governor, whom Bostonians overthrew in 1689 as their belated contribution to the “Glorious Revolution,” in which the Whigs shepherded the Protestants William and Mary to the English throne and sent James into exile.38 The Glorious Revolution deflated the theopolitical issues that had generated godly republicanism. The 1689 Bill of Rights finally guaranteed the Protestant limited monarchy that Thomas Cartwright had extolled in the 1570s, and a splintered, faded puritanism began its relatively unmolested new legal existence as a variety of now-tolerated Protestant denominational alternatives to the Church of England. Massachusetts’s second royal charter, issued in 1692, left it with a crown-appointed royal governor, religious toleration for all Protestants, and a franchise based on property. The colony’s new charter was a disappointment. But having been rescued from a dictatorial royal governor and an absolute Catholic monarchy by the Glorious Revolution, Massachusetts’s residents learned to prize their membership in a powerful monarchical empire that protected civil and religious liberty and true religion. In the eighteenth century, even in Massachusetts, “republican” served as a smear word. 39 Nonetheless, the new royal charter did not entirely obliterate the old godly republican Massachusetts. Massachusetts’s social base of independent yeomen and a wide franchise with much opportunity for holding public office continued to encourage active citizenship. The new charter left Massachusetts’s House of Representatives unusually powerful, while its leaders when dealing with their royal governor never forgot

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that their colony had once been virtually independent. One consequence of having an appointed royal governor was that the colonists once again started to use an oppositional language of liberty, the rights of property, and the importance of vigilant watch over rulers that they had not had much reason to employ since the founding decade of the colony. Eighteenth-century New Englanders could read about the corrupting dangers of unlimited power, the necessity to keep magistrates within bounds in order to preserve the people’s liberties, and the perfidious nature of Roman Catholic tyranny in imported popular radical Whig works like Cato’s Letters. They were not being introduced to a new Atlantic republican tradition, however, they were being reminded of what their radical puritan ancestors had already known.40 A multitude of other challenges preserved much of the original puritan discourse of liberty and tyranny in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Joshua Scottow may have shed the tears of an old man over what he saw as a growing clerical power grab within the Massachusetts congregational churches in the 1690s, but younger people shared his concern, and that concern kept the ancient puritan ecclesiastical issues of the people’s liberties, limited power, and the imminent danger of antichristian tyranny alive in the churches far into the eighteenth century. Congregationalism remained the de facto state-supported church establishment. Almost all congregationalists reacted with bitter resistance and hostility to the well-subsidized Church of England missionaries who aggressively fanned out over eighteenth-century New England, especially since those missionaries dreamed of ending puritan schism and defeating the republican, king-killing principles they perceived as rampant in New England by capturing the region for the Church of England. The periodically bloody struggle with the Roman Catholic French and their Indian allies on New England’s expanding borders made the war with Antichrist present in stark physical terms. Massachusetts pulpits regularly sounded the reminder that the forefathers fled arbitrary government in search of ecclesiastical and civil liberty, augmenting the memories passed down more informally “by fathers or grandfathers,” as John Adams put it.41 The ongoing reproduction of foundational religious and civic anxieties ensured a tumultuous reaction to the British imperial innovations of

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the 1760s and 1770s that finally provoked the American Revolution. A historian of the seventeenth century often gets an eerie sense of déjà vu about these: Anglican bishops seeking to extend their tyrannical rule to America and even erecting a “palace” next to Harvard College; cries of arbitrary taxation; rumors about increasing Catholic influence at the British court; and George III acting increasingly hostile to the liberties of his subjects and in the end proving a “Protestant Popish king.” Partisans on both sides of the conflict found parallels between the situation in America and the English Civil War. The loyalist Joseph Galloway went so far as to trace the American Revolution to the anti-monarchical principles of the Elizabethan presbyterians. Galloway claimed disapprovingly that the 1629 Massachusetts charter gave republicanism its first beachhead in America, while for similar reasons Massachusetts’s citizens renewed their appreciation for that charter. Given Massachusetts’s history, it is not surprising that the colony found itself at the forefront of the agitation that culminated in a more enduring republic than the one John Cotton celebrated. After the Revolutionary War, perhaps the shade of that fatalistic puritan would have allowed itself to take up the widespread conviction that the new American republic’s liberty, progress, and enlightened tolerant Protestantism were carrying the world yet again into the millennium.42

Note on Usage

All quotations have been reproduced as found, save that contractions have been expanded, and l, u, and v v have been replaced when they stood for j, v, and w. Dates are old style, while the years themselves are new style.

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I n t ro d u c t i o n 1. Joshua Scottow, Old Mens Tears for Their Own Declensions, Mixed with Fears of Their and Posterities Further Falling Off from New-England’s Primitive Constitution (Boston, 1691), 4–5. 2. Ibid., 8, 15, 18. 3. The declension model of later seventeenth-century New England puritan piety was passed down to nineteenth- and twentieth-century congregationalists and scholars and repackaged with great effect by Perry Miller. It has been repeatedly challenged since the late 1960s, beginning with Robert G. Pope, “New England versus the New England Mind: The Myth of Declension,” Journal of Social History, 3 (1970), 95–108. 4. Scottow, Old Mens Tears, 11, 12, 14. 5. Ibid., 11,14–15. 6. Ibid., 13; Scottow, A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony anno 1628 (Boston, 1694), 35. 7. Scottow, Old Mens Tears, 1, 3, 5. 8. For exceptions, to various degrees, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958); T. H. Breen, The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630–1730 (New Haven, Conn., 1970). For a comprehensive effort, see Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York, 1996). Now see David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York, 2011), which came out as Godly Republicanism was being copyedited. As Hall says (p. 202n35), there is conceptual overlap between his book and this project.

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9. The claims made in this introduction are extensively documented in the chapters that follow. See also my “Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (2006), 429; “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c. 1570–1606,” English Historical Review, 124 (2009), 1050–1074; “Algernon Sidney’s Calvinist Republicanism,” Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), 753–773. 10. John Whitgift, The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition (London, 1574), 180; John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, 3 vols. (London, 1851), 2:140. 11. Robert Filmer, The Free-Holders Grand Inquest (London, 1679), 298. 12. While the settlers of Plymouth Plantation sometimes used the term “pilgrims” to describe themselves, it was in a generic and devotional sense that they shared with many devout English Protestants. The first known use of “Pilgrims” as a proper noun was only in the 1790s. See Albert Matthews, “The Term Pilgrim Fathers and Early Celebrations of Forefathers’ Day,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications, 17 (1915), 293–391. 13. William Perkins, The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins. The First Volume (London, 1635), 699. 14. Dudley Fenner, A Brief Treatise upon the First Table of the Lawe (London, 1588), sig. 3c [i]r-v; William Ames, Medulla s.s. Theologiae (London, 1629), 332–40; John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargent Bush Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 245. For a discussion of the New England understanding of theocracy, see Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, UK, 1992), 247–250.

1 . T h e R i s e a n d B l e e d i n g F a l l of Eli zabeth an Go d ly R e p u b l i ca ni sm 1. John Whitgift, The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition against the Replie of T.  C. (London, 1574), 646; John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargeant Bush Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 245. 2. Whitgift, Defense, 171, 647; Thomas Cartwright, The Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright (Heidelberg, 1575), 228. Whitgift’s assault on elections was not only rhetorical. He helped push through new statutes at Cambridge University in 1570 that drastically restricted the university franchise and helped restrain the spread of puritanism there. See Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 124. 3. For balanced discussions of the “elect nation” motif in England, see Patrick Collinson, “John Foxe and National Consciousness,” in Christopher Highley and John N. King, eds., John Foxe and His World (Aldershot, UK, 2002), 10–36; Collinson, “Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode,” in Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, eds., Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 15–45; Michael McGiffert, “God’s Controversy with Jacobean England,” American Historical Review, 88 (1983), 1151–1176.

No t e s t o P a g e s 15– 17



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4. Dudley Fenner, A Counter- poyson (London, 1584), sig. [A]4r; Walter Travers, A Defence of the Ecclesiastical Discipline Ordayned of God to be Used in His Church (Middelburg, Holland, 1588), 64; A Parte of a Register (Middelburg, Holland, 1593), 289. 5. Whitgift, Defense, 178; Cartwright, Second Replie, 64; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), 247, 248, 278; Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), 204. 6. John Udall, Obedience to the Gospel (London, 1584), sig. A2 v–A3r. 7. W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, eds., Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt with a Reprint of the Admonition to the Parliament and Kindred Documents, 1572 (London, 1907), 9, 10. The charges in these early tracts were repeated countless times in later publications. In some dioceses, as many as four out of five clergy could not preach. See Haigh, English Reformations, 269, 273. The problem of providing preachers was exacerbated by the fact that the most zealous ministers tended to be puritans, who were not desirable to many bishops for a variety of reasons, and by the venality of some of the bishops and the complicated legal and fi nancial encumbrances on many parish livings. However, even with the best will in the world by all parties involved, it would have been impossible to fi nd preachers at the speed puritans demanded. 8. Walter Travers, A Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiasticall Discipline owt of the Word of God (Heidelberg, 1574), 132; William Fulke, A Briefe and Plaine Declaration, Concerning the Desires of All Those Faithfull Ministers, that Have and do Seeke for the Discipline and Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1584), 68– 69. For Fulke’s authorship of this treatise, see Matthew Sutcliffe, An Answere to a Certaine Libel Supplicatorie (London, 1592), 41. 9. Cartwright was relatively moderate in his nonconformity, for example, compared with some other presbyterians. He denied that wearing the surplice was absolutely unlawful, prompting a stiff response from various puritans. See Whitgift, Defense, 256–258, and Parte of a Register, 401–408. Those puritans completely opposed to the ceremonies found a variety of scriptures forbidding them. 10. Haigh, English Reformations, 246–247; Martin A. S. Hume, ed., Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs [of the Reign of Elizabeth] Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas. Vol. II. Elizabeth. 1568–1579 (London, 1894), 87; Fulke, Briefe and Plaine Declaration, 112; Parte of a Register, 45; Whitgift, Defense, 260; Robert Crowley, A Briefe Discourse against the Outwarde Apparell and Ministring Garmentes of the Popishe Church (Emden, Germany, 1566), sig. Aiiii [i]r. Ciiiir Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 96. 11. Laurence Chaderton, An Excellent and Godly Sermon (London, 1578), sig. Ciiiir; Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 17, 32. For discussions of the church courts, see F. Douglas Price “The Abuses of Excommunication and the Decline of Ecclesiastical Discipline under Queen Elizabeth,” English Historical Review, 57 (1942), 106–115; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1987); Ingram, “Puritans and the Church Courts, 1560–1640,” in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds., The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, UK, 1996), 58–91; R. A. Marchant, The Church under the

256

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

No t e s t o P a g e s 18 – 2 2

Law: Justice, Administration and Discipline in the Diocese of York, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1969). Whitgift, Defense, 604; Tom Webster and Kenneth Shipps, eds., The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–1638 (Woodbridge, UK, 2004), 154. William Bradshaw, A Direction for the Weaker Sort of Christians . . . Whereunto is Adioined a Verie Profitable Treatise of the Same Argument, by Way of Question and Answer, Written by Another (London, 1609), 2nd pag., 13, 75–76; William Perkins, A Godly and Learned Exposition or Commentarie Upon the Three First Chapters of the Revelation, 2nd ed. (London, 1606), 74–75; Travers, Full and Plaine Declaration, 166. The Book of Common Prayer gave ministers the power to keep the ignorant, quarrelsome, or wicked from the Lord’s Supper, and ministers did at times exclude parishioners. Puritans complained regularly that in practice this power was virtually useless, for lack of institutional and community support. For discussions see Arnold Hunt, “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, 161 (Nov. 1998), 39–83; Christopher Haigh, “Communion and Community: Exclusion from Communion in Post-Reformation England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 5 (2000), 721–738. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 191. For more background on the term “puritan,” see p. 43. Travers, Full and Plaine Declaration, 12. Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike Plainelie Set Foorth in the English Tounge (Middleburg, Holland, 1584), sig. Dv; John Penry, An Humble Motion with Submission unto the Right Honorable LL. of Hir Maiesties Privie Counsell (Edinburgh, 1590), “To the Reader” (no sig.); cf. Travers, Defence, 8; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, 2004), chap. 2. Whitgift, Defense, 418. Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 11. Ibid., 14. As the closest thing to an Elizabethan presbyterian party platform put it, “Let them only be admitted to the Communion that have made confession of their faith, and submitted themselves to the Discipline.” See A Directory of Church Government (London, 1644), sig. B2r. For the writing of this treatise, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 291–302. Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 16–17; Travers, Full and Plaine Declaration, 165–167. What follows is an expansion of my “Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (2006), 427–462. Penry, Humble Motion, 41. Whitgift, Defense, 396, 650. Ibid., 342, 444; Travers, Defence, 90. For surveys of radical puritan ecclesiastical political theory, see A. F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth Century Puritanism (Cambridge, UK, 1927), and Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 53– 64. Whitgift, Defense, 379, 476, 674; Fulke, Briefe and Plaine Declaration, 98, 107; Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 111.

No t e s t o P a g e s 2 2 – 2 5



257

26. Ibid., 119; Travers, Full and Plaine Declaration, 54; Fulke, Briefe and Plaine Declaration, 80. 27. Cartwright, Second Replie, 130; Whitgift, Defense, 171, 173; Fulke, Briefe and Plaine Declaration, 84, 86. No presbyterian writer that I am aware of envisioned congregations having unsupervised elections of ministers. William Fulke, for example, called repeatedly throughout Brief and Plaine Declaration (written in the early 1570s) for the election of ministers but explained what he meant by this on p. 125: a minister “by such Godly advise [of an assembly of elders] so chosen, ought to be presented to the Congregation, and of them to be allowed and received, if no man can shew anye reasonable cause to the contrarie. This is the right election . . . of Pastors.” In Fulke’s scheme, the elders chose pastors whom congregations could reject only if they had reasonable cause. Fulke (Brief and Plaine Declaration, 120– 121) further wrote, “Our lande is not yet wholly converted to Christe . . . therefore there can not bee suche an uniformitye of orders in all places. . . . Therefore it were meete, that the Overseers and Elders of the Churche, shoulde come together to consider of this matter, what orders were moste meete for diverse places.” “Overseers and Elders of the Churche” in this passage refers to synods, not congregations. Fulke did not mean to imply that individual congregations had the last say in how they were governed. His point was that there was a wide difference between parishes in their readiness for presbyterianism. For a much more “democratic” interpretation of these passages, see Peter Iver Kaufman, “English Calvinism and the Crowd: Coriolanus and the History of Religious Reform,” Church History, 75 (2006), 328, and Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (Notre Dame, Ind., 2004), 128. The first edition of the An Admonition to the Parliament (1572) stated that “then election was made by the common consent of the whole church,” while the second edition explained that the elders made the election while the congregation consented. See Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 10, especially note 2. Historians sometimes see a shift in meaning from the changed wording, but there is no reason to take it as anything but a clarification. 28. Cartwright, Second Replie, “sig. )( )( )( iiiv–)( )( )( iii ir; Laurence Chaderton, A Fruitfull Sermon (London, 1584), 72– 73; Travers, Defence, 64– 65; Penry, Humble Motion, 73–80; Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 18; Fenner, Counterpoyson, 13–14; Whitgift, Defense, 644; James Spedding, The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, 3 vols. (London, 1861), 1:100. Spedding attributes this statement to Bacon, not its ostensible author, Francis Walsingham. 29. Whitgift, Defense, 180–181; Travers, Full and Plaine Declaration, 178. For continental reformed discussions of mixed government and their extremely varied conceptions of the extent of the role of the “people” in these governments, see Philippe Denis and Jean Rott, Jean Morély (ca. 1524– ca. 1594) et l’utopie d’une démocratie ecclésiastique (Geneva, 1993), 126–171. 30. Cotton, Correspondence, 246; Anon., An Answere to a Sermon Preached the 17 of April anno D. 1608, by George Downame (Amsterdam, 1609), 2nd pag., 81. For context, see Howell A. Lloyd, “Constitutionalism,” in J. A. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 254–255. The term “republic” itself at this time was most commonly used to mean “commonwealth” in a general sense, rather than specifically a kingless state with accountability to the

258

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

No t e s t o P a g e s 2 5– 2 7

“people”; and such a kingless state was far more commonly described as a “free state” or “popu lar state” than as a “republic.” See Blair Worden, “Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience,” in Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 2002), 1:323n10. For a possible explanation of how the term “republic” shrank to its exclusive present meaning, see Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli’s Discoursi and the Pre-Humanist Origins of Republican Ideas,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, UK, 1990), 133n94. Matthew Parker, Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. John Bruce (Cambridge, UK, 1853), 437; John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, D. D. (Oxford, 1822), 1:495. For other examples, see Matthew Sutcliffe, A Treatise of Ecclesiasticall Discipline (London, 1590), 201; Richard Bancroft, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings (London, 1592), 18. For a discussion of the accusations of “popularity” and disloyalty to monarchy in the earlier debate between Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift, see Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 60– 62. John Bruce, ed., Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI of Scotland, Camden Society 46 (1849), 63– 64. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, 1960), 2:1493 (bk. iv, chap. xx, par. 8); Julian H. Franklin, ed., Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century; Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay (New York, 1969), 116. Calvin’s jaundiced view of monarchs and preference for republics is discussed in Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge, UK, 1982), chap. 7. On Calvin’s role in setting up the Geneva city government, see Robert M. Kingdon, “John Calvin’s Contribution to Representative Government,” in Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob, eds., Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge, UK, 1987), 183–198. Cartwright, Second Replie, 578; Whitgift, Defense, 180–181, 650; Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (University, Ala., 1985), chap. 4. A still very useful discussion is A. F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of SixteenthCentury Puritanism (Cambridge, UK, 1928), 92–93. For a more detailed argument that England’s citizens were thoroughly familiar with mixed government and therefore would not fi nd presbyterianism alien, see William Stoughton, An Assertion for True and Christian Church- policie (Middelburg, Holland, 1604), 361–364. Whitgift, Defense, 182. Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), 1–58; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1995); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, UK, 1999); Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester, UK, 1997), 207; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 204; Mark Goldie, “The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England,” in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded,

No t e s t o P a g e s 2 7 – 3 0

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.



259

c. 1500–1850 (New York, 2001), 125–152; John Guy, “Monarchy and Counsel: Models of the State,” in Patrick Collinson, ed., The Sixteenth Century, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2002), 123. Peter Lake, “The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I Redefi ned (by Its Victims) as a Conspiracy,” in Barry Coward and Julian Swann, eds., Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe (London, 2004), 89–114; Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth- Century Politics (Cambridge, UK, 2000), chap. 7; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 11, 22, 54–55; Blair Worden, “On the Winning Side,” TLS, 29 January 1999, 5– 6; Worden, “Republicanism, Regicide and Republic,” 309–314; Johann P. Sommerville, “Literature and National Identity,” in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, eds., The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, UK, 2002), 472, 474. For a summary of the positive effect the hunt for “republicanism” has had on the scholarly understanding of English government, see Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, UK, 2000), 26–29. Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 31–57; Collinson, “Servants and Citizens: Robert Beale and Other Elizabethans,” Historical Research, 79 (November 2006), 489; John Guy, “Monarchy and Counsel: Models of the State,” in Patrick Collinson, ed., The Sixteenth Century, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2002), 123. Lake, “Monarchical Republic.” Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, UK, 1987); Peltonen, Classical Humanism, chap. 5; Thomas Cartwright, A Commentary upon the Epistle of Saint Paule written to the Colossians (London, 1612), 273; Travers, Full and Plaine Declaration, sig. a2 v–a3r. Lake, “Monarchical Republic,” 90; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 59. The following section draws upon my “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c. 1570–1606,” English Historical Review, 124 (2009), 1050–1060. Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 177; Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 6, 31, 70. For examples of attacks on the bishops in the 1560s as popish tyrants, see Crowley, Briefe Discourse, sig. Ciiii [i]r; Anthony Gilby, To My Lovynge Brethren that is Troublyd Abowt the Popishe Aparrell (Emden, Germany, 1566), sig. Bii [i]r; Gilby, A Pleasaunt Dialogue, Betweene a Souldior of Barwicke, and an English Chaplaine (Middelburg, Holland 1581), sig. A4 iv r. This section was dated May 10, 1566. On the origins of the term “puritan,” see also p. 263, n8 below. The general narrative of the following five paragraphs is drawn from Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 243–272, with additions indicated by further citations. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the 16th and 17th Centuries (New York, 1988), chap. 2; Haigh, English Reformations, 278–280. Church reform measures proposed in the House of Commons in 1581 and 1584, with privy council support, among other “puritan” changes, required bishops to examine ministerial candidates and exercise discipline along with a panel of ministers, gave parishes the opportunity to object to prospective

260

46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

No t e s t o P a g e s 3 0 – 3 3

incumbents, and encouraged ministerial conferences. See T. E. Hartley, ed., Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth 1, 3 vols. (Leicester, UK, 1981), 1:511–521, 2:160–165. For discussions, see J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), 1:399–406, 2:62– 65; Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 162, 206, 282–283. Parte of a Register, 240. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 243–273. Ibid., 82. Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain (London, 1655), lays out the arguments for and against the legality of the ex officio oath and the other powers of the Court of High Commission in book 9, 183–185. Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, 3 vols. (London, 1822), 1:320–322, 331–335, has good introductions to the puritans’ legal arguments. Conrad Russell presents the basic statutory confusion out of which the puritans constructed their arguments; see “Whose Supremacy? King, Parliament and the Church, 1530–1640,” Lambeth Palace Library Annual Review (1995), 53– 64, and “Parliament, the Royal Supremacy and the Church,” Parliamentary History 19 (2000), 27–37. For further discussions of the Court of High Commission and the debates it engendered, see Roland G. Usher, The Rise and Fall of the High Commission (Oxford, 1913); Stephen Wright, “Nicholas Fuller and the Liberties of the Subject,” Parliamentary History, 25 (2006), 176–213; Faith Thompson, Magna Carta: Its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, 1300– 1629 (Minneapolis, 1948), chap. 8. The Star Chamber (the privy council meeting as a court) also used the ex officio oath, but defendants knew the charges against them before they had to answer. For a brief account of the tangled legal status of canon law in sixteenth-century England, see John Guy, “The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity,” in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, UK, 1995), 144–146. For examples, see Albert Peel, ed., The Seconde Parte of a Register, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1915), 1:211–212, 287–289, 2:28–30, 227–228; Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans, 3 vols. (London, 1813), 1:445–446; John Udall, A New Discovery of Old Pontificall Practises for the Maintenance of the Prelates Authority and Hierarchy (London, 1643), 10–14; Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 399, 409–410. William Stoughton, An Abstract, of Certain Acts of Parliament (London, 1583), sig. 3 ir. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 270; William Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (London, 1620), 107; W. D. J. Cargill, “Sir Francis Knolly’s Campaign against the Jure Divino Theory of Episcopacy,” in C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody, eds., The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson (Athens, Ohio, 1975), 39–77. Martin Marprelate (pseud.), Theses Martinianae (n.p., 1589), sig. Ciir; Strype, Life and Acts of John Whitgift, 1:402, 2:136; Parte of a Register, 284; Seconde Parte, 2:87. The judges ruled against the puritan lawyers in the celebrated Cawdry’s Case, deciding that the queen could empower the Court of High Commission. For a narrative of the case, see John Strype, Historical Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmer (London, 1821), 86– 97. For an analysis that takes some elements of Cawdry’s lawyers’ arguments less seriously than others,

No t e s t o P a g e s 3 4 – 3 6

53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59.



261

see Guy, “Elizabethan Establishment.” For a puritan response to Coke’s report of the case, see Anon., Certaine Considerations Drawne from the Canons of the Last Sinod (Middelburg, Holland, 1605), sig. B1v–B2 v, 30. Coke got the underlying law correct, according to this analysis, but he misapplied it. Peter Lake, “The Historiography of Puritanism,” in John Coffey and Paul C.  H. Lim, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, UK, 2008), 347– 349; Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 536–537; John Morrill, “The Religious Context of the English Civil War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 34 (1984), 155–178; Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 121, 137; Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (London, 1992), 170; J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640, 2nd ed. (London, 1999), 49, 179, 180, 204, 205, 213; Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles (Cambridge, UK, 2004), 49. For a major exception to the general firewall kept up between religious and secular political thought, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? See also Nicholas Tyacke, “The Puritan Paradigm of English Politics, 1558–1642,” Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 527–550. Parte of a Register, 334, 353, 356–357, 360; Leland H. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, Gentleman Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in His Colors (San Marino, Calif., 1981), 7; Edward Arber, An Introductory Sketch to the Martin Marprelate Controversy (London, 1879), 83. Parte of a Register, 2nd pag., 2, 4, 5. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, is the standard source on the authorship, although his enthusiasm for attributing works to Throkmorton runs a little out of control. See also Joseph Black, ed., The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge, UK, 2008), xxxiv–xlv. On the tracts’ background in local manuscript libels, see Patrick Collinson, “Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism,” in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, UK, 1995), 150–170; Adam Fox, “Religious Satire in English Towns, 1570–1640,” in Patrick Collinson and John Craig, eds., The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (Basingstoke, UK, 1998), 221–240. Marprelate, Theses Martinianae, sig. Aij [ii]v, C.j.r-v; Marprelate, The Protestatyon of Martin Marprelat (n.p., 1589), 22–23, 24; Marprelate, Hay any worke for Cooper (n.p., 1589), 26. Job Throckmorton, generally assumed to be the main Marprelate author, said in the House of Commons in 1586, “Under the warrante of Gode’s law, what may not this House doe? I mean the three estates of the land. To deny the power of this house ye knowe is treason.” See Hartley, Proceedings in the Parliaments, 2:232. Richard Bancroft, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (London, 1588), 83; Strype, Life and Acts of John Whitgift 2:18, 3:240. Strype, Life and Acts of John Whitgift, 1:556, 258, 2:83. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 317–329, is the standard account of this orga nization.

262

No t e s t o P a g e s 3 7 – 4 0

60. Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of S. John Illustrated with an Analysis and Scholions (Leiden, 1616), 192. Udall claimed that the “councell” summoned him. His examiners were all members of the Court of High Commission. See Udall, New Discovery, 1–2. For a list of members, see Usher, Rise and Fall, 345–361. 61. Neale, Elizabeth I, 1:393–8; Udall, New Discovery, 10–14, 19, 35, passim; Haigh, English Reformations, 263. 62. Udall, New Discovery, 41–43. 63. Ibid., sig. A3v, 102; John Cotton, A Reply to Mr. Williams Answer, to Mr. Cottons Letter (London, 1647), 116. Cotton emphasized the martyrdom theme in Udall’s death by citing a passage in William Perkins where Perkins linked the phenomenon of bleeding corpses to the first martyr, Abel. See William Perkins, A Cloud of Faithfull Witnesses, Leading to the Heauenly Canaan (London, 1607), 47. 64. Folio volume 1, Mather Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, unpaginated (pages 42–43 from first page of treatise). The American Antiquarian Society catalogue attributes this treatise to Richard Mather, but a note in the manuscript’s box by the Davenport scholar Isabel Calder identifies the treatise as Davenport’s, as does Franklin M. Dexter, “Sketch of the Life and Writings of John Davenport,” Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, vol. 2 (1877), 221–222. Besides Richard Mather and Davenport, Peter Bulkeley has been mentioned as a possible author. From internal evidence, neither Bulkeley nor Mather is likely to have been the author. The manuscript is a farewell and exhortation to an English church, written before departure by a minister who had adopted congregationalism. On the twenty-fi fth page, it includes a strong endorsement of public conversion narratives for church membership. Both Bulkeley and Mather emigrated in the spring of 1635, and such an endorsement so early from either of them would be extraordinarily precocious. Davenport emigrated in 1637, which is late enough for him to have been aware of the new Massachusetts practice. The manuscript’s comment on baptism corresponds with the opinion Davenport expressed in Holland before leaving (see p. 296, n33 below). The manuscript repeats the Udall “bleeding corpse” story, saying only that it was a servant of the bishop of London for whom the corpse bled, not the jury, and that the blood did not trickle but “gusht.” The congregationalist Jeremiah Burroughs, Cotton’s friend, referred to Udall’s prophecy and his death sentence in An Exposition of the Prophesie of Hosea (London, 1652), 414, preached around the turn of 1643.

2 . T h e S e pa r at i st B e gi n n i n gs of Eli zabeth an C o n gr e gat i o na l i s m a n d P r esby t eri ani sm 1. John Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe . . . Whereunto is Added a Reply to Mr. Williams Answer, to Mr. Cottons Letter (London, 1647), 2nd pag., 117. 2. Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, UK, 1977), 2; Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.



263

1991), 156; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 328, 433; Collinson, From Crammer to Sancroft (London, 2006), 124. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 22 (1920), 126–127. Frederick J. Powicke, Henry Barrow Separatist (1550?–1593) and the Exiled Church of Amsterdam (1593–1622) (London, 1900), 81n2, identifies “Mr. Philips.” Henry Barrow, The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587–1590, ed. Leland H. Carlson (London, 1962), 188. See p. 52 above for Barrow’s prediction of Queen Elizabeth’s impending damnation. The separatist Katherine Chidley, A New-Yeares- Gift (London, 1645), 8, claimed that people around Queen Elizabeth spread the word that she carried her grief over Barrow’s execution to her grave. A Parte of a Register (Middelburg, Holland, 1593), 24–25; John Strype, The History of the Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, Edmund Grindal (Oxford, 1831), 42–43; Albert Peel, ed., The Seconde Parte of a Register, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1915), 1:65. Peel, The First Congregational Churches: New Light on Separatist Congregations in London, 1567–81 (Cambridge, UK, 1920), is the best guide for untangling the documentation around these early London separating congregations. Strype, History of the Life and Acts, 142–146; Marshall Mason Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago, 1939), 197; James Gairdner, ed., Three Fifteenth- Century Chronicles with Historical Memoranda by John Stowe, the Antiquary, and Contemporary Notes of Ocurrences written by him in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1880), 135–136, 138, 139, 140. Parte of a Register, 25; Gairdner, Three Fifteenth- Century Chronicles, 143; Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550– 1641), 2 vols. (London, 1912), 1:80. Holy Trinity Minories was a stronghold of nonconformity, and four of the five known or suspected proto-separatist ministers preached there. See H. G. Owen, “A Nursery of Elizabethan Nonconformity, 1569– 72,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 17 (1966), 65–76. Hastings Robinson, ed., The Zurich Letters (Cambridge, UK, 1842), 201– 202; Tadataka Maruyama, The Ecclesiology of Theodore Beza: The Reform of the True Church (Geneva, 1978), 211; Parte of a Register, 31; Gairdner, Three FifteenthCentury Chronicles, 143; Martin A. S. Hume, ed., Calendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs, Preserved Principally in the Archive of Simancas. Vol. II. Elizabeth 1568–1579 (London, 1894), 11, 43. The first recorded contemporary use of the term “puritan” came from a Catholic exile during the vestments controversy: “To be apparailled priestlike seemeth so absurde to the Puritans off our Countre, to the zelous gospellers off Geneva.” See Thomas Stapleton, A Fortress of the Faith (Antwerp, 1566), fol. 134v. Hume, Calendar of Letters, 12; Edmund Grindal, The Remains of Edmund Grindal, ed. William Nicholson (Cambridge, UK, 1844), 295–296, 316–319; John Lorimer, John Knox and the Church of England (London, 1875), 299; Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 1:60– 61. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:13–18; Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 1:58. Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, ed. Albert Peel and Leland H. Carlson (London, 1953), 93; Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 1:106n2; Henry Ainsworth, Counterpoyson (Amsterdam, 1608),

264

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

No t e s t o P a g e s 4 4 – 4 8

39; John Robinson, A Justifi cation of Separation from the Church of England (Amsterdam, 1610), 54. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 112–116. Ibid., 134, 138–139; Brett Usher, “The Fortunes of English Puritanism,” in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, UK, 2006), 101–102; Owen, “Nursery,” 67, 68; Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 1:79, 82. W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, eds., Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt with a Reprint of the Admonition to the Parliament and Kindred Documents, 1572 (London, 1907), 9n3; Thomas Wilcox, A Forme of Preparation to the Lordes Supper (London, 1587), sig. 4 iiiv. Wilcox wrote the preface to the 1582 English translation of Theodore Beza, Tractatio de Veris . . . Notis (1579), A Discourse, of the True and Visible Markes of the Catholique Churche (London, 1582). In that treatise, Beza reduced the marks of the true church to a single one, the correct teaching of the gospel. For a discussion, see Maruyama, Ecclesiology, 159–173. John Whitgift, The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition (London, 1574), 795, 94; Thomas Cartwright, The Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright (Heidelberg, 1575), 38–39. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 116; Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:80, 90; 2:16; Ainsworth, Counterpoyson, 39; John Greenwood, The Writings of John Greenwood, 1587–1590, ed. Leland H. Carlson (London, 1962), 315; Henry Barrow, The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587–1590, ed. Leland H. Carlson (London, 1962), 254; Peel, First Congregational Churches, 15. Champlin Burrage, The True Story of Robert Browne (1550?–1633) (Oxford, 1906); Albert Peel, The Brownists in Norfolk and Norwich around 1580 (Cambridge, UK, 1920); Dwight C. Smith, “Robert Browne, Independent,” Church History, 6 (1937), 289–349; Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560–1643 (Woodbridge, UK, 2005), 64, 88– 92, 90– 91; Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, 157–160. The term “separatist tradition” here refers to the nest of personal contacts, shared goals and doctrines, intimate quarrels, publications and reprints, and conscious recognition of lineage outlined in B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, 1971). Thus Robert Browne was clearly an important figure in this tradition, as defi ned above, while the contemporary free-will separatist Edward Glover was not. As the title of White’s book suggests, the ideologues in this tradition were capable of discovering the roots of their tradition deep in the past—ultimately, like presbyterians, in the apostolic period. Patrick Collinson, “The Puritan Classical Movement in the Reign of Elizabeth I” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1957), 860– 930; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an Elizabethan County (Oxford, 1986), 199– 221; MacCulloch, “Catholic and Puritan in Elizabethan Suffolk, Archiv fur Reformationgeschicte, 72 (1981), 232–289; Reynolds, Godly Reformers, 71–75. Harrison and Browne, Writings, 48, 218; Tudor Royal Proclamations. Volume II: The Later Tudors (1553–1587), ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven, Conn., 1969), 501–502. On Browne’s activities around Bury St Edmunds, where his

No t e s t o P a g e s 4 8 – 5 1

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.



265

followers were executed, see John Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, UK, 2001), 104–107. Harrison and Browne, Writings, 410–411. Ibid.; Joshua Scottow, Old Mens Tears for Their Own Declensions, Mixed with Fears of Their and Posterities Further Falling Off from New-England’s Primitive Constitution (Boston, 1691), 14. For an introduction to conventicles and their place in puritan culture, see Patrick Collinson, “The English Conventicle,” in W. J. Shiels and Diana Wood, eds., Voluntary Religion, Studies in Church History 23 (Oxford, 1986), 228–234. Peel, First Congregational Churches, 37–44; Harrison and Browne, Writings, 254, 422. Ibid., 422, 101. There was an active and extremely controversial “congregationalist” movement among the French Reformed churches led by Jean Morély, which was effectively ended by the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants. It is possible that Browne knew something about Morély when his Norwich group was working out its own version of congregationalism, but no direct connection has been found. A comprehensive study of Morély, Philippe Denis, and Jean Rott, Jean Morély (ca 1524– ca 1594) et l’utopie d’une démocratie ecclésiastique (Geneva, 1993), 82–83, puts more emphasis on the considerable differences than the similarities between Morély and the English separatists and sees no need to posit that he influenced them. Harrison and Browne, Writings, 167, 200–201. See also Stephen Bredwell, The Rasing Of the Foundations of Brownisme (London, 1588), 124. Ibid., 53, 115, 411, 454, 460, 463, 271, 46. Ibid., 426–427. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:115; David Calderwood, A History of the Church of Scotland, 8 vols. (Edinburgh, 1842–1849), 4:1–3; Harrison and Browne, Writings, 519; Joy Rowe, “Some Suffolk Separatists and the Norwich Conventicle, 1588– 1610,” in C. Rawcliffe, R. Virgoe, and R. Wilson, eds., Counties and Communities: Essays in East Anglian History (Norwich, UK, 1966), 179–187; Reynolds, Godly Reformers, 93–107; Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain; From the Birth of Jesus Christ Until the Year M.DC.XLVIII (London, 1655), XVI century, IX book, 168. The discussion of Barrow that follows is an expansion of my “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570–1606,” English Historical Review, 124 (2009), 1060–1063. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 22 (1920), 127–128; The Works of Francis Bacon, 10 vols. (London, 1819), 3:60. Barrow was converted to separatism by the Norfolk minister Thomas Wolsey, who had been associated with Browne and Harrison. Wolsey remained almost continuously in jail from 1584 to his death in the early 1610s. See Reynolds, Godly Reformers, 92–93. For other connections between Browne and Barrow’s congregation, see B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, 1971), 70.

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31. Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 91– 93; Richard Bancroft, A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593), 427. Barrow’s congregation at its meetings alternated between scripture readings and extempore prayers in which one person spoke while the rest groaned, sobbed, and sighed. They appear not to have elected church officers until the fall of 1592, although they excommunicated before then. See Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:27–31, 36. 32. The respective beginnings of each section are Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 279, 335, 361, 483, 553. 33. Ibid., 342–343, 503. Salvation was not possible within the Church of England, according to Barrow, because its ministers did not preach genuine obedience to Christ, which would have resulted in separatism. See ibid., 509–510. Barrow elsewhere allowed that there were many thousands of God’s elect in the Church of England, “though not apparant to our eies, whom he in his good time will call more neare unto him.” See Henry Barrow, The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1590–1591, ed. Leland H. Carlson (London, 1964), 54. Barrow struck a somewhat softer note in a 1593 letter to “an Honourable Lady, and Countess of his Kindred.” There he claimed that “I had reverend estimation of sundre, and good hope of many hundred thousands in the land; though I uterly disliked the present constitution of this church.” He was fighting for his life when he wrote this and denying one of the charges of the indictment against him, which was that he asserted that all the people in England were infidels. See Henry Ainsworth, An Apology or Defence of such True Christians as are Commonly, but Unjustly called Brownists (Amsterdam, 1604), 93– 94. 34. Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 63, 261, 344, 360, 436, 559, 658. 35. Ibid., 263, 265. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “Federal Theology and the ‘National Covenant’: An Elizabethan Presbyterian Case Study,” Church History, 61 (1992), 401, notes that separatist ecclesiology would seem to leave no room for comparing England to Israel, since the separatists were very clear about excluding most of the English nation from their churches. John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, 3 vols. (London, 1851), 3:73, rejected the logic of the Israelite paradigm as being the logic of national churches, which he also rejected. Whether he would have continued to do so if he had found himself a pastor in New England is another question. Massachusetts puritans took to that paradigm with enthusiasm while setting very high bars to church admission. 36. Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 284, 285, 612, 635. 37. Ibid., 347–348. 38. Ibid., 559, 561, 562. Peter Ivor Kaufman, Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (Notre Dame, Ind., 2004), has claimed that that presbyterian clerics were having second thoughts about lay participation in the late 1580s. Those second thoughts would help account for Barrow’s suspicions about those ministers. However, Kaufman’s chief piece of evidence (p. 117) is that “Thomas Cartwright admitted in 1591 that presbyterians ceded very little authority to the laity, despite arguments that several of them made for lay counsel and consent twenty years before.” The “admission” that Kaufman cites (but does not quote) was written by Cartwright in response to questions sent him by Archbishop Whitgift, interrogating him about

No t e t o P a g e 5 5



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his role in the “underground” classes. In response, Cartwright tried to minimize the classes’ subversiveness and dubious legality by stressing that these were just fraternal gatherings of ministers “and not of any men of other calling,” except for a few schoolmasters who were intending to become ministers. The response says nothing about the role of ruling lay elders in an ideal ecclesiastical polity, and given the circumstances of its production, it is hardly an ideal document for assessing Cartwright’s genuine opinions. Kaufman cites the original manuscript, British Library Add MSS 48064, fols. 221r–222r. Both it and Whitgift’s questions are printed in Thomas Cartwright, Cartwrightiana, ed. Albert Peel and Leland H. Carlson (London, 1951), 21–27. 39. Anon., A Directory of Church Government (London, 1644), sig. C2[ii]r. For the writing of this treatise, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 291– 302. For Robert Browne’s endorsement of synods with “authority,” see Harrison and Browne, Writings, 271; White, English Separatist Tradition, 75. It has been sometimes claimed that presbyterians were ambiguous about the power of synods. That claim forms an important part of a larger scholarly argument about Elizabethan presbyterianism’s congregationalist tendencies and, thus, separatism’s lack of ecclesiological originality. The most thorough exposition of this argument, Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988), 205, claims that for presbyterians, “just how far this power [of conferences and synods] could be exercised to overturn the will of individual gathered churches was not always so clear.” But Brachlow makes his case for ambiguity about synodical authority by extremely selective quoting from Elizabethan presbyterian texts, of which space will allow only a few examples. Brachlow (Communion, 205) cites a passage from Anon., Directory, sig. A2[i]r: “Every particu lar church . . . ought to obey the opinion of more churches with whom they communicate.” Brachlow sees ambiguity because the author wrote “ought” rather than “must.” However, Directory consistently used “ought” to assert central presbyterian principles; see, for example, sig. A2 v: “In every particu lar church, there ought to be a presbytery”; and sig. A2r: “[church government not based on the New Testament] ought to be esteemed unlawfull and counterfeit.” Clearly, the author of what is as close to an Elizabethan presbyterian party platform as exists was using “ought” in the sense of an obligatory duty. In any case, Directory, sig. C2 v, reiterated the binding nature of the decisions of assemblies. Brachlow (Communion, 206) also cites a passage from the presbyterian William Fulke in which, according to Brachlow, Fulke was arguing that synods’ “authority stopped short of enforcing uniformity.” Yet the quotation says nothing about limitations on authority, only that the “wisdom of synods” should be attentive to the differences between churches, for it is “untrue” that “uniformity must be in all places.” Fulke, in the clarifying passage omitted by Brachlow that followed, explained that it would be unwise for synods to introduce “uniformitye of order” everywhere because “our lande is not yet wholly converted to Christe.” In other words, presbyterianism would be premature in much of England, an assessment with which it is hard to disagree. See William Fulke, A Briefe and Plaine Declaration (London, 1584), 120–121. The only presbyterian source that I am aware of that reads ambiguously about the power of synods is a

268

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

No t e s t o P a g e s 5 5– 6 0

frequently cited passage from Walter Travers, A Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiasticall Discipline (Heidelberg, 1574), 179. Travers claimed that the “people” could make synodical decisions “voide and off none effect iff they be not suche as in the last state wherin the people hathe to rule and governe.” Whatever Travers might have been trying to say in this passage, on the following page he argued that it was “necessary and profitable” to have synods as they were “used by other purer and better reformed churches.” Conversely, “nothinge doth more hurt” than English “Synods visitacions and convocations.” In other words, if Travers lived in a country with properly godly rulers and a properly reformed church, rather than the corrupt Church of England, he would expect that synods would be authoritative. A later manuscript by Travers emphatically asserted the power of synods; see pp. 108–109 above. Tom Webster repeats Brachlow’s central arguments, using the same sources, in Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c. 1620– 1643 (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 289–290. Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 150–151, 161. Ibid., 668– 669, 561, 559. Ibid., 511, 521. Ibid., 347–348, 511, 520–521. Ibid., 283, 284. Ibid., 416, 417, 483, 492–493, 495, 501. Ibid., 563. Ibid., 561, 600– 601. Richard Bancroft, the conformist scourge of puritans and eventual archbishop of Canterbury, was either inspired by Barrow or hit upon the same line of anti-puritan attack independently. See Albert Peel, ed., Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft (Cambridge, UK, 1953), 71–73. For an assessment of, and limited agreement with, Bancroft’s satire, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 187–190. Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 351, 359, 460, 480, 594, 599. The laity of Barrow’s own London congregation mostly came from the “middling sort” of English society, with a background of crafts and ser vice, along with a few scholars and ministers. See Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:27– 61. Patrick Collinson, “Toward a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition,” in C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody, eds., Essays for Leland H. Carlson: The Dissenting Tradition (Athens, Ohio, 1975), 3–38; Brachlow, Communion, 6. Brachlow consistently and drastically minimizes areas of disagreement between early congregationalists and presbyterians, see p. 267, n39 above; p. 274, n37 and p. 281, n28 below. Polly Ha reads Brachlow as “representing all puritan ecclesiology” as “default congregational,” which it manifestly was not, as she demonstrates in her monograph. See Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, 2011), 220n4. Anon., A Most Grave, and Modest Confutation of the Errors of the Sect, Commonly Called Brownists, or: Seperatists, ed. William Rathband (London, 1644), B2 v. For the origins of this important treatise, probably written around 1590, see Carol Geary Schneider, “Godly Order in a Church Half-Reformed: The Disciplinarian Legacy, 1570–1641” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1986), 125–126. Richard Ber-

No t e s t o P a g e s 6 0 – 6 6

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.



269

nard included a shortened version as an appendix to his Christian Advertisements and Counsels of Peace (London, 1608). John Robinson responded to the appendix in the fi nal chapter of his response to Bernard, A Justification of Separation from the Church of England (Amsterdam, 1610). Chidley, New-Yeares- Gift, 8. Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 496. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:41, 44, 47, 54, 55; Anon., Grave, and Modest Confutation, sig. A3 [i]r. Ibid., 10–11. Greenwood, Writings, 187, 190; Anon., Grave, and Modest Confutation, 17–18, 36, 38; Cartwright, Cartwrightiana, 66– 67, 68; John Penry, An Exhortation unto the Governours and People of her Maiesties Countrie of Wales (London, 1588), 40. See Collinson, Elizabethan Presbyterian Movement, 333–382, for a description of “presbytery in episcopacy” in practice in the Elizabethan church. Anon., Grave, and Modest Confutation, 20. Greenwood, Writings of Greenwood, 131, 202–203, 207; Anon., Grave, and Modest Confutation, 40–41. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 1–2. John Udall, A Commentarie upon the Lamentations of Jeremy (London, 1593), 61. Anon., Grave, and Modest Confutation, 60; Udall, Commentarie, 56. Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of S. John Illustrated with an Analysis and Scholions (Leiden, 1616), 159, 168, 172, 204, 205. Ibid., 172, 1019, 1114. See Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 198–217, for an introduction to Brightman’s arguments. William Ames, “Lectori Æquo, et Veritati Libere Studenti,” in William Bradshaw, Puritanismus Anglicanus (Frankfurt, 1610), sig. A4 [ii]r-v; Robert Parker, An Exposition of the Powring out of the Fourth Vial (London, 1650), sig. A3r; Thomas Shepard, The Works of Thomas Shepard, 3 vols. (Boston, 1853), 1:40; John Cotton, A Brief Exposition of the Whole Book of Canticles (London, 1642), 193–198, chap. 7, 239–240, 257–258; Ephraim Huit, The Whole Prophecy of Daniel Explained by a Paraphrase (London, 1644); Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, 213, esp. nn49,50; Robert Sanderson, XXXIV Sermons (London, 1689), 18; James I, A Meditation upon the Lords Prayer (London, 1619), 41 (on Brightman), 5–15 (on puritans in general). For other early references to Brightman, see Thomas Adams, The Blacke Devil or the Apostate (London, 1615), 4; Thomas Draxe, An Alarum to the Last Judgement (London, 1615), 107–108; Samuel Collins, Epphata to F.T. (London, 1617), 532, 534, 535; William Cowper, Pathmos (London, 1619), 22–23, 32, 216; David Calderwood, The Altar of Damascus (Amsterdam, 1621), 61, 69, 169. For the use of Brightman in James Ussher, Gravissimae Quaestionis (1613), see Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin, 2000), 88. William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642), 210–214; Gribben, Puritan Millennium, 40; William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660 (London, 1969), 50–51; Brightman, Revelation, 147. See Gribben, Puritan Millennium, 41, for how James’s conduct in England might have led to “a

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reevaluation of the ‘godly prince’ ideology” by the Scottish scholar of the apocalypse, James Napier. 65. Brightman, Revelation, 1023.

3. J a m e s I a n d a N ew C r i s i s o f A nt i ch ri st i an P ow er 1. Alan R. MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625: Sovereignty, Polity and Liturgy (Aldershot, UK, 1998), 44; A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, UK, 1925), 463–464; James VI & I, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh, 1603), sig. A4 [ii]r. 2. See MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, for the complicated relationship between James and the Scottish kirk. 3. The following two sections of this chapter are drawn from my “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570–1606,” English Historical Review, 124 (2009), 1063–1073. 4. Mark H. Curtis, “The Hampton Court Conference and Its Aftermath,” History, 46 (1961), 1–16; F. Shriver, “Hampton Court Revisited: James I and the Puritans,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982), 48–71; Patrick Collinson, “The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court Conference,” in Howard Tomlinson, ed., Before the Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, 1983), 27–52; Stuart Barton Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962), 43– 68; William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference (London, 1604), 82, 83. 5. Thomas Lathbury, A History of the Convocation of the Church of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1742, 2nd ed. (London, 1853), 114–115. 6. Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical (London, 1604), sig. P3v, canons 3– 9, 28, 57, 73, 140; Henry Jacob, To the Right High and Mightie Prince, James by the Grace of God, King of Great Britannie, France, and Irelande, Defender of the Faith, &c. An Humble Supplication (Middelburg, Holland, 1609), 35. 7. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, 147–149. For a discussion of the difficulty in coming up with a scholarly substitute for this figure of three hundred ministers, which was the puritan party line figure, see Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 99–101. 8. Andrew Foster, “The Clerical State Revitalized,” in Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Stanford, Calif., 1993), 141; MacDonald, Jacobean Kirk, chap. 7. Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 220–228, notes a few examples of ministers being allowed to make a limited subscription or evading subscription altogether. 9. Foster, “Clerical State,” 141; Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I,” in Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 27. 10. Jonathan D. Moore, “Preston, John (1587–1628),” and Mark E. Dever, “Sibbes, Richard” (1577?–1635), in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http:// www.oxforddnb.com, accessed September 15, 2008; Isabel MacBeth Calder, ed.,

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.



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Letters of John Davenport, Puritan Divine (New Haven, Conn., 1937), 13–14. See Foster, Long Argument, 68– 92, for a good introduction to this phase of puritanism. W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 1558–1610 (Northampton, UK, 1979), 87. British Library Add MSS, 28571, f 199; William Gouge, The Right Way: or A Direction for Obtaining Good Successe in a Weighty Enterprise (London, 1648), 32. Although the puritan fasting did not achieve its primary goal of overturning the canons, it did, according to Gouge, prompt God to reveal the Gunpowder Plot. The most thorough account of the parliamentary struggles is Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, chaps. 8, 9. J.  P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd ed. (London, 1986), 32. It is generally assumed that the Commons never passed the “Apology,” because it was too radical. See G. R. Elton, “A High Road to Civil War?,” in C. H. Carter, ed., From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation (New York, 1965), 325–347. That assumption is challenged by Theodore K. Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629 (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 105–107, and Robert Zaller, The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (Stanford, Calif., 2007), 579–580. For other discussions, see J. H. Hexter, “The Apology,” in R. Ollard and P. Tudor- Craig, eds., For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth- Century History (London, 1986), 33–44; and Hexter, “Parliament, Liberty, and Freedom of Elections,” in Hexter, ed., Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (Stanford, Calif., 1992), 21–55. Conrad Russell, “Parliament, the Royal Supremacy and the Church,” Parliamentary History, 19 (2000), 28, speculates that Nicholas Fuller wrote the section of the “Apology” concerning religion, which seems plausible. Anon., A Record of Some Worthy Proceedings in the Honourable, Wise, and Faithfull Howse of Commons in the Late Parliament (Amsterdam, 1611), 3, 5. See Nicholas Tyacke, “Puritan Politicians and King James VI and I, 1587–1604,” in Tom Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, UK, 2002), 36–44, for earlier manifestations of this tendency to unite religious and secular issues. For a study of the ecclesiastical elements of the debate in which these pamphlets were engaged, see Charles W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, UK, 2005). See also Mark Curtis, “William Jones: Puritan Printer and Propagandist,” Library, 5th ser., 19 (1964), 38– 66. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, 104–107 and chap. 5; Anon., The Remoovall of Certaine Imputations Laid Upon the Ministers of Devon: and Cornwall (London, 1606), 21, 45; Anon., Certaine Arguments to Perswade and Provoke the Most Honorable and High Court of Parliament (London, 1606), 10; Anon., Certaine Considerations Drawne from the Canons of the Last Sinod (Middelburg, Holland, 1605), sig. B3 iv; William Ames, “Lectori Æquo, et Veritati Libere Studenti,” in William Bradshaw, Puritanismus Anglicanus (Frankfurt, 1610), sig. A4 [iv]v. The argument about Parliament being the representative Church of England had been famously made by the common lawyer Christopher St German, An Answere to a Letter

272

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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(London, 1535), sig. G6r–v. For a discussion, see J. A. Guy, Christopher St German on Chancery and Statute (London, 1985), 42–44. Michael P. Winship, “Puritans, Politics, and Lunacy: The Copinger-Hacket Conspiracy as the Apotheosis of Elizabethan Presbyterianism,” Sixteenth- Century Journal, 38 (2007), 352; Martin Marprelate, Oh Read Over D. John Bridges . . . Epistle (n.p., 1588), 23–25; Martin Marprelate, Hay Any Worke for Cooper (n.p., 1589), 38– 39; Walter Travers, A Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiasticall Discipline owt of the Word of God (Heidelberg, 1574), 14; Albert Peel, ed., The Seconde Parte of a Register, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1915), 2:280. For the most important theological dispute of the 1580s, which broke down along puritan/conformist lines, see Dewey D. Wallace Jr., “Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ’s Descent into Hell in Elizabethan Theology,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschicte, 69 (1978), 248–287. Samuel Hieron, A Short Dialogue Proving that the Ceremonyes, and Some Other Corruptions Now in Question, are Defended by None Other Arguments then Such as The Papists Have heretofore Used (n.p., 1605), 31. For other examples, see Robert Parker, A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies: Especially in the Signe of the Crosse (Middelburg, Holland,1607), 98, 187; William Bradshaw, A Myld and Just Defence of Certeyne Arguments (London, 1606), 44–45; Bradshaw, A Treatise of Divine Worship (Middelburg, Holland, 1604), 22; Anon., Remooval, 4; Parker, Scholasticall Discourse, 187. For the developments to which these nonconformists were reacting, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), chap.  4; Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, UK, 1982), chap. 9; Lake, “Business as Usual? The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2001), 456–486; Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, UK, 2001), 205–208; Anthony Milton, “Anglicanism by Stealth: The Career and Influence of John Overall,” in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds., Religious Politics in PostReformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, UK, 2006), 159–178. Victoria Gregory, “Bradshaw, William (bap. 1570, d. 1618),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed September 15, 2008. William Bradshaw, English Puritanisme (London, 1605), title page, “To the Indifferent Reader,” 6, 22. Ibid., 5, 6; Bradshaw, A Protestation of the Kings Supremacie (London, 1605), 12. Increase Mather, A Disquisition Concerning Ecclesiastical Councils (Boston, 1716), vi. Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 18, 24, 31. Bradshaw, Protestation, 6; Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 7, 32. Presbyterians had long argued that bishops, to the extent that they had any legitimacy at all, had it as crown officers, not as ecclesiastical officers, and Bradshaw himself took up this argument in a later treatise. See William Bradshaw, The Unreasonablenesse of the Separation (Dort, 1614), sig. Fv–F2r.

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273

25. The monarch was by law the supreme governor of the Church of England. It was difficult for presbyterians to reconcile this status with their demands for synodical authority, thus providing another opportunity for conformists to charge presbyterians with disloyalty to the crown. Already in the 1580s, as a response, a few presbyterians emphasized that monarchs, not synods, ultimately made enforceable ecclesiastical law. One presbyterian even compared synods to boards of legal advisors to the crown. Presbyterians could then contrast their devotion to the royal supremacy with the bishops, who “prey[ed] on the rights of princes.” See Dudley Fenner, A Counter- poyson (London, 1584), 106, 152, 153, 155, 174; John Penry, A Briefe Discovery of the Untruthes and Slanders (Against the True Governement of the Church of Christ) Contained in a Sermon, preached the 8. [sic] of Februarie 1588. by D. Bancroft (Edinburgh, 1590), 40–41. Presbyterian tracts in the 1570s, by contrast, were reluctant to delve into the relationship of the monarch to the church. Thomas Wilcox and John Field, An Admonition to the Parliament (London, 1572), made no mention of the role of the Christian magistrate in church affairs, nor did Travers, Full and Plain Declaration. William Fulke, A Briefe and Plaine Declaration, Concerning the Desires of All Those Faithfull Ministers, that Have and do Seeke for the Discipline and Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1584), 140, 142, acknowledged that the “Prince” turned the edicts of synods into laws but emphasized that it was “unlawful” for him to do anything but rubber-stamp the decisions of synods. Even the presbyterian party platform was silent on the role of the monarch in church affairs; see Anon., A Directory of Church Government (London, 1644). For a comment, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 301. Thomas Cartwright, under heavy polemical pressure from his opponent, John Whitgift, in the 1570s, acknowledged that the magistrate could remove, silence, and replace a minister or synod for “reaching falsly or inconveniently.” Nonetheless, he insisted that “principal autority belongeth unto the minstery.” See Thomas Cartwright, The Rest of a Second Replie (Basel, 1577), 166–170. Seven years later Fenner used Cartwright as his authority for stressing the role of the monarch while turning what was for Cartwright a reluctant concession into a positive acknowledgement. 26. That Bradshaw’s congregationalism was an effort to create a form of presbyterianism acceptable to James I is argued, with different emphases, by R. C. Simmons, Puritanism and Separatism: A Collection of Works by William Bradshaw (Farnshawe, UK, 1972), in the introduction; Foster, Long Argument, 60– 61; Lake, Moderate Puritans, 269–273; Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, UK, 2006), 176–177. Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988)), 239–246, by contrast, stresses what he claims is the conventionality of Bradshaw’s views. 27. Bradshaw, Protestation, 21–22. 28. Bradshaw, Myld and Just Defence. This treatise was a response to Gabriel Powel, A Consideration of the Deprived and Silenced Ministers Arguments, for Their Restitution to the use and Libertie of Their Ministerie (London, 1606), which, in turn, was a running commentary on Anon., Certaine Arguments. Powel subsequently wrote a rejoinder to Bradshaw, A Rejoinder to the Mild Defence (London, 1607).

274

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29. Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 13, 29, 33. For the place of Antichrist in Bradshaw’s piety, see Peter Lake, “Antichrist and the Community of the Godly,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), 570–584. 30. Bradshaw, Protestation, 2; Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 33. 31. William Bradshaw, Myld and Just Defence, 76, 92– 93, 97–100. 32. Ibid., 118–119. For parallel constitutional exercises that did not take the king so directly head on, see Anon., Certaine Arguments, and Anon., Certaine Considerations. 33. Bradshaw, Myld and Just Defence, 119. 34. Bradshaw, Protestation, “To the Civill States of this Kingdom”; Bradshaw, Myld and Just Defence, 110–111; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J., 1957), 15, 226–227. Scholars have noted the use of the two bodies doctrine in the 1620s by puritans to critique the actions of the monarch. See Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987), 181–182. 35. Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 33; Bradshaw, Protestation, 12, 17. 36. Ibid., 4, 7; Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 27; Bradshaw, Twelve Generall Arguments (London, 1605), sig. E iir-v. Bradshaw’s claim that churches could not actively resist wicked civil authority needs to be put in context. Theories of limited monarchy could be stretched to encompass resistance easily enough, should circumstances necessitate that stretching, and before such necessity arose there was little to gain and much to lose by venturing into the subject, a point made by J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1999), 74–75. However, Sommerville, Royalists, 48–49, rejects a link between the “roots of modern democracy” and early modern Calvinism on the grounds that Calvinists did not necessarily endorse resistance theory. As if to establish where the roots of modern democracy actually lie, Sommerville then immediately proceeds to the conventional argument that the “equation of popery with arbitrary government,” a mainstay of radical puritan convictions since the 1580s, began in the 1620s in response the close relationship Charles I had with ceremonialist, anti-Calvinist churchmen like William Laud, Richard Neile, and Richard Montagu. 37. Brachlow, Communion of Saints, 167, as part of his minimization of separatist distinctiveness (see p. 267, n39 above and p. 281, n28 below), argues that Elizabethan presbyterians did not have a uniform way of interpreting Matthew 18:17. “At times,” he writes, “they took [Matt. 18:17] . . . to mean ‘tell the elders’ [the conventional presbyterian interpretation]: while at other times they understood Christ to mean ‘the whole church” [the standard separatist reading]. In addition, there are occasions remarkable for their apparent inconsistency, when these two distinct renderings appear in the same writing.” I checked all of Brachlow’s presbyterian citations, and all of them, to me, gloss Matthew 18:17 in the standard presbyterian way as meaning “tell the elders.” For an example of Brachlow’s contrary reading, he argues that Cartwright used “church” to mean the “whole congregation” in a passage where Cartwright rejected Whitgift’s argument that a single minister (a bishop, for example) could excommunicate. But the point Cartwright was making was simply that a single minister ruled not by himself but as part of a presbytery. There is nothing in the passage to suggest that Cartwright intended to encompass the entire con-

No t e s t o P a g e s 8 1– 8 3

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.



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gregation by his use of the word “church,” as Brachlow asserts. See Thomas Cartwright, The Rest of a Second Replie (n.p., 1577), 81–83. The one sixteenth-century presbyterian semi-exception of which I am aware is Dudley Fenner, Sacra Theologia (Geneva, 1589), fol. 121r-v, which Brachlow does not discuss. Fenner claimed that the elders shared authority with the whole congregation, although the elders had the greatest part. In case of a dispute between the elders and the congregation, a higher body was to resolve it. The presbyterian argument that “tell the church” meant primarily “tell the elders” was capable of many permutations in practice, as was the opposite separatist interpretation. But the latter was a wedge reading for strong congregational participation in government in a way that the former was not. Richard Bernard, The Separatists Schism (London, 1618), 88, called the argument that power lay in the whole church “the first A. B. C. Of Brownisme, whereupon they build al the rest of their untrueths.” For early separatist examples of this “Brownist” interpretation, see Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, ed. Albert Peel and Leland H. Carlson (London, 1953), 32; Henry Barrow, The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587–1590, ed. Leland H. Carlson (London, 1962), 619. The separatist John Robinson claimed that he heard the puritan Laurence Chaderton preach a sermon in Cambridge that took Matthew 18:17 to refer to the whole church in a specific circumstance not related to governance, and it helped him to become a separatist. See John Robinson, A Manumission to a Manuduction (Amsterdam, 1615), 20. Chaderton interpreted Matthew 18:17 in the conventional presbyterian way when referring to governance in A Fruitful Sermon (London, 1584), 68. Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 24, 31. Stephen Wright, “Jacob, Henry (1562/3–1624),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed October 30, 2008; Dewey D. Wallace Jr., “Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ’s Descent into Hell in Elizabethan Theology,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschicte, 69 (1978), 248–287. Henry Jacob, A Christian and Modest Offer of a Most Indifferent Conference, or Disputation (London, 1606), sig. *2r-*3r, 28–30: Jacob, An Attestation of Many Learned, Godly, and Famous Divines, Lightes of Religion, and Pillars of the Gospell (Middelburg, Holland, 1613), 313; Jacob, Reasons Taken out of Gods Word and the Best Humane Testimonies. Proving A Necessitie of Reforming our Churches in England (Middelburg, Holland, 1604), 18, 25, 31–32; Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641), 2 vols. (London, 1912), 2:157; Bradshaw, English Puritanisme, 33; Curtis, “William Jones,” 38– 66. Jacob, Reasons Taken out of Gods Word, 17–18, 20–21; Jacob, Attestation, 298. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:165. For an introduction to the convolutions of congregationalist attempts to explain the flow of power in churches, see John Cotton, A Defence of Mr. John Cotton from The Imputation of Selfe Contradiction, Charged on Him by Mr. Dan. Cawdrey (London, 1658), 2nd pag., 4–27, 32–43. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:284, 2:151, 157. The Convocation Book of 1606; Commonly Called Bishop Overall’s Convocation Book (Oxford, 1844), 3. James disallowed this set of canons because subsequent ones

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45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

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went on to assert the irresistible power of kings in ways that even James thought were excessive or at least politically unwise. See Convocation Book, “Preface,” 7–8. These assertions of monarchical power were directed against Catholics at least as much as they were directed against radical puritans. Sommerville, Royalists, chap. 9. Henry Jacob, A Supplication for Toleration Addressed to King James I, ed. S.  R. Maitland (London, 1859), 7, 11, 12, 14, 23, 32, 33, 38. B. W. Quintrell, “The Royal Hunt and the Puritans, 1604–1605,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31 (1980), 41–58. William Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation” (Boston, 1898), 12; Richard Bernard, Plaine Evidences: The Church of England is Apostolicall, the Seperation Schismaticall (London, 1610), 4; John Smith, The Works of John Smyth Fellow of Christ’s College, 1594–8, 2 vols., ed. W. T. Whitley (Cambridge, UK, 1915), 2:331–336; Henry Ainsworth, Counterpoyson (Amsterdam, 1608), 116; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 229. In a deft move of personal historical revisionism, Bernard explained away his covenanted group by claiming he had founded it only to keep its members from joining the separatists. See John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, 3 vols., ed. Robert Ashton (London, 1851), 2:101. Bernard made his claim when he was trying to get back in the good graces of the church hierarchy, and John Robinson dismissed the explanation with a warning that God would not be mocked. Some historians take Bernard’s explanation at face value. Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 22 (1920), 139. The next two paragraphs are drawn from Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge, UK, 2006), 16–20, and Ronald A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560–1642 (London, 1960), 149–159. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), 2:280–297; A True Confession of the Faith, and Humble Acknowledgement of the Alegeance, which Wee Hir Majesties Subjects, Falsely Called Brownists, Doo Hould toward God, and Yeild to Hir Majestie and All Others that are over Us in the Lord (Amsterdam, 1596); The Confession of Faith of Certayne English People Living in Exile in the Low Countreys (Amsterdam, 1598), sig. A4v; Confessio Fidei Anglorum (Amsterdam, 1598); Francis Junius, Certayne Letters, Translated into English, Being First Written in Latine (Amsterdam, 1602). For a good discussion of these tracts, see Henry Martyn Dexter, The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, as Seen in Its Literature (New York, 1880), 299–305. John Smyth, Parallelles, Censures, Observations (Amsterdam, 1609), 127. Barrow, Writings . . . 1587–1590, 264, 342–343, 503, 287, 317; Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1905), 427; Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville, 1971), 156–158; Keith L. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640 (Leiden, 1994), 49–50. Brachlow, Communion, 178; B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, 1971), chaps. 5, 6. For Collinson’s description of separatism, see p. 40 above. Dexter and Dexter, England, 423; Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 139; John Paget, An Arrow Against the Separation of the Brownists (Amsterdam, 1618), 2, 3, 6–7.

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277

53. Christopher Lawne, The Prophane Schisme of the Brovvnists or Separatists (London, 1612), 86.

4 . T he Tr i u m p h s a n d T r i a l s o f t h e L ord’ s Free P eop le 1. Miles Mickle-bound [pseud.], ed., Mr Henry Barrowes Platform (Amsterdam, 1611), sig. A3r-v. 2. Ibid., sig. B5 [i] r-v, C2 v, I3r-v. 3. Ibid., sig. K5 [ii]v, L4v. 4. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 22 (1920), 126. 5. John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, ed. Robert Ashton, 3 vols. (London, 1851), 3:15. 6. The argument in this chapter is that puritan congregationalism first emerged among presbyterians as an anti-episcopalian tactic and then absorbed other separatist positions because of the positive contact with Robinson’s congregation. Scholars have recently advanced a number of other arguments to explain puritan congregationalism. Patrick Collinson notes that “the national leaders [of Elizabethan presbyterianism] . . . were no doubt full-blooded Presbyterians, who advocated and even attempted to set up classical and synodal structures.” But he suggests that “it may be that whenever their own interests were involved, most Elizabethan puritans would have been reluctant to concede to synods anything beyond the power to “counsel” and “advise” allowed in later years by the Independents,” citing the Dedham conference as an example. Thus the Elizabethan presbyterians were grassroots incipient congregationalists, what ever their theoretical intentions. See Patrick Collinson, “Toward a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition,” in C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody, eds., The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson (Athens, Ohio, 1975), 16. Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, 2003), 220, repeats this claim and then puts his fi nger on its weakness as an explanation of congregationalism—that tendency, for most puritans, never manifested in support for a church system with no authoritative superstructure. “The goal of most English puritans into the 1640s,” he notes, “was the creation of a reformed episcopacy.” A widely dispersed tendency to voluntarism, such as Collinson and Bremer discuss, was certainly a precondition for congregationalism, but given that congregationalism itself attracted relatively few puritans, it is not a sufficient explanation for it. See the counterexamples in Stephen Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground: Alexander Leighton, the Puritan Triumvirate, and the Laudian Reaction to Nonconformity (Hamden, Conn., 1978), 5. Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 63, accounts for early radical puritan congregationalism by arguing that these ministers were “preempting the Separatist appeal.” “The recuperative power of the radicals [Jacob, Ames, Bradshaw, and Parker],” according to Foster, “lay in their ability to attract a lay following and to discipline its energies within the bounds of the established church. The non-separating Congregationalists performed their indispensable ser vice by fi nding a theory to

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

No t e s t o P a g e s 9 1– 9 3

justify and direct practice.” Foster does not demonstrate that Parker’s or Bradshaw’s theoretical forays into congregationalism were driven by concern about preempting a separatist appeal or attracting a lay following and disciplining its energies, and it would be very hard to make that demonstration. When Jacob and Ames justified separatist practices, there is no evidence that either of them did so to “preempt” separatist appeal; they did so because these practices were appealing to them. Ames’s argument that English congregations had implicit covenants, however (explored later in this chapter), was clearly an effort, in part, to preempt separatist arguments. George Downame, Two Sermons, the One Commending the Ministerie in Generall: The Other Defending the Office of Bishops in Particular (London, 1608), sig. ¶iv; Henry Jacob, An Attestation of Many Learned, Godly, and Famous Divines (Middelburg, 1613), 313; Anon., An Answere to a Sermon preached the 17 of April anno D. 1608, by George Downame (Amsterdam, 1609), 16; Kenneth Gibson, “Downame, George (d. 1634),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http:// www.oxforddnb.com, accessed April 1, 2006. Downame, Two Sermons, sig. ¶3iv, A r–Av, A2 v–A3v, A3iv, 4, 5, 7, 17, 52, passim. Downame criticized Bradshaw and Jacob’s congregationalism again in A Defence of the Sermon Preached at the Consecration of the L. Bishop of Bath and Welles, Against a Confutation thereof by a Nameless Author (London, 1611), 65– 66. Downame, Two Sermons, 95, 97, sigs. A2 v–A3v. Anon., Answere, sig. *3r, 7. Downame responded with A Defence of the Sermon, which prompted Anon., A Replye Answering a Defence of the Sermon (Amsterdam, 1614). Neither reply to Downame appears to me to be written by a protocongregationalist. A Replye, 1st pag., 116, even specifically claims to not entirely agree with the “later disciplinarians,” citing as examples works by Bradshaw and Jacob. But see Robert Paget, “The Publisher to the Christian Reader,” in John Paget, A Defence of Church- Government, Exercised in Presbyteriall, Classicall, and Synodall Assemblies; According to the Practice of the Reformed Churches (London, 1641), sig. ****2r-v. Paget identifies the author of A Replye only as “Sh.” “Sh.” is usually taken to be the nonconformist Richard Sherwood. Stuart Barton Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962), 179–182; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 324; Mark Curtis, “William Jones: Puritan Printer and Propagandist,” Library, 5th ser., 19 (1964), 38– 66, 52–53. Before Jones’s press was stopped, he had issued a collection of previously written anti-episcopal materials in response to Downame, Informations, or a Protestation, and a Treatise from Scotland (London, 1608). For a discussion of the controversy, see Charles W.  A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, UK, 2005), 139–157. For the publishing of the Answere, see Curtis, “William Jones,” 52, and A. F. Johnson, “The Exiled English Church at Amsterdam and Its Press,” Library, 5th ser., 4 (1951), 226. Robert Parker, A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies, Especially in the Signe of the Crosse (Amsterdam, 1607); Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, 3 vols. (London, 1822), 2:96; British Library Royal MS app. 78, fols. 14–20.

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279

12. Stephen A. Bondos-Greene, “The End of an Era: Cambridge Puritanism and the Christ’s College Election of 1609,” Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 197–208; William Hubbard, A General History of New England, from the Discovery to MDCLXXX (Boston, 1848), 187; Dr Williams’s Library, MS 38.34, John Quick, “Icones Sacrae Anglicanae, vol. 1: 9. 13. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 22 (1920), 131 (henceforth CSM, Publications); Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked (London, 1647), 95– 96; Robinson, Works, 2:43. Robinson made the mixed polity claim in his 1610 reply to Richard Bernard, but what he described in practice sounds like a democracy, with the elders having no more power, as he put it, than the prolocutor of a parliament. See also Robinson’s letter clarifying his position, printed in Henry Ainsworth, An Animadversion to Mr Richard Clyftons Advertisement (Amsterdam, 1613), 111–116. In a treatise originally published in 1618, Robinson depicted the elders far more emphatically as the government of the church and independent of the laity, although still making all important decisions in public and with the laity’s endorsement. In this latter treatise, Robinson portrayed the working of church government indistinguishably from Massachusetts practice. See Robinson, Works, 2:140, 173–174, 212; 3:6, 38–43. A perhaps overly tidy effort to distinguish Robinson’s conception of mixed government from that of early Massachusetts theorists, J. S. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge, UK, 2008), 98–108, makes much of the fact that Robinson combined his mixed government analysis with a claim derived from the French political theorist Jean Bodin that the “state” of the church was “popu lar.” Maloy tries to tease out differences between Massachusetts treatises and Robinson on the basis of Robinson’s claim. But John Cotton made the same Bodinian claim, in a document Maloy does not cite (see p. 24 above). 14. For the Pilgrims in Leiden, see Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1905); D. Plooi, The Pilgrim Fathers from a Dutch Point of View (New York, 1932); Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, Mass., 2009). Timothy George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, Ga., 1982), is the best introduction to Robinson. For the English background of the Leiden congregation, see R. A. Marchant, Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560–1646 (London, 1960), chap. 8. The standard identification of John Robinson with the “Robinson” who preached a fiery sermon at St. Andrew’s, Norwich, in 1603 is convincingly challenged in Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560–1643 (Woodbridge, UK, 2005), 98. For the Leiden congregation’s influence on Dutch pietists, see W. J. op’t Hof, “De Internationale Invloed van het Puritanisme,” in W. van’t Spijker, R. Bisschop, and W. J. op’t Hof, eds., Het Puritanisme: Geschiedenis, Theologie en Invloed (The Hague, 2001), 284–286. I thank Professor op’t Hof for sending me his essay. 15. Robinson, Works, 2:72, 69; 3:110. 16. Keith L. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640 (Leiden, 1994), chap. 6; Reynolds, Godly Reformers, 105–106;

280

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

No t e s t o P a g e s 9 5– 9 7

Foster, Notes, 58– 62; William Euring, An Answer to the Ten Counter Demands Propounded by T. Drakes (Leiden, 1619). Brewer left money in his 1619 will for Henry Jacob and the presbyterian patriarch John Dod, and he was a friend of the Dutch pietist William Teelinck. John Bastwicke and Alexander Leighton boarded with him when they were students at Leiden University. See Sprunger, Trumpets, 135; A. P. Bijl, “Teellinck en de Leidse Separatisten Rond John Robinson,” Documentatieblad Nadere Reformatie, 10 (1986), 70–72. Some scholars have pointed to lack of archival evidence that Brewer was a member of Robinson’s church, but John Paget, An Arrow against the Separation of the Brownists (Amsterdam, 1618), 28, identifies him as a member. Robert Cushman, The Cry of a Stone (London, 1642); Thomas Brewer, Gospel Public Worship (London, 1656); William Bradford, “A Dialogue, Or 3rd Conference betweene some Yonge-men borne in New-England, and some Ancient-men, which came out of Holand and Old England, concerning the Church, and the Gouvermente therof,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 1869–1870, 11 (1871), 407–464. Brewer’s book was written while Robinson was still alive. See Brewer, Gospel Public Worship, 99. Cushman’s treatise is deftly analyzed in Stephen Foster, “The Faith of a Separatist Layman: The Authorship, Context, and Significance of the Cry of a Stone,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 34 (1977), 375–403. Robinson, Works, 2:223. Cushman, Cry of a Stone, sig. av–a2r. William Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation” (Boston, 1898), 26. Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana, Ill., 1972), 32–33; Frank Benjamin Carr, “The Thought of Robert Parker (1564–1618) and His Influence on Puritanism before 1650” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1965), 103; William Bradshaw, Puritanismus anglicanus (Frankfurt, 1610); Robert Parker, De Politeia Ecclesiastica Christi et Hierarchica Opposita Libri Tres (Leiden, 1616); Paul Baynes, The Diocesans Tryall (Amsterdam, 1621); Victoria Gregory, “Baynes, Paul (d. 1617),” in Francis J. Bremer and Tom Webster, eds., Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (New York, 2006), 1:21–22; Jacob, Attestation. Baynes, Diocesans Tryall, 78–89. Thomas Gataker may have been referring to The Diocesans Tryall in this comment about William Bradshaw: “It is well known to some yet surviving, that the greatest part of that which was done in that grand Controversie with Doctor Downham . . . for the main matter of it, came forth of his forge; (however of his labour . . . another bare the name . . . ) the tart and bitter language only . . . , proceeding from another pen somewhat too much steeped in Vinegar and Gall, that which he complaineth of as much misliking, in a Letter to a Friend.” See Samuel Clarke, A General Martyrologie (London, 1677), 2nd pag., 55. The Diocesans Tryall came with a notably harsh preface by William Ames, and the author was identified as Baynes on the title page. If this story is correct, Diocesans Tryall must have circulated in manuscript before being published, since Bradshaw died in 1618. Parker, De Politeia Ecclesiastica, bk. iii; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1853), 1:480; David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A His-

No t e s t o P a g e s 9 8 – 10 0

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.



281

tory of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), 113n57; Paget, Defence, 105. John Ball, A Tryall of the New- Church Way in New-England and in Old (London, 1644), 71, in response to New England ministers citing Parker, correctly pointed out that New England practice was more “democratic” than Parker called for. Ames, A Second Manuduction for Mr Robinson (Amsterdam, 1615), 6–11, 32–33. Like earlier presbyterians, Ames argued that ministers’ callings in the Church of England came from their congregations, even if only in the attenuated form of an ex post facto acceptance of their ministry, while the approbation of a bishop was only civil, not spiritual. Moreover, the fact that discipline could not be carried out in the parish churches did not mean that it did not exist there. William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof, Divided into Five Books (London, 1643) [Wing A 2995], bk. iv, 41, 80; Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity Drawne Out of the Holy Scriptures (London, 1642), 158–159, 188–192, 201, 203; Quick, “Icones Sacrae Anglicanae,” 1:46; Sprunger, Learned Doctor Ames, 227. On the earlier separatists and prayer, see Christopher Durston, “By the Book or with the Spirit: The Debate over Liturgical Prayer during the English Revolution,” Historical Research, 79 (2006), 52. Durston is convincingly skeptical of the claim sometimes made that the presbyterian Admonition to the Parliament (1572) was advocating a blanket prohibition of set prayer. Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 82. John Burges, An Answer Rejoyned to that Much Applauded Pamphlet of a Namelesse Author, Bearing this Title: viz. A Reply to Dr. Mortons Generall Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies, &c. (London, 1631), 28; Sprunger, Trumpets, 167; Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, UK, 2001), 116– 120, 129n33; Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 82. See Sprunger, Trumpets, chap. 2, for the printing and distribution of clandestine puritan books in Holland. The minister Richard Baxter, wanting to study the disputes over church government in 1640 outside Birmingham, was able to get hold of Baynes and Parker, as well as an antiDowname treatise by the Dutch minister Gerson Bucerus and Alexander Calderwood’s Altare Damascenum. His reading left him an extremely moderate episcopalian. See Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London, 1696), bk. i, 16. Henry Jacob, A Declaration and Plainer Opening of Certain Pointes (Middelburg, 1612), 5– 6. Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988), 230, in his effort to minimize both separatist originality and the dependence of puritan congregationalists like Jacob on separatism (see p. 267, n39 and p. 274, n37 above), characterizes this passage (without quoting it directly) as “Jacob’s denunciation of the ecclesiastical narrowness he observed among the Separatists and his own disavowal of ever having had ties with them.” I fi nd it impossible to extract Brachlow’s characterization from what Jacob wrote. Jacob, Attestation, 249. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 424; William Bradshaw, A Protestation of the Kings Supremacie (London, 1605), 18. The obscure puritan congregationalist minister Randal Bate, who died in a London prison

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31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

No t e s t o P a g e s 10 0 – 10 4

in 1613, thought that it was legitimate to join the “purest Congregations, if it be without condemning others, as nothing,” which was Jacob’s intention. Randal Bate, Cartain Observations of that Reverend, Religious and Faithfull Servant of God, and Glorious Martyr of Iesus Christ, Mr. Randal Bate (Amsterdam, 1625), 187. For contemporary references to Bates, see Foster, Notes, 89n37. Henry Jacob, A Confession and Protestation of the Faith of Certain Christians (n.p., 1616), sig. A3r, B3v. Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641), 2 vols. (London, 1912), 2:239; Samuel Clarke, A General Martyrologie (London, 1651), 381; Clarke, The Lives of Two and Twenty English Divines (London, 1660), 151; Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge, UK, 2001), 131–136 (132 for James I’s sentiments); R.  H. Helmholz, The Privilege against Self-Incrimination: Its Origins and Development (Chicago, 1997), 70–81. For Travers and Maunsell’s response to Jacob, see the subsequent discussion in text. For the contemporary use of conferences by London ministers to try to manage and contain their confl icts, see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy,” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, Calif., 2001), chap. 9. I thank Peter Lake for discussions about Jacob’s conferences. Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616– 1649 (Cambridge, UK, 1977), 13; Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:294. Jacob, Confession, sig. Bv, Dr. John Bellamie, Justification of the City Remonstrance and Its Vindication (1645), 22; Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:319; Sabine Staresmore, The Unlawfulnes of Reading in Prayer (Amsterdam, 1619), 44. Roborough was an active presbyterian in the 1640s. See P. S. Seaver, “Roborough, Henry (d. 1649),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed January 4, 2005. Robinson, Works, 3:103; Mickle-bound, Barrowes Platform, sig. K2 [i]r. Another angry separatist wrote a marginal note in a copy of this tract, claiming that the passage was a “corruption of the printer” and that “none of us approve it.” See Henry Martin Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1905), 539n3. Lawne, Prophane Schisme, 47–54; Robinson, Works, 3:97. Brewer also encouraged members of John Paget’s church to listen to the sermons of the Amsterdam separatists. See Paget, Arrow, 7, 28– 9. Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, 99; Paget, Arrow, 127, Robinson, Works, 3:63; Paget, Arrow, 28–29. Robinson gave his justification for the practice of listening to Church of England sermons in a Latin treatise he published in 1619, later published in English as A Just and Necessary Apology. He defended it at length in another treatise he wrote around 1624. The treatise was published in Amsterdam in 1634 as A Treatise of the Lawfulnes of Hearing, of the Ministers in the Church of England. See Robinson, Works, 3:65. The preface to the published treatise (Robinson, Works, 345–351) reported on a schism over this issue in the now ministerless congregation after Robinson’s death. Another source claimed that this schism induced Robinson’s wife and a number of others to join the local Dutch Reformed Church. See D. Plooij, The Pilgrim Fathers from a Dutch Point of View (New York, 1932), 91.

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283

40. Robinson, Works, 3:110, 114; Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans, 3 vols. (London 1813), 2:337; Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:293; Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650: A Genetic Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 128. Henry Ainsworth, the most consistent representative of “rigid” separatism in Amsterdam, by contrast to Robinson, wrote that while there were “many” of “gods elect” in the Church of England, the best preachers “shew little power or authority. . . . The best of them may be seen to be but briars. . . . If by their preaching any be brought to the true faith, I account it Gods extraordinary work.” See Henry Ainsworth, Counterpoyson (Amsterdam, 1608), 23–25. 41. CSM, Publications, 121. 42. Robinson, Works, 2:90, 3:102. Much is sometimes made of a letter by a Dutch minister to the effect that Robinson was on the verge of joining the Dutch Reformed Church at the time of his death. But the letter is extremely improbable in some of its details and difficult to interpret. It does seem clear that Robinson gave a Dutch divine the impression that he would have rather had his son minister in a Dutch Reformed congregation than in a separatist one. Given that Robinson’s was the only separatist congregation in the Netherlands that was not arguably an embarrassment and that it was in the process of emigrating, the claim is plausible. He also told the divine that he was doing all he could to remove the schism between the separatists and the other English congregations in the Netherlands (another Dutch divine testified to having heard Robinson say this many times). But in itself that does not say much about Robinson’s ultimate intentions, since ending schism had always been Robinson’s professed goal. See A. C. Carter, “John Robinson and the Dutch Reformed Church,” in G. J. Cummings, ed., Studies in Church History, vol. 3 (Leiden, 1966), 232–241, for a strong argument that Robinson became disillusioned about separatism. If Robinson did have a change of heart about separatist ecclesiology before his death in 1624, it was an extremely belated one. In 1619 he published a book in Latin explaining what he thought was erroneous about the practices of the Dutch churches, and he subsequently translated it into English. No suggestion of dissatisfaction about separatism comes out in his letters to Plymouth colony dated from December 1623. See Bradford, History, 197–220. 43. Robinson, Works, 3:15; Parker, De Politeia Ecclesiastica, 124–128; Anon., A True, Modest, and Just Defence of the Petition for Reformation, Exhibited to the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie (Leiden, 1618), sig. A2v–A3r, A3 [i]r-v. 44. Robinson, Works, 3:150, 114. 45. Theo Bogels, “Govert Basson, English Printer at Leiden,” in Jeremy D. Bangs, ed., The Pilgrims in the Netherlands: Recent Research (Leiden, 1985), 20–21. The preface is signed “I R,” which does not leave many alternatives to Robinson, and Robinson is clearly indicated as the author by an opponent of the separatists, Thomas Drakes. See Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:143. 46. Sprunger, Trumpets, 137; Edward Arber, The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, 1606– 1623 (London, 1897), 222. There is no positive evidence that the Pilgrim Press actually owned a press; for the circumstantial evidence that it did not, see Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First International Diplomat (Boston, 2004), 9–10. Bangs also throws cold water on the common speculation that

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47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

No t e s t o P a g e s 10 7 – 1 10

a printing press screw was aboard the Mayflower. For a recent and extremely conservative tally of the books issued by the Pilgrim Press, see R. Breugelmans, “Were the Books with Brewster’s Address on Their Title-Pages Printed by Him?” in R. Breugelmans, ed., The Pilgrim Press, A Bibliographical and Historical Memorial of the Books Printed at Leyden by the Pilgrim Fathers by Rendel Harris and Stephen K. Jones; Partial Reprint with New Contributions by R. Breugelmans, J. A. Gruys, and Keith L. Sprunger (Kieuwkoop, 1987), 157–160. Thomas Dighton, Certain Reasons of a Private Christian against Conformitie to Kneeling in the Very Act of Receiving the Lords Supper (Leiden, 1618), 138–139; Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, 95–96; Staresmore, Unlawfulnes, 44; R. Breugelmans, “The Pilgrim Press and How Its Books Were Sold,” in Jeremy D. Bangs, ed., The Pilgrims in the Netherlands: Recent Research (Leiden, 1985), 25–28. For a discussion of the press’s books and their contents, see Sprunger, Trumpets, 139–140, and Sprunger, “The Godly Ministry of Printing by Brewster and Brewer,” in Pilgrim Press, 170–177. Staresmore, Unlawfulnes, 44. Sprunger, Learned Doctor Ames, 68–73; Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge, UK, 2005), xxxii–xxxiv, 32– 42; Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1995), 457n26; Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 555–568. Jacob, Confession, title page; Trinity College Dublin, MS 141, fol. 34 r,v. I thank Polly Ha for telling me of this manuscript and the Board of Trinity College, Dublin for permission to use quotations from it. For the substance of the debate between Travers and Jacob, see Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, Calif., 2011), 50–55, 75–80. Staresmore, Unlawfulnes, 8, 47. The Jacob church confession’s claim that prophecy would be permitted to any “understanding” male member of the congregation would have appeared excessive even to John Robinson, who suggested that only two or three laymen in a church could be expected to be fit to prophesy. See Jacob, Confession, sig. C2r; Robinson, Works, 3:55. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:17—177, untangles the convoluted processes, but see the corrections in Foster, Notes, 87nn31–32. John Robinson, A Treatise of the Lawfulnes of Hearing of the Ministers in the Church of England (Amsterdam, 1634), 69–74; Staresmore, Unlawfulnes, 44; A. T., A Christian Reprofe against Contention (Amsterdam, 1631), 20, 5– 6. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:321, 2:295; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 15–28. Jacob’s church gave its consent to Jacob’s departure and dismissed him from the congregation. See Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 2:295; Stephen Wright, “Jacob, Henry (1562/3–1624),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography at http:// www.oxforddnb.com, accessed May 6, 2005. Jacob had been “engaged” to go to Virginia, and the engagement might be connected to the 1621 patent given to the exlay elder of the Amsterdam separatist church, Edward Bennett. For Bennett and other early separatists in Virginia, see Babette M. Levy, “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 70

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(1960), 105–112. It is possible that Jacob’s mythical city first made its appearance in the nineteenth-century Dictionary of National Biography entry on him. Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:320, shredded the myth, but the city continues to show up in the work of historians.

5 . C h r i st i a n L i b e rt y at P ly m o u t h P lantati on 1. William Bradford, Governor William Bradford’s Letter Book (Boston, 1906), 23; Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation” (Boston, 1898), 3. 2. Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1905), 254, 557. The discussions among the Leiden congregation are recreated from Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked (London, 1647), 88– 90, and Bradford, History, 29–35. Winslow’s account of the conference between Brewster and Robinson runs generally parallel with Bradford’s depiction of the discussions between what Bradford called the “prudent governours” and the “sagest members” of the congregation. 3. Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston, 1898), 252, 262; New York Historical Society, Collections, 2nd ser., 3 (1855), 301–302. 4. Bradford, History, 38–43. 5. Ibid., 44–45; Charles Littleton, “Acculturation and the French Church of London, 1600–circa 1640,” in Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, S. C., 2004), 90–111. 6. Bradford, History, 45; John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, 3 vols., ed. Robert Ashton (London, 1851), 3:143–144; Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World (New York, 2010), 25; Kenneth Fincham, Abbot, George (1562–1633), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed November 29, 2010. 7. William Euring, An Answer to the Ten Counter Demands Propounded by T. Drakes (Leiden, 1619), 36. 8. Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, 89– 90; Roy E. Schreiber, The Political Career of Sir Robert Naunton, 1589–1635 (London, 1981), 44–47; Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, 2003), 141–142. 9. Bradford, History, 45–46. 10. Ibid., 51–52. 11. Edmund B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols. (Albany, 1853–1887), 1:22–24. 12. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–1938), 1:261, 264; Bradford, History, 54–58, 93. 13. Ibid., 47–48, 53, 66, 72. 14. Ibid., 199; Bunker, Making Haste, 259–267. 15. Bradford, History, 238. 16. Jeremy Dupertius Bangs, “Mayflower Passengers Documented in Leiden: A List,” Mayflower Quarterly, 51 (1985), 57– 64.

286

No t e s t o P a g e s 1 19 – 1 2 3

17. Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:259, 279–283; Nathaniel Morton, New-Englands Memoriall (Cambridge, Mass., 1669), 12. 18. John Smith, The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (London, 1630), 46; Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, Mass., 2009), 178–179; Bangs, Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First International Diplomat (Boston, 2004), 25; Bradford, History, 119, 133–134, 152. 19. J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherlands, 1609–1664 (New York, 1909), 112; Bradford, History, 493; George Gifford, Fifteen Sermons Upon the Song of Salomon (London, 1616), copy at Plymouth Hall Museum. 20. Alexander Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth: From 1602–1625 (Boston, 1841), 251; Bradford, History, 134–135; George D. Langdon Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620–1691 (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 17. 21. Bradford, History, 143. 22. George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New York, 1945), 235–236; Bradford, History, 175. 23. Bradford, History, 173; “A Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” American Historical Review, 8 (1903), 300. 24. Bradford, History, 188; William Hubbard, A General History of New England, from the Discovery to MDCLXXX (Boston, 1848), 93; Robert Charles Anderson, “The Conant Connection. Part 1: Thomas Horton, London Merchant, and Father-in-Law of Roger Conant,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 147 (1993), 234–239; Anderson, “The Conant Connection. Part 2: Roger Conant, Two Culverwell Families, and the Puritan Network,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 148 (1993), 107–129. 25. Bradford, History, 191, 193–196. 26. Ibid., 190–191, 200. 27. Ibid., 189, 192, 199–200; Frances Rose-Troup, John White: The Patriarch of Dorchester [Dorset] and the Founder of Massachusetts, 1575–1648 (New York, 1930), 69–70. Robinson wrote to Brewster, “Whether any larned man will come unto you or not, I know not: if any doe, you must Consilium capere in arena.” My thanks to Erika Hermanowicz for tracing the quotation to a letter by Seneca (Epistle 22): “Vetus proverbium est gladiatorem in harena capere consilium” (“There is an old proverb that gladiators make their plan in the arena”). See Bradford, History, 200. Robinson quoted Seneca extensively in his most frequently reprinted book, Observations, Divine and Moral and Divine (Amsterdam, 1625). 28. Banks, “Bradford on a Religious Rival,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 62 (1930), 34–53, mounts a vigorous defense of Lyford but turns him into an “Anglican” ceremonialist, as do Rose-Troup, John White, 76; Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:276; and Willison, Saints and Strangers, 246. Langdon, Pilgrim Colony, 20–23, defends the colony’s treatment of Lyford without paying much attention to the religious issues. Lyford’s nonconformity is safe to assume from the good reputation he once had enjoyed among nonconformists in Ireland and from the confession he made to gain admittance to the Plymouth church (see the subsequent discussion

No t e s t o P a g e s 1 2 4 – 1 2 9

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.



287

in text). The Church of Ireland, which was independent of the Church of England, was much more lax about enforcing conformity, and John Winthrop contemplated emigrating there in the 1620s. See Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (New York, 2007), 22–24, 41–55; Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, 2003), 139–140. John Smith, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631), 3 vols., ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 2:472. Bradford, History, 206, 219, 220, 238. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 206–208. Ibid., 208–210, 219. Bradford would have described Lyford’s calling as episcopal, regardless of how Lyford conceived he came by it (see p. 126 above). Thomas Morton, The New English Canaan, ed. Charles Francis Adams Jr. (Boston, 1883), 262–263; Edith Murphy, “Morton, Thomas (1580x95–1646/7),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed October 22, 2007. Morton, New English Canaan, 262–263. Lemuel Shattuck, A History of the Town of Concord (Boston, 1835), 149. See also John Paget, An Arrow against the Separation of the Brownists (Amsterdam, 1618), 15, 93– 94. In like manner, the minister George Philips warned in 1630 upon arriving in Massachusetts that if he were expected to minister on the basis of his calling by a bishop, he would leave his people. See Bradford, Letter Book, 55. The Elizabethan presbyterian Edmund Snape is reported to have said that he would rather have been hanged than stand on the virtue of his letters of ordination from his bishop. See Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 344–345. See also p. 62 and p. 281, n24 above. Robinson, Works, 3:144. Morton, New English Canaan, 263. Richard Alison, A Plaine Confutation of a Treatise of Brownisme (London, 1590), 128; Henry Gee and William John Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History (London, 1896), 492. Bradford, History, 194, 200. Hubbard, General History, 93– 94; Bradford, History, 219. It would have been perfectly within the bounds of non-congregationalist puritan theory for Lyford to administer the sacraments to the settlers on an ad hoc basis, not as a formal church. See John Ball, A Tryall of the New- Church Way in New-England (London, 1644), 31–36. Bradford, History, 220–221. Ibid., 221–228. Ibid., 234. Hubbard, General History, 93; Morton, New-England’s Canaan, 263. The Lyford affair was public knowledge when Bradford wrote, and Lyford’s widow had remarried in Massachusetts. Both factors would have put some restraints on the creativity of his writing.

288

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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Bradford, History, 234–236; Bunker, Making Haste, 345–349. Ibid., 230; Hubbard, General History, 93. Bradford, History, 232. Ibid., 218, 237, 329. Robert Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633, 3 vols. (Boston, 1995), 2:1140, doubts the common claim that Thomas Grey and Walter Knight were also at Nantasket. Bradford, History, 238–239; Littleton, “Acculturation,” 99, 102. Bradford, History, 239. Bradford in later decades would fight a losing battle to keep Plymouth almost as intolerant as Massachusetts. Bradford, Letterbook, 4; Bradford, History, 248, 250; Hubbard, General History, 94; Bunker, Making Haste, 219. See Rose-Troup, John White, chaps. 8–10, on the Dorchester Company and its plantation. White, The Planters Plea (London, 1630), 8; Hubbard, General History, 93. Rose-Troup, John White, chap. 11.

6 . S e pa r at i s m at S alem? 1. Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650: A Genetic Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 105, 128. All subsequent citations of Miller, Orthodoxy, unless identified otherwise, are to the 1933 edition. 2. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963), 81, states that the Massachusetts settlers arrived “prepared to found . . . congregationally or ga nized churches,” although he allows that “Plymouth people must have given a good deal of needed advice about procedures.” David D. Hall, “Introduction,” in Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650 (New York, 1970), xviii–xix, concludes that “Miller’s remains the soundest account of the Salem-Plymouth connection.” Hall argues that congregational ideas were pervasive throughout puritanism and that “every Puritan was capable of establishing a church limited to saints, of building a church government that made laymen and ministers more equal.” In the 1630s, expectations of a purified millennial church swirled through puritanism, and “the fervor of the cleansing process drove [puritans] to become congregationalists.” Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 154, basically repeats Hall’s argument (“the cast of mind among the more radical Puritan ministry [by 1630] . . . virtually dictated that the churches of New England . . . would conform to a pattern that would be called Congregational”), minus the millenarianism. Other historians have similarly downplayed the significance of Plymouth. Darren Staloff ignores Plymouth in his account of the Salem founding in The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York, 1998), 12–17, and asserts that the “impetus behind the gathering of this church, as well as its organ izational structure, came from the two ministers.” Theodore Dwight Bozeman dismisses the Plymouth church as “pathetically unimportant” in To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill,

No t e s t o P a g e s 13 5– 13 6

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.



289

N.C., 1988), 115. Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards, rev. ed. (Hanover, N.H., 1995), 58, states that the Salem puritans picked up “some points of Pilgrim worship” that “went beyond what many of their English brethren were able to do,” mentioning specifically only lay preaching. Bremer ascribes their willingness to pick up these points to innate tendencies of English puritanism, not to Plymouth persuasiveness, and leaves unanswered the question of why so few English brethren picked them up in the 1640s when there were no legal inhibitions. Bremer, in John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, 2003), 166, states only that the Salemites were “perhaps influenced” by Plymouth visitors. Susan Hardman Moore has no discussion of Plymouth in her account of the origins of New England congregationalism in Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, Conn., 2007), 38, 41. Historians of Plymouth colony, a much smaller, far more obscure group, continue to insist that Salem owed a great deal to Plymouth. See George D. Langdon Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620–1691 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 107–114; Lewis M. Robinson, “The Formative Influence of Plymouth Church on American Congregationalism,” Bibliotheca Sacra, 128 (1970), 232–240; Slayden Yarbrough, “The Influence of Plymouth Colony Separatists on Salem: An Interpretation of John Cotton’s Letter of 1630 to Samuel Skelton,” Church History, 51 (1982), 290–303; Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First International Diplomat (Boston, 2004), 123–127. But see Larzer Ziff ’s important essay, “The Salem Puritans in the ‘Free Aire of a New World,’ ” Huntington Library Quarterly, 20 (1957), 373–384. The interpretation in this chapter builds on Ziff ’s foundation. Francis J. Bremer, “Endecott, John (d. 1665),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed February 15, 2008. Endicott is referred to as “Captain” in a 1630 letter. See William Bradford, Governor William Bradford’s Letter Book (Boston, 1906), 57. William Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation” (Boston, 1898), 286. See William Heath, “Thomas Morton: From Merry Old England to New England,” Journal of American Studies, 41 (2007), 135–168, for a recent account of Morton and his famous picaresque adventures and confl icts with radical Protestants in Massachusetts. Frances Rose-Troup, John White: The Patriarch of Dorchester [Dorset] and the Founder of Massachusetts, 1575–1648 (New York, 1930), 134–135 and chap. 13; Moore, Pilgrims, 22. Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, 5 vols. (Boston, 1854), 1:37, 385; Rory T. Cornish, “White, John (1575–1648),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed January 15, 2008. For Davenport, see p. 306, n43 below. Keith L. Sprunger, “William Ames and the Settlement of Massachusetts Bay,” New England Quarterly, 39 (1966), 67– 68. Winthrop Papers, various eds., 6 vols. to date (Boston, 1927–), 2:31; John Cotton, A sermon Preached by the Reverend, Mr. John Cotton, Teacher of the First Church in Boston in New-England. Deliver’d at Salem, 1636 (Boston, 1713), 2, 3. As late as 1630,

290

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evidence for Cotton’s agreement in any way with Ames’s congregationalism in the surviving sources is extremely slender at most and perhaps nonex istent. Historians arguing otherwise point to the covenant he made with some of his parishioners in his English parish in Boston, Lincolnshire. But this sort of covenant could be drawn up by extremely moderate puritans; on its own, it is not evidence of a leaning toward congregationalism. See p. 303, n32 below. The other evidence sometimes cited for Cotton’s early congregationalism comes from a letter Cotton wrote to Salem’s minister Samuel Skelton dated October 2, 1630, in which Cotton defi ned a church as meeting together in one place. That defi nition might reflect Cotton’s reading of congregationalist authors. But it lacked distinctive congregationalist terminology clarifying that this was the only kind of instituted church possible; it had no reference to implicit or explicit church covenants; and Cotton went on to deny that covenants were essential to a church. Moreover, he immediately followed his defi nition with two distinctly non- or anti-congregationalist examples of what he considered to be valid Church of England covenants. One was Parliament’s rejection of popery in the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, an old presbyterian anti-separatist example. The other was the baptismal profession made by Church of England parents. Both these “national” ecclesiastical covenants unconnected to particu lar churches were antithetical to congregationalism. William Ames used neither when making his congregationalist minimalist defense of the Church of England to John Robinson in 1614, nor did Cotton himself when making the same defense fi fteen years after this letter. The closest Cotton approached to Ames’s argument about implicit parish church covenants was when he argued to Skelton that the minister and godly people in a parish had an implicit “mutuall engagement.” But that is an old presbyterian argument and not very close to congregationalism; congregational church covenants had nothing to do with the relationship between a minister and his people. Cotton’s fundamental argument in the Skelton letter was that Christians were entitled to the Lord’s Supper for themselves and baptism for their children on the utterly noncongregationalist basis that they were members of the universal church, not because of membership in a particu lar congregation. Ames disagreed with the first proposition but agreed with the second. Massachusetts congregationalists, and separatists, emphatically disagreed with both, including Cotton later. Cotton showed a similar non-congregationalist slide from particu lar churches to larger ecclesiastical units in a series of sermons preached around 1630. There he referred to the apostles writing letters to “particu lar Congregations, or to Churches or Nations” and had a long discussion about God’s covenant with his people without so much as hinting at church covenants. By 1630, if Cotton had wished to, he could have easily invoked the relevant parts of Ames’s congregationalism and terminology from Ames’s Medulla ss. Theologiae, first published in Amsterdam in 1627 but republished in London in 1629 and 1630. See John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargeant Bush Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 146; Cotton, Christ the Fountain of Life (London, 1651), 34–39, 180 (for the dating of these sermons to circa 1630, see p. 303, n23 below); Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (London, 1647), 2nd pag., 79–84; William Ames, A Second Manuduction, for Mr. Robinson (Amsterdam, 1614), 6–11; Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (Lon-

No t e t o P a g e 13 7



291

don, 1642), 159, 189; Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof (London, 1643) [Wing A2995], part iv: 81–82; Foster, Long Argument, 154. 9. Winthrop Papers, 340. 10. Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of the English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982), 164–165. John Wing has been suggested as a possible “Jacobite” in the 1620s. See ibid., 294. 11. Carol Geary Schneider, “Godly Order in a Church Half-Reformed: The Disciplinarian Legacy, 1570–1641” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1986), argues that the prominent puritan minister John Ball and his circle were under the heavy influence of William Ames, whom she calls Ball’s “mentor” (p. 310). Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, UK, 1997), chap. 16, amplifies Schneider’s arguments and devises the label of “Amesians” for Ball and his circle. But the differences between Ames and Ball marked fundamental differences between congregationalism and more moderate puritanism. The historical premise of Ames’s congregationalism was that the New Testament churches were always small enough that they could conveniently meet together for worship and business. See, for example, William Ames, Marrow, 201. John Ball, A Friendly Triall of the Grounds Tending to Separation (London, 1642), 301–302, argued that the apostles frequently founded churches too big to meet as single congregations and jabbed at congregationalist counterarguments in the process. Like earlier presbyterians, Ball insisted that Christ gave his power immediately to church officers. See Ball, Friendly Triall, 267, 271–272. By contrast, Ames, Marrow, 192, claimed that Christ gave his power to the church as a whole and that the church took an active, although subordinate, role in the officers’ execution of that power. Although Ball did not discuss the power of synods, that power was implicit in his argument that churches could be bigger than congregations, as all parties in this debate understood. Webster, Godly Clergy, 303n10, notes that Ball stated his agreement with Ames on certain issues, but these were issues where Ames disagreed with most congregationalists and agreed with moderate puritans. See p. 295, n33 below. Many of Schneider and Webster’s other arguments seem to me to be built on a misreading of sources. Schneider, “Godly Order,” 312, cites a passage where Ball made a claim about church power more like Ames’s without noting that Ball was presenting the opinion of divines with whom he disagreed. The same passage forms the lynchpin of the condensed version of her argument in Carol G. Schneider, “Roots and Branches: From Principled Nonconformity to the Emergence of Religious Parties,” in Francis J. Bremer, ed., Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth- Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston, 1993), 178. Webster, Godly Clergy, 303, cites a passage where Ball refers to Robert Parker’s opinion on the “power of the keys” and then assumes incorrectly that Ball held it. Webster, Godly Clergy, 302n8, sequentially incorrectly identifies Ball’s reference to the covenant that the universal church has with God as a congregational church covenant; ascribes an opinion to Ball in a passage where Ball was discussing William Ames’s opinion; and appears to argue that Ball’s saying that a church with officers could exercise discipline was “Amesian,” as opposed to being, as it was, generically presbyterian.

292

12. 13.

14.

15.

No t e s t o P a g e s 13 7 – 13 8

Webster (p. 298) also fi nds it significant that John Cotton could call himself a disciple of Paul Baynes and still protest the 1630 Salem decision discussed below, but Cotton’s reference was to Baynes’s practical divinity, not his ecclesiology. Ball’s insistence that ordination needed to be carried out by officers was not “Amesian,” as Webster (pp. 302–303) argues. Unlike Ball, Ames identified ordination with election by the people; congregationalists accordingly accepted lay ordination. See Ames, Marrow, 204. Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, Calif., 2011), 60–62, notes, contra Webster, the disagreement between Ball and Ames about the size of New Testament churches and the significance of that disagreement. Ames, Marrow, title page. For Bright, see Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 386; William Hubbard, A General History of New England, from the Discovery to MDCLXXX (Boston, 1848), 113; Miller, Orthodoxy, 129. Another minister, Ralph Smith, paid his own way to Salem. Smith was well connected in North Sea radical puritan circles. He may have intended to practice his ministry at Salem until the Company, as it claimed to Endicott, “understood of his difference of judgment in some things from our ministers.” Smith was told that he could stay in Salem only if he agreed to conform to its government. Smith ended up ministering in Plymouth for seven years, where William Hubbard claimed that he was a “rigid” Amsterdam-style separatist. Perhaps Smith was already a rigid separatist in England, or perhaps the Massachusetts Bay Company, pressured by its conservative wing, belatedly simply decided that Smith was a dangerous loose cannon— Smith had attempted to undermine John Davenport, one of the ministers who vetted prospective clerics for the Company, among the godly a few years previously because of Davenport’s conformity. See Stephen Foster, Notes from the Caroline Underground: Alexander Leighton, the Puritan Triumvirate, and the Laudian Reaction to Nonconformity (Hamden, Conn., 1978), 18–19; Hubbard, General History, 97; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:390. The commencement of the presbyterianized Church of England was delayed for almost a year in 1645 and 1646 as puritan ministers struggled against what they saw as Parliament’s refusal to give them sufficient powers to adequately police the Lord’s Supper. See George Yule, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament, 1640–1647 (Appleford, UK, 1981), chap. 7. Miller, Orthodoxy, 129–130; Thomas Hooker, Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633, ed. George H. Williams, Norman Pettit, Winfried Herget, and Sargent Bush Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 277–291; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1853), 1:356, 357. Foster, Long Argument, 103– 104, claims that Hildersham probably was a “non-separating congregationalist,” on the basis of his close association with the congregationalist William Bradshaw. No congregationalist that I am aware of tried to argue that Hildersham was one of theirs, including Hildersham’s friend Cotton. Hildersham was remembered in the 1650s as a presbyterian, and it was claimed that he disapproved of early New England congregationalism (he died in 1632). See London Provincial Assembly, A Vindication of the Presbyteriall-Government, and Ministry (London, 1650), 19; Matthew Newcomen, Irenicum (London, 1659), sig. av–a[i]r. Foster, Long Argument, 154, says Higginson knew “the classic statements of ‘nonseparating Congregationalism’ ”

No t e s t o P a g e s 13 9 – 1 4 3

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.



293

before emigrating, citing (348n31) Miller, Orthodoxy. I could not fi nd his reference. See also C. E. Welch, “Early Nonconformity in Leicestershire,” Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions 37 (1961–1962), 34–38. Cotton, Correspondence, 142–144; Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (London, 1648), 16; Cotton, A Practical Commentary, or, An Exposition with Observations, Reasons, and Uses upon the First Epistle Generall of John (London, 1656), 156–157; Cotton, A Brief Exposition of the Whole Book of Canticles (London, 1642), 31–32, 62, 112, 126, 169, 180–181; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:37g–h; Miller, Orthodoxy, 131. The three anti-separatist books Skelton brought to Salem were John Paget, An Arrow Against the Separation of the Brownists (Amsterdam, 1618); Stephen Bredwell, The Rasing of the Foundations of Brownisme (London, 1588); and either Richard Bernard, Christian Advertisements and Counsels of Peace (London, 1608), or Bernard, Plaine Evidences (London, 1610). Hubbard, General History, 117–118; Mather, Magnalia, 1:70; Newcomen, Irenicum, sig. a [i]r. Mather includes a quotation not in Hubbard. Victoria Gregory, “Hildersham, Arthur (1563–1632),” in Francis J. Bremer and Tom Webster, eds., Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (New York, 2006), 2:126–127. On April 17, 1629, the Company wrote to Governor Endicott, assuring him that all three ministers “have declared themselves to us to bee of one judgment, and to bee fully agreed on the manner how to exercise their ministry.” It is difficult to know what exactly the phrase “exercise their ministry” was intended to convey, given the ministers’ different backgrounds and given that Bright, the odd one out, would quickly leave the settlement. See Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:394. Bradford, History, 315–315. Christopher Lawne, The Prophane Schisme of the Brownists or Separatists (London, 1612), 4; Bradford, History, 61– 62. William Brewster had almost four hundred books, and William Bradford had over a hundred. Information accessed from the  Plymouth Hall Museum website, May 1, 2008: http://www.pilgrimhall.org / willwbradford.htm; http://www.pilgrimhall.org /willwbrewster.htm; http://www .pilgrimhall.org/willsfuller.htm; http://www.pilgrimhall.org/willmylesstandish.htm. John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, ed. Robert Ashton, 3 vols. (London, 1851), 2:446; Robert Cushman, The Cry of a Stone (London, 1642), 1–2, 6, 23. Bradford, History, 315–316. On the basis of a passing remark in a letter from Matthew Craddock to Endicott, found in Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:386, Miller (Orthodoxy, 129) claims that Hugh Peter was a friend of Endicott, but this may be putting more weight on the passage than it can bear. Peter either already was, or soon would be, a close personal associate of William Ames and would become one of the leaders of congregationalism in Holland. It is unknown how long before the 1630s Peter adopted Ames’s congregationalism, although one would not guess that uncertainty from reading Miller. Unless Peter was telling bald-faced lies in a letter of August 1627, which would have been near the end of any firsthand contact he had with Endicott, he was at that time, like many puritans, at most mildly unhappy with the Church of England’s ceremonies and had no objection to episcopacy itself. See William Prynne,

294

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

No t e s t o P a g e s 1 4 4 – 1 4 6

A Fresh Discovery of Some Prodigious New Wandring-Blasing- Stars, and Firebrands, Stiling Themselves New-Lights (London, 1645), 33. The earliest indication that Peter was leaning to congregationalism is the refusal of the militant anti-congregationalist John Paget in November 1628 to accept him as a second minister in the presbyterian English church at Amsterdam. Peter had lived with Ames at the University of Franeker earlier that year. See Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana, Ill., 1972), 86. Bradford, History, 316; Bradford, Letter Book, 48; Mather, Magnalia, 1:70; William Rathband, A Briefe Narration of Some Church Courses Held in Opinion and Practise in the Churches Lately Erected in New England (London, 1644), 8 (both Winslow and Rathband are identified only by their initials); Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked (London, 1647), 92. Miller, Orthodoxy, 136, makes much of William Bradford’s endorsement of a claim by Cotton, Way, 17, in response to the Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie, that the Massachusetts churches were not set up with “any solemn or common consultation” with Plymouth. But as with everything that Cotton wrote in reply to Baillie, his answer has to be parsed very carefully, and in this case with one eye on Baillie’s initial wildly inaccurate account of events in New England and the otherr on the wording with which Edward Winslow denied that the Massachusetts churches copied Plymouth. Baillie noted Cotton’s careful wording in his response to Cotton. See Robert Baillie, The Disswasive from the Errors of the Time, Vindicated (London, 1655), 14. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:37g–h; Paget, Arrow, esp.  95– 98. One of the Ainsworth titles, identified only as “Aynsworth,” was valued with Skelton’s most expensive books, which suggests that it was Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses, the Booke of the Psalmes, and the Song of Songs, or, Canticles (London, 1627). Thomas Barlow, Lady Margaret professor of divinity at Oxford before becoming bishop of Lincoln in 1675 and no friend to puritanism, let alone separatism, advised when providing a basic reading list for theological students, “On the Pentateuch, consult Ainsworth, inferior to none.” See Thomas Barlow, Autoschediasmata, De Studio Theologiae (London, 1699), 10. Nathaniel Morton, New-England’s Memoriall (Cambridge, Mass., 1669), 75. Ibid., 316–317; Hubbard, General History, 119; Bradford, Letter Book, 47; Rose-Troup, John White, 149n37. Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 75, for some reason overlooked the letter from Charles Gott to William Bradford dated July 30 in Bradford, History, 316–317, discussing this day. As a result, Morton collapsed this meeting into an August 6 meeting that Gott mentioned as being only for the selection and ordination of lay officers. At the same time, Morton provided details that obviously referred to the July 20 meeting but that Gott left out. In my reconstruction of the July 20 meeting, I have reinserted those details. Mather, Magnalia, 1:385. Cotton, Correspondence, 143. Ibid., 143. For Robinson’s comment about Church of England puritans being members of “the Catholick Church dispersed upon the face of the whole earth” but not members of “a spirituall politick body,” see his A Just and Necessarie Apologie of

No t e t o P a g e 1 47



295

Certain Christians, No Lesse Contumeliously then Commonly Called Brownists or Barrowists (Amsterdam, 1625), 58–59. 32. Mather, Magnalia, 1:257; Cotton, Correspondence, 143. The immigrant accepted for the sacraments was probably Thomas Matson, for whom see p. 298, n55 below, although if he presented a child for baptism, it did not live long enough to appear in the colony’s records. Twentieth-century historians have recognized that Skelton was arguing that churches needed explicit covenants and that Cotton disagreed with him. However, they have been deflected from the full separatist significance of Skelton’s action and his explanation of it for a number of reasons. They generally treat Skelton’s action and Cotton’s reply with the post-Miller assumption that Cotton was already leaning toward congregationalism, for which there is little to no evidence. They also generally overlook that Skelton was using Robinson’s arguments to make his case; that congregationalists like William Ames profoundly disagreed with Skelton; and that Cotton in his response was relying heavily on old puritan anti-separatist arguments, especially in a critical section where he was discussing covenants. See p. 289, n8 above and p. 303, n32 below. These oversights can make the two ministers’ positions seem considerably closer than they were. See Morgan, Visible Saints, 81, 86; David D. Hall, “John Cotton’s Letter to Samuel Skelton,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 22 (July 1965), 479; Cotton, Correspondence, 141–149; Foster, Long Argument, 153–154; Webster, Godly Clergy, 297–298. The letter was not generally known to historians until Hall edited and published it, which is why Perry Miller did not engage with it. 33. Ames, Conscience, part iv: 81–82. Ames argued that it was sufficient to know that the parents of children to be baptized were outwardly professing Christians, not that they were members of a specific covenanted, true church. As extreme examples, he stated that the children of Catholics could be baptized, since Catholics were “halfe Christians,” and he also claimed that if children of unknown parents were raised among Christians, for the purpose of baptism those children were to be “accounted as the children of Christians, if there be not a just cause of presuming the contrary.” Opponents of New England congregationalism pointed out the New Englanders’ difference with Ames. See Simeon Ashe and William Rathband, A Letter of Many ministers in Old England (London, 1643), 45, 48–49. In reply, Thomas Shepard and John Allin, A Defence of the Answer (London, 1648), 150, acknowledged that Ames, unlike the New Englanders in 1630 and thereafter, was “very large in his charity about the baptizing of Infants.” The future prominent New Englanders Thomas Hooker and John Davenport had the same opinion about baptism as Ames while still in Holland. In 1631, Hooker, under questioning by the presbyterian John Paget, rejected the Dutch practice of baptizing any children as long as one of their parents would make a verbal assent to the baptismal liturgy. Paget put the same question to John Davenport three years later, who cited Ames and explained that he wanted to privately examine parents who were not members of his church to ascertain that they were Christians (Skelton, by contrast, agreed that Coddington was a Christian before refusing to baptize his baby). Davenport planned to ascertain whether parents were Christians, he explained, by determining their religion, what church they belonged to, and their profession of faith. Davenport cited Ames to show that he was

296

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

No t e s t o P a g e s 1 47 – 150

only trying to implement what he considered to be universally agreed-upon standards. Paget indicated that Davenport and Hooker agreed on this point. See Hooker, Writings, 282; John Davenport, A Just Complaint against an Uniust Doer (Amsterdam, 1634), 2, 3, 5; Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 113. A congregationalist treatise written by Davenport before coming to New England simply said that children should not be baptized if both their parents were “visibly prophane.” See Folio vol. 1, Mather Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, unpaginated (p. 24 from the first page of the treatise). For the treatise, see p. 262, n64 above. Opponents of New England congregationalism also cited Davenport’s earlier opinion. See Ashe and Rathband, Letter, 49. Shepard and Allin, Defence, 150, tried to pull Ames within very remote hailing distance of the New England position that baptism for infants was dependent on a parent’s membership in a true church. They argued that it might be deduced that Ames assumed that anyone who made a profession of faith was a member of a particular church and that therefore he really meant that a parent’s church membership itself, even membership in the Catholic Church, was the requirement for infant baptism, not the individual Christian’s profession of faith, per se: “It may seeme by some passages that [Ames] understood by profession of faith, such as live in the visible Churches, and lookes at the child of a Papist as one of a visible Church for substance, though so exceedingly corrupt.” Even by the terms of this strained interpretation, Ames would have baptized the children of all arriving English immigrants. Cotton, Correspondence, 144. See p. 289, n8 above. Cotton’s arguments to Skelton about the success of the English ministry and the corruptions of the old “Jewish” church were in their general form, if not necessarily in their specific details, standard anti-separatist arguments. Hubbard, General History, 117. Bradford, History, 317; Hubbard, General History, 109; Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 75–76; Bradford, Letter Book, 57. In the summer of 1629, Higginson and Skelton were said to have denied that they had separated from the Church of England, which would suggest either a progressive radicalization of Skelton and other members of the Salem church over the coming months or a greater frankness after their most powerful opponents returned to England. See Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 77. Hubbard, General History, 117. Newcomen, Irenicum, sig. a [I]r. For accounts of the one functioning English presbyterian church at this time, see Alice Clare Carter, The English Reformed Church in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam, 1964); and Ha, English Presbyterianism, chap. 7. Hubbard, General History, 119–120. The example Hubbard gives is Higginson’s willingness to be flexible about admission procedures. Thomas Morton, The New English Canaan, ed. Charles Francis Adams Jr. (Boston, 1883), 306–307. Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 75, 76, 77; Bradford, Letter Book, 47. Bradford, History, 316; Hubbard, General History, 112, 113; Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 74, 75–77; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:51–53. Morton, New-

No t e s t o P a g e s 150 – 15 3

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53.



297

England’s Memoriall, 75–76, says that Higginson’s confession of faith and covenant were treated only as guides. Subsequent members had the options of being admitted after questioning about their religious knowledge or after reading their own confessions of faith. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:407–409. Bremer, John Winthrop, 193; Bradford, Letter Book, 56–59. Ibid., 56–57. Ibid., 56; Rose-Troup, John White, 201–202. For Wilson’s clerical friends, see Mather, Magnalia, 1:313. The friends were John Preston and Richard Sibbes, conformists; Thomas Taylor, a possible presbyterian; William Gouge, a nonconformist and possibly already presbyterian; John Norton, a nonconformist and future congregationalist; and William Ames. For Preston and Sibbes, see p. 270, n10; for Thomas Taylor, see his A Commentarie upon the Epistle of Saint Paul Written to Titus (London, 1619), 86, 121; and J. Sears McGee, “Taylor, Thomas (1576–1632),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http:// www.oxforddnb.com, accessed May 17, 2009; for Gouge, see Brett Usher, “Gouge, William (1575–1653),” in ibid., accessed May 17, 2009; and Ha, English Presbyterianism, 133; for Norton, see Mather, Magnalia, 1:288. Mather, Magnalia, 1:376; Hubbard, General History, 186; Bradford, Letter Book, 56, 57; Mather, Magnalia, 1:364; Hubbard, General History, 187. Hubbard says Browne was an officer in a separatist church, but it is possible that he has the details wrong. For Browne and the Jacob church, see p. 101 above. For Philips, see also p. 287, n36 above. Ibid., 56. In 1629, Winthrop wrote to Ames requesting “directions” on some issue involving the planned colony. Ames wrote back on December 29, 1629, saying that “I have nothing to write: as being ignorant of special difficulties; and supposing the general care of safetie, libertie, unitie, with puritie, to bee in all your minds and desires.” This refusal to offer advice is sometimes interpreted as demonstrating that Ames was confident that the colonists would set up congregationalist churches, which seems a heavy weight to put on Ames’s noncommittal answer. See Winthrop Papers, 2:180. Bradford, Letter Book, 57. Ibid., 57, 58. Mather, Magnalia, 1:377; Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893), 131. A slightly more elaborate, presumably later version of the Boston/Charlestown covenant is given in John Cotton, A Coppy of a Letter of Mr. Cotton of Boston, in New England (London, 1641), 6. Fuller’s letter to Bradford is explicit that three churches were to be founded. Nonetheless, it is sometimes argued that the Dorchester church was founded as a congregational church in England. The basis for this argument is that the group called its ministers after a day of fasting and preaching by John White in Plymouth, England, before migrating. See Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, from 1623–1636 (Boston, 1846), 347. Of the two ministers called, John Maverick’s opinions are unknown, while John Wareham was a nonconformist who had been either silenced or suspended. However, this account of the Plymouth rituals

298

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

No t e s t o P a g e s 15 3 – 15 4

gives no indication that this ceremony was regarded as the founding of a church. Roger Clap, the settler who supplied the account and migrated with the group, later in his narrative remarked on “our first beginning in Dorchester [Massachusetts], in the year 1630,” at which he was taken into church fellowship. See Young, Chronicles, 355. The settler Edward Johnson in his A History of New-England (London, 1654), 41, also stated that this church was gathered at Dorchester, not in England. See also Rose-Troup, John White, 202–203. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 54; Harry Reed Stiles, The History of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut (New York, 1859), 16–17, 167–172. In the winter of 1630–1631, Thomas Matson was “received by communion of churches from a church in London” to the Boston church. He did not become an actual member of the Boston church until 1636. The singular phraseology suggests that he was given the exceptional privilege of being allowed to participate in the sacraments without joining the church on the basis of his otherwise unrecorded membership in either the Jacob church or a London separatist church. If this had been a reference to a parish church, there would have been numerous immigrants recorded as being received on the basis of “communion of churches.” Richard D. Pierce, ed., “The Records of the First Church in Boston 1630–1868,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications, 31 (1961), 14, 20. I thank Frank Bremer for pointing out Matson’s entry. Hubbard, General History, 186. The practice of only listening to sermons in the parish churches on Robinsonian grounds was first clearly documented in a debate with Roger Williams commencing in 1634. See, for example, Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, 166. There is an ambiguous passage in one of John Cotton’s letters referring to this practice in the context of a trip by the minister John Wilson to England. He describes the circumstances in a way that might suggest that Cotton had been in Boston at the time, which would make it Wilson’s 1634–1635 trip, but he says that the trip lasted for more than a year, which fits the trip that Wilson took in 1631–1632. See Cotton, Correspondence, 239. Ames had assured Winthrop at the end of 1629 that he would emigrate “upon the news of your safe arrivall, with good hope of prosperitie.” See Winthrop Papers, 2:180. See also Sprunger, Learned Doctor, 92, 202–205. It might have been in either his 1631–1632 or 1634–1635 trip to England that Wilson explained that the presbytery of each Massachusetts church conducted its business before the congregation. See Cotton, Correspondence, 239. Winthrop gave a similar explanation in a letter to Nathaniel Rich, dated May 22, 1634. See Winthrop Papers, 3:167. In a paper conventionally dated to early 1631, John Winthrop was making a conventional congregationalist argument against separatism, defending only the “particu lar congregations” within the Church of England as true churches. See Winthrop Papers, 3:10–14. The first reference to synods comes in a November 1633 entry in Winthrop’s journal, in which Winthrop reported that all the ministers in Massachusetts were “cleere in that pointe that no Church or person can have power over another Churche.” See Winthrop, Journal, 103. Baptism aside, there is nothing in Ames’s writings to suggest that he would have denied the Lord’s Supper to arriving godly immigrants like the New Englanders

No t e s t o P a g e s 15 4 – 15 8

60.

61.

62.

63.

64. 65.



299

did. Thomas Hooker, in his answer to John Paget’s interrogatories in 1631, endorsed communion in English churches and rejected participating in church worship in separatist churches, which was the exact opposite of New England practice. See Hooker, Writings, 278, 280; Winthrop Papers, 2:332; Ames, Conscience, part iv: 62– 63, 81–82; part v: 141. Thomas Hooker was a prominent congregationalist, and most of the arriving ministers were his associates. The presbyterian John Paget rejected Thomas Weld as a co-minister during the latter’s brief stay in the Netherlands in 1631 because he did not want an incipient congregationalist (he rejected Hooker for the same reason). See Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 103–111. Samuel Stone was picked by the men coming with Hooker as his congregants because they were looking for someone who would be Hooker’s disciple as well as his assistant. John Eliot lived with Hooker and served as the usher at a school Hooker set up at his house in Essex after losing his ministry. See Mather, Magnalia, 1:335–336, 434. On Samuel Batchelor, see Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 347. For Roger Williams, see Chapter 9 in this volume. Not enough is known about Thomas James or William Leveritch to make an educated guess about their pre-emigration opinions. Cotton, A sermon, 1– 6. This is not to argue that puritan congregationalists did not influence Cotton and make him more receptive to congregationalism, only that as soon as Cotton can be identified as a congregationalist, he has moved past them. John Ball, A Tryall of the New- Church Way in New-England and in Old (London, 1644), 28, sig. A2v, questions three, four, and nine. Ball printed the original English letter and the previous New England response. The final publication in the exchange was Shepard and Allin, Defence. The original letter is printed in Cotton, Correspondence, 264–266. The additional requirement of a testimony of saving grace for church membership only exacerbated the original quarrel. The relationship between the testimony and the covenant can be seen in Richard Bernard’s letter to John Cotton in Cotton, Correspondence, 257–261, which formed part of another prolonged print and manuscript debate. For later English congregational practice, see pp. 235–237 above. At least two English copies of Cotton’s letter to Skelton survive. See Cotton, Correspondence, 142. Concern about overly restrictive baptismal requirements in New England began in the 1640s and led in the next decade to the contentious so-called Halfway Covenant dispute. In the 1680s, a few ministers started to baptize children whose parents appeared Christian but were not members of a particu lar congregation, which was Ames’s criterion. By 1719 it was claimed that a hundred ministers in Massachusetts would baptize any such child. See David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1972), 205; E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven, Conn., 1974), 182–186. Winthrop, Journal, 39; Mather, Magnalia, 1:306. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 22 (1920), 117; Roger Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (London, 1644), 46; Ball, Friendly Triall, 156; Rathband, Briefe Narration, 52; Winthrop Papers, 3:336, 400.

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No t e s t o Pa ge s 15 8 – 16 2

66. Miller, Orthodoxy, chap. 4. 67. Bradford, History, 250, 322.

7. Th e A p p e a l o f M a s sac h u s e t t s Cong regat i onali sm 1. Patrick Collinson, “Comment on Eamon Duff y’s Neale Lecture and the Colloquium,” in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1988), 73. For examples of cooperation between radical and moderate puritans, see Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, UK, 2001), 57; William Fiennes, Vindiciae Veritas (London, 1654), 148; Nicholas Byfield, An Exposition upon the Epistle to the Colossians, 3rd ed. (London, 1627), 2:75; Samuel Clark, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (London, 1649), 498; Clark, The Lives of Thirty Two Divines (London, 1677), 117, 134, 172; Ronald A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560–1642 (London, 1960), 170; Judith Maltby, “From Temple to Synagogue: ‘Old’ Conformity in the 1640s–1650 and the Case of Christopher Harvey,” in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, UK, 2000), 96. 2. For discussions of the dilemmas presented by subscription and conformity for Jacobean puritans, see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, UK, 1982), chaps. 10 and 11; and Lake, “Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church,” in Lake and Questier, Conformity and Orthodoxy, 179–205. For an example from the 1630s, see John Morrill, “A Liberation Theology? Aspects of Puritanism in the English Revolution,” in Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., Puritanism and Its Discontents (Newark, Del., 2003), 30. 3. Walter Travers, A Defence of the Ecclesiastical Discipline Ordayned of God to be Used in his Church (Middelburg, Holland, 1588), 38; Anon., A Most Grave, and Modest Confutation of the Errors of the Sect, Commonly Called Brownists, or: Seperatists, ed. William Rathband (London, 1644), 18 (see p. 268, n50 above for background); John Udall, Commentarie Upon the Lamentations of Jeremy (London, 1593), 22; Arthur Hildersham, CVIII Lectures upon the Fourth of Iohn (London, 1638), 165–167; John Cotton, A Practical Commentary, or, An Exposition with Observations, Reasons, and Uses upon the First Epistle Generall of John (London, 1656), 157; John Darrel, A Treatise of the Church (London, 1617), 101; Henry Smith, Gods Arrowe against Atheists (London, 1593), sig. K2r; Thomas Cartwright, Cartwrightiana, ed. Albert Peel and Leland H. Carlson (London, 1951), 54. 4. Robert Parker, A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with Antichrist in Ceremonies: Especially in the Signe of the Crosse (Middelburg, Holland, 1607), 120. 5. John Sprint, Cassander Anglicanus: Shewing the Necessity of Conformitie to the Prescribed Ceremonies of Our Church, in Case of Deprivation (London, 1618), sig. *3iv–A r; Henry Jacob, A Christian and Modest Offer of a Most Indifferent Conference (London, 1606), 19; John Burges, An Answer Rejoyned to that Much Applauded Pamphlet of a Namelesse Author (London, 1631), 9;; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi

No t e s t o Pa ge s 16 2 – 16 5

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.



301

Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1855), 1:416; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 191–193. Patrick Collinson, From Cramer to Sancroft (London, 2006), 115; Arthur Hildersham, CLII lectures upon Psalme LI Preached at Ashby-Delazouch in Leicester-shire (London, 1635), 179–180. See also Giles Firmin, The Real Christian (London, 1670), 68, for a dispute between Richard Rogers and John Knewstub on shunning as a teaching device. Rogers explained his position in A Commentary Upon the Whole Booke of Iudges (London, 1615), 48. See also John Udall, Peters Fall (London, 1584), sig. Dv. For discussions of generic puritan shunning, as practiced by conformist and nonconformist alike, see Peter Lake, “ ‘A Charitable Christian hatred’: The Godly and Their Enemies in the 1630s,” in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds., The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (New York, 1996), 156–174; and Patrick Collinson, “The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful,” in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 51–76. William Bradshaw, A Plaine and Pithy Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (London, 1620), 199. Burges, Answer, 4–5; George Downame, Two Sermons, the One Commending the Ministerie in Generall: The Other Defending the Office of Bishops in Particular (London, 1608), sig. A2r; Thomas Morton, A Defence of the Innocencie of the Three Ceremonies of the Church of England (London, 1618), Av, 44; Sprint, Cassander Anglicanus, sig. *3r; John Davenport, Letters of John Davenport, Puritan Divine, ed. Isabel MacBeath Calder (New Haven, Conn., 1937), 24; William Ames, A Reply to Dr Mortons Generall Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies (Amsterdam, 1622), 31; Winthrop Papers, various eds., 6 vols. to date (Boston, 1927–), 3:311; Thomas Hooker, Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633, ed. Sargent Bush Jr., Winfried Herget, Norman Pettit, and George H. Williams (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 116–117. Randal Bate, Certain Observations of that Reverend, Religious and Faithfull Servant of God, and Glorious Martyr of Iesus Christ, Mr. Randal Bate (Amsterdam, 1625), 263; Clark, Lives, 56–57; William Bradshaw, The Unreasonablenesse of the Separation (Dort, 1614), sig. K2v. Hildersham, CLII lectures, 181. A group of nonconformists, probably including Hildersham, in the early 1590s advised that the godly avoid being ensnared in the pollution of the wicked masses who flocked to church and the sacraments by showing “their dislike to them, mourning also for their profanenesse, and for the want of Christian discipline whereby they might be separated.” See Anon., Most Grave, and Modest Confutation, 52, and p. 268, n50 above. Thomas Hooker, Writings, 111. By contrast, a conforming puritan minister once raised the issue of the pollution of the Lord’s Supper by unworthy participants, only to dismiss it. He assured “tender consciences” that such participants endangered only themselves. See Stephen Denison, The Doctrine of Both the Sacraments (London, 1621), 156–157. John Cotton, The Way of Life, or God’s Way and Course (London, 1641), 367–368.

302

No t e s t o Pa ge s 16 5– 16 9

13. Bradshaw, Unreasonablenesse, sig. Kv; “Notes of Newtowne Sermons, 1636,” Shepard Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, 69. On Hooker as the preacher of these sermons, see Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 270n20. 14. Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, UK, 1989), prologue. 15. For this and the following paragraph, see Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I,” in Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Stanford, Calif., 1993), 35–36; Peter Lake, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I,” in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 113–133. 16. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, UK, 2005), 45, 446. 17. Jeremiah Dyke, A Sermon Preached at the Publicke Fast To the Commons House of Parliament. April. 5th. 1628 (London, 1629), 3–4, 22–25. For more on the prophetic fish, see John Frith, Vox Piscis: or, The Book-Fish (London, 1627). Dyke, an admirer of Thomas Hooker, also argued that all of England’s pulpits needed preaching ministers, a code argument for relief for puritan nonconformists. See Dyke, Sermon, 44–45. Jason Yiannikkou, “Dyke, Jeremiah (bap. 1584, d. 1639),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com, accessed April 3, 2006; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti- Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987), 157–160; Michael Questier, “Arminianism, Catholicism and Puritanism in England during the 1630s,” Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 53–78. 18. Dyke, Sermon, 36; Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, UK, 2001), 65– 66; Tyacke, Anti- Calvinists, 160–163; Alexander Leighton, An Epitome or Briefe Discoverie (London, 1646), 2. 19. Frances Rose-Troup, John White: The Patriarch of Dorchester [Dorset] and the Founder of Massachusetts, 1575–1648 (New York, 1930), 140–141; Mather, Magnalia, 1:361. 20. Winthrop Papers, 2:91, 106–149, quotations from 112, 125, 138–139, 140; Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, 2003), 157– 159; Christopher Thompson, “John Winthrop of Groton’s Decision to Emigrate to Massachusetts: A Reconsideration of his ‘General Conclusions and Particu lar Considerations,’ ” Suffolk Review (Fall 1996), 19–22. Winthrop made scattered references in these writings to setting up a “particu lar church,” and the phrase has sometimes been taken to mean that he was envisioning congregational churches. But the term was general. See, for example, John Whitgift, The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition (London, 1574), 3, 101, 140, 182, 236, 359, 380, and passim, where Whitgift, the future archbishop of Canterbury, and his presbyterian opponent Thomas Cartwright made numerous references to particu lar churches. 21. John Winthrop, Charles Fiennes, Richard Saltonstall, Isaac Iohnson, Thomas Dudley, George Philips, and William Coddington, The Humble Request of His Majesties Loyall Subjects (London, 1630), 3–4; William Hubbard, A General History of New England, from the Discovery to MDCLXXX (Boston, 1848), 126.

No t e s t o Pa ge s 16 9 – 174



303

22. Winthrop Papers, 2:121–122. See also Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 108–114. 23. John Cotton, Christ the Fountain of Life (London, 1651), 22–24. The sermons in this book can be roughly dated because they appear in much more skeletal form in John Cotton, A Practical Commentary, or an Exposition with Observations, Reasons, and Uses upon the First Epistle Generall of John (London, 1656), 381–431. Cotton, A Practical Commentary, 154, referred to the minister John Preston as deceased. Preston died on July 20, 1628. Cotton suffered an extended illness in 1631 and went into hiding in the summer of 1632, and those events provide a terminus for these sermons. Previous scholars, as far as I know, have not recognized that the two sets of sermons are the same. However, Sargent Bush, in John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargeant Bush Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 33n36, notes the concern about the ordinances in Christ the Fountain and, on that basis, assigns them a late date. Everett Emerson, John Cotton, rev. ed. (Boston, 1990), 138, dates them up through 1632. John Cotton, Gods Promise to His Plantation (London, 1630), 9–10, preaching to the departing emigrants in Southampton, raised the same themes but far more discretely. John Rous claimed Cotton was silenced temporarily for this sermon. See John Rous, Diary of John Rous, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1856), 53–54. 24. Cust, Charles I, 123–124; David R. Como, “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London,” Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 263–294; Webster, Godly Clergy, 154. 25. See pp. 63–64 above. 26. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3rd ser., 7 (1838), 45, 46. 27. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (New York, 1956), 4– 6; Miller presented an early version of his argument in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 468–471. Loren Baritz, City on a Hill: A History of Ideas and Myths in America (New York, 1964), 17; Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966), v; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “The Puritan ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly, 59 (1986), 231–251; Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), chap. 3. 28. Nicholas Byfield, A Commentary: or, Sermons upon the Second Chapter of the First Epistle of Saint Peter (London, 1623), 187. 29. Winthrop, “Modell,” 46. 30. Ibid., 47. 31. Keith L. Sprunger, “William Ames and the Settlement of Massachusetts Bay,” New England Quarterly, 39 (1966), 66–79; William Ames, A Second Manuduction, for Mr. Robinson (Amsterdam, 1615), 33–34; John Allin and Thomas Shepard, A Defence of the Answer Made unto the nine Questions (London, 1648), 13; Richard Mather, ChurchGovernment and Church- Covenant Discussed (London, 1643), 36–41. 32. Cotton, Correspondence, 143, 146; Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (London, 1648), 20. I am assuming that Cotton’s covenanted group was private from the restrained way in which Cotton discussed it. In that respect, it was

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less ambitious than some other puritan covenanted groups. In his letter to Skelton, Cotton spoke of “some congregacions in England” that had covenants between the ministers and the godly members of the parish. He would have had in mind the “solemne Vow, and Covenant unto the Lord” that John White, also very active in the Massachusetts Bay Company, required of his parishioners who wished to take the Lord’s Supper. White was a conforming puritan who became a conservative presbyterian in the 1640s; thus there is no reason to see Cotton’s covenant as evidence that he was already teetering on the brink of congregationalism, as some historians have argued. This is not to deny that there were tendencies in Cotton’s piety, and in puritan piety in general, that were favorable to congregationalism (congregationalism did not appear in a vacuum), only that a tendency to voluntaristic, spiritually elitist piety among puritans was neither identical to congregationalism nor needed to result in it. In most cases, it did not. For a historically informed discussion of Cotton’s covenant, locating it in a broad puritan practice of “covenanted grace,” see Patrick Collinson, “Toward a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition,” in C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody, eds., Essays for Leland H. Carlson: The Dissenting Tradition (Athens, Ohio, 1975), 21. For White, see Rory T. Cornish, “White, John (1575–1648),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com , accessed May 15, 2006. For White’s covenant, see Rose-Troup, John White, 418–422. For historians deducing that Cotton’s Boston covenant was a proto-congregationalist “church covenant” and even inferring that those who took the covenant shared the Lord’s Supper together, see Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 49; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963), 86; Stephen Foster, “English Puritanism and the Progress of New England Institutions, 1630–1660,” in David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate, eds., Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History (New York, 1984), 10; Foster, Long Argument, 153–154; Cotton, Correspondence, 149n23. This scholarly argument presumes different assumptions about the nature of covenants than Cotton himself held before he became a congregationalist (see p. 289, n8 above). Cotton stated to Baillie only that his group worshipped together, not that it shared the Lord’s Supper, which would have been to skirt the edge of separatism. Worship to puritans included everything from prayer to exhortation to listening to sermons to the struggle to stay holy. See William Perkins, The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins. The First Volume (London, 1635), 698–716. For an explanation of how non-congregationalist covenants worked in the divine economy, see transcript of “Of the visible Church of Christ under the Gospell,” by Richard Bernard, 1 April 1637, Massachusetts Historical Society, 42. It is significant that Cotton described his old English covenant in much more heightened language to Baillie in the mid1640s, when he was trying to minimize the extent to which his congregationalism represented a change of mind from his non-congregationalist letter to Skelton, written over fi fteen years earlier, than he did in that letter itself. 33. The Charlestown/Boston covenant is only a short declaration of an intention to form a biblically sound church. See Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of

No t e s t o P a g e s 17 6 – 17 7

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.



305

Congregationalism (New York, 1893), 131; Mather, Magnalia, 1:377. A slightly more elaborate, presumably later version of the covenant is given in John Cotton, A Coppy of a Letter of Mr. Cotton of Boston, in New England (London, 1641), 6. Roger Thompson, Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630–1680 (Amherst, Mass., 2001), 14–15. A few of the founders of the church had been presented for refusing to kneel at the Lord’s Supper in 1629. See Thompson, Divided, 30. Lemuel Shattuck, A History of the Town of Concord (Boston, 1835), 149. Shattuck, History, 151; David Weir, Early New England: A Covenanted Society (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2005), 153; Don Gleason Hill, ed., A Memorial Volume. The Record of Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths, and Admissions to the Church and Dismissals therefrom, Transcribed from the Church Records in the Town of Dedham, Massachusetts. 1638–1845 (Dedham, Mass., 1888), 12; John Hancock, A Memorial of God’s Goodness (Boston, 1739), 37; Edward Johnson, Wonder- working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England (Andover, Mass., 1867), 179. When the Salem church renewed its covenant in 1636, it vowed to follow Jesus and “oppose all contrary Wayes, canons and constitutions of men in his Worship.” See William Rathband, A Briefe Narration of Some Church Courses Held in Opinion and Practise in the Churches Lately Erected in New England (London, 1644), 17. How much of the contents of the renewed covenant were taken over from the original 1629 one is an irresolvable question. The exception in the surviving early covenants to this rule of repentance for previous worship is the 1630 Boston/Charlestown covenant and the recycled Charlestown 1632 version. See Weir, Early New England, 151. Cotton, Correspondence, 217; Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1656), 240–241; John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 271. Richard Mather wrote in 1640 that “[we will] judge our selves before the Lord, as long as wee live, for our sinfull ignorance and negligence, when wee were in England.” See Mather, Church- Government, 1st pag., 36. John Robinson’s church had not insisted on repentance for previous sinful worship as a condition of membership. See p. 104 above. New England–style repentance for previous sinful worship sometimes formed part of later English congregational covenants. See Anthony Palmer, A Scripture-Rule to the Lords Table (London, 1654), 4. It does not seem to have been a regular practice among English congregationalists. Nathaniel Rogers, from New England, urged English national repentance for false worship. See Nathaniel Rogers, A Letter Discovering the Cause of Gods Wrath against the Nation (London, 1644), 5. The moderate puritan Richard Baxter said that English ministers in the 1640s had been urged to repent for their previous conformity, but that he knew few who did so. See Richard Baxter, A Defence of the Principles of Love (London, 1671), 13. See also Thomas Edwards, Antapologia (London, 1644), 15. Mather, Church- Government, 28–29, set out the conditions that needed to be met for an arriving puritan to be able to take the sacraments before joining a Massachusetts church. If someone were “famously known to be godly,” brought testimonials to that effect from others also known to be godly, and brought a testimonial from the congregation in which he was a member, and if the congregation itself, besides being

306

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

No t e s t o P a g e s 178 – 18 1

a true church, was known to be sufficiently free of corruptions and impurities, then that person could enjoy the sacraments by virtue of the communion of churches. Mather noted that no one had arrived at the colony able to meet those requirements. William Pynchon, An Endevour after the Reconcilement of That Long Debated and Much Lamented Difference between the Godly Presbyterians, and the Godly Independents, about Church- Government (London, 1648), 40. Endevour was reissued in 1652 as The Jewes Synagogue with Pynchon identified as the author on the new title page. See also Michael P. Winship, “Contesting Control of Orthodoxy among the Godly: William Pynchon Re-examined,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997), 795–822; Susan Hardman Moore, “New Englands Reformation: ‘Wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us,’ ” in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, UK, 2006), 150–151. Mather, Magnalia, 1:360–361. W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America & West Indies, 1574–1660(London, 1860), 194; Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, Conn., 2007), 23. Cotton, Way, 20. Davenport became a congregationalist sometime after a conference that he, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and others had with John Cotton in 1633. All the sources for the conference agree that it was about church government as well as ceremonies. See Cotton, Way, 24; John Norton, Abel being Dead Yet Speaketh (London, 1658), 32; Judith Crawford et al., eds., The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database [2 CD-ROMs] (Ann Arbor, 1995), 29/2/45B-29/2/46A. See also Mather, Magnalia, 1:324. For a plausible reconstruction of some of the themes of the debate at the conference over ceremonies, see Webster, Godly Clergy, 157–164. Davenport indicated that interpreting the second commandment was a major part of the debates. See Norton, Abel, 32. By the logic of radical puritanism, it was self-evident that the second commandment encompassed church government as well as ceremonies. Bishops were human inventions and thus idols. See, for example, Dudley Fenner, A Brief Treatise upon the First Table of the Lawe (London, 1588), sig. 3c ir-v; Henry Jacob, Reasons Taken out of Gods Word and the Best Humane Testimonies Proving a Necessitie of Reforming our Churches in England (Middelburg, 1604), 1–4; William Ames, Medulla s.s. Theologiae (London, 1629), 332–340. The Jacob church credited their own interaction with Davenport for his change of mind. See Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641), 2 vols. (London, 1912), 2:298. Folio vol. 1, Mather Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, unpaginated (page 10 counting from the first page of the treatise). See p. 262, n64 above. Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (London, 1648), sigs. A3v–av; Hubbard, History, 165; p. 23 above. Winthrop, Journal, 103; John Cotton, “The Doctrine of the church sett downe by way of question and answers,” 1639, John Cotton Essays, Massachusetts Historical Society, 13. James F. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1999).

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307

48. Cotton, “Doctrine of the church,” 19; Shepard and Allin, Defence, 106; Mather, An Apologie of the Churches in New-England for Church- Covenant (London, 1643), 9. See also David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989), 147–150.

8. D e s i gn i n g a Go d ly R e p u bli c 1. Richard Mather, “Notes of Sermons, 1639,” Mather Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, 181, supplies the date. Mather’s notes include many more of Cotton’s sermons on Revelation than those that were eventually published but are far more skeletal. Helmut Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 76; William S. Dietrich, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: The Political Roots of American Economic Decline (University Park, Penn., 1991), 136. Hugh Hefner has integrated this quotation into his ongoing exposition of his “Playboy Philosophy,” though he is at pains to make it clear that he disapproves of puritanism in general. See http://www.playboy.com/worldofplayboy/hmh/philosophy/ the-playboy-philosophy-part4.html, accessed June 5, 2008. 2. John Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1655), 71–72. 3. The only other known comparable comment on the Scottish resistance came from a friend of Cotton’s in England, Jeremiah Burroughs, in what he thought was a private conversation in 1638. When Burroughs discovered that he was wrong, via a summons to the High Commission, he hastily accepted an offer to minister to the congregational church in Rotterdam. See K.  W. Shipps, “Lay Patronage of East Anglian Puritan Clerics in Pre-Revolutionary England (PhD diss., Yale University, 1971), 178–183, 406–408. Burroughs later claimed that for self-protection he had raised the points about resistance only as queries, not as assertions. See Jeremiah Burroughs, A Vindication of Mr Burroughes (London, 1646), 18–22. For a far more restrained way of saying the same thing about resistance for public consumption, probably by the congregationalist Henry Burton, see Lord Bishops No Lord’s Bishops (Amsterdam, 1640), sig. B[iv]v, K[iv]r. For the authorship of this tract, see William Lamont, “Prynne, Burton, and the Puritan Triumph,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 27 (1964), 103–113. For another puritan private discussion of resistance theory at this time, see Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 109. For discussions of early Stuart resistance theory, see Margo Todd, “Anti-Calvinists and the Republican Threat in Early Stuart Cambridge,” in Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., Puritanism and Its Discontents (Newark, Del., 2003), 85–10; and J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1604 (New York, 1999), 72–74. Cotton’s remarks seem to have escaped scholarly attention. 4. Cotton, Exposition, 108–112, 109 (quotations). Cotton’s argument that resistance to the supreme magistrate was legitimate as long as it was led by “lesser” magistrates (the guides and leaders of the people, as he put it) was conventional resistance theory. In the absence of that magisterial leadership, resistance was not permitted, as he also stressed, although not as clearly, due to a printer’s error corrected on the

308

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

No t e s t o P a g e s 18 5– 18 8

errata page. In a treatise written shortly after these sermons, Cotton reiterated this theory. Without magisterial leadership, Cotton added, churches were obliged to suffer “unjust persecutions without hostile or rebellious resistance.” See Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (London, 1644), 52. Like Cotton, Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (London, 1648), part II, 80, stated that churches had to “meekly” endure unjust persecution from the “supream Magistrate.” But unless Hooker supported King Charles I in the English Civil War, which seems unlikely for a great many reasons, he would have also agreed with Cotton that “lesser” magistrates could lead resistance to an unjust monarch. See also Francis J. Bremer, “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (1980), 103–124. Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, 5 vols. (Boston, 1854), 1:10–12, 45, 47, 50; W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint- Stock Companies to 1720, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1910), 1:151–152, 157, 162–163. For a prosopographical study of the Company’s freemen before the migration to Massachusetts, see Francis Rose-Troup, The Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors (New York, 1930), chap. 16. On the attendance requirements for meetings, see Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:16. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:49, 55, 59, Ibid., 1:73–78. John Gorham Palfrey, History of New England During the Stuart Dynasty, 3 vols. (Boston, 1865), 1:323, suggested that John Glover of Dorchester might have been a freeman of the Company in England. Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633, 3 vols. (Boston, 1995), 2:776, doubts the identification. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:79–80, 87. James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston, 1921), 141–143; Rose-Troup, Massachusetts Bay Company, 109–110; Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1934), 1:434, 438; Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees; the Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 14. Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK, 2005), 65. Perry Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma; the Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958), 78; Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven, Conn., 1971), 74. This interpretation is an extension of the argument of Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1939), chap. 14. I read the Court’s use of the term “establisheing” to carry the contemporary sense of “making stable,” not “creating.” Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York, 1998), 19–20, has suggested that the Court’s actions with regard to the franchise represent “rituals of cultural domination” intended for the creation of inner and outer parties in a oneparty state. William Hubbard, A General History of New England, from the Discovery to MDCLXX (Boston, 1848), 114, 147–148.

No t e s t o P a g e s 18 9 – 19 1



309

13. Richard Cust, “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 112 (1986), 60– 90; Thomas Cogswell, “The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in the 1620s,” Journal of British Studies, 29 (1990), 187– 215; F. J. Levy, “How Information Spread among the Gentry, 1550–1640,” Journal of British Studies, 21 (1982), 11–34; Adam Fox, “Rumor, News and Popu lar Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 597– 620; Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, UK, 2005), chap.  2; Cust, “Charles I and Popularity,” in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, UK, 2002), 235–258; Kenneth Shipps, “The ‘Political Puritan,’ ” Church History, 45 (1976), 196–205. 14. For an excellent recent account of the York House Conference, see Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2007), chap. 6. 15. Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987), is the standard account. Thomas Cogswell, “John Felton, Popu lar Political Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham,” Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 357–385. 16. Centre for Kentish Studies, Knatchbull MS U.951/Z10, 6, 9, 13, 14; Z17/3, 276r. For discussions of Scott’s political views, see Peter Clark, “Thomas Scott and the Growth of Urban Opposition to the Early Stuart Regime,” Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 1–26; Cust, Forced Loan, 175–185; Cesare Cuttica, “ ‘Adam, the Father of All Flesh’: An Intellectual History of Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and His Works in Seventeenth-Century European Political Thought (PhD diss., European University Institute, 2007), 148–164. 17. The studies of Scott’s political thought generally give no attention to his idea of church government, but now see Nicholas Tyacke, “The Puritan Paradigm of English Politics, 1558–1642,” Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 543–544. As examples of his presbyterian sentiment, in the tract calling for Parliament to execute Buckingham, Scott claimed that the “puritans,” among whom he counted himself, “teach a paritie betweene Bishopps and other Inferiour persons.” In a 1632 response to a treatise by James I, Scott wrote that the “puritans” desired “no other politie and paritie then the best reformed Churches practice.” See Knachtbull MS U.951/Z10, 7; Z17/3, fol. 275v. In 1614, Scott was still a moderate episcopalian, accepting the bishops on the Elizabethan basis that “Order allowes and requires, that among Presbyters of the same order, there should be some order, or subordination.” Scott was concerned, however, that English bishops and their “flatterers” were beginning to look upon episcopacy as a separate order of the ministry. At that time, Scott was also deeply concerned that bishops and other church officials could descend into antichristian tyranny. See Bodleian Library Ballard MS 61, fol. 7 r, 8r. 18. Cust, Forced Loan, 170–172. This paragraph follows Cust’s interpretation. 19. Cust, Forced Loan, 165–170, 329; Wallace Notestein, ed., Commons Debates for 1629 (Minneapolis, 1921), 94; Public Records Office, State Papers Domestic 16/54/82i; Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629–1638 (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 70. See also Conrad Russell, “The Nature of a

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

No t e s t o P a g e s 19 2 – 19 5

Parliament in Early Stuart England,” in H. Tomlinson, ed., Before the English Civil War: Essays in Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, 1983), 123–150. Dudley and a number of others who were to be important in the settlement of Massachusetts did not formally join the enterprise until the middle of 1629, but informal links existed before this period. Cust, Forced Loan, 232–233, chap. 5; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 226–227; Winthrop Papers, various eds., 6 vols. to date (Boston, 1927–), 1:337, 2:57; William Bradford, Governor William Bradford’s Letter Book (Boston, 1906), 58. For Winthrop, Barrington, and the Forced Loan, see Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, 2003), 143–144.For a detailed study of the Essex context of resistance to the Forced Loan, see William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), chap. 8. See also Francis J. Bremer, “The Heritage of John Winthrop: Religion along the Stour Valley, 1548–1630,” New England Quarterly, 70 (1997), 515–547. British Library MSS 2644, fol. 264v ; Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1982), 375, 379–381, 404–408; Christopher Thompson, “The Divided Leadership of the House of Commons in 1629,” in Kevin Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978), 253, 272. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (London, 1906), 82–83; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 56–57; Winthrop Papers, 2:145–149; L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, UK, 1989), 131. Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 48 (1914–1915), 48; Winthrop Papers, 4:468; John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 63, Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 95, 117–119. In 1634 the assistants imaginatively read into the charter their right to veto legislation. The freemen grumbled but ultimately assented to this reading, although it served as a source of friction for a decade. J. S. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge, UK, 2008), 113–121, 144–148, makes a good argument that the disagreement was not simply over how to read the charter but over two different understandings of the relationship between the freemen and their government and that this disagreement was one of the causes of Thomas Hooker and his party migrating to Connecticut. Emerson, Letters from New England, 105, 151; Winthrop, Journal, 292, 325. Winthrop Papers, 4:267. Winthrop was writing in response to efforts by Saye to convince New Englanders to move to Providence Island. Saye, after demanding a hereditary upper house in Massachusetts as a condition for moving there in the mid1630s, had made a 180-degree turn in his own colony of Providence Island. He offered to make the wealthier inhabitants of the island freeholders eligible to serve on the colony’s council and elect its governor. This offer was part of an effort to lure the minister Ezekiel Rogers and his congregation there in 1638. Rogers decided instead to go to Massachusetts, and Winthrop subsequently chivied Saye for his inconsis-

No t e s t o P a g e s 19 5– 19 6

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.



311

tency. Winthrop Papers, 3:266–267. William Hubbard appears to have seen the now-vanished letter of Winthrop’s to which Saye and Sele responded. See Hubbard, General History, 377. On Rogers, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York, 1993), 255. Ronald G. Walters, “New England Society and the Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 1648,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 106 (1970), 155–162; Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 1:412; “John Cotton’s ‘Moses His Judicialls’ and Abstract of the Laws of New England,” ed. Worthington Chancey Ford (Cambridge, Mass., 1902), 13. John Cotton, An Abstract or the Lawes of New England, as They are Now Established (London, 1641), 1. For a discussion, see Shira Wolosky, “Biblical Republicanism: John Cotton’s ‘Moses His Judicials’ and American Hebraism,” Hebraic Political Studies, 4 (2009), 104–127. John Winthrop, Journal, 74; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:87. Historians sometimes suggest that the freemen probably did not participate in this decision, but see B. Katherine Brown, “Freemanship in Puritan Massachusetts,” American Historical Review, 59 (1954), 869. In Connecticut the franchise was not tied to church membership (the governor had to be a church member). Hubbard, General History, 309, suggests that this was because, unlike in Massachusetts, the Connecticut government was “founded on the consent of the people.” In other words, Massachusetts’ godly franchise was a consensual modification in a political system already founded on the people’s consent, whereas Connecticut was creating a new polity. In the New Haven colony, church membership was linked to the franchise at the government’s founding. But in an echo of the constitutional issue presented in Connecticut, one of the freemen at the New Haven founding meeting wanted it noted that the freemen did not lose their power to change the franchise back to include non–church members later. In other words, civil power in New Haven, this freeman argued, ultimately resided with the “people,” who were voluntarily surrendering it to church members. See Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven, from 1638 to 1649 (Hartford, 1857), 14–15. John Cotton, A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation whose Design is Religion (Cambridge, Mass., 1663), 8. The title page gives Cotton as the author. Cotton Mather, in a good position to know as Cotton’s grandson, claimed that the real author was John Davenport. See Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1855), 1:330. Isabel Calder, “The Authorship of A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation whose Design is Religion,” American Historical Review, 37 (1932), 267–269, argued that Mather was mistaken and that Cotton was the author. Her argument was more assertion than demonstration, although later scholars accepted it. Bruce E. Steiner, “Dissension at Quinnipiac: The Authorship and Setting of A Discourse about Government in a New Plantation whose Design is Religion,” New England Quarterly, 54 (1981), 14–32, however, convincingly argues for Davenport’s authorship. Winthrop Papers, 2:333; Emerson, Letters from New England, 78; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:75, 77. See also T. H. Breen, The Character of a Good Ruler: A

312

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

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Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630–1730 (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 39–40. Grim news from England included Eliot and the other members of Parliament still imprisoned; peace concluded with Spain; Laud commencing his crackdown on the godly ministers of Essex; and Alexander Leighton punished with “12 lashes with a 3 corded ship, one eare cut of, one nostril slit and stygmatized in the face,” for his recent book in which he called on Parliament to remove the antichristian bishops. See Winthrop Papers, 2:322–323, 336. John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargent Bush Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 523. This important document and the accompanying “copy of a Letter” tends to attract only passing notice by scholars. See, for example, Breen, Character of a Good Ruler, 50–51, 54, 74–75; Foster, Solitary Way, 38. It receives an extended analysis in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Defi nitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies,” Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 35–57, but see p. 319, n28 below. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees, 68; Breen, Character of a Good Ruler, 50–51; Edmund S. Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794 (New York, 1965), xxix. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:87. Richard Cust, “Wentworth’s ‘Change of Sides’ in the 1620s,” in J. F. Merritt, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, UK, 1996), 72; Cust, ed., The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Bart. (1585–1645) (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134, 1996), xxvi–xxvii; Cust, Forced Loan, 173; Cotton, Correspondence, 523. Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Basingstoke, UK, 2004), 102, notes that Oliver Cromwell used the word “honesty” as “a shorthand for radical puritanism, since to Oliver a commitment to such piety was itself proof of sincerity and probity.” Cotton, Correspondence, 522; Cotton, Discourse about Civil Government, 20–22; “Thomas Shepard’s Election Sermon in 1638,” New England Genealogical and Historical Register, 24 (1870), 366. For a discussion of the issues of this and the following paragraph, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 28–49. Arthur Hildersham, The Doctrine of Fasting and Praier, and Humiliation for Sinne (London, 1633), 43; John Cotton, The Way of Life (London, 1641), 82. Hutchinson, History, 494. Second Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston: Containing the Boston Records, 1634–1660, and the Book of Possessions (Boston, 1881), 5; Don Gleason Hill, ed., The Early Records of the Town of Dedham, Massachusetts (Dedham, Mass., 1892), 2 (Dedham would not have a church until 1638); Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody (London, 1652), 283. Taunton was in Plymouth Colony, not the ideal location for would-be theocrats, and Streete eventually moved to far more congenial New Haven, where he became the ministerial colleague of John Davenport. Braddick, God’s Fury, 118. For a summary of two decades of scholarly debate over the size of the Massachusetts franchise in the seventeenth century, see B. Katherine Brown, “The Controversy over the Franchise in Puritan Massachusetts, 1954 to 1974,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (1976), 212–241.

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313

41. Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1995), 55–73; David Harris Sacks, “The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol’s ‘Little Businesses,’ 1625–1641,” Past and Present, 101 (1986), 69–105; John Stowe, A Survey of London, 2 vols., ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford, 1908), 2:206; Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 84. For a general discussion of the relationship of the English state and local communities, see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, UK, 2000). 42. London was the conventional place for the governments of chartered companies to meet, although the charters themselves did not always specify the location. See Ronald Dale Karr, “The Missing Clause: Myth and the Massachusetts Bay Charter of 1629,” New England Quarterly, 77 (2004), 89–107. 43. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:123–125, 145; Winthrop Papers, 3:397–398; Winthrop, Journal, 81–82. Richard Bellingham, Atherton Hough, and Richard Dummer were added to the assistants from the deputies, while Roger Ludlow lost his position, according to Winthrop, due to an intemperate outburst against the freemen, and Endicott lost his due to his agitation about the Cross of Saint George on the English ensign. Winthrop also claimed that the changes on the bench were partially due to the desire of the “people” to “exercice their absolute power.” This was the first election done with paper ballots. See Winthrop, Journal, 144–145. 44. Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), 179; Thomas Hutchinson, A Collection of Original Papers Relative to The History of The Colony of Massachusetts-Bay (Boston, 1769), 86; Clive Holmes, “Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property,” in J. H. Hexter, ed., Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (Stanford, Calif., 1992), 122–154; Winthrop, Journal, 140; Hutchinson, History, 1:422. 45. David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C., 1990), 257; Bodin, Six Bookes, 168. For Winthrop’s convoluted attempts when writing to England to defend the Massachusetts denial of the right of appeal while diplomatically affi rming English sovereignty over Massachusetts, see Mary Sarah Bilder, “Salamanders and Sons of God: The Culture of Appeal in Early New England,” in Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 74–77. 46. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:17. In 1639, Winthrop offered as one of his objections to a law code for the colony the fact that some of the practices of Massachusetts, such as not solemnizing marriages by ministers, were repugnant to the laws of England. To let these practices grow into law, in the manner of the English common law, Winthrop argued, would not violate the charter, whereas to codify them would. The General Court seven years later argued that Massachusetts’s laws were not repugnant to the common law of England because the basis of the common law was “the Lawe of God and of Right Reason,” as was also the case in Massachusetts. Any English law not created on that basis “was an error, and not a Lawe.” See Winthrop, Journal, 314–315, 662. 47. Winthrop, Journal, 432; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:117–118.

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48. William Brigham, ed., The Compact with The Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth (Boston, 1836), 38. 49. “Shepard’s Election Sermon,” 362; “A Model of Church and Civil Power,” in Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (London, 1644), 140 (“A Model” could not have been written, at least in the form Williams printed it, before 1638; See Bloudy Tenent, 177); John Allin and Thomas Shepard, A Defence of the Answer (London, 1648), 32; Hutchinson, Collection, 63. 50. Francis Jennings, The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire (New York, 2000), 30.

9 . A C i t y o n a H i ll 1. Roger Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (London, 1644), 14–15; Williams, The Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody (London, 1652), 12; Williams, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols., ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie (Hanover, N.H., 1988), 1:358. 2. Williams was a friend of Sabine Staresmore, active in the Jacob congregation, and his arguments about separation of church and state echo those of General Baptists (see following note). There is a large secondary literature on Williams. My reading of his ideas is straightforward and differs from the scholarly consensus only in its emphases. Because of Williams’s intricate debate with John Cotton in the 1640s about religious tolerance, scholarly attention gravitates toward his argument that Christ’s crucifi xion ended the national church of the Jews. I emphasize the other end of Williams’s argument, where he claimed that Antichrist picked up with a national church where the Jews left off. I make that emphasis partly because all the evidence suggests that this part of Williams’s argument was more immediately compelling in the early 1630s; partly to locate Williams in a well-established radical puritan tradition of argument; and partly because I believe, on the basis of that well-established tradition, that in terms of Williams’s rejection of the magistrates’ power in religious matters, his conclusion about the Jewish national church was secondary to his concern about antichristian power. John Robinson, for example, like Williams, denied that the Jewish “national church” had any relevance to Christians, yet he still allowed that magistrates could compel people to hear the word of God. See John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, 3 vols., ed. Robert Ashton (London, 1851), 1:41–42, 3:73. 3. The English General Baptists, hived off from the separatists and coming under Continental baptist influence, argued that the apostolic church, unlike the Jewish Old Testament “church,” used only the spiritual sword and that persecution was Catholic and antichristian. Under their influence, Williams would have modified the conventional arguments of radical puritans about the rise of Antichrist. For the baptist tracts, see Edward Bean Underhill, ed., Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution (London, 1846), 1–231. The General Baptist tract by Thomas Murton, A Most Humble Supplication (London, 1620), was circulating in manuscript in Massachusetts while Williams was there and perhaps at his instigation. See Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (London, 1644), 1– 6.

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315

4. Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, 34; Williams, Bloudy Tenet of Persecution, 7, 95, 150, 182; Williams, Bloody Tenet yet More Bloody, 189, 193, 244; Williams, George Fox Digg’d out of His Burrowes (Boston, 1676), 239. These are all much later sources, of course, but Williams’s arguments about “Christendom” in 1633 (see p. 212 above) and his scripture citations at that time are intelligible only within this conceptual framework. His argument in 1631 about the magistrates’ right to punish only crimes against the second table of the law (i.e., moral rather than religious crimes) suggests that this framework was in place when he arrived. 5. For a comparison of Williams and the earlier separatists on the role of the magistrate in religion, see James P. Byrd Jr., The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible (Macon, Ga., 2002), 133–134 and 134n21. John Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe . . . Whereunto is Added a Reply to Mr. Williams Answer, to Mr. Cottons Letter (London, 1647), 1st pag., 132. Cotton explained to Williams that it had not been the task of the Christian Roman emperors to keep churches from turning into worldly “wildernesses” once they had been made legal. This responsibility, and failure, belonged to church officers. The other weakness of the good Roman emperors, according to Cotton, besides being slow to execute heretics, was to excessively reward and empower church officers through “unknowing zeale” and thereby facilitate Antichrist’s rise to power. See also Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1656), 36–37. Williams, Bloody Tenet yet More Bloody, 189. 6. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 107–108; Williams, Correspondence, 1:630. 7. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston, 1958), 103. 8. Williams, Correspondence, 2:630. Winthrop, Journal, 50, more ambiguously says only that Williams “refused to join with the congregation,” mentioning nothing specific about an offer of a ministerial position, but it is hard to picture Williams making up the offer of teacher out of whole cloth. It is also difficult to imagine Williams refusing to become a member of the Boston church because of his disagreements with them, since he would have had the same reasons to refuse to join the Plymouth church. 9. Winthrop, Journal, 50. Richard Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts, 1626–1683: A Covenanted Community (Charlottesville, Va., 1975), 24–25, ascribes Williams’s departure from Salem in 1631 to a group of west country Salemites taking advantage of the Court’s letter to reassert their control over the town. But we have no idea what the varieties of reaction in Salem to the Court’s letter were nor what the Court’s reaction was to the town’s reaction. All we know is that Williams left, and a number of scenarios could explain that. In general, Gildrie assumes, rather than demonstrates, a geograph ical split in support for Williams. Williams’s influence in Salem clearly predates the large-scale East Anglian immigration on which Gildrie, Salem, 26–27, lays a great deal of stress, and there is no evidence that Williams’s influence increased because of this immigration. Gildrie makes no mention of Skelton’s separatism when discussing the town’s reception of Williams. Another possible, albeit purely speculative explanation for Williams’s departure from Salem in 1631 is that

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his separatism was more extreme than Skelton’s at this time, and the town, on close contact with him, decided that he was more extreme than they were comfortable with, especially in light of the Court’s disapproval. William Hubbard suggested that Skelton grew more rigid in his separatism after Higginson’s death (see p. 317, n17 below). In the next two years, Skelton might have made the church more receptive to what Williams had to offer. 10. Williams, Correspondence, 2:630; William Bradford, Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation” (Boston, 1898), 370; Nathaniel Morton, The New-England’s Memoriall (Cambridge, Mass., 1669), 78; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1853), 1:128; Winthrop, Journal, 82. 11. Winthrop, Journal, 54, 60– 61. The Watertown dispute was over the claim made by the minister George Philips and the ruling lay elder Richard Browne that the Catholic Church was a true church. Whether Rome was a true church and, if so, in what sense were enormously complicated questions, given that all but the most extreme Protestants accepted that Catholics did not need to be rebaptized if they converted to Protestantism. See Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1995), 128–172, for a discussion. Trying to reconstruct the details of Philips’s and Browne’s position on the basis of Winthrop’s terse remarks is an exercise in futility, although historians occasionally make the attempt. In a treatise Philips published in 1643, he argued that Antichrist ruling a church did not make that church absolutely a false church, although it had no truth in its present condition. Philips made this argument for the sake of the anti-separatist argument that true visible churches continued in England even in the Middle Ages, when the Church of England was under the power of the pope. See George Philips, A Reply to a Confutation of some Grounds for Infants Baptisme (London 1645), 144–145. Richard Browne, the Watertown church’s ruling lay elder, as a previous member of London’s separatist/congregationalist underground (see p. 152 above) may have picked up a similar argument promulgated by the separatist minister Francis Johnson. See Francis Johnson, A Christian Plea (Leiden, 1618), 137–138. 12. Mark Curtis, “William Jones: Puritan Printer and Propagandist,” Library, 5th ser., 19 (1964), 60; Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633, 3 vols. (Boston, 1995), 1:61– 63; Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982), 275–276, 301–302, 304, 305; Winthrop, Journal, 69, 143, 164–165; Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, 5 vols. (Boston, 1854) 1:100, 103; Winthrop, Journal, 143, 164–165, 198–199; Alonzo Lewis, The History of Lynn (Boston, 1829), 41–43, 54. Lewis provides no documents for his claim about Batchelor arriving with a congregation, but the wording of the Court order against him and Hubbard’s description lend credence to the claim. It must have been from a local source that Lewis reported correctly that Batchelor had been in Holland, which gives further credence to his claim about a congregation. Roxbury called John Eliot as its teacher in November 1631; see William Hubbard, A General History of New England, from the Discovery to MDCLXXX (Boston, 1848), 187, 193. The long-standing nature of

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.



317

Batchelor’s troubles in Lynn makes it hard for me to see how later manifestations of them serves as a demonstration of “growing disillusionment [with the Church of England] . . . year in and year out with each new lot of immigrants,” as Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 159, argues. Many of the evidentiary bases for Foster’s claim of increased radicalism in Massachusetts in the mid-1630s have similar relatively long term Massachusetts histories. See p. 318, n21 below and Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1642 (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 283n6. Winthrop, Journal, 107; Williams, Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody, 276. Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 78; Winthrop, Journal, 107–108; Bradford, History, 369. Winthrop, Journal, 90– 91; Winthrop Papers, various eds., 6 vols. to date (Boston, 1927–), 3:146–149. Winthrop, Journal, 108. Hubbard, General History, 117, wrote that after Higginson’s death, Skelton, “in some things, [did] not only imitate and equal, but strongly endeavor to go beyond, that pattern of Separation set up before them in Plymouth.” Hubbard gave as an example “refusing communion with the Church of England.” If Skelton had gone beyond the Plymouth pattern in this respect, it would mean that Salem church members could not listen to sermons in England. John Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 2nd pag., 2, 64, 142. It is not known whether this requirement at Salem was instituted when Williams returned or previously under Skelton. The other ministers were Wilson and Cotton at Boston; James at Charlestown; Philips at Watertown; Eliot and Weld at Roxbury; Warham and Maverick at Dorchester; Hooker and Stone at Newtowne; Skelton at Salem; Batchelor at Saugus; and Smith at Plymouth. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963), 96– 99, suggests that Cotton was the “principal author” of the test of saving faith, and his claim has been widely accepted by other scholars. But that claim is based on an unnecessarily restricted reading of a passage in Hubbard, General History, 186. Hubbard, as Morgan notes, wrote that George Philips “was, at the first, more acquainted with the way of church discipline, since owned by Congregational churches,” but “he met with much resistance from some of the magistrates” until John Cotton came. Cotton’s support and prestige, according to Hubbard, carried the day with the resisting magistrates for Philips’s congregationalism. Morgan also notes correctly that every other part of congregationalism except the test of saving faith was in place before Cotton arrived (Hubbard, General History, 181–183, says as much). But then Morgan leaps to assuming that Cotton must have been the “principal author” of that test. Logically this does not hold; if every other component of congregationalism was already in place, then the only thing that Philips could have been fighting for against the resistance of some of the magistrates was the test of saving faith, and thus Cotton can hardly be called its “principal author.” Hubbard’s account roughly parallels the one in Mather, Magnalia, 2:244. If Cotton had been the principal author of the test of saving faith, it would have been unlike his ancestor-worshiping grandson Cotton Mather not to make a point of it.

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19. Hubbard, General History, 117, 204–205. Some scholars read a passage in Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing From New England (London, 1642) 68, as indicating that Williams allowed women to speak in church, but the passage refers only to speaking during the examination for admission. Secondary sources date Williams’s ordination as teacher anywhere from immediately after Skelton’s death to the summer of 1635, and this uncertainty is inevitable because the evidence is confl icting. Henry Martin Dexter, As to Roger Williams, and His ‘banishment’ from the Massachusetts Plantation (Boston, 1876), 36n137, carefully lays out the case for the late date. His strongest piece of evidence is a letter to England from December 1634 saying that Williams was exercising his gifts but was not in any office. However, there are two pieces of evidence Dexter does not mention that suggest the letter writer might have been mistaken. Roger Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, 2, said he was “charged by office” to give his fast day sermon of September 20, 1634, which would mean he already had a formalized public role in the Salem church. Similarly, John Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 2nd pag., 38, wrote that about a year before Williams was sentenced (near the end of 1634), the magistrates called the elders for a conference about him because he too was an elder in a church. Dexter’s other piece of evidence for a late date is a statement in Winthrop’s Journal for July 1635. Winthrop wrote that after Williams came under questioning by magistrates and ministers for the opinions he voiced during his fast day sermon of September 17, 1634, “the Churche had since called him to Affi rme of a Teacher.” It could be that Williams had been elected teacher after Skelton died but was not ordained until months later, with “Affi rme” meaning “ratify” or “confi rm.” See Winthrop, Journal, 150, 150n22. 20. John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargent Bush Jr. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 238; Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 64; Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 79. 21. Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, 2. Stephen Foster, to support his thesis that Massachusetts grew increasingly extreme in the mid-1630s as increasingly embittered exiles came to the colony (see p. 316, n12 above), cites an alleged rise in separatist sentiment around 1635. He takes no notice of Salem’s long-standing separatism. It seems more likely that the chief difference between Salem in, say, 1632 and 1635 was the presence of a charismatic minister who had a long track record of being more confrontational than Skelton appears to have been over a wider range of issues. See Foster, Long Argument, 159–160. 22. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:117–118. 23. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:126, 128. 24. Williams, Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody, 19, 97– 98. Williams argued that divine retribution for public religious sins could be delayed for ages; therefore the magistrates had no warrant for speedy retribution. 25. The sins are reconstructed from Winthrop, Journal, 137, 144, 150; and Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 2nd pag., 4. Hubbard, General History, 164, 205, attributed the flag cutting to Williams’s influence. See Francis J. Bremer, “Endicott and the Red Cross: Puritan Iconoclasm in the New World,” Journal of American Studies, 24 (1990), 5– 22, for the incident. 26. Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, 2,

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319

27. Winthrop, Journal, 137. At the same Court of Assistants, the magistrates successfully dispatched the ministers John Cotton, Thomas Weld, and Thomas Hooker to confer with John Eliot about a foray into constitutional theory he had made from the pulpit. Eliot argued that the magistrates had no right on their own to make peace with the Pequots; they needed the consent of the people. The ministers convinced him that while the magistrates could not make war without the approval of the people, they could make peace. See Winthrop, Journal, 136, 137. 28. A. F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth Century Puritanism (Cambridge, UK, 1924), chap. 2; David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1974), 122–125. For an example of the exaggeration of Massachusetts’s theocracy, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Defi nitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies,” Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 35–57. Contrary to Kupperman’s claim (p. 25), “Massachusetts leaders” did not “purge” any magistrates in 1637 for unorthodox religious doctrines—the freemen voted them out of office (the General Court did expel two deputies, not magistrates, when the deputies defended a petition that the Court considered seditious). Nor was the “key principle” that no magistrate would be removed from civil office because he had been excommunicated ignored at this time (p. 26), for no magistrate was excommunicated. Nor did ordinary colonists enjoy “access to civil rights only through the approbation of the congregation” (p. 24). The only civil right that approbation of a congregation conferred was the franchise itself, and more men in Massachusetts exercised this civil right than in England. The ministers in Massachusetts did not have any more of a “prescribed governmental role” in Massachusetts than they did in Kupperman’s foil to Massachusetts, Lord Saye and Sele’s colony of Providence Island (p. 23; influence not being the same as a prescribed role), and the congregational constraints on their power of excommunication gave them in some ways less capacity for civil disruption in Massachusetts than in Providence Island. 29. Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 2nd pag., 26. Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York, 1998), 21, 37, by contrast, claims that the Massachusetts authorities found Williams’s argument about the religious power of the magistrates “damnable” and says that the only reason Williams had not been punished severely for it in 1631 was that he was a member of the colony’s “thinking class.” He provides no evidence for these claims. 30. Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 2nd pag., 38, 64. Judging from the approximate date Cotton gives, this is the meeting of December 27, 1634, discussed in Winthrop, Journal, 137. 31. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:142–143; Winthrop, Journal, 144. 32. Williams, Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody, 277. 33. Winthrop, Journal, 150–151. 34. Ibid. The ministers virtually described the Salem church under Williams when they laid out in more detail the grounds on which the magistrates could punish a church or its officers in “A Model of Church and Civil Power”; see Williams, Bloody

320

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

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Tenent yet More Bloody, 150 It was widely accepted at this time that heresy was dangerous to the state. See Winship, Making Heretics, 120, 122. Winthrop, Journal, 151. Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 2nd pag., 29; Winthrop, Journal, 158. See also the followup letter Williams and the ruling elder Samuel Sharpe wrote to the Boston church, in Williams, Correspondence, 1:26–27. Ibid. Winthrop, Journal, 158; Mather, Magnalia, 2:497. Morton, New-England’s Memoriall, 103–104; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:157, 158. Ibid., 1:160–161. Williams, Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody, 131. According to Williams, on the morning of the second day of the trial, one of the magistrates summarized Williams’s erroneous opinions: it was not lawful to ask a wicked person to swear an oath or pray; it was not lawful to hear sermons in the English parish churches; the magistrates’ power extended only to the “Bodies, and Goods, and outward state of men”; and Massachusetts should repent for its patent. Williams claimed that these opinions were the reasons for his banishment. John Cotton challenged Williams’s claim, stating that his wording was tendentious and that he was not convicted for his opinions about rigid separatism and the power of the magistrate, nor could he have been, since “many” people held them. See Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, 4–5; Cotton, Bloudy Tenent, 2nd pag., 26, 27–28. Joseph Barlow Felt, The Annals of Salem: From Its First Settlement (Salem, Mass., 1827), 121. Winthrop, Journal, 158, 175. Ibid. Ibid., 164–165; Hubbard, General History, 193. Winthrop, Journal, 746. Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a New England Town, 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), 179. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 138, gives a “contemporary estimate” of 3,000 immigrants in 1635, but she is misapplying William Hubbard’s estimate for 1638. Other orders regulated the formation of new towns, set up town meetings, and improved legal administration. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:169, 172, 157, 181. The General Court also attempted to invigorate the aristocratic element in its mixed government by authorizing a life council of magistrates, which never amounted to much. See Ellen Elizabeth Brennan, “The Massachusetts Council of the Magistrates,” New England Quarterly, 4 (1931), 54– 93. Winthrop, Journal, 165–168; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor, 1:168. The Hingham elders ruled without the participation of the laity, and almost all the families in town were members. See John T. Waters, “Hingham, Massachusetts, 1631–1661: An East Anglian Oligarchy in the New World,” Journal of Social History, 1 (1968), 362; Hubbard, General History, 192. The ministers at Newbury later tried to make over their church, founded on congregational principles, as presbyterian, which caused thirty years of confl icts. See James F. Cooper Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The

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49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.



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Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1999), 70–71, 74–75, 145– 149. Samuel Batchelor’s church at Saugus was irregular, but nothing is known about its government. Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 99–100; Cotton Mather, The Temple Opening (Boston, 1709), 30; Winship, Making Heretics, 75, 80–81, 273n7. See Baird Tipson, “Invisible Saints: The ‘Judgment of Charity’ in the Early New England Churches,” Church History, 44 (1975), 460–471, for the best description of what was new and controversial about this requirement. See also Tipson, “Samuel Stone’s ‘Discourse’ against Requiring Church Relations,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46 (1989), 786–799. Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London, 1696), bk. iii, 67; John Ball, A Tryall of the New- church Way in New-England (London, 1644), 50, 52. Morgan, Visible Saints, 106–109. For New Haven’s use of conversion narratives, see John Davenport, Another Essay for Investigation of the Truth (Cambridge, Mass., 1663), 28, 68. See also p. 252, n64 above. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 1:410–413; Cotton, Correspondence, 243–249. See ibid., 245, for the reference to Cartwright. Cotton, Correspondence, 245. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), viii, chap. 11. Cotton, Correspondence, 247; Hutchinson, History, 1:410. Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 5 (1862), 141; Cotton, Correspondence, 247. Cotton, Correspondence, 246; Winthrop Papers, 3:267; Thomas Hutchinson, A Collection of Original Papers Relative to The History of The Colony of Massachusets-Bay (Boston, 1769), 220; John Norton, Abel being Dead yet Speaketh (London, 1658), 19. Francis J. Bremer, “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (1980), 121. Winship, Making Heretics, 61– 62; John Davenport, A Sermon Preach’d at the Election of the Governour, at Boston in New-England, May 19th 1669 (Cambridge, Mass., 1670), 15. I agree with Theodore Dwight Bozeman’s argument in To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988) that surviving documents indicate New England millennial anticipation was, for the most part and most of the time, a byproduct of, and secondary to, the even more important recovery and maintenance of New Testament Christianity and the creation of a Biblicist holy society. There is no evidence that millennial concerns factored into the initial creation of Massachusetts congregationalism at the turn of the 1630s. As Bozeman points out (pp. 223–225), the earliest English congregationalists showed no sign of such concerns, except perhaps for Robert Parker. William Ames was on record as an amillennialist at the time that Massachusetts congregationalism was being formed. Cotton, Correspondence, 210–211. Ibid., 211. Judith Crawford et al., The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database [2 CD-ROMs] (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995), 29/2/45B, 29/2/51B, 29/2/54A, 29/2/55A,

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29/2/58A, 9/2/61A, 29/3/12B; Thomas Edwards, Antapologia Or, A Full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644), 32; Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London, 1646), 52; Thomas Goodwin, The works of Thomas Goodwin, D.D. (London, 1681–1704), 2: sig. * v, 2:133. For a discussion, see Thomas Michael Lawrence, “Transmission and Transformation: Thomas Goodwin and the Puritan Project, 1600–1704” (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2002), 112–129. 63. Cotton, Correspondence, 265; John Ball, An Answer to Two Treatises of Mr. Iohn Can (London, 1642), sig. A3ir-v; Ball, Tryall, sig. 2 v; Edwards, Antapologia, 22, 32; Baxter, Reliquiae, bk. iii, 19.

10 . Go d ly R e p u b l i ca n i s m ’ s Ap ocaly p se 1. John Cotton, The Powring out of the Seven Vials (London, 1642), 4th pag., 22, 26, 37; Cotton, The Churches Resurrection, or the Opening of the Fift and Sixt Verses of the 20th Chap. Of the Revelation (London, 1642), 16, 20–22; Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1656), 93. For the historiographical evolution of the fiction of the millennial errand into the wilderness, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “The Puritan ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly, 59 (1986), 234–235. Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan. Migration to America (Cambridge, UK, 1992), attempts a revival of the puritan millennial errand. For discussions of Exile and Kingdom by historians familiar with the writings of the New England authors that Zakai draws upon, see Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “Not the Main Event: Zakai vs. Bozeman,” Reviews in American History, 20 (1992), 308–312; Francis J. Bremer, “A Further Broadening of ‘British’ History?” Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 205–210; and the review of Exile and Kingdom by Brooks Holifield, New England Quarterly, 65 (1992), 514–516. 2. For the puritan struggles over church government in the 1640s, see Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Great Debate’ (Edinburgh, 1985); George Yule, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament, 1640–1647 (Sutton Courtenay, UK, 1981); Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, UK, 1977), chaps. 5, 6; Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); William A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, 1640–1660, 2 vols. (1900). 3. Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of the English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982), 331–332; John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1648 (Princeton, N.J., 1969), 223–229; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, 2 vols. (Oxford, 19789), 1:132; Stanley P. Feinberg, “Thomas Goodwin’s Scriptural Hermeneutics and the Dissolution of Puritan Unity,” Journal of Religious History, 10 (1978), 44–48; Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, An Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644), 5, 23 (the sequence of the phrases in this quotation were reversed for clarity).

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.



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Geoff rey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1957), remains the indispensable guide to English congregationalism in this period. See also Joel Halcomb, “A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan Revolution” (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2009). I thank Dr. Halcomb for sending me a copy of his thesis and for discussions on the congregationalism of this period. See Ralph F. Young, “Breathing the ‘Free Aire of the New World’: The Influence of the New England Way on the Gathering of Congregational Churches in Old England, 1640–1660,” New England Quarterly, 83 (2010), 5–46, for a summary of English congregationalism’s reliance on Massachusetts practices. Robert Baillie, The letters and journals of Robert Baillie, 3 vols., ed. David Lang (Edinburgh, 1851), 2:346, 348, 349–350; Papers Given in to the Honourable Committee of Lords and Commons (London, 1648), 13–121; Thomas Juxon, The Journal of Thomas Juxon, 1644–1647, ed. Keith Lindley and David Scott (Cambridge, UK, 1999), 95– 96; Shaw, History of the English Church, 2:47–54. The congregationalist minister Edward Reyner was remembered for his unusual refusal to accept prospective members into his church who came from parishes with puritan ministers. See Edmund Calamy, An Abridgement of Mr Baxter’s History of his Life and Times, 2 vols. (London, 1713), 2:444. Thomas Edwards, Antapologia (London, 1644), 51; A Letter from the Ministers of London (London, 1645), 3; Adam Martindale, The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. Richard Parkinson (Manchester, UK, 1845), 66; Baillie, The letters and journals, 2:236; Watts, Dissenters, 1:157–158; London Provincial Assembly, A Vindication of the Presbyteriall- Government, and Ministry (London, 1650), 113. David D. Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971); Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston, 1994), 191–192. The Agreement of the Associated Ministers of the County of Essex (London, 1658), sig. A2r; Derek Hirst, “The Failure of Godly Rule in the English Republic,” Past and Present, 132 (1991), 33– 66; Christopher Durston, “Godly Rule and the Failure of Cultural Revolution, 1645–1660,” in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds., The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, UK, 1996), 210– 233; Bernard Capp, “Republican Reformation: Family, Community and the State in Interregnum Middlesex, 1649– 60,” in Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, eds., The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK, 2007) 40– 66. For a sympathetic account of Cromwell’s religious establishment, see Anne Hughes, “ ‘The Public Profession of These Nations’: The National Church in Interregnum England,” in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds., Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, UK, 2006), 93–114. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1972), is the classic account of the wide varieties of Civil War religious radicalism, but see Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003), for a major adjustment to Hill’s interpretive framework. Nuttall, Visible Saints, 108–109; Bremer, Congregational Communion, 186–190. For some examples of the challenges of combining and adapting congregationalist ideals with an English parish ministry, see Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World

324

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10.

11.

12.

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Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, Conn., 2007), 130–139. The New England churches faced challenges of town-church relationships that were in some ways similar, but in a very different context. There were 2,029 puritan clergymen known to have lost their positions during the two-year reestablishment of the Church of England from 1660 to 1662. Of these, 194 were congregationalists and 19 were baptists. A small number of congregationalist ministers, along with most baptists, would be left out of these figures, since they did not have state-dependent livings to lose (how many baptists could usefully be called puritan is another question), while a larger number of moderate puritans would be left out because of their willingness, however reluctant, to agree to the newly stiffened requirements for holding on to a position. In other words, in 1660, at a maximum, less than one in ten English puritan ministers were congregationalists. See Watts, Dissenters, 1:219. A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in the Congregational Churches in England (London, 1659), 27 (“Of the institution of churches,” article xxx); John Beverley, Unio Reformantium (London, 1659), sig. A4 [iii]r; Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxteriana (London, 1696), bk. ii, 167–169; Giles Firmin, Of Schism (London, 1658), sig. A [ii]r-v′; The Agreement of The Associated Ministers and Churches of The Counties of Cumberland, and Westmerland (London, 1656), 7–17; Agreement of the Associated Ministers of the County of Essex, 12–13; Shaw, History of the English Church, 2:152–163. I thank Joel Holcombe for discussions on this issue. For an overview, see Blair Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate” in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration (Studies in Church History, vol. 21, Oxford, 1984), 199–233. For unrealized congregationalist and joint congregationalistpresbyterian legislative initiatives in the 1650s, see John Owen et al., The Humble Proposals of Mr. Owen, Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Sympson, and other Ministers (London, 1652); John Owen et al., Proposals . . . As also, Some Principles of Christian Religion, without the Beliefe of which . . . Salvation is not to be Obtained (London, 1652); John Owen et al., “A New Confession of Faith” (manuscript title page) (London, 1654) [Thomaston E 826(3)]; “June 1657: An Act for the better observation of the Lords Day,” in C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols. (London, 1911), 1167. The 1657 bill was intended to restrain the more generous religious provisions of the “Humble Advice and Petition” (1657), but key components were never carried out. See Samuel R. Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (London, 1906), 454–455. Patrick Little and David L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, UK, 2007), 152, 217–218; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), 35; Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor, Educator, Theologian (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1973), 107. For a thorough, albeit relatively gentle, appraisal of the part the leading congregational minister John Owen played in the overthrow of Richard Cromwell by the members of Owen’s church, see Toon, God’s Statesman, 109–114. Declaration of the Faith and Order, 19 (chap. xxvi, par. V). A good, comprehensive history of Restoration congregationalism has yet to be written. For an introduction, see Bremer, Congregational Communion, chap. 10.

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325

13. Nathanael Homes, A Sermon, Preached before the Right Honourable, Thomas Foote, Lord Maior, and the Right Worshipfull the Aldermen, Sheriffs, and Severall Companies of the City of London (London, 1650), 32. A group of puritan lords proposed to the government of Massachusetts, circa 1635, that they might emigrate if the colony set up a two-house Parliament (hereditary and elected) that reviewed its executive officers yearly, “the better to stop the way to insolence and ambition.” Both houses would have to agree to the creation of any new hereditary “gentlemen of the country.” See Thomas Hutchinson, The History of Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Boston, 1795), 1:434. It has recently been argued that these lords, as part of a larger group of puritan grandees, led the resistance to Charles at the turn of the 1640s with the aim of reducing the king’s power until the country was an aristocratic republic in all but name. See John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007), 504–519. 14. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, UK), 412–413. Charles did not make serious concessions on the power of bishops until October 1648. Even then he was only stalling for time, but the concessions were substantial enough to alarm his supporters. See Sean Kelsey, “Royalists and the Succession,” in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, eds., Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, UK, 2007), 200–205. See Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), for an excellent political, religious, and military survey of the period. 15. Elliot Vernon, “The Quarrel of the Covenant: The London Presbyterians and the Regicide,” in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, UK, 2001), 202–224; Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, vol. 1 of Mark Goldie, gen. ed., The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, 6 vols. (Woodbridge, UK, 2007), 1:155–157. For a helpful taxonomy of the varieties of 1650s republicanism, see Ruth E. Mayers, 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth (Woodbridge, UK, 2004), 208–228. For discussions of the religious elements of republicanism during the English revolution, see Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, UK, 2004), chap.  2; Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, UK, 1990), 225– 245; Mark Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in EarlyModern Europe (Cambridge, UK, 1987), 197–224. 16. B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth- Century Millenarianism (London, 1972), 53–55; John Owen, God’s Presence with a People (London, 1656), 25; Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1751), 2:217. In 1653, Cromwell and his army council handpicked a godly “nominated assembly” to govern England and surrendered their authority to it (“Barebones Parliament” is the usual term for the Nominated Assembly). Cromwell hoped that the English people would be won over to godliness by their experience of a genuinely godly government, whereupon the country could gradually move back to consensual government. The army ended the experiment in six months. See Wilbur Cortez Abbot, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1988), 3:64. Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), is the standard account for the Nominated Assembly. In the 1650s, it was occasionally

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18.

19.

20.

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proposed to limit the franchise to members of gathered churches, usually by Fifth Monarchists, a group that anticipated a temporary rule by Christ’s churches before Christ returned to rule the earth himself as its political as well as religious monarch. A group of baptist and congregationalist ministers wrote a response in 1652 in which they agreed that rulers should be men who truly feared God. But in England’s current ecclesiastical unsettledness, God-fearing men were spread over a number of persuasions or none at all, and therefore the right to vote could not be confi ned to any particu lar group. The ministers hoped that the millennium would soon arrive, whereupon the problem of divisions among Christians would disappear. See William Greenhill et al., A Declaration of Divers Elders and Brethren of Congregationall Societies, in and about the City of London (London, 1651), 4–7. The moderate puritan Richard Baxter, no republican, in his Holy Commonwealth (1659) proposed limiting the English franchise to members of Protestant churches with discipline. Perhaps he was influenced by his friend John Eliot. See Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth (London, 1659), 242–255. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans. An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in SeventeenthCentury England (Evanston, Ill., 1945). What follows is based upon my “Algernon Sidney’s Calvinist Republicanism,” Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), 753–773. Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism,” 230; Worden, “English Republicanism,” in J.  H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 474; Scott, Commonwealth Principles, 43; Goldie, “Civil Religion,” 203; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 202–204. Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, UK, 1988) and Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, UK, 1991), is the standard biography of Sidney. For a recent survey of classical republicanism, see Scott, Commonwealth Principles. For Sidney’s eighteenth-century reputation, see Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2001), chaps. 6–7, and Peter Karsten, PatriotHeroes in England and America (Madison, Wisc., 1978), chap. 2. J. G. A. Pocock, “England’s Cato: The Virtues and Fortunes of Algernon Sidney,” Historical Journal, 37 (1994), 926; Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis, 1990), xxii (henceforth, Discourses); Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge, UK, 2004), 205; Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 125. See also James Conniff, “Reason and History in Early Whig Thought: The Case of Algernon Sidney,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 43 (1982), 404–405. Two of the most acute recent scholars of Sidney, Blair Worden and Jonathan Scott, by contrast, have emphasized the depth of Sidney’s religiosity. In a certain sense, Worden and Scott agree, Sidney could even be considered a puritan. Nonetheless, Sidney, in their depictions, still cuts a proto-Enlightenment figure. His affinity with puritanism, they claim, lay not in Calvinist doctrine but in his sense of high moral seriousness. Sidney was no “Cal-

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21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.



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vinist fundamentalist” but rather someone with an “individualistic creed of personal religion and toleration.” Critical puritan doctrines like predestination were not important to him. Humans, instead of being absolutely depraved through the Fall, had the ability through their own reason to know God. Sidney was thus basically a Platonist and Christian humanist. See Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 27–29; Scott, Sidney and the Restoration, 55, 215; Worden, Roundhead Reputations, 143–146. Quotations from Worden, Roundhead Reputations, 142, and Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 27. Worden and Scott recognize that elements of Sidney’s religiosity are difficult to fit in this framework of Platonic rationalism. See, for example, Scott, Sidney and the Restoration, 353; Worden Roundhead Reputations, 144, 200. Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma Mulier, and Ronald Janse (Cambridge, UK, 1996). Court Maxims, 86, 91, 92, 93, 98, 106, 107, 108, 149; Geoff rey F. Nutall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago, 1992); Houston, Algernon Sidney, 126n116; Gilbert Burnett, Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times, 2 vols. (London, 1724), 1:573. It could be objected that Sidney’s theological statements are too terse in both Court Maxims and Discourses to conclude anything defi nitive about his religion. But the statements are consistently easy to read as Calvinist and difficult to read as anything else. Were Sidney not Calvinist, it would have required very little tweaking of them to communicate that fact. A minimalist conclusion to be drawn from Sidney’s theological assertions is that he thought it advantageous while expounding his political theory to give the impression that he was a Calvinist, an impression he reinforced by calling himself a Calvinist at a time when Calvinism was increasingly a minority position. Court Maxims, 38– 65, 87–112, 189–190. I thank Jonathan Scott for providing me with his transcription from the original manuscript for the quotation—“son of Man,” not “son of Mary” as the published version has it. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, UK, 1991), x, xxxiii; Filmer, Of the Blasphemie against the Holy- Ghost (London, 1646), 14–20; David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth- Century England (Oxford, 1996), 44. The pre-Filmerian stages of what might be called a unified Anglican theory of church and state are discussed in Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), chaps. 3, 4. For Scott, see p. 190 above. Discourses, 124, 437. “Puritan” in this period was used as it always had been, as a usually pejorative synonym for nonconformity and for the “godly.” For examples, see Roger Morrice, The Reign of James II, ed. Tim Harris, vol. 3 of The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, gen. ed. Mark Goldie, 6 vols. (Woodbridge, UK, 2007), 3:141, 164; Richard Baxter, Church-history of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (London, 1680), sig. a2 [i]r; Baxter, A Paraphrase on the New Testament (London, 1685), sig. A3r; Thomas Tomkins, The Inconveniencies of Toleration (London, 1667), 2; John Corbet, A Discourse of the Religion of England (London, 1667), 2. Discourses, 11, 123. The “perpetual enmity” and “guided by his spirit” excerpts were part of a larger passage in which Sidney claimed that Filmer’s bad political

328

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

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theory demonstrated his completely backward conception of what came from God in humans and what came from enmity to God. This confusion was understandable, Sidney allowed, from someone like Filmer, whose writings showed no trace that he had ever been regenerated or guided by God’s spirit. Ibid., 123. For examples of praise of moral virtues by the leading congregationalist divine, John Owen, who like Sidney was a suspect in the 1682 Rye House plot, see John Owen, Truth and Innocence Vindicated (London, 1669), 189, 190; Owen, A Discourse concerning Evangelical Love, Church-Peace and Unity (London, 1672), 36; Owen, A Display of Arminianisme (London, 1643), 120. See also William Perkins, A Golden Chaine (Cambridge, 1600), 11, 17–19; John T. McNeill, “Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers,” Journal of Religion, 26 (1946), 168–182; Bremer, Congregational Communion, 227. Discourses, 71; Worden, Roundhead Reputations, 146. Ibid., 7, 8, 56, 266–267. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 9. For Cotton and saintly political direct action, see p. 307, n4 above. Sidney regarded Quakers as among “God’s people,” which is more than most Calvinists would have conceded to them. See Algernon Sidney, Sydney Papers, ed. R. W. Blencowe (London, 1825), 258–260. However, Sidney’s tolerance needs to be put in context. The Restoration, according to Sidney, was made possible through what Sidney, in Court Maxims, called the “division amongst the honest party.” Yet that division, he claimed, was disappearing as the honest party, through their “prayer and holy exercises,” deepened their love for each other and faith in Christ. See Court Maxims, 107, 193. Sidney, in his sense of religious differences among the godly as temporary, resembled other midcentury radicals. See David Zaret, “Religion and the Rise of Liberal-Democratic Ideology in 17th-Century England,” American Sociological Review, 54 (1989), 169–170; J. C. Davis, “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal, 35 (1992): 507–530; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “John Clarke and the Complications of Liberty,” Church History, 75 (2006), 69– 93. In Court Maxims, chap. 8, Sidney denied that the state could coerce anyone into religious worship, but unlike some tolerationists, he made no endorsement of the right to false worship. For Sidney, Roman Catholicism and the rituals of the Church of England were idolatry. In Discourses, 439, Sidney placed idolatry on the same level of offense to God as murder and rapine. An analogy would be with John Milton, who fervently supported liberty of conscience except for idolatrous Catholics. See John Milton, “De Doctrina Christiana,” ed. Maurice Kelley, trans. John Carey, vol. 6 of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. D. M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953–1982), 6:704–715. Court Maxims, 146. John Whitgift, The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition (London, 1574), 189. For a general discussion, see Blair Worden, “The Question of Secularization,” in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge, UK, 2001), 20–40. For a maximalist reading of the survival of Calvinism in the Restoration Church of England, see Stephen Hampton, AntiArminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford,

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36.

37.

38.

39.

40.



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2008). On England’s development as a commercial society in this period, see Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2009), chap. 3. David Masson, The Life of John Milton, 7 vols. (London, 1877–1896), 6:620. James Tyrrell (1642–1718), for example, in the other major Whig response to Filmer, Patriarcha non Monarcha, neither made claims about being guided by the spirit nor insinuated that Filmer was damned. Filmer, according to Tyrrell, was an “ingenious” man, “whose good Name upon all accounts I designe not to diminish,” although his ideas were wrong and very dangerous. See James Tyrrell, Patriarcha non Monarcha (London, 1681), sig. A2 [ii]v. See also Tyrrell, Bibliotheca Politica (London, 1692), sig. A2 [ii]r. Locke’s Two Treatises was also a response to Filmer, although not directly. Algernon Sidney, The Very Copy of a Paper Delivered to the Sheriffs upon the Scaffold on Tower-Hill, on Friday Decemb. 7, 1683 by Algernoon Sidney, Esq. (London, 1683), 3. Sidney struck much the same tone at the closing of an “Apology” he wrote immediately before his death. See Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government. By Algernon Sidney, Esq; to which are Added, Memoirs of his Life, and an Apology for Himself, 3rd ed. (London, 1751), lii; Roger Morricce, The Reign of Charles II, 1677– 1685, ed. John Spurr, vol. 2 of Entring Book, 488. For accounts of Massachusetts’s struggles with the crown in the late seventeenth century, see Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (New Haven, Conn., 1923); David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York, 1972); Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies in the Era of the Glorious Revolution, 1675–1715 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1981); J. M. Soison, English America and the Revolution of 1688: Royal Administration and the Structure of Provincial Administration (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982). See Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), chaps. 5 and 6, for the development of Massachusetts puritanism within the context of the colony’s internal and external political struggles. For a British narrative, see Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006). Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), 83–84; Thomas S. Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven, Conn., 2004); Mark Valeri, “William Petty in Boston: Political Economy, Religion, and Money in Provincial New England,” Early American Studies, 8 (2010), 549–580; Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 50–56; W. Paul Adams, “Republicanism in Political Rhetoric before 1776,” Political Science Quarterly, 85 (1970), 397–421. The “republican” smear in Massachusetts took the form of complaints that the colonists were too republican and still acted as if Massachusetts was an independent country. See Bushman, King and People, 83–84; John Gorham Palfrey, History of New England, 5 vols. (Boston, 1890), 4:407, 447. Johnson, Adjustment, 385–404; T.  H. Breen, The Character of a Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630–1730 (New Haven, Conn., 1970), chaps. 6, 7. The degree to which the authors of Cato’s Letters should be considered “classical” republicans is a matter of scholarly debate, as is the utility of conceptualizing a single Atlantic republican tradition in the first place. In any case,

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the early seventeenth-century antecedents of this eighteenth-century terminology tend not to be recognized by American historians. See, for example, Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986), 189–190; Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002), 73– 92; Robert M. Calhoun, “The Religious Consequences of the Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 559. But see Breen, Character, 209. 41. James F. Cooper Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1999), 172, 193–194, 203; William T. Youngs Jr., God’s Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700–1750 (Baltimore, 1976), 97–102; Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel From the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day, 2 vols. (Boston, 1881), 1:250, 271–310; Bruce T. McCully, “Governor Francis Nicholson, Patron ‘Par Excellence’ of Religion and Learning in Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (1982), 310; Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York, 1962), 76; Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 181–184; James B. Bell, A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution (Basingstoke, UK, 2008), chaps. 1, 3; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986), 235–238; Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992), 19; Breen, Character, 150–167; Stout, New England Soul, 166–172, 240–244; Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, Conn., 1977), 44–54; John Adams, Papers of John Adams, 8 vols., ed. Robert J. Taylor (Cambridge, Mass., 1977–1979), 2:265. 42. Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 207–313; Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti- Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, Conn., 1995), quotation on 52; McConville, King’s Three Faces, 266–274; Joseph Galloway, Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion (London, 1780), 24–25, 28–33; Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 4 vols., ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (New York, 1968), 1:115–122; Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth- Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 259–260; John Adams, Papers, 3:333; Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (New York, 2002), 171–172; Israel Mauduit, Short View of the History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, with Respect to their Charters and Constitution, 3rd ed. (London, 1774), 20. For the “Christian republicanism” of the new republic, see James Moorhead, World without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), chap. 1; Noll, America’s God, chap.  5; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007), 285–289.

Acknowledgments

It takes a village to raise a scholarly book. Some of the basic arguments of Godly Republicanism were tried out at seminars and panels at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the North American Conference on British Studies, the Anglo-American Conference of the Institute for Historical Research, the University of Georgia, the University of California at Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, and Princeton University. They were further developed in “Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (2006), 427–462; “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570–1606,” English Historical Review, 124 (2009), 1050–1074; and “Algernon Sidney’s Calvinist Republicanism,” Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), 753–773. Librarians and archivists at Plymouth Hall Museum, Dr.  Williams Library, Trinity College Library, the British Library, Bodleian Library, Centre for Kentish Studies, Massachusetts Historical Society, and American Antiquarian Society were unfailingly helpful. Patrick Curry provided a home away from home in London. Thoughtful and very helpful scholarly and editorial suggestions for the manuscript were offered by Frank Bremer, Peter Hoffer, Peter Lake, Mike McGiffert, Mark Peterson, and the two anonymous press readers. Jonathan Scott volunteered exemplary help and guidance on Algernon Sidney. Kathleen McDermott guided the book efficiently through Harvard University Press and offered sage advice for applying a fi nal polish to the manuscript. Eleanor Winship made herculean, sustained efforts to get me to see my writing through the unfamiliar eyes of the

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Acknowledgments

general reader. She has amply earned the book’s dedication, quite apart from the completely correct “makes it all worthwhile” flourishes that ordinarily accompany a dedication to a loved one. Responsibility for all remaining factual errors, stylistic infelicities, and questionable interpretations falls entirely on my shoulders.

Index

Abbot, George, 96, 115, 116, 166 Adams, John, 239, 248 Admonition to the Parliament, An, 23, 45 Adventurers (Plymouth Plantation), 117, 119, 121, 122, 127, 129, 131, 132; religious divisions among, 118 Ainsworth, Henry, 87, 139, 144 Allin, John, 181 American Revolution, 249 Ames, William, 65, 93, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 117, 151, 152; on Thomas Brightman, 65; on parish churches, 96–97; congregationalism of, 98; A Marrow of Sacred Divinity, 137; differences of with Massachusetts congregationalism, 147, 155, 156; De Conscientia, 154 Amesians, 137, 291n11 Amsterdam separatist church, 51, 85–88, 104, 108 Anti-Calvinism, 73, 77, 166, 168 189. See also Arminianism Antichrist, 3, 66, 176, 177, 183, 213, 217, 221, 223, 233, 234, 248; rise of, 3, 21, 53–54, 208–209; radical puritanism and, 21, 24, 32, 53, 62– 63, 165; designs of on English state, 28–29, 33, 34, 53, 77; bishops as agents of, 32, 39, 72–73, 115, 125–126; separatism and, 47, 53–54, 55, 63, 115 Arminianism, 93, 107, 108, 179

Ball, John, 157 Bancroft, Richard, 51

Baptism, 87, 128; and congregationalists, 146–147, 149, 156, 295n33 Baptists, 87, 110, 208 Barrow, Henry, 39–41, 50, 75, 85, 86, 90, 99, 105, 148, 198, 208, 221, 246, 249; in separatist legend, 40–41, 59– 60; A Brief Discoverie of the False Church, 51–58; on presbyterians, 52, 53–55, 57, 60, 86; on bishops, 53; congregationalism of, 53–58 Batchelor, Samuel, 211–212, 224 Bate, Randal, 163 Baynes, Paul, 96, 134; congregationalism of, 97; on monarchy, 97 Bellingham, Richard, 191 Beza, Theodore, 26, 141 Bishops, 29, 47, 65, 68, 69, 73, 76, 84, 95, 102, 105, 108, 208, 241; presbyterian critique of, 20–21, 31–32, 34–36; campaigns of against nonconformists, 41–42, 62, 171; separatist critique of, 53, 55; as civil officers, 62, 114; defense of, 91– 92, 115. See also Antichrist: bishops as agents of Bonham, William, 44 Book of Common Prayer, 16, 31, 42, 149, 150, 230 Boston (Mass.) town meeting, 200 Boston/Charlestown church, 156, 192, 210, 213, 221 Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, 172 Brachlow, Stephen, 59, 267n39, 274n37, 281n28

333

334

Bradford, William, 40, 85, 95, 104, 118, 124, 125, 128, 131, 132, 143, 145, 157, 168, 212, 213 Bradshaw, William, 74; English Puritanisme, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 92, 97, 100; A Protestation of the Kings Supremacie, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81; congregationalism of, 74–75, 80–81; A Myld and Just Defence, 76–77, 78–79; on bishops, 76, 77–78, 79; on English monarchy, 78–79; on shunning, 162, 163–164 Brewer, Thomas, 95, 103, 106, 116 Brewster, William, 85, 98, 106, 112, 116, 118, 121, 124, 127, 211 Bright, Francis, 137–138, 149 Brightman, Thomas, 64– 66, 141; A Revelation of the Revelation, 141 Browne, Richard, 93, 101, 152, 153 Browne, Robert, 46, 50–51; A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Anie, 47; on puritans, 47–48, 49–50; congregationalism of, 48–49, 50, 55 Burchard, Edward, 120 Byfield, Nicholas, 172

Calderwood, David, 107, 108 Calling, ministerial, 61, 62, 115, 124, 125–126, 144, 146–147, 155, 176 Calvin, John, 25, 141 Calvinism, 34, 65, 73, 93, 114, 137, 166–167, 228, 236, 239, 240, 242, 244, 246 Canne, John, 87 Canons of 1604, 68– 69, 71, 78 Carlton, Dudley, 108 Cartwright, Thomas, 5, 13–14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 37, 44, 45, 107, 161, 180, 227 Catholic Church, 3, 17, 23, 43; as threat to England, 15, 30, 33–34, 72–73, 166, 167, 192 Charles I, 167, 185, 189; puritan hostility to, 183–184, 190, 209, 212, 213; on puritans as republicans, 193, 238 Charles II, 237, 240, 241, 245 Christ, as king of church, 21, 24, 25, 231 Church, true, marks of, 41–42

Index

Church, visible and invisible, 198–200, 225, 226 Churches, national, 134, 209, 210, 211 Churches, parish: and puritan congregationalism, 11–12, 50, 58, 97– 98, 100, 101, 102, 153–154, 235, 236; and separatist congregationalism, 50, 58, 105, 146–147, 210, 214, 223; and presbyterianism, 61– 62, 63, 105, 235, 236 Church of England: radical puritan critiques of, 16–19, 20–21, 72–73, 168–169; radical puritan defenses of, 60– 64, 97– 98, 281n24, 289n8; nonconformists and, 160–161, 171. See also Bishops; Churches, parish; Sacraments Church of Ireland, 129 Church of Scotland, 43, 69, 107, 108 City on a hill, 112, 182, 242 Clinton, Theopolis, Earl of Lincoln, 191 Coddington, William, 146–147, 191 Collinson, Patrick, 26, 27, 40, 59, 87, 100, 160 Conant, Roger, 122, 130, 132, 135 Confession of faith: Church of Scotland, 43; separatist, 86, 87, 103, 104; Jacob church, 101–102, 108; Church of England, 113–114; Salem, 144 Congregationalism. See Ames, William; Barrow, Henry; Baynes, Paul; Bradshaw, William; Browne, Richard; English puritan congregationalism; Jacob, Henry; Massachusetts congregationalism; Parker, Robert; Puritan congregationalism; Separatism Contract theory, 83 Conversion narratives, 214, 225 Cotton, John, 38, 39, 138, 146, 147, 151–152, 153, 154, 157, 191, 196, 245, 249; conversion to congregationalism of, 136, 154, 179, 181, 289n8, 303n32; on Church of England worship, 164–165, 169–171, 177, 230–231; on monarchs, 183–184, 194; republicanism of, 195, 197–200, 226–229; on eschatology, 233. See also St. Botolph’s parish church, Boston (UK) Council for New England, 119, 133, 135, 204

Index 

Court of Assistants, 185, 186, 187, 194, 215; intervention of, with churches, 211, 212; and Roger Williams, 212–213, 217, 218 Court of High Commission, 31, 33, 52, 53, 55, 56, 72, 101, 178–179 Covenants, 61, 85, 173, 187–188, 200, 289n8, 303n32; church, 58, 93, 97– 98, 100, 101, 144, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 176–177, 178, 181–182 Crane, Nicholas, 44, 46 Cromwell, Oliver, 87, 106, 235, 237, 238 Cromwell, Richard, 237 Cushman, Robert, 95, 123, 141–142

Davenport, John, 38, 70, 136, 179, 198 Deacons, 23, 42 Deighton, Thomas, 107 Directory of Church Government, A, 54 Discipline, church, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23–24, 42–43, 49, 57, 61– 62, 63, 80, 82, 131, 198, 199, 208, 212, 228 Dorchester (Mass.) church, 153, 176 Dorchester Company, 132, 133, 135 Downame, George, on episcopacy, 91– 92, 96, 97, 98, 108 Dudley, Thomas, 168, 191, 192, 211, 224 Dutch New Netherland Company, 117, 119 Dyke, Jeremiah, sermon of to House of Commons, 167

Elders: election of, 13–14, 23, 64, 75, 144–145, 257n27; in presbyterianism, 20, 22–23, 24, 81; in separatism, 50, 54, 55, 87; in puritan congregationalism, 75, 81, 82, 194. See also Presbytery Eliot, John, 192, 193 Elizabeth I, 18, 25, 27, 62; on presbyterianism, 26; in separatist legend, 40 Endicott, John, 135, 148, 149, 150, 152, 213, 217, 219, 221; and formation of Salem church, 141–144 England: as Israel, 14, 49, 52–53; republicanism in, 26–28, 238–239; as Egypt, 49, 50, 86 English puritan congregationalism, 231–232, 234–237. See also Ames,

335

William; Baynes, Paul; Bradshaw, William; Parker, Robert Euring, William, 95 Excommunication, 17, 20, 42, 58, 68, 69, 94, 223; of monarchs, 25, 80 Ex officio oath, 31, 33, 35, 77

Fenner, Dudley, 23 Field, John, 44 Fiennes, William, Lord Saye and Sele, 194–195, 229 Filmer, Robert, 242, 264; Patriarcha, 242–243 Forced Loan, 189–190, 193, 197, 242; puritan resistance to, 190–192 Foster, Stephen, 39, 135 Foxe, John, 86 Freemen, Massachusetts, 185, 186–187 Fulke, William, 22 Fuller, Samuel, 128, 130, 141–143, 148, 150, 151

Galloway, Joseph, 249 General Court, 185, 186–187, 215–216, 219–220, 221–222 Geneva, 25, 42, 166, 231 George III, 249 Goodwin, Thomas, 231–232 Greenwood, John, 40, 51 Grindal, Edmund, 41–42, 43

Hampton Court Conference, 68, 76, 81, 82, 91 Harrison, Robert, 46, 47, 50 Haynes, John, 222 Helwys, Thomas, 87, 128, 130 Hieron, Samuel, 73 Higginson, Francis, 137–138, 139, 140, 144–145, 148, 168, 178–179 Hildersham, Arthur, 101, 136, 139–140, 163, 199 Hilton, William, 120 Hingham (Mass.) church, 225 Holy Trinity Minories parish church (London), 42, 44

336

Honesty, as political virtue, 197–198 Hough, Atherton, 191 House of Commons, 35, 71–72, 137, 168, 298; and puritanism, 71–72, 168 House of Representatives (Mass.), 247 Hubbard, William, 122, 139, 148, 180, 188, 193 Humanism, 27 Humfrey, John, 154

Independent, as cognate for congregational, 83, 102 Israel, Old Testament government of, 195

Jacob, Henry, 81–82, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 102, 104, 107, 108, 110; congregationalism of, 82–84, 98; and separatism, 99–100; church, 100–103, 106, 108–109, 137, 147, 208 James VI and I, 65– 66, 71–72, 78–79, 108, 109, 116, 188–189, 213; and puritanism, 37, 67–70, 84, 166–167 Johnson, Francis, 87, 91, 117 Johnson, Isaac, 191, 192 Junius, Francis, 86

Knox, John, 42, 43

Laity: and presbyterianism, 22–23, 28, 65, 148; in puritanism, 30, 47, 48, 60, 85, 92, 126, 163, 173; and separatism, 42, 48–49, 50, 54, 55–56, 59; and congregationalism, 75, 81, 82, 180, 181 Lake, Peter, 28 Laud, William, 170, 171, 179, 192, 208 Lawyers, puritan, 31–32, 71, 84 Leiden separatist church, descriptions of, 95– 96. See also Robinson, John London separatist churches, 43, 48, 101, 109, 110 Lord’s Supper, 17–18, 62, 85, 107, 138, 146–147, 149, 164–165 Lothrop, John, 137

Index

Lyford, John, 122–131, 133 Lyford, Sarah, 130

Magistrates: and separatism, 49, 57, 58, 209; and puritanism, 58, 100, 210–211; and congregationalism, 75, 102, 209, 220; in Massachusetts, 196, 200, 202, 211–212, 216, 217–218, 220, 221, 224, 228–229 Marprelate, Martin (pseud.), 35–37, 190 Massachusetts: as quasi-republic, 194–195, 201, 204, 227–229, 237; and millennium, 229, 230 Massachusetts Bay Company, 136–137, 150, 160, 169, 178, 247 Massachusetts charter, 185–186, 194, 246–247, 249; interpretation of, 201–203, 216–217 Massachusetts congregationalism, 143, 153–154, 173–182, 228; relationship of to Church of England, 126, 155–158; Plymouth influence on, 141–145, 150–153, 154–157, 158; English puritan response to, 157–158, 165–166, 231–232, 234; relationship of to Massachusetts government, 210–213, 217, 219–220. See also Salem church; Williams, Roger Massachusetts franchise, 195–201 Mather, Cotton, 97, 138, 139, 143, 151, 211 Mather, Increase, 75 Mather, Richard, 181–182 Matthew 18:17, 80–81, 82, 87, 95, 97, 98, 274n37 Maunsell, Richard, 101, 109 Maverick, John, 151, 153 Mickle-bound, Miles (pseud.), 89– 90, 103 Millennium, 230, 231, 233, 249 Miller, Perry, 134–139, 148, 172, 233; Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 134 Monarchy, radical puritans on, 78–79, 97, 183–184, 194, 273n25. See also Beza, Theodore; Calvin, John; Excommunication: of monarchs Morély, Jean, and separatism, 265n24 Morton, Thomas, 125, 126, 135, 148–149, 186

Index 

Natural law, 243–244 Naumkeag. See Salem Naunton, Robert, 116 New England Company, 135 New Haven, 195, 226 New heaven and new earth, 229, 230 New Model Army, 158, 235 Nonconformity, 18–19, 43, 74, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93; tensions of, 160–161, 162. See also Shunning, puritan

Oaths, Massachusetts, 203, 216, 219, 220 Oldham, John, 121–122, 124–125, 130 Oldham, Lucretia, 124

Paget, John, 88, 97, 144 Parker, Robert, 65, 93, 94, 105, 161; A Scholasticall Discourse, 93; De Politeia Ecclesiastica, 96, 99, 105; congregationalism of, 97 Parliament, 71–72; radical puritans on the power of, 27, 36, 72, 78–79, 190 Particulars (Plymouth Plantation), 121–122, 124 Peter, Hugh, 142 Philips, George, 151–152, 153, 175–176, 193, 211 Pierce, John, 117 Pilgrim Press, 106–107, 108, 141 Pilgrims, 7, 51, 111–133, 254n12 Plymouth church, 104, 117–118, 120, 121, 124, 125–128. See also Massachusetts congregationalism: Plymouth influence on Plymouth colony, 40, 85, 106, 132, 135, 149, 204; planning for, 111–119 Pocock, J. G. A., 227–228 Political puritans, 189, 190 Pope, 15, 21, 24, 32, 73, 115, 180. See also Antichrist Prerogative, 32, 33, 53, 71, 78, 79 Presbyterianism, 42–43, 59, 74, 84, 92, 95, 96– 97, 140, 148; as mixed government, 5, 26; reforming goals of, 14– 25; and tyranny, 21– 23; as republican government, 24– 25; as threat to

337

monarchy, 25, 68, 166–167, 193; compatibility of with England’s government, 26– 28; agitation for, 28– 37, 44–45; defenses of Church of England, 60–64, 161; in mid-seventeenth century, 234– 235, 237–273n25. See also Barrow, Henry; Brightman, Thomas; Churches, parish; Elders: in presbyterianism; Elizabeth I: on presbyterianism; Laity: and presbyterianism; Monarchy: radical puritans on; Separatism: relationship of to presbyterianism Presbytery, 2, 3, 20, 94, 140. See also Elders Preston, John, 70 Prophecy, 98, 109 Puritan congregationalism: as alternative term for nonseparating congregationalism, 11–12; origins of, 74–75, 277n6. See also Ames, William; Baynes, Paul; Bradshaw, William; English puritan congregationalism; Jacob, Henry; Massachusetts congregationalism; Parker, Robert Puritanism, origins of term, 18, 29, 259n45; as reforming movement, 29–30, 70–71, 160, 234–235 Pynchon, William, 178, 193

Rathband, William, 143, 157 Reformed churches, 53, 66, 84, 86, 94, 108, 114, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146; Netherlands, 86; France, 115, 118, 131 Republicanism, 24–25, 194–195, 204, 227–229, 238–240, 247. See also Charles I: on puritans as republicans; Cotton, John: republicanism of; England: republicanism in; Massachusetts: as quasi-republic; Presbyterianism: as republican government; Sidney, Algernon: republicanism of Rigid separatism, 102–103, 111–113, 142, 210, 214, 224, 228, 233 Robinson, John, 85, 88, 90, 119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 132, 138–139, 147, 155; congregationalism of, 5, 94, 109; separatism of,

338

Robinson, John (continued) 94, 102–106; planning of for emigration, 112–114, 117 Rogers, Ezekiel, 177 Rotterdam congregational church, 137

Sabbath, 30, 70, 112, 242 Sacraments: and puritans in England, 20, 43, 45, 68, 69, 160, 163, 175, 220, 231, 235, 236; at Plymouth, 118, 121, 125, 127, 128; in Massachusetts, 136–138, 153, 154, 155, 157, 225 Salem, 132, 135, 149, 220 Salem church: founding of, 144–145, 148–150; and Roger Williams, 210–211, 212, 214–215, 216–217, 218–221, 223–224 Sandys, Edwin, 113, 114 Saugus (later Lynn) church disputes, 212, 224 Scotland, 50, 67, 107, 183–184 Scott, Thomas, 190, 242 Scottow, Joshua, 1–4 Second Admonition to Parliament, A, 22 Separatism, 81, 82, 85, 106, 113, 140, 142, 142; as reforming movement, 43–44, 52, 89– 90, 105; relationship of to presbyterianism, 44–47; relationship to state, 49, 209; puritan response to, 60– 64. See also Amsterdam separatist church; Antichrist: separatism and; Barrow, Henry; Browne, Richard; Elders: in separatism; Jacob, Henry: and separatism; Laity: and separatism; Leiden separatist church; London separatist churches; Magistrates: and separatism; Morély, Jean, and separatism; Plymouth church; Rigid separatism; Robinson, John; Williams, Roger Shephard, Thomas, 181, 198, 204 Shunning, puritan; 102–103, 163, 165, 231; and Massachusetts congregationalism, 177–178 Sibbes, Richard, 70 Sidney, Algernon, 239–240, 246; Discourses concerning Government, 239, 242–245; Court Maxims, 240–241;

Index

Calvinism of, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244; republicanism of, 240, 245–246 Standish, Miles, 19, 125 St. Botolph’s parish church, Boston (UK), puritanism of, 146, 147, 174 Stoughton, William, 32 Streete, Nicholas, 200 Subscription, clerical, 30–31, 69, 70, 84, 91, 162, 171 Surplices, 16, 141, 163 Symonds, Samuel, 229, 230 Synod of Dort, 108 Synods, 22, 36, 54–55, 59, 68, 71, 75, 78, 82, 97, 98

Thirty Years War, 166, 167 Throkmorton, Job, 35 Toulmie, Murray, 39 Travers, Walter, 21, 22, 101, 102, 108–109 Tuckney, Anthony, 230

Udall, John, 34–35, 37–38, 63– 64, 171, 246; A Demonstration of the Trueth of that Discipline, 35, 37, 39 Unlawfull Practises of Prelates, The, 33

Vane, Henry, 224 Veils, 214 Venice, 25 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 189, 190–191, 242 Virginia, 110, 113, 117, 119, 133 Virginia Company, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119

Wandsworth Presbtery, 44 Warham, John, 151, 153 Watertown, 93, 214 Watertown church, 153, 211 Westminster Assembly, 122 Weston, Thomas, 117, 121 Whig history, 33 Whigs, 240, 242, 243, 246, 247, 248 White, John (lawyer), 129

Index 

White, John (minister), 132, 135, 136 White, William, 43, 44 Whitgift, John, 13–14, 25, 26, 33, 39, 40, 41, 69, 72, 227, 246 Wilcox, Thomas, 44, 45 Williams, Roger, 207–208, 222–223; separatism of, 208–209, 210, 211, 215; as reformer, 210, 213, 214–215, 216–217, 219, 222–223; examinations and trial of, 212–213, 217–220, 221–222. See also Salem church: and Roger Williams

339

Wilson, John, 151, 156, 191–192, 210, 211 Winslow, Edward, 106, 129, 130, 143–144, 150, 152 Winthrop, John, 151, 152, 156, 154, 163, 189–181, 186–187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 202, 204, 211, 212, 213, 224, 229; reasons for emigrating, 168–169; and “a citty upon a hill,” 170–173 Wolstenholme, John, 114–115, 116 Woodbridge, John, 93 Wyncop, John, 116