SUCH WAS the complexity of England’s diversified ecology from which New England’s population was drawn. Not only did the familiar patterns of their daily lives differ from region to region and from place to place in the worlds they knew, but so too did their expectations in settling New England’s distant, largely uncultivated land. The mere diversity of their geo-ecological backgrounds and the shifting forms of their associations would be sources of friction, but the likelihood of conflict among them was heightened by the stressful conditions that had precipitated their emigration.
3
The communities from which the emigrants came, varied and multifaceted as they were, were deeply rooted, even in modernizing areas like East Anglia. There, as elsewhere, long-established webs of kinship, economic function, and neighborhood association, however complex, were dense, and the structure of social authority, in its variant forms, was widely respected. Though relative to its own past and to most of contemporary Europe, England was a mobile society, social cohesion served to brake the more extreme centrifugal forces. In such a world it would take what have been called “seismic shocks” to disrupt the interpersonal networks sufficiently to propel people in large numbers out of the sockets of customary life and into dangerous overseas voyages and resettlement in a land they could only imagine—to undertake a radical adventure certain to disrupt the delicate patterns of multilevel relationships.21 And there were sudden shocks, not least among them the economic recession that had hit much of greater East Anglia and parts of the West Country in the early 1620s and that continued for over a decade.
The severe downturn was the result of long-term population growth and increasing pressure on land use brought to a crisis by a collapse in the cloth trade, which devastated the prospects, indeed the livelihood, of much of the workforce in East Anglia and the West Country, and a series of poor harvests. The result had been plummeting wages, rising rents, widespread unemployment, increased vagrancy, and escalating food prices which led to near famine among the poor. Rural drifters joined with town workers to protest the shortages, high prices, and lack of employment, and to demand protection and increases in charitable relief.
Yet severe as these regional depressions were, and dangerous as was the increase in the “restless fringe” of drifters and the unemployed, there was no general breakdown of community organization, no broad-based, panicked uprising. “Simmering discontent” that broke out into occasional riots was familiar, especially in the more dynamic parts of the realm, which were closely tied to fluctuating European markets and dependent on erratic food supplies to provide for a growing population. And familiar too were the means of alleviating, or at least containing, popular distress until the economic cycle moved upward once again.22 What was not familiar, however, what created the shocks that precipitated the large-scale emigration to New England, were the near apocalyptic decisions made by local leaders in the countryside, clerical and lay, who were not only disillusioned by diminished economic prospects but also fearful of what was clearly a rising wave of religious repression by a newly aggressive, radically conformist ecclesiastical hierarchy. For the areas most severely affected by the economic collapse were also the regions of the highest incidence of Puritanism.
BY 1629, when Charles I dissolved Parliament—after having struggled with it since his accession, having imprisoned its most forceful leaders, and having continued to tax without consent—the nation’s public life was in turmoil and the danger of monarchical autocracy was palpable. The likelihood of a total convulsion in religious life was less predictable, but threatening signs were multiplying throughout the realm.
During her long reign, Elizabeth had maintained in the Church of England a careful, compromised balance between the extremist pressures of right and left—between the zeal of certain Catholics who dreamed of returning England to the Church of Rome, with all that that implied for the nation’s foreign alliances, and the fervor of those who felt that the English Church had barely begun its reformation and should be purified of its ritualistic formalism, institutional hierarchy, and emotional sterility. Both extremes had persisted, but while the threat from the Catholic right, implicitly unpatriotic, had diminished under savage repression, the pressures from the purifiers on the left increased and took doctrinal form. From a general impulse to carry England’s reformation to its logical conclusion, which would ground the experience of religion more squarely and solely on personal faith and the authority of the Bible, “Puritanism” became a cluster of doctrines bearing on worship, ecclesiology, preaching, and the ultimate goals of spiritual life. The differences mattered, in England as they would in New England. There the fault lines in the English reform movement would become fissures that led to bitter conflicts.
For some in the “feathering-out of the reform movement into an increasing host of sects and factions,” reform meant principally a change in ecclesiastical structure: the abolition of Episcopacy in favor of popularly elected preachers and elders organized from the bottom up into a hierarchy of synods and presbyteries culminating in a national assembly free of state control. Others concentrated on a transformation of preaching, seeking to go beyond routine instruction and exegesis to stir people’s emotions, hoping by exuberant exhortations to wring their souls in the search for salvation and to encourage them to adopt a rigorous discipline of sanctified behavior and spiritual striving. Others isolated the phenomenon of baptism as the key reform issue, its essential role in distinguishing the visible from the invisible church of God’s election. Still others demanded the isolation of those who experienced God’s grace into congregations of their own, independent of the overall church yet part of the larger world. And there were some—such were the Pilgrims—for whom there could be no stopping in the escape from the institutionalized life of a formal, national church until one reached exclusive conventicles of saints, withdrawn from the larger world, devoted to their own righteous living and the attainment of their personal salvation. And beyond even such isolates, there were small groups whose fervor carried them into an absolute resolution where one could tolerate no organization whatever—where individuals became churches in themselves, unbound in their sanctity by any constraints of the profane world. These were condemned, even by—especially by—others within the Puritan movement, as Brownists, Familists, antinomians, later Fifth Monarchy Men and Quakers; they were considered to be not merely religious radicals but social anarchists, reeling out of control, beyond the farthest reaches of respectable reform.23
Amid all these stirrings and strivings of reform, these complex and intermingled dreamings, designs, and exaltations, the Elizabethan state and its ecclesiastical arm had played a cautious role. Drastic suppression had been reserved for those whose religion could be considered a threat to the state itself, hence traitorous; more than 250 Catholics were executed or died in prison under Elizabeth, and many more suffered torture. This savagery was well known and lingered as a threat to all challengers to the authority of the established church and state, left as well as right. But though the Puritan movement in its far extremities might be considered anarchic, it was not traitorous, and only the wildest extremists challenged the belief that there could be only one true religion. So under Elizabeth there had been no systematic effort to stamp the reform movement out.24
To be sure, there had been, from time to time, well-publicized sanctions imposed on the most egregious reform agitators, and these episodes burned like flares in the awareness of later Puritan leaders. But since most of the reformers only barked and did not bite, they were not driven to the wall, and their voices were increasingly heard in pamphlets and manifestos and in Parliamentary declamations.
So Richard Rogers, in Wethersfield, Essex, one of the most fervent, famous, and effective of the early Puritan preachers, whose kin would play major roles in New England’s history, was forbidden to preach in 1583 but was restored to his pulpit by the intervention of highly placed Puritan patrons; they rescued him once again in 1589. But while prominen
t Puritans like Rogers could escape debilitating censure because of their influential patrons and the Crown’s reluctance to stir up trouble over the struggle for people’s souls, even they lived in fear of persecution. Humbler Puritans, devoid of influence, could be tossed into prison and otherwise seriously punished. At one point Rogers apprehensively visited the prisoners in Bridewell and returned troubled by the prospect that he too was “like to loose my liberty” and end up in such a fearful bedlam.25
For many, that likelihood rose sharply in Elizabeth’s last years and under her immediate successor, and not merely because of the activities of autocratic prelates. A peculiar social force was at work that intensified the Puritans’ conflict with church and state. The reform movement’s leaders, its publicists and formulators, were for the most part academic and clerical intellectuals, and that clerisy in the early seventeenth century was growing in number and influence. For increasingly, gentry and mercantile wealth flowed into the universities, creating more and better opportunities for the higher education of poor, able youths; but their careers could no longer be fulfilled within England’s national church or in the universities themselves. The best connected and luckiest, if not the ablest, of these professional intellectuals were appointed to established pulpits, but many, an increasing number, were not, and became journeymen preachers, chaplains, and above all “lecturers” (“the people’s creatures,” the Church called them) who were supported not by church funds but by temporary stipends or private endowments donated by lay patrons or congregations. The University of Cambridge was the major producer of this growing rootless intelligentsia, and its most vibrant and prolific centers were its Puritan colleges; Christ’s was “the greatest Puritan seminary of them all” until in 1584 Emmanuel was founded. From Christ’s, from Emmanuel, and from others—Sidney Sussex, Trinity, and Clare Hall—came a phalanx of well-educated, sophisticated, and ambitious young men who naturally, inescapably, were led “by the circumstances of their positions,” William Haller has written, “as well as their convictions to become the critics and opponents of authority, of custom, of accepted ideas and vested interest.”26
The pressure of their numbers and the notoriety of their preaching grew in the early years of James I’s reign. And in the decade that followed, under Charles I, with the advent to supreme power in the Anglican Church of William Laud—an ecclesiastical disciplinarian possessed of demonic energy and burning with zeal to rid the land of its dissidents—the tense mingling of forces exploded in bitter confrontations, which would shape New England’s history.
While still only Bishop of London, from 1628 to 1633, Laud became the dominant force in both of the most powerful coercive courts, the church’s Court of High Commission and the Privy Council’s criminal Court of Star Chamber. His influence swept across the land. In instructions to all twenty-five bishops of England, which he sent out in 1629 over the signature of the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, he ordered lecturers to substitute catechizing for afternoon sermons and to read, in hood and surplice, from the church’s Prayer Book before sermonizing. Itineracy was restricted, and the law limiting to high dignitaries the right to appoint chaplains was to be enforced. Laud was especially insistent that clerics and their parishioners adhere to all of the church’s rituals: wearing proper clerical vestments, bowing at appropriate moments, and returning the communion table to its traditional form as a railed altar before which one kneeled to receive the sacrament. And he began the process of eliminating the London trust (the Feoffees) that was buying up income-bearing properties (impropriations) to support Puritan preachers who were not otherwise provided for.27
Much of this could not be enforced, but though the cleansing Laud sought could not be fully achieved, even after his elevation to the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 1633, and he had to accept from many dissenting lecturers only the vaguest pledges of conformity, he was unrelenting in his efforts. For all its incompleteness, his campaign had a transforming effect on the Puritans. It created fear and a sense of desperation, forged a mutually supportive community of previously scattered dissidents, steeled their resistance, propelled many from a “loose conformity” to outright nonconformity, and precipitated a willingness on the part of certain of the Puritan leaders to contemplate flight.28
What stirred the Puritan community most deeply was Laud’s sweeping “visitations” of suspect dioceses to flush out even the mildest signs of nonconformity before they could fester and spread contamination, and his selective targeting of certain of the most influential and popular Puritan leaders. Laud’s inquisitors scoured the religious landscape with such intensity, especially in the Puritan regions of greater East Anglia and the West Country, that one of his chaplains could happily report that the nonconformists “shrink away at the very name of Visitation.”29
The visitation of the heavily nonconformist diocese of Norwich under Bishop Matthew Wren was especially severe: the House of Commons later concluded that as a result of his and his successor’s work “both ministers and tradesmen were driven to fly to Holland and New England.” God’s true church, one of the bishop’s victims wrote, is now “under hatches, the walls of Jerusalem beaten down; poor Suffolk and Norfolk lying desolate by that cursed, wretched Wren.” Fear grew as preacher after preacher and lecturer after lecturer was suspended from his clerical role for failing to preach orthodox doctrine and to observe the prescribed rituals of the church.30
But such general visitations, though they raised fears and created upheavals throughout the Puritan world, could not reach what Laud considered the most alarming sources of the Puritan malignancy. That lay in the work of a few powerful preachers, whom he and his aides were determined to silence. It was not so much isolated troublemakers who stirred Laud’s reprisals—pastors like Charles Chauncy of Marston St. Lawrence, Northamptonshire, and Ware, Hertfordshire, who was accused of committing doctrinal omissions and denouncing kneeling for communion at railed altars. Such a solitary scholar could be dealt with, especially since he seemed irresolute in his opposition. What troubled Laud most profoundly was the growing influence of a single large but tightly bound network of eloquent, well-connected, and increasingly popular “inconformists” deeply rooted in affluent parishes in the very heart of metropolitan England. At the center of this dangerous web of subversion was the interrelated clerical dynasty of the Rogers and Ward families, whose destinies, like Chauncy’s, would be fulfilled in New England.31
4
The patriarch of the deeply Puritan Rogers family, Richard, had survived his conflicts with authorities in the 1580s to publish in 1603 his Seven Treatises, one of the Puritans’ most popular works on the conduct of everyday life “leading and guiding to true happiness.” He died in 1618, but his progeny seemed to be everywhere, and to Laud they were everywhere incendiary. One of Richard’s sons, Daniel, followed him in the Wethersfield, Essex, pulpit, where he matched him in eloquence if not charisma, and another, Ezekiel, who would be known for his “passionate distemper,” settled in Yorkshire where his influence radiated far beyond his East Riding parish of Rowley. But the most powerful of the second-generation Rogerses was Richard’s nephew John, of Dedham, Essex. Revered by his followers as “the prince of all the preachers in England,” he was a “plain” preacher but enormously and theatrically eloquent. Clutching the canopy of the pulpit with both hands “and roaring hideously to represent the torments of the damned,” he reduced many of his auditors to tears. Mobs flocked to his blistering sermons, catching sparks from his legendary fire. His brother Nathaniel commanded large if not tumultuous audiences in nearby Bocking, and his stepbrothers, the Wards—the Reverends Samuel, John, and Nathaniel Ward—were at least as influential in their own constituencies; Samuel, of Ipswich, was particularly singled out by Laud’s agents as a veritable “breeder” of discontent, his preaching one of the causes of all “this giddiness.”32
But the Rogers-Ward network, which was such a threat to Laudian conformity, was not limited by consanguinity. One of the most gi
fted Puritan preachers, intellectuals, and counselors—and one of Laud’s prime targets—was Thomas Hooker, no blood relation of the Rogers-Ward cousinage but closely involved in their lives, in England as, later, in New England. After many vicissitudes, Hooker had settled near John Rogers for the express purpose of studying with him and sharing in his fierce Puritan commitment. There, in Chelmsford, Essex, in close collaboration with Rogers, he developed into a renowned healer of souls. Received by many as “a teacher sent from God,” he was a major force in the region’s monthly meetings of Puritan preachers, and his eloquence overwhelmed the people who heard his stern sermons. A close member of the Rogerses’ extended clan, he soon formed his own secondary circle of “bold and fiery spirits.” Among them were Thomas Shepard, Hugh Peter, Thomas Weld, and Nathaniel Ward, all of whom would carry their distinctive doctrines to New England, where their mentor would elaborate and apply his own views, to the discontent of many.33
Laud, increasingly concerned for the growing influence of the Rogers circle, soon learned that Hooker’s genius was penetrating the region’s pulpits and stirring up people far and wide. Hooker had become, he was told, a veritable oracle and the “principal library” of young preachers. One by one the others in the East Anglian Puritan cousinage were identified, and after Parliament was dissolved in 1629 the crackdown, the most severe since the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, began in earnest.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 47
