Since from that inquisitorial body he could expect nothing but “scorns and prison,” he fled to London, and there, in hiding, he considered various alternatives. He might live with the church’s demands as merely “indifferent things” and continue the struggle for reform, though at the risk of imprisonment. He could escape to the familiar refuge of Holland, where he might secretly influence events in England and be poised to return quickly when and if a great reformation occurred. Or he could join the migration west across the ocean, serve the saving remnant that had settled there, and share in the life of the apostolic churches he believed the colonists were creating. In June, urged on by his former parishioners already committed to emigration—substantial people like the Boston alderman Thomas Leverett, who had protected him in the past, and the town’s former mayor Atherton Hough—and disillusioned with prospects in Holland, Cotton joined two hundred other emigrants on the Griffin and left for Massachusetts.45
It could not have occurred to him, as he sailed to America, that in that distant land, free from the constraints of an oppressive church, the implications of his belief in an unmediated saving grace, as yet but an emphasis within the complex, still inchoate body of Puritan piety, would evolve, would become engrossing and rancorous, and would generate destructive animosities. Nor could he have anticipated that in these altered circumstances he would find it necessary to limit the quasi-pietistic tendency of his thought, and that in the end he himself, who had pressed so persistently against the establishment in England, would become a constraining force against other enthusiasts of “graceful” inner experience, whose ideas in their origins were similar to his own. And he certainly could not have imagined that on fundamental issues one of his strongest opponents, directly or indirectly, would be his respected shipmate, Hooker, with whom, four years earlier, he had discussed plans for the Puritan colony; with whose deeply pondered reasons for abandoning England he concurred; and with whom he had secretly consulted before departing for New England.46
HOOKER, so brilliantly successful in Chelmsford and so fiercely condemned by Laud, had also been shaped by his experiences in Cambridge, where he had remained for fourteen years, deeply immersed in the liberal arts and religious studies in that hotbed of Puritan spirituality.47 And it was there, in his late twenties, that he had undergone the deepest experience of his life, which set him on a path that would fundamentally diverge from Cotton’s. His conversion followed an extended spiritual crisis in which he lamented his miseries before God, suffered terrors (“O Lord, I am distracted”), and yearned for that “restructuring of experience, willed by a human will that could not will.” Despite all his efforts his redemption was very long in coming. Again and again he meditated in anguish, confessed his sins, begged for Christ’s mercy, and accepted damnation for the glory of God. When finally, after an agonizing trial of his soul, he felt the vast transformation he had sought, he was assured of his clerical vocation and the basic tendency of his ministry.
His search for personal redemption and its ultimate resolution had been “so intense, so difficult that he was never able to shake the memory of it, and the work of his pastoral career is marked by a tender consideration for the spirits of men and women undergoing like experiences.” And this bent of his thought, this pastoral orientation of his clerical role, was strongly reinforced by the strange circumstances of his first ministerial appointment.48
In the years when Cotton was enjoying his great popularity at St. Botolph’s and in effect sensitizing a broad constituency to the possibility of emigration, Hooker, upon leaving Cambridge, found employment only as rector of an obscure parish in Esher, Surrey, and as the personal counselor to the patron’s agonized wife who was distracted near to the point of insanity by fears of damnation and her incapacity to find salvation. For years Joanna Drake and her husband had sought the help of preachers, but none had been able to help her resolve her torments. Hooker, who lived in the Drake household for seven years while attending to the parish in general and Mrs. Drake in particular, applied the lessons of his own travail to Mrs. Drake’s affliction and in the process developed a model of the preparation for grace within the boundaries of predestinarian Calvinism.49 There were techniques involved (a “new answering method” framed by Ramist logic), specific steps to be taken to eliminate hindrances, and distinct stages to be reached before any help could be expected. It was not a matter of what one could do to reach a state of possible acceptance of grace, but what one must do, despite the fact that no human action could in the end be efficacious. And for success in this seemingly impossible effort, instruction was necessary, the minister’s work as guide was crucial, and the institutions of the church formed the context of correct procedure. By the time Mrs. Drake was “cured” and Hooker had accepted a lectureship in Chelmsford, he had become an expert in leading troubled souls to redemptive peace through an elaborate process of preparation, a guide through the labyrinth that led to a saving grace. In his four years in Chelmsford, before Laud deprived him of his lectureship, it was the doctrine of preparation that he mainly preached, and he made common cause with many who would share his views in New England’s later struggles. But committed as he was to the externals of worship and hence uncompromising in his demand for the reform of the church, he could sustain his success neither there in Chelmsford’s St. Mary’s parish nor in the refuge he sought in the Netherlands.50
The English churches there, he found, were convulsed with the question of church organization in general and congregational autonomy in particular, and he was immediately caught up in the struggle. Hugh Peter, “rash and hasty,” who had arrived in Holland four years earlier, could do little to secure a ministerial post for Hooker, especially when, upon inquiry, Hooker denied the authority of the ruling classis and justified the cause of what was in effect full congregational autonomy. Refused appointment in Amsterdam, Hooker moved to Delft and again became embroiled in a bitter dispute. Having failed twice in Holland to find the peace and stability he sought in order to continue his ministry, he was more convinced than ever of the truth of “unconformity,” even if it required the Puritans to fly “unto the Indians for safety, to say nothing of their losse of life itselfe, by cruell imprisonments.” Returning secretly to England, he retrieved his family and, evading the agents sent to find him, joined Cotton in boarding the Griffin bound for New England.51
COTTON AND HOOKER WERE major figures in the Puritan migration, famous in England long before they emigrated: inspired leaders, spiritual guides, formulators of basic doctrine, and ultimately adversaries. For them, as for others of the extraordinary phalanx of clerics who joined and helped lead the exodus from England, the decision to migrate was impelled by the deepest sources of their religious commitment. Given their insistence on reform, for them to remain within the immediate embrace of the “corrupted” church would be to call into question their integrity, their sincerity, ultimately the effectiveness of their ministry. But to leave England, especially under duress, was, as David Hall has written, to reject all worldly expectations and “to strike a prophetic stance.” To lead thousands of laymen across the ocean was surely “proof of the ‘regard’ for their ministry.” And thousands did follow, especially as New England came to be seen more clearly as the primary site of religious renewal.52
In leading their flocks abroad, the major figures—Cotton and Hooker most prominently—were never isolates within the ministry. Each brought with them, or rejoined, affiliates who shared their views. Closest to Cotton in religious doctrine was Davenport, thirteen years his junior, whom Cotton had guided to conversion. A kindred spirit too was John Wheelwright, who had fallen under Cotton’s sway in Lincolnshire, where Wheelwright had preached in Bilsby, a parish near Alford. To Hooker’s early clerical affiliates in Essex who would join in the migration—Weld, Ward, Peter, Eliot, and above all Shepard, more rationalist in doctrine than Cotton, more concerned with ministerial agency and church organization, and more devoted to the articulated preparatory staging of redemption—was lat
er added John Wilson, a contemporary of both Cotton and Hooker at Emmanuel College and a former student at the Inns of Court. Like so many others, Wilson, who had close family ties to the church’s hierarchy and to London’s politicians, had found his way to Puritanism and to Hooker’s allegiance through the influence of Richard Rogers, whose instruction he had sought and whose neighbor he had become when he settled in Sudbury, Suffolk.53
But the divergences of thought within militant Puritanism that would find clashing expression in New England were not confined to the differences between Cotton’s radical spirituality and Hooker’s temperate preparationism, the one veering toward the extreme of antinomian disregard for external, ecclesiastical constraints, the other tending toward institutional demands that would enhance the role of the clergy and restrict access to full church membership. Neither position was “orthodox” Puritanism. There was no Puritan orthodoxy as the migration began—only a broad field of force, within which there were many uncoordinated impulses.
If such respected and famous figures as Cotton and Hooker did not represent orthodoxy in Puritanism, still less did others of less renown or public acceptance whose instincts would lead in various directions: congregational-separatists like Samuel Skelton; quasi-Presbyterians like James Noyes and Robert Peck; proto-Anabaptists like Hanserd Knollys; radical spiritists like Samuel Gorton; and brilliant millennialist seekers like Roger Williams.
Williams was entirely unique. The perfectionism and driving logic of his radical Puritanism, which would lead him in the end away from all settled groups to isolation in a church of his own, might have been foreseen in his brief career in England. Fresh from the university in his early twenties, he had become the spiritual guide to Cromwell’s aunt, the melancholic Lady Joan Barrington. But his remorseless attack on what he believed was her unsatisfactory spiritual condition, his insistence that all her travails (her illnesses, her husband’s death, her children’s afflictions) were God’s “thunderclaps” and “quarrel” against her, and his constant dwelling on her “gray hairs,” her impending last days “like the close of some sweet harmony,” her candle “twinckling and glass near run” (in fact she lived another twelve years), so enraged the grieving widow that she banished Williams from her sight and in addition sharply rebuked him for his presumption in seeking a relationship with her niece. It was the same “unlambelike” stiffness, relentless pursuit of absolute resolutions, and self-assertive disregard for conventional norms that led Williams to join the migration to New England and thereafter to challenge the boundaries of the colony’s fragile civility.54
6
The religious leadership was thus as diverse, as potentially conflicted, as the ordinary settlers, drawn as they were from different regional backgrounds and habituated to different forms of customary life. No less diverse in their views than the clergy and at least as prone to discord was the secular leadership. Of that remarkable group much is known—of their intelligence, their ambition, their boldness, their imagination and ingenuity in facing unforeseen problems, and also their tenacity and obstinacy, fortified by religious conviction, their abrasiveness in human relations, and what seems to have been an elemental propensity for contention.
A few were pivotal figures, uniquely influential or peculiarly representative. First among them was John Winthrop, a man of exceptional ability: adept as a land manager, lawyer, lay theologian, and politician, whose personal agency became critical in precipitating the Great Migration. His personal concerns, his tormented state of mind, exemplify and vivify—convey in dilated form—the deep perplexities and worries of much of the Puritan gentry, and the “seismic” dimensions of the decision that many of them made amid agonizing doubts.55
He was the son and grandson of prosperous Suffolk gentlemen active in the Puritan reform movement since the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. His father was a barrister and manor lord with close connections to the Puritan leaders in Cambridge University, and Winthrop grew up in the “godly commonwealth” of East Anglia’s Stour Valley, a center of aggressive Puritanism. After studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Gray’s Inn, London, he returned to his native village of Groton. There he became the soul of managerial worldliness. He managed his family’s properties, served as a justice of the peace, and in addition took on the office of attorney in the royal Court of Wards in London. At home in Suffolk, as he immersed himself in estate management, local administration, and the spiritual life of the intense Puritan community, he observed the disordered state of ordinary lives. When in London he saw about him the corruptions of the cumbersome legal system and the fierce turmoils of the metropolitan city. By the late 1620s, a man just over forty with seven children, he had failed to exceed, at times to maintain, the role he had inherited and had begun to despair of his prospects for a reasonably successful and secure life. He was in debt, he was worried about his children, he was tied up in a lawsuit, he had given up his lucrative office in the Court of Wards, and in the background of these personal problems, he was increasingly aware of the growing autocracy of the English Crown. Anticipating a divine “affliction upon this land and that speedily,” he believed that God would provide “a shelter and hiding place for us and ours.” Perhaps that refuge could best be found overseas, in New England. But such a deracination would be a momentous event and could be undertaken only after the deepest consideration and with convincing justification.
JOHN WINTHROP, SR.
The dominant, successful leader in the establishment of Puritan society in New England, he sought compromises within a narrow range of toleration. (illustration credit 12.1)
In his “General Observations for the Plantation of New England,” which circulated in several manuscript drafts, and in his private letters, Winthrop not only laid out the conditions that led him to consider uprooting himself, his family, and his “company,” but also probed his own motivations, sought divine approval, and answered his critics point by point.56 England, he believed, was a world out of joint, corrupted, sinful, and in need of redemption. “The land groaneth under her inhabitants,” he wrote, “so that man, the best of creatures, is held more base than the earth they tread on.” Though the earth was the Lord’s garden, given to mankind for its improvement, people struggled to live on the cultivation of an acre or two when vastly more was freely available elsewhere. The “intemperancy” of the time—the extravagance, the feckless prodigality, the passion for cheap satisfactions—all that had grown to the point that “no man’s estate will suffice him to keep sail with his equal,” and if one fails to keep up with the high-flying excesses, one “must live in contempt.” So avarice is rampant and trades are carried on so deceitfully and unrighteously that “a good upright man [cannot] maintain his charge and … live comfortably in his profession.” Even the “fountains of learning”—the schools and universities—ruinously expensive, were so corrupted by the evil examples and “licentious government” within them that “the best wits and fairest hopes” of the youth were “perverted, corrupted, and utterly overthrown.” Above all, the true religion lay under heavy threat. The Jesuits’ “kingdom of antichrist” had brought all the European churches but England’s to desolation, and it could not but be that the like judgment would soon descend on England. To sit at home waiting for that to happen would result in just the ruin that had overtaken the true churches on the continent. That “woeful spectacle” should teach one to avoid the plague before it struck, before one was overcome by force and led into the temptation to backslide and abjure the truth.
Not all, even of Winthrop’s intimates, agreed. Specific, practical doubts were raised as Winthrop approached a decision. Would not the departure of the godly make an evil judgment on England more likely? Why hurry, when one could wait and see what happened? Was not England still a plentiful land? Suppose one died along the way, or died there quickly, of hunger or the sword: could one imagine “how uncomfortable would it be to see our wives, children, and friends come to such a misery by our occasion”? What war
rant was there for seizing others’ land—land that “had been so long time possessed by other sons of Adam”? Why not send just the young and expendable people rather than “our best number and magistrates”? And was not the record of recent plantations overseas dismal? Had they not uniformly failed of their purpose?
These were reasonable questions, raised not only by his friends but by Winthrop himself. They were answerable, and Winthrop replied to them systematically; but they did not go to the essential point. Behind all of Winthrop’s arguments and reasoning that led to his great decision lay something larger, something grander, than these specific problems. His thinking was illuminated by a desire to construct freshly, on distant shores, a society reformed not merely in religion but also in human relations, relieved not only of ecclesiastical tyranny but also of the hurt and grief of everyday conflicts. He yearned for wholeness, for a peaceful, unconflicted life in godly communities whose people were bound together in mutual support and obligation, and where the abrasions of competition and clashing desires would be softened and one could hope for generosity of spirit and goodwill from one’s neighbors.
It was this elemental hope and vision that he developed most fully in the lay sermon he delivered on the deck of the Arbella just before her departure for New England. His “Model of Christian Charity,” little remarked on at the time but destined for fame in later generations as a core statement of Puritan aspirations, cast his personal longings and his personal despair in familiar Christian terms. He longed for a community of decency, he said, of generosity, charity, and kindness—a community where the God-given order of society would be maintained in stable equilibrium, where “the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor nor the poor and despised rise up against their superiors,” where one loved one’s neighbors as oneself, where one helped another in want or distress, where “the care of the public must oversway all private respects,” where we and our posterity might be “the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world”—all of this “to serve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances.”
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 49
