Secret lists were drawn up of leading nonconformists: an Essex list of nine, in 1630, included John Rogers, Samuel Rogers, Nathaniel Ward, and Thomas Shepard. Within months John Rogers and both of his sons, Daniel and Nathaniel, were suspended from their offices, as were in time Samuel Ward and his brother Nathaniel. The latter, having been singled out as an “absolute inconformitarian,” was subjected to court proceedings that lasted for two years. The accusations against him were summarized in forty-three articles, which included charges that he had denounced ritualistic prayers as something “a parrot might be taught” and that one could get “a jack-an-apes or a baboon” to bow as prescribed. Adamant, defiant, he was suspended from his lectureship and ordered to recant and to pay all the court expenses.
The Rogerses and the Wards were major “breeders” of nonconformity, but Hooker was clearly preeminent. Despite warnings that suppressing him would enrage the local population and create “great heart-burnings,” Laud deprived him of his Chelmsford lectureship. But Hooker’s voice was not so easily stilled. He quickly established a grammar school, employing as his assistant the young John Eliot, whom he led to conversion, and he continued counseling the local ministers, preaching informally in laymen’s houses, and in the process drawing off whole congregations from the authorized churches. In 1630 he was summoned to the Court of High Commission. Forty-nine Essex clergymen protested on his behalf, testifying to his basic conformity and that he was “no ways turbulent or factious.” But counterpetitions by conforming churchmen citing his “licentious irregularities” carried more weight. His prospects were hopeless, and he fled to Holland, to join Hugh Peter, leaving his family under the protection of the Puritan Earl of Warwick.34
By then all of Hooker’s protégés were under attack. Thomas Weld was excommunicated and then summoned for admonition before the High Commission. In Yorkshire, where various Puritan “exercises” and conferences were shut down, Ezekiel Rogers was excommunicated for holding “secrete assemblies or conventicles,” expounding “dangerous and schismatic” views, and refusing to read to his people the official Book of Sports, which permitted what the Puritans believed to be the profanation of the Sabbath and which prevented them from restricting their servants’ engagement in undue “sports and pastimes.” In London, John Davenport, vicar of the vast parish of St. Stephens, found himself subject to sixteen charges of impropriety brought to Laud by Davenport’s own curate, and though he answered the accusations fully, and though he had the patronage of the powerful Vere family as well as Secretary of State Conway, he knew he could not long continue in his Puritan ministry in the heart of the nation’s metropolis. He was quite willing, he wrote Lady Vere, “to lye and dye in prison, if the cause may be advantaged by it,” but it was clearly more useful “to preserve the liberty of my person and ministry for the service of the church elsewhere if all dores are shutt against mee here.” So, forced by Laud from a rather loose nonconformity to a highly specified, rigid dissent, he disguised himself “in a grey suit and an overgrown beard” and fled to the Netherlands.
Far to the west, in Dorchester, Dorset—an area “deeply imbued,” the historian Clarendon would write, “with the rigid piety of the Puritans”—the Rev. John White was charged by the High Commission with opposing orthodox theology and formal rituals as well as maintaining “secret and sly practices” against church and state; he escaped prosecution only by the wiles of his most respectable parishioners. But the young Thomas Shepard, “a poore, weake, pale complectioned man” who had not yet decided whether or not he was “a nonconformable man,” was forced to present himself to Laud personally, to face the Episcopal wrath alone. That dramatic confrontation, on the eve of the Winthrop fleet’s departure, perhaps embellished in the telling, cleared up Shepard’s uncertainty and became a warning to others to seek refuge in any way possible.35
The bishop, Shepard reported, seemed at the start of the encounter to be in “a fit of rage” and immediately warned Shepard “to deal plainly with him, adding withal that he had been more cheated and equivocated with by some of my malignant faction than ever was man by Jesuit.” Laud’s anger seemed to grow with every effort Shepard made to defend himself: “he looked as though blood would have gushed from his face and did shake as if he had been haunted with an ague fit … by reason of his extreme malice and secret venom.” His “railing” became bitter: “You prating coxcomb! Do you think all the learning is in your brain?” And his verdict on the twenty-five-year-old cleric was sweeping:
I charge you that you neither preach, read, marry, bury, or exercise any ministerial function in any part of my diocese, for if you do, and I hear of it, I will be upon your back and follow you wherever you go, in any part of the kingdom, and so everlastingly disenable you.… You have made a company of seditious, factious Bedlams.… I will have no such fellows prate in my diocese. Get you gone, and now make your complaints to whom you will!
With that malediction upon his head, Shepard fled, and, hoping for a refuge “so remote and strange” as to be out of Laud’s reach, ended in Yorkshire, and there he began “to listen to a call to New England.” Should he leave all behind and join in that radical venture? He struggled with the question and in the end found five good reasons why remaining in Yorkshire and exercising his talent privately, secretly, was dubious and eight stronger reasons why he should commit himself to the refuge in the wilderness. First, he wrote in his autobiography, he “saw no call to any other place in old England, nor way of subsistence in peace and comfort to me and my family.” Second, many of his friends were already there or en route; further, God seemed to him to have left England with the departures of such luminaries as Hooker; in addition, participating in any way in a church of empty ceremonies was surely not lawful; and beyond that, only in New England, it seemed, could he fulfill “all God’s ordinances.” His wife, he noted, favored the move, and surely Christ had deliberately provided this escape. Though he admitted that his “ends were mixed” and that the search for physical security and personal comfort mingled with loftier motives, God had revealed to him “the glory of these liberties in New England” and that for him to join in that holy enterprise, weak as he was, would be to “come out from the dead, to his praise.”36
Other clergymen, many others, pondered the question, organized their thoughts in similar syllogisms, but came to different conclusions. Some, like Samuel Rogers, agonized for months, probing the issues again and again, and finally decided against the move—largely in deference to the wishes of his father, Daniel, a man of “a most woeful temper,” who had opposed Winthrop’s leaving because he was dissatisfied with the governor’s closely wrought reasoning. Still others, who had turned first to the Netherlands as a more accessible asylum, had discovered that the English churches there were no less conflicted than England’s and were well within the reach of Laud’s influence. How many churchmen in all actually emigrated to New England in the decade of the 1630s cannot be precisely known—98, according to one estimate, 103 or 113 according to another, 129 according to still another. Many of them—at least 43—returned to England after 1640, when the Puritan revolution toppled Laud and his entire ecclesiastical regime; but the clergy’s presence nevertheless dominated the exile community in New England, and not only because of numbers.37
The clerics who did emigrate had been steeled by adversity—stripped of their offices, silenced, harassed, and threatened by the highest powers of church and state. These were not gentle souls. The timid, the unsure, and the malleable found means of accommodation, adopting loose forms of outward conformity while practicing their beliefs in private: they remained at home. Those who left were tougher, more defiant, more self-assured, more self-absorbed. They had been tempered by their refusal to buckle under to what Ezekiel Rogers, in his bristling Last Will and Testament of 1661, would recall as “the hottest persicution of that bloody hierarchy.” Their nonconformity, like Nathaniel Ward’s, had been “absolute,” and so they were not easy men, unlikely, in any circumst
ances, to compromise for peace. They had risked too much, had known too much of “persecution, frustration, defiance, and fear.”38
For Richard Mather, suspended from his pulpit in Toxteth Park, near Liverpool, the fear of persecution had a vivid, dramatic meaning. As he considered the future of life under the present repressive church-state regime, he turned to John Foxe’s martyrology, Actes and Monuments of … the great persecutions … practised by the Romishe Prelates.… With the third volume open before him, he read of the fearful torments that had been inflicted on Bishop Nicholas Ridley and the Rev. John Bradford in 1555. Then he came on the advice those martyrs had given others as they prepared themselves to be burned at the stake for heresy. For Mather, contemplating the world in 1635, nothing could have been more relevant. Those who fear they might not be able to stand firm before the ultimate violence, John Bradford had written—those who might dishonor God when in extremis—should “fly … if you feel such infirmity in yourselves.” Bradford, who had been, as Mather then was, a Lancashire preacher, had phrased the issue especially well, and Mather, in his elaborate “Arguments” justifying his removal from “a corrupt church to a purer,” partly quoted and partly paraphrased the exact words he found on pages 518 and 319 of Foxe’s third volume. “In respect of your infirmity,” Bradford, facing death at the stake, had written to friends whose ultimate courage he doubted, “God will never tempt you above your ability; fly and get you hence … your home here is no home, but that ye look for another.” Had not God told Joseph that he should fly rather than stay and in his weakness disgrace His name? “Go,” Bradford had instructed his “infirm” friends, “go where you may with free and safe conscience serve the Lord.” Mather went.39
But he had not needed Foxe’s Actes to justify his fears. The terrible sufferings of those who had died for their faith under Queen Mary were living, personal memories in Lancashire; and so they were elsewhere—in Hingham, Norfolk, for example, where the Rev. Robert Peck’s grandfather had been driven underground in Mary’s reign and had been forced to flee for his life and to preach “in woods and forrest places.” Was it so different now? True, Mather, Peck, and the other suppressed Puritan activists had not themselves been physically tormented or savagely martyred, as their predecessors had been, but might that not be their eventual fate? They had been forced to consult and collaborate secretly and to protect themselves against spies; some had gone into hiding and were moving about in disguise. Having faced intimidation, they were unbending and defiant in spirit. Seasoned controversialists, articulate and well informed on doctrinal points, and capable of mobilizing arguments quickly to defend their positions, they were braced for further contention. Not all were as severe, as commanding and imposing, as the “choleric,” “condescending” Hooker who, Cotton Mather later wrote, was “able to do more with a word, or a look, than most other men could have done by a severer discipline.” But they all left England embattled—uncompromised in spirit, fortified by adversity.40
5
Tranquillity would forever elude them. For the Puritanism that defined them collectively was a cluster of latently divergent views and commitments. As they boarded the vessels for New England these differences were suppressed in their common defense of church reform and their mutual struggle to survive. At the point of their departure, differences were as yet “nuances of temperament and thought within the framework of a more cohesive Puritanism.”41 But the fissures that would become conflicts when the pressure was relieved could, even then, be seen. And none of these differences would be more important, more central to the lives of the migrants and the entire New England community, than those that divided Hooker from his shipmate aboard the Griffin in June 1633, John Cotton. Their experiences in England before they left—Hooker at age forty-seven, Cotton at age forty-nine—and the development of their thought from the time they left the University of Cambridge to the time they made their decision to emigrate, explains much of the tumultuous history of the colony’s early years.
COTTON, for twenty-one years vicar of the largest parish church in England, the notoriously Puritan St. Botolph’s in Boston, Lincolnshire, was the intellectually gifted son of an obscure Derbyshire lawyer.42 He had a brilliant academic career in Cambridge, and as a fellow of Emmanuel College, amid clerics of learning and disputational skills, he became famous for his mastery of languages, elegant preaching, and piety. There he came to embrace the fundamental tenets of Puritanism, and there too, in association with Richard Sibbes, master of St. Catharine’s College, and John Preston, master of Emmanuel and a great intriguer in public affairs, and together too with other like-minded scholars, clerics, and patrons, he turned to the spiritist side of Puritanism, the more pietist emphasis within the broad ambit of the reform movement.
Having himself experienced to his great satisfaction a profoundly moving, exalting conversion to God’s grace, Cotton became convinced that only such shattering, radically transforming, direct, and unmediated infusions of divinity ultimately mattered. He could express the overwhelming experience that ruled his life best in metaphors. Conversion, he wrote, was “a melting of stone, a warming of ice, a quickening of paralyzed will”; it was not a mere wading in grace, but such a drenching that one would never thereafter be dry. With respect to such a profound experience—a marriage with Christ heavy with erotic implications43—all external trappings, rational calculations, willful strivings for redemption, and clerical ministrations were worthless. So like the others who have been called the Spiritist Brethren within the Puritan movement, he could tolerate some of the church’s demands as simply irrelevant—“indifferent things”—and he could in good conscience avoid confrontation with the church by evasions while nourishing his and his parishioners’ deepest spiritual ambitions. Seeking to reach into his parishioners’ souls, he abandoned the academic elegance of preaching and learned to speak simply, plainly, but with powerful effect as he exhorted his listeners to receive the infusion of the Lord’s transforming power.
In St. Botolph’s, to whose vicarage he had been preferred in 1612, he practiced what he preached—not blatantly, not defiantly, but softly, subtly, diplomatically, and persistently, clinging to the belief that the Church of England, for all the corruptions of its rituals and its stultifying hierarchies, was still the true church. Rather than restricting participation in the parish church to those who gave convincing evidence of a saving grace, he gathered those palpable converts together into an informal, semisecret inner group, a congregation of the truly converted within the broader eclectic congregation, and to this cluster of visible saints he ministered separately and quietly. This small, exclusive church within the church flourished, without excluding from ordinary worship the majority, who were unredeemed, and without alienating the local conformists or unduly antagonizing the Episcopal powers.
Thoughtful, mild in manner, never confrontational, professing conformity to just the minimal degree needed to avoid collision with the church authorities, Cotton turned his parish toward the spiritist tendency within Puritanism. At this stage he had no need to probe the deep, tangled implications of his instinctive spiritism. As the years passed, he grew ever more certain that the heart and soul of true Christianity lay in the inward, personal experience of saving grace, in the direct visitation of God’s mercy, which owes nothing to human effort or to contractual relations with divinity, or even to the sanctity of one’s daily life.
In part his long survival within England’s ecclesiastical establishment, which was growing ever more rigid in its demands for conformity to institutional rituals, was the result of the protection he received from sympathizers among the nobility—not only the Earl of Lincoln, whose estate was becoming a refuge for harassed and deposed Puritan clergymen, but also Viscount Dorchester, a principal secretary of state and supporter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Earl of Dorset, the Earl of Lindsey, admiral of the fleet and privy councilor, and others among the powers in the land—the Pembrokes and the Veres; Warwick; Say and Sele; and ev
en at one point the king’s favorite, the Duke of Buckingham.44 Insulated in part from the more rigorous demands of the church, Cotton extended his reach farther and farther into the world, accepting for his tutelage a flow of Cambridge students sent to him by Emmanuel College’s master as well as groups of young Germans who sought his instruction. And to the world at large he preached with extraordinary diligence: both mornings and afternoons on Thursdays and Saturdays, and also mornings on Wednesdays.
His fame spread through Puritan circles, in Lincolnshire and beyond. For one contemporary he was “one of England’s glories,” for another he was a man “of admirable candor, of unparalleled meekness, of rare wisdom, very loving even to those that differed in judgment from him.” His radiating influence shed light for many perplexed people on what the ultimate experience of justification might be, how far to discount the rituals of the church, and in the end what to think about the ultimate survival of true religion in England and what to do if all hope faded.
The possibility of flight was in the minds of many of his personal followers. Some had left for New England in the first wave; many were actively planning their emigration; and Cotton himself, though so far sheltered, grew close to the Massachusetts settlement in his correspondence with Samuel Skelton, the Earl of Lincoln’s former chaplain who in 1629 had settled with the advance party in Salem, Massachusetts. As Cotton’s fame spread, so too did his vulnerability, and when after 1633 the pressure from church authorities mounted, Cotton’s protectors’ influence waned, and he was summoned to the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 48
