The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

  Roger Williams might be the most ambitious of all the New England Puritans, but his ambitions are strictly spiritual. He fears no man, only God. He desires heavenly riches, not earthly influence. He seeks absolute communion with his Creator and he does not in 1631, nor will he ever, care about anything more. His fellow New Englanders find his zeal kind of inspirational but awfully off-putting.

  So from the get-go Roger Williams comes off as a fully formed crank, a man whom even Puritans dismiss as a tad too fanatical. By turning down the Boston teacher job, he is nitpicky, annoying, galling, and rude. But he is nevertheless principled, self-confident, forthright, and true to himself. In this earliest run-in, he also makes a small, preliminary stand that hints at his later legacy of calling for the separation of church and state. Along with rebuffing the Bostonians’ job offer, Williams informs Winthrop and his fellow magistrates that, by the way, they have no right (records Winthrop) “to punish breach of the Sabbath, nor . . . any other breach of the first table.”

  The first table is the first four of the Ten Commandments, the ones having to do with God—not worshipping another god, not making idols, not taking the Lord’s name in vain, and keeping the Sabbath holy. Keeping the Sabbath holy is Massachusetts Bay law and therefore punishable by the General Court. Williams believes that adhering to the first four commandments is a religious matter and not the business of civil magistrates. Williams makes a distinction between a sin and a crime.

  Getting wind of this, the civil magistrates must have screamed a collective “Goddamnit!” Or would have but for Commandment Three. Threatening to take away a Puritan magistrate’s right to punish is like yanking the trumpet out of Louis Armstrong’s hands. As Williams will soon find out, punishment is what the General Court is for. Winthrop erupts, and not only at Williams. He’s just as upset with Endecott’s church in Salem. How dare they elect Williams as their teacher after that troublemaker insulted Boston’s church and magistrates?

  When Endecott receives the court’s scolding letter, the Salem church withdraws its job offer to Williams, so Williams heads to Separatist Plymouth, where he will stay until he realizes even Plymouth is not quite Separatist enough. Plymouth’s Governor Bradford calls Williams “a man godly and zealous . . . but very unsettled in judgment.” Bradford says that when Williams “exercised his gifts among us,” his teaching was “well-approved.” Bradford blesses God for sending Williams to him and even claims to be “thankful to [Williams] even for his sharpest admonitions and reproofs, so far as they agree with the truth.” His point being, a lot of Williams’s reprimands were full of crap. Williams, said Bradford, “fell into some strange opinions . . . which caused some controversy between the church and him.”

  One of these strange opinions involved Williams reprimanding Plymouth residents who, when visiting friends and family back in England, would go to church with them—Church of England church. If a godly American so much as accompanied his elderly English mother to tea with her vicar, Williams had a fit, bemoaning those who profess “to be a separate people in New England . . . and yet communicating with the parishes in Old.” So Williams departs Plymouth “abruptly,” says Bradford, and returns once again to Salem, a town not immune to strange opinions.

  Roger Williams is hardly the only argumentative Jesus freak within John Winthrop’s jurisdiction. Winthrop’s problem with Williams isn’t so much that he says strange things, it’s that Williams persists in believing strange things after he has been shown the errors of his ways. Winthrop’s journal is chockablock with grievances to mediate and wrongheaded people to set straight. There’s no agreeing to disagree in Massachusetts Bay. There is only agreeing to agree. Winthrop’s perpetual task is consensus-building.

  For example, it seems the Watertown pastor has been telling his flock that “the churches of Rome were true churches.” Wrong! So Winthrop, along with Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley and a Boston church elder, hurries to Watertown to organize a debate before the congregation and the pastor. Perhaps Winthrop whips out that Geneva Bible with its marginal note in the Book of Revelation about the pope being the Whore of Babylon. Can a true church have the Whore of Babylon in charge—can it really? Luckily, everyone in the congregation “except three” admits his error and all’s well. (Then, later on, one of the dissenters will be excommunicated for a few hours until he finally concedes he’s mistaken and is un-excommunicated and welcomed back into the fold and all is well yet again.)

  On November 2, 1631, Margaret Winthrop, along with John Jr., arrives, prompting something of a town party in Boston. Winthrop writes that the “assistants and most of the people . . . came to welcome them,” bringing hogs and poultry, venison and geese, “so as the like joy and manifestation of love had never been seen in New England.” This out-pouring of foodstuffs and goodwill must have convinced Margaret that she had married Mr. Popularity. She’ll soon discover that her husband will need an ally at home more than ever, as he has a nemesis at work.

  If Nancy Drew were trying to get to the bottom of Winthrop’s petty rivalry with Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, the book might be titled The Mystery of the Pretentious Wainscoting. What happened was, the assistants had agreed to build a fortified new town across the Charles River from Boston, which, per New England’s usual creativity with naming things, they called “New Town.” (It would eventually be renamed Cambridge, after they founded a university there. Because what else would men who attended England’s Cambridge University name a university town?) So Winthrop and Dudley started building houses there. Then Winthrop’s Boston neighbors cajoled the governor not to abandon them, and so he promised “he would not leave them.” When Winthrop has his servants start dismantling his New Town house, Dudley is miffed. So Dudley quits his post as deputy governor in a huff. Which was, notes Winthrop in his journal, “not allowed.”

  Following a meeting on May 1, 1632, Winthrop writes that Dudley defends his resignation as a gesture of keeping the “public peace,” that when he airs his hurt feelings “he saw that bred disturbance.” Supposedly, the purpose of the meeting is for everyone to kiss and make up. But the Winthrop of “Christian Charity,” the one who admonished that “the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor,” presses Dudley on why he just sold some corn to poor people at too steep a price. “There arose hot words,” writes Winthrop, who continues, “The governor”—Winthrop frequently refers to himself in the third person—“took notice of these speeches, and bore them with more patience than he had done.” Then, in another dumb diplomatic move, given how sensitive Dudley is on the subject of new houses in New Town, Winthrop slams Dudley for building a fancy mansion there, unseemly “in the beginning of a plantation.” Winthrop’s complaint? Adorning the house with ostentatious wainscoting. Doesn’t Winthrop realize that part of “rejoicing together,” as he put it in “Model of Christian Charity,” is complimenting one another’s wood paneling? Dudley is surely offended and protests that his wainscoting “was for the warmth of his house . . . being but clapboards nailed to the wall in the form of wainscot.”

  A week later, Winthrop would be reelected governor and Dudley “accepted his place again” as deputy. At which time Winthrop enthuses, “ The governor and he being reconciled the day before, all things were carried very lovingly.” But by August, Dudley was complaining about Winthrop’s abandonment of New Town again, and questioning Winthrop’s authority and decisions. This is when Dudley levels that charge about letting Philip Ratcliffe hang around too long after being banished the previous winter. Dudley also accuses Winthrop of lending twenty-eight pounds of gunpowder to Plymouth during some Indian troubles without the court’s consent. Winthrop writes, “The Governor answered, it was of his own powder.”

  Winthrop sat there calmly, lapping up the insults dished out by Dudley. To his journal he explains his approach to Dudley this way: “To clear his reputation with those to whom the deputy had accused him, he was willing to give him satisfaction . . . that he might free him of such jealousy.” Nice try.
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br />   These are, after all, Englishmen, a people with such a knack for infighting that the coming decade carries their countrymen back home into civil war. Throughout the 1630s, Winthrop’s journal documents a Massachusetts Bay always on the brink of arguing itself into oblivion. The body politic constantly threatens to kill itself, and Winthrop is the guy who puts in a lot of late nights manning the suicide hotline.

  Just as Watertown got the crackdown for kind thoughts about the Catholic Church and thus not being puritanical enough, Winthrop also has to rein in those Puritans he fears will purify the colony to pieces. Case in point, the uproar over the red cross on the king’s flag.

  It might seem strange that such a gung-ho group of Christians would abhor the symbol of the cross, the very wooden structure that makes possible their savior’s sacrifice. But the Puritans think of the cross as a graven image that therefore breaks the Second Commandment against idol worship. A cross, to a Puritan, is not a symbol of Christ—it is a symbol of the pope. In his journal Winthrop notes that once, coming home to Boston after a visit to Plymouth, he “came to a place called Hue’s Cross.” He continues, “The governor being displeased at the name” because it might “give the Papists occasion to say that their religion was first planted in these parts, changed the name, and called it Hue’s Folly.”

  As for the flag controversy, one day in 1634, a certain Salem resident who shall remain John Endecott, noticed the king’s flag with its red cross of Saint George whipping in the wind. So he ordered the cross to be cut out of the flag. In his journal, Winthrop is conflicted. On the one hand, Endecott has a point: “the red cross was given to the king of England by the pope, as an ensign of victory, and so a superstitious thing, and a relic of antichrist.” (He is referring to the Crusades, when the red cross of Saint George was England’s pope-approved battle flag.) On the other hand, if news of this got back to England, “it would be taken as an act of rebellion . . . in defacing the king’s colors.”

  In a later entry, Winthrop describes hosting a powwow of the assistants at his house. They know that gossip this juicy is not going to stay on this side of the Atlantic for long, so they agree to appease the king by writing an open letter to Winthrop’s brother-in-law in England, telling “the truth of the matter . . . therein we expressed our dislike of the thing, and our purpose to punish the offenders.”

  Eventually the court condemns Endecott, according to Winthrop, not so much for defacing the flag, but for acting “rash” and on his own, for “not seeking the advice of the court.” They find Endecott “uncharitable,” making a unilateral decision for Salem that the officers of the General Court had a right to discuss and debate and come to a collective agreement about. Endecott is also taken to task for “laying a blemish also upon the rest of the magistrates, as if they would suffer idolatry . . . and giving occasion to the state of England to think ill of us.” I.e., Endecott made the court look sloppy, as if it had been oblivious to an idol of popery in its midst. Endecott is censured from holding public office for a year, receiving this mild sentence and not, say, having his ears sliced off with his own flag-ripping sword, because he acted “out of tenderness of conscience, and not any evil intent.” In other words, they agreed with what he did, just not the showboating way he did it.

  Winthrop is wise to fear the king’s wrath. For starters, a few of the men Winthrop and his court had banished back to England, including the earless Philip Ratcliffe—who, for some reason, holds a grudge—were stirring up trouble against the colony, petitioning the king to the effect that Massachusetts Bay is set on “rebellion, to have cast off our allegiance, and to be wholly separate from the church and laws of England.” They also complained that the “ministers and people” of Massachusetts “did continually rail against the state, church, and bishops there.”

  Of course, there was plenty of railing against the state and especially against the bishops, going on back in England, too; especially against Bishop Laud, King Charles’s closest ally in the clergy, whom Charles would officially appoint Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Laud is as firm a believer in the Church of England as the Puritans are firm in their beliefs. Which is highly, severely, vindictively, insanely firm. Laud’s rather understandable problem with Calvinism’s harsh insistence on predestination made him proclaim, “My very soul abominates this doctrine, for it makes God, the God of all mercies, to be the most fierce and unreasonable tyrant in the whole world.” An excellent point. Yet how does the highest authority in the Church of England choose to counter the Puritans for having turned God into a tyrant? With unfettered tyranny, of course.

  Laud oversaw a network of informants around England whose job it was to report Anglican ministers who slacked off in providing their parishioners with the finer things—the organ music, the vestments, the candles, and kneeling—that sickened Puritan-leaning clergymen. Trespassing preachers were hauled before Laud’s Court of High Commission, and if they failed to repent they were thrown in jail.

  In 1633, a friend warned John Cotton that just such a letter demanding he appear before Laud’s commission was on its way to him. According to his grandson Cotton Mather, Cotton’s friend broke it to him “that if he had been guilty of drunkenness, or uncleanness, or any such lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon; but inasmuch as he had been guilty of . . . puritanism, the crime was unpardonable; and therefore, said he, you must fly for your safety.” So Cotton went into hiding. He was forty-eight, he was venerable, and he was on the lam. He found refuge in the houses of other like-minded ministers and friends, but wrote his wife, Sarah, not to visit him because “I fear you will be watched, and dogged at the heels. But I hope, shortly God will make way for thy safe coming.”

  Hearing of Cotton’s predicament, John Winthrop invited him to Boston. And on September 4, 1633, Winthrop’s journal notes Cotton’s arrival, along with Puritan firebrand Thomas Hooker, on the ship Griffin. “They gat out of England with much difficulty,” writes Winthrop, Cotton and Hooker both having been “long sought for to have been brought into the high commission.” Their fellow minister Thomas Shepard, who would soon follow them to America, remarked, “I saw the Lord departing from England when Mr. Hooker and Mr. Cotton were gone.”

  The Boston congregation reassigned John Wilson as their pastor and elected Cotton their teacher. (The studious Cotton would later justify escaping to America to avoid prison in London, “where there would be no opportunity for books or pens.”) Cotton’s preaching was a big hit. Within three months, Winthrop remarks in his journal, many “profane and notorious evil persons came and confessed their sins, and were comfortably received into the bosom of the church” in Boston.

  John Cotton arrives in 1633 just in time to help Massachusetts Bay board up its theological windows. Hurricane Roger is a coming. Winthrop reports in his journal that he turns to Cotton for advice. It seems Roger Williams has arrived at some exciting new conclusions, which he has generously decided to share with his fellow colonists.

  Neither Williams nor Cotton will ever get over their arguments of 1633-35. The two will spend the rest of their lives irking each other so much they would engage in the seventeenth-century New England version of a duel: pamphlet fight! Since the contemporary record of Massachusetts Bay’s quarrel with Williams, and vice versa, consists mostly of Winthrop’s journal, Williams and Cotton’s later publications are handy for getting the skinny on what the original fuss was about. Williams publishes “Letter of Mr. John Cotton,” unbeknownst to its sender; then Williams publishes his own rebuttal, “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Examined and Answered.” Cotton then publishes “John Cotton’s Answer to Roger Williams.” After which Williams publishes a pamphlet taking Cotton to task, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. Then Cotton slams Williams right back with The Bloudy Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb. Then Williams counterattacks with The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy. Only death prevented Cotton from finishing his final sequel, The Bloudy Tenent: Attack of the Clones.

  On December 2
7, 1633, Winthrop writes in his journal that he has met with the court of assistants and some of “the most judicious ministers,” which would include Cotton, about a “treatise” Williams sent to the governor of Plymouth “wherein, among other things, he disputes their right to the lands they possessed here, and concluded that, claiming by the king’s grant, they could have no title, nor otherwise, except they compounded with the natives.” In other words, Williams says the royal charter that gave Plymouth the rights to Plymouth is illegal because what Plymouth really needed was a deed from the Indians. Williams is under the impression the land belonged to its original inhabitants.

  Winthrop continues that the magistrates and the ministers are also “much offended” by Williams’s description of the late King James as a liar who committed the blasphemy of “calling Europe Christendom, or the Christian world.”

  Roger Williams is God’s own goalie—no seemingly harmless pleasantry gets past him. To Williams, “Christendom,” that affable word describing Europe and its colonies, is an affront to Christ. For this, he blames Constantine the Great.

  Is he referring to Constantine, the first Roman emperor to legalize Christianity in the year 313, thereby allowing Christians to worship in peace after centuries in the Coliseum as lion food? Yep, that’s the jerk.

  In The Bloudy Tenent, Williams points out that Constantine “did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes.” At least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that’s when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the state. Williams explains that under Constantine, “the gardens of Christ’s churches turned into the wilderness of national religion, and the world (under Constantine’s dominion) to the most unchristian Christendom.” Legalizing, legitimizing the Church turned Christianity into just another branch of government enforced by “the sword of civil power,” i.e., through state-sponsored violence.