THE EVENTS OF EARLY 1649 stunned the English on both sides of the Atlantic. After a parliamentary tribunal convicted King Charles of treason, he was beheaded in public. After the king’s execution, the House of Commons abolished the institution of monarchy as “unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people.” The Commons did away with the House of Lords as well. England was now a commonwealth, a republic.1
New Plymouth and the other New England colonies functioned as their own commonwealths, as what historian Michael Winship calls “quasi-republics.” William Bradford and Edward Winslow had made clear their sympathy for Parliament during the English Civil War, but the news of regicide led to indecision rather than celebration. In June 1649, Plymouth’s General Court canceled the colony’s annual elections. Bradford, his assistants, and other officers continued in their positions for the next year. The issue at hand was probably the oath that elected officials swore “to be truly loyal to our sovereign Lord King Charles, his heirs, and successors.” There was now no king to whom elected officials could swear their loyalty. In addition to scrapping the election, Plymouth’s General Court did not admit any freemen that year.2
After the initial shock of the king’s decapitation faded, governance in New Plymouth returned to normal. In June 1650, the General Court reelected all of the existing magistrates and resumed admitting freemen. In the colony’s book of laws, Nathaniel Morton crossed out “our sovereign Lord King Charles” and substituted “the state and government of England as it now stands.” Colony officials duly added references to “his highness the Lord Protector” once Oliver Cromwell assumed that office in 1653.3
Ecclesiastical affairs in England remained chaotic throughout this period. The Presbyterian puritans who controlled Parliament for most of the 1640s eliminated bishops, suppressed the Book of Common Prayer, ejected hundreds of ministers from their positions, and even outlawed Christmas. There was no consensus behind such reforms, however. A large number of English women and men were attached to the Prayer Book, and even more liked Christmas. At the same time, other voices found converts as they took advantage of the freedom to publish their writings and preach in the streets of London and across the countryside. No more than five percent of the populace attended Congregationalist (Independent), Baptist, or other sectarian meetings, but such groups achieved an outsized significance and notoriety.4
Presbyterians responded with fierce denunciations of the newfound toleration, and in 1648 Parliament passed a law against blasphemy that required the death penalty for anyone who denied the Trinity. By then, however, the Presbyterians had lost control of English politics to the Independents and radicals that predominated within the New Model Army. Cromwell favored liberty of conscience for at least most Protestants, and while he decried disunity and certain heresies, the net result was an unprecedented religious toleration. In 1650, Parliament eliminated the requirement that individuals attend their parish churches. In the mid-1650s, Cromwell permitted several hundred Jews to settle in England, which had expelled its Jewish population in 1290. In England, a largely puritan revolution had ushered in substantially more religious liberty than was present in most parts of New England.5
Back in the mid-1620s, Bradford had reassured the colony’s English investors that New Plymouth punished individuals who did not observe the Sabbath and attend worship. However, especially as settlers formed new townships and dispersed into outlying areas, the colony’s magistrates did not attempt to enforce religious observance. As long as men and women did not organize their own religious meetings, spout blasphemy, or slander ministers, they could remain quietly indifferent to the colony’s churches. Many settlers were indifferent, and some—following the lead of dissenters such as Samuel Gorton and William Vassall—were openly critical of the colony’s churches and ministers. In the early 1650s, New Plymouth’s leaders attempted to put an end to this relative laxity. In 1650, the General Court mandated a ten-shilling fine for anyone who vilified the colony’s churches, ministers, or sacraments. The next year, the court ordered that anyone who skipped church pay a ten-shilling fine or be publicly whipped.6
The new laws were out of step with developments in England, and attempts to enforce them sparked discontent and resistance. This was most evident in the Cape Cod town of Sandwich. In October 1651, a grand jury cited Richard Kerby and a dozen other Sandwich residents for not coming to worship. Kerby and Ralph Allen Sr. did more than skip church. They also made “deriding, vild [vile] speeches … concerning God’s word and ordinances.” Presumably they both said a great deal, as the court gave them a few months to pay five pounds or suffer a whipping. Sandwich’s minister, William Leverich, complained that many townspeople were “transported with their … fancies, to the rejecting of all churches and ordinances.” Leverich explained that Satan sought to “undermine all religion, and introduce all atheism and profaneness.” Richard Kerby was not an atheist, but he objected to laws that forced him to attend a church he now rejected.7
It wasn’t just Sandwich. The 1651 grand jury identified transgressions in many towns. Men and women were cited for fraternizing at night and for dancing with each other. The jury cited several individuals for selling strong drink without a license. Much of the misbehavior pertained to religious observance, however. As other residents of the town of Plymouth gathered for worship, Elizabeth Eddy pointedly wrung out and hung out her laundry. Arthur Howland, brother of Mayflower passenger John Howland, stopped attending Marshfield’s church. In Duxbury, Nathaniel Bassett and Joseph Pryor came to church but disturbed worship. They were given the option of a twenty-shilling fine or being bound to a post with “a paper on their heads on which their capital crime shall be written.” The records do not reveal which punishment they chose. The same court that punished Kerby, Allen, Bassett, and Pryor declared a general day of thanksgiving, directing settlers to thank God for Oliver Cromwell’s recent victories in Scotland. The religious malcontents of Plymouth Colony surely wondered why they did not enjoy the same liberty of conscience as men and women back in England.8
Sandwich remained an epicenter of religious disaffection. In 1655, Ralph Allen, his brother George, and Peter Gaunt—all Sandwich residents previously cited for not attending church—were brought before the General Court for absenting themselves from worship. Asked for an explanation, Gaunt volunteered his opinion that there was “no public visible worship now in the world.” In other words, there was no legitimate church or worship for him to attend. Meanwhile, Richard Kerby’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, made dissent a family tradition when she made “suspicious speeches” against a preacher and a magistrate. The court sentenced her to a severe whipping but did not carry it out, hoping that a warning would improve her behavior. The views of the Kerbys and the Allens resembled those of English women and men known as Seekers. These individuals believed that all churches were corrupt; they waited for new revelation or apostles to establish a true church to which they could belong.9
The ideal across puritan New England was that each town should have a single, covenanted church with a godly, learned minister. By the mid-1650s, the reality in Plymouth Colony fell far short of this ideal. Several ministers left for opportunities elsewhere, and many communities lacked the money or motivation to build meetinghouses and pay educated clergymen to preach in them. In 1656, the Bay Colony’s magistrates complained to the United Colonies commissioners that New Plymouth had failed to secure ministers for its towns. The next year, Plymouth’s General Court responded to the chastisement by requiring all townspeople to support orthodox ministers. If a town failed to tax its residents, the magistrates would take it upon themselves to do so. Fourteen residents of Sandwich pledged a paltry fifteen pounds toward the yearly support of a minister, no more than half of what it would take to attract a qualified candidate. The Allens and Kerbys did not give a single shilling. By then, they and others in Sandwich had opened themselves to a new light.10
In the spring of 1652, George Fox—the most famous apostle of that light—crossed the River Trent into the town of Gainsborough, where the separatist minister John Smyth had gathered a congregation nearly five decades earlier. One of Fox’s followers had already preached in the Gainsborough marketplace. By the time Fox showed up, the town was in an uproar. When Fox took shelter in a sympathetic man’s home, people rushed in after him. A man accused Fox of having claimed to be Christ. At that, the people were ready to tear him to pieces. Fox now climbed onto a table and explained himself: “That Christ was in them, except they were reprobates, and it was the eternal power of Christ, and Christ that spoke in me that time to them.” The distinction between the historical Jesus, the eternal Christ, and Fox and his followers was not always clear, but his words quieted the mob.11
George Fox was the son of a puritan weaver in the English Midlands. He rejected the Presbyterian rigidity of his parish minister, but years of depression and uncertainty followed. Then Fox heard a voice: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to your condition.” After the Spirit opened him to the “light of Jesus Christ,” Fox wandered around the Midlands and the northern counties of England, urging people to experience the same light for themselves. Hundreds of women and men were convinced by his message.12
At their meetings, they sometimes sat in silence for hours, but the “power of the Lord” also led to prophesying, exhilaration, and ecstasy. For their trembling and shaking as God’s power coursed through their bodies, critics named them Quakers. Fox and his followers referred to themselves as the “Children of Light,” the “People of God,” and the “Friends of the Truth.” By 1655, Friends were holding well-attended meetings in London, Bristol, and other major English cities. Within another five years, there were an estimated forty thousand to sixty thousand Quakers in England. There were more Friends than Baptists.13
Much of what the Quakers taught and did had precedents, not only within the religious underground of Familism and antinomianism, but also among separatists, Baptists, and other puritans. As had many sorts of Protestants, so Friends called on individuals “to be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the sons of God.” The Quakers attracted converts who shared the anti-legalism and anti-ceremonialism that were part of the warp and woof of both separatism and mainstream puritanism, but they articulated a still more radical version of Christian liberty. All of these groups worried that outward forms of religious practice walled off the Spirit and kept individuals from communion with Christ. Rather than wanting to purify the sacraments, though, Friends dispensed with them entirely. In addition to rejecting prayer books and prepared sermons, the Quakers—somewhat like the separatist turned Baptist John Smyth—also did away with psalm singing in favor of “singing with the Spirit.” Moreover, what Fox and his missionaries taught undercut key Protestant doctrines about salvation, the Trinity, the Bible, and male religious leadership. Salvation was readily available, the Spirit was more important than the letter of the Bible, the light of Christ within mattered more than the historical person of Jesus, and women could preach and prophesy.14
Theology was not the main flash point, however. The Quakers were social revolutionaries who denounced all forms of hierarchy. They believed in the equality of men—and women, to an extent—regardless of class, rank, and title. For instance, etiquette required individuals to use the formal “you” when addressing their superiors. In seventeenth-century English, “thou” was a more familiar form of address. English translations of the Bible used the familiar “thee,” “thou,” and “thy” when referring to God. The Geneva and the Authorized (King James) translations rendered part of the Lord’s Prayer as “hallowed be thy name.” The Quakers reasoned that if they referred to God as thee and thou, they could hardly address mere mortals as “you.” Also offensive to magistrates, judges, and many gentlemen was the refusal of Quakers to remove their hats in the presence of their superiors. Those superiors regarded Quakers as insolent and subversive for this sort of behavior, which resembled that of the Ranters and the Diggers, other radical groups that had appeared in the late 1640s.
The Friends behaved in other ways calculated to provoke maximum hostility. They went into Protestant churches and denounced their worship. They called ministers “hireling priests” and lay Protestants “professors,” alleging that they assumed the veneer of Christianity without godliness or spiritual power. They castigated the sinfulness of towns and townspeople in the marketplace. They ignored the Sabbath. They urged people not to pay tithes, often a welcome message among common people who needed every penny they earned. The Friends also refused to swear oaths, a stance inherited from some separatists and Baptists. “Swear not at all,” Jesus had commanded, “but let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay” (Matthew 5:34, 37). The issue of oaths created endless legal problems for the Friends.15
Some Quakers made themselves even more conspicuous and offensive. On occasion, the Lord led the Children of Light to perform provocative “signs.” In October 1656, as men and women sang hosannas in the midst of a drenching rain, James Nayler—second in influence only to Fox among the early Friends—rode into Bristol mounted on a horse or donkey in an apparent imitation of Jesus’s royal entrance into Jerusalem. Other Friends made public displays of penance, wearing white sheets and carrying candles. A few Quakers walked naked through English towns and cities, following what they said was a divine commandment to imitate the prophet Isaiah, who had gone barefoot and without clothes for three whole years.16
Outraged ministers, magistrates, and ordinary people accused Quakers of blasphemy, heresy, immorality, witchcraft, and sedition. After one Friend berated a crowd of people about their profaneness, they beat him and his wife and stoned them out of town. Mobs pulled Friends’ hair, rubbed excrement on their faces, and ransacked their meetinghouses. Believing that Nayler through his Bristol sign claimed to be Jesus Christ, Parliament convicted him of “horrid blasphemy.” Nayler then imitated Christ in his suffering. He was mocked, scourged, branded with a “B” on his forehead, and had his tongue bored through with a red-hot iron. There was more religious toleration during the Interregnum (the years without a king, from 1649 to 1660) than had been the case under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, but the Quakers transgressed its bounds by a wide margin.
Many Friends welcomed imprisonment and other forms of persecution, as such misfortunes confirmed their union with Christ and participation in his passion. They were soldiers in the “Lamb’s War” predicted by the Book of Revelation, willing and sometimes eager to suffer for the savior they loved. They did not fight back, but they would not surrender. If beaten and banished, they would come back for more.17
In July 1656, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher came from Barbados to Boston and became New England’s first Quaker missionaries and prisoners. Boston’s magistrates burned some of their books, imprisoned them, and ordered women to search them for signs of witchcraft. According to a Quaker account, their persecutors “stripped them stark naked, not missing head nor feet, searching betwixt their toes, and amongst their hair, tewing [pulling] and abusing their bodies more than modesty can mention.” Although they found no physical clues that Austin and Fisher had made a compact with Satan, the magistrates sent the two missionaries back to Barbados. The magistrates hoped that by promptly banishing Quaker missionaries, they would prevent what they understood as a dangerous contagion from gaining a foothold in their colony. A second, larger group of missionaries arrived two days after Austin and Fisher’s departure. The Massachusetts General Court jailed the new arrivals until they could find a way to transport them out of the colony.18
New England’s magistrates, however, discovered that they could not insulate their colonies from Quaker teachings. Nicholas Upshall, a sixty-year-old Boston innkeeper, had made contact with Austin and Fisher during their brief stay in the city. Like the Kerbys in Sandwich, Upshall was a Seeker who had been disaffected from Boston’s church for many years. In 1651, the congregation had excommunicated him after he “denie[d] all the ordinances of Christ in the church.” Now Upshall wanted to talk with missionaries who denounced the same ordinances. When he learned of Austin and Fisher’s imprisonment, he paid the jailer for their board and presumably found a way to converse with them. When the Massachusetts General Court passed an anti-Quaker act, Upshall spoke out against it. The court banished him too.19
Upshall took refuge not in Rhode Island, but in Sandwich. That winter, Henry Fell—a Quaker missionary in Barbados—reported that “in the jurisdiction of Plymouth patent … there is a people not so rigid as the other at Boston, and great desires among them after the truth.” According to a Quaker publication, the colony’s magistrates allowed the refugee innkeeper to stay through the winter over the opposition of Governor Bradford.20
Plymouth’s leaders soon became less hospitable. They learned that Upshall and others were holding meetings at the home of William Allen, during which those in attendance “inveigh[ed] against ministers and magistrates.” Richard Kerby and his family came to the meetings, and Sarah Kerby and her older sister Jane Launder marched into Sandwich’s poorly attended church and disturbed the course of Sunday worship. The court heard a complaint that they were “opposing and abusing the speaker,” who was probably Richard Bourne, an inhabitant of the town, lay preacher, and missionary to the Wampanoag community at nearby Mashpee. If the sisters proceeded as was customary among the Friends, they endured Bourne’s sermon, then stood up and denounced the church, its rituals, and its preacher as worthless and Antichristian. Perhaps they called Bourne a “hireling priest,” a “painted beast,” or a “deluder of the people.” Two years earlier, the court had spared Sarah Kerby a whipping with the hope that she would improve her behavior. This time around, the court let Jane Launder off with a similar warning, but it ordered Sarah Kerby whipped.21
Now less inclined toward leniency, New Plymouth’s magistrates ordered Upshall to leave the colony. He went to Rhode Island, which Friends termed the “habitation of the hunted-Christ.” (Other New Englanders called it the “Island of Errors.”) During his brief stay in Sandwich, however, Upshall had convinced others to follow the same principles he had embraced.22
One of those convinced—Quakers preferred that term to converted—was Edward Perry, who had emigrated from Devon around 1650. Like many other individuals in Sandwich, Perry had already shown signs of disaffection from the colony’s political and religious establishment. In 1654, the General Court fined him five pounds because he refused to “have his marriage ratified” before a magistrate. Perry later wrote that despite his faithful attendance at Sandwich’s church, he was “not redeemed out of Satan’s power, nor come one step nearer unto God.” It was not enough for him to know that Christ had died for his sins sixteen centuries ago. He wanted Christ to come to him in the here and now. Searching for salvation, Perry listened to sermons in Plymouth, Scituate, Weymouth, and Boston, but every church left him despondent. He stopped going to worship. When Quaker missionaries arrived in Sandwich, they told him about “Christ Jesus the light within the heart and conscience.” Finally, he wrote, God set his soul “at liberty from the power of sin and Satan.” He urged his neighbors and others who would listen to cast off their “unprofitable teachers” and search inside themselves for the same light of Christ, which would lead them to the same liberty. Only a small minority of Plymouth’s settlers embraced that light, but the Friends gained a foothold in Sandwich and adherents in several other towns.23
The convincement of Plymouth’s first Friends coincided with a time of political transition in the colony. Myles Standish died in 1656 after what Nathaniel Morton described as “much dolorous pain” caused by kidney or urinary stones.24 A greater blow came the next year with the May 1657 death of William Bradford, who had served as governor for all but five of the colony’s first thirty-six years and had never faced any serious challenges to his leadership.
Bradford’s history reveals next to nothing about his family and other private affairs. We do not know anything about his relationships with his wives or his four children. Plymouth’s court records document his landholdings, and the inventory of his estate upon his death reveals his accumulation of fine furniture, pewter dishes and silver spoons, well-appointed clothing (a “suit with silver buttons”), and a large library.25 It is through Bradford’s books and writings that we learn about some of the things that animated him. He spent a good portion of his final years studying Hebrew, writing poetry whose banality contrasts with the rich allusiveness of his prose history, and brooding about threats to New England’s settlements.
The threats were everywhere. Despite the long peace between Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, Bradford feared that Indians armed with English-made guns would attack colonial settlements, rape English women, and torture other inhabitants before killing them. The greatest danger was within, however. Although graced with a “prudent magistracy” and true churches, New England had become a “mixed multitude,” with many settlers motivated by greed rather than by godliness. In verse, Bradford lamented that “whimsy errors have now got such head / And under notion of conscience, do spread.” He warned that if New Englanders followed the example of the ancient Israelites and degenerated from their pure foundations, God would sorely chastise them.26
Plymouth’s governor saw many signs of degeneration. Bradford lamented that Plymouth Colony had developed in ways antithetical to his principles. He cared about the unity of the congregation he had helped transplant from Leiden, and he mourned when its members dispersed to new townships. In the mid-1640s, Plymouth’s residents contemplated moving across Cape Cod Bay in order to escape “the straitness and barrenness” of their immediate environment. In the end, the larger portion decided to stay, but several families relocated to what became the town of Eastham. In 1646, the Bay Colony’s John Winthrop reported that Plymouth was “now almost deserted.” An embittered Bradford compared Plymouth’s church to “an ancient mother, grown old, and forsaken of her children … like a widow left only to trust in God.” In a marginal note in his history, he explained that Satan had “untwiste[d] these sacred bonds and ties” that had bound together the Pilgrims. Bradford added that it was part of his old-age “misery” that he could no longer enjoy “the sweet communion” present in earlier years.27
Despite his laments, Bradford’s cup did not overflow with bitterness. He sustained his spirit in part by immersing himself in the original languages of the Bible. While Bradford developed some familiarity with Greek, he was more captivated by Hebrew, an interest he shared with other prominent separatists such as John Smyth and Henry Ainsworth. The governor copied Hebrew words, phrases, and biblical verses into the covers and spare pages of his books. “Though I am grown aged,” he explained above one such set of exercises, “yet I have had a longing desire, to see with my own eyes, something of that most ancient language, and holy tongue, in which the law and oracles of God were writ.” Hebrew brought Plymouth’s governor to a more immediate encounter with “the holy text,” with its ancient authors, and with God. Bradford persisted with his studies for his “own content[ment].”28
Given Plymouth’s lack of renowned and well-published ministers, its lack of a college such as Harvard, and its commercial inferiority to Boston, many historians have described Plymouth Colony as an insignificant backwater. Bradford himself contributed to such views with his description of Plymouth’s abandonment and desolation. Once the Pilgrims settled at Patuxet, Bradford never traveled farther from his New England home than Boston and the southeastern shores of Cape Cod. Unlike Edward Winslow, Timothy Hatherly, and Isaac Allerton, he never returned across the Atlantic.
William Bradford, “Of plimoth plantation.” (Courtesy of Massachusetts State Library.)
Bradford’s outlook, though, was not provincial, either in economic or intellectual terms.29 Along with Winslow, Hatherly, Thomas Willett, and many others, he participated in transatlantic markets that included New England, New Amsterdam, Europe, and the West Indies. Like many other Plymouth Colony leaders, Bradford maintained a large library, evidence of his ongoing engagement with the larger world of Reformed Protestantism. The hundred or so books inventoried in Bradford’s estate include an English translation of Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians, in which the German reformer proclaims Christian liberty from the wrath of God, the power of the devil, and the tyranny of the pope; the works of theologians such as John Calvin and Peter Martyr Vermigli; broadly popular English puritan titles such as John Dod’s Exposition of the Ten Commandments and the works of William Perkins; several books of his old pastor John Robinson alongside books by the separatists Henry Ainsworth, Henry Barrow, and John Greenwood; and John Cotton’s Bloudy Tenant, in which Boston’s minister maintained that it would be better for magistrates to banish or even execute men and women than to permit “the flock of Christ to be seduced and destroyed by … heretical wickedness.” Bradford had books in Dutch, and he had English books printed in Amsterdam. William Brewster may have published one or two of the books in Bradford’s library. Plymouth Colony’s longtime governor understood his plantation’s significance within the much broader context of Reformed Protestantism.30
When Bradford prepared his will, he asked his friends to pay particular attention to his “little book with a black cover” containing “sundry useful verses,” most of which were Bradford’s own poems. Nathaniel Morton printed one of Bradford’s better efforts in his New-Englands Memorial:
In wilderness he did me guide
And in strange lands for me provide
In fears and wants, through weal and woe
As pilgrim passed I to and fro.
Bradford observed that as “a man of sorrows” (the Book of Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant, whom Christians interpreted as Jesus Christ) he had known “wars, wants, peace, plenty.” Old age had overtaken him, and he looked forward to the “happy change,” the death that would bring him into the presence of Christ.31
For New Plymouth, Bradford’s death marked the end of an era but was not a rupture with the colony’s original principles. Bradford was succeeded as governor by Thomas Prence, the son of a Gloucestershire carriage maker who came to New Plymouth in 1621 aboard the Fortune. Prence quickly advanced himself. He married Patience Brewster in 1624, became one of the Undertakers, and served two terms as governor in the 1630s. He moved to Duxbury, then to Eastham. In the early eighteenth century, Josiah Cotton praised Prence as a “terror to evil doers” (Romans 13:3)—in other words, a biblical magistrate. Prence had supported Bradford’s moves against religious dissenters in New Plymouth, and he resolved to take action against the Quakers when they appeared in the colony.32
In addition to Prence, Mayflower passenger John Alden remained a magistrate, as did Scituate’s Timothy Hatherly and James Cudworth. Josiah Winslow and William Bradford Jr. also served among the assistants. So too did Thomas Willett, who belonged to the Leiden congregation in the 1620s and had emigrated on a different Mayflower in 1630. Despite the humiliation he endured at the hands of the French at Plymouth’s Kennebec trading outpost, Willett succeeded Myles Standish as the colony’s military captain in 1648 and gained election as a magistrate beginning in 1651. Like Isaac Allerton, with whom he sometimes did business, Willett spent considerable time in New Amsterdam. He forged close relationships with Willem Kieft and Petrus Stuyvesant and served as a liaison during times of tension between the English and Dutch. Willett grew rich trading in foodstuffs, tobacco, and slaves, and he accumulated land in both New Plymouth and New Amsterdam. Through the 1650s, Willett’s views on religious toleration resembled those of Bradford, Prence, and Stuyvesant, all of whom favored firm measures to uphold their established Reformed churches.33
For the several years after the arrival of the first Quaker missionaries in 1656, New Plymouth’s leaders found themselves consumed by what most of them regarded as a grave crisis. The events in Sandwich prompted Plymouth’s General Court to pass a series of anti-Quaker measures. Any person who attended one of the Quakers’ “silent meetings” faced a fine of ten shillings and those who hosted such gatherings faced stiffer fines. If inhabitants of the colony became aware of any Quakers in their midst, they had to inform the authorities or else face punishment themselves. When constables apprehended Quaker missionaries, they were to bring them before a magistrate, who would order them imprisoned without access to visitors and with only such food as the court permitted. Jailed Quakers would remain confined until they paid for the costs of their imprisonment and their transportation out of the colony. The General Court made it illegal to be a Quaker, to befriend a Quaker, or even to ignore a Quaker. The missionaries treated the laws like an open invitation.34
As Plymouth’s court passed its first explicitly anti-Quaker laws, eleven missionaries set sail from England on the Woodhouse. In August 1657, the vessel reached New Amsterdam, where its owner, Robert Fowler, refused to remove his hat when summoned to a meeting with Director General Stuyvesant. Meanwhile, two of the missionaries, Mary Wetherhead and Dorothy Waugh, disembarked. According to the account of New Amsterdam’s Dutch Reformed clergy, they “began to quake, putting their fury at work, preaching and calling out in the streets that the last day was near.” One of the townspeople who came to see the commotion misunderstood the message and cried out, “Fire!” Wetherhead and Waugh continued to preach on their way to jail. Stuyvesant then banished them.35
Robert Hodgson, another of the Woodhouse missionaries, held meetings in Hempstead (Heemstede) on Long Island. According to his own account, an English magistrate had him arrested and tied to a cart, which hauled him through the woods at night to New Amsterdam. There, the Dutch authorities forcibly removed Hodgson’s hat in court. Stuyvesant sentenced him to a fine of six hundred guilders or two years’ work “at the wheelbarrow with the Negroes.” Hodgson refused to work or pay the fine. Now the violence began. After Hodgson stood for several days chained to a wheelbarrow, Stuyvesant ordered him stripped to the waist with a log tied to his feet. Hodgson related that “the governor then set a strong Negor [Negro] with rods, who laid many stripes upon him both backward and forward, wherewith he cut his flesh very much, and drew much blood upon him; then was he loosed and put into the dungeon, too bad a place for swine, being a stinking hole and full of vermin, not suffering any to come and wash his stripes.” The punishment was repeated two days later. Eventually, Hodgson agreed to work. Soon freed by Stuyvesant, he took refuge in Rhode Island.36
Plymouth’s merchant, magistrate, and militia captain Thomas Willett was in New Amsterdam during Hodgson’s imprisonment. In publications designed to sway English opinion against New England’s rulers, the Quakers blamed Willett for “incensing the Dutch governor with several false reports of them that are called Quakers.” While Willett probably approved of Stuyvesant’s treatment of Hodgson, New Netherland’s director general would have acted as he did without the Plymouth magistrate’s encouragement. In the fall of 1657, New Netherland’s council issued a series of anti-Quaker laws modeled on those enacted by New England’s puritan colonies. The Quakers also held Willett responsible for the new measures.37
English settlers at Flushing (Vlissingen) sent a remonstrance against the laws to the council. The petitioners maintained that no magistrate was in a position to discern “who is true and who is false.” Therefore, all people should enjoy “outward liberty” irrespective of religion. The petitioners noted that the Dutch states granted peace and liberty even to Jews and Muslims. (Stuyvesant had grudgingly obeyed a West India Company directive to allow a group of Jews from Dutch Brazil to take refuge in New Netherland, but he did his best to discourage their continued presence.) Why should New Netherland not welcome Baptists and Quakers? Although the Flushing Remonstrance eventually gained fame as an early American argument for religious liberty, it did not persuade Petrus Stuyvesant. The director general arrested the principle petitioners.38
Two other Woodhouse missionaries, Christopher Holder and John Copeland, were among those who had been expelled from Boston the previous year. This time, they began their work in Rhode Island, then went to Martha’s Vineyard. When they refused to leave the island, its governor arranged for the Wampanoags to transport the pair to Cape Cod by canoe. Holder and Copeland visited Sandwich and then went to Plymouth. Magistrates John Alden and Thomas Southworth ordered them to leave the colony, but the missionaries responded that the Lord had commanded them to return to Sandwich. A constable took them six miles toward Rhode Island, but when he left them, they headed for Sandwich anyway. When they were arrested again, the next escort took them all the way to Rhode Island.
Another Woodhouse passenger became New Plymouth’s most notorious Quaker missionary. Little is known of Humphrey Norton’s life before Quaker records locate him in Durham, Essex, and London in 1655. The next year, Norton penned a letter to the imprisoned George Fox, offering himself to Oliver Cromwell “body for body” if the Protector would grant Fox his freedom. Cromwell reportedly was moved by Norton’s spirit of sacrifice but turned down what he considered an unlawful deal. Norton was also bold in ways less helpful to the movement. He accused Quaker organizer Margaret Fell, a close ally of Fox’s, of permitting too much speech, prayer, singing, and frivolity at meetings. After a brief mission to Ireland, Norton again stirred dissension within the movement. “Humphrey Norton run out [apostatized],” recorded Fox, “and drew a company after him into his imaginations and self-righteousness and some of them came in again and he came to meetings again.” Norton hindered Fox’s efforts to impose a measure of order on his fractious movement.39
Headstrong spirits were well suited for the mission field, however. When Copeland and Holder came back to Rhode Island with reports of both convincements and persecution, Norton immediately headed east to confront Plymouth’s leaders. As did other Friends upon their arrests, Norton complained that the magistrates deprived him of the liberties due any Englishman, such as the right to examine the laws he was charged with violating and the right to due process. “I require of you a public examination,” Norton recalled declaring to Thomas Prence, “and if found guilty, [to be] publicly punished, if not, cleared.” According to Norton, Prence entirely ignored the legal arguments and banished him. Plymouth’s secretary, though, recorded the banishment as the General Court’s decision.40
Escorted most of the way to Providence, Norton next went to an English settlement on Long Island, where he strolled into a meetinghouse on Sunday and denounced its minister. He was arrested and brought to New Haven, whose magistrates proved much harsher than their Plymouth counterparts. They kept Norton in shackles for three weeks, then charged him with heresy and disturbing the peace. Norton gladly provided evidence against himself by writing papers disparaging ministers, magistrates, and sacraments. The New Haven town records and Norton’s own account roughly corroborate each other, though Norton left out the extent to which he made himself obnoxious. Much as separatists and other radical puritans had argued against their opponents in England, Norton alleged that New England’s leaders were “all of that cursed stock the Pope, and are guided by the spirit of witchcraft and idolatry.” He called the ministers “epicures and belly-gods” and likened the magistrates to Judas and Cain. They in turn accused him of claiming sinless perfection and promoting anarchy “as if every man should be left to his liberty to do what he would.” In court, Norton interrupted anyone speaking against him but refused to say anything when questioned. The next time Norton began his courtroom denunciations, the authorities silenced him by binding “a great iron key” over his mouth. The court then fined Norton ten pounds and ordered him whipped, branded on his writing hand with an “H” for heresy, and banished. After enduring his physical punishments, Norton refused to pay the fine. At that point, a Dutch baker from New Amsterdam intervened. He offered the magistrates two-thirds of what they had assessed Norton, who was then free to return to Rhode Island.41
W. M. Cary, Norton’s Punishment, from William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States, vol. 2 (1878).
In New Plymouth, the banishment of missionaries and the punishment of settlers who welcomed them failed to put an end to Quaker meetings. Instead, the anti-Quaker measures revived and deepened divisions among the magistrates themselves. In March 1658, a number of Scituate settlers informed the General Court that magistrate and militia captain James Cudworth had invited the Quakers to hold meetings in his home. Cudworth later explained that he welcomed Quakers because he thought it better to become acquainted with their teachings rather “than with the blind world to censure, condemn, rail, and revile them.” The Quakers did not convince Cudworth of their principles, but he was convinced they did not deserve persecution. Cudworth’s fellow magistrates stripped him of his captainship, and the colony’s freemen did not reelect him as a magistrate in the spring. As usual, the freemen reelected Scituate’s Timothy Hatherly as one of the assistants, but he refused to take his customary office in protest against the colony’s treatment of the Quakers. The divisions revealed by William Vassall’s proposal for religious toleration, apparently dormant for a dozen years, had reemerged.42
Despite the opposition from Cudworth and Hatherly, Plymouth Colony further strengthened its anti-Quaker laws. In imitation of English vagrancy laws used to prosecute Quakers, the General Court voted to establish a workhouse for Quaker missionaries, other vagrants, idle persons, and rebellious children and servants, so that imprisoned miscreants would earn their own bread. The court also declared that Quakers could not become freemen, and that freemen who became Quakers would lose that status. Those living in the colony who had not yet taken an oath of fidelity had to do so. If they refused, they could either leave the colony or pay a stiff fine. Furthermore, anyone who had not taken the oath could not participate in local elections or hold any political offices. After passing the new laws, the court summoned Richard Kerby, several members of the Allen family, and other Sandwich men and ordered them to take the oath. The court fined them when they refused to do so.43
As Plymouth’s political unity frayed, Humphrey Norton returned, this time in the company of fellow missionary John Rous. Norton and Rous came prepared for verbal combat and physical suffering. They got their words in and got what they expected in return.
Norton was the chief combatant. Brought before the General Court on June 1, 1658, he did his utmost to fan the flames of religious and political tension. “Thou liest,” he repeatedly told Governor Prence. “Thomas,” he added, “thou art a malicious man.” Norton had a large stock of such insults, and Prence was one of his favorite targets. In a book published the next year, he characterized Plymouth’s governor as “a mad dog, ready to bite at every one that crosseth his way.”44
The magistrates were unsure how to proceed. They had already banished Norton once, and they could see the H that New Haven’s magistrates had burned into his hand. Prence knew that New Plymouth could whip, fine, and banish Norton, and he would keep coming back. If they jailed him, he would refuse to pay the fees that typically accompanied imprisonment. Why should the colony’s orthodox settlers pay to feed Norton? If they sentenced him to forced labor, he would refuse to perform it. How could they get rid of him?
Prence contemplated harsher forms of punishment. He obtained a deposition from Christopher Winter, who was not exactly an upstanding member of the community. Scituate’s church had once excommunicated Winter for his marriage to a “woman of scandalous carriage,” and he later escaped conviction on charges of incest only because his daughter refused to identify him as her infant’s father. Nevertheless, Plymouth’s leaders asked Winter to converse with Norton and make a record of the imprisoned Quaker’s teachings. Winter’s deposition began with Norton’s assertion that the scriptures “were not for the enlightening of man … for he [Norton] said that he had the true light in him and he never had any from the Scriptures.” According to Winter, Norton also maintained that “Christ enlightened every man that came into the world and … that he that obeyed this light it would save him.” In a written response, Norton called Winter a liar but did not back away from his teachings about Christ’s light, the Bible, and human salvation.45
Plymouth’s capital crimes were treason or rebellion, murder, witchcraft or a compact with Satan, the burning of ships or houses, sodomy, rape, and bestiality. In 1642, the colony executed a servant named Thomas Granger, who confessed to sexual intercourse with a variety of animals. Although Plymouth’s earliest legal code made adultery punishable by death, a 1658 law decreed instead that adulterers would receive two whippings and wear the letters “AD” sewn on their clothes. Heresy and blasphemy were not capital crimes. In 1655, however, the colony had mandated “corporal punishment” for any who would “deny the Scriptures to be a rule of life,” leaving the exact penalty to the magistrate’s discretion “so as it shall not extent to life or limb.” The court could have used Winter’s deposition to convict Norton on this basis, and Prence could have used his discretion to order a more severe whipping or the cropping of Norton’s ears. After deputizing men to further investigate Norton’s opinions, however, Prence dropped the possibility of a heresy trial.46
Brought back into court, Norton resumed his insults. “Thou art like a scolding woman,” he chided Prence. Finally, the court demanded that Norton and Rous take an oath of fidelity to the state of England. They refused, saying they would not swear any oath. For that, the court ordered them to be whipped and imprisoned until they paid the marshal’s fees. They refused to pay. The magistrates finally gave up and sent them back to Rhode Island.47
From there, Norton posted two letters that New Plymouth’s secretary termed “railing papers.” Norton railed with relish. He arraigned Prence for having “defrauded” the poor by taking their money and goods to satisfy unjust fines. For his sins, the governor would experience “anguish and pain … like gnawing worms lodging betwixt [his] heart and liver.” Norton also had a special message for John Alden, who apparently had wavered over his colony’s treatment of Quakers. He had perceived “a tenderness” in Alden, but the longtime magistrate had now made himself a “packhorse to Thomas Prence” and a “self-conceited fool.” Norton encouraged Alden to follow Timothy Hatherly’s example, speak for himself, and resign his post, but Alden supported Prence and retained his office.48
As they healed from their Plymouth whippings, Norton and Rous concluded that Jesus wanted them in Boston. They reached the town on a lecture day, a weekday worship service attended by ministers from other churches. Norton and Rous waited through the sermon of Boston’s John Norton, whom they termed a “painted sepulcher.” Then the Quaker Norton stood up and asserted that Boston’s church was an “abomination.” Norton was arrested on the spot and charged with blasphemy. In court, he claimed the liberty to appeal to England. Governor John Endecott insisted that Norton could not appeal. Boston’s magistrates decided that the Quaker prisoners would be whipped twice a week, with the number of stripes increasing by three each time. Rous, Norton, and two other men received one such punishment, thrashed, they reported, “as a cruel man would beat his horse.” The magistrates then gave up and released them.49
Christopher Holder and John Copeland came to Boston on the heels of Norton and Rous. Unlike the latter pair, Holder and Copeland previously had been banished from the Bay Colony. In September 1657, the Massachusetts General Court had strengthened its anti-Quaker laws by mandating that a banished male Quaker who returned would have one ear “cut off.” If he returned again, he would lose another ear. Banished women would be “severely whipped” the first two times they returned. Those who returned a third time, male or female, would “have their tongues bored through with a hot iron.” When John Rous heard that Copeland and Holder were in prison, he returned to Boston and was promptly arrested again. The magistrates sentenced the three prisoners to lose their right ears and scoffed at their demand to appeal to Oliver Cromwell. Boston’s executioner performed the grisly task.50
Fortunately for their welfare, the Lord now directed Rous and Norton to return to England, where they published books with a simple message. England’s government should rescue “freeborn English people” from cruel, bloody, and deceitful New England magistrates. Rous and Norton asserted that those leaders denied Friends not only liberty of conscience but also due process and other liberties guaranteed to all Englishmen. In their books, the Quakers included a letter from Scituate’s James Cudworth, who had lost his civil offices because he dissented from New Plymouth’s anti-Quaker laws and punishments. Cudworth stated that although he “was no Quaker,” he would also “be no persecutor.” Plymouth had whipped and beggared Quakers, and Massachusetts had done even worse. “We expect that we must do the like,” Cudworth predicted, “we must dance after their pipe; now Plymouth-saddle is upon the Bay-horse.” Cudworth alluded to the fact that England had scrapped mandatory parish church attendance and had extended liberty of conscience to a wide array of Protestant sects. By contrast, Plymouth had “a state religion … a state-minister, and a state-way of maintenance.” Plymouth was like England under Charles and Laud, not like England under Cromwell. When the court learned of Cudworth’s letter, it imposed a stiff fine and deprived him of his freeman rights.51
In September 1658, the United Colonies confederation held its annual meeting, this year in Boston. Noting that all punishments to this point had not deterred the Quakers, the commissioners encouraged general courts to execute banished Quakers who returned and refused to recant. Thomas Prence and Josiah Winslow were New Plymouth’s representatives to the United Colonies meeting in 1658; they both signed the document. The Massachusetts General Court passed the proposed law the next month. In 1659, the Bay Colony sentenced three returned Quakers to hang. The condemned included Mary Dyer, whose “monstrous birth” had captivated John Winthrop and William Bradford two decades earlier. After following the Hutchinsons to Rhode Island, the Dyers had eventually returned to England, where Mary Dyer became convinced. In October 1659, Bay Colony authorities executed William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson but granted Dyer a reprieve on the scaffold.52
Contrary to Cudworth’s prediction, New Plymouth did not execute or crop the ears of Quakers. Following her gallows reprieve, Mary Dyer came to Plymouth in the company of Sandwich inhabitant Thomas Greenfield. The court imprisoned the pair and fined Greenfield to pay for Dyer’s imprisonment and transportation back to Rhode Island. Choosing martyrdom, Dyer returned to Boston again the following spring and was hanged.53
When Mary Dyer passed through Plymouth, two other Quaker missionaries were languishing in its jail. William Leddra and his fellow missionary Peter Peirson had been arrested in June 1659 after visiting meetings in Sandwich. In October, the magistrates asked the pair to pay their fines, leave the colony, and not return. Leddra and Peirson informed their persecutors that they would not submit to unjust laws. Two months later, the magistrates were ready to forget about the fines. They just wanted the missionaries gone. No rush, they assured the pair. They could take a few days, depending on the weather. They simply wanted to know that the missionaries had no intention of returning. Leddra and Peirson refused to make any promises. It was impossible to know how the Lord would direct their movements in the future. They were sent back to prison. The next March, the magistrates tried yet again. “If I were at liberty out of prison,” Leddra allowed, “I might depart in the will of God ere long.” The hopeful magistrates offered to set them at liberty if they would simply agree to leave and not come back. Peirson again replied that only the will of God dictated their movements. The magistrates told Leddra and Peirson to update them should God intend their departure. In April 1660, they were finally freed and left the colony, though it is unclear whether they, the magistrates, or the Lord backed down. Later that year, Leddra went to Massachusetts, which had already banished him and now sentenced him to hang.54
New Plymouth’s leaders tried less barbaric ways of extirpating Quakerism. In 1659, the General Court authorized four individuals to attend Quaker meetings in order to “reduce them from the error of their ways.” Among those chosen was Isaac Robinson, son of the Leiden separatist minister. Instead of eliminating the alleged errors, the younger Robinson followed Cudworth’s example and wrote a letter critical of New Plymouth’s magistrates. The court declared Robinson “a manifest opposer of the laws of this government” and sentenced him “to be disfranchised of his freedom.” Like Cudworth, Robinson was not convinced by Quaker teachings, only that it was wrong to persecute the Quakers. Robinson moved to Saconeesett (later the Cape Cod town of Falmouth) and Martha’s Vineyard, but he remained a member of Barnstable’s church.55
Sandwich’s inhabitants refused to enforce the colony’s anti-Quaker laws. The magistrates responded by appointing George Barlow as marshal of Sandwich (and Barnstable and Yarmouth), empowered to act as a constable to make arrests and collect fines. As in the instance of Christopher Winter, Plymouth’s godly magistrates had found a very ungodly individual to do their dirty work. Barlow was a cruel and turbulent man who persecuted Quakers in order to enrich himself. (In later years, he was convicted of drunkenness and accused of raping another man’s wife.) Humphrey Norton reported that Barlow burst into meetings while the Friends were “sitting still,” pulled off their hats, and threatened to put them in the stocks. The Sandwich Quakers began meeting in the woods instead, but Barlow tracked their footprints “as dogs do beasts of prey.” Barlow also took property as payment for fines. He deprived Richard Kerby of eight cows, three steers, two calves, and three bushels of corn. The fines were a considerable revenue stream for the colony’s government and for Barlow himself. The property seizures impoverished Sandwich Friends but did not end their meetings. In 1660, the General Court ordered the erection of cages in Sandwich (along with Duxbury, Marshfield, and Scituate), and it authorized constables to put those who attended Quaker meetings on public display in the cages.56
The magistrates eventually tired of Barlow’s zeal, however. In 1661, they fined the marshal for forcing Benjamin Allen to sit in the stocks overnight, and they also ordered Barlow to return a shirt and a few pieces of linen to Ralph Allen. The magistrates did more than upbraid the loathsome Barlow, however. They conceded that their attempt to rid their colony of Quakers had failed.57
As New England’s Congregational colonies tried in vain to rid themselves of Quakers, the ground of English society shifted dramatically once more. After Oliver Cromwell’s 1658 death, his son Richard succeeded him as Lord Protector. The younger Cromwell lacked his father’s grip on the army and, needing money, called a Parliament that soon undermined his authority. In May 1660, Parliament declared that Charles II had been England’s lawful king since his father’s beheading, and the restored monarch returned later that month. In June 1661, two months after his coronation, New Plymouth’s General Court recognized Charles II as England’s king. Once again, Nathaniel Morton revised the colony’s oaths.
Bishops and church courts came back with the Stuart monarchy, but Charles II proclaimed that he would permit “a liberty to tender consciences,” promising not to disturb those who held different opinions about religious matters so long as they did not “disturb the peace of the kingdom.” In particular, the king was moved by testimonies about the Quaker suffering in Boston, and in 1661 he sent a letter to Massachusetts Bay ordering its government to cease its executions and corporal punishment of the Friends. William Leddra was the last Quaker hanged in the Bay Colony.58
Charles II’s tenderness proved short lived. In early 1661, former Massachusetts settler Thomas Venner led an uprising against the newly restored monarchy. Venner and like-minded Fifth Monarchists sought to establish a theocracy in which the godly would rule according to biblical law and in which Jesus would be England’s only king. Venner paid for his rebellion with his life, but the resulting furor led to the imprisonment of thousands of Quakers as well. According to the 1662 Quaker Act, anyone convicted a third time for refusing to swear a legal oath or for attending a Quaker meeting would be punished by transportation to the colonies. George Fox and Margaret Fell endured long imprisonments in the mid-1660s, hundreds of Friends died in jail, and many more paid fines and suffered other penalties and indignities. Other dissenters, including the Presbyterians who had warmly welcomed the Restoration, also ran afoul of new legislation repressing conventicles. Despite England’s own periodic crackdowns against dissent, the crown continued to urge New England magistrates to grant toleration to religious minorities. This was in part because the Congregational magistrates were hostile to Church of England worship, but also because English officials continued to view colonies as ideal destinations for dissenters.59
New England had never been an exceptional enclave of persecution within a tolerant transatlantic English world. Certainly, religious dissenters enjoyed more liberty in some parts of England and within some colonies than others, but intolerance and persecution were endemic around the transatlantic English world and in continental Europe as well. New Plymouth was intolerant in comparison with Rhode Island, but what if Laudian or even Restoration England is the benchmark? Religious toleration gained many advocates in the 1640s and 1650s, especially from minorities who feared mistreatment at the hands of those in power. Still, the leaders of England’s largest religious groups—the Presbyterians, those who wanted to return to the pre–Civil War episcopal hierarchy, and even many Independents—denounced toleration as a threat to godliness and civil order. The response of Plymouth’s leaders to the Friends was not at all unusual within its transatlantic context.
Moreover, New Plymouth had embraced a more moderate approach even before the Restoration and the king’s instructions to Massachusetts Bay. In 1659, the colony repealed its compulsory church attendance law. Sabbath laws remained on the books, but in many parts of the colony only flagrant violations produced penalties. After the Restoration, the General Court repealed the measure that permitted constables to place apprehended Quakers in cages, and many other anti-Quaker laws became dead letters. The magistrates tacitly permitted Quakers to hold meetings and no longer fined individuals who refused to swear an oath in court. Partly in response to such developments, the Quakers made themselves easier to tolerate. The monarchy’s restoration extinguished some of the movement’s apocalyptic fervor, and most Friends now spread their message more quietly. Quaker diatribes in churches and courtrooms became uncommon.60
New Plymouth did not promulgate toleration for Quakers, and church taxes in particular became a point of contention for decades to come. Still, communities found ways to limit religious conflict. Many Friends and their sympathizers moved to new settlements away from hostile magistrates and marshals. Richard Kerby bought land in Dartmouth and later on Long Island. His daughter Sarah married Matthew Allen; they also moved to Dartmouth.
Many Quaker missionaries and converts remained in Rhode Island, where they were tolerated if not always welcome. Roger Williams regarded the Friends as rank heretics and was dismayed when they gained control of the colony’s government. After Humphrey Norton’s restless spirit led him back to Rhode Island, Williams described him as the “Archdeacon,” “Archbishop,” and “Pope” of the region. Williams observed that as the Fox-led Quakers became more restrained and theologically sophisticated, Norton clung to the older ways and remained an uncompromising nuisance. The year and place of Norton’s death are unknown.61
In both old England and New England, toleration and persecution depended on local circumstances as much as on royal edicts or the ideas advanced by thinkers such as John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. Outcomes hinged on the behavior and persistence of dissenters, the consensus of magistrates, and the cooperation of constables, marshals, and inhabitants. As much as they disliked the Quakers, New Plymouth’s settlers chose to endure the presence of the Friends because attempts to eradicate Quakerism had proven both ineffective and odious.