What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  This child king, beloved as he seems to have been by the people, was given no tomb. According to the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, his grave is marked only with “a simple modern slab.” My 1911 Britannica has little to say about him, none of it kind. Rumors that he was alive persisted for years after his death, and it is good they were false, the article says, “for Edward showed signs of all the Tudor obstinacy, and he was a fanatic into the bargain, as no other Tudor was except Mary.” Attacks on the child began early. In the words of a contemporary, “If ye knew the towardness of that young prince, your hearts would melt to hear him named, and your stomach abhor the malice of them that would him ill. The beautifulest creature that liveth under the sun: the wittiest, the most amiable, and the gentlest thing of all the world.” Edward was ten when this was written, and there were already “them that would him ill.” The convention of blaming the king’s advisers for grievances would certainly be plausible here, since his collaborator in these reforms, and surely in part his instigator as well, was his uncle and Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Somerset’s ideas “were in striking contrast with those of most Tudor statesmen, and he used his authority to divest the government of that apparatus of absolutism that Thomas Cromwell had perfected. He had generous popular sympathies and was by nature averse to coercion.” Somerset’s downfall, which led to his execution, is generally considered to have resulted in part from his conciliatory response to Kett’s rebellion, an armed popular rising protesting the impoverishment that came with the privatization—that is, the enclosure by landlords—of the common lands that were historically a resource of the poor. Kept apart from all this, apparently, is the issue of religious reform, which is laid to the child king’s precocious and intense piety, his fanaticism—though it was marked by that reluctance, entirely untypical of the times and his forbears and his successor, to burn heretics. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina says, “It is an heretic that makes the fire, / Not she which burns in’t.” The same critique could be applied to the word fanatic. Surely it is bizarre to harbor historical animosities toward a doomed child.

  The problem seems to be that, as head of the church, Edward was a Puritan before the word. MacCulloch is careful to insist that he and his circle were not Calvinists, offering no grounds for this assertion. Calvin in fact corresponded with Edward and Somerset. In one letter he responds to a request for his advice on completing the reform of English church and society. He dedicated both editions of his Commentary on Isaiah to Edward, and sent him a brief commentary on a psalm he thought might interest him. Many particulars of the Edwardian church are consistent with Calvinism. For example, Edward ended the requirement of clerical celibacy and introduced English into the Eucharist. And, tellingly, Thomas Norton, a poet and politician who made the first English translation of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, was a member of Somerset’s household, his secretary, and the son-in-law of Edward’s councillor and archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, who also corresponded with Calvin. About Norton my doughty old Britannica has this to say: “Norton’s Calvinism grew with years, and towards the end of his career he became a rabid fanatic.” After three hundred fifty years the embers were still hot.

  I am suggesting that a polemic with its origins in American prehistory has more or less expunged, has at least alienated, an important part of our colonial and national history, the part that is appropriately called Puritan. This could not have happened if we had not collaborated in it decisively, of course. Why would we have done this? And why am I perfectly confident that we will persist in it? It can’t be the whole problem that when people feel they know who to blame or to snicker at, they seldom feel the need to know more.

  The alienation of New England from our sympathies has, oddly enough, at the same time made it more or less the epitome of our origins, an enclave of the provincial and fanatical in a world that was, by implication, reasonable and relatively humane. How many witches had been burned in Britain and Europe before a Puritan set foot on American soil? How many had been burned before the word Puritan was coined? Were there never witch trials in the colonial South? Did only Puritans devote themselves to rigorous piety? It is bizarre that they are isolated by association with attitudes and practices that were, if anything, less characteristic of them than of British and European culture as a whole. The implication that they were exceptional in these things implies that we can simply assume contemporaneous cultures—the American South, for example—may be understood with unspecific reference to a standard of reasonableness that is never to be assumed anywhere. And this erases history that would give context and meaning to a great deal that has been thought and done here, some of it, the Puritan impulse toward reform, their passion for education, and their genius for institution-building, a heritage of great value.

  A true genealogy of American Puritanism leads back through the English Revolution, through the brief reign of a tombless and disparaged child, and back farther yet to the masters of the old vernacular style, the Lollards and Wycliffites who discovered the beauty of the language of common life, and of common life itself, and were the originators of the great dream rehearsed in that language through so many generations. In this light we can understand John Winthrop, and Lewis Tappan as well.

  * * *

  The period between the fall and death of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II, the so-called Interregnum when England was governed by Parliament and Cromwell, took place at a time when colonies were established in America, firmly enough to have some sense of themselves as societies and recently enough to feel very intimately involved in English affairs. They were governed under charters granted by the Crown that forbade the establishment of laws inconsistent with what was then, before the parliamentary revolution, British law. During the civil wars that engrossed the mother country, and during the Protectorate of the Puritan Cromwell, the colonies could only have had an interregnum of their own. England had more urgent demands on its attention, for one thing, and for another, Massachusetts and Connecticut would have been as unanimous in their support of the Puritan side, perhaps, as Cromwell’s army itself. Early American history is not my field, but I have read enough, unsystematically, to attach some significance to the fact that I have seen scant mention of the effects of either the wars or the Protectorate in New England, immediately important as they were to the American settlement. The severing of British and American history at this point is completely artificial. Men left New England to fight on the side of Parliament and Cromwell. Cromwell’s own chaplain was formerly a minister in Massachusetts.

  Puritanism was a political as well as a religious movement—indeed, the two were simultaneous. The colonists were moved by beliefs about religion and society that were closely related to those held by Cromwell and his army, and by the dissidents in Parliament. There is every reason to note differences of opinion among Cromwell, army, and Parliament, and there is no reason to assume unanimity among any group of colonists. But the English factions hung together well enough to sustain and win two major wars against the royal army and the Scots. It is clearly important to acknowledge a high degree of consensus among them, as well as their strong association with New England colonization. As I have said, Cromwell was personally involved in the founding of Saybrook, Connecticut.

  When that good Englishman John Winthrop spoke in 1630 about the city on a hill, he was appealing to his hearers as people creating a model society whose success or failure would be known to the world. Describing elsewhere the decision to admonish a tradesman for taking an excessive profit on his goods, Winthrop says it was decided that the first of the “false principles” that had misled the tradesman was “That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can.” This admonition was necessary since the man was, says Winthrop, “a member of a church and commonwealth now in their infancy, and under the curious observation of all churches and civil states in the world.” Such
minuteness of attention is only imaginable given the actual frequency of travel to and from New England and the continuous communication of England with the colonies. It is interesting to consider by what standards the great world was assumed to be judging this new commonwealth—clearly it is not one that we bother with now, or regard as having any tendency to diminish the brightness of that same city on a hill.

  In any case, New England, so far from being the isolated refuge of an austere religious minority, was a laboratory for a kind of social order being tried in parts of Europe and soon to be tried in England itself. Winthrop’s speech aboard the Arabella anticipates the Interregnum by more than a decade. It is only its inexplicable isolation from British and European history that allows it to be read as a very early celebration of an American nation. It is in fact a utopian vision of a society whose relations are based on charity, using the word in the biblical sense, meaning love. The religious critique of existing social order from the Puritan side was that it was unbiblical, un-Christian, in the fact of its being based on status, wealth, and power, all of which preclude the thoroughgoing mutual liberality Winthrop calls for, using just this word. He was the governor of the colony, and might have been expected to mention the usual texts about how authority is to be honored as an instance of God’s providence. Instead, he sees the bonds of society in mutual care and service. This particular vision has a long and deep history in English culture, going back to Piers Plowman and forward to William Blake. It was the vision of the Quakers and the Levelers. Shakespeare pondered it as the regime of his forests and wild places. This is not to say that anarchy in any sense of the word lies behind Winthrop’s vision, only that the essential, primary order for his commonwealth would be a matter of maintaining these bonds of mutual affection. Strictures against profiteering should be thought of in this light, then and now, at least insofar as the health and cohesion of society are valued.

  Colonies actually governed by British law as it stood before the Civil Wars were necessarily limited in their options. That they were frustrated in their attempts to legislate for themselves is among the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence. But in the seventeenth century, while the monarchy was in crisis, then dissolved, they began to create laws of their own. In practice these codes did not survive the Restoration, but insofar as they are discoverable they are evidence of the social theories of the colonists. Given their kinship with the English dissidents, it seems reasonable to suppose that they are also an indication of the thought that lay behind what would be called the Commonwealth, that is, the revolutionary government of Parliament and Cromwell.

  I have come across references to a code drawn up by the colony of New Haven. I happened to learn about the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 many years ago from a mention in a letter to the editor in The New York Times. I can’t really be sure to what extent the gap in history I sense here is really an artifact of my own lack of thoroughness in looking into the field. But my decades of browsing predispose me to thinking that a subject I have never seen raised or alluded to has probably dropped out of American history. This period, from the point of view of the general public, is a complete blank, except for the few caricatures sketched into it of witches and somber men with buckles on their hats. How much formulating and publishing of laws happened in New England in the Cromwell period I don’t know. After the Restoration, delegates from New England went to London to reestablish their charters. I am glad to have happened upon the Body of Liberties, which is a very interesting document, brief and clear, anticipating the American Bill of Rights in defining liberty in largely negative terms. For example, item 46 says: “For bodily punishments we allow among us none that are inhumane, barbarous or cruel.” Anyone who has any acquaintance with contemporary English or European history knows what a radical departure this is. Cromwell as Lord Protector tried to reform what he called the “wicked and abominable” sentences of the criminal law, but failed to gain the approval of Parliament.

  The Massachusetts Body of Liberties lists twelve capital crimes: idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, premeditated murder, murder in rage, murder by guile (they seem to have wanted to arrive at the number twelve), bestiality, sodomy, adultery, kidnapping, false witness against the accused in a capital case, and insurrection or subversion. All of these but the last have warrant of Scripture, which is cited. If this code seems severe by our lights, a bitter consequence of Puritan religious zeal, in fact it very much limits the list of capital crimes, and in particular it excludes from the death penalty what were overwhelmingly the crimes of the poor. Under English law theft and also idleness or vagrancy were punished by hanging. Early American law is always said to be based on English common law, without elaboration. Then either the use of the gibbet in such cases did not accord with common law but was prevalent all the same, or American practice and theory departed in important ways from this precedent.

  I looked up common law in my Britannica. The article is brief, one column devoted to this important subject. Common law is, the article says, “probably best defined with reference to the various things to which it is opposed.” These things are statute law, equity, civil law, canon or international law, and “local or customary law, as the general law for the whole realm.” Quoting further: “Blackstone divides the civil law of England into lex script or statute law, and lex non script or common law.” The latter, he says, “consists of (1) general customs prevailing in certain districts, which are the common law strictly so called, (2) particular customs prevailing in certain districts, and (3) laws used in particular courts.” Inevitably the article concludes that common law “is the foundation of law in the United States.” How anything so amorphous and indefinable could be the basis of anything is a question worth looking into. It is not even the basis of English law, surely, because it can be contravened by these other systems. “Occasionally,” says the Britannica, the term common law “would appear to be used in a sense which would exclude the law developed by at all events the more modern decisions of the courts.” The notion of common law, which suggests a kind of common decency brought to bear on disputes and transgressions that required public resolution, is hard to discover in practice. I am persuaded at this point that the notion that our legal system is based on it is simply a cliché. There is a kind of English “law” that serves much better as progenitor, the biblical/utopian codes proposed by dissident groups like the Lollards and the Kentish rebels in Kett’s rebellion. It is this nucleus that is to be the basis of the new society whose character and viability will be of such interest to the world.

  Into the twentieth century there was a body of law called Poor Law, which very narrowly governed the lives of the mass of the British people. Mention of it is omitted in this Britannica article, though a full six pages are devoted to it elsewhere. They deal in grueling detail with pauperism and workhouses, a system still very much up and running in 1910, still taking its ethos explicitly from a statute of Elizabeth I. There is no difficulty whatever in finding evidence of its reality and importance. If it is relevant to the development of American law, it is inversely relevant, in that our laws do not include an Ordinance of Labourers, a special legal system meant to govern the working poor. It is over against its strictures on movement and association that the First Amendment of the Constitution should be understood. That said, Poor Law does appear to be the basis for laws that protected the institution of slavery in America.

  The idea of a lex terrae, a “law of the land” that constrained the king and limited other law, was important in the time of Edward VI, when George Ferrers, a member of his court, first translated the Magna Carta into English. What this famous document ever meant in practice, whether in Latin or in English, is an open question. Poor Law, which was national in scope and as nearly uniform as it could be made, seems, however, to have produced a sort of holocaust of the redundant, carried out by legal means over generations. The common folk, who were, in law, “the poor” if they lived by their labor, would be u
nlikely to have endorsed this, they being potentially so vulnerable to it, so helpless in the face of it. As Sir Thomas More pointed out, Moses has no capital punishment for crimes involving property, to which the English poor were often driven. In the Body of Liberties, the laws of Massachusetts were brought into line with Old Testament law and became relatively modern and enlightened in their biblicism. In this at least, thank God, we have followed Moses. I can’t imagine that he any more than the Puritans would find our recent zeal for endless incarceration admirable, though it is marginally less abusive of the poor.

  New England Puritans are very often said to have aspired to theocracy, even to think they had achieved it. In the first place, it is difficult to imagine a more theocratic arrangement than one that assumed the divine right of the king. Charles I was persuaded that he had no one to answer to but God alone. Then again, if the pope were granted final authority over every regime in Christendom, this could certainly be described as theocratic as well. Two “liberties” in the Massachusetts code shed light on the question. First, “Civill Authoritie hath power and libertie to deale with any Church member in a way of Civill Justice, notwithstanding any Church relation, office or interest.” In other words, membership or standing in the church should not at all exempt anyone from the ordinary functioning of the law, as clergy have been exempted traditionally. Second, “No church censure shall degrade or depose any man from any Civill dignitie, office or Authoritie he shall have in the Commonwealth.” The decisions of a church will not interfere with the workings of civil government or with the standing of anyone as a member of civil society. By the standards of the time this is an extremely clean separation of church and state, depriving the church of powers to coerce that were still very important elsewhere. These are not the laws of a theocracy, as should be clear by comparison with virtually any other society contemporary with it.