_THE PILGRIM MIGRATIONS._
I.
[Sidenote: Accession of James I.]
[Sidenote: Neal, ii, 28. Compare Burns's Prel. Diss. to Wodrow,
lxxiv.]
The accession of James of Scotland to the English throne in 1603
raised the hopes of the Puritans. James had said, in 1590: "As for our
neighbour kirk of England, their service is an ill-said masse in
English; they want nothing of the masse but the liftings." Later, when
the prospect of his accession to the English throne was imminent,
James had spoken with a different voice, but the Puritans remembered
his lifelong familiarity with Presbyterian forms, and his strongly
expressed satisfaction with the Scottish Kirk. They met him on his way
to London with a petition for modifications of the service. This was
known as the Millinary Petition, because it was supposed to represent
the views of about one thousand English divines.
[Sidenote: Hampton Court conference.]
[Sidenote: Svmme and Svbstance, _passim_.]
[Sidenote: Prel. Diss. to Wodrow, lxxiv.]
[Sidenote: Ch. Hist., x, vii, 30.]
[Sidenote: Nugae Antiquae., i, 181.]
In January, 1604, the king held a formal conference at Hampton Court
between eleven of the Anglican party on one side, nine of them being
bishops, and four Puritan divines, representing the petitioners.
Assuming at first the air of playing the arbiter, James, who dearly
loved a puttering theological debate, could not refrain from taking
the cause of the churchmen out of their hands and arguing it himself.
The reports of the conference are most interesting as showing the
paradoxical qualities of James, who, by his action at this meeting,
unwittingly made himself a conspicuous figure in the history of
America. The great churchmen were surprised at the display made by the
king of dialectic skill. They held Scotch learning in some contempt,
and were amazed that one bred among the "Puritans" should know how to
handle questions of theology so aptly. James, though he had declared
the Church of Scotland "the sincerest kirk in the world" because it
did not keep Easter and Yule as the Genevans did, now had the face to
assure the prelates that he had never believed after he was ten years
old what he was taught in Scotland. His speeches in the conference are
marked by ability, mingled with the folly which vitiated all his
qualities. Quick at reply and keen in analysis, he even shows
something like breadth of intelligence, or at least intellectual
toleration, but without ever for a moment evincing any liberality of
feeling. His manifest cleverness is rendered futile by his narrow and
ridiculous egotism, his arrogance in the treatment of opponents, and
his coarse vulgarity in expression. "In common speaking as in his
hunting," says Fuller, "he stood not on the cleanest but nearest way."
The Puritans were no more able to answer the arguments of the king
than was AEsop's lamb to make reply to the wolf. Laying down for his
fundamental maxim "No bishop, no king," he drew a picture of the
troubles that would beset him when "Jack and Tom and Will and Dick"
should meet and censure the king and his council. He would have no
such assemblage of the clergy until he should grow fat and pursy and
need trouble to keep him in breath, he said. It could not occur to his
self-centered mind that so grave a question was not to be settled
merely by considering the ease and convenience of the sovereign. "He
rather usede upbraidinges than argumente," says Harrington, who was
present. He bade the Puritans "awaie with their snivellinge," and, in
discussing the surplice, made an allusion that would be deemed a
profanation by reverent churchmen of the present time.
[Sidenote: The king and the bishops.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
[Sidenote: Compare Nugae Antiquae, ii, 25, 26.]
With characteristic pedantry he spoke part of the time in Latin, and
his clever refutation of the hapless Puritans sounded like the wisdom
of God to the anxious bishops. In spite of the downright scolding and
vulgar abuse with which the king flavored his orthodoxy, the aged
Whitgift declared that undoubtedly his Majesty spoke by the special
assistance of God's Spirit; but one of the worldly bystanders
ventured, in defiance of the episcopal dictum, to think that whatever
spirit inspired the king was "rather foul-mouthed." Bancroft, Bishop
of London, theatrically fell on his knees and solemnly protested that
his heart melted within him with joy that Almighty God of his singular
mercy had given them such a king "as since Christ's time the like
hath not been seen." The king in his turn was naturally impressed with
the sagacity of a bishop who could so devoutly admire his Majesty's
ability, and, when soon afterward a fresh access of paralysis carried
off Whitgift, it was not surprising that Bancroft should be translated
from London to Canterbury over the heads of worthier competitors. From
the moment of Bancroft's accession to the primacy the lot of the
Puritans and Separatists became harder, for he plumed himself
doubtless on being the originator of the high-church doctrine, and he
was a man whose harsh energy seems not to have been tempered by an
intimate piety like that of Whitgift.
[Sidenote: Results.]
[Sidenote: Svmme and Svbstance, 35.]
[Sidenote: Compare Bacon's Certain Considerations touching the better
Pacification of the Church of England.]
When James rose from his chair at the close of the debate on the
second day he said, "I shall make them conform themselves, or I will
harry them out of this land, or else do worse"; and he wrote to a
friend boasting that he had "peppered the Puritans soundly." But the
king had missed, without knowing it, the greatest opportunity of his
reign--an opportunity for conciliating or weakening the Puritan
opposition, and consolidating the church and his kingdom. James could
think of nothing but his own display of cleverness and browbeating
arrogance in a dispute with great divines like Reynolds and Chaderton.
The conference had been for him a recreation not much more serious
than stag-hunting. That it was pregnant with vast and far-reaching
results for good and evil in England and the New World he, perhaps,
did not dream. By his narrow and selfish course at this critical
moment he may be said to have sealed the fate of his son, if not the
doom of his dynasty; and his clever folly gave fresh life to the
bitter struggle between Anglican and Puritan which resulted in the
peopling of New England a quarter of a century afterward.
II.
[Sidenote: The storm of persecution.]
[Sidenote: Bacon's Observation on a Libel.]
Every proscription of the Puritans within the church was accompanied
by a crusade against the Brownists without, who were counted sinners
above all other men. Though Ralegh in 1593 had estimated the Brownists
at twenty thousand, they were by this time in consequence of
oppression "about worn out," as Bacon said. Upon those who remained
the new persecution broke with untempered severity. Badgered on every
side by that vexatious harrying which King James and his ecclesiastics
kept up according to promise, the little congregation at Scrooby in
1607 resolved to flee into Holland, where they would be strangers to
the speech and to the modes of getting a living, but where they might
worship God in extemporary prayers under the guidance of elders of
their own choice without fear of fines and prisons.
[Sidenote: Toleration in the Low Countries.]
[Sidenote: Errours and Induration, p. 27.]
That which is most honorable to the Low Countries, from a historical
point of view, namely, that their cities were places of refuge for
oppressed consciences, was esteemed odious and highly ridiculous in
the seventeenth century. In one of the plays of that time there is a
humorous proposition to hold a consultation about "erecting four new
sects of religion in Amsterdam." The Dutch metropolis was called a
cage of unclean birds, and a French prelate contemned it as "a common
harbor of all opinions and heresies." At a later period Edward
Johnson, the rather bloodthirsty Massachusetts Puritan, inveighs
against "the great mingle mangle of religion" in Holland, and like a
burlesque prophet shrieks, "Ye Dutch, come out of your hodge podge!"
Robert Baylie, in a sermon before the House of Lords as late as 1645,
says of the toleration by the Dutch, that "for this one thing they
have become infamous in the Christian world."
[Sidenote: Flight of the Pilgrims.]
To the asylum offered by the Low Countries the Scrooby Separatists
resolved to flee. The pack of harriers let loose by James and Bancroft
were in full cry. The members of the Scrooby church found themselves
"hunted and persecuted on every side," having their houses watched
night and day, so that all their sufferings in times past "were but as
flea bitings in comparison." But the tyranny that made England
intolerable did its best to render flight impossible. In various
essays to escape, the Separatists were arrested and stripped of what
valuables they had, while their leaders were cast into prison for
months at a time.
[Sidenote: The Pilgrims in Amsterdam.]
[Sidenote: Bradford's Plimoth Plantation 16.]
At length by one means or another the members of this battered little
community got away and met together in Amsterdam. To plain north
country folk this was indeed a strange land, and one can see in the
vivid and eloquent language of Bradford of Austerfield, who was a
young man when he crossed the German Ocean, the memory of the
impressions which these cities of the Low Countries made on their
rustic minds. But "it was not longe before they saw the grimme and
grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man, with whom
they must bukle and incounter."
III.
[Sidenote: Removal to Leyden.]
[Sidenote: Bradford's Plimouth Plantation.]
[Sidenote: Winslow's Relations.]
Robinson discovered that he was not of a piece with those Separatists
who had preceded him to Amsterdam. In one division of these, questions
of whalebone in bodices, of high-heeled shoes and women's hats,
distracted scrupulous minds. In the other, which came from the same
part of England as Robinson's church, the agitations were of a
theological nature. Questions about the baptism of infants and the
inherent righteousness of man and the portion of his nature that
Christ derived from his mother, with discussions of the right of a man
to be a magistrate and a church member at the same time, were seething
in the heated brain of the scrupulous but saintly pastor. Robinson saw
that these controversies would involve the Scrooby church if it
remained in Amsterdam. In Robinson the centrifugal force of Separatism
had already spent itself, and his practical wisdom had set bounds to
the course of his logic. To leave the Dutch metropolis for a smaller
place was to reduce the Scrooby exiles to still deeper poverty, but
nevertheless the Pilgrims fled from discord as they had fled from
persecution, and removed to the university city of Leyden, called by
its admirers "the Athens of the Occident." After their departure
English Separatism in Amsterdam went on tearing itself to pieces in a
sincere endeavor to find ultimate theological truth, but Robinson's
people in spite of their poverty were united, and were honored by
those among whom they sojourned. Others, hearing of their good report,
came to them from England, and the exiled church of Leyden was fairly
prosperous.
IV.
[Sidenote: Danger of extinction.]
But when ten years of exile had passed the outlook was not a pleasant
one. The life in Leyden was so hard that many chose to return to their
own land, preferring English prisons to liberty at so dear a rate. The
"tender hearts of many a loving father and mother" were wounded to see
children growing prematurely decrepit under the weight of hard and
incessant toil; "the vigor of Nature being consumed in the very bud as
it were." Some of the young people were contaminated by the
dissoluteness of the city, others joined the Dutch army or made long
voyages at sea, acquiring habits very foreign to the strictness of
their parents. The result of a contest between the rigid Puritanism of
the little church and the laxity prevalent in Holland was not to be
doubted. Human nature can not remain always at concert pitch.
Intermarriages with the Dutch had already begun, and all that was
peculiar in the English community was about to be swallowed up and
lost forever in the great current of Dutch life which flowed about it.
[Sidenote: Emigration planned.]
[Sidenote: Compare Winslow in Young, 387.]
Puritanism was in its very nature aggressive, even meddlesome. It was
not possible for a Puritan church, led by such men as Robinson, and
Brewster, and Carver, and Bradford, and Winslow, to remain content
where national prejudices and a difference in language barred the way
to the exertion of influence on the life about them. With destruction
by absorption threatening their church, these leaders conceived the
project of forming a new state where they "might, with the liberty of
a good conscience, enjoy the pure Scripture worship of God without the
mixture of human inventions and impositions; and their children after
them might walk in the holy ways of the Lord."
V.
[Sidenote: Puritans and American settlements.]
[Sidenote: Waddington's Cong. Hist., ii, 113, 114.]
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
What suggested in 1617 the thought of migration to America we do not
know. Just twenty years earlier, in 1597, some imprisoned Brownists
had petitioned the Privy Council that they might be allowed to settle
"in the province of Canada," an indefinite term at that time. Francis
Johnson with three others went out in that same year to look at the
land. The voyage was an unlucky one, and the settlement of Johnson as
pastor of the church in Amsterdam was the result. The persecutions
which followed the accession of Bancroft to the archbishopric had
started as early as 1608 a widespread agitation among the Puritans in
favor of emigration to Virginia, but, when only a few had got away,
the primate secured a proclamation preventing their escape from the
means of grace provided for them in Courts of High Commission.
[Sidenote: Condition of Virginia.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
[Sidenote: Inventory of books.]
[Sidenote: Winsor's pamphlet on Elder Brewster.]
The year 1617, in which the agitation for emigration began among the
Pilgrims, was the year after Dale's return with highly colored reports
of the condition of the Virginia colony. It is noticeable that among
the books owned by Elder Brewster at his death was a copy of
Whitaker's Good Newes from Virginia, published in 1613. Whitaker was
minister at Henrico in Virginia, and was the son of a Puritan divine
of eminence who was master of St. John's College, Cambridge. It is
possible that he was known to Brewster, who had been at Cambridge, or
to Robinson, who had resigned a fellowship there to become a
Separatist. Whitaker himself was Puritan enough to discard the
surplice. His Good Newes is an earnest plea for the support of the
colony for religious reasons. "This plantation which the divell hath
so often troden downe," he says, "is revived and daily groweth to more
and hopeful successe." At the very time when the Pilgrims first
thought of migrating there was beginning a new and widespread interest
in Virginia. This was based partly on religious enthusiasm, such as
Whitaker's book was meant to foster, and partly on the hope of new and
strange commodities, particularly silk. Even this silk illusion may
have had its weight in a secondary way with the Leyden people, for
Bradford, afterward governor at Plymouth, was a silk-weaver in Leyden,
and there were two books on silkworms in Brewster's library at his
death.
[Sidenote: Alternatives.]
To European eyes all America was one; even to-day the two Americas are
hardly distinguished by most people in Europe. The glowing account of
Guiana given by Ralegh helped to feed the new desire for an American
home; and it was only after serious debate that North America was
chosen, as more remote from the dreaded Spaniard and safer from
tropical diseases. One can hardly imagine what American Puritanism
would have become under the skies of Guiana. Not only did the Pilgrims
hesitate regarding their destination, but there was a choice of
nationalities to be made. England had not been a motherly mother to
these outcast children, and there was question of settling as English
subjects in America, or becoming Dutch colonists there.
VI.
[Sidenote: Application to Sandys.]
[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, pp. 22, 23.]
The Pilgrims preferred to be English, notwithstanding all. But they
wished to stipulate with England for religious liberty. In this matter
they had recourse to Sir Edwin Sandys, the one man who would probably
be both able and willing to help them. Brewster had lived, as we have
seen, in an old episcopal manor at Scrooby. Sandys, Archbishop of
York, had transferred this manor by a lease to his eldest son, Sir
Samuel Sandys, who was Brewster's landlord and brother of Sir Edwin
Sandys. Of Sir Edwin the great liberal parliamentary statesman, Fuller
says, "He was right-handed to any great employment." In 1617 he was
already the most influential of the progressive leaders of the
Virginia Company, its acting though not yet its nominal head, and in
1619 he was elected governor of the Company. Brewster's
fellow-secretary under Davison was a chosen friend of Sandys, and, in
view of both these connections, we may consider it almost certain that
the two were not strangers. To Sir Edwin Sandys was due much of the
new interest in Virginia. He and his group seem to have been already
striving to shape the colony into a liberal state.
[Sidenote: Failure to secure formal toleration.]
[Sidenote: Bacon's Advice to Villiers.]
[Sidenote: Archdale's Carolina, 26.]
To meet the views of the Leyden people, Sandys endeavored by the
intervention of a more acceptable courtier to gain assurance from the
king, under the broad seal, that their religion should be tolerated if
they migrated to Virginia. But James's peculiar conscience recoiled
from this. He intimated that he would wink at their practices but he
would not tolerate them by public act. And, indeed, the Pilgrims
reflected afterward that "a seale as broad as the house flore would
not serve the turne" of holding James to his promise. At the king's
suggestion the archbishops were applied to, but neither would they
formally approve such an arrangement. Nor can one wonder at their
unwillingness, since the most profound, liberal, and far-seeing
thinker of that age, Lord Bacon himself, was so far subject to the
prejudices of his time that he could protest against allowing heretics
to settle a colony, and could support his position by a mystical
argument fit to be advanced by the most fantastic theologian. "It will
make schism and rent in Christ's coat, which must be seamless," he
says. He even goes so far as to group Separatists with outlaws and
criminals, and to advise that if such should transplant themselves to
the colonies they should be "sent for back upon the first notice," for
"such persons are not fit to lay the foundation of a new colony." Much
more fit than is a speculative philosopher to draw the lines on which
practical undertakings are to be carried forward. The transplanting of
English speech and institutions to America would have languished as
French colonization did, if none but orthodox settlers had been
allowed to fell trees and build cabins in the forest. Ever since the
age of stone hatchets colony planters have been drawn from the ranks
of the uneasy. An early Quaker governor of South Carolina puts the
matter less elegantly but more justly than Bacon when he says: "It is
stupendious to consider, how passionate and preposterous zeal, not
only vails but stupefies oftentimes the Rational Powers: For cannot
Dissenters kill Wolves and Bears as well as Churchmen?"
VII.
[Sidenote: Relations with the Virginia Company.]
[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co., Feb. 2, 1620.]
[Sidenote: Winslow's Briefe Narration, Young, 383.]
The liberal and practical mind of Sir Edwin Sandys harbored none of
the scruples of Bacon, and his more wholesome conscience knew
nothing of the fine distinctions of James and the archbishops
between formal toleration and a mere winking at irregularities. He
embraced the cause of the Pilgrims and became their steadfast
friend, passing through the Virginia Company successively two
charters in their behalf, and the general order which allowed the
leaders of "particular plantations"--that is, of such plantations as
the Leyden people and others at that time proposed to make--to
associate the sober and discreet of the plantation with them to make
laws, orders, and constitutions not repugnant to the laws of
England. This was a wide door opening toward democratic government.
The patent given to the Pilgrims was also a liberal one, and it was
even proposed to put into their hands a large sum of money
contributed anonymously for the education of Indian children, but to
this it was objected that the newcomers would lack the confidence of
the savages. One of the Virginia Company, possibly Sandys himself,
lent to the Leyden people three hundred pounds without interest for
three years. When we consider that the Pilgrims had to pay in their
first year of settlement thirty and even fifty per cent, interest on
their debts, and that this three hundred pounds, the use of which
they received without interest, would be equal in purchasing power
to five or six thousand dollars of our money, we may readily believe
that this loan and the semi-independence offered them under their
"large patent" from the company, were the considerations that
decided them in favor of emigration after the English Government had
refused a guarantee of toleration, and the Dutch Government had
declined to assure them of protection against England.
[Sidenote: Authors of the Plymouth Government.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
That group of liberal English statesmen who were charged with keeping
"a school of sedition" in the courts of the Virginian Company founded
the two centers of liberal institutions in America. The Earl of
Southampton, the Ferrars, Sir John Danvers, and above all and more
than all, Sir Edwin Sandys, were the fathers of representative
government in New England by the charter of February 2, 1620, as they
had been of representative government in Virginia by the charter of
November 13, 1618. When the Pilgrims found themselves, upon landing,
too far north to use their "large patent" from the Virginia Company,
they organized a government on the lines laid down in the general
order of the company. The government established by them in their
famous Compact was precisely the provisional government which the
Virginia Company in the preceding February had given them liberty to
found "till a form of government be here settled for them." Under this
compact they proceeded to confirm the election of the governor,
already chosen under the authority derived from the charter, now
invalid.
[Sidenote: Charges against Sandys.]
[Sidenote: Duke of Manchester, papers, Royal Hist. MSS. Comm. viii,
II, 45.]
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
The enemies of Sir Edwin Sandys did not fail to make use of his
friendship for the Leyden people to do him injury. It was afterward
charged that he was opposed to monarchical government, and that he had
moved the Archbishop of Canterbury "to give leave to the Brownists and
Separatists to go to Virginia, and designed to make a free popular
state there, and himself and his assured friends were to be the
leaders." That Sandys thought of emigration is hardly probable, but he
succeeded in establishing two popular governments in America which
propagated themselves beyond all that he could have hoped to achieve.
VIII.
[Sidenote: The farewell to Europe.]
[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantation, 59.]
"Small things," wrote Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln in the first
months of the Massachusetts settlement--"small things in the beginning
of natural or politic bodies are as remarkable as greater in bodies
full grown." The obscure events we have recited above are capital
because they had a deciding influence on the fate of the Pilgrim
settlement. It is not within our purpose to tell over again the
pathetic story of that brave departure of the younger and stronger of
the Pilgrims from Leyden to make the first break into the wilderness,
but courage and devotion to an idea are not common; courage and
devotion that bring at last important results are so rare that the
student of history, however little disposed to indulge sentiment,
turns in spite of himself to that last all-night meeting in Pastor
Robinson's large house in the Belfry Lane at Leyden. "So," says
Bradford, as if penning a new holy scripture, "they lefte that goodly
and pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place near 12 years;
but they knew they were pilgrimes and looked not much on those things,
but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie and
quieted their spirits." Nor is it easy to pass over the solemn parting
on the quay at Delft Haven, where, as the time of the tide forced the
final tearful separation, while even the Dutch spectators wept in
sympathy, the voice of the beloved Robinson in a final prayer was
heard and the whole company fell upon their knees together for the
last time.
[Sidenote: Robinson's influence.]
[Sidenote: Winslow's Briefe Narration, Young, 397.]
[Sidenote: Note 6.]
These things hardly pertain, perhaps, to a history of life such as
this. It is with the influences that are to mold the new life while it
is plastic that we are concerned. Chief of these is Robinson himself,
a Moses who was never to see, even from a mountain top, the Canaan to
which he had now led his people. He must stay behind with the larger
half of the church. Rising to the occasion, his last words to this
little company are worthy his magnanimous soul. He eloquently charged
them "before God and his blessed angels to follow him no further than
he followed Christ." ... He was confident "the Lord had more truth and
light to break forth out of his holy word." In whatever sense we take
them these were marvelous words in the seventeenth century. Robinson
understood the progressive nature of truth as apprehended by the human
mind in a way that makes him seem singularly modern. In the same
address he declared it "not possible that ... full perfection of
knowledge should break forth at once." He bade them not to affect
separation from the Puritans in the Church of England, but "rather to
study union than division."
Admirable man! Free from pettiness and egotism. Fortunate man, who,
working in one of the obscurest and dustiest corners of this noisy and
self-seeking world, succeeded in training and sending out a company
that diffused his spirit and teachings into the institutions and
thoughts of a great people!
IX.
[Sidenote: The landing.]
[Sidenote: Morton's Memorial, 6th edition, p. 22, note.]
[Sidenote: Compare Asher's History of W. I. Company in Bibl. Essay.]
[Sidenote: Note 7.]
[Sidenote: Note 8.]
On a chain of slender accidents hung the existence of New England. Had
the claims of Guiana prevailed, had the tempting offers of the Dutch
changed the allegiance of the Robinsonian Independents, had the
Mayflower reached her destination in what is now New Jersey, the
current of American history would not have flowed as it has. A South
American New England, a Dutch New England, or a non-peninsular
community of English Puritans west of the Hudson with good wheat
fields and no fisheries or foreign trade, would have been different in
destiny from what we call New England, and its influence on events
and national character could not have been the same. It will always
remain doubtful whether or not Jones, the captain of the Mayflower,
was bribed by the Dutch, as the Plymouth people came to believe.
Nothing could be more probable in view of the general bad character of
the seamen of that time and the eagerness of one political party in
Holland to secure a foothold for the Dutch in America; but whether
Jones, who seems to have borne a bad reputation, was bribed, or, as he
pretended, became entangled in the shoals of Cape Cod and turned back
in real despair of finding his way, is of no moment. He turned back
and came to anchor in Provincetown Harbor. Here the threats of the
brutal seamen, unwilling to go farther, and the clamor of the
overcrowded and sea-weary passengers did the rest. To continue longer
closely cabined in the little ship was misery and perhaps death. Here
was land, and that was enough. And so, after exploration of the whole
coast of Cape Cod Bay, the place already named Plymouth on John
Smith's map was selected for a settlement. Here the landing was made
on the 10th of November, O.S., 1620.
[Sidenote: Elements of New England.]
Camden has preserved to us an old English saying accepted in the days
of the Pilgrims, to the effect that "a barren country is a great whet
to the industry of a people." It was the wedding of an austere creed
to an austere soil under an austere sky that gave the people of New
England their marked character, and the severe economic conditions
imposed by the soil and climate were even more potent than Puritanism
in producing the traits that go to make up the New England of history.
X.
[Sidenote: Earlier attempts to colonize New England.]
The unwise management that ruined nearly all projects for colonization
in that age and that produced such disasters in Virginia, had defeated
every earlier attempt to plant English people on the New England
coast. Gosnold had taken a colony to Elizabeth Island in Buzzard's Bay
in 1602, but the men went back in the ship in order to share the
profit of a cargo of sassafras. Captain George Popham was the head of
a party that undertook to colonize the coast of Maine in 1607, but
having suffered "extreme extremities" during the winter, the colonists
returned the following year. In 1615 Captain John Smith himself set
out with sixteen men, only to be taken by a French privateer. These
and other attempts ending in failure, and many disastrous trading
voyages, led to a belief that the Indian conjurers, who were known to
be the devil's own, had laid a spell on the northern coast to keep the
white people away. This enchanted land might long have lain waste if
Captain Jones of the Mayflower, sailing to Hudson River or the region
south of it, had not run foul of the shoals of Cape Cod.
[Illustration: Coast explored by the Pilgrims.]
XI.
[Sidenote: Sufferings at Plymouth.]
The Pilgrims suffered, like their predecessors, from the prevailing
unskillfulness in colony-planting. They had escaped from the horrors
of the Mayflower, but how much better was the wild land than the wild
sea; the rude, overcrowded forest cabins than the too populous ship?
"All things stared upon them with a weather-beaten face," says
Bradford. The horrors of the first winter in Virginia were repeated;
here, as at Jamestown, nearly all were ill at once, and nearly half of
the people died before the coming of spring. The same system of
partnership with mercenary shareholders or "adventurers" in England
that had brought disaster in Virginia was tried with similar results
at Plymouth, and a similar attempt at communism in labor and supply
was made, this time under the most favorable conditions, among a
people conscientious and bound together by strong religious
enthusiasm. It resulted, as such sinking of personal interest must
ever result, in dissensions and insubordination, in unthrift and
famine.
[Sidenote: Bradford.]
The colony was saved from the prolonged misery that makes the early
history of Virginia horrible by the wise head and strong hand of its
leader. William Bradford, who had been chosen governor on the death of
Carver, a few months after the arrival at Plymouth, had been a youth
but eighteen years old when he fled with the rest of the Scrooby
church to Holland. He was bred to husbandry and had inherited some
property. In Holland he became a silk worker and on attaining his
majority set up for himself in that trade. He was still a young man
when first chosen governor of the little colony, and he ruled New
Plymouth almost continuously till his death--that is, for about
thirty-seven years. He was of a magnanimous temper, resolute but
patient, devotedly religious, but neither intolerant nor austere. He
had a genius for quaintly vivid expression in writing that marked him
as a man endowed with the literary gift, which comes as Heaven pleases
where one would least look for it.
XII.
[Sidenote: Abolition of communism.]
[Sidenote: Note 9.]
After two years of labor in common had brought the colony more than
once to the verge of ruin, Bradford had the courage and wisdom to cut
the knot he could not untie. During the scarce springtime of 1623, he
assigned all the detached persons in the colony to live with families,
and then temporarily divided the ancient Indian field on which the
settlement had been made among the several families in proportion to
their number, leaving every household to shift for itself or suffer
want. "Any general want or suffering hath not been among them since to
this day," he writes years afterward. The assignment was a
revolutionary stroke, in violation of the contract with the
shareholders, and contrary to their wishes. But Bradford saw that it
was a life-and-death necessity to be rid of the pernicious system,
even at the cost of cutting off all support from England. In his
history he draws a very clear picture of the evils of communism as he
had observed them.
XIII.
[Sidenote: Significance of Plymouth.]
Why should the historian linger thus over the story of this last
surviving remnant of the "Brownists"? Why have we dwelt upon the
little settlement that was never very flourishing, that consisted at
its best of only a few thousand peaceful and agricultural people, and
that after seventy years was merged politically in its more vigorous
neighbor the colony of Massachusetts Bay? Historical importance does
not depend on population. Plymouth was the second step in the founding
of a great nation. When Bradford and the other leaders had at last
successfully extricated the little settlement from its economical
difficulties, it became the sure forerunner of a greater Puritan
migration. This tiny free state on the margin of a wilderness
continent, like a distant glimmering pharos, showed the persecuted
Puritans in England the fare-way to a harbor.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 162.]
Sir John Harington says: "The bishops came to the Kynge aboute the
petition of the puritans; I was by, and heard much dyscourse. The
Kynge talked muche Latin, and disputed wyth Dr. Reynoldes, at Hampton,
but he rather usede upbraidinges than argumente; and tolde the
petitioners that they wanted to strip Christe againe, and bid them
awaie with their snivellinge: moreover, he wishede those who woud take
away the surplice mighte want linen for their own breech. The bishops
seemed much pleased and said his Majestie spoke by the power of
inspiration. I wist not what they mean; but the spirit was rather
foule mouthede." Nugae Antiquae, i, 181, 182. James took pains to put an
example of his bad taste on paper. In a letter on the subject he brags
in these words: "We haue kept suche a reuell with the Puritainis heir
these two dayes as was neuer harde the lyke, quhaire I haue pepperid
thaime as soundlie as ye haue done the papists thaire.... I was forcid
at the last to saye unto thaime, that if any of thaim hadde bene in a
colledge disputing with their skollairs, if any of their disciples had
ansoured thaim in that sorte they wolde haue fetched him up in place
of a replye, and so shoulde the rodde haue plyed upon the poore boyes
buttokis." Ellis Letters, Third Series, iv, 162. The principal
authorities on the Hampton Court Conference are, first, "The Svmme and
Svbstance of the Conference, which it pleased his excellent Majestie
to have," etc., "Contracted by William Barlovv, ... Deane of Chester";
second, Dr. Montague's letter to his mother, in Winwood's Memorials,
ii, 13-15; third, the letter of Patrick Galloway to the Presbytery of
Edinburgh, in Calderwood, vi, 241, 242; and, fourth, a letter from
Tobie Mathew, Bishop of Durham, to Hutton, Archbishop of York, in
Strype's Whitgift appendix, xlv. Compare Nugae Antiquae, 181, 182, and
the king's letter to Blake, in Ellis's Letters, third series, iv, 161,
which are both cited above. Mr. Gardiner has shown (History of
England, i, 159) that this letter is addressed to Northampton. There
are several documents relating to the conference among the state
papers calendared by Mrs. Greene under dates in January, 1604. Of the
vigorous action taken against the Puritans after the conference, some
notion may be formed by the letter of protest from the aged Matthew
Hutton, Archbishop of York, to Lord Cranborne, in Lodge's
Illustrations of British History, iii, 115, and Cranborne's reply,
ibid., 125.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 168.]
Stith has not the weight of an original authority, but he is justly
famous for accuracy in following his authorities, and he had access to
many papers relating to the history of Virginia which are now lost.
Under the year 1608 he says: "Doctor Whitgift, Arch-Bishop of
Canterbury, ... having died four Years before this, was succeeded to
that high Preferment by Dr. Richard Bancroft.... He had very high
Notions with Relation to the Government of both Church and State; and
was accordingly a great Stickler for, and Promoter of, the King's
absolute Power, and failed not to take all Occasions, to oblige the
Puritans to conform to the Church of England. This Prelate's Harshness
and Warmth caused many of that People to take the Resolution this Year
of settling themselves in Virginia, and some were actually come off
for that Purpose. But the Arch-bishop, finding that they were
preparing in great Numbers to depart, obtained a Proclamation from the
King, forbidding any to go, without his Majesty's express Leave."
History of Virginia, 1747, p. 76.
[Sidenote: Note 3, page 168.]
For Whitaker's filiation, Neill's Virginia Company, 78. Whitaker's
Good Newes from Virginia is no doubt intended by the entry in the
inventory of Brewster's goods, "Newes from Virginia." I know no other
book with such a title. That Alexander Whitaker was himself touched
with Puritanism, or at least was not unwilling to have Puritan
ministers for colleagues, is rendered pretty certain from passages in
his letters. For instance, he writes to Crashaw from Jamestown, August
9, 1611, desiring that young and "godly" ministers should come, and
adds, "We have noe need either of ceremonies or bad livers." British
Museum, Additional MSS., 21,993. (The letter is printed in Browne's
Genesis, 499, 500.) In a letter given in Purchas and in Neill, 95,
dated June 18, 1614, he says that neither subscription nor the
surplice are spoken of in Virginia. It has escaped the notice of
church historians that Whitaker's semi-Puritanism seems to have left
traces for many years on the character and usage of the Virginia
church. The Rev. Hugh Jones writes as late as 1724 in his Present
State of Virginia, p. 68, that surplices were only then "beginning to
be brought in Fashion," and that the people in some parishes received
the Lord's Supper sitting.
[Sidenote: Note 4, page 173.]
The late Dr. Neill was the first, I believe, to call attention to this
fact, though he did not state it quite so strongly as I have put it in
the text. It is worth while transferring Neill's remarks from the New
England Genealogical Register, vol. XXX, 412, 413: "The action of the
passengers of the Mayflower in forming a social compact before landing
at Plymouth Rock seems to have been in strict accordance with the
policy of the London Company, under whose patent the ship sailed. On
June 9, 1619, O.S., John Whincop's patent was duly sealed by the
Company, but this which had cost the Puritans so much labor and money
was not used. Several months after, the Leyden people became
interested in a new project. On February 2, 1619-'20, at a meeting at
the house of Sir Edwin Sandys in Aldersgate, he stated to the Company
that a grant had been made to John Peirce and his associates. At the
same quarterly meeting it was expressly ordered that the leaders of
particular plantations, associating unto them divers of the gravest
and discreetest of their companies, shall have liberty to make orders,
ordinances, and constitutions for the better ordering and directing of
their business and servants, provided they be not repugnant to the
laws of England." Bradford, in his Plimouth Plantation, 90, says they
"chose or rather confirmed Mr. John Carver, ... their Governour for
that year"--that is, for 1620. Mr. Deane, the editor of Bradford, has
lost the force of this by misunderstanding a statement in Mourt's
Relation, so called. See Deane's note, page 99, of Bradford. The
statement in Mourt is under date of March 23d. I quote from the
reprint in Young, 196, 197: "and did likewise choose our governor for
this present year, which was Master John Carver," etc. Young applies
Bradford's words, "or rather confirmed," to this event, and Deane also
supposes that Bradford confuses two elections. Carver was no doubt
chosen in England or Holland under authority of the charter to serve
for the calendar year, and confirmed or rechosen after the Compact was
signed. What took place on the 23d of March was that a governor was
elected for the year 1621, which, according to the calendar of that
time, began on the 25th of March. For the next year they chose Carver,
who was already "governor for this present year," and whose first term
was about to expire. Both Deane and Young failed to perceive the
pregnant fact that Carver was governor during the voyage, and so lost
the force of the words "or rather confirmed." Bradford, in that
portion of his History of Plimouth Plantation which relates to this
period, gives several letters illustrating the negotiations of the
Pilgrims with the Virginia Company. The MS. Records of the Company in
the Library of Congress, under dates of May 26 and June 9, 1619, and
February 19, 1620 (1619 O.S.), contain the transactions relating to
the Whincop Charter, which was not used, on account of Whincop's
death, and the Pierce Charter, which the Pilgrims took with them.
[Sidenote: Note 5, page 174.]
The charge against Sandys is in the Duke of Manchester's papers, Royal
Historical MS. Commission viii, II, 45. It is remarkable that the
dominant liberal faction in the Virginia Company is here accused of
seeking to do what the Massachusetts Company afterward did--to wit, to
found a popular American government by virtue of powers conferred in a
charter. That liberal government in New England had its rise in the
arrangements made with the London or Virginia Company before sailing,
and not, as poets, painters, and orators have it, in the cabin of the
Mayflower, is sufficiently attested in a bit of evidence, conspicuous
enough, but usually overlooked. Robinson's farewell letter to the
whole company, which reached them in England, is in Bradford, 64-67,
and in Mourt's Relation. It has several significant allusions to the
form of government already planned. "And lastly, your intended course
of civill communitie will minister continuall occasion of offence."
The allusion here seems to be to the joint-stock and communistic
system of labor and living proposed. In another paragraph the allusion
is to the system of government: "Whereas, you are become a body
politik, using amongst your selves civill governmente, and are not
furnished with any persons of spetiall emencie above the rest, to be
chosen by you into office of governmente," etc., "you are at present
to have only them for your ordinarie governours, which your selves
shall make choyse of for that worke." That the government under the
Virginia Company was to be democratic is manifest. The compact was a
means of giving it the sanction of consent where the patent and the
general order did not avail for that purpose.
[Sidenote: Note 6, page 176.]
Winslow's Briefe Narration appended to his Hypocrisie Vnmasked is the
only authority for Robinson's address. Dr. H. M. Dexter has with
characteristic wealth of learning and ingenuity sought to diminish the
force of these generous words of Robinson in his Congregationalism,
403 and ff. But the note struck in this farewell address was familiar
to the later followers of Robinson's form of Independency. Five of the
ministers who went to Holland in 1637 and founded churches, published
in 1643 a tract called An Apologeticall Narrative Humbly Submitted to
the Honourable Houses of Parliament. By Thomas Goodwin, Phillip Nye,
Sidrach Simpson, Jer. Borroughs, William Bridge. London, 1643. From
the copy in the British Museum I quote: "A second principle we carryed
along with us in all our resolutions was, Not to make our present
judgment and practice a binding law unto ourselves for the future
which we in like manner made continuall profession of upon all
occasions." On page 22 Robinson's words are almost repeated in the
phrase "they coming new out of popery ... might not be perfect the
first day." Robinson's early colleague, Smyth, the unpractical,
much-defamed, but saintly "Anabaptist," says in a tract published
after his death, "I continually search after the truth." Robinson
wrote a reply to a portion of this tract. See Barclay's Inner Life,
appendix to Chapter V, where the tract is given. This holding of their
opinions in a state of flux, this liberal expectancy of a further
evolution of opinion, was a trait to be admired in the early
Separatists in an age when modesty in dogmatic statement was
exceedingly rare.
[Sidenote: Note 7, page 177.]
Neill, in the Historical Magazine for January, 1869, and the New
England Genealogical Register, 1874, identifies the Mayflower captain
with Jones of the Discovery, who was accounted in Virginia
"dishonest." But honest seamen were few in that half-piratical age.
That he was hired by the Dutch to take the Pilgrims elsewhere than to
Hudson River is charged in Morton's Memorial, and is not in itself
unlikely. But the embarrassments of Cape Cod shoals were very real; a
trading ship sent out by the Pilgrims after their settlement, failed
to find a way round the cape.
[Sidenote: Note 8, page 177.]
Early New England writers were not content with giving the Pilgrims
the honor due to them. Hutchinson asserts that the Virginia Colony had
virtually failed, and that the Pilgrim settlement was the means of
reviving it. This has been often repeated on no other authority than
that of Hutchinson, who wrote nearly a century and a half after the
event. The list of patents for plantations in Virginia as given by
Purchas, in which appears that of Master "Wincop," under which the
Pilgrims proposed to plant, is a sufficient proof that Virginia was
not languishing. "These patentees," says Purchas, "have undertaken to
transport to Virginia a great multitude of people and store of
cattle." Virginia had reached the greatest prosperity it attained
before the dissolution of the company, in precisely the years in which
the slender Pilgrim Colony was preparing. It is quite possible to
honor the Pilgrims without reversing the order of cause and effect.
[Sidenote: Note 9, page 181.]
Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, 135, 136: "The experience that was had
in this commone course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that
amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanitie of that
conceite of Platos and other ancients, applauded by some of later
times--that the taking away of propertie, and bringing in communitie
into a comone wealth, would make them happy and florishing; as if they
were wiser than God. For this communitie (so fare as it was) was found
to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment
that would have been to their benefite and comforte. For the yong-men
that were most able and fitte for labour and service did repine that
they should spend their time and streingth to worke for other mens
wives and children with out any recompence. The strong, or man of
parts, had no more in devission of victails and cloaths, then he that
was weake and not able to doe a quarter the other could; this was
thought injuestice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalised
in labours, and victails, cloaths, &c., with the meaner and yonger
sorte, thought it some indignite and disrespect unto them. And for
mens wives to be commanded to doe servise for other men, as dresing
their meate, washing their cloaths, &c., they deemd it a kind of
slaverie, neither could many husbands well brooke it. Upon the point
all being to have alike, and all to doe alike, they thought them
selves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so if it
did not cut of those relations that God hath set amongest men yet it
did much diminish and take of the mutuall respects that should be
preserved amongst them. And would have bene worse if they had been men
of another condition."
CHAPTER THE FOURTH.
_THE GREAT PURITAN EXODUS._
I.
[Sidenote: Result of the Pilgrim settlement.]
Men who undertake a great enterprise rarely find their anticipations
fulfilled; they are fortunate if their general aim is reached at last
in any way. The Pilgrims had migrated, hoping to be "stepping-stones
to others," as they phrased it. They thought that many like-minded in
matters of religion would come to them out of England, but the
Separatist movement had been worn out by persecution. There were few
open dissenters left, and the Pilgrims, by their long exile, had lost
all close relations with their own country. Among those that came to
Plymouth from England were some whose coming tended to dilute the
religious life and lower the moral standards of the colony. The fervor
of the Pilgrims themselves abated something of its intensity in the
preoccupations incident to pioneer life. The hope of expanding their
religious organization by the rapid growth of the colony was not
fulfilled; discontented Puritans were not eager to settle under the
government of Separatists, and ten years after their migration the
Plymouth colony contained little more than three hundred people.
[Sidenote: The religious motive.]
None the less the hope of the Pilgrims was realized; they became
stepping-stones to thousands of others. Captain John Smith laughed at
the "humorous ignorances" of these "Brownist" settlers, but, humorous
or not, ignorant or not, the "Brownists" remained on the coast while
other emigrants retreated. In spite of their terrible suffering none
of the Pilgrims went back. This is the capital fact in their history.
A new force had been introduced into colonization. Henceforth
persecuted or discontented religionists, prompted by a motive vastly
more strenuous and enduring than cupidity, were to bear the main brunt
of breaking a way into the wilderness.
[Sidenote: Commercial settlements.]
[Sidenote: John White's The Planter's Plea, in Young's Chronicles of
Mass.]
The first effect of the slender success at Plymouth was to stimulate
speculative and merely adventurous migration. From 1607 until the
arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 no English colony had landed on the
northern coast; but after the Pilgrims came, fish-drying and
fur-buying stations began to appear on the banks of the Piscataqua and
the coast eastward in 1622 and 1623. These tiny settlements were germs
of New Hampshire and Maine, the only New England plantations begun
without any admixture of religious motives. A commercial colony was
tried in Massachusetts Bay as early as 1622, but it failed. There were
other like attempts. In 1624 some men of Dorchester, headed by John
White, the "Patriarch" Puritan clergyman, sent out a colony to Cape
Ann. The members of this company were to grow maize to supply fishing
ships, and in the season the same men were to lend a hand on board the
ships, which would thus be saved the necessity for carrying double
crews. But this plausible scheme proved a case of seeking strawberries
in the sea and red herrings in the wood. Farmers were but lubbers at
codfishing, and salt-water fishermen were clumsy enough in the
cornfield. Losses of several sorts forced the Dorchester Company to
dissolve. Four members of their futile colony, encouraged by a message
from White, remained on Cape Ann. Removing to the present site of
Salem, they waited at the risk of their lives for the coming of a new
colony from England.
[Sidenote: Individual settlers.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
Solitary adventurers of the sort known on nearly every frontier were
presently to be found in several places. The scholarly recluse was
represented by Blackstone, who had selected for his secluded abode a
spot convenient to a spring of good water where the town of Boston was
afterward planted; the inevitable Scotch adventurer was on an island
in Boston Harbor; Samuel Maverick, a pattern of frontier hospitality
and generosity, took up his abode on Noddle's Island; while the
rollicking and scoffing libertine was found in Thomas Morton, who with
some rebellious bond servants got possession of a fortified house in
what is now Braintree. Here Morton welcomed renegade servants from
Plymouth and elsewhere. He wrote ribald verses which he posted on his
Maypole, and devised May-dances in which the saturnine Indian women
participated. He broke all the commandments with delight, carried on
a profitable trade in selling firearms to the savages in defiance of
royal proclamations, and wrought whatever other deviltry came within
his reach, until his neighbors could no longer endure the proximity of
so dangerous a firebrand. Little Captain Standish, whom Morton
derisively dubbed "Captain Shrimp," descended on this kingdom of
misrule at last and broke up the perpetual carnival, sending Morton to
England.
The settlement of New England was thus beginning sporadically and
slowly. If the Massachusetts Puritans had not come, these feeble and
scattered plantations might have grown into colonies after a long
time, as such beginnings did in New Hampshire and Maine, and later in
North Carolina, but having no strong neighbor to support them, it is
likely that they would all have been driven away or annihilated by
some inevitable collision with the Indians.
II.
[Sidenote: Puritanism at the accession of Charles I.]
English Puritanism throughout the reign of James I had been the party
of strict morals, of austere and Pharisaic scrupulosity, of rigid
Sabbath observance, and of Calvinistic dogmatism. During that reign it
had passed through its last transformation in becoming a political
party--the party of anti-Catholic politics at home and abroad. Because
Parliament was on its side, the mere course of events had made the
Puritan party favor the predominance of Parliament, and this brought
it to represent liberalism in politics. By his unconcealed
partisanship, James had contrived to make the Puritans a permanent
opposition suspected of disliking monarchy itself. Charles I was even
more the antagonist of Puritanism than James.
[Sidenote: Later Puritanism conservative.]
In one other respect the position of Puritanism had been gradually
changed by mere parallax. In Elizabeth's reign it had been the party
of innovation. It was no longer the party of change in religion when
Charles came to the throne. The adoption of the Arminian system of
doctrine by many of the High-churchmen, and the reactionary
innovations now proposed by ecclesiastics like Laud, had left
Puritanism to stand for Protestant conservatism. It was immeasurably
the gainer with the mass of slow-moving people by this change of
relative position. The parliamentary struggle with James and Charles
added to the religious Puritans a numerous body of political Puritans
who, without much care about religion, were fain to ally their
political discontent with the discontent of those who resisted
ecclesiastical retrogression. This compact party, powerful after all
its defeats, was bound by its position to cherish every aspiration for
the improvement of morals, every indignant movement for the
suppression of abuses, and it became the ally of every popular
resentment against royal absolutism or episcopal encroachment, and the
advocate, almost to fanaticism, of an anti-Spanish foreign policy, and
a domestic policy in which repression and persecution of Roman
Catholics held first place.
III.
[Sidenote: Rise of Laud.]
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
But the king and the High-churchmen were the party in possession.
Buckingham, in the first years of Charles, was more than ever dominant
at court, and Buckingham's favorite, just rising above the horizon,
was Dr. Laud, Bishop of St. Davids at the death of James, and soon
afterward translated to Bath and Wells and then to London. It soon
came to be understood that he was only waiting for the death of his
opponent, Archbishop Abbott, to take the primacy, much of the power of
which he had already contrived to grasp. On the death of Buckingham,
Laud succeeded him as chief favorite at court. The one great and real
service which this able and indefatigable divine rendered the world is
the last he would have chosen. He was the main spur to the settlement
of Puritan colonies in New England.
[Sidenote: Character of Laud.]
[Sidenote: Letter to Selden in Chalmers, art. Laud.]
Do our best, we moderns shall hardly avoid injustice in our opinion of
Laud. The changes of time and the advance of ideas have rendered a
sympathetic judgment of him difficult. Ecclesiastic above all, he was
not, like Whitgift and Bancroft, a Protestant High-churchman. He
sought to make the English church Catholic and mediaeval, yet he would
on no account attach it to Rome. Like Whitgift, he made the church
dependent on royal authority, and in this he was far removed from the
earlier churchmen. There was nothing spiritual in his nature; his
personal devotion had neither agony nor exaltation. He had none of the
mediaeval enthusiasm that prompted the vigils of his contemporary,
Nicholas Ferrar, for example, and elevated the master of Little
Gidding to a saintship, amiable and touching. Notwithstanding the
energy of Laud's devotion, his nature was as shallow and objective as
it was sincere. It has been remarked that when Laud spoke of the
beauty of holiness he meant no more than decorum in public worship,
the beauty of a well-ordered church and of proper intonation and
genuflexion. He seemed to touch a modern note when he proposed to
suppress the futile debate between Calvinists and Arminians because it
tended to disturb Christian charity; but Laud's Christian charity,
like his holiness, was purely external; it was merely quiet submission
to one ritual and one form of discipline. His relentless, vindictive,
and even cruel temper toward opponents showed him incapable of
conceiving of charity in any spiritual sense. He disliked controversy
because it put obstacles in the way of uniformity, and he had no taste
for speculative debate because it tended to undermine authority. His
intellect was utterly practical and phenomenally acute. It was
incredibly energetic, and its energy was intensified by its
narrowness. His attachment to the church had no relation to the
beneficent utilities of the church. The church was a fetich for which
he was ready to die without a murmur. In his zeal he was reckless of
personal danger and sometimes unmindful of the moral complexion of his
actions. His egotism was so interblended with his zeal that he could
not separate one from the other, nor can the student of his character.
A disservice to him was an affront to Almighty God. The very honesty
of such a man is pernicious; a little duplicity might have softened
the outward manifestations of his hard nature. Unhappily, there was
not even indolence or self-indulgence to moderate his all but
superhuman activity, which pushed his domination to its possibilities,
and, with a vigilance aspiring to omniscience, penetrated to the
minutest details in the administration of church and state. He even
filed papers giving the elements of the debates on good works as an
evidence of sanctification carried on between Hooker and Cotton in the
cabin meeting-houses of New England. For the rest he presents the
paradoxes one expects in so marked a character. While he had no taste
for the credulous dogmatism of his time, he showed a certain relish
for superstitions in recording dreams and omens, yet he had none of
the timidity of superstition. He was, moreover, fearless in peril, and
he faced unpopularity without flinching. Stubborn and inflexible with
the clergy and the populace, obdurate and pitiless with those who had
offended him or his king or his church, he was flexible and
insinuating in his relations with those in power. His unworthy
yielding to his early patron, the Earl of Devonshire, in a matter
which concerned his ecclesiastical conscience, gave him a bitter and
lifelong repentance. His complacence to Buckingham, and his servile
devotion to Charles, seem a little despicable. He was even willing at
the last to make terms with Parliament, when it became plain that
Parliament was the new master. Though obsequious, he was the farthest
possible from a coward, and he accepted death on the scaffold with the
serene composure of a martyr.
IV.
[Sidenote: Political conditions promote emigration.]
[Sidenote: Gorges's Briefe Narration.]
The great migration to New England set in soon after the beginning of
Laud's ascendency in the ecclesiastical government of England. It
waned as he declined, and ceased forever with his fall. There is a
witty justness in the phrase by which a colonial historian dubs Laud
"the father of New England." Other archbishops had contented
themselves with crushing the Separatists, but, with characteristic
boldness and logical thoroughness, Laud struck at the powerful Puritan
party which had contrived for more than half a century to remain in
the Church of England while protesting against the discipline and
service of the church. The arbitrary government of the new king, the
dissolution of Parliament, and the imprisonment of liberal leaders cut
off hope of securing church reform or a relaxation of oppressive laws.
High-church pulpits resounded with arguments in favor of the king's
absolute authority and the duty of unquestioning obedience, while the
declared principles of the king and his court left the property,
liberty, and life of the subject exposed to the rapacity or the
vindictiveness of those in power. In view of these things, some of the
Puritans began to think the American wilderness a better place of
residence than England.
V.
[Sidenote: Religious motives for Puritan emigration.]
The state of the church was even more a reason for removal than the
oppressions of the government. Persecution had failed to drive Puritan
ministers or their followers into what they deemed the capital sin of
schism. They hated the domination of the bishops, communion with the
ungodly, and the absence of a rigid discipline. But they had been
sustained through long years of waiting by the hope of delivering the
church from those who oppressed and defiled her. They proposed,
whenever they could gain power, to winnow the chaff from the wheat,
and they probably destined the chaff to swift destruction. But the
hope of seeing a church without spot or wrinkle, prayer book or
bishop, died under the reactionary policy of Buckingham and Laud, and
many came to look with favor on a project whose full import was only
whispered in the ear, to found in the wilds of America a "particular
church," as they phrased it--a new church with a right of priority in
a new land and backed by the sanction of the government of the
country. It was no modern generalized love of liberty, civil or
religious, but a strenuous desire to find a place where they might
make real their ideal of church organization that brought the Puritans
out of their comfortable nests in England to dwell in poor cabins in a
wilderness. It is a motive for braving dangers by sea and land hard of
comprehension in our Sadducean age.
[Sidenote: Fear of judgments.]
[Sidenote: Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 390, 313.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
There was one other consideration still more difficult for men of our
day to understand. Political and military reverses had apparently
well-nigh wrecked Protestantism on the Continent. Many Protestants in
the Palatinate and elsewhere were making peace by becoming Roman
Catholics. "All other churches of Europe are brought to desolation, &
our sinnes, for which the Lord beginnes allreaddy to frowne upon us &
to cutte us short, doe threatne evill times to be comminge upon us."
These words are set down in the Reasons for New England as the second
consideration. In another part of the same paper it is urged that the
"woefull spectacle" of the ruin of "Churches beyound the Seas," "may
teach us more wisdome to avoide the Plauge when it is foreseene & not
to tarry as they did till it overtake us." The dominance of Old
Testament ideas is easily seen here. But this fleeing from judgments
that were to fall not on the lives or possessions of men, but on the
churches themselves--judgments of a spiritual nature, apprehended only
by inference--was a refinement of Hebraism never known to the Hebrews.
The delusion that Laud meant to hand over the English church bound
hand and foot to Rome may have made such judgments seem visibly
imminent.
VI.
[Sidenote: Rise of the Massachusetts Company.]
[Sidenote: Compare The Planter's Plea.]
The project for a Puritan colony languished at first on account of the
failure of the semi-Puritan, semi-commercial Dorchester farming and
fishing colony on Cape Ann; but White of Dorchester continued to
agitate the planting of a colony. He had, no doubt, efficient help in
the proceedings against the Puritan clergy. From Dorchester the plan
was carried to London, where it soon became, in the phrase of that
time, "vulgar," or, as we should say, popular. Its countenance to the
world, and especially toward the government, was that of a commercial
venture like the planting of Virginia, but in its heart it was a
religious enterprise. In March, 1628, the Council for New England gave
to the Massachusetts projectors a patent for lands extending from the
Merrimack to the Charles and three miles beyond each river. The
western boundary of this tract was the Pacific Ocean, for holders of
grants could afford to be generous in giving away the interior of an
unexplored continent about which nothing was known but that it
abounded in savages.
VII.
[Sidenote: Leadership and character of Endecott.]
[Sidenote: 1628.]
[Sidenote: Bentley's Description of Salem.]
[Sidenote: Eliot's Biography, 195.]
In June a small colony was sent to Massachusetts under John Endecott.
The next year another company of emigrants was added. Endecott, who
was one of the patentees, loved a bold enterprise, and readily
consented to take charge of the forerunners of the colony. He lacked
the moderation and saneness needed in a leader, and his long career in
connection with Massachusetts was marked from the beginning by
mistakes born of a rash temper and impulsive enthusiasm. Two of the
gentlemen emigrants who had been named by the company in London as
members of the local Council were not willing to go to the unexpected
lengths Endecott favored in the organization of the Salem church,
though they were probably Puritans of a moderate type. They held a
separate service with a small company, using the prayer book. Endecott
appears to have made no effort at conciliation; he promptly shipped
John and Samuel Browne, pack and prayer book, back to England. This
was precisely the course that even Lord Bacon advised in the treatment
of schismatics who should contrive to gain access to a colony, and
there is no occasion for surprise that a quixotic enthusiast like
Endecott did not hold broader views than those of a philosopher of the
same period. But Endecott's rash action endangered the whole
enterprise, which required at this stage the extreme of prudence. The
alarmed managers in England contrived to settle with the Brownes in
private, and the affair had no other result than to ruin Endecott's
reputation for prudence. Endecott, however, went on fighting the
Lord's battles against the Apollyons of his fancy, regardless of
results. Soon after his arrival he marched to the den of Morton, the
profligate master of "Merrymount." In the absence of Morton he hewed
down the profane Maypole in God's name, and solemnly dubbed the place
Mount Dagon, in memory of the Philistine idol that fell down before
the ark of the Lord. At a later period he cut one arm of the cross out
of the English colors of the Salem trainband, in order to convert the
Union Jack to Protestantism. One of the many manifestations of his
pragmatical conscience was his Tartuffian protection of modesty by
insisting that the women of Salem should keep their faces veiled at
church. He was also a leader in the crusade of the magistrates against
the crime of wearing wigs. A strange mixture of rashness, pious zeal,
genial manners, hot temper, and harsh bigotry, his extravagances
supply the condiment of humor to a very serious history--it is perhaps
the principal debt posterity owes him. But there was a side to his
career too serious to be humorous. Bold against Maypoles and prayer
books and women who presented themselves in church immodestly
barefaced, and in the forefront against wigs, he was no soldier either
in prudent conduct or vigor of attack. When intrusted with the command
of an expedition to demand satisfaction of the Pequots, he proved
incapable of anything but a campaign of exasperation. When late in
life he was governor of Massachusetts, and had become, after the death
of Winthrop and Dudley, the dominant political leader, the putting to
death of Quakers left an ineffaceable blot on the history of the
colony he had helped to found. When the colony was brought to book in
England for this severity, Endecott showed himself capable of writing
one of the most cringing official letters on record, as full of cant
as it was of creeping servility. In him we may clearly apprehend
certain unamiable traits of Puritanism and of the early seventeenth
century which appear in his character in exaggerated relief. This
hearty and energetic bigot must have been representative of a large,
though not of the better, element in Massachusetts Puritanism, for he
was chosen to the governorship oftener than any other man during the
continuance of the old charter government.
VIII.
[Sidenote: Leadership of Winthrop.]
It is a pleasure to turn from Endecott to one who was, like him, a
seventeenth-century man, and who did not escape the scrupulosity and
ridiculosity of Puritanism, but whose amiable personality,
magnanimity, and qualities of leadership made him the principal figure
in the Puritan migration. Winthrop, like two or three of the
conspicuous actors in our later history, owes his distinction to the
moral elevation of his character quite as much as to his considerable
mental gifts; for character multiplied into sagacity is better than
genius for some kinds of work.
[Sidenote: Rise of the great migration of 1630.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
He was a late comer in the enterprise. In the year after Endecott had
brought over a colony composed mostly of servants of the company and
of the individual patentees, a second company of emigrants had been
sent over with a commission to Endecott as governor on the place,
assisted by a council. A church had been formed at Salem. Now set in a
larger agitation in favor of migration to New England. The course of
events in England was so adverse to Puritanism that those who were
devoted to that purified church, which was as yet invisible, except to
the eye of faith, began to look toward America. Every door for public
action in state or church was closed to the Puritans in England,
closed and barred by Courts of High Commission, by the Star Chamber,
and by the Tower. Into one of the gloomiest rooms of the latter had
lately gone, at the arbitrary command of the king, that high-spirited
martyr to constitutional liberty, Sir John Eliot. Finding no way by
which to come out again except a postern of dishonor, Eliot
deliberately chose to languish and die in prison. The almost hopeless
outlook at home, the example set by Endecott's emigration to New
England in 1628, and by that of Higginson's company in 1629, perhaps
also the ever-active propagandism of "Father White" of Dorchester, set
agoing among the Puritans a widespread interest in the subject. Some
of the leading minds thought it a noble work to organize a reformed
church in a new country, since, in their view, the Church of England,
under Laud, had taken up its march backward. This purpose of planting
a Puritan church in America now began to take the first place; even
the conversion of the Indians, which had been the chief avowed purpose
hitherto, fell into the background.
[Sidenote: Winthrop's paper.]
The manuscript paper entitled Reasons for New England, to which
reference has already been made, was widely but secretly circulated,
and frequently copied, after a fashion of that time, prevailing
especially in the case of tracts or books of a kind to shrink from
print. It contained arguments in favor of removing to New England,
with answers to the various objections made against emigration.
Several copies of these Reasons, or Considerations, have come down to
us in various handwritings, and the authorship has been attributed now
to one, now to another; to Winthrop, to White of Dorchester, to Sir
John Eliot himself. It appears to have been in its earliest form the
production of Winthrop. There were horseback journeys, some of them by
night, made about this time for the purpose of secret consultation.
[Sidenote: His character.]
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
Winthrop, a country gentleman of Groton, in Suffolk, and an attorney
in the Court of Wards, was a strict Puritan, desiring above all a
reformed church and "the ordinances of God in their purity," as the
phrase of the time went. Precocious in everything, and inclined to
ideal aims, he had been religious from boyhood, had married at a
little over seventeen years of age, and had been made a justice of the
peace while still very young. He studied divinity, and only the
dissuasion of friends kept him from entering the ministry. Of judicial
temper, he came to be often consulted upon points of conscience, which
gave much trouble in that age of casuistry and abounding scruples. His
kindly visits to those who were in any trouble of spirit were highly
prized. He himself makes much of the corruptions of his own nature and
of his juvenile aberrancy, but generosity and purity of spirit like
his are born and not acquired. His devoutness, accompanied by a habit
of self-criticism in the presence of Infinite Justice, doubtless gave
additional vigor to his virtues. For the rest, he was a man of
independent estate, of prudent and conciliatory carriage, of a clear
but not broad mind. What, as much as anything else, fitted him for his
function was, that all his virtues were cast in Puritan molds and all
his prejudices had a Puritan set.
[Sidenote: His influence.]
[Sidenote: Note 6.]
When the question of emigration was under discussion other gentlemen
who thought of going turned to Winthrop as the natural leader,
declaring that they would remain in England if he should desert them.
He was not only the official head, but he was indeed the soul, of the
migration of 1630, and he went to America confident of a call divine
like that of Moses.
IX.
[Sidenote: Cradock.]
It is a fact worthy of note that the three primary steps toward the
establishment of free government in America were due to Englishmen
who did not themselves cross the sea. The Great Charter of 1618 to the
Virginia colony, and the "large patent" to the Plymouth Pilgrims, were
granted, as we have seen, under the leadership of Sir Edwin Sandys,
Governor of the Virginia Company of London. The third of the measures
which placed colonial government on a popular basis was due to the
governor of another corporation engaged in colony planting.
[Sidenote: Cradock's plan.]
[Sidenote: Mass. Records, July 29, 1629.]
[Sidenote: Sainsbury's Calendar, May 17, 1626.]
On the 28th of July, 1629, while Winthrop and his friends were
debating their removal to New England, Mathew Cradock, a wealthy and
liberal merchant, who held the office of governor, or, as we should
say, president, of the Massachusetts Company, read in a "general
court" or meeting of the company "certain propositions conceived by
himself," as it is carefully recorded. He proposed "that for the
advancement of the plantation, the inducing and encouraging persons of
worth, quality and rank to transplant themselves and families thither
and for other weighty reasons"--reasons which probably it was not
thought best to spread upon the records, but which were the core of
the whole matter--for these reasons Cradock proposed to "transfer the
government of the plantation to those that shall inhabit there," and
not to continue it in subordination to a commercial company in London.
The sorrows of the Virginia colony under the administration of Sir
Thomas Smyth and the disagreements between the Pilgrims and their
"adventurers" in London had taught a wholesome lesson. Three years
earlier Sir Francis Wyatt, the best of all the early governors of
Virginia, had set forth in an elaborate report that the principal
cause of the "slow proceeding of the growth of the plantation" was
that the government had been divided between England and Virginia.
Massachusetts escaped from this embarrassment.
X.
[Sidenote: Evolution of the Mass. government.]
[Sidenote: Hubbard, chap. xviii.]
[Sidenote: Note 7.]
The evolution of the Massachusetts government may now be traced
through its several stages. A company was formed, partly of Dorchester
men, but chiefly of residents of London. This company secured a patent
to lands in Massachusetts Bay from the Council for New England. The
patentees intended both a commercial enterprise and a Puritan
settlement. They sent Endecott, one of their number, as agent or
superintendent, with a company of servants and others, to prepare the
way for the migration of other patentees. In March, 1628, they secured
a liberal charter from the king, which gave them the right to
establish in Massachusetts a government subordinate to the company.
The plan was to settle a government in the form rendered familiar by
that of the Virginia Company. The Massachusetts Company in London sent
a commission to Endecott as governor on the place, subject to the
orders of the company in England. A council of assistants was
associated with him, but there was as yet no provision for giving the
people a voice in the government.
[Sidenote: The change of plan.]
Winthrop and his coterie of gentlemen appear to have been dissatisfied
with the prospect of living under a government directed from England,
and thus subject to English stockholders and liable to interference
from the court. Cradock had been a leader and the most liberal
investor in the enterprise. He, no doubt, readily foresaw the great
advance that the colony would make if Winthrop and his friends should
embark their lives and fortunes in it, and he may have intended to
emigrate himself. The annulling of the charter of the Virginia Company
on frivolous pretexts had shown how easily the Massachusetts charter
might meet the same fate in a reign far more devoted to arbitrary
government than that of James and entirely hostile to Puritanism.
There could hardly be a doubt that the charter would be revoked as
soon as its projectors should develop their true purpose before the
all-observing eyes of Laud, who was now rising rapidly to dominant
influence in the government. It was at this juncture probably that
Cradock conceived his ingenious plan. He would resign his place and
have the officers of the company chosen from gentlemen about to embark
for the plantation. The charter prescribed no place of assembling to
the company, which had been left free apparently to make its
headquarters at its birthplace in Dorchester or at its new home in
London. It was also free to meet in any other place. The meetings of
the company might therefore be held in Massachusetts, where the
Puritanism of its proceedings would attract less attention. The
governor and other officers would then be chosen in the colony; the
company and the colony would thus be merged into one, and the charter
transported to Massachusetts would perhaps be beyond the reach of
writs and judgments.
XI.
[Sidenote: The Cambridge agreement.]
[Sidenote: 1629.]
No doubt the influential company of friends who were debating a
removal to New England were informed of Cradock's proposition before
it was mooted in the company on the 28th of July. The plan was
probably thought of in consequence of their objection to emigration
under the Virginia system. Cradock's proposition was at least the
turning point of their decision. Nearly a month later, on the 26th of
August, the leaders of Winthrop's party assembled to the number of
twelve, at Cambridge, and solemnly pledged themselves, "in the
presence of God who is the searcher of all hearts," "to pass the Seas
(under God's protection) to inhabit and continue in New England." The
preamble states the object of this migration. It was not civil
liberty, the end that political Puritans had most in view, and
certainly there is no hint of a desire for religious liberty. Even the
conversion of the Indian is not uppermost in this solemn resolve.
"God's glory and the church's good" are the words used. This has the
true ring of the Puritan churchman. The whole pledge is couched in
language befitting men who feel themselves engaged in a religious
enterprise of the highest importance.
This pledge contained a notable proviso. The signers agreed to
emigrate only on condition that "the whole government together with
the patent for said plantation" should be transferred and legally
established in the colony by order of the General Court of the
Company, and that this should be done before the last of the ensuing
month. There was opposition to the removal of the government, and this
peremptory condition was necessary. Three days later, after a debate,
the company voted that its government should be transferred to
Massachusetts Bay.
[Sidenote: Removal of the charter.]
[Sidenote: 1629.]
[Sidenote: Note 8.]
[Sidenote: Compare Palfrey, i, 371, and Deane's note in Mass. Hist.
Soc. Proc. 1869, p. 185.]
[Sidenote: Hutchinson's Hist. Mass., p. 31.]
On the 20th of October Cradock resigned his governorship and Winthrop
was chosen in his stead. Puritan ministers were at once elected to the
freedom of the company, in order that its proceedings might not want
the sanction of prayer. The next year the charter crossed the wide
seas, and in 1630 a court of the company was held in the wilderness at
Charlestown. But a subordinate government "for financial affairs only"
was maintained in London, with Cradock, the former president, at the
head. This seems to have been an effectual blind, and probably the
king's government did not know of the flight of the charter until the
Privy Council in 1634 summoned Cradock to bring that document to the
Council Board. Thomas Morton, the expelled master of Merrymount,
writes of the wrath of Laud, who had been foiled by this pretty ruse:
"My lord of Canterbury and my lord privy seal, having caused all Mr.
Cradock's letters to be viewed and his apology for the brethren
particularly heard, protested against him and Mr. Humfries that they
were a couple of imposturous knaves." Laud had thought to crush the
government of Massachusetts by destroying the company, whose office
remained in London, with Cradock still apparently its head. The
archbishop found too late that he had eagerly pounced upon a dummy. He
devised many things afterward to achieve his purpose, but the charter
remained over seas.
XII.
From the point of view of our later age, the removal of the charter
government to America is the event of chief importance in this
migration of Winthrop's company. The ultimate effect of this brilliant
stroke was so to modify a commercial corporation that it became a
colonial government as independent as possible of control from
England. By the admission of a large number of the colonists to be
freemen--that is, to vote as stockholders in the affairs of the
company, which was now the colony itself, and a little later by the
development of a second chamber--the government became representative.
[Sidenote: The main purpose.]
But we may not for a moment conceive that the colonists understood
the importance of their act in the light of its consequences. In their
minds the government was merely a setting and support for the church.
The founding of a new church establishment, after what they deemed the
primitive model, was the heart of the enterprise. This is shown in
many words uttered by the chief actors, and it appears in strong
relief in an incident that occurred soon after the arrival of
Winthrop's company. Isaac Johnston, the wealthiest man of the party,
succumbed to disease and hardship, but "he felt much rejoiced at his
death that the Lord had been pleased to keep his eyes open so long as
to see one church of Christ gathered before his death." Here we have
the Puritan passion for a church whose discipline and services should
realize their ideals--a passion that in the stronger men suffered no
abatement in the midst of the inevitable pestilence and famine that
were wont to beset newly arrived colonists in that time.
XIII.
[Sidenote: Influence of Plymouth.]
One salient fact in the history of the Massachusetts Bay colony is the
dominant influence of the example of Plymouth. The Puritans of the
Massachusetts colony were not Separatists. No one had been more severe
in controversy with the Separatists than some of the Puritans who
remained in the Church of England. They were eagerly desirous not to
be confounded with these schismatics. When the great migration of 1630
took place, the emigrants published a pathetic farewell, protesting
with the sincerity of homesick exiles their attachment to the Church
of England, "ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have
obtained in the common salvation we have received in her bosom and
sucked at her breasts."
[Sidenote: Differences among the Puritans.]
It is to be remembered that these Puritans did not agree among
themselves. Puritanism was of many shades. There were some, like the
Brownes whom Endecott sent out of the colony, that were even unwilling
to surrender the prayer book. The greater part of the earlier Puritans
had desired to imitate the Presbyterianism of Scotland and Geneva, and
in Elizabeth's time they had organized presbyteries. Nothing seemed
more probable beforehand than the revival in New England of the
presbyteries of the days of Cartwright. But what happened was
unexpected even by the Puritans. The churches of Massachusetts were
formed on the model of John Robinson's Independency.
[Sidenote: Effect of emigration.]
[Sidenote: Roger Clap's Memoirs, 40.]
[Sidenote: Note 9.]
There must have been a certain exhilarant reaction in the minds of the
Puritans when at last they were clear of the English coast and free
from the authority that had put so many constraints upon them. There
were preachings and expoundings by beloved preachers with no fear of
pursuivants. The new religious freedom was delightful to intoxication.
"Every day for ten weeks together," writes one passenger, they had
preaching and exposition. On one ship the watches were set by the
Puritan captain with the accompaniment of psalm-singing. Those who
all their lives long had made outward and inward compromises between
their ultimate convictions and their obligations to antagonistic
authority found themselves at length utterly free. It was not that
action was freed from the restraint of fear, so much as that thought
itself was freed from the necessity for politic compromises. Every
ship thus became a seminary for discussion. Every man now indulged in
the unwonted privilege of thinking his bottom thought. The tendency to
swing to an extreme is all but irresistible in the minds of men thus
suddenly liberated. To such enthusiasts the long-deferred opportunity
to actualize ultimate ideals in an ecclesiastical vacuum would be
accepted with joy. What deductions such companies would finally make
from the hints in the New Testament was uncertain. The only sure thing
was that every vestige of that which they deemed objectionable in the
English church would be repressed, obliterated, in their new
organization.
[Sidenote: Rise of the Congregational form in New England.]
[Sidenote: Cotton to Salonstall in Hutch. Papers.]
[Sidenote: Hubbard's Hist. of New Eng., 117.]
With the evils and abuses of the English church more and more
exaggerated in their thoughts, the sin of separation readily came to
seem less heinous than before. There was no longer any necessity for
professing loyalty to the church nor any further temptation to think
ill of those at Plymouth, who, like themselves, had suffered much to
avoid what both Separatists and Puritans deemed unchristian practices.
A common creed and common sufferings, flight from the same oppression
to find refuge in what was henceforth to be a common country, drew
them to sympathy and affection for their forerunners at Plymouth. The
Plymouth people were not backward to send friendly help to the
newcomers. The influence of the physician sent from Plymouth to
Endecott's party in the prevailing sickness soon persuaded the
naturally radical Endecott to the Plymouth view of church government.
Winthrop's associates, or the greater part of them, drifted in the
same direction, to their own surprise, no doubt. There was a lack of
uniformity in the early Massachusetts churches and some clashing of
opinion. Some ministers left the colony dissatisfied; one or more of
the churches long retained Presbyterian forms, and some stanch
believers in presbyterial government lamented long afterward that New
England ecclesiastical forms were not those of the Calvinistic
churches of Europe. But the net result was that Robinsonian
independency became the established religion in New England, whence it
was transplanted to England during the Commonwealth, and later became
the prevailing discipline among English dissenters.
[Sidenote: Note 10.]
Thus the church discipline and the form of government in Massachusetts
borrowed much from Plymouth, but the mildness and semi-toleration--the
"toleration of tolerable opinions"--which Robinson had impressed on
the Pilgrims was not so easily communicated to their new neighbors who
had been trained in another school.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 191.]
Morton's settlement has become the subject of a literature of its own,
and of some rather violent and amusing discussion even in our times.
Morton's New English Canaan has been edited by Mr. C. F. Adams for the
Prince Society. His defensive account of himself leaves the impression
that the author was just the sort of clever and reckless rake who is
most dangerous to settlements in contact with savages, and who might
be expelled neck and heels from a frontier community holding no
scruples of a Puritan sort. The Royal Proclamation in Rymer's Foedera,
xvii, 416 (and Hazard's State Papers, i, 151), 1622, sets forth the
evil of the sale of arms to the savages, but it was leveled at earlier
offenders than Morton. Compare Sainsbury's Calendar, September 29 and
November 24, 1630, pp. 120, 122. There are also references, more or
less extended, to Morton in the Massachusetts Records, Winthrop's
Journal, Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, Dudley's Letter to the
Countess of Lincoln in Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, and in
other early accounts.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 193.]
Abbott's account of Laud's rise, Rushworth, i, 440, is traced with a
bitter pen, no doubt, but the student Laud, as Abbott draws him, is so
much like his later self that one can not but believe that the
description of him picking quarrels with the public readers and
carrying information against them to the bishop has a basis of fact.
[Sidenote: Note 3, page 199.]
Rushworth, writing under the later date of 1637, says: "The severe
Censures in Star Chamber, and the greatness of the Fines, and the
rigorous Proceedings to impose Ceremonies, the suspending and
silencing Multitudes of Ministers, for not reading in the Church the
Book for Sports to be exercised on the Lord's day, caused many of the
Nation, both Ministers and others, to sell their Estates, and to set
Sail for New England (a late Plantation in America), where they hold a
Plantation by Patent from the King." Part II, vol. i, p. 410.
[Sidenote: Note 4, page 204.]
"We trust you will not be unmindful of the main end of our Plantation,
by endeavouring to bring the Indians to a knowledge of the Gospel."
Cradock's letter to Endecott, February 16, 1629, Young's Chronicle,
133; also the official letter, ibid., page 142, where the "propagation
of the Gospel" among whites and Indians is the "aim." The Royal
Charter itself declared that "to win and invite the natives of the
country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and
Saviour of mankind ... is the principal end of this Plantation." (A
similar provision was inserted in the Connecticut Charter in 1662, in
imitation of that of Massachusetts.) The common seal of the
Massachusetts colony, sent over in 1629, bore an Indian with the
inscription, "Come over and help us." Young's Chronicles of
Massachusetts, 155, Instructions to Endecott. The paper of "Reasons,"
attributed to Winthrop, keeps the conversion of the Indians in view,
but it is blended with that which was in his mind the main end, the
founding of a Puritan church. The first paragraph reads, "It will be a
service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell into
those parts of the world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse of
the Gentiles, & to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of
Ante-Christ which the Jesuites labour to reare up in those parts."
Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 309. The copy of this paper in Sir
John Eliot's handwriting has a preamble written in a nervous style
that may well be Eliot's own. This preamble goes back to the
conversion of the Indians as a main purpose. The Antapologia of T.
Edwards, 1644, declares that White of Dorchester and others had the
conversion of the Indians in view in promoting emigration to New
England. Edwards says, page 41, that the establishing of
Congregational churches "was not in the thoughts of them that were the
first movers in that or of the ministers that were sent over in the
beginning." The statement is quite too strong, but the ecclesiastical
purpose seems to have grown rapidly when the number of emigrants
revealed the greatness of the opportunity.
[Sidenote: Note 5, page 204.]
Cotton Mather says, Magnalia, Book II, chap. iv, 3, that Winthrop was
made a justice at eighteen, but Mather's account of anything marvelous
needs support. Winthrop held his first court at Groton Hall several
months after he had attained his majority. Life and Letters, i, 62.
Compare page 223 of the same volume.
[Sidenote: Note 6, page 205.]
Of his election to the governorship he wrote to his wife, "The onely
thinge that I have comforte of in it is, that heerby I have assurance
that my charge is of the Lorde & that he hath called me to this
worke." Life and Letters, i, 340.
[Sidenote: Note 7, page 208.]
The government of the colony under Endecott was substantially that
prescribed for "particular plantations" in the general order of the
Virginia Company at the time the charter for the Pilgrim colony was
granted, and like that which was formed at Plymouth under the Compact.
The Massachusetts form may have been borrowed from Plymouth. This may
be considered the primary form of colony government in the scheme of
the Virginia Company. The plan antedates the formation of the Virginia
Company by at least twenty years, for it was a form proposed by Ralegh
when, in 1587, he organized his colony under the title: "The Governor
and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia." The secondary form
of government was that prescribed for Virginia in the charter of 1618,
which added a lower house elective by the people. This fully developed
government could come only when the population had become large enough
to render a representative system possible.
[Sidenote: Note 8, page 210.]
It has been maintained by several writers that the charter had been
worded with a view to removal. See, for example, Palfrey's New
England, i, 307. But a paper read before the Massachusetts Historical
Society, and printed in the Proceedings for December, 1869, by the
late Charles Deane, shows that such a presumption is groundless. In
calling the subordinate government of Endecott "London's Plantation in
Massachusetts Bay in New England," the company showed that it proposed
to keep its headquarters in London. It is open to question, however,
whether Deane does not go too far in denying that the charter gave
authority for the transfer. In that technical age the letter of the
instrument would probably be counted more conclusive than at present,
and the evidence of the dockets would have less weight. The removal of
the government was not one of the charges made in the _quo warranto_
proceedings against the company. On the main question compare also the
very significant treatment of the subject by Winthrop in his paper on
Arbitrary Government, Life and Letters, ii, 443, where he expressly
says that it was intended to have the chief government in England,
"and with much difficulty we gott it abscinded." It is to be
remembered that the exercise of governmental functions by a commercial
corporation was not a novel spectacle in that age. In 1620 the English
and Dutch East India Companies, after having been at war while the two
nations were allies, concluded a treaty of peace. No doubt the
exercise of such powers by trading companies had been made familiar by
the mingling of the functions of government with those of commerce by
the merchants of the Hanse cities. The East India and the Hudson Bay
Companies continued to exercise territorial jurisdiction until a very
recent period.
[Sidenote: Note 9, page 214.]
This rebound from their previous attitude of compromise is well
exemplified in the church covenant adopted at Dorchester, Mass., in
1636, under the lead of Richard Mather, which contains these words:
"We do likewise promise by his Grace assisting us, to endeavour the
establishing amongst ourselves all His Holy Ordinances which He hath
appointed for His church here on Earth, ... opposing to the utmost of
our power whatsoever is contrary thereto and bewailing from our Hearts
our own neglect hereof in former times and our poluting ourselves
therein with any Sinful Invention of men." Blake's Annals of
Dorchester. Robinson of Leyden, in his Justification of Separation,
1610, declared that the Puritans would soon separate if they might
have the magistrates' license; and Backus, who quotes the passage (i,
pp. 2, 3), remarks on the confirmation which the history of
Massachusetts gives to Robinson's theory of conformity.
[Sidenote: Note 10, page 215.]
In his Way of the Churches Cleared, controversial necessity drove
Cotton to assert that Plymouth had small share in fixing the
ecclesiastical order of Massachusetts, but he is compelled to admit
its influence. "And though it bee," he says, "very likely, that some
of the first commers might helpe their Theory by hearing and
discerning their practice at Plymmouth: yet therein the Scripture is
fulfilled, 'The Kingdome of Heaven is like unto leaven,'" etc., pp,
16, 17.