It was this longing for a softer, more benign existence that would lead him as magistrate away from the hard edge of Puritanism, its restrictive precisionism, toward its softer humanity and generosity of spirit. So again and again, in years to come, he would be accused by his opponents of excessive leniency when severity was needed, of being indulgent when excessive “enthusiasm” threatened the colony’s coherence. For while he was always zealous, his latest biographer has written, “he was not a zealot,” and he instinctively reached for moderation in the fierce religio-ideological struggles that would ensue. Aware of his own sinfulness, he sought to treat his opponents with charity, confident that in the end God would ensure the wholeness of life that he sought.57
It was in the end this vision—of a more harmonious, more organic, more godly community—and not merely the mounting practical problems and fears he faced that led Winthrop to the wrenching decision to leave the land of his birth. By 1629, when he joined with others similarly disposed to reorganize the Massachusetts Bay Company and arrange for its transfer to New England, where it would serve as a government overseas, his general desires and frustrations had fused into an irrevocable determination to begin the world anew. As the company’s governor, he threw himself into the myriad practical tasks of extricating himself and his family from their deep local roots, recruiting a population of settlers who would form not simply a labor force but a fully constituted society, hiring and supplying the fleet of vessels needed to transport hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people overseas, and keeping the entire venture clear of the authorities of church and state.
As his determination steeled and he took on the managerial burdens of the evolving project, the strength and complexity of his personality became a force in itself. In outward manner he was cool, austere, constrained, unbending, proud, and remorselessly purposeful, but his interior self was passionate, fervent, and sensuous. Though unbending in his belief that it was proper for women’s roles to be restricted, his heart-wrenching, prayerful deathwatch over the demise of his second wife—an exultation of piety and love which he recorded almost hour by hour for two weeks—and his deeply affectionate letters to his third wife, Margaret, testify to the force and warmth of his private emotions, however discreet and sober he appeared in public. When he and Margaret were separated for extended times they pledged to commune with each other telepathically—“to meet … in spirit before the Lord”—each Monday and Friday between five and six. Severely self-disciplined, he knew the truth and sought to engender it in a world mired in error and corruption. He had the vigor, intelligence, and passion for the achievement of a commander, a leader of men, but he was a leader with a rigorously logical mind capable of fine discriminations in theological debate and a sense of human frailty. His greatest virtues were the clarity of his vision, his resolution, and his managerial skills; his weakness was his single-mindedness, which made him seem at times self-righteous. But he was always a commanding figure, and he dominated the circle of able men who shared in the leadership of the Puritans’ Great Migration.58
For while many of the decisions that propelled the project forward were his, they were not his alone. Others, equally competent and equally committed, joined him in triggering the exodus, which was never a silent Völkerwanderung, a mute, undirected milling and drifting of people overseas. From the start it was a deliberate, well-organized, and purposeful mobilization of the idealistic, the discontented, the frustrated, and the fearful into a structured project—for some, renewal; for others, evasion. Some who shared in the migration’s initial leadership were of the gentry like Winthrop, some were merchant entrepreneurs, some were local leaders of ordinary status. They were all, like Winthrop, experienced in practical affairs and, also like him, forceful and resolute.
THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED among them, the most cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated, and intellectually adventurous, was Winthrop’s son, John, Jr. Only twenty-five when he joined the migration in 1631, he had already completed his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, had spent three years at the Inns of Court, had served in the military campaign to relieve the siege of La Rochelle, had traveled to Constantinople, and had visited major cultural centers in Italy and the Netherlands. The impetus behind much of his traveling was the desire to advance his knowledge of the world in general and of science in particular, especially the advances in alchemy, one of the frontiers of scientific advancement at the time, and medicine associated with it. He had discovered the lure and importance of alchemical science in London, and it merged in his mind with the semisecret Rosicrucian movement, dedicated to the universal betterment of mankind. He had found in “alchemical culture,” his most recent biographer writes, “an intellectual and Christian natural philosophy to which he could fully commit and through which he could seek knowledge and material gain while fulfilling his Christian duty to improve the world.” But what for his colleagues and mentors in advanced intellectual circles in London were largely theoretical matters became for Winthrop highly practical concerns, since in New England he found the ideal setting for the realization of the meliorist dreams of the alchemical experimentalists, the pansophists, and the Rosicrucian healers.
Over the next half century, Winthrop [Jr.] would found three colonial towns, serve as a Bay Colony assistant for nearly two decades, govern the colony of Connecticut for eighteen years, secure that colony a charter from the Restoration court of Charles II granting it virtual independence, found several New England iron foundries, serve as a physician to nearly half the population of Connecticut, and become a founding member of the Royal Society. Alchemical knowledge and philosophies factored, often essentially, into each of these accomplishments.
A “Christian alchemist” and the most successful and renowned physician in New England, he never deviated from his commitment to the Puritan cause, but his world was broader than his father’s, more complex, more closely attuned to the new and exciting intellectual waves that were sweeping across Europe and the entrepreneurial possibilities they inspired. So broad were his interests, so serious his commitment to advancement in whatever form, that in the end he could not avoid deviating from his revered father on the question of toleration, and indeed he became an outspoken advocate of liberty of conscience, so long as it did not lead to social or political unrest.
JOHN WINTHROP, JR.
A modernizing, worldly Puritan, he was an aspiring scientist and entrepreneur, open to the emerging world, tolerant of religious dissent. (illustration credit 12.2)
A well-traveled, talented intellectual, he was also a practical manager, and he shouldered much of the heavy burden of arranging the departure and resettlement of the large Winthrop family on the shores of Massachusetts. Clearly, a contemporary wrote, young Winthrop was “a very ingenious Gent” who would prove to be “of speciall use to the Plantation.”59
But though Winthrop, Jr. was impressively energetic and enterprising, he was a junior among the migration’s initial leaders, and he was uncharacteristically genial and conciliatory in difficult situations. His seniors in the settlement were, almost to a man, stubborn, self-willed, and sharply competitive when challenged.
Thus Thomas Dudley, who would prove to be the elder Winthrop’s chief competitor for dominance in governing the colony, had been brought up in the household of the Earl of Northampton and had clerked for a judge before serving as an army officer in France and then, for over a decade, as manager of the Earl of Lincoln’s estates, which he helped rescue from debt. Like so many others, he found in and around Boston in Lincolnshire in the late 1620s the direction he would follow in nonconformist politics and in devotion to the Puritans’ ideals. A natural leader, he would be elected governor of Massachusetts four times, deputy governor thirteen times. But his would never be a peaceable kingdom. “Proud and overbearing, irascible and argumentative,” he was a rigid precisionist whose rule was always abrasive. Hating heresy, it has been said, “was the largest component of his piety.”60
His belligerence, his ass
ertiveness, and his argumentativeness seem typical of New England’s first leaders. If Dudley was a hard man, the hardest, the genealogist James Savage wrote, was Richard Bellingham, who would serve for twenty-three years as either governor or deputy governor of the Bay Colony. A lawyer, recorder of the town of Boston, Lincolnshire, and in 1628 a member of the House of Commons (the only migrant to have held that office), he was close to Lincolnshire’s social and political leadership, including the Earl of Lincoln, and he was a man who never doubted his worth. Secure in the social and political status he brought with him from England, he would prove to be a relentless foe of the Winthrops and a skillful political infighter—a populist of sorts, promoting the cause of the town representatives against the magistracy of which he was himself a part. But however populist he became in politics, he was never remotely beholden to public opinion. “Very very greedy for more money,” a contemporary wrote, short-tempered and truculent, he would scandalize everyone, high and low, by officiating at his own wedding—in effect marrying himself—to a girl twenty-six years his junior and then refusing to withdraw as judge of the court that was to try him for the offense.61
William Pynchon also came from a well-connected English family and also became a controversialist. An inheritor of substantial properties in Essex, “on the fringe of the social class which usually held manors and served as justices of the peace,” and a churchwarden in his native town of Springfield, he was like Dudley a precisionist in secular affairs as in religion. When at the age of forty he, his wife, four children, and some servants arrived in New England with the Winthrop fleet, he was long experienced in commercial land management and trade and as alive to the possibilities of material profit as he was to the nuances of theological debate. While his experience in estate management in the most commercialized part of rural England would pave the way for his remarkably successful exploitation of the fur supplies and the land that he would acquire on the Connecticut River—which in time would make his heir a wealthy frontier rentier—so too his close associations with his Puritan neighbors in Essex, especially Hooker, and his acquaintance with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, predisposed him to enter freely, and contentiously, into the doctrinal debates that would threaten the colony’s stability.62
There were other secular leaders—a remarkable number of them—of background and standing similar to those of Dudley and Pynchon, who were equally experienced in practical affairs, equally contentious, equally contrary-minded, equally argumentative, sensitive to slights, and relentless in following through on their opinions.
William Coddington, the son of a wealthy Lincolnshire merchant, was another adherent of the Earl of Lincoln. His Puritanism reinforced by the preaching of his Lincolnshire neighbor Cotton, he arrived in New England with Winthrop in 1630. He would soon thereafter oppose the colony’s establishment and join with the opposition; in the end he would defect from the colony altogether. But his respectability and affluence were never in doubt; for Winthrop he was, at least initially, “a godly man and of good estate.”63
William Vassall, also a challenger for the colony’s leadership, was no less respectable, no less affluent, no less godly, and no less prickly. The son of a London alderman and brother of one of the founders and financiers of the Massachusetts Bay Company who was also a Parliamentary leader in the resistance to the Crown, Vassall was always, Winthrop would later write, “a busy and factious spirit … a man never at rest but when he was in the fire of contention.” Yet he was undeniably a man of substance, with powerful political connections.64
And some of the colony’s most substantial people, who would themselves prove to be peaceable, enterprising, and orderly, brought with them sources of profound disorder—none more so than the Hutchinsons.
They arrived as a virtual clan in 1633–34. A sprawling Lincolnshire family anchored in part in their native village of Alford, near Boston, and in part in London, where their kinsman Richard was a prosperous ironmonger, they sent over to New England two forerunners and then followed in a party of seventeen: William and his wife Anne, ten of their children (Anne, age forty-three, had borne fourteen children in twenty-three years of marriage), three kinswomen, and two male servants. They quickly settled in, began organizing an Atlantic-wide network of trade linking London, Boston, Rhode Island, and Barbados, and entered into the colony’s political and religious life. But while William and his enterprising sons and in-laws worked quickly and quietly to develop their stake in the colony’s economy, Anne—fiercely defiant, verbally clever, and a zealot in her religious beliefs—had already begun her journey into radical dissent which would, within two years of her arrival in the colony, force into the open the deepest, most contentious implications of Puritan thought, and in the process traumatize the colony’s religious life.65
Her sensational career in New England emerged from within the context of East Anglia’s pious, prosperous tradesmen and London’s newly affluent, rising merchants. Robert Keayne was not as respectable or sophisticated as the Hutchinson men nor as penetrating a thinker as Anne, but he was a successful tradesman, had acquired wealth above that of most of the prosperous migrants, and was fierce and passionate in his piety.
Keayne was a product of the lesser world of London’s shopkeepers and small-scale money dealers—an inhabitant of the narrow, crowded, clangorous lanes and alleyways that radiated out from the main artery of the medieval city—Cheapside, Cornhill, and Leadenhall streets. There aspiring, marginal people lived intense, bristling lives, elbowing their way forward by careful calculation, taking while the taking was good. By 1635 when he left for New England, Keayne, a butcher’s boy from Windsor, had greatly succeeded. Said to be a “gentleman,” admitted to the freedom of the Merchant Tailors’ Company and of the city of London, he had married the daughter of London’s Lord Mayor and hence become kinsman of the highly respectable preacher John Wilson, and he was a member of the Honourable Artillery Company of London. As his prosperity had grown, so too had his piety and commitment to the Puritan cause, and that commitment had both reinforced his drive for material success and at the same time acted as a moral constraint on it. For God’s sake alone, he believed, one must work industriously in this world and profit from it wherever and whenever possible, but not for display, not for sensuous satisfaction. Carefully, delicately, one must balance avarice and benevolence, enterprise and morality; one must prosper but not exhibit, and calculate profit and loss in one’s spiritual as well as material life.
When Keayne appeared in Massachusetts, acquisitive and ascetic, ardent and calculating in everything he did, he carried with him, besides “two or 3000 lb in good estate,” both a reputation for “covetous practice” and a bundle of sermon notes he had taken down over the years that testified to his passionate piety and the fierce tension of his inner life. His standing as a fervently pious and enterprising, if not avaricious, tradesman devoted to the Puritan cause was typical of a significant group within the migration’s leadership, men whose names feature in the economic history of early New England and who became mainstays of the developing community. Such were the new Bostonians: Valentine Hill, John Hewes, John Cogan, Henry Shrimpton, Edward and William Tyng, John Cogswell, Anthony Stoddard. Such too were the enterprising founders of the New Haven colony, almost all of them ex-inhabitants of Coleman Street, London, in Davenport’s parish, adjacent to Cheapside and Cornhill: Theophilus Eaton, his son-in-law Edward Hopkins, Richard Malbon, and David Yale.66
And such too were the leaders from other parts of the realm. The West Country contribution to the migration of 1630 was initially inspired by the embattled Rev. John White, rector of Dorchester, Dorset. As early as 1622 he had sought to transform the West Country’s seasonal fishing stations in New England into permanent settlements that would serve both Dorset’s economy and the propagation of the gospel to the fishermen and the native Americans they might encounter. When his plans failed they were taken over by the Dorchester Company, funded by substantial Dorset and Devon gentry and merch
ants, together with a scattering of London investors and local men “in a small way of business.” By 1628, as that company was being absorbed first by the New England Company and then by the Massachusetts Bay Company, it had on the ground, at Salem, a governor of their own in John Endecott and an agent of some experience in Roger Conant; and they were discovering leadership qualities in Roger Ludlow and Henry Wolcott.67
Endecott, who would serve for at least fifteen years as governor of Massachusetts, would soon become famous, notorious, for his fierce Puritanical fervor. Suppressor “of a pestilent generation … called Quakers” (he would hang three), given to fistfights on occasion and enthusiastic assaults on Indians, he would embarrass the colony by tearing the red cross from the royal flag as a symbol of the pope and the Antichrist. Conant, the son of a prosperous Devonshire yeoman and a brother of a clerical associate of White’s, would have a less prominent, more tranquil career, but even he showed some of the characteristics of this hard, adventurous generation. Having prospered in the London salters trade, supplying ships with provisions and supplies, he had ventured with his family to the Pilgrims’ colony as members of the unassociated “particular” settlement, along with the notorious Oldham and Lyford. He made no friends there. Bradford found him to be “an ignorant, foolish, selfwilled fellow” who failed to establish a necessary salt manufacture. He soon moved off to Boston’s North Shore where, first at Cape Ann and then at Salem, he secured the West Country’s foothold in the Bay Colony. Thereafter he withdrew from the colony’s leadership to a magistrate’s role in county and town government.68
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