Such small dramas played themselves out throughout the 1640s and 1650s, especially in the calm years 1646–48 between the two phases of the Civil War, and after the downfall of the monarchy, years when the remigration was at its height. The elders, Winthrop above all, were shocked and embittered by the growing apostasy. “Such as come together into a wilderness,” Winthrop wrote angrily, “where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men and there confederate together in civil and church state … do implicitly at least, bind themselves to support each other.” How could one desert New England and the covenanted cause? Think of it, he wrote: Would you have “plucked up thy stakes, and brought thy family 3,000 miles,” if you had expected to be forsaken? How can one grant liberty to leave to some and not to others? “And so church and commonwealth may be left destitute in a wilderness, exposed to misery and reproach, and all for thy ease and pleasure.”33
How many responded to the upheaval at home, overcame their scruples, and found the means to return to a world turned upside down is not known. But reasonable estimates indicate something of the magnitude of the remigration. At least 600 colonists who have been identified by name returned to England in the 1640s and 1650s, most of them permanently. If, as seems likely, at least 450 of the 600 were adult men, by extrapolating from complete passenger lists that include women and children, one finds, the most recent student of the subject concludes, “a fairly secure figure of a minimum of 1,500 settlers … returned to England.”
How significant is this number? If the total immigrant population to New England before 1640 had been 21,000, the proportion of the immigrants who returned to the total migration of the 1630s would have been one in fourteen; if the Massachusetts population had been 12,500 in 1640, as is widely believed, the proportion for that colony would have been one in eight. More reliable, and perhaps more significant, are the figures for the clerics who returned. Of the seventy clerical immigrants known to have been alive in 1640, twenty-five (more than one in three) left for England. And no fewer than half of the 108 Harvard graduates before 1660 ended their careers in England, Ireland, or Scotland; few of them ever returned to the colonies.
A broader study identified all those who might be called “university men” or “intellectuals” in the Puritan colonies—those who matriculated in any college or university, had been informally tutored for clerical careers, or had held positions contingent on higher education (lawyers, doctors). Of the total of 266, nearly half of those alive in 1640 left for England, only 5 percent of whom ever returned to the colonies. And the majority of all of these remigrating groups were the younger among them, those less likely to find secure positions in view of their elders’ establishment. Many faced underemployment at best while Cromwellian England suddenly seemed a world of opportunity.34
SOME, PERHAPS MOST, of those who left—even some of the most notorious in the colonies—fell comfortably back into unremarkable and undocumented lives “at home.” Wheelwright, so embroiling and belligerent a figure in Massachusetts, slipped silently into a Lincolnshire parish a few miles from Bilsby, where he had presided for a decade before leaving for New England. And the notorious William Aspinwall carried forward his erratic and polemical career to London, where he became a leading publicist for the Fifth Monarchist belief that the only valid laws were those of God not man (views that led his New England colleague Thomas Venner to stage a murderous revolt in the back streets of London, for which he was hanged, drawn, and quartered); but in the end Aspinwall settled for a parish in County Kildare, Ireland, where he did what he could to advance the Puritan cause.35
But while few of the returnees became major players in the turmoils of the war years and the Cromwellian regime, a significant number of them entered actively into England’s political and military struggles and became prominent in midlevel positions; in their ambitious outreach they brought New England’s presence out from its deepening provincialism into the greater world. For in Britain they were not anonymous. “ ’Tis a notion of mighty great and high respect to have been a New-English man,” Nathaniel Mather wrote from England in 1651, “ ’tis enough to gain a man very much respect, yea, almost any preferment.” He exaggerated, in his enthusiasm, but the success of some of the returnees bore him out.36
Saltonstall, liberated by Cotton’s kind advice, became a trustee of confiscated estates in Scotland and later a commissioner there for customs and excise. Stephen Winthrop served as a captain in his brother-in-law Thomas Rainsborowe’s regiment in Ireland, ending a colonel with a seat in Parliament and substantial landed property. John Leverett of Boston also served as one of Rainsborowe’s captains, and Israel Stoughton, of Pequot War fame, led a group of Boston’s Artillery Company to join that regiment; he became Rainsborowe’s lieutenant colonel. When Rainsborowe died, command was taken by George Cooke, once of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who participated in the savage sack of Wexford, of which he then became the military governor. George Fenwick, one of the leaders of the Connecticut River project at Saybrook, twice held seats in Parliament, commanded a regiment in the north, and became governor first of Berwick then of Leith and Edinburgh, ending in 1651 as one of the commissioners to govern Scotland. The pious Edward Hopkins, once a “Turkey merchant in London, of good credit and esteem,” who served for years as governor of Connecticut, returned to London in 1652, where he became a member of Parliament, commissioner of the Navy, and keeper of the palace of Westminster. The New England ship captain Nehemiah Bourne saw action as a British naval commander in the 1650s and also was appointed a commissioner of the Navy. Robert Sedgwick, of Charlestown, prominent merchant, commander of Massachusetts’s Artillery Company, and major general of the colony, was commissioned by Cromwell, along with his son-in-law Leverett, to lead an amphibious attack on New Netherland; when that project was terminated by the conclusion of the Dutch war in 1654, Sedgwick went on to lead a large naval expedition to reinforce Cromwell’s Western Design in the Caribbean. The commission in charge of that vast and disastrous project was chaired by the Pilgrims’ old negotiator, Edward Winslow, who had come to Cromwell’s attention as a spokesperson for New England in London and had chaired a commission to adjudicate England’s wartime claims against the Dutch. Though the Western Design failed in its main purpose, it did result in the capture of Jamaica, which Sedgwick, briefly, helped govern and whose economy he helped organize for further trade with New England. He died there in 1656.37
While a few became prominent, even famous, some became infamous. Hugh Peter had arrived in Boston in 1635, to work first with Winthrop, Jr., his son-in-law, thereafter to serve as minister at Salem, where he proved to be a popular preacher and a stalwart of the colony’s nascent establishment. He returned to England in 1641 as one of the colony’s agents, charged with burnishing the Puritans’ darkening reputation and advancing the cause of their special church form. Frenetic in everything he did, Peter flung himself into endless rounds of preaching, organizing, negotiating, planning, publicizing, and counseling on Cromwell’s and the colony’s behalf. Distinguishing himself particularly as an inspiring army chaplain and tireless defender of Puritan reform, he disagreed with his American sponsors from time to time, especially on the question of toleration, but generally preached their Congregational version of reformed Christianity.
Often Peter and his colleague in the colony’s agency, Thomas Weld, discussed returning to New England (“ah sweet New England,” Peter wrote to Winthrop, Sr., while pleading for greater toleration), but caught up in the exciting swirl of great affairs, neither man did. Peter, however, never lost contact with the Puritan colony, and he did what he could to advise ambitious young New Englanders finding their way in Britain. An “eloquent, resolute, bustling little man,” he was semiretired at the Restoration, and while he was not technically a regicide, he was widely hated by royalists and religious conservatives and was promptly charged with and convicted of treason and executed. His head was posted on display on London Bridge. Two years later Sir Henry Vane—the disfavo
red governor of Massachusetts in 1635–37 but always, as Winthrop wrote, “a true friend of N.E. & a man of noble & generous minde”—was similarly executed after a major career at the heart of England’s revolutionary politics. As politician, diplomat, political and ecclesiastical theorist, official at various levels, and able administrator, for twenty years after he left Boston Vane had lived at the heart of British public life, ending, as did Hugh Peter, consistent in following the vision of his early years.38
But by far the most successful and famous—to many Puritans the most villainous—of the returnees was Winthrop’s nephew, George Downing, a member of Harvard’s first graduating class (1642), who was brought up under Hugh Peter’s tutelage in Salem. At age twenty-two he left the colony to become a chaplain in the New Model Army. From there he rose in prominence and was appointed scoutmaster general of the English army in Scotland—in effect, head of army intelligence. Married to “a very beautiful Lady of a very Noble Extraction,” he served in the Parliaments of the 1650s and began a series of diplomatic missions of increasing importance, developed a network of spies, and became a valued adviser on the fiscal power of state building. At the Restoration he deceitfully disowned his Puritan background and was taken on by the Crown for his skill in diplomacy, political economy, and intelligence gathering. Knighted in 1660, he received a baronetcy in 1662 and a plethora of lucrative offices. But his reputation as “a most ungrateful villaine” (Pepys) followed him as he organized the apprehension and execution of three regicides. Ruthless, ambitious, shrewd, and energetic, he served the Crown as “one of the most remarkable legislative entrepreneurs of his time” and as a designer of the fiscal-military state. Ultimately he became the wealthiest landowner in Cambridgeshire. In New England, however, Thomas Hutchinson later wrote, “it became a proverbial expression, to say of a false man who betrayed his trust, that he was an arrant George Downing.”39
THE REMIGRATION HAD HAD a double effect. While it brought New England out into the mainstream of Cromwellian Britain insofar as some of its leading members contributed to the politics, religious life, and military efforts of the new regime, it drained from the colonies not only most of the outspoken dissidents but also many of the most broad-minded, innovative, and imaginative minds of the younger generation. Their instinct was to broaden the colony’s culture, bring it out from its deepening provincialism into the modernizing world. “While old England is becoming new,” the banned Baptist John Clarke declared, in his rollicking, satirical Ill News from New-England, “New-England is become Old.” To many of its most sympathetic returnees, New England looked “more and more conservative, particularly in light of the political gains of the radicals during the years of the Long Parliament.”40
Again and again the returnees wrote back pleading for greater toleration in the colonies they had left, for a loosening of the tight restrictions that had defined the New England Way. In 1645, a year after Massachusetts had banished all Baptists from the land, George Downing wrote John Winthrop, Jr., that the “law banishing for conscience … makes us stinke every wheare.” At the same time Stephen Winthrop was writing his brother John from London that “heere is great complaint against us for our severitye against Anabaptist[s]. It doth discourag any people from coming to us for feare they should be banished if they discent from us in opinion.” And Sir Richard Saltonstall, whose stay in Massachusetts had been so short, reacting to the persecution of three prominent Baptists of Rhode Island, expressed his grief at the “sadd things [that] are reported dayly of your tyranny and persecution”; these “rigid wayse,” he insisted, “have layd you very lowe in the hearts of the saynts.”41
But none were more insistent in seeking a broader, less restrictive society than the merchants, especially the young among them. For them the shock of the Civil War and the transformation of England, with its devastating effect on New England’s economy, was a stimulus for new, imaginative, and innovative enterprises that would make Boston and its environs a hub of Atlantic commerce. But the transition from the gnarled world of Robert Keayne to the soaring amplitudes of the new commercial entrepreneurs would not be easy.
6
The economic situation after 1640 was desperate. Lacking the cash and credit supplied by incoming heads of families, the colonists’ purchases of necessary goods from abroad could not be funded. Their credit in England dried up, the price of cattle collapsed, the markets for agricultural products became glutted, debts could not be discharged, and grain ceased to have monetary value. Friends in England warned that “if there not be some course taken for beter payments of our creditors our tradeing will utterly cease.”
Facing disaster, the leaders moved in two directions: short term, to relieve the pressure on debtors, and long term, to create a permanent, self-sufficient economy free of the encroachments of the philistine world. Debtors could be helped, it seemed, simply by benevolent legislation. Laws were passed to prevent the ruinous valuation of foreclosed property; the pricing of seized property would thereafter be determined not by market forces but by the arbitration of “3 understanding and indifferent men.” Further, all debts could thereafter be paid in “corne, cattle, fish, or other commodities,” at rates also determined “by apprizment of indifferent men.” Such decrees did ease some of the debtors’ burdens, but they were weak gestures that could not in the long run loosen the grasp of creditors or pay for goods bought from abroad. What was needed was a local commodity valuable enough in England to serve as a direct means of payment, and beyond that, large-scale local production of essential goods that would relieve the burden of imports.42
There was hope—there had been from the start—that the fur trade could be developed to serve the European markets in immaculate exchanges—exchanges, that is, that did not embroil the Puritans in foreign dealings or draw to New England’s shores crowds of riotous sailors, peddlers, and dock hands. New Haven’s merchants—Theophilus Eaton, his son-in-law Edward Hopkins, and Daniel Yale—were among the most affluent immigrants, and they were especially well situated to draw on the furs available in western and northern New England and to tap into Manhattan’s hinterland. There was hope that they might go beyond that, to reach the primal source of furs said to be somewhere around a great lake in the north, which the Laconia Company of 1629 had searched for in vain. But in fact the local sources had largely been exhausted. The furs they were able to collect were insufficient to contribute in any significant way to the balance of payments, and the “great Mediterranean sea” was never found, even by a newly licensed company of traders chartered to discover it. Nor did a scheme to penetrate north through the Delaware River succeed; that effort was quickly blocked by the Dutch. Scattered efforts to collect furs indirectly from Great Lakes sources continued, but with little success. Even the Pynchon family, who had become the landed gentry of western Massachusetts thoroughly versed in local geography and who for a while did profit from the pelts they acquired, could not produce anything like the furs needed to supply the needed remittances. By the 1650s the fur trade was in deep decline; by 1660 it was defunct.43
There remained the possibility that New England’s economy could be rescued and would remain as independent as its churches and government if native manufactures could be created that would supply at least the two most vital imports: cloth goods and iron products.
In 1640 the General Court of Massachusetts offered a bounty on every shilling’s worth of linen and woolen and cotton cloth spun and woven by the settlers, and required all servants and children to use their free time working on hemp and flax, which Connecticut ordered all families to plant. But it was wool that had the greatest promise, especially with the growing flocks of sheep in various areas of the region. But if there was enough wool, there were not enough cloth workers. And so Massachusetts prohibited all exports of sheep and lambs and ordered the towns to count up the number of spinners each family had available and ordered the designated spinners to turn out three pounds of linen, cotton, or wool threads every week for th
irty weeks each year. The town of Rowley, settled by Yorkshire cloth workers, was productive and built a fulling and cloth-processing mill, but the legislation greatly exaggerated the effectiveness of government regulation in frontier communities. The laws could not be enforced, and it quickly became clear that New England would not develop a textile industry sufficient for its needs.44
But if furs and the production of textiles failed, some degree of self-sufficiency might be gained by a domestic iron industry, and for this there was a major effort—highly financed, technically sophisticated, and for a while productive. Its failure was not only an economic defeat but the source of a bitter ideological struggle that reached into the basics of Puritan belief and that created tension between Winthrop, Sr. and his son.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 59
