by Sarah Vowell
On the one hand, there is no surer sign that Williams should probably ease up his Christian truth quest than when the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay find him to be too theologically intense. I just feel sorry for him that he lived in an age before air quotes; maybe he would have calmed down about use of the word “Christendom” if he could make sarcastic hand gestures every time he heard or said it.
On the other hand, Williams makes an interesting point. Remember that Christendom, at the moment he complains about King James once using that word on a charter, is at war with itself, that being the Thirty Years’ War. Catholics are slaughtering Protestants in France and Protestants are slaughtering Catholics in Germany. A year after Williams arrived in Boston, the town held a day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the fall of Munich at the hands of Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden’s Protestant king. Williams would later write, “The blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the wars of present and former ages, for their respective consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace.”
Winthrop issues a warning to John Endecott in Salem, where Williams was living, pointing out that Williams’s treasonous put-downs are not confined to the late king but include the current one. Winthrop alludes to Williams citing three particularly mean verses from the Book of Revelation that he “did personally apply to our present king, Charles.”
Williams backs down—for now. He writes “very submissively” to Winthrop and the council that he regrets the hubbub and permits his treatise “to be burnt.” A few weeks later, Winthrop is pleased to report that the Reverends Cotton and Wilson were mollified by Williams’s “retraction.”
In May of 1634, Winthrop writes in his journal, “The court chose a new governor, viz., Thomas Dudley, Esq., the former deputy.” Winthrop is elected deputy governer. In other words, he is now his rival’s number two. He is surely embarrassed but his diary contains no bellyaching. It was of course God’s will, so he deserved it. In fact, Winthrop has all the assistants over for dinner. Though, perhaps to cheer himself up about his accomplishments while governor, he does write a letter to a friend in England a few days later talking up the colony’s improved mortality stats. “There hath not died above two or three grown persons and about so many children all the last year,” he boasts.
In July of 1634, the assistants receive a letter from Matthew Craddock, the Massachusetts Bay Company’s man in England. The Commission for Regulating Plantations, headed by the king’s pet, Bishop Laud, is recalling the patent, i.e., the Charter. Craddock “wrote to us to send it home,” records Winthrop. Ship back the Charter and they might as well pack up the whole colony in the same trunk. The assistants agree to reply to Craddock’s letter, but without the Charter, and without “any answer or excuse.” Poor Craddock—ordered by Laud to procure a document and all he gets in return is a letter about how the weather sure is hot in Boston? Winthrop records that Craddock fires back, enclosing in his reply, hint-hint, a copy of the government order “whereby we were required to send over our patent.” Unnerved, the assistants nevertheless write Craddock back that they couldn’t possibly legally return the Charter to England “but by a general court,” which would not be held until the following September.
In Winthrop’s next entry, the assistants meet on Castle Island in Boston Harbor where they conspire to build a fort. Remember the apocalyptic paranoia that inspired the passengers on the Winthrop fleet to quit England in the first place? Well, that was mostly superstitious conjecture based on pessimistic readings of biblical prophets and worries that the Thirty Years War might spread to England. This business of the king’s committee recalling the charter is an actual concrete threat to their hard-won way of life. Winthrop was born the year his country’s fleet defeated the mighty Spanish Armada; he knows English monarchs are not shy about dispatching their battleships when provoked.
In August, Winthrop gets word that the colony’s enemies in England, led by men banished from Massachusetts, have made “railing speeches and threats against this plantation and Mr. Winthrop in particular.” They succeeded in getting Laud’s committee to appoint a governor to come to Massachusetts with a military escort and take over. By January, Winthrop says, the assistants and ministers hold a meeting in Boston to discuss “what we ought to do, if a general governor should be sent out of England.”
In his journal, Winthrop records their answer to that cat aclysmic question of how the men of Massachusetts should respond to the arrival of a royal interloper sent to put an end to their city on a hill: “We ought not to accept him.”
Remember this is almost a century and a half before the Boston Tea Party, before Lexington and Concord, before the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown burns down that tavern built on the site of Winthrop’s first American house. John Winthrop is no Son of Liberty. He’s a Puritan father of communal control. But behind the politeness of that line, “We ought not to accept him,” Winthrop reveals himself. He is a pussy-footing pragmatist who will clap his own hand over Roger Williams’s mouth and confiscate John Endecott’s sword if it keeps from riling up King Charles. But we know from Winthrop’s journal that he left England with a recipe for gunpowder. That same journal is clear about this: if the king’s men come for Massachusetts, Massachusetts will be ready.
Where do these men get such cheek? They are the king’s subjects, not citizens. What are the sources of their defiance? There are, I think, primarily two: the Bible and the Magna Carta.
The Bible is full of anecdotes that prime the pump of treason. We have already read of King James’s irritation with the way the Geneva Bible’s marginal notes spell out how it is biblically sanctioned to defy the Egyptian pharaoh (and therefore all monarchs) when he commands that Hebrew babies be murdered. But those prickly Protestant marginal notes are simply amplifying what’s already in the text. I grew up on the King James Version of the Bible, the translation that was, by definition, supposed to be more tolerable to kings, and I would like to point out that by the time I was eight I had already put on a puppet show about how people of faith are required to stand up to wrongheaded kings.
Every summer when I was a kid I attended vacation Bible school. It was like arts-and-crafts camp, only churchier—firing and glazing ceramic praying-hands bookends, that sort of thing. We studied the Book of Daniel’s third chapter, in which Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, commissioned a gold idol that his subjects were required to bow down to. Anyone failing to kneel before the image “shall be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.” Kneeling before a false idol being an obvious violation of the Second Commandment, three Jews on Nebuchadnezzar’s payroll refuse to worship another god. The three lawbreakers, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are hauled before the king, who tells them that when he said that thing about the fiery furnace he really meant it. They reply that perhaps God will save them from the flames, “But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
Those words are insolent and bold, even when spoken by a felt puppet with glued-on googly eyes. The three hope God will save them, but if not they will gladly burn. Nebuchadnezzar is happy to help them find out. He has Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thrown into the furnace. To mimic the flames, my fellow Bible students and I rattled flashlights at the puppets, who remained perfectly still and perfectly unharmed, not a yarn hair on their heads singed. “ They have no hurt,” marveled the king, who decreed that anyone from anywhere who spoke against “the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort.” A happy ending—the faithful defy the king and the king admits he was wrong.
The lessons of that story—be true to yourself, be not afraid to defy authority, be willing to die for what you believe in—had a profound influence on my own moral backbone, and I am not alone. In his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” Martin L
uther King, Jr., writes of the lawbreaking that landed him in the clink: “Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake.”
In 1940, when more than 300,000 British and French troops were trapped on the beach in the Belgian coastal town of Dunkirk, awaiting certain death at the hands of the approaching German army, the British commander there sent a three-word message to England of his men’s resolve to stick it out and fight: “But if not.” Stirred by the subtle reference to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the British people jumped into their yachts and fishing boats by the thousands and raced across the English Channel to ferry the soldiers to safety.
“God’s people have been immovable, constant, and resolved to the death in refusing to submit to false worships, and in preaching and professing the true worship, contrary to the express command of public authority,” wrote Roger Williams in The Bloudy Tenent. He continued, “So the three famous worthies against the command of Nebuchadnezzar.”
Of course a mischief-maker like Williams would make Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego his personal mascots. But the more mild-mannered Winthrop read the same Bible, including the Geneva Version, where the notes on the Book of Daniel are typically feisty toward royal authority. Perhaps Winthrop, his peripheral vision ever scanning the horizon for the warships of King Charles, perused Daniel 3:19, when Nebuchadnezzar instructs the furnace operators to crank up the heat “seven times” hotter for his three victims. The Geneva marginal note to that verse reads:
This declares that the more that tyrants rage, and the more crafty they show themselves in inventing strange and cruel punishments, the more is God glorified by his servants, to whom he gives patience and constancy to abide the cruelty of their punishment.
As for the second source of the New Englanders’ impertinence, the Magna Carta, it came about for the same reason so many landmarks of liberty, including the Declaration of Independence, were established in the English-speaking world—because the upper middle class balked at paying taxes. In 1215, armed English barons, sick of being bilked to pay for King John’s wars in France, captured London. Seeking a truce, the king met the barons at Runnymede, a meadow by the river Thames, and they hammered out an agreement in Latin that came to be called Magna Carta, the Great Charter.
Many of the Magna Carta’s sixty-three clauses enumerate antiquated rules about knights, forests, wine measurement, removing fish-weirs from the Thames, owing money to Jews, and, in case anyone is worried, restoring “the son of Llywe lyn and all the hostages from Wales.” But two concepts in it stuck. Clause 39 states, “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” In other words, the king can’t just jail his subjects on a whim. Clause 40 declares, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” In other words, a prisoner cannot be locked up indefinitely without a sentence. Thus the basic gist of the Magna Carta is that no one—including the king—is above the law of the land.
In 1628, two years before the Winthrop fleet sailed for Massachusetts, the Magna Carta was enjoying something of a comeback thanks to the Five Knights Case and the Petition of Right. In 1627, Charles I jailed five Members of Parliament who refused to pay a forced loan to underwrite his war in Spain. Charles, who had held a grudge against Spain ever since the court at Madrid turned down his proposal of marriage to the Spanish princess, had dispatched his armies, under the command of his incompetent best friend, the Duke of Buckingham, to go to war with Spain. Things were not going well. Buckingham’s expedition to attack Cadiz in 1625, for example, was pure slapstick—English troops stumbled onto warehouses stocked with Spanish wine and got too drunk to fight. So when five English knights (members of the landed gentry) refused the king’s demand of a “loan” (which would probably never be repaid) to fund such foreign-policy buffoonery, Charles had them thrown in jail for who knows how long.
Parliament rallied to the knights’ cause, arguing that the Magna Carta denied the king the right to jail his subjects on a whim and forever. Edward Coke, the most important English legal mind of the seventeenth century, led the charge against the king, famously proclaiming to Parliament, “Take heed what we yield unto! Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.” Coke helped author Parliament’s landmark response in 1628, the Petition of Right. It states:
It is declared and enacted, that no freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.
(By the way, the confrontational Coke was the mentor and benefactor of that most confrontational of New England colonists, Roger Williams. Coke paid for Williams’s education. Williams would later write Coke’s daughter that her father’s “example, instruction, and encouragement have spurred me on to a more than ordinary, industrious and patient course.” Williams might have also picked up his sometimes impenetrable writing style from Coke. Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England was still the standard legal textbook more than a century later when Thomas Jefferson went to law school—much to Jefferson’s dismay; he complained of Coke, “I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life.” Once, in one of his many letters to Winthrop, Williams confessed his fear that “my lines are as thick and over busy as mosquitoes.”)
Coke and Parliament goaded Charles I into signing off on the Petition of Right. Of course, Charles pretty much ignored it, and canceled Parliament the following year, prompting some of the jitters that made so many Englishmen, including Winthrop, flee to New England. Nevertheless, the Petition was on the books. Its reframing of the Magna Carta’s call for due process, writes Winston Churchill, is “the main foundation of English freedom.” He continues, “The right of the Executive Government to imprison a man . . . for reasons of State was denied; and that denial, made good in painful struggles, constitutes the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”
Is this not stirring? Churchill wrote that in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and every time I read those words I am proud to be an English-speaking person.
All of which to say, those penny-pinching barons at Runnymede, those knights and Coke and Parliament standing up to the crown, made it thinkable for Thomas Dudley, John Winthrop, and the other assistants in Massachusetts Bay Colony’s court to build a fort and train militias and construct a beacon to guard against an invasion by their own king.
That said, just because something is thinkable doesn’t mean it’s doable, much less desirable. The idea of American independence from Britain is a tea not nearly finished steeping. Though the court quietly readies for war, it does its damnedest to crack down on unnecessarily incendiary talk against the king.
Cue Roger Williams. On November 27, 1634, Winthrop’s journal notes that the Court of Assistants got word that Williams “had broken his promise to us, in teaching publicly against the king’s patent, and our great sin in claiming right thereby to this country.”
In fact, Williams was calling it a “national sin” for the colony to claim the right to Indian lands based on the Charter granted them by the king of England. John Cotton later claimed that Williams was agitating in Salem that in order for the colonists to repent of this sin, it was “a national duty to renounce the patent,” which Cotton fears would have “subverted the fundamental state and government of the country.” Cotton also reported that among Williams’s arguments was a repudiation of England’s justification for colonization, that the natives were not using the land because they were not cultivating it properly, not raising cattle. According to Cotton, Williams pointed out that the Indians were using the land—not for farming but for hunting. The Indians, Williams said, “burnt up all the underw
oods in the country, once or twice a year.” This stewardship, he maintained, was not unlike that of English nobles who “possessed great parks, and the king, great forests in England only for their game, and no man might lawfully invade their property.”
John Cotton, in a letter to Williams, rolls his eyes at this logic, cracking, “We did not conceive that it is a just title to so vast a continent to make no other improvement of millions of acres in it, but only to burn it up for pasture.” Besides, English nobles don’t just use their forests for hunting, “but for timber.”
It was Cotton, after all, who, in his 1630 farewell sermon to the Winthrop fleet, “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” proclaimed, “In a vacant soil, he that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his right it is.” Upon whose authority? God’s, of course, in “the grand charter given to Adam and his posterity.” The Massachusetts Bay Charter, therefore, is merely the legal subset of the original patent God granted His very first human creation. Cotton cites Genesis 1:28: “Multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” He continues, “If therefore any son of Adam come and find a place empty, he hath liberty to come, and fill, and subdue the earth there.”
The Charter Winthrop and his friends hold dear as the legal mandate for their American rights and property was therefore in jeopardy from two sides—Laud’s commission ordering it be returned to London, and some loudmouth in Salem bellowing that the king had no authority to issue a charter in the first place (news of which might egg on Laud all the more).
