[Sidenote: Note 19, page 298.]
Barclay, in his Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the
Commonwealth, p. 97, cites Peter John Zwisck, a Mennonite of West
Frisia, as the author, in 1609, of The Liberty of Religion, in which
he maintains that men are not to be converted by force. In 1614 one
Leonard Busher petitioned James I in favor of liberty of conscience,
and Barclay conjectures that he was a member of that Separatist or
General Baptist church returned from Holland, of which Helwyss had
been pastor. In 1615 this obscure and proscribed congregation
professed a great truth, yet hidden from the wise and prudent, namely,
that "earthly authority belonged to earthly kings, but spiritual
authority belonged to that one Spiritual king who is king of kings."
In more than one matter Roger Williams showed himself attracted to the
doctrines of the Mennonites and their offshoot the English General
Baptist body. Whether directly through his reading of Dutch
theological works or indirectly through English followers of Dutch
writers, Williams probably derived his broadest principles, in germ at
least, from the Mennonites or Anabaptists of the gentler sort, as he
did also some of his minor scruples. For the connection between the
Mennonites of the Continent and the English cognate sects the reader
is referred to Barclay's Inner Life, a valuable work of much research.
See also the petition of the Brownists, 1641, cited in Barclay, p.
476, from British Museum, E 34-178, tenth pamphlet.
[Sidenote: Note 20, page 299.]
Another delightful example of the far-fetchedness of Cotton's logic is
his justification of the sentence of banishment against Williams by
citing Proverbs xi, 26: "He that withholdeth corn, the people shall
curse him." This text, says Cotton, "I alledged to prove that the
people had much more cause to separate such from amongst them (whether
by Civill or church-censure) as doe withhold or separate them from the
Ordinances or the Ordinances from them, which are the bread of life."
Reply to Williams's Examination, 40. The reference in the text is to
the same work, 37. "Much lesse to persecute him with the Civill Sword
till it may appeare, even by just and full conviction, that he sinneth
not out of conscience but against the very light of his own
conscience." But in Cotton's practice those who labored with the
heretic were judges of how much argument constituted "just and full
conviction." This logic would have amply sheltered the Spanish
Inquisition.
[Sidenote: Note 21, page 300.]
Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38, 39. Cotton confesses to
having had further conversation of a nature unfavorable to Williams,
but he is able to deny that he counseled his banishment. Even Cotton
could hardly have prevented it, and he confesses that he approved the
sentence. The only interest in the question is the exhibition of
Cotton's habitual shrinking from responsibility and his curious
sinuosity of conscience.
[Sidenote: Note 22, page 301.]
In an unpublished work by Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public
Library, which I have been kindly permitted to read, and which is a
treatise on the election sermons mostly existing only in manuscript,
the author says: "The early discourses were full of ecclesiasticism, a
great deal of theology, some politics; ... but of humanity, brotherly
kindness, and what we understand by Christianity in the human
relations, I have been able to discern very little."
[Sidenote: Note 23, page 302.]
Many of Roger Williams's scruples were peculiar, but his scrupulosity
was not. Cotton takes pains to call pulpits "scaffolds," to show that
they had no sacredness. The scruple about the heathen names of days of
the week was felt by many other Puritans. It is evident in Winthrop,
and it did not wholly disappear from Puritan use until about the end
of the seventeenth century.
[Sidenote: Note 24, page 303.]
Barclay, Inner Life, etc., 410, 411, cites Sebastian Franck's Chronica
of 1536, from which it appears that the Seekers in fact if not in name
existed about a century before Williams adopted their views. "Some
desire to allow Baptism and other ceremonies to remain in abeyance
till God gives another command--sends out true laborers into the
harvest.... Some others agree with those who think the ceremonies
since the death of the Apostles, are equally departed, laid waste and
fallen--that God no longer heeds them, and also does not desire that
they should be longer kept, on which account they will never again be
set up but now are to proceed entirely in Spirit and in Truth and now
in an outward manner." The relation of Seekerism to Quakerism is
manifest. "To be a Seeker is to be of the best Sect next to a finder,"
wrote Cromwell in 1646.
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
_NEW ENGLAND DISPERSIONS._
I.
[Sidenote: Importance of the Rhode Island colony.]
The removal of Roger Williams and his friends was the beginning of
dispersions from the mother colony on Massachusetts Bay. The company
that settled Providence was too small in number at first to be of
great importance. The emigration of Williams and his followers to the
Narragansett country was an example that may have turned the scale
with Hooker and his party in favor of a removal to the Connecticut
instead of to some place in the Massachusetts wilderness. Williams
certainly prepared a harbor for most of the Hutchinsonians, and
pointed the way to Gortonists, Baptists, Quakers, and all others of
uneasy conscience. Providence Plantation, and at times all Rhode
Island, fell into disorders inevitable in a refuge for scruplers and
enthusiasts established by one whose energies were centrifugal and
disintegrating. But when at length it emerged from its primordial
chaos the community on Narragansett Bay became of capital importance
as an example of the secularization of the state, and of the congruity
of the largest liberty in religion with civil peace. The system which
the more highly organized and orderly commonwealths of Massachusetts
and Connecticut labored so diligently to establish--a state propping
and defending orthodoxy and church uniformity--was early cast into the
rubbish heap of the ages. The principle on which the heterogeneous
colony of religious outcasts on Narragansett Bay founded itself, was
stone rejected that has become the head of the corner.
II.
[Sidenote: The Connecticut migration.]
The emigration to the Connecticut River was already incubating when
Williams sat down with his radical seceders in the Narragansett woods.
The Connecticut settlement was impelled by more various and
complicated motives than that of Williams, and its origins are not so
easy to disentangle. But it, too, has an epic interest; one dominant
personality overtops all others in this second of venturesome westward
migrations into the wilderness.
[Sidenote: Early life of Hooker.]
[Sidenote: 1630.]
We can trace nothing of Hooker to his birthplace, a little hamlet in
Leicestershire, except that the imagery of his discourses in after
life sometimes reflected the processes of husbandry he had known in
childhood. But that he passed through Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
while Chaderton was master, is more significant, for Emmanuel was the
cradle of Puritan divines, the hatching-place of Puritan crotchets,
the college whose chapel stood north and south that it might have no
sacred east end, a chapel in which "riming psalms" were sung instead
of the hymns, and where lessons different from those appointed in the
calendar were read. Hooker was presented to the living of Chelmsford,
in Essex. Here his eloquence attracted wide attention, and unhappily
attracted at the same time the notice of his diocesan Laud, then
Bishop of London, who drove the preacher from his pulpit. Hooker
engaged in teaching a school four miles from Chelmsford, where Eliot,
afterward the Indian apostle, became his usher and disciple. But Laud
had marked him as one to be brought low. He was cited before the Court
of High Commission, whose penalties he escaped by fleeing to Holland.
Thus early in his career Laud unwittingly put in train events that
resulted in the founding of a second Puritan colony in New England.
III.
[Sidenote: Hooker's company.]
[Sidenote: Walker's First Church in Hartford, 40.]
[Sidenote: Dudley's Letter to Countess of Lincoln, Young's Chron. of
Mass., 320.]
[Sidenote: Mass. Records, 14 June, 1631, and 3 February, 1632.]
[Sidenote: Holmes's Hist. Cambridge, 1st Mass. Hist. Coll., vii, 6-8.]
The persecution of Hooker made a great commotion in Essex, dividing
attention with the political struggle between the king and the people
about tonnage and poundage. While Hooker was an exile in Holland a
company of people from Braintree and other parts of Essex, near his
old parish of Chelmsford, emigrated to New England, chiefly, one may
suppose, for the sake of good gospel, since they came hoping to tempt
Hooker to become their pastor. This company settled at Newtown, now
Cambridge, which had been projected for a fortified capital of the
colony, that should be defensible against Indians and out of reach if
a sea force should be sent from England to overthrow the government.
Newtown was palisaded and otherwise improved at the expense of the
whole colony. Hooker's company were perhaps ordered to settle there
because no place was appropriate to the great divine but the new
metropolis.
IV.
[Sidenote: Failure of Newtown as a metropolis.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 98, 99. 1632.]
But a metropolis can not be made at will, as many a new community has
discovered. It had been arranged that all the "assistants" or ruling
magistrates of Massachusetts should live within the palisades of
Newtown, but Winthrop, after the frame of his house was erected,
changed his mind and took down the timbers, setting them up again at
Boston. This was the beginning of unhappiness at Newtown, and the
discontent had to do, no doubt, with the rivalry between that place
and Boston. It is probable that there was a rise in the value of
Boston home lots about the time of the removal of the governor's
house. Trade runs in the direction of the least resistance, and
peninsular Boston was destined by its situation to be the metropolis
of New England in spite of the forces that worked for Salem and
Newtown.
[Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxviii.]
[Sidenote: Wood's N. E. Prospect, 1634. Young, 402.]
[Sidenote: October, 1632.]
Newtown, or Cambridge, to call it by its later name, was a long,
narrow strip of land, "in forme like a list cut off from the
Broad-cloath" of Watertown and Charlestown. The village was compactly
built, as became an incipient metropolis, and the houses were
unusually good for a new country. In one regard it was superior to
Boston. No wooden chimneys or thatched roofs were allowed in it. To
this town came Hooker, and if it had continued to be the capital,
Hooker and not Cotton might have become the leading spirit of the
colony. But a capital at a place to which only small vessels could
come up, was not practical, and the magistrates in the year before
Hooker's arrival decided by general consent that Boston was the
fittest place in the bay for public meetings.
[Sidenote: Hooker's arrival, 1633.]
[Sidenote: Wood's N. E. Prospect.]
[Sidenote: Young, 397, 398.]
The hopes of Newtown were perhaps not wholly extinct for some time
after. The arrival of Hooker must have been a great encouragement to
the people. But Boston was on the alert. That town had neither forest
nor meadow land. Hay, timber, and firewood were brought to its wharf
in boats. From the absence of wood and marsh came some advantages--it
was plagued with neither mosquitoes nor rattlesnakes, and what cattle
there were on the bare peninsula were safe from wolves. Not to be
behind in evangelical attractions it secured Cotton to balance
Newtown's Hooker, when both arrived in the same ship. That Boston was
now recognized as the natural metropolis was shown in the abortive
movement to pay a part of Cotton's stipend by a levy on the whole
colony.
V.
[Sidenote: Discontent at Newtown.]
[Sidenote: Mass. Rec., _passim_.]
[Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxxiii.]
[Sidenote: Compare Holmes's History of Cambridge, 1 Mass. Hist. Coll.,
vii, pp. 1, 2.]
[Sidenote: 2d Mass., vii, 127.]
"Ground, wood, and medowe" were matters of dispute between Newtown and
its neighbors as early as 1632, and the frequent references to questions
regarding the boundary of Newtown go to show dissatisfaction in the
discarded metropolis, the number of whose people was out of proportion
to its resources. Cattle were scarce in the colony. Each head was worth
about twenty-eight pounds, the equivalent of several hundred dollars of
money in our time. The Newtown people saw no prospect of foreign trade,
and found the plowable plains of Cambridge dry and sandy. They had given
up trying to coax fortunes from the stony hill land of the town with
hand labor, and turned their attention to the more profitable pursuit of
cattle-raising. They took unusual pains to protect their valuable herd
from the wolves by impaling a common pasture. Natural meadow was the
only resource for hay in the English agriculture of the seventeenth
century, and the low grounds of Cambridge yielded a poor grass. Shrewd
men in Newtown already saw that as an agricultural colony Massachusetts
was destined to failure, and one Pratt, a surgeon there, was called to
account for having written to England that the commonwealth was "builded
on rocks, sands, and salt marshes."
VI.
[Sidenote: Cotton and Hooker.]
[Sidenote: Compare Walker's First Church of Hartford, 129-132.]
There is good authority for believing that a rivalry between Hooker
and Cotton had quite as much to do with the discontent as straitened
boundaries and wiry marsh grass. Hooker was the greatest debater,
perhaps, in the ranks of the Puritans. His theology was somewhat
somber, his theory of Christian experience of the most exigent type.
To be saved, according to Hooker, one must become so passive as to be
willing to be eternally damned. In other regards he was a Puritan of a
rather more primitive type than Cotton. He knew no satisfactory
evidence of a man's acceptance with God but his good works. Cotton was
less logical but more attractive. His Puritanism grew in a garden of
spices. He delighted in allegorical interpretations of the Canticles,
his severe doctrines were dulcified with sentiment, and his conception
of the inward Christian life was more joyous and mystical and less
legal and severe than Hooker's. He was an adept in the windings of
non-committal expression, and his intellectual sinuosity was a
resource in debate or difficulty. Hooker, on the other hand, had a
downrightness not to be mistaken. With an advantage in temperament and
the additional advantage of position in the commercial and political
center, it is not surprising that Cotton's ideals eloquently and
deftly presented soon dominated the colony and that he became the
Delphic oracle whose utterances were awaited by the rulers in
emergencies.
[Sidenote: Theological differences.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
Theological differences were early apparent in the teachings of the
two leaders. Trivial enough to the modern mind are these questions
concerning works as an evidence of justification and concerning active
and passive faith in justification. Hooker maintained all by himself
that there was "a saving preparation in a Christian soule before unyon
with Christ." The other ministers pretended to understand what he
meant by this, and at first opposed him unanimously. No doubt, too,
Hooker and his disciples found some fault with the outer form of the
church as shaped by Cotton. Certain it is that Hooker's theories of
civil government were more liberal and modern than Cotton's, though
like Cotton's they were hung upon texts of Scripture. Hooker lacked
Cotton's superfluity of ingenuity; he had less imagination and less
poetic sentiment than Cotton, but his intellect was more rugged,
practical, and virile. He was not a man to have visions of a political
paradise; he did not attempt to limit citizenship to church members
when he framed a constitution for the Connecticut towns. Nor did he
give so much power and privilege to the magistrate as was given in
Massachusetts. He disapproved of Cotton's aristocratic theory of the
permanence of the magistrate's office, as he did apparently of the
negative vote of the upper house and of the arbitrary decisions which
the Massachusetts magistrates assumed the right to make.
VII.
[Sidenote: Attractions of Connecticut.]
One other potent motive there was. Stories of the fertility of the
"intervale" land on the Connecticut River came by the mouth of every
daring adventurer who had sailed or tramped so far. There one might
find pasture for the priceless cattle and hay to last the long winter
through, and in that valley one might cultivate plains of great
fertility.
VIII.
[Sidenote: Obstacles to removal.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 167, 168.]
There were dangerous Pequots on the Connecticut, it is true, and the
Dutch had already planted a trading house and laid claim to the
territory. The Plymouth people who traded there were also claimants.
And, more than all, leaving Massachusetts in a time of danger from the
machinations of Laud would seem desertion. The government of the
Massachusetts Bay colony was anomalous; it partook of the character of
the commercial company from which it sprang, yet it had traits of a
religious or at least a voluntary society. It was the accepted opinion
that those who had taken the freeman's oath were "knit" together "in
one body," and that none of them ought to leave the colony without
permission. Hooker's party gained the consent of a majority of the
representative members of the General Court, but not of a majority of
the assistants. This precipitated a debate in the colony on the
constitutional question of the right of the assistants, or
magistrates, to form an upper house and veto a decision of the chosen
deputies of the towns.
IX.
[Sidenote: Attempts to prevent removal.]
It is no part of our purpose to unravel the tangle of ecclesiastical
and civil politics in which the proposed emigration had now become
involved. The Dorchester church and a part of that of Watertown were
ready to follow the lead of Hooker and Newtown. Days of fasting and
prayer were appointed to prevent the removal of these "candlesticks,"
as the churches were called, out of their places; but in spite of
humiliations and of Cotton's persuasive eloquence, which at one time
almost charmed away the discontent, the emigration set in,
stragglingly at first.
[Sidenote: Explorers and pioneers.]
[Sidenote: 1633.]
John Oldham, an adventurous man of a rather lawless temper--one of
those half-ruffians that are most serviceable on an Indian
frontier--had been expelled from Plymouth. He was now a resident of
Watertown, one of the centers of discontent and next neighbor to
Newtown. He had gone with three others on a trading expedition to the
westward overland. Walking along trails from one Indian village to
another they discovered a large river, which they found to be the
Fresh River of the Dutch and the Connecticut of the Plymouth traders.
They probably brought back to Watertown accounts that produced a fever
for removal. Oldham was not a man to stand on the manner of his
emigration. Waiting for nobody's consent, he led out a small company
from Watertown the next year. These settled at what is now
Wethersfield. From Dorchester, which had no alewife fishery with which
to enrich its fields, settlers removed in 1634 to the Connecticut,
where the soil did not need to be "fished." In 1635 the number of
emigrants was larger, and there was much suffering during the
following winter and many of the cattle perished.
X.
[Sidenote: Emigration by churches.]
[Sidenote: 1636.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
But the unit of New England migration was the church. No doubt the
cohesiveness of the townships, and of the churches which were the
nuclei of the towns, was re-enforced by provincial differences between
the several communities. In 1636 Hooker, the real founder of
Connecticut, and his congregation of Essex people, sold their houses
and meadows and home lots and acre rights in the commonage in
Cambridge to a new congregation led by Thomas Shepard. From Newtown
and from Dorchester the churches emigrated bodily--pastors, teachers,
ruling elders, and deacons--carrying their organization with them
through the wilderness like an ark of the covenant. New churches were
soon afterward formed in the places they had left. Naturally, town
government became the principal feature of civil organization in
states thus planted by separate and coherent groups.
XI.
[Sidenote: The new government.]
[Sidenote: Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 20, 21.]
[Sidenote: Conn. Hist. Soc. Coll., i, 3, and ff.]
The Connecticut rulers acted at first as a government subordinate to
Massachusetts; but the settlements, except that of people from Roxbury
at Springfield, were south of the line of the Massachusetts colony,
and it was not in the nature of things that Hooker and Haynes should
subordinate themselves to Cotton and Winthrop. There was indeed no
little exasperation between the two colonies. An independent
constitution was adopted in Connecticut, on principles which Hooker
thought he found in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, and which were
not exactly those that Cotton had managed to deduce from Scripture in
his Model of Moses his Judicials. The Massachusetts people, whose
government aspired to dominate all New England, seem to have been
angered by Hooker's secession and by his refusal to subordinate the
new state to their own. Massachusetts asserted its authority over
Springfield, which was within its limits, and every effort possible
was made to prevent new emigrants who landed at Boston from going to
the west. Even in England accounts adverse to Connecticut were
circulated. Hooker, the real head of the new state, resented this in a
letter of great vigor and some passion.
XII.
[Sidenote: Instability of a theocracy.]
In its early years Massachusetts had no rest. Three profound
disturbances--the expulsion of Williams, the secession of Hooker and
his followers, and the Hutchinsonian convulsion--followed one another
in breathless succession, and a dangerous Indian war ran its course at
the same time. That the early settlements were founded on "rocks and
sands and salt marshes" was not the chief misfortune of the Bay
colony. Its ecclesiastical politics proved explosive, to the
consternation of its pious founders, who like other settlers in Utopia
had neglected to reckon with human nature.
XIII.
[Sidenote: Severity of Puritanism.]
It has been the habit of modern writers on the subject to dismiss the
Hutchinsonian controversy as a debate about meaningless propositions
in an incomprehensible jargon. Yet there was in it but the action of
well-known tendencies in human nature which might almost have been
predicted from the antecedent circumstances. Puritanism had wrapped
itself in the haircloth of austerity, it took grim delight in harsh
forbiddings, and heaped up whole decalogues of thou-shalt-nots. Nor
did it offer, as other intense religious movements have done, the
compensation of internal joys for the gayety it repressed.
Theoretically Calvinist, it was practically an ascetic system of
external duties and abstentions, trampling on the human spirit without
ruth.
[Sidenote: Reaction toward a subjective joyousness.]
[Sidenote: Magnalia B. III, c. I, 32.]
[Sidenote: Compare Cotton's Fountain of Life, 35.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
[Sidenote: Shepard's Memoirs in Young, 505.]
But the heart will not be perpetually repressed; kept from natural
pleasures, it will seek supernatural delights. Men were certain sooner
or later to soften the iron rigidity of Puritanism by cultivating
those subjective joys for which Calvinism provided abundant materials.
While preachers like Hooker were scourging the soul into a
self-abasement that could approve its own damnation, and while
ingenious scribes were amassing additional burdens of scruple for
heavy-laden shoulders, there arose in England a new school of Puritan
pietists. These shirked none of the requirements of the legalists, but
their spirits sought the sunnier nooks of Calvinism, and they
preached the joy of the elect and the delight of a fully assured
faith. Cotton, whose fair complexion, brown hair, and ruddy
countenance attested a sanguine temperament, belonged by nature to
this new order. He rejoiced that he had received the "witness of the
Spirit" on his wedding day, and he delighted to draw out Scripture
imagery to a surprising tenuity in describing the "covenant of
marriage" and the intimacy of the "covenant of salt" or of friendship
between God and the soul of the believer. Preachers of the same sort
brought relief to multitudes in various towns of England. The people,
tired of churchly routine on the one hand and of legalism on the
other, thronged to hear such divines "filling the doores and windows."
It was the evangelicalism of the following century sending up its
shoots prematurely into a frosty air. The old-fashioned Puritan had
always conceived of religion as difficult of attainment. It was a
paradoxical system wherein men were saved by the works they
theoretically abjured. Conservative Puritans complained of the
preachers who spread a table of "dainties," as though it were
meritorious to sustain the soul on a rugged diet of rough doctrine. In
Thomas Shepard's Memoirs of his own Life we may overhear "a godly
company" of the time in familiar "discourse about the wrath of God and
the terror of it, and how intolerable it was; which they did present
by fire, how intolerable the torment of that was for a time; what,
then, would eternity be?"
XIV.
[Sidenote: Cotton's revivalism.]
[Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, i, 144.]
[Sidenote: Report of Record Com. ii, 5. Boston Town Records, 1635.
Hutchinson Papers, p. 88.]
Cotton professed that he loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of
Calvin before he went to sleep. His emotional rendering of Calvinistic
doctrines wrought strongly on the people of the new Boston, and his
advent was followed by widespread religious excitement. More people
were admitted to the church in Boston in the earlier months of
Cotton's residence than to all the other churches in the colony.
Boston seems to have become religious in a pervasive way, and in 1635
measures were taken to prevent persons who were not likely to unite
with the church from settling in the town. In this community, which
had no intellectual interest but religion, and from which ordinary
diversions were banished, there were sermons on Sunday and religious
lectures on week days and ever-recurring meetings in private houses.
The religious pressure was raised to the danger point, and an
explosion of some sort was well-nigh inevitable. Cotton's enthusiasms
were modulated by the soft stop of a naturally placid temper, but when
communicated to others they were more dangerous.
XV.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson's character.]
[Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. lxii.]
[Sidenote: Note 6.]
[Sidenote: Short Story, etc., p. 31.]
[Sidenote: Cotton's The Way of the Churches Cleared, Part I, p. 51.
Short Story, 31.]
[Sidenote: Short Story, 34.]
Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been one of Cotton's ardent disciples in old
Boston. She crossed the sea with her husband that she might sit under
his ministry in New England. She was a woman cursed with a natural
gift for leadership in an age that had no place for such women. "This
Masterpiece of Womens wit," the railing Captain Johnson calls her, and
certainly her answers before the Massachusetts General Court go to
show that she was not inferior in cleverness to any of the magistrates
or ministers. Winthrop, whose antipathy to her was a passion, speaks
of her "sober and profitable carriage," and says that she was "very
helpful in the time of childbirth and other occasions of bodily
infirmities, and well furnished with means to those purposes." In the
state of medical science at that time such intelligent and voluntary
ministration from a "gentlewoman" must have been highly valued. Almost
alone of the religionists of her time she translated her devotion into
philanthropic exertion. But a woman of her "nimble and active wit"
could not pass her life in bodily ministrations. Power seeks
expression, and her native eloquence was sure to find opportunity.
Mrs. Hutchinson made use of the usual gathering of gossips on the
occasion of childbirth to persuade the women to that more intimate
religious life of which she was an advocate. It was the custom to hold
devotion at concert pitch by meetings at private houses for men only;
women might be edified by their husbands at home. Mrs. Hutchinson
ventured to open a little meeting for women. This was highly approved
at first, and grew to unexpected dimensions; fifty, and sometimes
eighty, of the principal women of the little town were present at her
conferences.
XVI.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson's doctrines.]
[Sidenote: Compare Whelewright's Sermon in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc.,
1866, 265. Cotton's Sermon on the Churches Resurrection, 1642.]
In these meetings she emphasized Cotton's favorite doctrine of "a
covenant of grace." Her sensitive woman's nature no doubt had beat its
wings against the bars of legalism. She was not a philosopher, but
nothing could be more truly in accord with the philosophy of character
than her desire to give to conduct a greater spontaneity. Cotton
himself preached in the same vein. In addition to the Reformation, of
which Puritans made so much, he looked for something more which he
called, in the phrase of the Apocalypse, "the first resurrection."
Mrs. Hutchinson, who was less prudent and more virile than Cotton, did
not hesitate to describe most of the ministers in the colony as
halting under a "covenant of works." Her doctrine was, at bottom, an
insurrection against the vexatious legalism of Puritanism. She carried
her rebellion so far that she would not even admit that good works
were a necessary evidence of conversion. It was the particular
imbecility of the age that thought of almost every sort must spin a
cocoon of theological phrases for itself. Spontaneity of religious and
moral action represented itself to Mrs. Hutchinson and her followers
as an indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the believer and as a personal
union with Christ whom they identified with the "new creature" of
Paul. Such a hardening of metaphor into dogma is one of the commonest
phenomena of religious thought.
XVII.
[Sidenote: Vane's arrival, 1635.]
[Sidenote: His election as governor, 1636.]
Sir Henry Vane the younger, who had become an ardent Puritan in spite
of his father, landed in Boston in October, 1635. He had already shown
those gifts which enabled him afterward to play a considerable part in
English history. His high connections made him an interesting figure,
and though only about twenty-six years of age he was chosen governor
in May, 1636. Ardent by nature, and yet in his youth when he "forsook
the honors and preferments of the court to enjoy the ordinances of
Christ in their purity," nothing was more natural than that he should
be captivated by the seraphic Cotton and that he should easily adopt
the transcendental views of Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop, the natural
leader of the colony, having given place in 1635 to Haynes, perhaps in
order that Hooker's party might be conciliated and the Connecticut
emigration avoided, was a second time thrust aside that a high-born
youth might be honored. Winthrop was utterly opposed to Mrs.
Hutchinson, in whose teachings his apprehensive spirit saw
full-fledged Antinomianism, and, by inference, potential anabaptism,
blasphemy, and sedition. The Hutchinsonians were partisans of Vane,
who adhered to their doctrine. The ministers other than Cotton and
Whelewright, stung by the imputation that they were under "a covenant
of works," rallied about Winthrop. Political cleavage and religious
division unfortunately coincided.
XVIII.
[Sidenote: Arrogance of the Hutchinson party.]
[Sidenote: 1636.]
[Sidenote: Cotton's Churches Resurrection, p. 27.]
Supported by the prestige of the young governor and of some
conspicuous citizens and inspired by Cotton's metaphorical and
mystical preaching, which was interpreted with latitude, the
enthusiasm of the Hutchinsonians tended to become fanaticism. We have
to depend mainly on the prejudiced account of their enemies, but there
is little reason to doubt that the advocates of "a covenant of grace"
assumed the airs of superiority usually seen in those who have
discovered a short cut to perfection. The human spirit knows few
greater consolations than well-disguised self-righteousness. The
followers of Mrs. Hutchinson, if we may believe the witnesses,
sometimes showed their sanctity by walking out of meeting when a
preacher not under "a covenant of grace" entered the pulpit. They even
interrupted the services with controversial questions addressed to the
minister. Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, was condemned by them
as being under "a covenant of works," and also incidentally criticised
for his "thick utterance." Nor can one find that Cotton interposed his
authority to protect his less gifted colleague. It is quite
conceivable that he looked with some satisfaction on the progress of
affairs in Boston. The heavenly minded young governor who had chosen
to suffer reproach with the people of God was his disciple. The
brilliant woman who was easily the leader of the town was the very
apostle of his doctrine. The superiority of his opinions on a union
with Christ that preceded active faith as compared with those of
Hooker and the lesser divines was enthusiastically asserted by the
great majority of the Boston church, led by Mrs. Hutchinson. Seeing so
much zeal and sound doctrine he may have felt that the first or
spiritual resurrection of which he was wont to prophesy from the
Apocalypse, had already begun in his own congregation, and that among
these enthusiasts were those who had learned to "buy so as though they
bought not"--those who had been lifted into a crystalline sphere where
they had "the Moone under their feet. And if we have the Moone under
our feete, then wee are not eclipsed when the Moone is Eclipsed." Thus
did Cotton's imagination revel in cosmical imagery.
XIX.
[Sidenote: Bitterness of the debate.]
[Sidenote: Overthrow of Vane, 1637.]
The arrogance of the elect is hard to bear, and it is not wonderful
that the debate waxed hot. The concentrated religiousness of a town
that sought to shut out unbelieving residents made the dispute
dangerous. In the rising tempest a ballast of ungodly people might
have been serviceable. But in Boston there were few even of the
indifferent to be buffers in the religious collision. While the
covenant-of-grace people made themselves offensive, their
opponents,--Winthrop, the slighted ex-governor, Wilson, the unpopular
pastor, and the ministers accused of being under a covenant of
works--resorted to the favorite weapons of polemics. They hatched a
brood of inferences from the opinions Mrs. Hutchinson held, or was
thought to hold, and then made her responsible for the ugly bantlings.
They pretended to believe, and no doubt did believe, that Mrs.
Hutchinson's esoteric teaching was worse than what she gave out. They
borrowed the names of ancient heresies, long damned by common consent,
to give odium to her doctrine. That the new party should be called
Antinomian was plausible; the road they had chosen for escape from
Puritan legalism certainly lay in that direction. But Antinomianism
had suffered from an imputation of immorality, and no such tendency
was apparent, unless by logical deduction, in the doctrines taught in
Boston. The hearers of Mrs. Hutchinson were also accused of having
accepted the doctrines of the so-called Family of Love which had of
old been accused of many detestable things, and was a common bugaboo
of theology at the time. The whole town of Boston and the whole colony
of Massachusetts was set in commotion by the rude theological brawl.
Such was the state of combustion in Boston that it was thought
necessary by the opponents of Vane and Mrs. Hutchinson to hold the
court of elections at the former capital, Newtown. The excitement at
this court was so great that the church members, who only could vote,
were on the point of laying violent hands on one another in a contest
growing out of a question relating to the indwelling of the Holy
Ghost. Vane was defeated, and Winthrop again made governor.
XX.
[Sidenote: The Synod of 1637.]
[Sidenote: Short Story of the Rise, Reign, etc., _passim_.]
[Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, i, 284, and following.]
[Sidenote: Cotton's Way of the Churches Cleared, _passim_.]
A great synod of elders from all the New England churches was
assembled. All the way from Ipswich and Newbury on the east and from
the Connecticut on the west the "teaching elders" made their way by
water or by land, at public expense, that they might help the
magistrates of Massachusetts to decide on what they should compel the
churches to believe. For more than three weeks the synod at Cambridge
wrestled with the most abstruse points of doctrine. The governor
frequently had to interpose to keep the peace; sometimes he adjourned
the assembly, to give time for heats to cool. A long list of errors,
most of which were not held by anybody in particular, were condemned.
A nearly unanimous conclusion on certain fine-spun doctrines was
reached at length by means of affirmations couched in language vague
or ambiguous. Cotton, who had been forced after debate to recant one
opinion and modify others, assented to the inconclusive conclusions,
but with characteristic non-committalism he qualified his assent and
withheld his signature.
XXI.
[Sidenote: The persecution.]
[Sidenote: Mass. Rec., i, 207.]
The field was now cleared for the orderly persecution of the
dissentients. Whelewright, Mrs. Hutchinson's brother-in-law, had been
convicted of sedition in the preceding March on account of an
imprudent sermon preached on a fast day. But his sentence had been
deferred from court to court, apparently until after the synod. At the
November court following the synod Whelewright was banished, and those
who had signed a rather vigorous petition in his favor many long
months before were arraigned and banished or otherwise punished. The
banished included some of the most intelligent and conspicuous
residents. Not until this November court had her opponents ventured to
bring Mrs. Hutchinson to trial. Whelewright, standing by his
hot-headed sermon, had just been sentenced; the abler but more timid
Cotton had already been overborne and driven into a safe ambiguity by
the tremendous pressure of the great synod. Vane had left the colony,
and the time was ripe to finish the work of extirpation. The elders
were summoned to be present and advise.
XXII.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson's trial, 1637.]
[Sidenote: Hutchinson's Hist. of Mass. Bay, ii, appendix.]
[Sidenote: Note 7.]
During a two days' trial, conducted inquisitorially, like an English
Court of High Commission, Cambridge presented the spectacle of a
high-spirited and gifted woman, at the worst but a victim of
enthusiasm, badgered by the court and by the ministers, whose dominant
order she had attacked. Cotton, with more than his usual courage,
stood her defender. The tough-fibered Hugh Peter, who made himself
conspicuous in several ways, took it on him to rebuke Cotton for
saying a word in defense of the accused. Endecott and Hugh Peter,
mates well matched, browbeat the witnesses who appeared in Mrs.
Hutchinson's behalf, and Dudley, the conscientious advocate of
persecution, was rude and overbearing. Winthrop acted as chief
inquisitor, the narrow sincerity and superstition of his nature
obscuring the nobler qualities of the man.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson is excommunicated.]
[Sidenote: Note 8.]
[Sidenote: Rise, Reign, Ruine, etc., and Winthrop's Journal, i, 309,
310.]
Mrs. Hutchinson defended herself adroitly at first, refusing to be
trapped into self-condemnation. But her natural part was that of an
outspoken agitator, and her religious exaltation had been increased,
doubtless, by persecution, for combativeness is a stimulant even to
zeal. On the second day she threw away "the fear of man," and declared
that she had an inward assurance of her deliverance, adding that the
General Court would suffer disaster. For this prophesying she was
promptly condemned. Cotton had prophesied notably on one occasion,
Wilson, his colleague, was given to rhyming prophecies, and Hooker had
made a solemn prediction while in Holland. In this very year the plan
of the Pequot campaign had been radically changed in compliance with a
revelation vouchsafed to the chaplain, Stone. But these were
ministers, and never was the ministerial office so reverenced as by
the Puritans, who professed to strip it of every outward attribute of
priestliness. Above all, for a woman to teach and to have revelations
was to stand the world on its head. "We do not mean to discourse with
those of your sex," etc., said Winthrop severely to Mrs. Hutchinson
during the trial. She was sentenced to banishment, but reprieved, that
the church might deal with her. On the persuasion of Cotton and
others, Mrs. Hutchinson wrote a recantation apologizing for her
assumption to have revelations, and retracting certain opinions of
which she had been accused. But she added that she had never intended
to teach or to hold these opinions. For this falsehood, as it was
deemed, she was summarily excommunicated. Yet nothing seems more
probable than that her hyperbolic utterances under excitement had not
stood for dogmatic opinions. Under Cotton's fine-spun system of church
government a member could not be excommunicated except by unanimous
consent. Many of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends were absent from the
colony, others had prudently changed sides or stayed away from the
meeting. But her sons ventured to speak in her behalf. Cotton at once
admonished them. The effect of putting them under admonition was to
disfranchise them; it was one of Cotton's ingenuities of the
sanctuary. The sons out of the way, the mother was cast out
unanimously--a punishment much dreaded among the Puritans, who
believed that what was thus bound on earth was bound in heaven. It was
a ban that forbade the faithful even to eat with her. But the
melancholy under which Mrs. Hutchinson had suffered vanished at once,
and she said as she left the church assembly, "Better to be cast out
than to deny Christ."
XXIII.
[Sidenote: Omens and auguries.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 313, 316; ii, 11, and Short
Story of Rise and Reign of Antinomianism.]
[Sidenote: Winthrop, i, 316.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 326.]
[Sidenote: Death of Mrs. Hutchinson.]
Mrs. Hutchinson and most of her party settled on Rhode Island, where
they sheltered themselves at first in caves dug in the ground. Here
she again attracted attention by the charm of her eloquent teaching,
and some came from afar to hear the "she Gamaliel," as her opponents
called her. Such gifts in a woman, and in one who had been
excommunicated by the authority vested in the church, could be
accounted for only by attributing her power to sorcery. Winthrop sets
down the evidence that she was a witch, which consisted in her
frequent association with Jane Hawkins, the midwife, who sold oil of
mandrakes to cure barrenness, and who was known to be familiar with
the devil. At length "God stepped in," and by his "casting voice"
proved which side was right. Mary Dyer, one of the women who followed
Mrs. Hutchinson, had given birth to a deformed stillborn child. This
fact became known when Mrs. Dyer left the church with the
excommunicated Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop had the monstrosity exhumed
after long burial had rendered its traits difficult to distinguish. He
examined it personally with little result, but he published in England
incredible midwife's tales about it. God stepped in once more, and
Mrs. Hutchinson herself, after she went to Rhode Island, suffered a
maternal misfortune of another kind. The wild reports that were
circulated regarding this event are not fit to be printed even in a
note; the first editor of Winthrop's journal felt obliged to render
the words into Latin in order that scholars might read them
shamefacedly. But Cotton, who was by this time redeeming himself by a
belated zeal against the banished sectaries, repeated the impossible
tale, which was far worse than pathological, to men and women, callow
youths, young maidens, and innocent children "in the open assembly at
Boston on a lecture day," explaining the divine intent to signalize
her error in denying inherent righteousness. The governor, who was
more cautious, wrote to the physician and got a correct report, from
which the divine purpose was not so evident, and Cotton made a
retraction at the next lecture. We are now peering into the abyss of
seventeenth-century credulity. Here are a grave ruler and a divine
once eminent at the university, and now renowned in England and in
America, wallowing in a squalid superstition in comparison with which
the divination of a Roman haruspex is dignified.
[Sidenote: Note 9.]
Having suffered the loss of her husband, and hearing of efforts on the
part of Massachusetts to annex Rhode Island, Mrs. Hutchinson removed
to the Dutch colony of New Netherland with her family. Here she and
all her household except one child were massacred by the Indians. This
act of Providence was hailed as a final refutation of her errors, the
more striking that the place where she suffered was not far removed
from a place called Hell Gate.
XXIV.
[Sidenote: Results of ecclesiastical government.]
This famous controversy lets in much light upon the character of the
age and the nature of Puritanism. It is one of many incidents that
reveal the impracticability of the religious Utopia attempted in New
England. The concentration of religious people undoubtedly produced a
community free from the kind of disorders that are otherwise
inseparable from a pioneer state and that were found abundantly in New
Netherland, in Maryland, and in Virginia and on the eastward fishing
coast. "These English live soberly," said a Dutch visitor to Hartford
in 1639, "drinking but three times at a meal, and when a man drinks to
drunkenness they tie him to a post and whip him as they do thieves in
Holland." But while some of the good results to be looked for in an
exclusively Puritan community were attained, it was at the cost of
exaggerating the tendency to debate and fanaticism and developing the
severity, the intolerance, and the meddlesome petty tyranny that
inheres in an ecclesiastical system of government. During the lifetime
of one generation Massachusetts suffered all these, and it is doubtful
whether regularity of morals was not purchased at too great a
sacrifice of liberty, bodily and spiritual, and of justice. Certainly
the student of history views with relief the gradual relaxation that
came after the English Restoration and the disappearance from the
scene of the latest survivors of the first generation of New England
leaders.
[Illustration: New England after the dispersions.]
XXV.
[Sidenote: The New Haven colony.]
During the period of the greatest excitement over the Hutchinson case
John Davenport, a noted Puritan minister of London, had been in
Massachusetts. Like many other emigrant divines of the time he brought
a migrant parish with him seeking a place to settle. Davenport arrived
in June, 1637, and took part against the Antinomians in the synod.
After examining every place offered them in Massachusetts, he and his
friends refused all and resolved to plant a new colony. The people
were Londoners and bent on trade, and Massachusetts had no suitable
place for their settlement left. The bitterness of the Hutchinson
controversy may have had influence in bringing them to this decision,
and the preparations of Laud to subject and control Massachusetts
perhaps had weight in driving them to seek a remoter settlement.
Davenport had ideals of his own, and the earthly paradise he sought to
found was not quite Cotton's nor was it Hooker's. He and his followers
planted the New Haven colony in 1638. In this little colony church and
state were more completely blended than in Massachusetts. The
government was by church members only, to the discontent of other
residents, and in 1644 New Haven adopted the laws of Moses in all
their rigor. The colony was united with Connecticut by royal charter
at the Restoration, after which the saints no longer sat upon thrones
judging the tribes of Israel.
CONCLUSION.
[Sidenote: Later English emigrations to New England.]
[Sidenote: Lord Maynard to Laud, 17 March, 1638, in Sainsbury.]
[Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 319, 320, 322.]
[Sidenote: Rushworth, i, Part II, 409, 718.]
[Sidenote: Josselyn's Rarities, 108.]
The emigration to New England from the mother country was quickened by
the troubles that preceded the civil war. In 1638 it reached its
greatest height, having been augmented perhaps by agricultural
distress. Fourteen ships bound for New England lay in the Thames at
one time in the spring of that year. There was alarm at the great
quantity of corn required for the emigrants, lest there should not be
enough left in London to last till harvest. "Divers clothiers of great
trading" resolved to "go suddenly," in which we may see, perhaps,
evidence of bad times in the commercial world. Some parishes it was
thought would be impoverished. Laud was asked to put a stop to the
migration; but the archbishop was busy trying to compel the Scots to
use the prayer book. Most of the lords of the Council were favorable
to New England; the customs officers purposely neglected to search for
contraband goods, and the ships, twenty in all, got away with or
without license, and brought three thousand passengers to Boston. But
the tide spent itself about this time, and by 1640 emigration to the
New England colonies had entirely ceased. About twenty-one thousand
two hundred people had been landed in all.
[Sidenote: Cavalier emigration to Virginia.]
[Sidenote: Petition to House of Lords, 15 Aug., 1648. Royal Hist. MS.,
Com. Rept., vii, 45.]
[Sidenote: Sainsbury, 360.]
The swing of the political pendulum in England that served to check
the Puritan exodus gave impetus to a new emigration to Virginia and
Maryland. During the ten years and more before 1640 few had gone to
that region but bond servants. There were in that year not quite eight
thousand people in Virginia. It is the point of time at which the
native Virginians began to rear a second generation born on the soil.
The waning fortunes of the king sent to the colony in the following
years a large cavalier emigration, and the average character of the
colonists was raised. Better ministers held the Virginia parishes and
better order was observed in the courts. In 1648 four hundred
emigrants lay aboard ships bound for Virginia at one time, and in 1651
sixteen hundred royalist prisoners seem to have been sent in one
detachment.
[Sidenote: Prospective ascendency of the English colonies.]
By the middle of the seventeenth century the English on the North
American continent were in a fair way to predominate all other
Europeans. From the rather lawless little fishing villages on the
coast of Maine to the rigorous Puritan communes of the New Haven
colony that stretched westward to pre-empt, in advance of the Dutch,
land on the shores of Long Island Sound, the English held New England.
English settlers "seeking larger accommodations" had crossed to Long
Island and were even pushing into the Dutch colony. The whole
Chesapeake region was securely English. Already there were Virginians
about to break into the Carolina country lying wild between Virginia
and the Spanish colony in Florida. The French and the Dutch and the
Spaniards excelled the English in far-reaching explorations and
adventurous fur-trading. But the English had proved their superior
aptitude for planting compact agricultural communities. A sedentary
and farming population where the supply of land is not limited reaches
the highest rate of natural increase. At a later time, Franklin
estimated that the population of the colonies doubled every
twenty-five years without including immigrants. The compactness of
English settlement and the prolific increase of English people decided
the fate of North America. The rather thin shell of Dutch occupation
was already, by the middle of the seventeenth century, feeling the
pressure under stress of which it was soon to give way. A century
later collision with the populous and ever-multiplying English
settlements brought about the collapse of the expanded bubble of New
France.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 321.]
There is a paper on this debate in the British Record Office indorsed
by Archbishop Laud, "Rec: Octob: 7. 1637," "Propositions wch have
devided Mr. Hooker & Mr. Cotton in Newe England. 1. That a man may
prove his justification by his works of sanctification, as the first,
best, and only cheife evidence of his salvation. 2. Whither fayth be
active or passive in justification. 3. Whither there be any saving
preparation in a Christian soule before his unyon with Christ. This
latter is only Hooker's opinion, the rest of the ministers do not
concurr with him: Cotton and the rest of the contrary opinion are
against him and his party in all." Colonial Papers, ix, 71. In the
next paper in the same volume, also indorsed by Laud, the controversy
is more fully set forth. Copies of both are in the Bancroft collection
of the New York Public Library. Laud indorsed these papers
respectively October 7 and 15, 1637. The Cambridge Synod, which met
August 30th, had adjourned late in September, and the debates which
divided the two divines must have preceded it, and perhaps preceded
the migration of Hooker to Connecticut in 1636. When Haynes was
Governor of Massachusetts he had pronounced the sentence of banishment
against Williams. But some years later, while Governor of Connecticut,
he relented a little and wrote to Williams: "I think, Mr. Williams, I
must now confesse to you, that the most wise God hath provided and cut
out this part of his world for a refuge and receptacle for all sorts
of consciences. I am now under a cloud, and my brother Hooker, with
the bay, as you have been, we have removed from them thus far, and yet
they are not satisfied." Quoted by Williams in a letter to Mason, 1st
Massachusetts Historical Collections, i, 280.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 322.]
The abstract of Hooker's sermon of May 31, 1638, as deciphered and
published by Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, is in the Collections of the
Connecticut Historical Society, i, 20, 21, and the Fundamental Laws of
1639 are in Hinman's Antiquities, 20, and ff., and in Trumbull's Blue
Laws, 51. Compare also the remarkable letter of Hooker to Winthrop in
Connecticut Historical Society Collections, i, 3-15. Hooker objects
strongly to the right of arbitrary decisions by the magistrate: "I
must confess, I ever looked at it as a way which leads directly to
tyranny, and so to confusion, and must plainly profess, if it was in
my liberty, I would choose neither to live nor leave my posterity
under such government." This letter exhibits Hooker's intellect to
great advantage. One is inclined to rank him above most of his New
England contemporaries in clearness and breadth of thought.
[Sidenote: Note 3, page 325.]
The selling of half-developed homesteads to newcomers by older
settlers was of constant occurrence in all the colonies during the
colonial period. It was a notable practice on the frontiers of
Pennsylvania down to the Revolution, and perhaps later. Hubbard thus
describes what went on in every New England settlement: "Thus the
first planters in every township, having the advantage of the first
discovery of places, removed themselves into new dwellings, thereby
making room for others to succeed them in their old." General History
of New England, 155.
[Sidenote: Note 4, page 328.]
The existence in England of a doctrine resembling that of the
followers of Cotton and Mrs. Hutchinson is implied in Welde's preface
to the Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of Antinomianism.
"And this is the very reason that this kind of doctrine takes so well
here in _London_ and other parts of the kingdome, and that you see so
many dance after this pipe, running after such and such, crowding the
Churches and filling the doores and windowes."
[Sidenote: Note 5, page 328.]
Giles Firmin's Review of Davis's Vindication, 1693, quotes from a
letter of Shepard of Cambridge, Massachusetts: "Preach Humiliation,
labor to possess Men with a Sence of Misery and wrath to come. The
Gospel Consolations and Grace which some would have only disht out as
the Dainties of the times and set upon the Ministry's Table may
possibly tickle and ravish some and do some good to some which are
Humbled and Converted already. But if Axes and Wedges be not used
withal to hew and break this rough unhewn bold but professing age, I
am Confident the Work and Fruit ... will be but meer Hypocrisie."
[Sidenote: Note 6, page 330.]
Notwithstanding his early imprudence during the partisan excitement in
Boston, Whelewright was a man of sound judgment, and his testimony
regarding his sister-in-law is the most important we have. "She was a
woman of good wit and not onely so, ... but naturally of a good
judgment too, as appeared in her civill occasions; In spirituals
indeed she gave her understanding over into the power of suggestion
and immediate dictates, by reason of which she had many strange
fancies, and erroneous tenents possest her, especially during her
confinement ... attended by melancholy." Mercurius Americanus, p. 7.
[Sidenote: Note 7, page 338.]
Hugh Peter, after his return to England, adopted the views in favor of
toleration beginning to prevail there. Nine years after he had
obtruded himself so eagerly to testify against Mrs. Hutchinson, he was
writing to New England earnest remonstrances against persecution. 4
Massachusetts Historical Collections, vi, where the letters are given.
[Sidenote: Note 8, page 338.]
There were those who wished to give time for a second admonition
before excommunication, but they were overruled, probably by Wilson.
Winthrop, i, 310. It would, perhaps, have been in better form to take
the other and less eager course. There is a Latin paper in the British
Public Record Office, dated 3 March, 1635, which professes to give a
brief and orderly digest of the canons of government constituted and
observed in the reformed New England churches. I am unable to trace
its authority. From this I quote; "Qui pertinacitur consistorii
admonitiones rejecerit a coena domini suspendatur. Si suspensus, post
iteratus admonitiones nulla poenitentiae signum dederit ad
excomunicationem procedat Ecclesia."
[Sidenote: Note 9, page 341.]
It would be a waste of time to controvert the ingenious apologies
which have been written to prove that an inexorable necessity
compelled the banishment of the Antinomians. The Massachusetts
government was in its very nature and theory opposed to religious
toleration, as we may see by the reference of the case of Gorton and
his companions to the elders, and their verdict that these men, not
residents of the jurisdiction, ought to be put to death for
constructive blasphemy, a decision that the magistrates by a majority
vote would have put in execution if the "deputies" or representative
members of the assembly had not dissented. Savage's Winthrop's
Journal, ii, 177. The doctrine of intolerance is ingeniously set forth
in Cotton's "The Powring Ovt of the Seven Vials, ... very fit and
necessary for this Present Age," published in 1642. Cotton compares
Jesuits and heretics to wolves, and says, "Is it not an acceptable
service to the whole Country to cut off the ravening Wolves?" The
Puritans of New England from their very circumstances were slower to
accept the doctrine of religious liberty than their coreligionists in
England.
INDEX
Abbot, Abp., on Calvert's resignation, 259, n. 6.
Abercromby's Examination, 258, n. 4; 262, n. 11; 263, n. 12.
Aberdeen Burgh Records, no Sabbatarian legislation in, 140, n. 12;
quaint ordinance from, 140, n. 12.
Accidents, New England hung on a chain of slender, 176.
Act, for Church Liberties, 1639, 251; 265, n. 22;
for discovering popish recusants, 237, m.;
of Toleration, 1649, 255, 256;
act to prevent, etc., 237, m.
Activity, intellectual, men excited to unwonted, 1.
Adam's needle and thread, garments woven of fiber of, 79;
efforts to cultivate, 80.
Admonition to the People of England, 115, m.
Advertisements for Planters of New England, 27, m.
Age of romance and adventure, an, 1, 20;
of colony beginnings, 92;
dramatic and poetic to its core, 100.
Agrarian and industrial disturbance aids the Puritan movement, 111.
Ainsworth wrote tractate on the Jewish ephod, 108.
Alexander, William, Encouragement to Colonies, 258, n. 3.
Alleghanies deemed almost impassable, 11.
Almond, an, for a Parrat, 116.
America excited the most lively curiosity, 2;
notion that it was an Asiatic peninsula, 3;
search for a route through, lasted one hundred and fourteen years, 8;
a Mediterranean Sea sought in the heart of, 11;
fact and fable about, 14;
excepted from the Deluge, 20;
treasure from flowing into Spanish coffers, 74;
Hakluyt spreading sails for, in every breeze, 76;
all one to European eyes, 169.
Amer. Antiqu. Soc. Trans., 22, n. 4.
Amsterdam, Separatists migrated to, 148;
called a common harbor of all opinions, 164.
Anabaptism, divergencies in direction of, in Mass., 267.
Anarchy and despotism the inevitable alternatives of communism, 26.
Anderson's Church of England in the Colonies, 258, n. 3.
Anderson's Commerce, 22, n. 5; 75, m.; 76, m.; 95, n. 3.
Anglican and Puritan party lines not sharply drawn at first, 110.
Anglican Church party, leaders at Zurich and Strasburg, 104;
held to the antique ritual, 106;
content with moderate reforms, 109;
must have a stately liturgy and holy days, 110;
becomes dogmatic, 113;
aided by Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 122.
Anglican zeal founded a nation of dissenters, 91.
Animals, notions about American, 18;
too many kinds for Noah's ark, 20.
Animals for breeding, stock of, 48;
sold by Argall, 50.
Antinomianism, divergencies in direction of, in Mass., 287;
found by Winthrop in Mrs. Hutchinson's teachings, 332.
Antinomians sheltered by Vane and Cotton, 267;
Davenport took part against, in the synod, 343;
banishment of the, 349, n. 9.
See also HUTCHINSON, MRS. ANNE, and HUTCHINSONIAN CONTROVERSY.
Antwerp, a place of refuge for the persecuted, 312, n. 18.
Apocalypse of John, the, received hearty consideration from the New
England Puritans, 301.
Apostolic primitivism, aim of the Puritan, 303;
goal of the Separatist, 303.
Apostolic succession asserted as essential, 113.
Archdale's Carolina, 171, m.
Archer, Gabriel, wounded by the Indians, 28;
hostile to Smith, 37;
character of, 64, n. 3;
a ringleader in disorders, 63, n. 3;
a paper on Virginia by, 96, n. 7.
Archery on Sunday prohibited, 127.
Arctic continent, an, 2.
Argall, Captain, the first Englishman to see the bison, 24, n. 10, 50;
sent to the Bermudas, went to the fishing-banks for food, 42;
to Mt. Desert for plunder, 47;
bad record and government, 50;
robbed Company and colonists, 50, 52;
fitted out a ship for piracy, 51;
charter procured for a new plantation to protect, 51, 68, n. 13;
escaped in nick of time, 52.
Argonauts of the New World set sail, 25.
Arianism, divergencies in direction of, in Massachusetts, 267.
Ark, The, and The Dove, efforts to prevent departure of, 241;
no Protestant minister or worship on board, 242.
Armada, the Spanish, patriotism aroused by the danger from, 121.
Armenian silk-raisers brought to Virginia, 78.
Arminian Nunnery, 93, m.
Arminianism spreads among the High-Church clergy, 133, 192.
Arminians and Calvinists, Laud attempts to suppress debate between, 194.
Arminians excluded from toleration in the Netherlands, 298, 312, n. 18.
Arnold's History of Rhode Island, 311, n. 17.
Articles of Union, the, provided for freedom of private belief, 312,
n. 18.
Arundel, Lord, a friend of Sir George Calvert, 226;
territory assigned to, 259, n. 5.
Asher's History of West India Company, 177, m.
Asia, efforts to reach, 3.
Aspinwall Papers, 56, m.; 70, n. 15; 264, n. 20.
Aubrey's Survey of Wiltshire, 136, n. 5.
Augustine on the Sunday-Sabbath, 137, n. 8; 140, n. 13.
Austerfeld, a cradle of the Pilgrims, 149;
the stolid rustics of, 150;
the font at which Bradford was baptized, 151;
inhabitants at Bradford's birth a most ignorant people, 152.
Austerity in morals a Puritan characteristic, 119.
Auxiliary societies formed, 53.
Avalon, Calvert's province in Newfoundland called, 224, 258, n. 3;
charter of, 225, 234;
primary design of the colony, 225; 259, n. 5;
troubles of Baltimores and Puritans in, 228;
abandoned by Calvert, 230;
Catholic emigrants to, 239.
Bacon, Lord, objects to heretics settling a colony, 171.
Bacon's Lord, An Advertisement touching Controversies, 117, m.;
Advice to Villiers, 171, m.;
Certain Considerations, 162, m.;
Essay on Plantations, 27, m.;
Observation on a Libel, 163, m.;
Speech in reply to the Speaker, 25, m.
Bacon's Laws of Maryland, 264, n. 19; 265, n. 22.
Bacon, Nathaniel, 60, n. 1.
Bacon, Roger, on the Sunday question, 138, n. 8.
Baillie, Robert, on John Robinson, 156.
Baltimore, first Baron. See CALVERT, GEORGE.
Baltimore, Letters to Wentworth, 241, m.
Baltimore, second Baron. See CALVERT, CECILIUS.
Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London, theatrical adulation of King
James, 161;
as primate persecutes the Puritans, 162;
stops emigration to Virginia, 168, 183, n. 2.
Baptist Church, the General, on earthly and spiritual
authority, 312, n. 19.
Baptists, Williams and his followers become, 303.
Barclay's Inner Life, 146, m.; 186, n. 6; 312, n. 19; 314, n. 24.
Barlow's Svmme and Svbstance, 143, m.; 160, m.; 162, m.; 182, n. 1.
Barrow hanged at Tyburn, 148.
Barrowism a mean between Presbyterianism and Brownism, 148;
the model for the church at Scrooby, 154.
Bawtry, the station near Scrooby, 149, 150, 151.
Baylie, Robert, condemns the toleration of the Dutch, 164, 311, n. 18.
Baylie's Errours and Induration, 164, m.; 311, n. 18.
Bell, ringing of only one, to call people to church, 129;
of more than one a sin, 130.
Bentley's Description of Salem, 200, m.;
Historical Account of Salem, 311, n. 17.
Berkeley, Sir William, persecution of Puritans in Virginia by, 252.
Bermudas, Gates and Somers shipwrecked on the, 40;
birds and wild hogs at the, 41, 65, n. 6;
marvelous escape from the, 41, 65, n. 6.
Beste, George, 2, m.; 4;
on the New World, 21, n. 2.
Biard on Dale's severity to French prisoners, 66, n. 9.
Bible, reading the, as part of the service, reprehended by the
extremists, 117.
Birch's Court of James I, 68, n. 10; 69, n. 14; 72, n. 19; 258, n. 1.
Bishoprics filled by Elizabeth, 143.
Bishops, effect of the hostility of the, to the Puritans, 112;
attacked by the Mar-Prelate tracts, 115;
reaction in favor of, 121;
had become Protestant to most people, 123.
Bison found near the Potomac, 50.
Blackstone, William, first settler at Boston, 190.
Blake's Annals of Dorchester, 219, n. 9.
Boston chosen as fittest place for public meetings, 319;
secured Cotton to balance Newton's Hooker, 319.
Boston church, Roger Williams refused to become a minister of, 270.
Boston Town Records, 329, m.
Boulton, a Separatist, recanted and hung himself, 157, n. 2.
Bowling in the streets the daily work at Jamestown, 44.
Bowls, Calvin playing at, on Sunday, 124;
Mar-Prelate berates the Bishop of London for playing, 128.
Bownd's, Dr., Sabbath of the Old and the New Testament, 124, 128;
views rapidly accepted, 129;
ultra-propositions exceeded, 130;
captivated the religious public, 130;
opposition to, 131;
new edition published, 132, 139, n. 10.
Bozman, 265, n. 22.
Bradford, William, a silk-weaver in Leyden, 169;
chosen governor at Plymouth, 179;
abolishes communism, 180;
of high aspiration restrained by practical wisdom, 306.
Bradford's Dialogue of 1593, 146, m.;
Plimoth Plantation, 145, m.; 153, m.; 154, m.; 155, m.; 158, n. 3;
165, m.; 166, m.; 175, m.; 184, n. 4; 186, n. 9; 274, m.
Brewster, William, at court, 152;
master of the post at Scrooby, 153;
secured ministers for neighboring parishes who were silenced, 153;
the host and ruling elder of the Scrooby church, 154;
useful career of, 155;
project of forming a new state, 167;
books owned by, 168.
Briefe Declaration, MS., 27, m.; 40, m.; 43, m.; 44, m.; 45, m.;
46, m.; 47, m.; 66, n. 9.
Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 135, n. 3.
Briggs, Henry, on the nearness of the Pacific, 10, 22, n. 6.
Bristol colony in Newfoundland, 258, n. 3.
British Museum, MS., 42, m.; 44, m.
Broughton wrote a tractate on the Jewish ephod, 108.
Brown, Richard, submitted to remonstrance, 290.
Browne, John and Samuel, sent back to England by Endecott, 200.
Browne, Robert, leader of the Separatists, 145;
despised for recanting, died in prison, 146;
career lasted only four or five years, 147;
John Robinson's justification of, 157, n. 1;
authorities on, 157, n. 1; 158, n. 2.
Brownists. See SEPARATISTS.
Brown's Genesis of the United States, 94, n. 1; 183, n. 3.
Bruce's Economic History of Virginia, 95, n. 3.
Buckingham dominant at court, 193;
consents to sale of Calvert's secretaryship, 227.
Bull and bear baiting on Sunday, 129.
Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, 23, n. 8; 126.
Burgesses, House of, in Virginia, 55.
Burk's History of Virginia, 69, n. 13.
Burleigh, Lord Treasurer, treatise on Execution of Justice in England
published by, 238.
Burns's Prel. Diss. to Woodrow, 159, m.; 160, m.
Busher, Leonard, petitioned James I for liberty of
conscience, 312, n. 19.
Cabins at Jamestown, 29.
Cabot, John, discovers America, 3;
his ships retarded by codfish, 18;
Deane's voyages of, 21, n. 1;
Harrisse on, 21, n. 1.
Cabot, Sebastian, not a discoverer, 21, n. 1;
a doubtful authority, 24, n. 9.
Calendar of Colonial Documents, 70, n. 15; 96, n. 5; 259, n. 5.
Calendar of Domestic Papers, 259, n. 6.
Calendar of Domestic State Papers James I, 77, m.
Calendar of State Papers America, 224, m.
Caliban suggested by popular interest in savages, 17.
Calvert, Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, son of George Calvert, 234;
expected large Catholic migration, 240;
religious aim of, 240;
partners in financial risks, 240, 263, n. 13;
policy of toleration, 242;
orders the Catholic service to be conducted privately on
shipboard, 242;
a conservative opportunist, 243;
supported at court by Strafford, 249;
schemes against Virginia, 249, 264, n. 21;
seeks to be governor, 250;
offer to New England people, 252;
had Maryland oath of fidelity modified for Puritans, 253;
yielded office of governor to Protestant, 254;
again master of Maryland, 257.
Calvert, George, character of, 221;
his rise in power, 223;
denied being bribed by Spain, 223, 258, n. 1;
member of Virginia Company, 1609, 224, 229;
councilor for New England, 224;
establishes colony in Newfoundland, 224, 239;
his conversion to Catholicism, 226;
intractable, 225;
resigned secretaryship and made Baron Baltimore, 228, 259, n. 6;
in Newfoundland, 228, 229;
sails to Virginia, 229;
not received hospitably, 230;
refuses to take oath of supremacy, and leaves Virginia, 232;
religious enthusiasm, 233, 258, n. 3;
passion for planting colonies, 233;
death of, 233.
Calvert Papers, 250, m.; 264, n. 17.
Calvin, John, the dominant influence at Geneva, 104;
on the Sabbath, 124;
Cotton a follower of, 329.
Calvinism, materials for subjective joys provided by, 327.
Calvinistic churches, efforts to assimilate the Church of England
to the, 112;
controversy adds another issue, 133;
doctrines popular, 328, 329, 347, n. 4.
Calvinists and Arminians, Laud's attempt to suppress debates
between, 194.
Cambridge settled under the name of Newtown, 317.
Cambridge pledge, the, of Winthrop and others, 209.
Camden's Elements of New England, 177, m.
Canada, Brownists ask leave to settle in, 167.
Cannibalism at Jamestown, 39;
denied by Gates, 65, n. 5.
Cape Anne, failure of Dorchester Company's colony on, 189, 199.
Cape Cod shoals turn back the Mayflower, 177, 186, n. 7.
Carlisle's treatise, 75, m.
Cartwright, leader of the Presbyterians, 112, 136, n. 6.
Cartwright's Admonition to Parliament, 129, m.
Carver, John, chosen governor, 173, 184, n. 4.
Castle Island, platform constructed on, 284.
Catholic conscience, oath made offensive to the, 237.
Catholic migration, the, 220;
revival in England, 226;
settlers in Newfoundland, 228, 239;
Baltimore family openly, 228, 235;
migration to Maryland small, 240;
pilgrims very religious, 243, 244, 245;
tax on Catholic servants in Maryland, 248;
colony in Maryland until after 1640, 247;
at peace with Puritans in Maryland, 254;
element protected in Maryland, 257;
party in minority in Maryland, 266.
Catholicism condoned, to conciliate Spain, 238;
tide toward, in England, 240.
Catholics, Irish, not allowed to settle in Virginia, 231;
Baltimore's party of, repelled from Virginia, 231;
harsh laws in England against, 236, 237, 238;
enforcement of penal statutes against, 239;
co-religionists of queen, 239;
toleration and protection to English Catholics in Maryland, 242;
no perfect security for, in Maryland, 248;
rich and influential families of, in Maryland, 264, n. 18;
conciliation to Protestants at expense of fairness toward, 251;
papist religion forbidden, 257;
excluded from toleration in the Netherlands, 298, 312, n. 18.
Catlet, Colonel, reaches the Alleghanies, 11.
Cattle, scarce in Massachusetts colony, 320;
perished in Connecticut, 324.
Cavalier emigration to Virginia, 345.
Cedar timber exported, 45.
Ceremonies, observance of pompous, 101;
bitter debates about, 108;
ceased to be abhorrent, 123.
Certayne Qvestions concerning the high priest's ephod, 108, m.
Chapman, Jonson and Marston's Eastward, Ho! 23, n. 8.
Charles I, coronation robe of silk for, from Virginia, 78;
obliterated by Puritanism, 133.
Charles II wore silk raised in Virginia, 78.
Charter, the Great, granted by the Virginia Company, 55, 173, 206;
only information concerning, 70, n. 15.
Charter for a private plantation obtained by Warwick, 51, 68, n. 13.
Charter of New England, 1620, 173;
of the Massachusetts Company, 210, 218, n. 7;
of Avalon, April 7, 1623, 225;
for precinct in Virginia granted to Leyden pilgrims, 229;
for new palatinate on north side of the Potomac granted to
Baltimore, 233;
of Maryland passed, 234;
terms of the, 234, 235, 236;
compared with those of Avalon, 234;
ambiguous, 251.
Charter-House School founded by legacy as Sutton's Hospital, 268;
attended by Roger Williams, 268.
Chesapeake Bay mapped by Captain John Smith, 36.
Chesapeake region securely English, 345.
Chimes not in accord with a severe Sabbath, 129.
Church, a "particular," Puritans desire to found, 197;
the unit of New England migration, 325.
Church at Jamestown enlarged, 42, 65, n. 7.
Church economy, each system of, claimed divine authority, 113.
Church, English, Laud sought to make Catholic, 193.
Church government, three periods of, 112, 136, n. 6;
questions of, fell into abeyance, 137, n. 6;
Barrowism, the form of, brought to New England, 148;
Puritans desire to make real their ideal of, 198;
Puritan passion for, 212.
Church of England repudiated as antichristian, 147;
divergencies in direction of, in Massachusetts, 267.
Church of the exiles at Frankfort, the factions in developed into two
great parties, 105.
Church quarrels at Strasburg and Frankfort, 105;
reform, no hope of securing, 196, 197.
Churches of Massachusetts formed on model of Robinson's
Independency, 213;
lack of uniformity in the early, 215;
borrowed discipline and form of government from Plymouth, 215.
Churchill's Voyages, 265, n. 23.
Churchmen, High, aggressive, 113.
Cities of refuge on the Continent, 104;
English churches organized in, 104.
Civet cat, Hariot thought, would prove profitable, 19.
Claiborne, claim of, to Kent Island, 253.
Clap's, Roger, Memoirs, 213, m.
Clarendon Papers, 67, n. 9.
Clarke's Gladstone and Maryland Toleration, 245, m.
Clergymen most active writers in favor of colonization, 91;
some preach sermons but stay away from public prayer, 143;
supported by magistrates in Massachusetts if church order
was disturbed, 266;
men of unusual prudence in ranks of, 266.
Climate of Great Britain not favorable to raising products
of the Mediterranean, 75.
Coddington's Letter, 308, n. 9.
Code of Lawes, Divine, Morall, and Martiall, by Sir Thomas
Smyth, 70, n. 16; 132.
Codfish, multitude of, on coast of Newfoundland, 18.
Coxe, Sir Edward, defended legacy which founded Charter-House
School, 268;
appointed Roger Williams to a scholarship, 268;
schism detested by, 270.
College proposed and endowed, 91.
Collier's Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, 263, n. 12.
Colonial Constitution of Virginia modified for the worse, 249.
Colonial Papers, 68, n. 11; 71, n. 18; 262, n. 11; 264, n. 21;
265, n. 25; 346, n. 1.
Colonial proprietors, 70, n. 15.
Colonial Records of Virginia, 70, n. 15.
Colonies, secondary, 220.
Colonists, efforts of friends to succor, thwarted, 47;
loss of life among, in Virginia, 58.
Colonization, English, the fate of, settled by the experiments
on the James River, 58;
promoted, to get rid of excess of population, 136, n. 5;
unwise management ruined many projects for, 178.
Colony, English, rise of the first, 1;
motives for founding, 73.
Colony government, primary and secondary forms of, 218, n. 7.
Colony of St. Maries, 245.
Colony-planters drawn from the ranks of the uneasy, 171, 220.
Colony-planting, Hakluyt's tireless advocacy of, 5;
John Smith on, 37;
spurred by three motives, 74;
kept alive by delusions, 74;
first principles of, not understood, 76;
an economic problem, 84;
the religious motive most successful in, 189, 220;
centrifugal forces in, 220, 266.
Commandment, the fourth, held to be partly moral, partly ceremonial,
138, n. 8; 140, n. 13;
Shepard holds it to be wholly moral, 140, n. 13.
Commerce with the Orient, the hope of, retarded settlement, 4.
Commissions, forged, to "press" maidens, 72, n. 19.
Commodities, sixteen staple, exhibited from Virginia, 49;
production of, the main hope of wealth for Virginia, 75, 97, n. 9.
Commons inclosed, 111, 135, n. 5.
Commons Journal, 71, n. 18.
Communion, withdrawal of, a fundamental principle of Separatism, 271.
Communism at Jamestown, 26, 42;
abolished, 56;
attempted at Plymouth, 169, 185, n. 4;
abolished by Bradford, 180;
evils of, 186, n. 9.
Compact, the, of the Pilgrims, 173, 183, n. 4; 185, n. 5.
Company's Chief Root of Differences, the, 52, m.;
authors of, 69, n. 13.
Congregationalism, rise of, in New England, 214.
Connecticut, a secondary colony, 220;
the migration to, has an epic interest, 316;
independent constitution adopted by, 325;
accounts adverse to, circulated in England, 326.
Connecticut Historical Society Collections, 326, m.; 347, n. 2.
Connecticut River, stories of the fertility of the intervale land
on the, 322;
dangerous Pequots on the, 323;
soil did not need to be "fished," 324.
Consciences, oppressed, places of refuge for, in the Low Countries, 163.
Conservative and radical, difference between constitutional, 109;
churchman limited his Protestantism, 109.
Constitutional government, starting point of, in the New World, 55.
Continent, an arctic and antarctic, 2;
crossed by Ingram in a year, 14.
Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience, 300, m.
Conversion of the Indians, desired for the sake of trade, 16, 90,
216, n. 4;
orders for the, 42;
interest in, becomes secondary, 204, 209;
authorities on the, 216, n. 4;
by the Catholics, 247.
Convicts asked for by Dale, 47.
Cook's Historical View of Christianity, 138, n. 8.
Cooper, Dr., Bishop of Winchester, answered first Mar-Prelate tract, 116.
Copley, business administrator of Jesuits, 251, 264, n. 17.
Corn not planted at proper season, 44, 60, n. 2;
ground for, cleared, 48;
more raised by private than by public labor, 49.
Cotton, John, apparent sanction of Antinomianism by, 267;
one of the greatest luminaries of the Puritans and one of the lights
of New England, 269;
apostle of theocracy, shaped ecclesiastical affairs in New
England, 279, 308, n. 8;
his rivals left Massachusetts, 280;
virtually attained a bishop's authority, 280;
on Williams's book, 282;
complete system of church-state organization, 287;
verbal legerdemain on Williams's banishment, 297;
casuistry of, 299, 313, n. 20; 321;
attitude toward Williams's banishment, 299, 300, 313, n. 21;
source of his intolerance, 300;
belongs among the diplomatic builders of churches, 306;
uncandid and halting accounts of Williams's trial, 309, 310, n. 12;
311, n. 17;
curious sinuosity of conscience, 313, n. 21;
secured by Boston to balance Newtown's Hooker, 319;
rivalry with Hooker, 320;
Puritanism of, grew in a garden of spices, 321;
of a sanguine temperament, 328;
his advent followed by widespread religious excitement, 329;
theological differences between his teachings and those of Hooker,
346, n. 1;
Model of Moses his Judicials, 326;
opinions recanted and modified by, 336;
defends Mrs. Hutchinson, 337;
persuades her to recant, 339;
disfranchises her sons, 339;
belated zeal of, against the sectaries, 341;
wallows in superstition, 341.
Cotton planted, 29.
Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 308, n. 10, 11; 310, n. 16;
313, n. 20, 21;
Fountain of Life, 328, m.;
Sermon on the Church's Resurrection, 331, m.; 334, m.;
Way of Congregational Churches, 157, n. 2; 219, n. 10; 330, m.; 336, m.
Council for New England grants a patent to the Massachusetts projectors,
199, 207.
Councilors of estate in Virginia, 55.
Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, 84, m.
Country, a barren, a great whet to industry, 177.
Courtier, the honor of a, possessed by Calvert, 223;
the happiest has least to do at court, 258, n. 1.
Courts of High Commission, penalties of, 270.
Covenant of grace _vs._ covenant of works, 331, 334, 335.
Cox, Richard, followers of, dispute with those of John Knox, 105.
Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, 127, m.; 138, n. 8;
139, n. 10.
Cradock, Mathew, Governor of the Massachusetts Company, proposes
transfer of the government, 206, 208, 209;
resigned his governorship, 210;
denounced by Laud, 211;
letter to Endecott, 216, n. 4.
Credulity about America, 2, 20;
abyss of seventeenth century, 341.
Customs, low, advocated by Captain John Smith, 37.
Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, 134, n. 1.
Dainties, preachers who spread a table of, complained of, 328, 348, n. 5.
Dainty, Argall's voyage in the, 50.
Dale, Sir Thomas, sent to Virginia, 43;
tyranny of, 45-47;
horrible cruelties of, 46;
services, 47;
theatrical return, 48, 68, n. 10;
glowing reports of the country, 49, 168;
cruelties of, proved, 66, n. 9;
his severity, 67, n. 9;
various authorities on, 67, n. 9.
Danvers, Sir John, interested in the Virginia Company, 54;
in power, 71, n. 17;
one of the fathers of representative government in America, 173.
Darien, Isthmus of, 6.
Davenport, John, took part in the synod, 343;
with his followers planted the New Haven colony, 343.
Days of the week, scruples about the heathen names of the, 302,
314, n. 23.
Days of fasting and prayer appointed, 324.
De Costa, in Mag. of Amer. Hist., 23, n. 8.
De la Warr, Lady, plundered by Argall, 50.
De la Warr, Lord, sends expedition for gold, 13;
arrival of, regretted by the old settlers, 41;
governor at Jamestown, 41;
resides at the falls of the James, 43;
flight of, from the colony, 43;
nominally governor, 44;
ceremonious landing at Jamestown, 101;
escorted to church by gentlemen and guards, 102.
Deane, Charles, Voyages of Cabot, 21, n. 1;
misunderstood a statement by Bradford, 184, n. 4.
Debate, the Puritan, 108;
bitterness of the, 114;
new issues, 123;
advantage of new ground of, to the Puritan, 131.
Debates, theological, concerned with speculative dogmas, 108.
Declaration of Virginia, 95, n. 3.
Delft Haven, the parting at, 175.
Delusions in colony-planting, 74.
Deptford, gold-refining works at, 13.
De Rasieres's letter, 103, m.
Dermer, seeking the Pacific, is driven into Long Island Sound, 9.
Description of the Now-discovered river and Country of Virginia,
96, n. 7.
Desertion, Dale's punishment for, 46.
Devil worship, Indian, belief in, 16.
De Vries's Voyages, m., 231.
Dexter, F. B., in Winsor's Narrative and Critical History, 155, m.
Dexter's H. M., Congregationalism, 147, m.; 157, n. 1; 185, n. 6;
"As to Roger Williams," as erudite as it is one-sided, 311, n. 17.
Discontent, numerous causes for, 111, 135, n. 5.
Discourse of the Old Virginia Company, 54, m.; 66, n. 9; 68, n. 11;
70, n. 16.
Discovery, the pinnace, 25.
Dispersions from the mother colony, 315.
Display, love of, in Elizabeth's time, 98;
greatness declared itself by, 100, 134, n. 2.
Dissension, outbreak of, among the English Protestant exiles, 104.
Dividends, Dale's aim to make the colony pay, 45.
D'Ogeron supplied buccaneers with wives, 71, n. 18.
Dogs as food, 8.
Domestic Correspondence, James I, 134, n. 1.
Dorchester Company, failure of colony of, on Cape Ann, 189, 199.
Dorchester, Mass., church covenant, 219, n. 9;
ready to follow the lead of Hooker, 323;
settlers remove from to Connecticut, 324;
church emigrated bodily, 325.
Drama, the age of the, 99.
Dress, inordinate display in, 134, n. 2;
laws to repress, 100;
excesses in, denounced, 120;
regulations against, in Massachusetts, 285.
Drunkenness, punishment for, 342.
Dudley, a zealous advocate of religious intolerance, 287;
impatient to snuff out Williams, 288;
verse by, 288;
rude and overbearing, 338.
Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln, 174, 317, m.
Durham, legal power of Bishops of, given to proprietor of Maryland,
236, 263, n. 12.
Dutch Government declined to assure the Pilgrims of protection
against England, 173;
made tempting offers to the Independents, 176;
despised for showing toleration, 298, 311, n. 18;
laid claim to the Connecticut, 323;
occupation giving way, 346.
Duties, heavy, on tobacco, 85, 96, n. 8.
Dyer, Mary, misfortune of, 340.
East India Company's agents, cruelty of, 67, n. 9.
East Indies, desire for a short passage to the, 3, 4, 5, 12, 22, n. 5.
Eastward, Ho! the play of, 23.
Ecclesiastical Commission, the inquisitorial, 114.
Ecclesiastical extension desired by the English Church, 90;
organization of the Brownists dominant, 141;
politics explosive in Massachusetts, 326;
system of government, petty tyranny that inheres in, 342.
Economic success of the Virginia colony assured, 49;
adverse conditions more deadly than an ungenial climate, 78;
problems solved by homely means, 84.
Edwards, T., Antapologia, 217, n. 4.
Eliot, Sir John, confined in the Tower, 203.
Eliot, John, convinced of error, 290, 291;
usher and disciple of Hooker, 317.
Eliot's Biography, 201, m.; 288, m.
Elizabeth, Queen, jeweled dresses of, 98;
gorgeous progresses of, 99;
could not compel uniformity, 109;
threatens to unfrock a bishop, 110;
molded the church to her will, 112;
her policy of repression resulted in the civil war, 114;
greatest popularity in last years of her reign, 121.
Elizabethan age, the, 1;
prodigal of daring adventure, 20.
Ellis Letters, The, 182, n. 1.
Ellis collection, first series, 238, m.
Elton's brief biography of Roger Williams, 311, n. 17.
Emigrants sail for Virginia, 25;
bad character of the, 27, 59.
Emigration to New England quickened by troubles that preceded the
civil war, 344;
reached greatest height in 1638, 344;
ceased entirely in 1640, 344;
to Virginia and Maryland, received impetus from check of Puritan
exodus, 344, 345.
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the cradle of Puritan divines, 316.
Endecott, John, leadership and character of, 200;
cut arm of cross from English colors, 201;
put Quakers to death, 202;
impetuous radicalism of, 271;
protested against the double injustice to Salem, 291;
arrested, apologized, and submitted, 291;
witnesses for Mrs. Hutchinson browbeaten by, 338.
England, danger from, feared in Massachusetts, 284, 285.
English, character of the, at the period of Elizabeth and James, 20;
sober living of, 342;
superior aptitude of, for planting agricultural communities, 346;
compactness of settlement and increase of, decided the fate of
North America, 346.
English knowledge and notions of America, 1;
first protest against oppression, 56;
jealousy of Spain, 74, 94, n. 1;
ecclesiastics reproached by Roman Catholics, 90, 97, n. 11;
Church leaders not content while Spanish priests converted
infidels, 90;
eminent clergy among the exiled, 104;
churches organized in cities of refuge, 104;
beginning of two parties in the Church, 107;
heads of the Church attacked by Mar-Prelate, 115;
laws against Catholics embarrass the foreign policy, 238;
rise of the first of the colonies, 1;
prospective ascendency of the colonies, 345.
English Protestantism. See PROTESTANTISM, ENGLISH.
Ephod of Jewish high priest, discussion of material of, 108.
Epworth, the nest of Methodism, 150.
Esquimaux kidnapped by Frobisher, 17.
Eustachius and his document dropped from heaven, 138, n. 8.
Evans, Owen, accused of "pressing" maidens, 72, n. 19.
Evelyn's Diary, 18, m.; 134, n. 1.
Excerpta de Diversis Literis, 246, m.
Excommunication dreaded by the Puritans, 339.
Exiles, the English, 104;
return of, 107;
results of their squabbles, 107.
Exploration, American, the history of, a story of delusion and
mistake, 3;
retarded settlement, 4.
Extravagance of Indian tales, 8.
Factions at Jamestown, 36, 64, n. 4.
Fairs and markets on Sundays, 138, n. 8.
Faith, devotion to, 245.
Families, the colony a camp of men without, 42;
a plantation can never flourish without, 57;
some, sent to Virginia with De la Warr, 65, n. 8.
Family of Love, Anne Hutchinson accused of accepting the doctrines
of the, 335.
Famine at Jamestown, 38, 65, n. 5.
Fast day, a, appointed in Massachusetts, 286.
Ferrar, John, election of, 71, n. 17;
deputy governor, 91.
Ferrar, Nicholas, Jr., deputy governor of Virginia Company, 91;
established a religious community at Little Gidding, 92;
austere discipline of, 93;
mediaeval enthusiasm of, 194.
Ferrar, Nicholas, Sr., courts of Virginia Company held at house of, 91;
gave money for educating infidels in Virginia, 91.
Ferrars, the, among the founders of liberal institutions in America, 173.
Firearms, sale of, to the savages, 191, 216, n. 1.
Firmin's, Giles, Review of Davis's Vindication, 348, n. 5.
Fisheries, American, importance of, foreseen, by Capt. John Smith, 37;
of Newfoundland, 261, n. 7.
Fishing on Sunday, ordinances against, 127.
Fishing seasons in the James River learned, 49.
Fleet, Henry, only survivor of Spelman's party, 22, n. 7.
Fleet's Journal, 23, n. 7.
Flemish Protestants favored independency, 158, n. 2.
Font, the stone, at which Bradford was baptized, 151.
Food, bad and insufficient, 45, 46.
Force, men not to be converted by, 312, n. 19.
Formalities, proper, never omitted, 41, 101;
at Plymouth, 102.
Founding of a state a secondary end, 73.
Fox, Luke, sails to the northwest, 10.
Franck's, Sebastian, Chronica, 314, n. 24.
Frankfort, disputes in the church at, produced great results, 105;
character of debates at, 105;
rapid changes produced by the, 106, 135, n. 3.
Freemen's oath extended to residents, 289, 308, n. 11;
opposed by Williams, 289, 309, n. 12.
Fresh River of the Dutch, the Connecticut, 324.
Frobisher's, Sir Martin, voyages, 2, 4, n. 1;
brilliant failure, 5;
attempt to plant a colony, 7;
finds "gold eure," 13;
Voyages, 21, n. 1.
Fuller, Thomas, judgment of Captain John Smith, 63, n. 3.
Fuller's Church History, 103, m.; 131, m.; 157, n. 1; 160, m.;
Worthies, 259, n. 6.
Gainsborough, the hamlet of, 150.
Gammell's Life of Roger Williams, 311, n. 17.
Gardens, private, apportioned in Virginia, 48, 49, 68, n. 12.
Gates, Sir Thomas, wrecked on the Bermudas, 40;
abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, 41, 101;
sent to England for cattle, 41;
denied that human flesh was eaten, 65, n. 5;
installed governor in proper form, 101.
General Court of Massachusetts protested against selection of Williams
as a minister of the Salem church, 271;
prevented his ordination, 272, 307, n. 5;
makes regulations for dress, 285;
appointed a fast day, 286;
promulgated a new resident's oath, 289;
"convented" Williams several times, 289;
forced Salem into submission, 291, 293;
tried and banished Williams, 292;
fearing his settlement at Narragansett Bay, agreed to send him
to England, 294;
banished scores for their opinions, 297;
the real extenuation for the conduct of the, 297;
character of the age forbids condemnation of, 300.
Geneva, the city of refuge for the Puritans, 104;
differences between exiles at, and those at Zurich, 107.
Gibbons, Captain, of Boston, commission sent to, 252.
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, on a northwest passage, 5;
attempt to plant a colony, 7.
Glass-blowers ran away to the Indians, 83.
Glass, window, not used in the colony, 65, n. 7.
Glass-works established near Jamestown, 83, 95, n. 5.
Glastonbury, also called Avalon, 258, n. 3.
Glover in Phil. Trans., 11, m.
Godspeed, The, 25.
Gold and silver, exportation of, restrained by law, 75.
Gold, belief in finding, in North America, 12, 14, 22, n. 7; 75.
Gold-hunting, 7, 12;
in Virginia, 13, 23, 42.
Gold mines of the Hudson River, 23.
Gondomar's spies in the Virginia Company, 87;
influence over Calvert, 226, 258, n. 2.
Goodman's Court of King James, 258, n. 2.
Goodwin, Thomas, and others, Apologetical Narrative, 185, n. 6.
Gorges's Briefe Narration, 196, m.
Gowns and litanies, squabbles about, 107.
Gosnold, agitating for a new colony, 33;
failure of colony in Buzzard's Bay established by, 178.