THE “PILGRIMAGE” THAT, toward the end of his life, Robert Blair (1593–1666) recalled in “some notes concerning” its “chief passages” carried him from his native Scotland to Ireland and, thereafter (1636), to passage on a ship heading to newly founded Massachusetts, a voyage thwarted by bad weather. That he left Scotland had everything to do with the Articles of Perth, which turned him into a critic of the state church. After losing his post at the University of Glasgow, he went to Ireland and ministered to fellow Scots who had emigrated to Ulster. A decade later, after being forbidden to preach (1634), he looked around for another haven—possibly in Massachusetts, having listened to John Winthrop Jr. describe the new colony. Almost overnight, this quest came to an end when an insurgency against the policies of Charles I erupted in Edinburgh. In its wake, Blair became one of the leaders of a newly reformed state church and chaplain in a Scottish army that repelled the king’s attempt to restore his authority (1639–40). For a man who remembered being indifferent to the politics of religion at the outset of his career, this sequence of events was unimaginable: the insurgency and civil war, followed by a far-reaching purge of the innovations forced upon the kirk by James I and Charles I. The repercussions in England were almost as remarkable. There, in the aftermath of his failure to subdue the Scottish insurgency by military means, Charles I authorized the election of two new Parliaments, the “short” of April 1640 and the second, of November, which eventually became known as the “Long Parliament.” Its policies were so at odds with Charles I’s understanding of monarchy and the true church that the outcome was civil war in England between supporters of the king and supporters of Parliament.1
Explaining this sequence of events tests every historian of 1630s and 1640s Britain. The puzzles are many. In the context of this book, the most significant of these is the relationship between civil politics and the politics of religion. Intertwined throughout the history of the English and Scottish reformations, their relationship tightened in the practice and rhetoric of Charles I and the party he favored, here known as the Laudians. Like his immediate predecessors, the young king took for granted that opposition to his version of true religion was equivalent to challenging his authority as king. At once, the religious and the political (and especially the royal supremacy) become inseparable. Before 1640, the political and the religious in Scotland had also become intertwined, but in a quite different manner. There, it was being argued that a monarch’s policies were corrupting a perfect church. And there, as registered in the life of Robert Blair, a unique event in British history unfolded.2
Beginning with Charles I’s agenda and the reactions it aroused in the 1620s and 1630s, this chapter takes up the experiment of godly rule in New England and, thereafter, the remarkable turn of events in Scotland.
Robert Blair was already in Ireland when James I’s reign ended in early 1625 and Charles ascended to the throne. A change of monarchs could provoke fresh debate about which version of religion should prevail. Not in 1625, however, for Charles shared his father’s preference for a rapprochement with Catholicism abroad and at home, although he briefly (1624–27) allied himself with a “patriot” or “war” party in Parliament eager to intervene on the side of European Protestants caught up in the Thirty Years War. By the close of 1625, he had concluded the negotiations with France begun by his father and married Henrietta Maria, the youngest daughter of Henry IV. With her came a retinue of Catholic priests who staffed the private chapel she was allowed to have in London. Before long, the Catholic presence at the Court or nearby in London included papal agents, a Jesuit “house,” and high-ranking converts.3
Meanwhile, Charles was indicating that he preferred a sacrament-centered worship and a strong version of episcopacy. By the decade’s end, the king was supporting a group of bishops and clergy who brushed aside the themes of “idolatry” and “primitive perfection” that had been of such importance in the making of the English and Scottish Reformations. Dubbed by some historians the “avant-garde conformists” but in these pages referred to as “Laudians” after William Laud (d. 1645), who in 1626 became the king’s most important advisor on matters of religion, this group included Richard Neile, Lancelot Andrewes, John Cosin, George Montaigne, and Matthew Wren. By the 1630s it also included a few bishops in Scotland, where they acquired the nickname of “Canterburians.” In Ireland, John Bramhall, who arrived in 1633 and was made bishop the next year, would advocate Laudian-style churchmanship. The Duke of Buckingham (d. 1628), had his finger in church affairs and, after allying himself with Neile and others, did everything he could to impede the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, who ended up being sequestered, that is, relieved of most of his authority, in 1627. Abbott had already been eclipsed by Laud, who became bishop of London in 1628 and archbishop in 1633, two days after Abbot’s death.4
Charles was no theologian and Laud no Dutch-style Arminian.5 Where the king led and Laud followed or the clergyman led and the king followed is a question that can tax the best of historians.6 Broadly speaking, Laud, Andrewes, and Bramhall preferred a more positive view of human nature and its capacities for good than the practical divinity endorsed. The doctrine of double predestination was their bête noire, as was the Reformed premise of a limited (not universal) atonement. As Protestants, Laud and his allies agreed that divine (free) grace remained the ultimate source of salvation. Otherwise, they exploited the ambiguities of the Thirty-Nine Articles vis-à-vis high Calvinism. Uncomfortable with the nexus of preaching and “experimental” piety nurtured by the practical divinity, the Laudians extolled the sacraments, the ceremonies, and the visible church as an institution, or what Laud regarded as the “external” means of divine grace. Assumptions of this kind prompted the resumption of practices and artifacts the state church had curtailed under Edward VI and Elizabeth: baptismal fonts, chalices (the cup containing the communion wine), a full array of clerical vestments, standing when the creed was read and bowing at the name of Jesus. For many in England, the most troubling of these changes was how the celebration of the Lord’s Supper was rearranged. At a moment when parish churches were administering the sacrament at a table situated in the middle of the chancel or perhaps in the main aisle of the church, Laud and his allies decided to make this setting more altar-like. The remedy they chose was to restore the table to the upper end of the chancel and enclose it within rails. Thereafter, no one could participate in the sacrament without kneeling to do so.7
Like the king, the Laudians regarded unity or uniformity as foundational. No evasive subscriptions by erstwhile nonconformists would do. Nor could dissidents appeal to the principle of things indifferent that had been the church’s response to Puritan complaints about the ceremonies. Instead, the Laudians justified kneeling in particular and the ceremonies in general as apostolically sanctioned and therefore crucial to the very being of a jure divino church. Just as provocative was the argument that the unity of the church depended on episcopacy, which Laud regarded as sanctioned by Christ, existing in an unbroken sequence since the origins of Christianity, and grounded in a higher authority than that of the apostles. Most of his predecessors had emphasized the fidelity of the church to Scripture as the reason why Protestantism was superior to Catholicism, but Laud relied on the Church Fathers to validate his understanding of bishops and the ceremonies. For those who shared his understanding of Christianity and its political implications, the theme that unified the several parts of this program was the presence of the sacred in monarchy, state church, bishops, and worship, all of them seamlessly linked in a divinely instituted economy of grace.8
In keeping with this program, Laud had a more positive view of Roman Catholicism than was customary among English Protestants. Rome was a true church, he insisted, although erring in some respects. It followed that the apocalypticism of John Foxe and so many others was simply wrong: the pope was not the Antichrist despite the presence of this commonplace in the Irish Articles of 1615, the Book of Martyrs, a treatise on Revelation written by James I during his tenure in Scotland, and countless expressions of popular and academic Protestantism. So was idolatry when it was broadly defined, that is, applied in some blanket manner to Catholicism. Wanting reconciliation but not reunion with Rome, the Laudians followed the lead of James and Charles and, at home and abroad, attempted to ease the anti-Catholic rhetoric so prevalent in religious politics.9
Implementing these assumptions in Ireland became one of Laud’s priorities in the 1630s. Like Charles, the archbishop wanted uniformity throughout the whole of Britain at a moment when the Church of Scotland continued to preserve some aspects of presbyterianism and the Church of Ireland much of Reformed orthodoxy, together with a posture of independence from the Church of England. Never going there in person, Laud worked through surrogates, most importantly the imperious Thomas Wentworth, who became the highest civil official in the country in 1633. Aided by Bramhall, who became bishop of Derry in 1634, Wentworth undertook to curtail the autonomy of the Church of Ireland and eliminate nonconformity. Bramhall was dismayed by what he found in those dioceses where Scottish-style preaching and worship persisted, reporting to Laud in 1634 that “it would trouble a man to find twelve Common Prayer Books in all their churches, and those not only cast behind the altar because they have none, but in place of it a table . . . where they sit and receive the sacrament together.” He and Wentworth put their mark on the state church by tightening up the rules for uniformity and revising its official statement of doctrine. At a Convocation of church leaders and clergy in October 1634, Bramhall insisted on the adoption of the Thirty-Nine Articles, although foot-dragging by James Ussher and some of the other Irish clergy kept the Articles of 1615 from being formally repudiated. At the next Convocation (1635), however, a set of canons was adopted after much give- and-take between Bramhall’s insistence on Laudian norms and Ussher’s strong feelings about the autonomy of the Irish church.10
The new regime also targeted the Scottish families and their ministers in Ulster, driving out most of the ministers who had come over from Scotland and, when news arrived of the National Covenant (see below), requiring the Scottish community to abjure (deny) that covenant and swear never to take up arms against the king. What seems to have survived was an underground network of prayer meetings not unlike the “privy kirk” of the 1550s. It seems certain, too, that in parish churches, some laypeople avoided the rules about kneeling and other ceremonies by staying away. What also survived among these Protestants were memories of the fervent spirituality that erupted during sacramental feasts and monthly lectures from the early 1620s onward, a spirituality some in western Scotland were beginning to experience thanks to the presence of ministers who returned to their homeland after being forced out of Ireland.
Of the measures taken by Laud, Charles, and some of the bishops to impose similar policies in England, several deserve special notice. At each of the two English universities, college fellows and presidents began to speak out against doctrines characterized as “Calvinist” or Reformed. Any such attempts had been punished in the 1590s and continued to be controversial throughout the 1620s. But by the 1630s, the more ardent defenders of Calvinism (moderate or otherwise) were being dismissed or falling silent in the face of censorship, real or threatened.11 In 1626 and again in 1629, fresh versions of James I’s 1622 “Instructions” specified that ministers in the church were not to preach “new inventions or opinions,” language that, in the coded discourse of these years, referred to aspects of Reformed orthodoxy. As well, the “Instructions” were designed to minimize the role of preaching in the economy of grace. Continuing what Richard Bancroft had begun, in 1633 Laud required all lecturers—in his eyes, “the people’s creatures” who “blow the bellows of sedition”—to take up a second appointment. The archbishop also ordered that clergy limit themselves to the exercise of catechizing at the afternoon services on Sunday. In 1633, Charles reissued a proclamation his father had previously endorsed (1618), the Book of Sports, which pushed back against any strong version of the Sunday Sabbath by authorizing certain “lawful” recreations—archery, other exercises, dancing (including Morris dances), maypoles, and church ales. Unlike James’s version, which not been enforced, the proclamation of 1633 commanded every bishop to ensure that it was read aloud in each parish and to punish any minister who refused to do so. The same year, the Privy Council, on which Laud and other bishops served, resolved a dispute about the location of the communion table in an important London church in favor of those who wanted it “placed altar-wise.”12
The year 1633 was also when Laud oversaw the dissolution of the Feoffees for Impropriations (see chap. 4), an organization condemned by the govern-ment’s lawyer as “a Confederacy or Conspiracy, and this against the Church” and described by Laud himself as one of “the main instruments for the Puritan faction to undo the Church.” In his own diocese of London, which included parts of East Anglia as well as in other regions where like-minded bishops had been installed, a fresh campaign against nonconformists and, especially, lecturers, unfolded. During a “draconian” visitation led by Matthew Wren in his diocese of Norwich in 1637, he ordered local church wardens to move the communion table to the upper end of the church and build rails around it; thereafter, he expected clergy to face the altar during some of the service. Wren also instructed ministers to limit the scope and substance of their sermons to what was laid out in documents like the prayer book catechism and use the sign of the cross in the ritual of baptism. Here and elsewhere, efforts were underway to suppress the versions of voluntary religion that the godly were accustomed to practicing.13
The final project of the Laudians was a fresh set of canons. Ratified by a Convocation in the spring of 1640 after the “Short Parliament” had been dismissed by the king, these opened with a dubious interpretation of the English Reformation: the emphasis on “rites and ceremonies” was not new but had been approved during the reign of Edward VI and practiced during the reign of Elizabeth I. More telling of the king’s mood at a moment when his authority in Scotland had collapsed was the assertion that complaints about the ceremonies were really “aim[ed] at our own royal person, and would fain have our good subjects imagine . . . that we intend to bring in some alteration of the religion here established.” This awareness of anti-popery and the damage it was doing to the king’s authority prompted the first canon, which required every minister in the church to read aloud four times a year a statement extolling divine right monarchy. Canon 6 required clergy and certain others to swear an oath approving “the doctrine, and discipline, or government” of the church and promising never to “alter” its episcopal structure, an oath known as the “etcaetera oath” because “&c.” followed the statement about episcopacy. The liturgy—or, as was commonly said, the “ceremonies”—was the subject of canon 7, which, among other rules, called for people to bow toward the altar when they entered and left a church, a gesture justified by its being a “most ancient custom of the primitive church in the purest times.”14
Step by step, measures of this kind alienated the many clergy and laypeople who preferred a toned-down version of prayer book worship and took for granted the connections between English Protestantism and the Reformed tradition. Or perhaps their alienation had to do with rumors of a “popish plot” in which Laud and some of his fellow bishops were implicated—a plot directed at the political system (or “liberty”) as well as at Protestantism. None of this resistance made sense to Laud despite the historic importance of anti-Catholicism in the making of popular Protestantism. His supporters justified their program not only on its own terms but also politically. They did so at a moment when Parliament and the young king were increasingly at odds over his authority to impose certain levies he needed to finance the government—so much at odds over “constitutional” issues that, after dissolving the Parliament of 1628–29, Charles governed on his own until 1640, when the crisis in Scotland forced him to authorize a new Parliament. Lacking his father’s astuteness about compromise, Charles absorbed the argument that nonconformity, presbyterian schemes of church government, and Calvinist theology were, at bottom, anti-monarchical. Left unchecked, they would subvert the royal supremacy in religion and the authority of the monarchy in general. Laud saw any discontent through the same glasses, declaring in 1637 that those who disagreed with his program were bent on “rais[ing] a sedition, being as great incendiaries in the state (where they get power) as they have ever been in the Church.” The king’s steadfastness was repeatedly praised by men such as Samuel Brooke of Cambridge University, who warned him in 1630 that Puritanism was “the roote of all rebellions and disobedient intractableness in parliaments etc and all schisme and sauciness in the countrey, nay in the Church itself.”15
Almost as telling as the actual program of the Laudians was the high pitch of their rhetoric. By the mid-1630s, with no Parliament to worry about, ministers such as Edmund Reeve in The Communion Booke Catechisme Expounded (1635) and Peter Heylyn in a series of books were praising the new emphasis on the altar, defending the Book of Sports, and mocking lectureships and Puritan-style sabbatarianism. Many years later, the ever-aggrieved Heylyn revisited the origins of the English Reformation and blamed much of what had gone wrong—in particular, the repudiation of Catholic-style worship—on sixteenth-century Edwardians who had fallen under the spell of John Calvin.16 Meanwhile, English Catholics were heartened by the Laudian program and its beneficial consequences, including a “calme . . . from the violence of persecution” and a “good disposition . . . in many principall statesmen,” as one Catholic noted in a letter of mid-1633. In the same circles, it was whispered that Charles was leaning toward their faith and that Laud was exchanging letters with the pope.17
Rumors of this kind were not what the Laudians were expecting once they endorsed a rigid version of uniformity. Yet as others before them had learned to their dismay, nonconformity always seemed to survive the campaigns directed against it. As had been true since the Elizabethan Settlement, bishops, church wardens, laypeople, and clergy variously embraced, ignored, or resisted aspects of official policy, avoiding it to such an extent in some counties or dioceses that a historian of religion and politics in Hampshire describes avant-garde conformity as a “failure,” an assertion notably true of the Book of Sports.18 Even though no one could criticize the monarchy, moderates within the church defended the traditional location of the communion table or documented the historic ties between the Church of England and the Reformed international. Others urged the government to align its foreign policy with the “Protestant cause” in a wartorn Europe. John Williams, the bishop who allowed John Cotton to drag out his nonconformity, was among the few of his rank who challenged the very heart of the Laudian program, which he did by questioning the new emphasis on the altar in a book published anonymously in 1637. Williams’s politics prompted the government to fine and imprison him.19
As his protest indicated, the Laudian agenda was alienating some who favored episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer or were at the moderate end of the Puritan spectrum. The onslaught on what many English Protestants had taken for granted—anti-popery, for one—drew a critical response from someone as well placed as Samuel Ward, the longtime master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and one of the delegates to the Synod of Dordt, who balked at labeling Reformed orthodoxy as distinctively “Puritan.” As he put it, “Why that should now be esteemed puritane doctrine which those held who have done our Church the greatest service in beating down Puritanism, or why men should be restrained from teaching that Doctrine herafter, which . . . has been generally . . . maintained . . . I cannot understand.” On the third day of the Short Parliament (April 17), a member of the House of Commons revisited the overtones of the same word, tying its abuse to “the divell” and, more immediately, to a popish plot. Another possibility was to insist anew on the connections between the papacy and the Antichrist, as the venerable Thomas Beard did in Antichrist the Pope of Rome (1625), a project abetted by a Puritan-managed reprinting of the Book of Martyrs (1632), and Beard’s Theatre of Divine Judgments (1631).20
Locally, church wardens and magistrates in towns where the godly were a significant presence dragged their feet when told to move the communion table and rail it in, possibly because they recognized in Laud and his allies a clericalism that threatened every local elite. In All Saints, Northampton, where the wardens refused to do so, they filed suit after suit with various agencies in the hope of delaying any action. Once the rails were installed, they remained in place for a few months until someone moved the communion table back to its traditional location (1638). Other people were adding their weight to this resistance by refusing to take communion in the new manner.21 It was telling that neither Laud nor local justices of the peace could prevent these expressions of defiance. Nor were they able to rein in lectureships and the workings of voluntary religion. All this we learn from sources that include Thomas Dugard’s diary, which documents the persistence of “a quasi-presbyterian clerical community” and the “practical failure” of the Laudian program in the second half of the 1630s.22
By the close of the 1620s, the Laudians were being dogged by something far more serious than foot-dragging or surreptitious publications, a rhetoric akin to anti-popery but more extreme in the sense of identifying a conspiracy aimed at undoing Protestantism and English liberties.23 One place where this rhetoric flourished was the House of Commons, which enjoyed a freedom of speech that could not be exercised elsewhere. The agitation in 1621 about the “Spanish match” and James’s attempts to relax the pressure on English Catholics were fresh in the memories of Charles’s first Parliament (1625), and although he enjoyed a better relationship with that body than his father had, the new king never understood that the rhetoric of anti-puritanism made little sense to many in the House of Commons and a smaller group in the House of Lords. Slowly, but with a growing assurance that they were right, a handful of parliamentarians began to argue that liberties that everyone took for granted were being betrayed by a faction of church leaders and courtiers. A name for this faction was easily at hand: “Arminian.” Using this word loosely, critics of the policies of Laud and Charles I combined their several discontents into an alternative version of conspiracy, in this case a plot organized and led by a cabal bent on altering not only the historic identity of the Church of England but also the constitutional system.24
An important moment in the making of this social imaginary came in 1624, when John Pym, a member of the House of Commons, warned that “Arminianism” threatened the very foundations of English Protestantism and civil liberty. Speaking in Parliament for the first time in 1621, Pym had criticized James I’s “lenity” toward Catholics and any relaxing of the laws against Catholic recusancy on the grounds that a domino-like sequence would unfold: “after toleration they [Catholics] will look for equality, after equality for superiority, and having superiority they will seek the suppression of that religion which is contrary to theirs.” Thereafter, Pym drew on anti-popery and the apocalyptic tradition, with its bifurcating of Christ and the faithful few against an ever-threatening Antichrist, to incorporate the whole of the Laudian program into a story of deceit and deception. For men of this mindset, the rhetoric of anti-puritanism had been devised to weaken the unity of the Church of England and make it more vulnerable to subversion. Politically, the implications were just as alarming, for a “popish and malignant party” was using this rhetoric to alienate the king from Parliament and its role in governance.25
No one paid Pym much attention in 1621, but by the mid-1620s the mood in Parliament was changing as more was learned of Charles’s sympathies and speculation rose about the connections between current events and the apocalypse. Stories circulated of who had his ear in Court circles—not only his Catholic wife, but also agents of the papacy and the entourage of priests she had been allowed to bring from France. Telling, too, was his indifference to the plight of Protestants on the Continent. Like his father, Charles ignored this crisis until deciding abruptly—and recklessly—to declare war first on France and then on Spain, episodes that culminated in embarrassing defeats, one of them inflicted on forces sent to relieve the siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle.
The full force of these anxieties was felt in the Parliament that met in 1628 and reconvened in early 1629. In a June 1628 “remonstrance,” the House of Commons singled out Neile and Laud as agents of an Arminian conspiracy, and that same month, both houses endorsed a “petition of right” protesting the king’s breach of constitutional privileges. In November, the Commons resolved that “Whosoever shall bring in innovation in Religion, or by favour or countenance, seek to extend or introduce Popery or Arminianism or other opinion disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, shall be reputed a capital enemy to this Kingdom and Commonwealth.” What Charles said in return—affirming his own authority as “supreme Governor” of the church, endorsing the Thirty-Nine Articles, and characterizing the anxiety about Arminianism as nothing more than “disputes” about “curious points” (i.e., inconsequential)—prompted a committee of the House of Commons to warn in 1629 of the “unfaithfulness and carelessness” of some of the king’s “ministers” who were jeopardizing “the preservation of God’s religion, in great peril now to be lost.” Pointedly, the same committee linked the “extraordinary growth of popery” to “the Queen’s Court” and “the subtle and pernicious spreading of the Arminian [i.e., Laudian] faction,” to which it added a list of parliamentary and other statements on behalf of Reformed orthodoxy. As Pym had done in 1621, the authors of the report asserted that pro-Catholic groups were behind the government’s anti-puritan rhetoric.26
The most striking of these outbursts may have been a speech by Pym’s brother-in-law Francis Rous, a lay theologian who took for granted a Catholic conspiracy against English religious and political liberties. Characterizing Catholicism as “the whore of Babylon” and conflating it with Arminianism, Rous urged the House of Commons to “look into the belly and bowels of this Trojan horse, to see if there be not men in it ready to open the gates to Romish tyranny and Spanish monarchy.” The taxes being levied by the government, taxes the House had repeatedly protested, were part of this conspiracy, as were other tactics aimed at weakening the role of Parliament in the making of state policy. But for Rous, the real challenge was to thwart a project that tied together the religious and the political in ways that corrupted both. If the one fell, the other was sure to suffer the same fate: “when the soul of a Commonwealth is dead, the body cannot long overlive it.” Hence his concluding appeal to the House (and the nation): avert a decline into tyranny by “mak[ing] a vow and covenant . . . to hold fast our God and our religion.”27
The day would come when the people of England and Scotland were summoned en masse to sign such a covenant. In the 1630s, with no Parliaments meeting in England and seemingly no effective avenues of dissent in Scotland, a handful of individuals came forward to dramatize the polarizing of good and bad religion and the specter of tyranny. These men acted at a moment when an updated apocalypticism was reinforcing the scenario of a popish plot. Ever protean, the biblical symbolism of trumpets, seals, vials, whore, and beasts had tempted sixteenth-century Protestants to align the narratives of apostasy, divine judgment, and restoration with the end times as described in Revelation 20: Babylon overthrown, the Devil sealed in a pit, the saints and martyrs reigning with Christ for a thousand years. Uncertainty about the dating and substance of this “millennium” (a “mystery” to John Bale and others in the sixteenth century) persisted, but in the 1590s and continuing thereafter, a fresh group of commentators began to link the symbolism of beasts and vials with history as they knew it and, using various methods, to redate the turning point when renewal or restoration would overtake apostasy—or if not the millennium itself, a millennium-like phase when the visible church would enjoy a distinctive purity. These attempts to decipher Revelation were paralleled by attempts to situate in current history the four kingdoms Daniel discerned in a dream (Dan. 2) and the four beasts he evoked in Daniel 7. Doing so would make it possible to foresee when the fourth kingdom would give way to the rule of the saints in a fifth and final kingdom.
Of the Protestants who struggled to untangle the chronologies embedded in this symbolism, the fiercely anti-Catholic John Napier, a Scottish mathematician, was especially influential. In A Plaine Discovery of the whole Revelation of Saint John (1593), Napier calculated that the final battle against the Anti-christ would begin in 1639 and the Last Judgment happen by the end of the century. Foreseeing a period of well-being for the church on earth as it awaited “the sudden coming of the Lord and bridegroom, Christ Jesus”—a church without any need for another Constantine—Napier may have been the earliest British writer to connect current and future history to the coming kingdom.28 Arthur Dent was much less specific in The ruine of Rome, or An Exposition upon the Revelation (1603), although he predicted that “even in this life” Rome would fall: “What can be more ioyfull or comfortable to all the people of God, then to know afore-hand that Babylon shall fall: Rome shall downe: Antichrist the great persecutor of the Church, shalbe utterly confounded and consumed in this world.” The worsening situation of Protestants in the early stages of the Thirty Years War prompted the important Continental Reformed educator Johann Alsted, whose prodigiously inclusive Encyclopaedia had made him famous, to fix on 1694 as the beginning of the thousand-year rule of the saints, an argument he made in his Diatribe de mille annis apocalypticis (Frankfurt, 1627; translated as The beloved city; or, The saints reign upon earth a thousand years [1643]). In this as in earlier work, he insisted that the sequencing of vials and trumpets encompassed his own era. The English churchman Joseph Mede introduced a new method of aligning prophecy and contemporary events in Clavis Apocalyptica (1627 in Latin, 1643 in English). Although a loyal churchman, he maintained the connections between the papacy and the Christ in the course of arguing that the millennium was not something already accomplished but could be expected at some point in the future.29
For evangelical Protestants in Britain, Thomas Brightman was the most persuasive of these commentators. Like so many others who passed through late sixteenth-century Cambridge University, he became a nonconformist and, in the aftermath of the canons of 1604, was suspended for making “divers bitter invectives against” the state church. After he died in 1607, a Frankfurt bookseller published Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (1609), followed by an English version, A revelation of the apocalypse (Amsterdam, 1611), which, when reprinted in 1615, bore the title A Revelation of the Revelation. Brightman also wrote a Latin commentary on Song of Songs (Basel, 1614) and another on the Book of Daniel (Basel, 1614). Much of his exegesis concerned the dating of the conversion of Jews to Christianity, which he regarded as a necessary prelude to the return of Christ, an assumption grounded on Romans 11:26.30 The more specifically Puritan aspects of his commentary—which drew heavily on Foxe, Bale, and more recent interpreters such as Napier and Hugh Broughton—was the perilous situation of the “whole Christian world” and especially the Church of England, a veritable “Laodicia” (Rev. 3:15) or “lukewarm” church that God would eventually “spew out of his mouth.” What made it lukewarm was the “contagion of the Romist regime” and the absence of effective church discipline. No friend of episcopacy and, like Napier, critical of Constantine although continuing to appeal to the figure of the Christian prince, he interpreted the reference to “Philadelphia,” the most favored of the churches singled out in Revelation (3:7–13) and certain to be included in the “new Jerusalem” to come, as a reference to Reformed-style churches in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands. Using language that harkened back to Thomas Sampson, Brightman warned his own church that it was “far off from coming to a full and due reformation” and would experience the “fury” of Christ unless it altered its pattern of worship.31
That dramatic change would occur was certain, in part because spiritual blindness was gradually giving way to a fuller awareness of divine truth. Taking for granted the progressive unfolding of sacred history, Brightman shared with other interpreters the assumption that, as the return of Christ neared—signaled, among other signs or portents, by the blasts sounded by seven successive trumpets (Rev. 8–9) and the conversion of the Jews—the visible church would experience a second millennium. The first having already occurred, the next phase was a “Middle Advent” or “Brightness of his Coming” (2 Thess. 2:8) when Christ would rule spiritually and the visible church achieve a remarkable purity. Brightman repeated another of the themes of Revelation, that conflict and suffering would intensify as Protestants approached the Middle Advent. A decade or more after he wrote, an English minister influenced by Brightman’s analysis was among the many who corroborated this scenario by citing the Thirty Years War and the rise of the English “Arminians,” both of them interpreted as signs that “Babylon” was continuing to ascend and the papacy to gain ground.32
How it happened that Brightman’s analysis became so well known remains unclear, but it was immediately acknowledged by moderates and radicals in Scotland, England, and the Netherlands: James Melville in a letter of 1609; Separatists in the Netherlands; Robert Parker in An exposition of the powring out of the fourth vial, a brief tract (1616) that circulated in manuscript before being printed in 1650; Richard Bernard in A Key of Knowledge For the opening of the secret mysteries of St Johns mysticall Revelation (1617); David Calder-wood in 1619 and 1621; Alsted in his treatise of 1627; Henry Burton in his apocalyptic The Seven Vials; Or a briefe and plaine Exposition upon the 15: and 16: Chapters of the Revelation (1628). Tellingly, the conformist minister Robert Sanderson remarked in a sermon he preached in 1619 in Boston, Lincolnshire (possibly as a guest of John Cotton), that Brightman was the “great admired [by Puritans] opener of the Revelation.” Summing up one version of his message, Sanderson complained that he “maketh our Church the linsey-woolsey Laodicean Church.”33
Whether Brightman’s doing or, more likely, in response to a wider array of arguments about the impending conversion of the Jews and other events, speculation about the approach of the end times made its way into godly culture on the heels of anti-popery. John White, the godly minister in Dorchester, tucked a reference to the conversion of the Jews into A Planters Plea (1630), as did John Wheelwright in his incendiary fast-day sermon of January 1637 (see below). In April 1639, Brilliana Harley reminded her son Edward, then living at Oxford as a student, that “this year 1639, is the yeare in which maney are of the opinion that Antichrist must begine to falle,” adding that, “if this be not the year, yet shure it shall be, in its due time.” Her afterthought may be as telling as her ability to repeat Napier’s dating, for it suggests that she and her fellow godly were deeply engaged with the scenario of the true church at war with the Antichrist, a process unfolding as she wrote, for English troops were being mobilized to attack Scotland. At about the same moment, Robert Woodford was discerning “the whore of Rome the mother of fornicacon and all the abominacons that are in the earth” in the Laudian program and asking himself “why should not Babilon fall and be cast . . . into the botome of the sea like a milstone”?34
Enter the suffering few who defied church and state in order to expose the malice of the Antichrist. The resolve to become a martyr-like figure came easily to Alexander Leighton (d. 1649), the Scottish minister-turned-doctor who had challenged John Davenport’s conformity in the mid-1620s. At the same moment, he was sounding the alarm about Catholicism in a book of 1624 and did so again in An appeal to Parliament; or Sions plea against the prelacy (1628; printed in Amsterdam with a title page that included a prophetic allusion to the defeat of English troops sent to relieve the siege of the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle). Warning that the true church was in danger and highlighting the duplicities of bishops in the Church of England, he characterized them and “Arminians” in general as agents of a Catholic conspiracy.
The corporal punishment and life imprisonment he suffered in 1630 for his outspokenness were inflicted anew in 1634 and 1637 on three English critics of the regime. Henry Burton, a former royal chaplain who pushed back against the rhetoric of anti-puritanism in the mid-1620s, poured his complaints about Laudian “innovation” into For God and the King (1636) and a “collection of sundry memorable examples of Gods judgements upon Sabbath-breakers” (1636; a direct attack on the Book of Sports); politically, he tied Arminianism to assertions of the divine right of kings. The lawyer and lay theologian William Prynne had already insisted in Anti-Arminianisme (1630) that “Arminians swarme like Locusts in our Church of late,” instancing Richard Montagu and others and characterizing all such men as “Traitors to our Church, our State, our selves.” By the early 1630s, he was arguing in strongly worded books and pamphlets that “Arminianism” was really Catholicism in disguise and, like Burton, singled out Laud as the person responsible for destroying true religion. Prynne was also fiercely critical of the Laudians’ jure divino argument for episcopacy. John Bastwick, a physician, was criticizing the policies of Charles and Laud by 1634 and became more outspoken by 1637, when a Leiden printer published his denunciation of the bishops, “the very offspring of antichrist,” as power-hungry and persecuting tyrants. All three drew on the fusion of Christian primitivism and apocalypticism that Brightman had consolidated at the beginning of the new century, and all three exulted when the moment came for them to withstand the Antichrist in the person of Laud.35 Burton was in trouble by the end of the 1620s and Bastwick by 1634, when he was heavily fined, the same year Prynne lost his ears for publishing what the Star Chamber (a royal court of which Laud was a member) classified as a “libel” against the monarchy.
On the same day in June 1637, the lives of the three became irrevocably intertwined when they were publicly punished after having been convicted in Star Chamber: imprisoned for life, heavily fined, the rest of Prynne’s ears cut off, his forehead branded with the initials “SL” (for seditious libeler), with Burton and Bastwick losing their ears as well. “Many thousands of people” gathered at the site of the humiliation of the three men, a scene transformed by the response of an immense crowd “clapping and shouting for joy to see so great courage and comfort and undauntedness in each of them.” As the victims of this violence made their way across the countryside to places of imprisonment, others cheered them on. Likening this process to a “pilgrimage,” an observer reported that “the Puritans” were treating “the bloody sponges and handkerchiefs that did the hangman service in the cutting off their ears” as the “relics of martyrs.”36
For the thousands who applauded the three men as well as for those who gathered up relics of their brutal treatment, a narrative familiar to every English Protestant had sprung to life. What happened so often in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was happening before their very eyes, the transformation of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne into suffering servants of Christ. At that moment, everything Laud and Charles were hoping to accomplish began to unravel. Now, enemies of the state were really God’s agents on earth and those in power were ungodly tyrants. Or did the treatment of the three martyrs replicate the persecution of the “witnesses” described in Revelation? This was what young John Lilburn assumed at the debut of his career as an outspoken critic of oppression by churches and governments. For Nehemiah Wallington, the government’s handling of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne was another episode in the over-arching story of “the wicked . . . hat[ing] the godly and plot[ing] against them.” “What had these men don that they must suffer so much misery to the sheding of their blood with perpetual imprisonment[?] All was but for preaching and wrighting of the trueth of the word of God. In which their [sic] was a terror to the prelets false prophets Idolatry and profainors of the Lords day.” Echoing Pym and many others, Wallington concluded that forces in England were conspiring to “corrupt” the true church.”37
Several weeks later, a more far-reaching process of reversal erupted in Scotland when a crowd of women attending a Sunday service in Edinburgh shouted down a minister who began to read aloud from a new prayer book. For Laud and the king, this prayer book was the capstone of their program to align the Church of Scotland with a reimagined Church of England. The protests in Edinburgh and, by early 1638, throughout Lowland Scotland, had exactly the opposite outcome, the return of presbyterianism and the abolition of episcopacy. Across the Atlantic in the region known as New England, a similar process was unfolding. There, too, every aspect of the Laudian program gave way to a reformation that surpassed what the presbyterians of Cartwright’s generation had imagined.
Several years before Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne were mutilated, thousands of English men and women were crossing the Atlantic and colonizing a region the explorer John Smith had named New England. At about the same time, many others from Scotland and England were moving to Ireland or creating communities in the Caribbean, Nova Scotia, and the Chesapeake. The earliest of the mainland ventures in North America, the doing of the Virginia Company of London, led to the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Some investors in this project were Puritans of one kind or another, but it was the Virginia Company’s financial difficulties that caused it to assign a patent of land to the Leiden Separatists, who ended up on the north side of Cape Cod, where they founded the town of Plymouth in December 1620. The founders of the Somers Island Company (1612; known today as Bermuda) included Puritan-affiliated investors, one of them Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, who also promoted the founding of Providence Island (1630), which he envisioned as a base for raiding Spanish settlements and possibly as a refuge for political opponents of the king. Of the clergy who came to Bermuda and Virginia, several had been nonconformists in England or presbyterians in Scotland and, in the absence of bishops and church wardens to hold them accountable, did pretty much as they pleased. In the early 1640s, a few of the ministers in Massachusetts went to the Chesapeake at the invitation of preaching-starved colonists in Virginia, a mission terminated by the colony’s royal governor after civil war broke out in England. Thereafter, the two regions diverged, leaving Massachusetts and three other jurisdictions (Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth) as the only places in mainland North America with a resolutely Puritan culture.38
The Massachusetts phase of this story began in 1628 when a group of investors, most of them London merchants known for their Puritan sympathies, formed the New England Company for the purpose of establishing a settlement along the coast. A year later, the company enlisted prominent ministers and gentry from East Anglia and renamed itself the Massachusetts Bay Company. Several of these London merchants had participated in the Feoffees for Impropriations and, in the 1640s, became “pre-eminent among the financiers and organizers of the parliamentary cause.”39 Despite being at odds with the policies of Charles I, the company’s leaders secured a royal charter to the land between Cape Cod and a few miles beyond the Merrimack River to the north. Charter in hand, the company voted in October 1629 to transfer its leadership (or “government of persons”) and the actual charter to Massachusetts, a decision paired with the naming of John Winthrop, who owned a manor in Groton (Suffolk), as the company’s governor after he agreed to participate in the venture. A frenetic several months devoted to recruiting ministers, colonists, supplies, and ships enabled Winthrop and many others to leave England in March 1630. The venture hung in the balance for the next year or so, but by 1633 fresh waves of immigrants began to arrive, some of them organized in “companies” made up of parishioners of a minister or of families that knew one another. Separately, several Puritan-affiliated English aristocrats and gentry created the Say-brook Company (1632) and acquired the rights to territory along the coast and upriver in present-day Connecticut as well as to the north of Massachusetts. In trouble with the government of Charles I because of their connections with the Scottish insurgency (see below, sec. 3), some of the Saybrook organizers considered moving to Connecticut or elsewhere in the New World but stayed put once Charles I summoned the Parliament that met in November 1640.40
By the end of the decade, the colonists had dispersed along the coast or moved inland, migrations that ended up adding two more colonies—Connecticut and New Haven—to Plymouth and Massachusetts. Another cluster of settlements on Aquidneck Island and the nearby mainland evolved into the colony of Rhode Island (1644), which became a haven for people such as Roger Williams. From the start, and in sharp contrast to early Virginia, the four orthodox colonies attracted intergenerational families bent on remaining in their new home and, by the time immigration ceased in 1639/40 in response to political turmoil in England, several dozen men who had previously been ordained in the Church of England had arrived and resumed their profession.41
Only a small fraction of the godly crossed the Atlantic in the 1630s. The decision to do so came easily to some. For others, it emerged out of careful consideration of the merits and risks of an ever-more-threatened “old non-conformity” versus the merits and risks embedded in the project of colonization. As recalled by one of the colonists before he changed his mind, it seemed better to remain in England and “suffer than to cast himself upon dangers in flying [fleeing].” Seeking more advice, John Sill exposed his dilemma to “many ministers” who “sought God and could not tell [him] what” to do. For those who made up their minds more quickly, worship was the heart of the matter. In entries in a notebook he began to keep in the 1640s, John Brock recalled having been taught by his parents and others to “see the Evil of the Idolitrous Worship & Ceremonies of the Church of England.” Brock had avoided ministers who adhered to the rules of the state church, a practice that made it easier to immigrate. Another incentive was the “love” he felt for “the Saints that were called Puritans” and the possibility of entering “the Society of a beloved Christian.” The laymen Nathaniel Sparrowhawk and Edward Collins also cited the difference between the “superstitions” that “clouded God in ordinances” and the “purity” of worship in New England as their main reason for leaving England; according to Collins, he had been unable to “find God’s presence in ordinances, being full of mixtures” and welcomed the “liberties” he had gained by immigrating. Writing from Massachusetts in October 1635 to his brother in England, the layman Edward Trelawny contrasted the “abominations and wickedness” he had witnessed in his homeland with the “pure worship of God” he found in Massachusetts, a difference he “account[ed] the greatest happiness” he had ever known. Summing up these aspirations and his own as of 1630, John Winthrop noted that the purpose of the migration was to secure “a place upon the earth” where the church could be “better preserved from the Common corruptions of this evill world” and the “Ordinances” would regain their “purity.”42
For most of the ministers who left England, the decision to immigrate grew out of tensions between conscience and conformity that the Laudian program was exacerbating. As several pointed out in a collaborative letter (1637 or 1638) explaining why they gave up on the old nonconformity, the turning point had been the decision to regard certain practices or rules in the state church as “unlawful” and therefore too much for “conscience” to bear. John Davenport made the similar point in a letter of 1633: “in matters of conformity to the ceremonies established . . . I cannot practice them as formerly I have done.” With compromises a thing of the past, most of the ministers and many of the colonists were eager to use their newfound “libertie” to achieve familiar ends: eliminating every trace of idolatry, protecting the sacraments from the unworthy, and asserting the authority of the church to act on its own. No longer bound by the principle of things indifferent associated with the old nonconformity, ministers and laypeople imagined Massachusetts (and more broadly, New England) as a place where they could restore church, worship, and ministry to their primitive perfection.43
A reformation of this kind looked back to what Thomas Sampson and John Knox had attempted in the 1560s, and forward to the Middle Advent. In Winthrop’s letters as well as in those he received on the eve of immigrating, references abound to the “worke” of “establishing of a true church” and right worship. Writing from Massachusetts in 1634, John Cotton told a friend that “our people here desire to worship God in spirit, & in trueth,” adding that the principal reason he and others had for leaving their homeland was “that we mighte enjoy the libertye, not of some ordinances of god, but of all, & all in Purity.” Two years later, he told another correspondent that the colonists “doe in generall professe, the reason of their coming over to us was, that they might be freed from the bondage of such humane inventions and ordinances as their soules groaned under.” A prominent layman echoed these words in a letter of 1634 to an English correspondent: “I account it an excellent mercy that the Lord has brought me to see that which my forefathers desired to see but could not: to see so many churches walking in the way and order of the gospel, enjoying that Christian liberty that Christ has purchased for us.” For Thomas Weld, freedom of this kind was reason to rejoice. In a rapturous letter of mid-1632 to the godly of Terling, Essex, where he had been a lecturer in the 1620s, Weld reported that in his new homeland, “all things are done in the form and pattern showed in the mount [Exod. 25:40] members provided church officers elected and ordained sacrament administered . . . fast days and holy feast days and all such things . . . performed according to the precise rule,” adding, a sentence later, that “all things [are] so righteously so religiously and impartially carried, I am already fully paid for my voyage.” Echoing what Brightman had prophesied about the immanence of the kingdom, Cotton exulted in a letter to John Davenport, then in the Netherlands, that “the Order of the Churches and of the Commonwealth was so settled in New England, by common Consent, that it brought to his mind, the New Heaven and New Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness.” A journey to Massachusetts thus became a journey down a road that very few English Puritans had traveled, a journey driven by “the Spirit of God” and destined to “set a patterne of holiness to those that shall succeed us.”44
Simultaneously, the founders of Massachusetts embarked on an experiment in civil governance. According to the provisions of the Massachusetts Bay Company charter, “freemen” were stockholders in the company. Only a handful were present by the fall of 1630, a circumstance these men amended by admitting 116 men to the status of freemen and, the following spring, tying the status of freeman to church membership. At once, this step eliminated the criteria of wealth and rank that, for the most part, determined who could vote in England. Several years later (1635), a small group of ministers articulated a rationale for this rule and its corollary, that anyone holding office in the colony must also be a church member. Citing, among other biblical passages, Proverbs 29:2, “Where the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice,” they gave two reasons for requiring “that all free men . . . be only Church-members.” The first was the possibility that, without such a rule, “others besides Church members” would become part of the government and turn it against the project of reform. The second combined the biblical and the political, the imperative of adhering to “the pattern of Israel, where none had power to choose but only Israel, or such as were joined to the people of God.”45
Some months later, John Cotton defended the law in response to Lord Say and Sele, an English aristocrat of Puritan sympathies who wrote Winthrop asking for political privileges consistent with his rank if he came to the new colony. At Winthrop’s urging, Cotton replied that the law was a “divine ordinance” based on (among others) Exodus 18:21 and could not be compromised. Cotton also emphasized its benefits in a colony that was assigning so much authority to church members and conferring significant “liberties” on everyone. Stability hinged on giving some group an “interest” in supporting the new version of church government. As Cotton noted, “Purity, preserved in the church, will preserve well-ordered liberty in the people.” Doing so was also in keeping with godly rule, or the moment—tied to the rhythms of prophetic time—when the “saints” would finally come into their own as rulers.46
Left unsaid at this moment but discernible in hindsight were three circumstances that enabled the colonists to travel as far as they did down the path of reformation. Of these three, the most crucial was being on the other side of the Atlantic. Had Charles I been able to defeat the Scots in 1639/40, it seems certain that his government would have curtailed the colonists’ autonomy. In 1636, it demanded that the colony return the Massachusetts Bay Company charter, which the leadership in Massachusetts refused to do. A year later, there was talk in London of sending a royal governor. Instead, Charles found himself dealing with the Scottish insurgency and, by the end of 1640, contending with a Parliament that would not have agreed to undo what was happening in New England. The reformers in Scotland came close to having a similar freedom, but Massachusetts was the first place where the godly could act without having to worry about the royal supremacy, a Court of High Commission, and a state church with its apparatus of canons, Book of Common Prayer, and parishes. As the minister Thomas Allen observed to John Cotton in 1642, the “dangerous” aspects of the royal supremacy had given way to a situation where the colonists could proceed without “such burdens as the churches [in England] were not able to bear.” Thanks to being on the other side of the Atlantic, the colonists also avoided the clash between Presbyterians and Independents that disrupted the Westminster Assembly, the Long Parliament, and the alliance formed in 1643 between the Long Parliament and the Scottish government (see chap. 8).47
Immigration dispensed with another obstacle to reform. Although the people who arrived by the thousands in the 1630s were never of one mind, few of them resembled the “swearers” and “sons of Belial” who abused the godly in England. Of more importance in the short run, none of the grandees or aristocrats who participated in the Puritan movement turned up and remained. It is telling of Lord Say and Sele’s perspective that, in Providence Island, the colony off the coast of South America he helped create, political authority was vested in a small group of officers appointed from afar, whereas in Massachusetts (as of 1634) the governor, deputy governor, magistrates, and deputies who represented each town were being elected annually by a substantial group of “freemen.” Policies of the kind Cotton defended in his letter to Say and Sele ensured that Massachusetts and its sister colonies attracted only a tiny number of landed gentry and very few others, such as lawyers, who enjoyed special privileges in England. This shortening of the social scale and curtailing of socio-legal privilege had immense consequences: long-stalled demands for reform of the legal system became feasible, and popular participation in churches and civil governments expanded well beyond what was customary in England and Scotland. Because no town or colony awarded local congregations any property and tithes had disappeared, the crazy-quilt system of financing the state churches in England and Scotland vanished. No layperson in early New England would ever own church property, profit from church tithes, or in some manner “own” the privilege of choosing a local minister.48
One other circumstance is often overlooked—and, in the present-day rush to discover “diversity” among the colonists, overlooked without any awareness of what diversity looked like in Ireland, Scotland, and England. In two of those countries, Catholicism remained the religion of a significant number of people; and in Ireland, of nearly all the native Irish. Decade after decade, governments and state churches pressured these people into becoming Protestants and executed the militantly Catholic. In all three countries, therefore, coercion was a fact of life for Catholics, with persecution an ever-present possibility, although Catholics and others deemed heretics, like the tiny sect known as “Familists,” became adept at blending in. Spared any such Catholic presence, Massachusetts and the other orthodox colonies were not spared the presence of Protestants who questioned this or that policy. But as commonly happened in Scotland, the typical response to criticism from within, as it were, was to banish these people.
At the outset, the organizers of the Massachusetts Bay Company remained silent about their understanding of the true church. Aware of rumors that the company was a Trojan horse filled with Separatists, its leaders initiated a literary campaign (1630) that included John White of Dorchester’s A Planters Plea: Or the grounds of plantations examined, another text by John Cotton, and a brief statement issued just before Winthrop set sail in which he and six others professed their affection for “our deare Mother” the Church of England, a statement White (who may have written it) quoted in his own text.49 In the other, a letter by John Cotton that circulated in handwritten copies, he complained about an event in the town of Salem, where an advance group of colonists had organized a church in 1629 and, shortly thereafter, installed two ministers hired by the company, Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton. The newly formed congregation was “gathered” or selective, omitting two-thirds of the settlers and bringing the other third together in a covenant. A year later, as this group was preparing to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, Winthrop and a handful of others who arrived at Salem with him asked if they could participate. Another newcomer wanted the two ministers to baptize one of his children. To each request the answer was no, the reason being that the two sacraments were reserved to those who were joined in covenant. On the other hand, the congregation welcomed a member of the semi-Separatist Jacob-Lothrop community “upon sight of his testimony from his church” and agreed to baptize his child. Hearing of this event, Cotton wrote at once to express his dismay, for the rebuff of Winthrop seemed to signal a Separatist-like policy of rejecting the parish churches in England because they lacked “the essentiall forme of a church,” that is, a covenant and some means of disciplining the many who were “scandalous gospellers.” Cotton thought he knew what had happened. “You went hence of another judgment,” he told the two ministers, adding that “your chaunge hath sprung from new-Plimmouth-men.”50
Seen through Cotton’s letter, the events at Salem imply a fast-paced process of improvisation, as though the earliest people to arrive were reaching into the grab bag of Puritan ideas about the true church and emerging with several akin to Separatist principles. The more apt comparison may be with the “unsettled” Elizabethan Settlement. As in that long-ago period, so in early 1630s Massachusetts hopes ran high for an unflinching process of reform that would eliminate anti-Christian “tyranny” and Catholic style ‘idolatry.” Turning these hopes into rules and practices tested the civil leadership of Massachusetts and the cadre of ministers who participated in the migration. As late as 1635–36, the situation remained fluid in places such as Salem. There, the presence of Separatist-like tremors had much to do with the volatile Roger Williams. After he arrived in the colony in February 1631, he refused to “joyne with the Congregation at Boston because they would not make a public declaration of their repentance for havinge Communion with the Churches of England.” Two years later, he asserted that Charles I was guilty of “blasphemy” and, as a “friend of the Beast,” had “committed Fornication with the whore.” He also complained that the colonists had no right to the lands they were occupying. In Salem, where he preached from time to time and eventually was chosen by the congregation as its “teacher,” he declared that all the “churches of England” were “Antichristian.” The following spring (1635), after the government required every man in the new colony to take an oath of loyalty, Williams preached that no magistrate should “tender an oath to an unregenerate man” or ministers “pray with such though wife child etc.” He disagreed as well with the Old Testament model of righteous kings who enforced divine law, which his fellow ministers endorsed. In these early moments of his long life in New England, Williams was true to one strand of the Puritan movement in placing so much emphasis on the difference—for him, almost impossible to bridge in the everyday world—between purity and corruption in both churches and civil life.51
Elements of this purism turned up elsewhere, as when George Phillips, about to be named minister of the congregation in newly founded Watertown in 1630 and previously a minister in England, told his prospective congregation that “if they will have him stand minister by that calling which he had received from the prelates in England, he will leave them”—troubling because a stance of this kind echoed Separatist practice and threatened to divide congregations from ministers and ministers from each other. (Williams was also a critic of “unlawful” callings.) Simultaneously, some of the colonists were saying harsh things about the Church of England in letters that became widely known. A correspondent alerted Winthrop to rumors of “a too palpable separation of your people from our church gouernement” and, in a follow-up letter, that “you count all men in England, yea all out of your church . . . in the state of damnation.” The tremors also included an act of iconoclasm. In November 1634, with warm support from Williams, John Endicott, who had headed the new colony until Winthrop arrived, sliced the St. George’s cross out of the English flag the militia in Salem was using.52
These gestures drew a strong response from civil and religious leaders. Learning that an unidentified person had accused certain congregations of “mak[ing] whores and drunkards visible Christians,” Winthrop offered a measured defense of people of “weake” faith and their nurture by the church. He had an ally in John Wilson. Elected minister of the congregation in Boston in 1630, he told the group that, although he gladly accepted reordination, he would not “renounce his ministrye he received in Englande.” In another riposte to Separatist-style purity, the leadership of the colony censured Endicott and enlisted Thomas Hooker to defend the proposition that the flag was “no . . . danger” to the program of reform. (Two years later, the government eliminated the St. George’s cross except in the flag at the fort which guarded the harbor.) Although Cotton sided with Endicott, he told Williams that the colonists were bent on “walk[ing] with an even foote betweene two extreames; so that we neither defile our selves with the remnant of pollutions in other churches, nor doe wee . . . renounce the Churches [in England] themselves, nor the holy ordinances of God amongst them,” a stance he characterized as “moderation.” The decisive step came in December 1635 when the magistrates ordered Williams to leave the colony. After a brief stop in Plymouth, he reemerged as one of the founders of the town of Providence in what subsequently became Rhode Island.53
Amid these crosscurrents,54 a consensus was emerging on several key aspects of church order. Winthrop signaled this process in a letter to an English friend in September 1633 noting the concurrence of Cotton and Hooker, who traveled together to Massachusetts that year. Agreement on a two-kingdoms framework happened easily, abetted by the willingness of the civil leaders of Massachusetts to forgo any role in the process of church discipline and the colonists’ determination to dispense with the heavy hand of the civil state in religious affairs. A conference among the ministers held in 1635 produced “A Model of Church and Civil Power.” Reiterating the difference between spiritual and temporal forms of authority that so many Reformed Protestants (and Luther!) had articulated, the authors of the “Model” described Christ as head of the visible church, and Scripture (“the pattern in his Word”) as authoritative in all matters of church order. Thereafter, it empowered congregations to choose their ministers, admit members, and carry out the process of church discipline in local churches, to encompass everyone regardless of rank or social status. Conversely, the “Model” barred churches from “erecting or altering forms of Civil Government” and ministers from holding civil office. The purpose of these strictures was to ensure that “the civil state and the church may dispense their several governments without infringement . . . of the power and honor of the one or the other.” The boundaries between the two were sacred, the doing of a sovereign God. The point was also to disprove the commonplace that two-kingdoms theory threatened the authority of the civil state. Not so, the authors of the “Model” insisted, as long as the church stayed within the confines of the “ecclesiastical and spiritual.” Ultimately, the significance of the “Model” was its understanding of the church. Instead of reproducing a Christendom in which church and nation or empire were indistinguishable, it took for granted that the true church was akin to the church of the earliest Christian centuries: possibly persecuted, never itself an instrument of persecution, and “free” in the sense of embracing voluntary membership and divine law. As John Cotton had been wont to say, “Christianity fell asleep in Constantine’s bosom.” Now, among a newly awakened group of the colonists, a postimperial church was coming into its own.55
The making of church and state extended into the 1640s, when the substance of the “Model” was incorporated into the “Body of Liberties,” a text drafted in the late 1630s and circulated among all the towns before being endorsed by the colony’s General Court in 1641. Among the “liberties” pertaining to the church was the “full liberty” of godly people to “gather themselves into a Church estate,” followed by a liberty from “injunctions” by the state “in point of Doctrine, worship or Discipline.” Simultaneously, the “Body of Liberties” conceded to “Civil Authority” the “power and liberty to see the peace, ordinances and Rules of Christ observed in every church according to his word so it be done in a Civil and not in an Ecclesiastical way.”56
When John Davenport arrived in the colony in 1637, he reemphasized these principles in a text that remained in manuscript until the 1660s, “A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion.” Starting from the premise that church and state were “co-ordinate States” working together to promote the “spiritual good of men and the glory of God,” Daven-port warned against any confounding of these two spheres, “1. . . . either by giving the Spiritual Power into the hand of the Civil Magistrate . . . or 2. By giving Civil Power to Church-Officers.” Davenport’s “Discourse” and the ministers’ “Model” are striking for what was not said. When Cartwright endorsed the same principles during the Admonition Controversy, he was pressed by Whitgift to acknowledge the royal supremacy. Nothing akin to the equivocations in Cartwright’s response appear in the two Massachusetts statements and nothing, as well, of the tortured deliberations of the General Assembly in Scotland about clerical representation in the Scottish Parliament. Instead, the “Model” affirmed a policy that had been signaled in 1632 when the ruling elder of the Boston Church resigned his post as secretary of the government rather than hold these two posts at the same time. Thereafter, no minister or ruling elder held civil office of any kind in Massachusetts and its sister colonies. When asked by English moderates if the churches in Massachusetts could act without the approval of the head of state, the ministers answered, Robert Browne-like, that there was no need to wait for such support, one sign, among many, that the colonists had put the royal supremacy and the tempered Erastianism of English Parliaments out to pasture.57
Agreement also came easily on what form of church government the new colony would adopt. By the close of the 1630s a few “presbyterians” had arrived in Massachusetts and set up town churches. Yet they were far outnumbered by ministers and lay colonists who preferred a congregation-centered system. No document survives from discussions of circa 1631–1634 about the merits of a congregational polity, and we cannot make much of the example of Salem. However, Cotton’s insistence mid-voyage in 1633 that he would not baptize a ship-born son because his ministry had lapsed clearly pointed in this direction, as did the presence of Thomas Hooker on the same ship. In 1631, Hooker had told John Paget, the minister of the English church in Amsterdam, that he favored the reasoning of William Ames about the capacity of a “particular congregation” to choose its own minister. In their back- and-forth, Hooker also cited the theorizing of Ames, Robert Parker, and Paul Baynes on the autonomy of each church in other respects. John Davenport had taken the same stand during his dealings with Paget.58 Another straw in the wind was the arrival in 1635 of Hugh Peter who, in England, had helped raise funds for the Feoffees for Impropriations before leaving for the Netherlands, where he reorganized the English church in Rotterdam in accordance with the theorizing of Ames, who died just as he was about to join the Rotterdam congregation. Plan or no plan on the part of the Massachusetts Bay Company, it is striking that Peter and Ames had been approached in 1629 about becoming ministers in the new colony; after Ames died, his wife and family arrived in 1636. Knowing little about the politics of most of the ministers who reached Massachusetts by 1635, we can credit Cotton, Hooker, and a few others with extraordinary influence (which may have been the case) or acknowledge that long-existing possibilities rooted in the hybrid program of Cartwright, Travers, and their fellow presbyterians were springing into life. In May 1634, Winthrop told someone in England that “our Churches are governed by Pastors, Teachers ruling Elders and Deacons, yet the power lies in the wholl Congregation and not in the Presbitrye further then for order and precedencye,” a clear indication that agreement been reached on a de-centralized structure—soon to acquire the name of “Congregational Way”—akin to what Henry Jacob had attempted in London and others in the Netherlands.59
To Cartwright and, for that matter, John Calvin, several aspects of this polity would have seemed appropriate and others, unsettling. Every minister was to reside in a parish—or more precisely, was attached to the town-based congregation that elected him to office. In keeping with what was said in Travers’s Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline, the “office” of these men could not be exercised outside the boundaries of that congregation. More unusual was the principle, which Robert Browne had emphasized and Ames endorsed, that congregations should be founded on a covenant. Covenants of this kind were welcomed by most of the ministers in Massachusetts as a means of committing church members to mutual “edification,” and symbolically as a means of differentiating Christ’s spiritual kingdom from the profane or fallen world. Tradition reappeared in the structure of ministry, for the colonists reaf-firmed what was said in the Scottish books of discipline: corporate or collective and incorporating the rule of “parity,” it retained the familiar titles of teacher, pastor, elders (in Massachusetts, a single person), and deacons. Left unsaid, yet telling in light of what would happen in England in the 1640s, was the assumption that ministers held a distinctive office entitling them but not laymen to administer the sacraments.
To these principles and practices, the ministers and lay leaders were adding others that would have bothered Cartwright and, in the 1630s, were criticized by more conservative godly in England. One red flag to moderates was the decision to empower lay church members (the men, that is) to select their minister and ordain him without outside supervision. Congregations also held the “power of the keys,” a principle that allowed them to debate and vote on matters of church discipline. Telling, too, was the willingness to let laymen “prophesy” (by asking questions, or perhaps by commenting on Scripture) during church services. From a presbyterian perspective, the decision to do away with centralized structures to which congregations were accountable was troubling. So was the shift toward lay governance. Both clashed with the assumption that parish churches should be supervised by a collectivity of ministers and, more tellingly, by synods.
Any such structures were melting away in the hothouse atmosphere of 1630s Massachusetts, their place taken by a robust understanding of each congregation’s liberties. Always with episcopacy and Catholic “tyranny” as reference points, Cotton underscored the importance of safeguarding the churches from unlimited power in sermons he was preaching on Revelation 13 in the late 1630s. These were notable for his pessimism about the tendency of “transcendent power . . . [to] certainly over-run those that give it, and those that receive it.” Everyone in Massachusetts and, for that matter, every Puritan in Britain, knew of real-life examples of this process—Catholicism, of course, and the royal prerogative in the hands of Charles I and church leadership in the hands of William Laud. For Cotton, a system of autonomous, self-governing congregations was the ideal means of protecting laypeople from a relentless appetite for power.60
About the same time as Cotton was describing the perils of unlimited authority, two of his fellow ministers were justifying the experiment with lay-centered governance. Responding to English critics who complained that the new system was empowering “illiterate” people, Richard Mather altered the meaning of literacy by locating it in the “hearts” of those who “have learned the Doctrine of the holy Scripture in the fundamentall points thereof.” Thomas Hooker was explicit in A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (1648; written several years earlier). There, he argued that “these are the times when people shall be fitted” to “receive and practice” much greater privileges. Like Mather before him, he deployed the scenario of the end times to subvert the cultural trope of “the people” as ignorant and unskillful and therefore “not fit to share” authority with those who were their superiors. Citing Brightman and evoking the new day that was dawning, Hooker insisted that God was enacting a great reversal: those of low rank or status were being raised up and made “fit,” for “the Lord hath promised: To take away the vail from all faces in the mountain, the weak shall be as David, and . . . the light of the Moon shall be as the Sun.”61
This newfound confidence in the people prompted other aspects of the new system. With state-mandated tithes and lay patronage dispensed with, congregations shifted to voluntary contributions. Justifying this practice to English critics, Mather evoked the framework of Christian primitivism: the “poison” of “settled endowments” had not entered the Christian church until the fourth century CE.62 What happened with maintenance was also happening with worship, which the colonists wanted to liberate from structures that impeded the free movement of the Spirit. Stray copies of the Book of Common Prayer made their way to Massachusetts, but local congregations preferred the pattern of worship used in Scotland and endorsed by English presbyterians, a Sunday service consisting of Scripture readings, the singing of psalms, Word-centered sermons, and several times a year, the Lord’s Supper. More daringly, the ministers insisted on free-form prayer, which they defended as in keeping with the “liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” and the “Primitive patterns of . . . the Churches of God in their best times.” There may have been some restlessness with singing a fixed text, as the psalms most certainly were, and argument arose about allowing laymen to ask questions during church service. Yet these disputes never became divisive, perhaps because what Cotton said on behalf of text-based singing was persuasive. As in Scotland and as Cartwright had proposed in the 1570s, marriages and funerals became civil events.63
The culminating feature of the Congregational Way was its version of church membership. What mattered most was to replace the “mixt multitude” of the typical English parish with churches “of saints . . . called by god into the fellowship of Christ” where they would “edify themselves.” Complaints about inclusive churches filled with the unworthy had figured in the Admonition to the Parliament and the presbyterian program of the 1570s and 1580s. At that moment, the remedy was twofold: bar them and their children from the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion and transfer the workings of church discipline from ecclesiastical courts to each parish. Now, in Massachusetts, this project acquired a fresh importance in the context of the colonists’ aspirations for purity. No longer constrained by the parish system, and remembering how they had grieved in their homeland “when . . . profane persons” participated in the Lord’s Supper, ministers and laypeople concurred on limiting membership to “Saints by calling” or “visible saints,” the phrase used by the organizers of a congregation in the newly founded town of Dedham, Massachusetts.64
A step of this kind had been anticipated in Separatist or semi-Separatist ventures dating from the 1580s and hinted at in the Admonition Controversy. At those moments, the more “forward” Puritans had narrowed the distance between the visible and invisible churches and tied the validity of the church as a spiritual community to the ongoing presence of edification, or growth in grace as expressed in mutual love. Without using this word, John Winthrop endorsed the goal of edification in his “Charitie Discourse” of 1630. There, he outlined an ethics of “sympathy” or “love” for one another that visible saints were uniquely able to practice. Soon after he arrived in Massachusetts, Cotton was extolling the same ethics of love he discerned among those who had passed into membership. In the earliest of his manifestos about church order, Cotton echoed Paul’s counsel to the initial Christian churches, calling on the saints to practice “brotherly love . . . and the fruits thereof, brotherly unity” and “brotherly equality.” By unity he meant a congregation “perfectly joined together in one mind and one judgment . . . not provoking or envying one another . . . but forbearing and forgiving.” By equality he meant a version of the golden rule, Christians “preferring others before ourselves . . . and seeking one anothers welfare . . . and feeling their estates, as our owne,” playing here on the double meaning of estate as worldly wealth and spiritual condition.65
The unity of the local church and its commitment to the golden rule were ideals embedded in the covenants adopted by most New England congregations. In 1639 the founders of the congregation in Branford agreed to “deny ourselves . . . all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and all corruptions and pollutions wherein in any sort we have walked” and, looking ahead, to “walk together . . . in all brotherly Love and holy Watchfulness to the mutuall building up one another in Faythe and Love.” Woburn’s covenant affirmed a commitment to “mutual aid,” adding a rejection of “the ordinate love and seeking after the things of the world.” In Concord, the covenant opened with a backward glance at the “yoke and burdening of mens traditions” of the colonists’ English years and the “precious liberty of the ordinances” they were enjoying in New England. Agreeing to subject themselves to Christ as king, the church members spoke with unusual realism about the possibility of “devour[ing] one another” and giving way to “self-love.” Their way of thwarting such self-love was to promise to “avoid all oppression . . . and hard dealing, and [to] walk in peace, love, mercy, and equity . . . doing to others as we would they should do to us.”66 In 1647, the congregation in Windsor, Connecticut, renewed its commitment to a social ethics it shared with many other local churches, an ethics encompassing “love, humility, peacefulness, meekness, inoffensiveness, mercy, charity, spiritual helpfulness, watchfulness, chastity, justice, truth, self-denial,” and mutual encouragement in the form of “counsel, admonition, comfort, oversight.”67
A similar fervency flavored the process of organizing the congregation in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1637–38. The handful of men who led the way began by agreeing that “the proper matter of” a church was “visible believers or saints,” by which they meant people “who ought to make their faith and holynes visible not only by ther baptism” and “a civillle restrained life and some other religious duties . . . but such as by a profession of an inward worke of faith & grace declared by an holy life sutable therto [emphasis added]” made them capable of expressing “brotherly love” to others. This step accomplished, the next was to join in a covenant or “band of love” requiring everyone to preserve the “ordinances . . . in purity” and practice “all [the] duties of brother love especially faithfulnes to the soules of one an other in watching over each other.”68
What happened in Dedham was also happening elsewhere. The founding of a congregation in Newtown (soon to be renamed Cambridge) in February 1636 seems to have been regarded as an example that other communities should emulate. Accepting the advice of colleagues who were present that seven persons were needed to “make a Churche,” Thomas Shepard and six or seven men of the town “declare[d] what worke of Grace the Lord had wroughte in them” and “gave a solemne assent” to the church covenant. That the sermon text he chose for his sermon this day was Ephesians 5:27 indicates how fervently Shepard wanted the new congregation to be “a glorious church . . . holy and without blemish.”69 Thereafter, the women and men who became members in the 1630s and 1640s described their spiritual histories in “relations,” a practice in other churches as well, although not in all of them and not always in the same manner. In sermons Shepard preached on the parable of the ten virgins (Matt. 25:1–13) soon after the congregation had been organized, he spoke rapturously about “virgin churches, not . . . defiled with the company of evil men; pure ordinances, pure people, pure churches,” evoking, as he did so, the “brightness of his coming” prophesied in Daniel and Revelation when, awaiting the second coming of Christ, churches would “make themselves ready” by admitting only those who seemed “visible saints, visible believers, virgins espoused to Christ, escaping the pollutions of idolatry and the world.”70
We may find it perplexing that the colonists raised the bar for church membership, and we may also wonder what was meant by “visible saint” and whether the bar was so high in practice. These are three quite different questions, of which only the first and second can be answered with reasonable precision. Setting the bar as high as possible was in keeping with the dynamics of reform in new-world Massachusetts. The meaning of “visible saint” drew on what ministers such as Shepard, Mather, and (with some reservations) Cotton were saying in the mid-1630s in the context of the practical divinity. Explaining to Mather why the gathering of a church in Roxbury, where he was about to become minister, was thwarted several months after the church in Cambridge came into being, Shepard emphasized the imperative to “build . . . a temple, not of stones, but of saints elect and precious.” After listening to the ‘profession[s] of faith” by laymen in that town, Shepard had decided that these were lacking in “evidences” of “gracious hearts.” The same emphasis on interiority figures in a letter of circa 1637 from a group of Massachusetts clergy to English friends: “We heare them [i.e., candidates] speake concerning the Gift and Grace of Justifying Faith in their soules, and the manner of Gods dealing with them in working it in their hearts.” That local churches wanted to hear about the inward workings of grace was underscored by what was said about infant baptism. As Richard Mather pointed out in Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed, a text dating from the late 1630s, allowing baptized adults to become church members could mean admitting someone who was a “drunkard” or “adulterer.” This was a rhetorical flourish. Mather’s real point was that people baptized as infants in the new colony would still need to make a “personal profession of Faith . . . when they come to yeares,” a rule he likened to the practice in Reformed churches of examining people who wanted access to the Lord’s Supper.71
Statements of this kind seem unimpeachable evidence of how the colonists understood the term “visible saint.” These were people known for their capacity to practice edification and who were able to describe heartfelt “repentance” and encounters with a loving Christ. All too often, historians of this process have relied on “conversion” to encapsulate what was being described or expected. When this word was used in 1630s Massachusetts, it referred to a lifelong process. More commonly, people spoke of making a “profession.” This term may seem formulaic, but in 1630s Massachusetts it signified the same combination of qualities Winthrop singled out in his lay sermon of 1630: profession as ethical practice (mutual love) that stemmed from the workings of the Holy Spirit on the heart. According to a spiritual autobiography written some years later by a woman who had been turned down for membership in Roxbury in the mid-1630s, that church was counting on her to describe a “particular promise made . . . in power” to her, or knowing “experimentally what it was to have . . . grace in my heart.” It seems safe to conclude, therefore, that references to profession took for granted a combination of “inward” or “experimental” and outward evidence or righteousness, which is exactly what happened in Dedham.72
By 1640, a healthy share of the colonists had made their way into church membership.73 Nonetheless, the Newtown-Dedham model excluded people who felt that being a member in good standing in England should entitle them to the same status in Massachusetts. One such person was Mary Oliver of Salem, who “plead[ed] her right” to “be admitted to the Lord’s supper without giving public satisfaction to the church of her faith,” a statement that must be read alongside what she said a little later to John Winthrop, “that all who dwell in the same town, and will profess their faith in Jesus Christ, ought to be received to the sacraments there.” In Shepard’s Cambridge, a high-status woman was remarking about the same time that the congregation was “too strict in examining of members.” Already, too, people who had become church members were beginning to worry about the status of their children, who were not considered real members of a church until, as adults, they satisfied the requirements of circa 1636. Were they condemned to ecclesiastical limbo if they could not do so? A decade after the model of gathered churches had been formalized in Dedham and Newtown (Cambridge), pressure was growing to strengthen the significance of baptism, a story narrated in chapter 9.74
Amid tensions of this kind, the founders of Massachusetts and its sister colonies were implementing an innovative array of rules and practices in social and economic life. In a step with far-reaching consequences, the Massachusetts government distributed the land assigned to the Massachusetts Bay Company by the charter of 1629 to towns to dispose of as they wished. In turn, they distributed it as freehold (rent-free) to the firstcomers or founding families.75 Amazing in and of itself, this process was accompanied by the near-universal practice of allowing all “admitted inhabitants” (i.e., heads of households) to vote in town meetings on how other distributions should be arranged. Commonly, townspeople evoked “equity” or “fairness” alongside the rule of proportionality (those with more received more) as these distributions were being made. The outcome was a system that ensured the economic independence of the great majority of households. In civil affairs, the colonists were almost as daring as they were with their churches. By 1634, the structure of governance described in the Massachusetts Bay Company charter had mutated into a system of deputies from each town meeting alongside magistrates in a “General Court,” with freemen voting annually for governor and magistrates. In Connecticut, the founders of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor were not constrained by a charter and could do whatever they wished. Hostile to Stuart-style monarchy, these towns arranged for the annual election of colony governors and the magistrates (or “Assistants”) who served alongside them. No governor could succeed himself, and the assembly could call itself into session if the governor refused to do so.76
Another forward-looking aspect of governance was visible in the altering of legal procedures and the substance of civil and criminal law. Beginning with a statement titled “How Far Moses [His] Judicials Bind Mass[achusetts]” and another of uncertain title that John Cotton drafted in the mid-1630s, a small group of colonists, none of them lawyers by profession in England, revised practice and principle. Out went law French. In came a cluster of rights and privileges for plaintiffs and defendants: no one could be imprisoned “before the Law hath sentenced him,” bail in all but exceptional cases, the right of appeal to a higher court, allowing plaintiffs and defendants to represent themselves. As well, in came a relocating of courts to towns and counties, with capital cases or those involving banishment reserved for the colony government to decide. Out went torture, high fees, and long delays. In Massachusetts, these reforms were incorporated into the provisional code known as the “Body of Liberties” (1641), which gave way to a Cambridge, Massachusetts–printed compilation of all the laws in force, The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes (1648). The earliest book of its kind in British culture, the Lawes and Libertyes reaffirmed the revisions in legal procedure already spelled out in the “Body of Liberties.” Theft ceased to be a felony punishable by death and became tied to restitution, and crimes deemed “capital” shrank to a short list of Old Testament rules about adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy, and the like—laws that, with few exceptions, no court enforced. The other orthodox colonies followed suit. Overnight, the cruelties of the English law and the abuses of power and money it sanctioned gave way to the values of peace, “mutual love,” and equity.77
Unexpectedly, unity broke down in Massachusetts in the mid-1630s. The proximate cause was the preaching of John Cotton. By 1636, he was having second thoughts about the procedures for admitting new members and the customary wisdom about assurance of salvation. In Cotton’s home congregation of Boston, a laywoman named Anne Hutchinson shared his apprehensions about what people understood as assurance and whether churches were being misled. For her as for Roger Williams, congregations were admitting too many who were hypocrites, a complaint she and Williams owed to their Separatist-like anxiety about who had been a true Christian in England. More emphatically, she objected to the preaching of the colony’s other ministers. Except for John Cotton and John Wheelwright, who had recently arrived, she regarded everyone else as preaching a “covenant of works” instead of “free grace.”78 These assertions touched off a wave of anti-ministerial sentiment that flooded local congregations—Boston’s in particular, where a dispute broke out about the authority of the church members to chastise or dismiss John Wilson, Cotton’s older colleague. “Now the faithfull Ministers of Christ must have dung cast on their faces, and be no better then Legall Preachers, Baalls Priests, Popish Factors,” was how a witness to these events recalled the turmoil of circa 1636–37.79
John Wheelwright added fuel to these fires in a fast-day sermon he preached in Boston in mid-January 1637. The purpose of the fast was to restore peace to a community that was becoming badly divided. Instead of urging peace, Wheelwright evoked the scenario of the faithful few at war with the “many” allied with the Antichrist. Massachusetts, he warned, had its false Christians or “hypocrites,” the people who were saying that “sanctification” was reliable evidence of justification. Evoking a phrase dear to John Knox and many others, Wheelwright characterized the “saints of God” as “few, they are but a little flocke, and those that are enimyes to the Lord . . . are very strong.” To this message he added the ultimate imperative of apocalypticism, the mandate to “kill” the enemies of Christ “with the word of the Lord.” You may lose everything you own, he told those he was characterizing as true “saints,” yet waging war against the Antichrist would only strengthen their relationship with Christ. “Therefore let the saints of god rejoice, that they have the Lord Jesus Christ, and their names written in the book of life.”80
The response on the part of the magistrates and other ministers was unequivocal. Recognizing that Wheelwright’s evocation of “spirituall” warfare threatened to derail any magistracy-ministry–led project of reformation, the government voted him guilty of sedition in March and, in November, banished him from the colony. (He moved to the region that became known as New Hampshire and, by the early 1640s, was beginning to reconcile with Cotton and others.) Thereafter, the magistrates, ministers, and most of the deputies to the General Court closed ranks and initiated a “cure” for what they termed an “infection.” In September, a “synod” of ministers identified eighty-two “errors” and five “unsavory speeches,” doing so in the presence of laypeople who participated in some of the discussion. The final day of reckoning came in November, when the General Court fined, disfranchised, and disarmed dozens of men on various grounds; simultaneously, it banished Hutchinson and men in several congregations. In March 1638, having spent the winter in Roxbury under the watchful care of a minister, Hutchinson was excommunicated by the Boston church for lying about her theological commitments. Later that year, she and her family moved to Rhode Island and subsequently to the Dutch colony of New Netherland, where she and some of her family were killed by Native Americans in 1643.
No one knew this in 1637, but the “Antinomian controversy” anticipated the confusion that overtook the Puritan movement in 1640s England, where the dawning of a new age of the Spirit spurred some of the godly to repudiate the principles of mainstream Puritanism (see chaps. 8 and 9). No such disruption occurred in Massachusetts, for the crackdown on Hutchinson and her allies renewed the alliance of ministers and civil leaders. As the response to Roger Williams had indicated, that alliance was in good shape before the controversy broke out. Amid political unrest about the accountability of the colony’s highest officers, Winthrop and his allies had voted in April 1634 to require every male above the age of sixteen to take an oath of loyalty, adding, a month later, a second oath for the colony’s freemen, a step akin to what the leaders of the “pilgrims” had accomplished with the “Mayflower compact” of 1620. The same year, the government urged ministers and church members to devise a “uniform order of discipline” for the churches, and “to consider how far the magistrates are bound to interpose for the preservation of that uniformity.” The mere hint of an “order” that would include interchurch cooperation aroused Williams and Samuel Skelton, the minister in Salem, to protest that such a step “might grow in time to a Presbiterye or Superintendancye, to the prejudice of the Churches Libertyes.” Brushing aside their complaint, in 1635 the government called on all householders and single men to live within half a mile of a meetinghouse, a response—never of any practical significance—to the untidy dispersal of the immigrants across the landscape, but also a means of preserving moral supervision of the colonists.81
More telling was a step the government took in March 1636, when it ordered that any group intending to organize a new church must “acquaint the magistrates and the elders of the greater part of the churches in their jurisdiction, with their intentions, and have their approbation herein.” Subsequently, the government welcomed the “synod” of September 1637 and, in the “Body of Liberties,” authorized ministers and “brethren” to meet and discuss “doctrine or worship or government,” to the end of “preventing and removeing of errour and offence.” Hearing that the system of voluntary maintenance was causing problems, the government ordered in 1638 that every household in each town contribute to a minister’s income. This year too, the government added civil penalties onto the ecclesiastical penalty of excommunication, a step justified by the presence of people who had not repented within six months of being condemned by their congregations.82
These steps suggest that that a more corporate and state-driven church was emerging within the outer husk of the “Congregational Way.” Something akin to this was happening, although curtailed by the structure already put in place and the fervency of certain ministers and congregations for the freedom and purity of circa 1635–36. Learning of the law of 1636 just as Dedham was beginning to organize a congregation of its own, the people involved in that process asked the government to clarify its practical significance, effectively a shot across the bow of encroaching state control—and a salutary one, for the government quickly acknowledged the liberties of the church. Cotton spoke out against the new law about maintenance and insisted that his own church continue to rely on voluntary contributions. He intervened more emphatically in 1639 when, aroused by the law of 1638 imposing civil penalties on people who had been excommunicated, his strong words about it as an anti-Christian exercise of state power and possibly other protests prompted the government to repeal the measure.83
Nonetheless, the insurgency of 1636–37 was altering the priorities of many ministers and lay leaders. Salem had been a hotbed of dissent while Williams was there, for the congregation included a “separatist” faction. Some of these people left before Hugh Peter arrived in December 1636 as the church’s new minister. Acting quickly to calm things down, Peter gained the congregation’s assent to a covenant that bound church members to spurn “irregularities” and “carrye our selves in all lawfull obedience to those that are set over us in Church and Common wealth.” The Boston congregation also renewed its covenant, vowing as it did so to “submit our selves to the discipline and government of Christ in his Church.” Possibly at the urging of Winthrop, Thomas Shepard preached a sermon in May 1638 on “election day,” when most of the freemen in Massachusetts gathered in one place to cast their votes for governor and other magistrates. Shepard used the occasion to contrast “discontent” and the misuse of “popular election” with “the strict government of god” upheld by the magistrates. From his point of view, the first would result in a politics of “divide and rule” and the second in “peace,” with “public” needs replacing those that were “private.” Perhaps because he knew of restlessness with the rule of 1631 tying the status of freeman to church membership, he warned that those who were “shut out of the fellowship of churches” were certain to be “an enemy unto the strictnes of churches,” adding that, “to “ruine church you ruine state.”84
Another way of preventing future difficulties was to reemphasize catechesis, as the Boston church did in 1636. At his ordination in 1641, Ezekiel Rogers spoke “somewhat earnestly about Catechizing, which (if God mean us good) must be a maine help.” Its benefits were social as well as religious, benefits he regarded as imperative because of the “many Anabaptisticall Spiritts among us.” By the close of the 1640s, thirteen different ministers had written catechisms for their congregations, some doing so in response to a recommendation of the government in 1641 that they resume the practice of instructing their congregations. Founding a college belongs in this sequence of events. The initial steps in this direction were taken in 1636. Two years later, a generous bequest from John Harvard, a Cambridge graduate and minister who died soon after arriving in the colony, prompted the organizers to attach his name to the new institution. Brushing aside any doubts about the importance of formal learning in the formation of ministers, the founders reproduced as closely as they could the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge. As was said in New Englands First Fruits (1643), which publicized the college and the earliest stirrings of missionary outreach to the Native Americans, the purpose of Harvard was to produce a learned ministry.85
All this while, the godly community in Britain had been watching and wondering as news trickled in of Williams’s outbursts, the “Antinomian” insurgency of 1636–37 associated with Anne Hutchinson, and the making of the “Congregational Way.” Much of this news was alarming to men of the stature of Richard Bernard and John Dod. What made them anxious was the possibility—signaled in John Cotton’s letter of 1630 to the ministers of Salem—that the colonists had veered too close to Separatism. In a letter of 1637 signed by Dod and twelve other ministers, the group expressed its dismay with the colonists’ aversion to “stinted” prayer and the empowering of a majority of church members to decide matters of discipline, “though the pastours & governers & part of the asssemblie be of another minde.” These men also worried that church membership had become effectively Separatist, given the rule that membership in the Church of England did not qualify someone for church membership in New England. The deeper issue was theological. How could congregations be confident of knowing the difference between the worthy and the unworthy? And why were the ministers rejecting the concept of a universal visible church that encompassed all who were Christians? Turning to church governance and the power of the keys, Dod and his colleagues warned that the new system was unduly “popular.” In what sense was ministry a divine “calling” if everyone in this office received his authority from the congregation and was ordained by laymen? Wary of “popularity” at a moment when it was synonymous with “Brownisme,” the letter writers urged the ministers in Massachusetts to hold on to the authority that was rightfully theirs—indeed, necessarily theirs given the sorry consequences of popularity. Concluding, Dod and his colleagues pleaded with the ministers to reconsider what they had done and “speedily reforme what is out of order.”86
Queries of this kind suggest that, from afar, no one understood that a dynamic process of reform had preserved as much as had been altered. When the dust began to settle, the outcome—unplanned but fortuitous—was a “parochial” or “diocesan congregationalism” of covenanted churches, each of them the only church in a town and each therefore responsible for every member of the community. This double identity and the practices associated with it—limiting who was admitted but including every young adult or child in the exercise of catechesis—was unlike any of the Separatist experiments in the Netherlands or Jacob’s congregation in London. Nor had any of those experiments included a magistracy-ministry alliance of the kind that existed in Massachusetts, an alliance shorn of the Erastianism of the royal supremacy and the daunting presence of nobility and royal commissioners, as in Scotland. Somehow, the colonists had managed to combine high claims for purity and a strong version of local liberties with something more corporate or collective, a mixture impossible to replicate in Scotland and attempted in England only in the informal setting of conventicles.
Eight years (1633) after his coronation in England, Charles returned to his native Scotland to be crowned as monarch of that country, a ritual occasion he used to display his indifference to the Scottish Parliament and the customary privileges of the nobles. With Laud at his side, Charles wanted to complete the project of religious uniformity his father had initiated. As part of that process, he had begun to appoint bishops who disdained all aspects of presbyterianism. Nicknamed the “Canterburians” because of their sympathy for Laud’s agenda, this group included James Wedderburn, John Maxwell (who seems to have endorsed a jure divino understanding of episcopacy), and William Forbes (d. 1634), possibly the first person of this rank in Scotland to question some aspects of Reformed orthodoxy and advocate a closer relationship with Rome.87
All was not well when Charles reached Edinburgh, for grievances of several kinds had been accumulating from the moment he succeeded his father. As was true of discontent in England, these encompassed social, economic, political, and religious aspects of his rule—such as much higher taxes than usual, a project of “revocation” that disquieted the Scottish elite, the same group’s resentment of the bishops who were holding offices of state, the king’s indifference to petitions and local styles of governance, and rumors of “innovations” he was contemplating.88 The “coronation Parliament,” which included all of the Scottish bishops, saw in Charles the same king whose high understanding of the royal prerogative had prompted the “Petition of Right” in England. Tell-ingly, he told the Scots that his authority in matters of religion was indistinguishable from his authority in general, to the point of allowing him to command changes in worship without consulting a general assembly or any branch of civil society. The king’s rough handling of Parliament, which was given a single day to vote on various measures without being able to review them ahead of time, alienated most of the gentry and burgesses.89
Then and later, Charles bet the house on the royal prerogative. He did so without heeding anyone who protested his policies, as William Haig (c. 1586–1639) did in a “Supplication” the king might never have read. Speaking on behalf of a group of men who recruited him to publicize their opposition to royal policy, Haig singled out a mode of taxation that violated the unwritten rules of the Scottish system. He complained, too, of the king’s disdain for parliamentary procedures. Haig knew of the “anti-popery” voiced by John Pym and the assertion that “Arminianism” was a stepping stone to tyranny. He gave this argument a Scottish twist: bishops were instruments of the king’s authority and should be excluded from parliaments, an argument reiterated in a separate petition signed by Thomas Hogge, a minister who had been deprived for refusing to acknowledge the Articles of Perth. Summing up “the grievances of the Presbyterian party,” his petition cited the suppression of general assemblies (none had met since 1618) and the silencing of ministers who rejected the modes of worship prescribed at Perth. The master theme of both texts was being “free”: once upon a time Scotland had enjoyed free assemblies and free Parliaments where people could speak without having to fear the Scottish version of the Court of High Commission or be accused of sedition, as happened to Haig and, after he fled the country, to John Elphoinstone, Lord Balmerino. An opponent of the Articles of Perth who, in 1633, voted against some of the king’s program, Balmerino was convicted of treason after a copy of the “Supplication” was found in his house. Although the sentence was suspended, the king’s pursuit of Balmerino gave the Scottish political elite an additional reason for distrusting Charles.90
The Church of Scotland saw another side of the king, his determination to align worship in Scotland with worship in the Church of England. The religious services Charles attended in Edinburgh were startling for their pomp, as was the coronation. Privately, he and Laud informed the Scottish bishops that the time had come to prepare a new service book for their church, a task Laud entrusted to a few of these men, although intending to review and, if necessary, edit any text that came his way. At an earlier moment (1616–19), when James I was urging a similar step, it seemed likely that the Book of Common Prayer would be melded with some of the peculiarities of Scottish Protestantism. This project lapsed, in part because of opposition to the Articles of Perth. In the end, the book that reached the bishops largely reproduced the English mode of worship, although closer to the more conservative (that is, more Catholic) prayer book of 1549 in how the Eucharist was described.91 That it came with the king’s personal endorsement and therefore the authority that was his as head of the church was underscored by the language of a new set of canons imposed by fiat in early 1636. The most immediately political of these may have been the requirement that every minister use the new service book, which no one had seen, or be deprived. Others reaffirmed the Articles of Perth, treated private meetings (conventicles) for prayer or discussions of Scripture as illegal, placed discipline in the hands of the bishops, called for moving the communion table to the upper end of the chancel, assigned the king the authority to summon a general assembly, and imposed an oath of supremacy (i.e., acknowledging that “the king’s majesty hath . . . the same authority in causes ecclesiastical” as “Christian emperors in the primitive church”) on all of the clergy.92
Learning in the spring of 1637 that Scotland’s Privy Council and the bishops had done little more than require ministers or local kirks to purchase a copy of the just-published prayer book, the king imposed a deadline: bishops were to use the book in the cathedral church in Edinburgh at once. Thereupon the bishop of Edinburgh ordered the churches in and near that city to do so on Sunday, July 23. What happened on that date has become legendary in Scottish popular Protestantism. At St. Giles, with most of the Privy Council, the city magistrates, and a delegation of bishops on hand, a group of women shouted insults at the minister who rose to read from the book, tacking on abusive language addressed to the bishops: “Sorrow sorrow for this doolefull day, that they are bringing in poperie among us,” was reputedly among the milder complaints. According to another report, a stool was thrown at the head of one of the bishops, a gesture accompanied by “out cries, rapping at the Doors, throwing in of Stones at the Windows by the Multitude without, who cry’d a Pope, a Pope, Antichrist, pull him down.” When the bishop of Edinburgh chose the path of least resistance and walked out, he was stoned. Rioting erupted elsewhere in the city, with crowds assaulting bishops and other officials.93
These were not the spontaneous protests of an undisciplined rabble. Beforehand, letters and conversations had linked a “wide circle” of ministers and civil leaders hoping to thwart the imposing of a text deemed nearer to “Rome” than to authentic Protestantism. A letter of this kind reached the minister Samuel Rutherford at the beginning of 1634, whereupon he promptly dispatched copies to his circle of friends. The message was simple: from being a “glorious church” in “doctrine, sacrament, and discipline,” the kirk of Scotland was in decline thanks to the “bastard porters” who ruled it. Prompted by this rhetoric of decline into apostasy, a loosely structured “underground” formed by early 1637, a process abetted by a small group of nobility and clergy aware of and probably encouraged by the conventicles and prayer meetings that emerged in the aftermath of Perth. Almost certainly, the group was also in touch with some of Charles’s critics in England, who passed on news of the political situation in that country; and some were familiar with what David Calderwood and a newcomer to religious politics, the young minister George Gillespie, were saying about the fate of true religion in their homeland, Gillespie in the Dutch-printed A Dispute against the English Popish Ceremonies Intruded upon the Church of Scotland (1637). Hence the legitimacy of associating their cause with criticism of Laud’s program in England; the grievances in Scotland were British grievances and the militant response to the new prayer book was warranted by a British-wide conspiracy aimed at true religion.94
The events of 1636—the new canons and, in November, the announcement that the new prayer book was being printed—accelerated the organizing of discontent. By June 1637, the leaders of the movement included two important ministers, Alexander Henderson and David Dickson. At St. Andrews, where he studied, Henderson had been among the “episcopal party” headed by George Gledstanes. Early in his ministry, however, he heard the sometime exile and fiery presbyterian Robert Bruce preach on the theme of the robber who enters the sheepfold (John 10:1) and switched sides, to the point of opposing the Articles of Perth in the assembly of 1618. Never actually suspended, he remained a parish minister until the insurgency thrust him into a public role he retained until his death in 1646. From his seat as moderator of the assembly of 1638 (see below), Henderson recalled the situation of ministers who, like himself, “entered” their office “unlawfully and with an ill conscience,” thereafter doing little to “repair the injury” to God. The purpose of this self-criticism was to underscore the imperative to realign conscience and divine law, the same imperative felt by so many of the ministers and laypeople who went to New England. Awaiting the arrival of the new prayer book, the group pondered how to thwart it. In the aftermath of the riots of late July, Henderson and his allies began to insist that the moment had arrived for obeying God, not man, a theme leavened with apocalyptic allusions to the challenge of “rebuilding Gods house, and casting doune the Kingdome of Antichryst.” What gave this assertion its political significance was the backing it received from nobles such as Lord Balmerino and John Rothes.95
Perhaps to their surprise, the organizers of the turmoil of July 23 were rapidly joined by other members of the nobility who objected to the prayer book, episcopacy, and how Scotland was being governed. (The “most powerful noble” in the country, Archibald Campbell, had to wait until his father, a royalist sympathizer, died in October 1638 before he could join the insurgency. Once he did so in his capacity as the eighth Earl of Argyll and chief of Clan Campbell, he became de facto leader of its political wing.) As the historian Laura Stewart has pointed out, the breadth of support in Edinburgh and elsewhere arose out of a “deep sense of alienation from the king and his Scottish government.”96 Hearing of the riots, Charles I told the Privy Council to punish those who were responsible for the disturbances, telling them also to impose the new liturgy, which he described as something he had personally “seen and approved.” “Continue as you have begun . . . till the work be fully settled,” he told the bishops. Powerless to do so because of the insurrection and of different minds themselves about the right course of action, the council was hearing from local kirks and members of the nobility that the time had come to oppose all “innovations” in religion. Tellingly, a substantial number of the nobility added their names to a “Supplication” justifying the revolt, a document critical not only of the prayer book but also of the canons of 1636 and the behavior of the Scottish bishops.97 By December, the insurgents were demanding that the government abolish the Scottish version of the Court of High Commission and remove bishops from the Scottish Parliament and other civil offices. As the year was ending, they put together a structure of “Estates” to serve as an alternative to a Privy Council paralyzed by the intransigence of Charles I and its own internal politics. A little later (February 1638), when it became obvious that the king was unwilling to compromise, the leaders of the protest decided to draw the entirety of the Scottish people into a ceremony of covenant renewal tied to a document known as the Scottish National Covenant or “confession of faith,” the phrase used in its opening sentence.98
As with any text of this kind, negotiations about the final wording softened some of its language; for example, “innovations” were mentioned but not specified. Yet there was no mistaking the core message of the text. To the “noblemen, barons, gentlemen, burgesses, ministers, and commons” who, beginning on February 28, added their names to the covenant, it represented the insurgency as an act of conscience tied to the difference between “true and false religion” and justified by the imperative to eliminate all “papistry and superstition.” Pointedly, the document cited a plot to “corrupt and subvert” God’s true religion and “our liberties, laws and estates.” Doing so was intentional, for it linked the insurgency in Scotland to the uneasiness in England with Charles’s quest for revenue and his indifference to the customary role of that country’s Parliament. Yet the centerpiece of the document was the version of Scottish church history fashioned by ardent presbyterians in the late sixteenth century, a history centered on the argument—evoked in late 1637 in the presence of the Privy Council by John Campbell, the first Earl of Loudon—that “ancestors” had entrusted the current generation in Scotland with a Protestantism “without mixture of human inventions” and incorporated into “the oath and covenant of the whole land.” In keeping with this version of the past, the National Covenant included the entire text of the Negative Confession of 1581, to which it added a long list of parliamentary measures from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries directed at maintaining “true religion, and His Majesty’s authority.” Doing so was forcefully political, for these documents validated the capacity of “free” parliaments, presbyteries, and general assemblies to decide matters of religion.99
To its makers, the National Covenant was primarily a theological text. In the context of divine providence, the Scottish people were being summoned to throw off idolatry and reclaim the true church that had once been theirs, a church clothed in the aura of the myth so carefully nurtured by the Melvilles and David Calderwood, among others. As was said in the opening paragraph, the “true Christian faith and religion,” although “believed and defended” elsewhere in the world, was “chiefly” visible in the “Kirk of Scotland,” an assertion reiterated via a quotation from a statute that characterized Scottish-style Protestantism as “Christ’s true religion, the true and Christian religion, and a perfect religion.” To this assertion, the young Edinburgh lawyer Archibald Johnston, who drafted the text, added an apocalyptic overlay: the covenant signaled “the Lords merciful end so to perfect this reformation of ours” as part of the “work of destroying . . . Antichrist in the world.” The covenant also evoked the story of decline from the high standards set by the “Golden Acts” of 1592. In effect, its purpose was to justify a wholesale unwinding of all that two Stuart kings had imposed on the church—an unwinding that necessarily extended to the royal supremacy. The covenant papered over the chasm between true religion and the king’s policies by pledging to uphold “the majesty of our king.” Yet it was unmistakable that the policies of Charles I had turned him into “an enemy” of what the Covenanters “considered to be the true faith.”100
No mere piece of paper, the covenant was sanctified by fast days, appeals to repent and renew the historic covenant between kirk and God, and the fervor unleashed at these moments. Beginning on February 28 in Edinburgh and throughout the country in the weeks that followed, parishes, the nobility, burgesses, and many others added their names to the text or affirmed it with “uplifted hand,” doing so after listening to a sermon and a public reading of the covenant. Describing one of these services in Edinburgh on April 1, 1638, Archibald Johnston noted that the minister used Exodus 19:5–8 (on keeping God’s covenant) and Jeremiah 3:1 (where an unfaithful Israel is likened to a prostitute) as springboards for arguing that the covenant was God’s means of “recalling and reclaiming his people” from their “former whoredomes and idolatries.” As recorded by Johnston, “thereafter he desyred the nobles . . . to hold up thair hands and swear by the naime of the living God, and desyred al the people to hold up thairs in the lyk manner; at the which instant . . . thair rose such . . . abundance of tears, such a heavenly harmony of sighs and sobbes . . . as the lyk was never seen nor heard of.” Ever mindful of divine providence, Johnston took this emotional outburst as a sign of God’s “immediat presence, and inexpressable influence of his Spirit upon the whol congregation, testifying from heaven that he directed the work.” “Taking the covenant” thus became a moment of collective and individual purification, tears flowing as repentance gave way to a powerful sense of God’s sanctifying presence. At long last, the kirk was regaining “the greatest purity that ever any enjoyed . . . since the apostles’ days.”101
Samuel Rutherford shared this elation, to which he added an apocalyptic gloss. In 1636 the Court of High Commission had ordered him to leave his usual place of ministry and move to distant Aberdeen. There, he continued to counsel the people who sought him out, telling them that, despite the country’s many sins, God was on the verge of doing something great for Scotland. In his reading of divine providence, signs of the times included Catholic victories in the Thirty Years War and the animus against “Puritans” in his homeland, all of them evidence that the ancient “feud” between the “dragon” and “the Lamb and his followers” was ripening to a climax. In his gloss on the National Covenant, Rutherford melded biblical references to the escape from Egypt and the end times foreseen in Revelation into a celebration of a Scotland that had taken Christ as its bridegroom: “For the Lord is rejoicing over us in this land, as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride: and the Lord hath changed the name of Scotland. They call us now no more ‘forsaken,’ nor ‘desolate’; but our land is called ‘Hephzibah’ and ‘Beulah’ ” (Isa. 62:4). Turning prophet, Rutherford predicted that the end times were fast approaching. The conversion of the Jews was in sight, and God was “fetching a blow upon the Beast, and the scarlet-coloured Whore.” Writing in 1639 to his countryman, the imprisoned Alexander Leighton, he remained confident that the “kingdoms of the earth” were about to “become Christ’s.”102
Rutherford did not speak for everyone, for others felt that the covenant went too far in curtailing the king’s authority. In a fast-day sermon preached in April, Henderson acknowledged that some of his countrymen were reluctant to act “against our superiours” but brushed such “scruples” aside. The covenant was not directed against the king; “on the contrary,” everyone who signed the document was promising to “stand to the defence of our dread Sovereign the King’s Majesty . . . in the preservation of . . . true religion.” As the leaders of the Covenanter movement surely knew, the stipulation “true religion” altered the meaning of what was said about the king, as did the rest of this sentence, which committed those who signed it to “the mutual defence and assistance every one of us of another . . . against all sorts of persons whatsoever.” Mutual defense against whom, a contemporary reader may have wondered, to which the implicit answer was, the king and those of the nobility who sided with him, that is, “all sorts of persons whatsoever” who opposed the document.103
Some modern scholars ignore this wording and question the radicalism of the Scottish National Covenant, pointing out, for example, the role of a disaffected nobility in the revolt of 1637–38, a circumstance they regard as a sign of business as usual, that is, reform or protest as a top-down process the nobility was expecting to control. Or it has been suggested that the Covenanters were depending on concepts of “fundamental” law they owed to an English tradition and were imagining a pan-British process of renewal.104 For sure, the “covenanting movement was never completely homogeneous.”105 Yet in the context of what was happening (and in England, not happening), the radicalism of the insurgency that brought it into being is unmistakable. In the wake of the covenant and hints that Charles I might be willing to relax his policy, the leaders of the insurgency specified eight demands that were quickly made public, a list that included the elimination of the Court of High Commission, holding of general assemblies once a year, allowing a new Parliament to endorse what a forthcoming assembly would decide, and no appointments of ministers unless these were approved by the local parish and presbytery. The insistence on free assemblies and parliaments implied something much closer to a constitutional monarchy, as did the covenant itself, which was “distinctly unorthodox” in how it represented the relationship between king and people. Framing itself as an “unconditional” pact between God and the Scottish people, it was explicitly conditional with respect to the monarch’s authority: were a king to introduce corruption, the people were empowered to purge church and state on their own. As David Dickson said in August 1638, “Better to obey God than man; where he proved that disobedience to God could not be disobedience to authority.”106 According to the covenant and what was being articulated in its aftermath, the true “lieutenants of God” were the Scottish people, together with the institutions of assembly, parliament, and a ministry Henderson described as blessed with “a seal from heaven” to pursue “with all diligence and faithfulness” the cause of reform. In fast-day and communion sermons he preached in 1638, Henderson attributed great things to the document. It was liberating Scotland from a “slavery” akin to what ancient Israel had experienced during its “captivity,” and enabling the kirk to reclaim its identity as a “Sion” unlike any other in being so fully committed to “the Word of God.”107
That Presbyterianism was the sole alternative to anti-Christian innovations became clear when a “free” General Assembly met in Glasgow in late November 1638. The question that haunted the two hundred ministers and lay delegates—the same question that has haunted every revolution in modern Europe—was how to ensure the legitimacy of a newly renovated institution. According to a rule laid down in the 1580s, no general assembly could meet without the approval of the king. On the eve of the assembly, a group of Scottish bishops underscored the precarious legality of the assembly-to-be in an angry “Declinotor and Protestation”: the “pretended” assembly was usurping the king’s authority and their own, without which it was unlawful. Already, however, the leaders of the insurgency were evoking an alternative understanding of authority. In a “Protestation” justifying their insistence on a free assembly—free in the sense of debating and deciding without any “limitation[s]”—they argued that it was warranted without the king’s approval thanks to an “authority” God had entrusted to the kirk so it could best serve the “salvation of the peoples Soules.”108 Via assertions of this kind, a line Charles I regarded as sacrosanct was about to be transgressed.
For the moment, the king acceded to the advice of his principal advisor in Scotland, the Marquis of Hamilton, and allowed him to attend the assembly in the role of the king’s “Commissioner.” In the opening moments, with Hamilton nodding his approval, Henderson endorsed the concept of the godly monarch as guardian of the church: “it hath been the glorie of the reformed Churches, and we accompt it our glorie after a speciall maner, to give unto Kings and Christian Magistrates, what belongs to their places.” Hamilton may have assumed that the assembly would refrain from rejecting episcopacy—abjure, perhaps, but not abolish. Any hopes of a more moderate outcome ended once the assembly approved the presence of lay elders chosen by local presbyteries, whereupon Hamilton walked out. In his absence, Henderson sang a different tune: Christ “hath given divine warrants to convocat assemblies whether Magistrates consent or not,” adding that the kirk was subject to the authority of God and entitled to act on its own if need be.109 With virtually no dissent (none of the bishops were on hand, and local elections of delegates had been dominated by the covenanting party), the assembly nullified each of the six assemblies that had met since 1606 and repealed the Articles of Perth. Simultaneously, it dismissed the canons of 1636 and the new prayer book; declared null and void the oath required of newly ordained ministers to accept the Articles of Perth; and overturned all suspensions or deprivations of ministers under the old regime. As well, it prohibited any blurring of civil and ecclesiastical offices, insisted on annual sessions of the General Assembly, and restored the “Powers and Jurisdictions” of presbyteries, synods, and assemblies. Last but not least, it voted to excommunicate most of the bishops, a few of whom had already recanted their office, with episcopacy itself “abjured, never hereafter to be established,” a step it took after listening to the minister Robert Baillie read “A Discourse anent Episcopacy,” which retraced the biblical and post-apostolic evidence for and against a “perpetuall superioritie” and “divine institution” of this office.110
This package made it certain that Charles I would try to intervene and quash the insurrection by force of arms and just as certain that some in Scotland would support him or look for ways of combining royal authority with free parliaments. As Charles noted in a statement of February 1639, the issue was “whether he were king or not,” a point underscored in a royal proclamation of May 14 referring to the insurgents as “Rebells” and specifying the king’s determination to “destroy” them.111 By this time, a “committee of estates” comprised of gentry, ministry, and nobles was running the country alongside the customary institutions of governance. Its immediate task was to prepare for what was coming, an invasion by English troops in mid-1639. The deeper question arose out of the extraordinary fervor of March 1638. Could the covenant become a truly national or unifying document? In 1638, a near miracle had occurred, an upwelling of support that included most of the nobility and, with a few significant exceptions, the whole of the ministry and virtually the whole of Scottish Protestants. Anyone who knew Scottish history was aware of other moments of popular fervor—the Negative Confession of early 1581 and the covenant of 1596—that, in the long run, had not impeded James VI. Was there something different about the National Covenant that would give it an enduring presence?
Scotland being Scotland, some people were never going to acknowledge the covenant—Catholics, most obviously, but as it turned out, also the theological faculty in Aberdeen, a group known as the “Aberdeen doctors,” who protested the theological and political implications of the covenant, with the backing of the town’s lay leaders. As the “doctors” pointed out, the Negative Confession of 1581 had not condemned episcopacy, and the Articles of Perth had been ratified by a Parliament and a “national assembly.” A delegation of ministers from Edinburgh having failed to convince them otherwise, the new government undertook military action against the town and other dissidents in the Highlands where, as usual, rivalries among the clans were intertwined with religious and political affiliations.112
That force or something close to it would be necessary to bring about the semblance of unity was demonstrated when the next General Assembly asked the government to impose the covenant on everyone, a step the Scottish Parliament, meeting for the first time since the insurgency, took in August 1639. Simultaneously, it endorsed the abolition of episcopacy. A year later (August 1640), the assembly voted to deprive or excommunicate any ministers who had subscribed to the covenant but were “speak[ing] against the same”; in a separate action it excluded any minister who refused to sign from serving in the church or one of the universities. Via actions of this kind, a revolution initiated in the name of conscience, true religion, and “free” institutions came to depend on central state authority. In March 1638, covenant taking had been a religious exercise, framed as such by Henderson and others as a gesture of repentance that would repair the relationship between the Church of Scotland and its God. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a covenant that presumed the unity of church and nation under God would become a divisive force in Scottish politics.113
When the two armies met at the Scottish border in June 1639, the outcome was a truce or “pacification” preceded by negotiations that, on the Scottish side, centered on the lawfulness of the assembly of 1638. The leaders of the insurgency made it clear that peace would depend on the king accepting the independence of that assembly, which Johnston and his colleagues justified by using two-kingdoms theory. Charles gave way and agreed to authorize another “free assembly” and a new Parliament.114 When the assembly met in August, it endorsed the decisions of 1638 up and including the eliminating of bishops as a third estate in the Scottish Parliament. For reasons having to do with an increasingly complex if not dysfunctional relationship between the two governments, Hamilton accepted these actions and signed the covenant. Some months later (June 1640), with Charles still bent on a military solution at the urging of Thomas Wentworth, who promised to provide Irish soldiers to stiffen the army Charles was trying to assemble, the Scottish Parliament met without his approval, a step it took after another commissioner prorogued (postponed) it in 1639. With no representative of the king on hand to say yea or nay, the new Parliament terminated clergy representation by voting to substitute “barons” (or lairds) for the bishops’ “estate.” Simultaneously, it redefined the representation of boroughs or shires in such a way that, thereafter, burgesses and their ilk would be present in far greater numbers than before. The long-term consequences of this step were immense. In the context of 1640, the most daring step was to eliminate the king’s role in deciding when parliaments met or were dissolved. Hereafter, a free Parliament would meet at least once every three years. Simultaneously, Parliament altered its own procedures, replacing a system of committees the nobility had dominated with a much broader process of participation. In matters of religion, the acts of the 1639 assembly were endorsed and became official. Still hoping for national unity, Parliament also authorized military expeditions against clans or magnates who remained loyal to the king and instructed the Scottish army to invade England.115
In August 1640, the second Bishops’ War ended ingloriously for Charles, with a Scottish army encamped in his country. At long last, the reformers in both countries could take a deep breath. Unable to pay off the invaders, Charles summoned a Parliament that met for the first time on November 4, 1640. At once, both Houses took on the challenge of interrogating the “innovations” Francis Rous had lamented in 1629, innovations at once constitutional and religious. That this Parliament was bent on curtailing the royal prerogative was not said in so many words—not yet, at least. But as inquiries set afoot by the House of Commons about Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne and the sheltering of Jesuits signaled, all roads led to Charles I—an unhappy Charles, who resented what the insurgency of 1637–38 had done to his authority. Now, in his other main kingdom, it was about to be challenged as forcefully as in Covenanter Scotland.