CHAPTER TWELVE

Salamanders

IN THE EARLY TO mid-1640s, William Vassall tried to overturn the religious and political order of both New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Vassall first brought his family to Salem in 1630, but the Vassalls sailed back home before the year was up. Five years later, they returned to New England, stopping in Roxbury but then moving south to the rapidly growing Plymouth Colony town of Scituate. When the Vassalls made their second emigration, they did so with a full awareness of New England’s Congregational orthodoxy. William Vassall joined Scituate’s church, swore an oath of fidelity to the colony, and became a freeman.¹

Vassall had much in common with one of New Plymouth’s leading citizens, Edward Winslow. Vassall and Winslow were among the colony’s most cosmopolitan men, well attuned to moneymaking opportunities around the Atlantic world. They were also restless, quick to cross the ocean on political errands and in search of profits. In the end, both men went back to England, then ended their lives in the Caribbean. Vassall and Winslow even had family connections. Winslow’s stepson and fellow Mayflower passenger Resolved White married Vassall’s daughter Judith in 1640.

Despite all they shared, Vassall and Winslow clashed over what sort of liberty the settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts should have in their churches and civil societies. As far as Vassall was concerned, Winslow and his fellow magistrates imposed a schismatic Congregationalism on people whether they wanted it or not. Vassall pressed New England settlers to embrace a more expansive liberty of conscience. Winslow countered that Vassall’s machinations threatened New Englanders’ well-worn and well-earned liberty to govern themselves. For Winslow, liberty remained inextricably connected to theological orthodoxy and a godly magistracy.

Winslow called Vassall a “salamander,” a creature that thrived in flames, according to many folk traditions. Thomas Walley, later minister at the Cape Cod town of Barnstable, complained about “stirrers up of strife and division … salamanders, that love to live in the fire, that are firebrands in church and commonwealth.”² Vassall was among several New England firebrands who circulated petitions, argued in courtrooms, and formed their own churches. Talk of free grace, religious toleration, and the liberties of freeborn Englishmen thrilled some New Englanders and alarmed others. Most settlers, though, focused on more prosaic tasks. They were not interested in either strengthening or weakening the colony’s Congregational churches. In the end, Vassall and other dissenters bent New England’s religious and political order but could not break it.

No religious conflict in early New England matched the intensity of what most historians have termed the “antinomian controversy.” Kindled in 1636, the theological firestorm engulfed Boston and the Bay Colony for the ensuing two years and reverberated across all of New England for decades to come.³

At the heart of the matter was the problem of spiritual anxiety. Along with other Calvinists, puritans insisted that human salvation hinged not on good works or on the ability of humans to respond faithfully to God, but on God’s eternal decrees. Ideally, such notions were comforting, especially once individuals reckoned with the true depth of their sinfulness. On the other hand, women and men longed to know that they numbered among God’s elect, and puritans insisted that they could not know this with absolute certainty. Nevertheless, most ministers pointed to some benchmark by which believers could gain a reasonable assurance of their salvation. If they truly mourned their sins, if they felt the stirrings of faith within themselves, if they achieved some measure of sanctification, then Christians could trust that God had saved them.

A faction within Boston’s church—including its pastor John Cotton, the minister John Wheelwright, new Massachusetts governor Henry Vane, and lay teacher Anne Hutchinson—rejected such notions. For them, reliance on sanctification was a covenant of works, something that smacked of popery and Antichrist. In an echo of Canterbury weaver Gilbert Gore’s alleged heresy, Cotton taught that “God may be said to justify me before the habit, or act of faith.”⁴ Salvation was in God’s hands alone. Grace was an entirely free gift. Cotton, Wheelwright, and Hutchinson did believe that women and men could gain the assurance they sought, but for them, such knowledge came through revelation. God’s spirit put his seal on his elect. Ravished by his power and grace, they knew they were Christ’s.

Cotton’s fellow Bay Colony ministers—especially Cambridge’s Thomas Shepard—became alarmed at what they heard from Cotton and members of his congregation. If sanctification could not provide assurance, did men and women have any reason to live righteously and to obey those in authority? Moreover, talk of immediate revelation and union with Christ raised the specter of “Familism,” a cluster of ideas associated with the German mystic and Anabaptist Hendrick Niclaes and his Family of Love. Niclaes and those he influenced valued individual revelation and union with God over the ordinary means of salvation, such as scripture and the sacraments.

In the spring of 1637, Massachusetts freemen voted Vane out of office. He returned to England. The colony’s General Court convicted Wheelwright of sedition and eventually banished him. Hutchinson, whom John Winthrop labeled an “American Jezebel,” raised eyebrows because of the number of women and men who visited her home to hear her teachings. Prior to her emigration, Hutchinson had become convinced “that the ministers of England were … Antichrists.” After she came to Massachusetts Bay, Hutchinson quickly became nearly as concerned about its churches. In November 1637, Massachusetts magistrates accused Hutchinson of slandering other ministers as teachers of a false covenant of works. At the resulting trial, she horrified her accusers with claims of immediate revelation from God. The court banished her, and Boston’s church excommunicated her the following March. The magistrates and other ministers reconciled with Cotton, which stabilized the colony.⁵

The ministers, elders, magistrates, and at least some residents of New Plymouth paid close attention to these developments in the Bay Colony. In a display of ecclesiastical cooperation and unity, Plymouth Colony churches sent representatives to a synod at Newtowne, Massachusetts, that identified and condemned a long list of alleged theological errors. In February 1638, the Scituate church observed a day of humiliation in which townspeople prayed that God would remove the “spreading opinions” in the Massachusetts Bay churches and prevent them from contaminating those in Plymouth Colony. Even after the controversy began to die down in Massachusetts, Plymouth’s magistrates and ministers remained on edge. William Bradford pressed John Winthrop for information about “a monstrous and prodigious birth,” a malformed stillborn child of Mary Dyer’s that Hutchinson had delivered in her work as a midwife. New England’s defenders of theological orthodoxy interpreted the misfortune as God’s judgment.⁶

Wheelwright, Hutchinson, and several dozen of their followers took refuge on Rhode Island, to the south of Providence, not far from new English settlements in the western portion of New Plymouth’s patent. Because of Plymouth Colony’s position between two very different neighboring jurisdictions, moreover, its history increasingly became intertwined with that of Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island.

Samuel Gorton, an erstwhile London clothier, clashed with the authorities of three New England colonies. A mystic and mischief-maker, Gorton refused to humble himself before any man. He had no respect for university-educated ministers. They quenched the spirit. Nor did Gorton show any deference to magistrates, whom he accused of unjustly punishing those who refused to render obeisance to their unwarranted authority. Whereas puritans preached that the Fifth Commandment required obedience not just to parents but also to magistrates and ministers, Gorton would not submit to anyone.⁷

Gorton, his wife, Mary, and their children came to New England, he said, “only to enjoy the liberty of our consciences.” For that pursuit, they picked the wrong place and the wrong time, arriving in Boston the same month that Bay Colony magistrates found John Wheelwright guilty of sedition. The Gortons prudently relocated to the town of Plymouth.⁸

Ralph Smith, Plymouth’s former minister, had known Gorton in England and let a portion of his home to the newcomer and his family. After a year or so, however, Gorton found himself at odds with Smith and with Plymouth’s magistrates when he sheltered a woman named Ellen Aldridge. According to Gorton’s account, Plymouth’s magistrates took umbrage when Aldridge smiled at church. She had arrived in the colony recently, and the magistrates decided to send her back on the ship that had brought her. When the Gortons heard of her plight, they employed her as Mary Gorton’s servant and hid her from the colony’s constables. Unable to prosecute Aldridge, Plymouth’s leaders summoned Gorton. The discussion did not go well. Gorton interrupted one of the magistrates and accused him of hyperbole, whereupon the confused magistrates asked Elder Brewster to define “the meaning of that word.” Brewster duly explained that Gorton had called the magistrate a liar. Whatever the particulars of Gorton’s behavior, the magistrates fined him and ordered him to appear before the December 1638 General Court.⁹

Meanwhile, Plymouth’s leaders concluded that Gorton was making himself an alternative source of religious authority. Ralph Smith’s wife, several other members of the Smith family, and a female servant of John Reyner—Smith’s successor as Plymouth’s pastor—began attending Gorton’s “family exercises,” times of Bible reading, prayer, and teaching. In 1629 or 1630, Mary Smith had emigrated from Leiden with her first husband, the Sandwich separatist Richard Masterson. According to Gorton, she found “her spirit was refreshed in the ordinances of God as in former days which she said was much decayed and almost worn out of religion since she came to Plymouth.” Gorton accused Plymouth’s church of having departed from its original purity and spiritual power. They were “an apostatized people fallen from the faith of the gospel,” whose leaders now put more stock in the performance of religious obligations than in the freely given grace of Jesus Christ. The critique was similar to what Roger Williams had alleged about the Pilgrim church during his stay in the colony. Not surprisingly, Plymouth’s leaders interpreted the meetings as a challenge, to the town’s religious order and to that of the Smith household.¹⁰

Gorton made a memorable appearance before the General Court. According to Winslow, Gorton referred to Governor Bradford as “Satan.” Then he addressed the crowd: “Ye see good people how ye are abused! Stand for your liberty; and let them not be parties and judges.” It seems that no one stood up in response, but the court fined Gorton for “stirring up the people to mutiny in the face of the court” and gave him two weeks to depart the colony.¹¹

In the dead of winter, Gorton joined the recent Bay Colony exiles in the newly established town of Portsmouth on Rhode Island. The Gortons and their servant soon made themselves unwelcome there as well. According to Winslow, Ellen Aldridge beat another woman who strayed onto Gorton’s land in pursuit of a cow. Once more haled before a court, Gorton mocked the Rhode Island magistrates as “Just Asses.” They did not appreciate his sense of humor. Gorton was banished again, this time after being whipped. He went to Providence, then along with a few followers moved to nearby Shawomet, which they purchased from the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi. Providence settlers opposed to Gorton then traveled to Boston in the company of two other sachems who claimed that Shawomet was their land and had been unlawfully sold. Massachusetts magistrates were eager to assert jurisdiction over Shawomet, which lay outside the Bay Colony’s patent. (Plymouth Colony subsequently claimed that its jurisdiction included Shawomet.) When Massachusetts leaders sent messages to Gorton and his followers, they received a flurry of insults in response. The magistrates next sent soldiers to arrest the Gortonists.¹²

The dispute began with property and jurisdiction, but it also involved theology. Gorton emphasized the divinity within all human beings above the earthly incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In their own version of Christian liberty, the Gortonists had no use for sacraments, for learned ministers, or for magistrates. Narrowly escaping a capital conviction on charges of blasphemy, Gorton was banished from Massachusetts and Shawomet, as were his followers. The now thrice-banished Gorton and two associates sailed for England to seek redress.

While the Gortons were still living in Ralph Smith’s house, Plymouth’s church invited Charles Chauncy to Plymouth. Church members intended to ordain him as their teacher, a second minister alongside John Reyner. After nearly two decades of absent or largely uninspiring clerical leadership, Chauncy’s arrival was a coup for Plymouth. Chauncy had several degrees from Cambridge and had taught Hebrew and Greek at Trinity College. Next came ten tumultuous years of parish ministry, in which Chauncy repeatedly clashed with ecclesiastical officials over everything from the surplice to communion rails. In November 1635, the Court of High Commission suspended him from his ministry and sent him to prison. Two months later, Chauncy got down on bended knee and promised to mend his ways. The next year, however, an official observed that Chauncy “doth mend like sour ale in summer.” At this point, Chauncy wisely decided to leave England. Plymouth was a rather precipitous fall for a scholarly and well-connected minister, but Chauncy’s abject submission before Laud probably made him less attractive to other New England congregations. For his part, William Bradford was thrilled. Plymouth finally had a preacher whose intellectual chops rivaled those of John Robinson and the ministers of the Bay Colony.¹³

Chauncy may have been learned, but he had not learned to avoid conflict. The prospective pastor had several idiosyncratic ideas about the sacraments, often the seedbed for controversy in seventeenth-century New England. Chauncy taught that Christians should celebrate the Lord’s Supper after sundown, in imitation of the last meal shared by Jesus and his disciples. The idea was inconvenient, but not a deal-breaker. If post-sunset communion had been the only sticking point, Plymouth’s congregants would have stuck by their prospective teacher. In fact, the newly organized church in the Cape Cod town of Sandwich adopted the practice.¹⁴

It was Chauncy’s ideas about baptism that sank his candidacy. He insisted that “children ought to be dipped and not sprinkled.” Even early English opponents of infant baptism, such as John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, had not argued for the necessity of immersion, but there were some recent precedents for Chauncy’s stance. In 1633, the English minister Daniel Rogers published a book in which he argued that the Bible commanded baptism by immersion. Ministers needed to immerse infants in water, hold them in it, and bring them out again in imitation of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Chauncy contended that sprinkling as opposed to dipping was among the “Jesuitical ceremonies” Protestants should reject.¹⁵

Plymouth’s leaders allowed that immersion was permissible according to the Bible, but they did not want infants plunged into frigid New England waters. The congregation tried to find a compromise with Chauncy by proposing that he could baptize those children whose parents opted for immersion, while John Reyner could baptize the rest by sprinkling or pouring. Chauncy, however, could not abide the sprinkling of any Plymouth babies.

The church asked ministers within and beyond the colony to persuade Chauncy to change his mind. There were debates and exchanges of letters, and John Cotton preached on the issue in Boston. “Nakedness of women in the congregation is not civil nor decent,” Cotton warned. In the seventeenth century, “naked” generally did not imply a complete absence of clothing. The Boston minister probably meant that dipping would require individuals to remove their outer garments. While most of those baptized would be infants and young children, the idea of Chauncy dipping women into Plymouth’s Town Brook was especially disturbing. Cotton, who was probably relieved that someone else’s ideas were receiving scrutiny, also asserted that immersion could prove deadly. Chauncy’s dipping would endanger the lives of children in winter, and the Bible did not authorize delaying baptisms until summer. Neither Cotton nor anyone else could persuade Chauncy to back down, however.¹⁶

Churches in New England usually made decisions only after attaining consensus among their members. Bare majorities did not seek to impose their will on minorities, because to do so invited subsequent strife and division. Chauncy thus remained “in suspense” for some time, because significant factions within Plymouth’s church both favored and opposed him. He complained that his “long unsettledness hath occasioned great impairing … of that little estate I had.” Eventually, however, it became clear that he could not become Plymouth’s pastor.¹⁷

The conflict over Chauncy drove a rare wedge between Edward Winslow and William Bradford. Plymouth’s governor wanted his colony to find another way to make use of Chauncy’s scholarly talents. In 1636, the Bay Colony had established what became Harvard College, but the enterprise had made little headway during its first few years, thus leaving an opening for other initiatives. With John Reyner’s support, Bradford proposed that Chauncy start an academy on the Jones River three miles to the north. Winslow foresaw trouble. If situated between Plymouth and Duxbury, Chauncy would “weaken if not destroy both the congregations.” Winslow wrote Bay Colony governor John Winthrop and urged him to intervene with Bradford, who shelved the idea.¹⁸

Chauncy instead became the minister at a divided and diminished congregation in Scituate. The town’s first minister was John Lothrop, who prior to his 1634 emigration was the successor to Henry Jacob at the independent congregation in London. After Lothrop came to Scituate, he and a dozen other men and women covenanted with each other to form a church. The congregation grew to sixty members within a few years. In December 1636, the church observed a day of thanksgiving. Congregants and others gathered at their newly built meetinghouse shortly after sunrise. For more than three hours on a frigid morning, they prayed and sang psalms. Lothrop preached. Then they feasted together, “the poorer sort being invited of the richer.”¹⁹

Despite this promising start, both the church and town were soon mired in dissension, some of which stemmed from conflicts over the allocation of land. Lothrop and the majority of Scituate’s church members moved to the newly formed Cape Cod town of Barnstable. Out of those who remained, Timothy Hatherly—Scituate’s wealthiest man and one of the colony’s magistrates—wanted Chauncy. Vassall and several other remaining congregants, however, objected to the candidate’s “judgment and practice in the sacraments.” Unlike in Plymouth, a small majority imposed its will on a congregation and installed Chauncy as Scituate’s pastor.²⁰

Chauncy now practiced what he had preached. According to John Winthrop, after Chauncy baptized two of his own children in very cold weather, one died. Another frightened child grabbed hold of Chauncy during a baptism and nearly pulled the minister into the water. At this point, one Scituate woman took matters into her own hands. Anna Stockbridge and her husband, John, had sailed to New England on the same ship as the Vassalls. Anna, but not her husband, joined Scituate’s church during Lothrop’s pastorate. In July 1642, she demanded that Chauncy provide her with a letter enabling her to take her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, elsewhere for baptism. Even in the summer, Stockbridge did not want Elizabeth immersed. Anna Stockbridge must have been a persuasive and forceful woman. In an unusual display of accommodation, Chauncy agreed, and Stockbridge and her husband, John, brought their daughter to Boston. The couple promised to raise Elizabeth “in some church gathered and ordered according to Christ.”²¹

Anna Stockbridge died later that summer, but her husband kept their baptismal promise. He joined a church in Scituate, but not Charles Chauncy’s. The Stockbridges and the Vassalls were among several Scituate families who in 1643 began holding their own religious meetings. Both their faction and Chauncy’s claimed to be Scituate’s church. Chauncy insisted that Vassall’s followers had unlawfully separated, and he asked churches in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay to withhold communion from them. According to Chauncy, they no longer belonged to any true church and therefore should not be admitted to the Lord’s Supper anywhere.²²

Vassall was livid. “Is it a small persecution to keep us and ours in the state of heathen [without access to the sacraments]?” he asked. Chauncy and many other puritans had been persecuted in England. Now, Vassall alleged, “the persecuted are become persecutors.” Vassall insisted that he should be allowed to worship God according to his conscience without license from anyone else. Accordingly, Vassall and his supporters made plans to ordain their own pastor. They offered the position to William Wetherell, a member of Duxbury’s church. After earning two degrees from Cambridge, Wetherell had become a schoolmaster in the Kentish town of Maidstone. After ecclesiastical authorities accused him of using his classroom as a pulpit for nonconformist ideas, Wetherell emigrated to New England. He taught in Charlestown and then Cambridge before moving to Duxbury.²³

Chauncy was just as outraged. In puritan New England, the liberties of congregations were paramount, not those of individuals. Once individuals swore to a church covenant, they could not join another church without a formal dismissal. Moreover, magistrates and ministers agreed that each town should have—must have—a single, orthodox church. The colony’s other churches attempted to apply pressure on Vassall and his followers. Duxbury and its minister Ralph Partridge refused to dismiss Wetherell, and the town of Plymouth’s church warned that it would withhold communion from Vassall, Wetherell, and their party should they proceed with their plans. Chauncy threatened to excommunicate Vassall, which would have prevented him from becoming a member or receiving the sacraments at another church. All of these procedures were designed to contain dissent and to encourage disaffected individuals to mend fences with their congregations.

Vassall and Wetherell were undeterred. On September 2, 1645, they and their followers observed a day of fasting, renewed their church covenant (they understood themselves not as a new, separate church, but as the continuation of Scituate’s original church), and installed Wetherell as their minister. They held their meetings in the southern portion of Scituate, on the North River. The colony’s magistrates and other ministers relented. Chauncy’s idiosyncrasies and stubbornness created some sympathy for his Scituate opponents, and at least Vassall and Wetherell had consulted with other churches and had proceeded with some patience.

It was a landmark moment in the early history of New England. One town had two religious options born out of controversy and schism. Wetherell’s congregation became known as the “south church,” Chauncy’s the “north church.” Townspeople had the liberty to choose between them.

As Charles Chauncy and William Vassall feuded in Scituate, several chapters of New Plymouth’s early history came to an end. Displaying his penchant for going where he was not wanted, Thomas Morton made one final trip to New England. In 1643, he landed in Rhode Island, came to Plymouth, and somehow finagled permission from Governor Bradford to spend the winter. Morton annoyed his old nemesis Myles Standish—“Captain Shrimp”—by going “fowling” on his property in Duxbury. When Morton moved on to Massachusetts Bay the next year, its magistrates were less forgiving of his past transgressions. They jailed him for a winter, decided that he was too “old and crazy [broken down]” to be whipped, fined him one hundred pounds, and released him when he agreed to leave the colony. Morton went to the Maine settlement of Agamenticus (present-day York), whose charter decreed that the non-puritan colony would hold fairs on the feast days of St. James and St. Paul. Perhaps the onetime “host” of Merry Mount found some merriment before his 1647 death.²⁴

William Brewster, the Plymouth church’s longtime elder, died in April 1644. Brewster had opened his home for separatist meetings in Scrooby, published dissenting literature in Leiden, and, although there is no record of any of their content, had probably preached more sermons than any other man in New England. Brewster was Plymouth’s true rock, a pillar of stability who compensated for the early settlement’s absence of ministerial leadership. Despite Brewster’s death, the Pilgrim core of Plymouth’s leadership remained largely intact: Mayflower passengers Bradford, Winslow, Standish, and John Alden, along with Thomas Prence, who came on the Fortune in 1621 and twice served as governor in the 1630s.

Plymouth’s English population expanded rapidly in the early 1640s. In 1643, the colony’s towns enumerated around six hundred men of fighting age. In addition to the new towns on the Cape (Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Eastham, the latter incorporated in 1644), settlers established themselves at Cohannet (soon renamed Taunton) and Seekonk (Rehoboth) farther to the west. Prior to the planting of Seekonk and Cohannet, English settlements dotted the coast but had not penetrated the interior. The push into the western lands strained the colony’s relationship with Ousamequin and other sachems. While the English brought trading goods, they diminished the region’s supply of game and timber, and English horses and livestock trampled Wampanoag crops. The alliance between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags nevertheless remained firm during these years, in part because English power still helped Ousamequin advance his interests against his Narragansett enemies.²⁵

Meanwhile, the peace between Massachusetts Bay and the Narragansetts frayed. The aftermath of the Pequot War badly dispirited the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi, who complained that English settlers “with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.” Miantonomi proposed that Native peoples from the Hudson to Narragansett Bay join together against the Dutch and the English. “So must we be one as they are,” he argued, “otherwise we shall be all gone shortly.” The plan foundered in large part because of implacable hostility between the Narragansetts and the Mohegans.²⁶

Miantonomi’s efforts inadvertently furthered the unity of New England’s puritan colonies. In 1643, colonial magistrates formed the United Colonies of New England (or the New England Confederation). Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven agreed to defend each other in the event of war against either Indians or the Dutch. Previously, Massachusetts Bay had refused to assist Plymouth against French raids, and Plymouth had demurred when asked to join the war against the Pequots. Now the colonies had a mutual-defense pact in which each pledged to assist each other with men and money in all instances of “just wars.” Partly because they disagreed about whether particular wars were just and looked to their own individual interests, the four colonies struggled to maintain their professed unity in the coming decades. Still, the confederation is a striking example of early cooperation among England’s North American colonies.

Miantonomi did not attack the English, but instead was captured while leading his warriors against the Mohegans. In September 1643, the Mohegan sachem Uncas brought his prize captive to the first meeting of the United Colonies, in Hartford. At the session, the delegates agreed that Plymouth should help Ousamequin regain land upon which the Narragansetts allegedly had encroached. As for Miantonomi, the English told Uncas to do as he saw fit. After taking Miantonomi back onto Mohegan lands, Uncas’s brother split his head. Fearing Narragansett attacks, Plymouth Colony towns took measures to defend themselves, but Canonicus—who had sent the arrows bundled in snakeskin to Squanto in the winter of 1621–22—and other Narragansett sachems made peace with the English.²⁷

During these same years, English society was turned upside down. The late 1630s attempt of Archbishop Laud and King Charles to bring the Church of Scotland into greater conformity with its English counterpart produced a revolt. Now desperate for funds, Charles briefly recalled Parliament in April 1640, then again after the Scots crushed his poorly trained and insufficiently equipped army. The setbacks led to the rapid unraveling of Charles’s authority. The House of Commons impeached Archbishop Laud on charges of treason, accusing him of everything from attempting a reconciliation with Rome to having prodded the king toward war against Scotland. Political conflict between Charles and Parliament intensified. In 1642, Charles fled London, and for several years Royalist and parliamentary armies fought for control of England. Laud was beheaded in January 1645, and the New Model Army—created out of a variety of parliamentary forces—soon closed in on the last Royalist strongholds. By the next year, Charles was Parliament’s prisoner.

For New England puritans, Parliament’s victory in England’s Civil War was the triumph of Christ over Antichrist, a triumph most had expected would not come this side of the millennium. For decades, puritans had watched their version of Reformed Protestantism lose ground both in England and on the continent. Now, with a puritan-dominated Parliament in charge, the hated surplices, prayer books, and even the hierarchy itself were gone. “The tyrannous bishops are ejected,” Bradford rejoiced, “their courts dissolved, their canons forceless, their service cashiered, their ceremonies useless and despised; their plots for popery prevented, and all their superstitions discarded, and returned to Rome from whence they came.” Plymouth’s governor had not expected to live to see what he understood as a harbinger of Christ’s millennial reign. “But who hath done it?” Bradford asked, and he used a quote from the Book of Revelation to answer his question. “Who, even he that sitteth on the white horse, who is called faithful, and true, and judgeth, and fighteth righteously.” It was Christ’s victory, but those who had been willing to suffer for Christ’s true church—including the “little handful” at Plymouth—had prepared his way.²⁸

Parliament’s victory laid bare the fact that puritans did not agree among themselves about how they should reform England’s church. Presbyterians and Independents (Congregationalists) jostled for control, and Baptists and a host of radical Protestant sectarians emerged as advocates for a broader religious liberty. This changed situation in England encouraged Scituate’s William Vassall to challenge New England’s Congregational establishments, which he now regarded as just as tyrannical as the old episcopal hierarchy.²⁹

It began in the spring of 1645 with what should have been a minor dispute in Hingham, the Bay Colony town that bordered Scituate. After reelecting a man who had served for years as their militia captain, Hingham’s male residents reversed course and instead chose a new captain. Recriminations and grandstanding ensued. The incumbent militia officer refused to give way, and Hingham’s minister threatened to excommunicate him. John Winthrop, then the colony’s deputy governor, summoned several Hingham men to explain themselves and jailed two who refused to appear before the magistrates.

In June 1645, eighty-one residents of Hingham sent a petition to the Massachusetts General Court. The petition’s single paragraph employed liberty or liberties eight times. It declared that the magistrates threatened the “liberty and power of the General Court,” “the liberty of the churches amongst us,” and “the general liberty of the whole country.” The petitioners alleged that the magistrates wielded arbitrary power and were tyrannizing the colony’s citizens and churches. They asked for the opportunity to plead their case before the bicameral court, hoping that its deputies would reverse the actions of the magistrates.³⁰

When the court met, the magistrates agreed to hear the case, and the petitioners named Winthrop himself as the object of their complaints. Winthrop stepped down from his position among the magistrates, sat with his head uncovered, and endured what amounted to an impeachment trial. In the end, the court—magistrates and deputies—acquitted Winthrop and fined the petitioners. Winthrop then asked for the right to deliver a “little speech.” In it, Winthrop contrasted two forms of liberty, one “natural” and one “civil or federal.” The former was simply the desire of individuals to do whatever they pleased, whether for good or evil. “This liberty,” Winthrop warned, “is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.” It was a “wild beast which all the ordinances of God are bent against.” Civil liberty, by contrast, operated within covenants, both ecclesiastical and civil. It allowed men and women to pursue “that only which is good,” and only within the hierarchical relationships that governed human societies. Thus, churches enjoyed liberty under the authority of Christ, citizens enjoyed liberty under the authority of magistrates, and wives found liberty in subjection to their husbands. This same principle of ordered, constrained liberty had guided New Plymouth’s responses to Samuel Gorton and to the schism within Scituate’s church.³¹

According to Edward Winslow, it was William Vassall who “blew up this [the Hingham case] to such an height.” Apparently, Vassall had lurked in a nearby home, to which the Hingham plaintiffs repeatedly came for advice. Vassall was more open about his activities in Plymouth Colony. At a court of assistants, Bradford introduced what Winslow cryptically referred to as “a matter of great concernment.” It was a proposed law to suppress religious dissent, probably aimed at Baptists and anyone whose ideas resembled those of Anne Hutchinson or Samuel Gorton. In October, Plymouth’s General Court approved Bradford’s measure. One week later, at another court session attended by more magistrates and deputies, Vassall criticized the recently passed statute “as pernicious and destructive to the weal of the government.” Vassall and his supporters called for the law to be “defaced and crossed [out].” Bradford, Winslow, and Thomas Prence refused to do so, but they suggested that if the measure proved “prejudicial,” it could be repealed in the future.³²

In the meantime, Vassall circulated his own bill, a law that would “allow and maintain full and free tolerance of religion to all men that would preserve the civil peace, and submit unto government.” According to an apoplectic Winslow, Vassall—like Thomas Helwys and Roger Williams before him—made no exceptions for Turks, Jews, Catholics, or Familists. New Plymouth would become a second Rhode Island. Winslow was even more shocked to learn “how sweet this carrion relished to the palates of most of the deputies!” Bradford, Winslow, and Thomas Prence were opposed but feared they would be outvoted. Apparently, three other magistrates—Scituate’s Timothy Hatherly, Sandwich’s Edmond Freeman, and Taunton’s John Browne—backed Vassall. Procedure dictated that the measure receive a vote, but Bradford “would not suffer it to come to vote.” Plymouth’s governor feared Vassall’s bill would “eat out the power of godliness.”³³

Unfortunately, a letter from Winslow to Winthrop provides the only account of the episode, and it raises many questions. If the colony’s deputies—and perhaps the townspeople who had elected them—were so enthusiastic about Vassall’s proposed toleration, why did the matter drop after Bradford’s procedural veto? Perhaps the stature of Plymouth’s governor insulated him from any significant protest, but it is also likely that Winslow exaggerated Vassall’s support. The next year, the colony’s freemen reelected Bradford and all of his assistants, with the exception of Edmond Freeman. The bulk of Plymouth’s settlers probably had no interest either in Bradford’s measure to strengthen the religious establishment or in Vassall’s bill for toleration. The colonists were a mixed multitude. A minority actually belonged to the colony’s churches, though more settlers attended them. By this point, only a small number had rejected infant baptism or had embraced the more adventurous ideas of Gorton or the Bay Colony exiles. Many other inhabitants of New Plymouth were not especially attached to the colony’s churches, but they were also not opponents of them.

Turning his attention back to the Bay Colony, in the spring of 1646 Vassall supported a group of seven men in another campaign for religious toleration. The principals were Robert Child, who had just returned to Massachusetts with the poorly conceived intention of establishing a vineyard; Samuel Maverick, in the region since the mid-1620s; and John Dand, a London grocer who emigrated in the early 1640s. The seven were not church members. With the exception of Maverick, they were not freemen. As a resident of Plymouth rather than Massachusetts Bay, Vassall could not sign their petition, but Winthrop identified him as the instigator behind the effort.³⁴

In their remonstrance, the petitioners asserted that New England’s magistrates and ministers had reduced them to “perpetual slavery and bondage.” They could not vote, but a government levied taxes and other obligations on them without their consent. In particular, the Massachusetts magistrates’ exercise of a veto against the decisions of the deputies amounted to “an over-greedy spirit of arbitrary power” that threatened the liberties they held as “freeborn subjects of the English nation.” Likewise, they were forced to attend churches to which they did not belong, and towns forced them to contribute to the support of ministers who would not admit them to the Lord’s Supper or baptize their children. The petitioners asked the Massachusetts General Court to compel churches to either admit them as members or grant them the liberty to form their own churches.³⁵

John Winthrop understood the conflict similarly but with reversed roles. “They complained of fear of perpetual slavery,” the governor countered, “but their intent was, to make us slaves to them.” The petitioners wanted to do away with the privileges and power enjoyed by freemen, church members, and magistrates. The court deferred action on the petition until the fall of 1646. The petitioners circulated copies of their remonstrance, but it gained little support among the residents of Massachusetts, who either agreed with their magistrates or realized that to support the petitioners would have exposed themselves to charges of contempt or sedition. The petitioners expected the court to reject their demands. They would then appeal to Parliament.³⁶

As the Bay Colony magistrates contemplated how to respond to the petition from Child and Maverick, they were startled by the arrival in Boston of Randall Holden, an associate of Samuel Gorton. After their banishment from Shawomet, Gorton and Holden had gone to England and appealed to the parliamentary Committee for Foreign Plantations, a successor of sorts to the commission over which William Laud had presided. Headed by the Earl of Warwick, the committee’s members included Samuel Vassall—William’s brother—and former Massachusetts governor Henry Vane. Massachusetts Bay was not prepared to defend itself before the committee, and Gorton benefited from rising English support for religious toleration and the fact that the same committee recently had given Roger Williams a patent for Providence and Rhode Island. In May 1646, the committee sided with the Gortonists and granted them safe passage back to their Shawomet land. Holden’s triumphant return to Boston alarmed Bay Colony leaders. If individuals convicted of offenses in New England could appeal to English authorities, the colonies could not properly govern themselves.³⁷

Even before the General Court formally rejected their petition, Child and his partners had decided to send Vassall to England. The Massachusetts magistrates countered by sending Edward Winslow on a mission to overturn Gorton’s favorable ruling and to defend the Bay Colony against Vassall. Some in the Bay Colony wondered why their government should employ a Plymouth man as their agent, while William Bradford was piqued that Winslow would undertake this errand for Massachusetts. On Winslow’s last visit to England, Archbishop Laud had sent him to prison. By the time Winslow set foot on English shores again, Laud was dead and King Charles was Parliament’s prisoner. There was no assurance, though, that the committee would favor New England’s magistrates over the colonies’ religious and political dissenters.

In addition to his appearances before the committee, Winslow engaged in heated printed exchanges with both Gorton and Vassall. While the latter pair aimed most of their criticism at Massachusetts Bay, they informed Parliament that New Plymouth was no better. Gorton alleged that although Plymouth and Bay Colony settlers had once been “pilgrims” who fled persecution, they now had adopted “the selfsame spirit” of their persecutors. Likewise, Vassall asserted that just as Plymouth’s leaders imitated the Bay colonists “in their church-ways, so they follow them in their arbitrary government.” The complaints of Gorton and Vassall echoed the criticisms the poet John Milton leveled against the puritan Presbyterians who now controlled Parliament. In the early 1640s, Milton had been a fierce critic of Laud and the episcopal hierarchy. Now Milton charged that “new presbyter is but old priest writ large.” Likewise, Gorton and Vassall alleged that New England leaders enforced their own version of ecclesiastical and political tyranny.³⁸

Winslow scoffed at the notion that New England’s settlers were pilgrims turned persecutors. “What greater wrong can be done a poor persecuted people that went into the wilderness to avoid the tyrannical government of the late hierarchy,” he asked, “and to enjoy the liberties Christ Jesus hath left unto his churches … than to be accounted persecutors of Christ in his saints?” Winslow, like John Winthrop, insisted that true liberty rested on political and ecclesiastical order, and he asserted—with considerable exaggeration—that Presbyterians were welcome anywhere in New England and that New Plymouth left Baptists unmolested. Winslow urged the committee to permit New Englanders to govern themselves. He went so far as to suggest that the colonies were “growing up into a nation,” though he stressed—again, with some exaggeration—that they closely adhered to the laws of England.³⁹

Winslow’s mission was partly successful. He failed to reverse the committee’s judgment on Gorton’s case, but he prevailed against Vassall. The committee declared that it did not wish to “encourage any appeals” from New England justice. The governments of Massachusetts Bay and New Plymouth governed without interference from England until the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.⁴⁰

William Vassall probably knew he would be unwelcome back in Scituate or anywhere else in the puritan colonies. Instead, he went to Barbados, where he accumulated land and slaves. He died in late 1655 or 1656.

Winslow remained in London as the Bay Colony’s agent, served on several parliamentary committees, defended the commercial interests of New England, and raised money for missionary work among New England’s Native peoples. He was also one of many religious dissidents who returned to England after the fall of the church hierarchy made it safe to do so. Winslow’s departure was a serious loss for New Plymouth; no one else in the colony matched his transatlantic connections.⁴¹

When it became clear that he would not come back to New England anytime soon, Winslow’s daughter Elizabeth went to England, perhaps to help care for her father, perhaps to find a suitable husband. Winslow’s son Josiah, with his wife, Penelope, also journeyed to London. Susanna Winslow never visited her husband. She remained in Marshfield to manage the family’s farms and other business in her husband’s absence. Edward, Josiah, and Penelope sat for portraits in 1651. The painting of Edward Winslow is the only known contemporary portrait of a Mayflower passenger. The three portraits do not depict the austere Pilgrims of the American imagination. The Winslow men sport fancy collars, cuffs, a tassel, and—in Edward Winslow’s case—what are probably silver buttons. The Winslow men wear black not to be dour, but because black dye was expensive and signified wealth. Both Josiah and Edward have long hair, of which many puritan moralists disapproved. Penelope Winslow is strikingly fashionable. She holds a velvet or silk wrap around a green dress. A gold-beaded necklace adorns her neck, and a small hood with a row of pearls ornaments her loose, curled hair.⁴²

In his portrait, Edward Winslow holds a piece of paper that identifies itself as a “letter from your loving wife Susanna” (see page 175). After he left New England late in 1646, Edward Winslow never saw his Careswell estate or Susanna again. Other settlers felt his absence as well. William Bradford was disappointed when members of his church moved away to find better land and better prospects. He understood Winslow’s decision to stay in England as a betrayal of sacred congregational bonds. Winslow, though, saw no conflict between his religious principles and the pursuit of wealth and parliamentary appointments.

Penelope Winslow, 1651. (Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts.)

In early 1655, Winslow, now nearly sixty years old, arrived in Barbados as part of Admiral William Penn’s campaign against the Spanish West Indies. While there, Winslow crossed paths with William Vassall, his old antagonist.⁴³ Perhaps he also encountered another man he had once known. If Hope still lived, he probably would have heard that his former master was on the island. After the expedition set sail for Jamaica, Edward Winslow died of a fever and was buried at sea.

In 1646, the commissioners for the United Colonies gathered in New Haven for their annual meeting. Led by the Bay Colony’s representatives, they discussed proposals to combat the spread of what they understood as heresy. Rhode Island had granted its settlers “a licentious liberty,” allowing them to “profess and practice what is good in their own eyes.” Now dissenters wanted to bring such chaos to the other colonies. In order to preserve the “liberties of the gospel,” the commissioners proposed that the colonies undertake measures to suppress Anabaptism, Familism, antinomianism, and all errors that undermined the Bible and the Sabbath “under a deceitful color of liberty of conscience.” Scituate’s Timothy Hatherly and Taunton’s John Browne represented New Plymouth, and they refused to endorse the motion without advice from their general court. Contrary to the claims of Gorton and Vassall, New Plymouth did not march in lockstep with Massachusetts Bay.

Josiah Winslow, 1651. (Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts.)

Hatherly and Browne did support a resolution that condemned the oppression of the poor through high prices and low wages, as well as other signs of godlessness, such as drunkenness and showy apparel. The commissioners called on the region’s English settlers to live as true Christians. “And though the God of this world (as he is styled) be worshipped … in the main and greatest part of America,” they concluded, “yet this small part and portion may be vindicated as by the right hand of Jehovah, and justly called Emmanuel’s [Christ’s] land.” All of New Plymouth’s leaders shared this vision of a godly New England.⁴⁴

Although events across the Atlantic and the decisions of colonial magistrates influenced the boundaries of religious orthodoxy and toleration, they were also negotiated at a local level. In 1649, Barnstable’s church excommunicated Judith Shelley. According to Barnstable minister John Lothrop, “Goody Shelley” became upset when other Barnstable women did not invite her to a “Christian meeting.” She allegedly slandered a fellow church member by calling her a proud and dishonest gossip. Shelley also claimed to possess “a spirit of revelation.” Because Lothrop at first had acknowledged her gift and then denied it, she asserted that it was her minister who deserved to be cast out of the church. Disparaging ministers and claiming the spirit of revelation had gotten Anne Hutchinson banished from Massachusetts Bay. Judith Shelley’s only apparent penalty for her behavior was excommunication. The fact that the women of Barnstable were meeting on their own, moreover, hints at realms of women’s religious experience and leadership rarely visible in colonial records.⁴⁵

In 1649, more than a dozen individuals in Rehoboth split from the town’s church, denounced its minister, and began holding their own meetings. As William Brewster and John Robinson had done a half century before, the dissenters in Rehoboth separated from a church they regarded as corrupt. The Rehoboth separatists were convinced that the Bible did not authorize infant baptism and that, therefore, their own infant baptisms were invalid. Under the leadership of Obadiah Holmes, they asked a minister from Rhode Island to baptize them. Plymouth’s magistrates were not eager to intervene, but after receiving several petitions complaining about the rebaptisms, the General Court threatened individuals who organized unsanctioned religious meetings with disenfranchisement and unspecified further punishments. Holmes and most of his followers soon left for Newport.⁴⁶

While the colony’s magistrates and freemen opposed religious toleration, they were far more sluggish in taking action against religious dissidents than their Bay Colony counterparts. When Obadiah Holmes visited the Massachusetts Bay town of Lynn, held meetings, and baptized several persons, he was arrested, taken to Boston, and whipped. The fragile consensus in New Plymouth was that Baptists were to be grudgingly tolerated rather than forcibly corrected. Indeed, in 1655, New Plymouth allowed a prominent Baptist to move to Scituate. The previous fall, Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College, had made public his opposition to infant baptism. Forced to resign and leave the colony, he took refuge in Scituate without any apparent controversy. In an ironic development, Harvard recruited as its second president Charles Chauncy, who agreed to keep quiet about his own idiosyncratic baptismal preferences.⁴⁷

Quite literally in between Rhode Island and Massachusetts Bay, New Plymouth came to occupy a middle ground between the former’s thoroughgoing toleration and the latter’s stricter policing of orthodoxy. Not long after Scituate swapped Chauncy for Dunster, however, a new group of dissidents mounted a much more dramatic challenge to the colony’s religious establishment.