BY THE LATE 1620S, the puritan cause in England was entering its nadir. Shortly after his accession, King Charles married Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic princess, and he allowed his wife’s chaplain to remain at court. The new king also bestowed his favor upon a faction of bishops determined to extinguish puritanism once and for all. William Laud, newly elevated bishop of London, introduced new forms of ceremonialism into parish worship and punished and defrocked ministers who objected to his innovations. In the past, puritan ministers had met the demands of the hierarchy and then quietly resumed their nonconformity. Especially after he became archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Laud made such compromises next to impossible.
It wasn’t just Laud and the Catholic queen consort, though. Puritan discontent with ecclesiastical policy coincided with political tumult over taxation and the prerogatives of Parliament. Needing money to fund wars against Spain and France, in 1626 Charles demanded what became known as a “forced loan” from his subjects. Charles called it a loan, but it amounted to taxation without parliamentary consent. Large numbers of gentlemen, many of them puritan, found themselves in jail when they failed to love their king enough to give him their money. Such actions raised the related question of whether the king could imprison individuals without showing cause. Pamphleteers alleged that the king, or at least the king’s counselors, aimed to deprive the people of their liberties and reduce them to slavery. Parliamentary pushback eventually forced the king to accept a petition (known as the Petition of Right) that declared that no person should be compelled to “contribute to any tax, tallage, aid, or other like charge not set by common consent, in Parliament.” Charles resented what he understood as an assault on his own prerogatives. In March 1629, the exasperated king dissolved Parliament and would not call another for eleven years. The controversy advanced a fear of arbitrary government in both old England and New England, a fear present in subsequent political debates on both sides of the Atlantic.1
Especially as Laud increased pressure on puritan ministers, many of the godly, with great reluctance, concluded that it was time to leave. “England hath seen her best days,” preached Thomas Hooker, the future minister of Hartford, Connecticut, “and now evil days are befalling us: God is packing up his gospel.” First in small numbers, but soon by the thousands, English puritans also packed up and left for New England. They were joined by other men and women seeking economic opportunity, reuniting with relatives, or fleeing trouble at home. The first waves of new emigrants settled on the rim of Massachusetts Bay, but they soon formed communities across New England.2
Even as Laud harried their ministers out of England, most puritans wanted nothing to do with separatism, still an object of scorn among nearly all English Protestants. Nevertheless, Plymouth’s leaders successfully introduced themselves to the new emigrants as kindred spirits rather than seditious Brownists. The Pilgrims and the Massachusetts Bay settlers found that they shared many ideas about Christian liberty. John Cotton, who became Boston’s minister in 1633, explained that he and other emigrants had come to New England to “enjoy the liberty, not of some ordinances of god, but of all, and all in purity.” Separatists and other puritans wanted worship free of nonbiblical corruptions: no vestments, prayer books, or signs of the cross.3
Before they came to New England, very few puritans had embraced the key elements of congregational polity that were part and parcel of separatism: the restriction of church membership to godly Christians, coupled with the restriction of the sacraments to members of particular, covenanted churches; the liberty of the people to elect officers and discipline offenders; and the autonomy of each congregation. The puritan emigrants to Massachusetts Bay adopted precisely this sort of congregationalism, and they did so in large part through the influence of Plymouth’s emissaries and example. At least for a moment, the Pilgrims’ wildest dreams became reality.
In September 1628, the emigrants under the leadership of John Endecott settled at what the English called Naumkeag (after the Native people of the region). There were already a few settlers there, including Roger Conant, who had come to New Plymouth earlier in the decade but then moved north with a few other families. Conant and Endecott together renamed their settlement Salem, a Hellenized version of shalom, the Hebrew word for peace. The new name turned out to be more aspirational than descriptive.
John Endecott was a tempestuous man, the Bay Colony counterpart to Myles Standish. Likely hailing from England’s West Country, Endecott moved to London, fathered a child out of wedlock, paid another man to raise him, and enlisted as an English volunteer fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands. The time abroad repaired his reputation. When he returned to England, he married Anne Gower and became one of the patentees of the New England Company. The company (the forerunner of the Massachusetts Bay Company), obtained a patent—soon confirmed by a royal charter—for an area stretching from the Merrimack River to south of the Charles River.4
At Salem, disease and malnutrition led to a partial reprise of Plymouth’s first winter. Bradford wrote that many of the settlers perished, “some of the scurvy, other[s] of an infectious fever.” Endecott sent word to Plymouth asking for help, and the Pilgrims dispatched Samuel Fuller as their emissary. Born in 1581 in a Norfolk village, Fuller worked as a weaver after his 1611 emigration to Leiden. As a deacon in John Robinson’s congregation, Fuller oversaw collections, paid the minister’s salary, and attended to the needs of the poor. The deacon left his wife, Bridget, behind when he sailed on the Mayflower; she joined him three years later. In New Plymouth, Fuller became one of the Undertakers who assumed financial responsibility for the colony’s debts. Fuller’s accumulation of livestock and servants indicates a prosperity he would have been unlikely to enjoy had he remained in England or Leiden.5
Fuller proved a welcome visitor at Salem. At some point in the 1620s, the former weaver had become a self-taught physician and surgeon. By the time of his 1633 death, he owned a number of “physic [medicinal] books.” At Salem, Fuller’s ministrations were not very effective. In 1621, Edward Winslow had urged transatlantic passengers to take lemon juice with them to ward off scurvy. Fuller’s primary treatment, however, remained bloodletting, which was at best a source of hope for those patients who believed in its efficacy. In his New English Canaan, Thomas Morton castigated Fuller as a “quacksalver” and “Doctor Noddy [that is, a fool]” and alleged that in his incompetency Fuller cured Endecott “of a disease called a wife.” Anne Endecott died during the colony’s first year, but Salem’s governor did not blame Fuller. Instead, John Endecott thanked Bradford profusely for Fuller’s assistance.6
Fuller also treated the negative preconceptions the new settlers had about separatism and Plymouth. As in medicine, Fuller was self-taught but well read in theology. In addition to the works of John Robinson and Henry Ainsworth, Fuller’s large library included titles by Calvin, Theodore Beza, Thomas Cartwright, and John Dod. Fuller, moreover, shared the relative moderation of Leiden separatists such as Robert Cushman and John Robinson. The fact that Fuller had favored clemency for John Lyford—the minister whom Pilgrim leaders had banished in 1624—probably endeared the physician to Bay settlers such as Roger Conant.7
John Endecott liked what he heard from the deacon. “I am by him [Fuller] satisfied,” wrote Endecott to Bradford, “touching your judgments of the outward form of God’s worship … no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth.” Endecott went so far as to assert that his people and Plymouth’s were “sealed with one and the same seal, and have for the main, one and the same heart.” Fuller convinced Endecott that the Plymouth colonists were godly Reformed Protestants, not schismatics.8
In the summer of 1629, bolstered by several hundred new arrivals, Salem’s settlers proceeded to form a church. Thirty men gave their assent to a confession of faith and entered into a simple covenant with God and each other in which they bound themselves “to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.” The procedure and language closely resembled those used by the separatists in Scrooby and Gainsborough more than two decades earlier, when as “the Lord’s free people” they had covenanted to walk in God’s ways.9
Next the newly covenanted church members elected and ordained their officers. Early New England churches that could afford to do so typically installed two ministers: a pastor and a teacher. The former typically bore more responsibility for church discipline and pastoral care, and the latter exercised more authority when it came to doctrine. Most simply, however, if a congregation secured both a pastor and a teacher, the two men shared a heavy ministerial burden. The 1629 emigrants to Salem included the ministers Samuel Skelton and Francis Higginson, who both held master’s degrees from Cambridge. Skelton and Higginson did not claim that their authority rested on their prior ordinations in the Church of England. Instead, the pair acknowledged that ministers needed “an outward calling” from a covenanted people and that all male church members “are to have a free voice in the choice of their officers.” Church members voted by secret ballot, selecting Skelton and Higginson as pastor and teacher, respectively. Leading congregants then laid hands on Skelton and Higginson, praying over them and ordaining them into their new offices. The congregation repeated the procedure two weeks later when it chose elders and deacons. Bradford and other emissaries from Plymouth’s church came to Salem and gave their counterparts “the right hand of fellowship,” signaling their acceptance of the new congregation as a true church. Fuller went so far as to praise John Endecott as a “second Burrow [Henry Barrow],” the separatist martyr. He did so because Salem had so thoroughly embraced Plymouth-style congregationalism.10
Just as John Lyford and others objected to Plymouth’s church, so too some settlers at Salem expressed discontent. Not everyone who had come to Salem was a puritan, let alone a congregationalist. The brothers John and Samuel Browne were among the New England Company’s patentees and had arrived in Salem before the formation of its church. Along with a few other settlers, they now convened their own services, at which they used the Book of Common Prayer. Endecott quickly arranged a confrontation between the brothers and the ministers. The Brownes denounced Skelton and Higginson as “separatists, and would-be Anabaptists.” Skelton and Higginson rejected the charge. “They did not separate from the Church of England, nor from the ordinances of God there,” they insisted, “but only from the corruptions and disorders there.” Puritans had suffered in England from their refusal to use the prayer book and the ceremonies it prescribed. Now “being in a place where they might have their liberty,” Skelton and Higginson concluded, “they neither could nor would use them.” Salem’s ministers celebrated their liberty, which they understood as the pure, biblical worship of God.11
Endecott handled the Brownes as William Bradford had treated John Lyford and John Oldham. He purloined the brothers’ letters, accused them of promoting mutiny and faction, and informed them that “New England was no place for such as they.” The Brownes had no liberty to participate in what Salem’s ministers considered the “sinful corruptions in the worship of God.” Endecott shipped the brothers back to England, where they lodged bitter complaints about their treatment and about “rash innovations begun and practiced in [Salem’s] civil and ecclesiastical government.” The Massachusetts Bay Company eventually compensated the brothers for their financial loss.12
There was more ecclesiastical drama the next year, when new Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop—a wealthy lawyer—led around one thousand passengers to New England. Winthrop’s ships reached Salem in June 1630 with the company’s royal charter, a legal security the Pilgrims never obtained. Unlike the Brownes, these new arrivals relished the chance to worship without the Book of Common Prayer. They received a surprise, though, when Salem’s Samuel Skelton refused to admit them to the Lord’s Supper or to baptize children born during the Atlantic crossing. Puritans wanted to exclude known sinners from the sacraments, but why the exclusion of godly men and women, including Governor Winthrop himself?
John Cotton, a leading nonconformist minister back in England whose congregants were among those excluded from the sacraments, was appalled at the news from Salem. “You went hence of another judgment,” he lamented, “and I am afraid your change hath sprung from New Plymouth men.” Cotton could think of no explanation for Salem’s exclusionary policies other than Plymouth’s influence. Skelton responded that “no man may be admitted to the sacrament, though a member of the catholic [universal] church, unless he be also a member of some particular Reformed church.” Skelton now believed that England’s parish churches did not meet that standard.13
Skelton made one notable exception, however. He “admitted one of Mr. [John] Lothrop’s congregation, not only to the Lord’s Supper, but his child unto baptism.” This settler belonged to an independent congregation in London founded by Henry Jacob and now pastored by Lothrop (who later emigrated to Plymouth Colony). During the earliest years of his ministry, Jacob was a puritan critic of both ecclesiastical corruption and separatism. By 1610, he was in the Dutch Republic, on friendly terms with both John Robinson and the exiled puritan theologian William Ames. Jacob came to agree with the separatists that a true church was a local, covenanted congregation, but unlike Robinson, he did not denounce the Church of England as false or Antichristian. Instead, he simply returned to London and gathered his own congregation. In 1622, he made plans to emigrate to Virginia, and he apparently died there two years later. Lothrop then succeeded Jacob as the congregation’s minister. Skelton considered the Jacob-Lothrop congregation a true church. The other new emigrants did not belong to covenanted churches and therefore had not qualified themselves to receive the sacraments.14
Winthrop and most of the 1630 emigrants went south to Charlestown, at the confluence of the Mystic and Charles Rivers. Samuel Fuller spent time there as well, draining the blood of the sick and draining away objections to New Plymouth congregationalism. Once again, Fuller’s religious diplomacy proved more effective than his medicine. Sickness ravaged the colonists at Charlestown, prompting Governor Winthrop to set aside a day for fasting and prayer. At the conclusion of the fast, leading male settlers would form a church by covenanting with the Lord. Winthrop asked Plymouth to hold a fast on their behalf on the same day. The Pilgrims obliged.
It is a wonder New Plymouth did not respond to Winthrop’s request with a day of thanksgiving. England’s transplanted puritans were remaking themselves in Plymouth’s image. As the Bay colonists dispersed into towns, each formed its own covenanted church and restricted the Lord’s Supper and baptismal privileges to members of particular congregations. Furthermore, just as John Robinson had done, Massachusetts Bay ministers advised their members that it was permissible to hear sermons in English parish churches but that they should not partake of the Lord’s Supper.15
Since the early 1630s, participants, critics, and many generations of historians have argued about the extent to which the Pilgrims influenced the development of Massachusetts Bay congregationalism. Perry Miller, who still looms large over the historical study of early New England, entirely rejected the idea of Plymouth’s influence. “How can we have much respect for the intellectual development of these people [the Bay colonists],” he asked, “when they did not seem to know where they stood or what they wanted, when the determination of their gravest problem lay at the chance mercy of a medical visit from Deacon Fuller?” According to Miller, Skelton, Higginson, and Endecott were influenced not by John Robinson, William Bradford, and “Doctor Noddy,” but by “non-separating” congregationalists such as William Ames, one of a small number of puritans prior to 1630 who had embraced congregational polity but had not flat out rejected England’s church. As far as Miller was concerned, the Pilgrims were a collection of fringe unsophisticates, while the Bay colonists brought an established theological system to New England.16
Miller underestimated the Pilgrims. True, Plymouth’s church did not have a minister who could match the erudition or reputation of Thomas Hooker or John Cotton. For most of the colony’s first decade, Plymouth had no minister at all, but the Pilgrims had remained engaged with ecclesiastical and theological developments in England. Bradford, Brewster, Fuller, Winslow, and Standish were all well-read laymen quite prepared to make convincing arguments for their church way.
Without Plymouth’s example and diplomacy, it is quite possible that Salem’s settlers would have covenanted with each other to form a church and elect officers. What is much less likely is that the Salem colonists would have barred even their fellow puritans from the sacraments had they not planted their colony a day’s sail from the Pilgrims. Between Fuller’s visit, the friendly relations between Winthrop and Bradford, and Cotton’s initial response to the policies at Salem, the evidence for Plymouth’s influence is strong. Other communities in Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut did not need to use Plymouth as a model, as they largely replicated the procedures used at Salem.17
The Bay Colony influenced Plymouth as well. Whereas the Pilgrims had brought fairly simple standards for church membership to New England (John Robinson required a basic profession of faith and the acceptance of a congregation’s covenant), many churches in the Bay Colony began requiring prospective members to publicly describe how God had regenerated their souls. At some point, Plymouth’s church adopted the Bay Colony’s stricter membership standards. Bradford noted in 1648 that New England’s churches—including his own—were “rather more strict and rigid in some proceedings about admission of members” than the Leiden separatists had been. Despite the mutual influence, the church establishments of the two colonies were not identical. Massachusetts Bay linked citizenship to church membership, while Plymouth did not. Also, over the course of the seventeenth century, many Plymouth Colony congregants remained more wary of innovation and intercongregational synods than their counterparts in the Bay Colony.18
Regardless of their minor differences, the leaders of both colonies sought to establish communities centered around town churches comprised of godly men and women and their children. Their churches were separated from the Church of England in deed if not in word. Plymouth-style separatism and Bay Colony puritanism converged to create New England Congregationalism, or what John Cotton called the “New England Way.”
Once Winthrop’s ships reached New England, the population of Massachusetts Bay was much larger than that of New Plymouth. The interests of the two colonies sometimes diverged, and Massachusetts Bay proved a rival as often as it did an ally in the decades to come. Still, as William Bradford looked back on the establishment of the Bay Colony from the vantage point of the mid-1640s, he allowed himself a rare moment of satisfaction. “Thus out of small beginnings,” he wrote, “greater things have been produced by his hand that made all things of nothing … as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many.” In coming across the ocean, the Pilgrims hoped that their church would become more attractive to English puritans. They had finally succeeded.19