Who would true Valour see
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There’s no Discouragement,
Shall make him once Relent,
His first avow’d Intent,
To be a Pilgrim.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Those that love their own chimney corner and dare not go far beyond their own towns’ end shall never have the honour to see the wonderful works of Almighty God.
The Reverend Francis Higginson, 1629
The accession of Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1558 brought with it what proved to be the decisive victory of Protestantism; but scarcely was it won when the word Puritan began to be heard, in allusion to a party within the national church which held that the work of reformation was not complete when the Pope had been rejected, the monasteries dissolved, the mass abolished and the Book of Common Prayer imposed.
Inevitably the authorities saw the existence of this party as a political problem. As has been stated,1 the Renaissance state existed to secure its subjects against civil war and invasion. The Tudor dynasty rammed home this point explicitly, endlessly. Anarchy, battle and usurpation had brought them the Crown of England; their propaganda against these evils – which found its most brilliant expression in certain plays of Shakespeare – was incessant. The Tudors also saw clearly that if subjects were left to themselves they would make their sovereign’s religious opinions the touchstone of their loyalty. To monarchs convinced of their right and duty to rule it was intolerable that civil peace, their reigns, perhaps even their lives, should be at the mercy of turbulent fanatics. The inference was clear. Not only must religion teach the duty of obedience to the prince and submission to the social order over which he (or she) presided. The national church must be, for safety’s sake, of royal ordering both in form and doctrines; it must be subordinate to royal purposes. To Queen Elizabeth, at least, the rightness of the arrangement was clear. She was not, she knew, a demanding sovereign: she would make no windows into men’s souls. Let her subjects swear allegiance to her as Supreme Governor of the church and all would be well. It was her duty, it was her God-given exclusive privilege, to rule the realm, to take the decisions necessary for its safety and her own. Therefore to disobey her too conspicuously, or to question her decisions too publicly, or too frequently to demand more than she was prepared to give, was to verge on disloyalty, if not rebellion.
Unfortunately many Englishmen and Englishwomen did demand more. Protestantism had a built-in democratic tendency in that it encouraged the literate to search the Scriptures for themselves and act in the light of what they found there. Thus strengthened by what they took to be God’s word, the Puritans frequently refused to conform their conduct to the Queen’s views: some of them dared to rebuke her to her face. Nor was even she wholly reasonable, consistent or realistic. Her own religious tastes (it would probably be excessive to speak of her convictions) were conservative, and as her reign continued she gradually found bishops who, sharing them, were happy to attempt to force them on her subjects. Hence the promotion to Canterbury of the bullying Whitgift and to London of the policeman-like Bancroft. Furthermore Elizabeth, like almost everyone else, clung to the old medieval dream of religious unity. The Church of England must be the Church of all Englishmen: the whole nation at prayer. She would not admit that the ideals of uniformity and comprehensiveness were at war with each other, but even in her lifetime Archbishop Whitgift’s conservatism and rigidity drove many of the devout to ‘separate’ from the sinful national church – to resign from it, as it were, and organize little ‘separatist’ churches of their own (they were called ‘conventicles’). Bishops grew more and more unpopular; and in the seventeenth century the ideal of a comprehensive national church crashed to the ground, bringing the dream of national religious uniformity (whether episcopalian or presbyterian) to ruin with it.
At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the Puritans were, in a sense, no less (and no more) than the Protestant party itself. They saw that the country was still for the most part either Catholic or indifferent. Their business was to bring the full Reformation to pass; to achieve the conversion of England. For years and years they tried to persuade their Queen to join them in the work by reorganizing the church on presbyterian lines and by using her unquestioned right to compel her subjects to be saved. They quite agreed with her that a uniform, all-embracing national church was demanded by both reason and religion; only it must be governed on the lines that Calvin inferred from the Bible. Elizabeth, however, steadily refused to co-operate. So the Puritans were compelled, after some nasty brushes with the law, to turn from political to purely pastoral labours. As they were not to have the chance to compel their countrymen to come in, they tried to preach them in. By 1603 they were succeeding spectacularly.
The English Reformation had many causes, but its soul was the desire to renew the Christian life of the people, and Puritanism was that soul’s instrument. Episcopacy was resisted because it acted as an umbrella for such abuses as pluralism, non-resident clergy, corrupt church courts and a ‘dumb dog’, non-preaching, unlearned ministry, all of which came between the English and the good news of salvation. Even before their rebuff at the Queen’s hands the Puritan ministers had shown themselves adept at pastoral work; thereafter they moved through the land, devoted to uprooting sin from the hearts of the congregations. Their chief tool was the sermon. It had played little part in pre-Reformation church life. Now a conscientious minister would expect to have to preach once every day, and at least twice on the Sabbath; and preaching was extraordinarily popular. It was something new, and people flocked to hear good speakers – so much so that ‘gadding about to sermons’ was a vice much denounced by the conservative.2 But the godly had the last word. Serious and intelligent, they had an influence on their communities out of all proportion to their numbers, though those increased rapidly. Like young Siegfried with the broken sword Nothung, the Puritans ground down the English soul to powder and then re-forged it to heroic temper. Nor is this only metaphor. The central Puritan experience was that of conversion, when a man’s sins ‘came upon him like armed men, and the tide of his thoughts was turned’. Conversion struck in many ways, as we learn from the innumerable fragments of autobiography left us: from a tract sold by a pedlar, from an insult hurled by a woman in the street (thus ‘drunken Perkins’ became ‘painful Perkins’, a celebrated preacher) – most usually from some ‘affectionate’ sermon. Conversion was the moment when God’s grace entered the soul and began the work of its redemption. It was a moment predestined from Creation, as St Paul taught:3 ‘Whom he did predestinate, them he also called;’ it was the moment when Hell’s gates closed: ‘Whom he called, them he also justified;’ the moment when the doors of the Celestial City opened: ‘Whom he justified, them he also glorified.’ It was a moment that enlightened and rejoiced the lives of tens of thousands of plain people. It assured them that although life would continue to daunt them with its problems and temptations, they had only to fight ceaselessly against sin within them and without them, and whatever wounds they took in the battle, victory was sure.4
It is easy to mistake the nature of this Puritanism. The word today generally connotes a loveless respectability, a Philistine narrowness, Biblical idolatry or a neurotic hatred of other people’s pleasures. ‘Show me a Puritan,’ said H. L. Mencken, ‘and I’ll show you a son-of-a-bitch.’ But while it would be absurd to deny that a certain censoriousness was present in Puritanism from the start, it would be equally absurd to let the degenerate aspect it wears today conceal the splendours of its prime. Certain of their salvation, the best Puritans were brave, cheerful, intelligent and hard-working. One of their preachers urged them to be ‘merry in the Lord, and yet without lightness; sad and heavy in heart for their own sins, and the abominations of the land, and yet without discouragement or dumpishness’. The quality of Puritan piety is best savoured in The Pilgrim’s Progress. John Bunyan, the old Ironside, knew how to make his simple image – one that had long been dear to Puritans, indeed to all Englishmen: Hakluyt’s continuator called his book Purchas, His Pilgrims5 – of life as a journey and a battle, not only true, but startlingly important. It is easy, reading Bunyan, to feel what immense strength those of his faith derived from their belief that the promises Christ made were literally true. For them, the trumpets were sure to sound on the other side.
What could kings, queens and archbishops do against such people? Very little; and for the most part they prudently attempted less. Puritanism was left to seep peacefully through England. But after the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 Policeman Bancroft, now Archbishop of Canterbury, was unwise enough to attempt a little persecution. ‘Apparitors and pursuivants and the commissary courts’ – the whole detested machinery of ecclesiastical officialdom – were turned against those, within and without the church, who were less than perfect conformists to the officially prescribed practices; among them a little band of Separatists living in villages on the borders of Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. The leaders of this conventicle were educated, but its members were for the most part lowly, sincere, literate but otherwise untutored folk. Their irregular piety was thus doubly offensive to the authorities, with their memories of Tyler, Cade and Kett.6
So
some were taken and clapped up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to flee and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood.7
Understandably, these religious Lincolnshire poachers decided to emigrate. With some difficulty in 1607 and 1608 they slipped over in groups to Holland, ‘where they heard was freedom of religion for all men’, led by Pastor Robinson and Elder William Brewster.
Robinson and Brewster took their followers to Leyden, where with much difficulty they scratched a living for the next ten years or so. But Leyden could not be a permanent resting-place. There was a danger of Spanish conquest; the prospect of continuing grinding poverty was a discouragement; the children of these resolute English threatened to turn Dutch, not only as to language, which was bad enough, but as to religion, which was far worse (for the Dutch, though Calvinists, refused to keep a properly gloomy Sabbath). Finally, there seemed to be small chance in Leyden of achieving that really remarkable labour for God of which the more ardent Separatists dreamed, hemmed in as they were by the world. It would be better to move on again. Where to? England was still closed, its churches, for the most part, corrupt. Their minds began to turn to ‘some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America’.
It was not really surprising. The idea of a religious refuge across the water was tolerably obvious. The French Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny, had sent a party to settle in Florida as early as 1560 (though as the Separatists knew, it had been speedily snuffed out by the Spaniards). More particularly, the exiles were by no means cut off from English news, and these were the great years of the Virginia adventure, as we have seen. The Virginia Company of London, in its quest for funds, was advertising itself far and wide. John Smith was still busy. In 1612 he published his map of Virginia, ‘with a description of its Commodities, People, Government, and Religion’. In 1614 he was employed by the Company to explore the North Atlantic coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. He learned enough to make another good map, to give the region a name, New England, and to begin a lengthy literary campaign extolling the excellences of those parts for settlement: thus in 1616 he published his Description of New England and in 1620 his New England Trials.8 In fact he became a full-fledged ‘booster’, a type we have met before and will again. Nevertheless, the Captain, as was his habit, told few lies, in spite of his enthusiasm. He could truthfully boast, for example, that
you shall scarce find any bay, shallow shore or cove of sand, where you may not take many clams or lobsters, or both at your pleasure, and in many places load your boat if you please; nor isles where you find not fruits, birds, crabs, and mussels, or all of them; for taking at a low water cod, cusk, halibut, skate, turbot, mackerel, or such like are taken plentifully in divers sandy bays, store of mullet, bass, and divers other sorts of such excellent fish as many as their net can hold: no river where there is not plenty of sturgeon, or salmon, or both, all which are to be had in abundance observing but their seasons: but if a man will go at Christmas to gather cherries in Kent, though there be plenty in summer, he may be deceived; so here these plenties have each their seasons, as I have expressed.9
In this and other passages throughout his work he gave vent to his settled belief that a fortune, indeed an empire, could be founded on the fisheries of New England: Portugal, Spain, Provence and Italy would all provide ready markets for ‘our dry fish, green fish, sturgeon, mullet, caviare, and buttango’. ‘Therefore (honorable and worthy countrymen) let not the meanness of the word Fish distaste you, for it will afford as good gold as the mines of Guiana or Tumbatu, with less hazard and charge, and more certainty and facility.’
The Leyden community might well be encouraged by such talk. Furthermore, these were the years of a burgeoning Dutch interest in North America. In 1609 Sir Henry Hudson, an English mariner in Dutch pay, had rediscovered Manhattan Island and, behind it, a huge river which now bears his name. He thus opened up a rich fur-bearing region to European trade, and was soon followed. In 1613 the Dutch sailed 150 miles up the Hudson and founded a trading-post called Fort Nassau (later, Orange; later still, Albany; today, the capital of New York state). They also began to trade on the Delaware river, whose mouth is 150 miles or so south of that of the Hudson. In 1621 their activities culminated in the foundation of the Dutch West India Company, much on the lines of the various English companies: it began to send out settlers in 1624, and in 1625–6 founded a colony on Manhattan Island, called New Amsterdam. To increase its security the director of the enterprise, Peter Minuit, bought the island from the local Indians with sixty guilders’ worth of miscellaneous goods. This transaction is now legendary as ‘the best real-estate deal in history’.
The Leyden congregation was approached by the Dutch, looking for worthy settlers, when word of their plans got about. But Dutch stirrings were not very far advanced when Pastor Robinson’s flock began its deliberations in 1616 or 1617. And neither Virginia nor New England could seem better than daunting. For the Separatists had none of the resources of the great companies; their only reliance could be on their own characters and on the God whom they were trying so earnestly to please. Trusting in that God, and in His blessing on such a great and honourable action, they refused to be daunted. They agreed on the principle of emigration to the New World and on an application to the Virginia Company of London for a patent to erect a ‘particular plantation’ on its territory. These plantations were the latest device of the London Company for encouraging, at small cost to its exhausted exchequer, more of the settlers of whom it was in desperate need.10 In effect the organizers of a particular plantation were given such rights as to make it almost an independent colony. In return, it was hoped, they would provide supplies and colonists. The idea became a favourite of Sir Edwin Sandys. It so happened that Elder Brewster’s father had been Sandys’ brother’s tenant at Scrooby (a relationship that was closer than it sounds); and that Sandys himself had puritanical sympathies. The conclusion was obvious to both parties, and matters should have gone swiftly forward to a conclusion.
They did not, even with royal encouragement;11 the struggle to organize the desperate voyage went on for two years, far into the summer of 1620. News came that another Separatist congregation, from Amsterdam, sailing to America on a similar errand, had met with total disaster at sea, 130 perishing: this must have lowered spirits at Leyden, though voices were not wanting to attribute the disaster to the failings, moral and ecclesiastical, of the expedition’s leader. Money was short, and Brewster, by tactlessly printing a religious tract attacking James VI and I’s church policy in Scotland, alienated the authorities and had to go into hiding. But ‘at length, after much travail and these debates, all things were got ready and provided’. They had bought Speedwell, a small ship of sixty tons, at Leyden, to carry them to England; they also hoped to make use of her in America. A larger ship, Mayflower, was hired to carry the greater part of the company and its stores across the Atlantic. She was to meet Speedwell at Southampton. Brewster would be the spiritual guide of the journeyers, for Robinson must stay in Leyden with the majority of the congregation who had declined the voyage, at any rate for the present.
And the time being come that they must depart, they were accompanied with most of their brethren out of the city, unto a town sundry miles off called Delftshaven, where the ship lay ready to receive them. So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.
This was on 22 July 1620.
Even now there were more delays. Speedwell proved unseaworthy (Bradford thought her crew had sabotaged her), but it was long before hope of her repair was abandoned. Only on 16 September did Mayflower finally sail from Plymouth. She carried, besides the officers and crew, 105 persons, of whom thirty-five only were certainly Pilgrims (as the Separatists may now, following their historian, properly be called). The rest had been found by the London merchants whom the Pilgrims had induced to finance their voyage, and were indentured servants or persons of particular skills likely to be useful in the new colony (the lessons of Jamestown had sunk in, though the Pilgrims had dared to refuse John Smith’s offer to come with them). The ship was heavily laden with furniture, pots, pans and provisions; some livestock, it appears – pigs, goats and chickens, two dogs (of course), no cattle. The ship herself is described as a ‘staunch, chunky, slow-sailing vessel, square-rigged, double-decked, broad abeam, with high upper structure at the stern, the passengers occupying cabins or quarters between decks, or, in the case of the women and children, in rough cabins forward below the poop’.12 She was about ninety feet long, twenty-five feet wide at her waist. She boasted twelve cannon. Her upper deck leaked in bad weather, and she was very overcrowded, having perhaps thirty more people on board than she should. During the voyage she encountered the autumnal gales, and her passengers were extremely seasick. At one point there was serious danger of the vessel foundering. Altogether, it was in conditions very like those of the later steerage, as well as those of the earlier Virginia voyages, that the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic. In this sense they had a typical emigrant experience. The single advantage of Mayflower was that she was a ‘sweet’ ship: having been engaged in the wine trade, her hold was not rank with the smells and diseases left behind by animal cargoes. The result was a healthy voyage: of the entire complement of 149 persons, ‘only’ five died. But food was insufficient and not good, the voyage was overlong, confinement on shipboard was even longer. When the landing in America had been made and the winter had come, the mortality from scurvy and similar complaints was frightful, carrying off half the crew and half the passengers, including all but four of the eighteen married women. Many of these deaths must be attributed to what was suffered on Mayflower.
So when, at daybreak on 9 November, they made landfall, ‘they were not a little joyful’. The tip of Cape Cod, fifty miles out from the mainland, must have looked much as it does today: a waste of tumbled white sand dunes, patchily held together by stands of scrubby oak and pine. The Pilgrims could not settle there, but they took water aboard and then set out to look for a friendlier shore. They hoped to sail south and settle on the Hudson, in what was then termed ‘the northern parts of Virginia’; but wind and rocks forced them back into what is now Provincetown harbour on Cape Cod. From there various reconnaissance parties went out in search of food and a suitable site for inhabitation, and on 11 December a party led by Bradford found its way, in a blinding snowstorm, into Plymouth harbour (first discovered by John Smith, named by him and the future Charles I). Plymouth was chosen to be their new home, and on 16 December Mayflower entered the harbour.13 On 25 December, ignoring any popish significance of the date, they set to work to erect ‘the first house for common use to receive them and their goods’. Jamestown had acquired a sister.
The Pilgrims’ case was grim enough. Bradford says:
And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men – and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not… What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen, which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity,’ etc. ‘Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good: and His mercies endure forever.’
The Pilgrims had to suffer: agony followed their arrival, an agony which did not abate until 1625, when, Bradford tells us, the settlers first tasted ‘the sweetness of the country’. But in some respects they were lucky. The winter was mild for the region, and the Indians, having been immensely reduced in number by a plague, were less dangerous than those of Virginia. Near-contemporary accounts,14 though admittedly written as encouraging propaganda, do make it seem that conditions were less unbearable in Plymouth than they had been, ten years previously, in Virginia. For one thing, the Pilgrims were made of better stuff than the Virginians. They survived, and thus achieved their historic mission.
For New Plymouth was not a colony that could easily or quickly grow. The Separatists were a minority of the inhabitants to begin with, but they early subdued their fellows to their ways; yet their ecclesiastical doctrines, which in effect denied the authenticity, the purity, of all other congregations whatever, except those of the remaining exiles in Leyden and Amsterdam, were bound to repel many, even many other Puritans, who might have joined them. Then, the economic basis of the colony was too weak and narrow to support any ambitious edifice: not until 1648 did the Pilgrims pay off the debts in which their voyage had involved them. Farming and fishing (the soil being thin and Plymouth far from the best fishing-grounds) alike at first disappointed the hopes that had been placed in them: only the fur-trade kept the infant colony in being. In a small way, it is true, it throve: in 1628 the town presented a respectable appearance to a Dutch visitor, who has left us details of the well-built wooden houses, the gardens, the stockade and the cannon; by 1630 its population stood at nearly 300, by 1637 it was nearly 550. But Virginia, at the same dates, had a population of more than 2,500 and more than 5,000 respectively. Plymouth, with its population of, in the main, unintellectual and socially undistinguished zealots, could save itself, indeed prosper, by its exertions; its influence could spread only by example. There would be nothing like the steady march of population across country from the first settlement that so strongly characterized the Virginian development; though it is worth noting that in other respects the common features of American experience made themselves felt. Thus, in Plymouth, as in Jamestown, an attempt to have all things in common was made, and failed. Bradford tells us:
So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor15 (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust themselves… And so assigned every family a parcel of land… This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.
Once more it had been shown that, whatever their faith in a common road to heaven, Jacobean Englishmen desired individual economic salvation on earth, and that the only way to secure their prosperity and cohesion in the New World was by assuaging their land-hunger: which, fortunately, was easy. In New England, as in Virginia, the most alluring advertisement for the colonies was to be that which we find in such remarks as William Hilton’s, made from Plymouth in 1621: ‘We are all freeholders, the rent day doth not trouble us…’
And, as in Virginia, the political necessities of American life also made themselves felt promptly. When the Mayflower company contemplated its future after reaching Cape Cod it seemed plain that such a group, far from all the sanctions and blessings of regular English government, could not thrive without an agreed constitution. Accordingly the Saints (remembering the covenant by which they, like all Separatist churches, had established themselves) and the Strangers (that is, the non-Saints) agreed on the Mayflower Compact – signed on 11 November by most of the company’s adult males. In content it was no more than a covenant constituting the signatories a body politic, which would issue and abide by its own laws; but the manner in which it was arrived at was, if not democratic, at least self-governing, like the Separatist churches;16 and the constitution which evolved from it, though in substance paternalistic (for the Governor and his council made all decisions), had similar characteristics: notably the provision for the annual election of the Governor by all properly qualified adult males. Seen against a modern American background there is nothing very striking in the Pilgrims’ political arrangements; but set against the background of Stuart England they are eloquent of what was different about the New World. Government, indeed survival, was possible there only with the consent of the governed; political institutions therefore became in the first instance instruments for securing that consent. The Mayflower Compact was the first of innumerable agreements arrived at by the American people as they founded new settlements. Its example was unconsciously but exactly followed in seventeenth-century New England, in eighteenth-century Kentucky, throughout revolutionary America, and everywhere on the nineteenth-century frontier: in Texas, California, Iowa and Oregon. These agreements enabled generations of settlers to feel that their lives, property and prospects were secure under the rule of law, and they conditioned American political assumptions, so that the leaders of revolutionary Maryland could assert without fear of contradiction that ‘All government of right originates from the people, is founded in compact only.’17 All this prepared the way for the greatest compact of all, the Constitution of the United States. The Pilgrims were thus forerunners of even more than was prophesied to them from England in 1623, when their associates wrote: ‘Let it not be grievous unto you that you have been instruments to break the ice for others who come after with less difficulty; the honour shall be yours to the world’s end.’ The Pilgrims had shown what could be done; and others soon profited from their example.
For England had now entered on a half-century of chronic trade depression, and her greatest export, cloth – especially in its traditional form, the so-called Old Draperies – was hardest hit of all. An ill wind blew throughout East Anglia and the South-West, where Puritanism, outside London, was at its strongest; and presently a new force began to make itself felt in the Church of England: the bigoted moderation of William Laud, created bishop in 1621, Bishop of London in 1628, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Over-zealous and over-sure of himself he was, in the end, to do as much as any man (next the King) to bring down the old order in England; but before that he mightily helped to bring about another important work, the Great Migration of thousands of Puritans to New England, there to be free of him and hold up the model of a Reformed church to their unhappy countrymen at home.
Other impulses too pushed them westwards, as they had pushed the Virginians before: impulses which, throughout this time, were speckling the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland southwards, with white men’s habitations. As a result of the depression, land-hunger and the quest for trade were stronger than ever. Not only that, it was an era when mounting incompetence and remoteness were driving the Stuart monarchy into ruinously arbitrary courses: it was not so good to be an Englishman as it had been. But there can be no doubt that the religious impulse, as such, was predominant, indeed sufficient by itself to account for this ‘Puritan Hegira’.18 It was intimately connected, of course, with the other forces mentioned. Two-fifths of the emigrants seem to have come from the cloth counties. The King’s incompetent despotism was a seamless web, oppressing the political and economic as well as the religious life of his subjects, with Star Chamber as well as High Commission, since religion, labour and politics were interfused. But none of this need have been true, and the Puritans would still have sailed. Laud silenced the godly preachers, enforced conformity, frustrated all attempts to puritanize the Church of England from within. More and more the Puritans found God’s work to be hampered in England; they must pursue it elsewhere.
It is unnecessary to elaborate the process which led to the great decision. The propaganda of a generation had pointed the way, and the Pilgrims had made it seem practicable. Laud made the matter urgent. Earlier efforts were crowned and superseded by the foundation, in 1629, of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which inherited a struggling plantation at Naumkeag (now Salem) in New England; and in 1630 it put a fleet to sea of eleven ships, carrying 700 passengers, 240 cows, sixty horses, the royal charter of the Company (so that self-government was legally possible in New England)19 and a leader, the Governor of the Company and the colony, John Winthrop (1588–1650), the first great American.
Winthrop was of the same astonishing gentry generation as Pym, Hampden and Oliver Cromwell; nor was his achievement less than theirs. Like Cromwell, he was a decaying gentleman: his estate, Groton in Suffolk, was at the heart of the region injured by the decline of the Old Draperies. Like Cromwell, though he was far from being an ordinary man, an ordinary man could have been made out of him. His natural tastes were those of a straightforward countryman: he liked food, drink and field sports; was extremely uxorious (four wives, sixteen children); hated London. Like Cromwell, his soul had early been fired by Puritanism; like Cromwell, he had little or no sense of humour; like Cromwell, his chance came at the age of forty.
There the resemblance ceases. There were traces of a high generosity and an intellectual distinction in Winthrop which Cromwell never attained. There was no whiff of sulphur about him, none of the Cromwellian blind groping to his destiny. Winthrop was eminently reasonable. He wrestled intelligently with his temptations, in the process discovering the great strength of his character and the joys of a life of challenge. His days were marked throughout by an earnest and honest attempt to mould himself and his society according to the will of God. But he made no impossible demands of himself and his fellows. His religion reflected his character, as a man’s religion always does, rather more than it shaped it.
Winthrop was able, hard-working, healthy and, until the call came, obscure: Puritanism enabled him to balance ambition and pleasure, and to accept the narrow confines of his life. Yet in 1629 he was known to a wide circle of Puritan gentry, merchants, lawyers and ministers as a man of great gifts, at peace with himself. He was clearly such a man as the Massachusetts Bay Company needed. Gradually he was drawn into its plans; gradually he accepted the part he might play in them. He set down on paper the arguments in favour of attempting a Puritan plantation in New England. Reasons of ambition and economics were stated; but over all predominated the feeling that, for the faithful of God, the times were bad and getting worse; that God was preparing a judgement against England, ‘and who knows, but that God hath provided this place, to be a refuge for many, whom he means to save out of the general destruction’. However, if the old England were, in spite of all, to be saved, it might best be done from the new. ‘It was a good service to the Church of the Jews that Joseph and Mary forsook them, that their messiah might be preserved for them against the times of better service.’ And if this undoubtedly honourable work were to succeed, it would need to be undertaken by some men, at least, of education, ability and wealth. Winthrop at last agreed to be the chief of them. His friends had long insisted that they would not stir without him.
The decision once made, his spirit sang within him:
Now thou the hope of Israel, and the sure help of all that come to thee, knit the hearts of thy servants to thyself, in faith and purity. Draw us with the sweetness of thine odours, that we may run after thee, allure us, and speak kindly to thy servants, that thou may possess us as thine own, in the kindness of youth and the love of marriage. Carry us into thy Garden, that we may eat and be filled with those pleasures, which the world knows not: let us hear that sweet voice of thine, my love, my dove, my undefiled. Spread thy skirt over us and cover our deformity, make us sick with thy love. Let us sleep in thine arms, and awake in thy kingdom.
The joyous sense of a divine work to be done carried him on triumphantly to the building of the most remarkable of the English colonies and the establishment of a truly new society in the New World.
The times were with him. At their arrival, the Puritans found, like the Pilgrims before them, that the Indians were agreeably few; and there was no serious interference, let alone attack, from the Dutch or the French. The colony never lacked the essential for success, plentiful recruitment: during the ‘Eleven Years Tyranny’ some 20,000 Puritans are thought to have crossed to Massachusetts Bay. Many died, many lost heart and returned; but most stayed. The earlier arrivals supplied the later with corn, dressed timber, cattle; in return the latecomers provided the cloth, pots, gunpowder and so on which could not yet be manufactured in New England.
The debt of America to Winthrop and his associates (especially the ministers) can scarcely be overestimated (though it may be misstated). It was not merely that the Governor made all the great decisions of the early days, such as that to establish the seat of government on the Shawmut peninsula, thereafter famous as Boston; or that his cheerful faith sustained the settlers’ morale throughout the starving winter after their arrival; or that he generously subsidized the colony from his own pocket. His faith, his programme, his method of government raised some questions, settled others; but overall the great work of the Puritans was the stamping of their character on American society. For the mark, though much altered by time, has proved indelible.
True, in the eyes of the Puritans themselves, their failure was almost as conspicuous as their success. We have seen that one aim of the Great Migration was to provide in the New World a new model of the due form of government, civil and ecclesiastical, by which, when the times mended, the Old World was somehow to be saved. ‘We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill,’ said Winthrop to the first settlers, ‘the eyes of all people are upon us.’ A splendid and deservedly famous assertion. Unfortunately it remained a mere assertion. The eyes of all people – even of English people – proved to be looking elsewhere; and from that day to this, when they have from time to time turned to the Bible Commonwealth founded by Winthrop, they have seen more to blame than to admire. Seventy-five years of the Puritan spirit bore the New England settlements as their fruit; but the spirit continued to evolve with the years, leaving the ideas of Winthrop’s generation behind, stranded, as it were, on the American shore: looking to a different harvest. Winthrop’s city upon a hill was, nevertheless, actually built, organized and maintained against its enemies. Few other Utopias could ever boast as much. No wonder that, in spite of outer neglect and inner backsliding, its citizens continued to be proud of it and of themselves.
It was very much a Separatist Utopia. Not that, before their voyage, many of the Puritans had been of the Pilgrim stripe. As a matter of fact, nothing in the history of English Protestantism is more striking than the extreme and long-enduring reluctance of the Puritans under the Stuarts to be logical and separate from the national church. However zealous for the discipline, few of the ministers and lay Puritans had the martyrs’ temperament; and many, even of the most earnest, of those least swayed by material considerations (the discomfort of prison, the comfort of a benefice) could not bring themselves to abandon comprehensiveness and their dear, if sinful, fellow-countrymen, even though they cherished the notion that a church ought only to be a local thing, an exclusive and independent congregation of the saved. The Massachusetts Congregationalists were not voluntary schismatics: they were driven out of their church by Laud.20 It is not surprising that professed Separatists had been the first to make the greatest break of all, and leave, not just their church, but their country, seeking a new England; and it is a certain testimony to the despair settling like a winter fog over the Puritans in Laudian England that so many of them decided to follow the Pilgrim lead. For by doing so they conceded the Separatist case. They struggled against admitting it: Winthrop and his friends (protesting, maybe, a trifle too much) issued a fulsome declaration of loyalty to the Church of England just before sailing. They had no wish to seem deserters of God’s cause in England. But the act of sailing was a sign that they had in fact abandoned it. Geography was too strong. Three thousand miles of ocean, they discovered, left them free (and therefore bound) to follow their religious principles to their logical conclusions without fear or regret. Bishops and the Book of Common Prayer were abandoned. Ties of sentiment and habit fell away, and non-separating Congregationalism ended. Every New England church was sovereign in its locality, amenable only to the advice of neighbouring churches and the strong arm of the civil authority.
This last was a very severe restriction on the sacred freedom of the churches. It was a much more total surrender to the state than anything which Charles I or Laud were able to impose on the church in England. But Winthrop and the ministers felt they had little choice but to try to square this circle. Heresy and sedition (that is, non-Congregationalist views) would sprout unless some power existed to check them. That power could only be the state, since no church might coerce another, and since the state existed only to further God’s clear purpose… it was sophistry, but plausible enough. Heresy became a civil offence, like any of the others (such as witchcraft, profanity, blasphemy, idolatry, adultery, sodomy, Sabbath-breaking) with which the courts had to deal. Right liberty, Winthrop carefully explained, was liberty only to do God’s will. All other forms of liberty were frowned on. So, arm in arm, the Puritan churches and the Puritan state forced men to be free. It was an enlightened despotism.
Such a system was more acceptable in the religious than in the secular sphere. The bulk of the settlers were happy to believe that the divines whom they had followed from England knew how to steer them all safe to heaven, and supported them and the enforcing secular arm contentedly against such challengers as Roger Williams (1603–83), the founder of Rhode Island colony in 1636, who argued for complete separation between the institutions of church and state, and Anne Hutchinson (1591 – 1643), who claimed direct inspiration from God. Politics was a different matter. Winthrop launched, and would have liked to continue, an enlightened despotism in this sphere too, but circumstances were too strong for him, and he showed his usual good sense in gracefully giving way to them. The colonists intended to run no risks of forced loans, ship money, billeting or any other arbitrary exactions now that they had got free of Old England. The preachers too, remembering Laud’s heavy hand, were all in favour of a strictly limited government in non-ecclesiastical affairs. ‘If you tether a beast at night,’ said the Reverend John Cotton, ‘he knows the length of his tether before morning.’
So in 1632 the settlers insisted on the principle of no taxation without representation (though not in those words). It was agreed that every town was to elect two deputies (like the borough members of the House of Commons) to confer with the Governor and other magistrates (known as assistants) and vote necessary taxes. They also successfully claimed the right to elect the Governor and Deputy. Then in 1634, at the May meeting of the General Court, ‘it was ordered, that four general courts should be kept every year, and that the whole body of the freemen should be present only at the court of election of magistrates, etc., and that, at the other three, every town should send their deputies, who should assist in making laws, disposing lands, etc.’. The General Court was, under the charter, the sovereign body both of the Massachusetts Bay Company and of its colony, into which it had merged. Increasingly this court came to resemble the English Parliament. The resemblance was accentuated when, in 1644, it was formally divided into two houses, the magistrates and the deputies.
Winthrop, believing in a truly aristocratic government – ‘the best part is always the least and of that best part the wiser is always the lesser’, he said – deplored this evolution, but could not end it. The annual election of Governor and other magistrates had brought the joys of electoral politics to the sympathetic soil of North America. Winthrop was twice voted out of the Governorship for a period of years (in 1634 and 1640); and his belief in a flexible, organic government, to be guided by the precedents of its own decisions, was rejected by the colonists, who insisted on a code of written laws – the Body of Liberties (1641).21 Within so few years of its establishment, the Massachusetts plantation had grown into a fully self-governing little republic, having only paper connections with the royal government in England – it was far outside both the protection and the power of Whitehall. But it was far from being a democracy, which Winthrop (reflecting the general educated attitude of his time) described as the meanest of all forms of government. There had been no democracy in Israel. The danger that ‘worldly men should prove the major part’ of the government had to be avoided, and was, by a decree (1631) that ‘to the end the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men… no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same’. Since only those who could convince the other members that they had been converted were admitted to churches the danger of ungodly rule was thus eliminated; and since the number of the converted was always small, the danger of mere majority rule was eliminated at the same time.
An élite, then, of the elect, the Saints, governed Massachusetts; an élite which was itself dominated by men like Winthrop, as he desired, men of wealth, education and breeding.22 It was not a class élite, all the same. God did not save or damn by income: poor as well as rich were admitted to the churches. Whatever the other inequalities, church members were equal in political rights. Yet in every class, in every town, they were in a minority. By the end of the century their monopoly of political power was exciting envy in the unregenerate. Long before that, it was proving inconvenient to the regenerate. Efficiency required wider citizenship. For freemanship entailed not rights only, but responsibilities, and all too many church members, obeying a natural instinct to shirk, were declining to apply for it. In order to keep the affairs of government running smoothly, it proved necessary to find ways round the rule restricting freemanship – let us say citizenship – to the saved. (In the daughter colony of Connecticut – founded in 1635 – the rule was never adopted.) The purely local franchise was early opened to all men of mature years who had taken the oath of fidelity to the commonwealth. In this way the idea of political equality began to make itself felt.
It was not an ideal which could make much headway in a society whose prime preoccupation was religion. But (here the history turns comic) though the subject continued fascinating, the preoccupation did not last very long – certainly not so long as the ministers’ obsession with the idea of New England’s divine errand and covenant with God. Soon the men of Marblehead near Salem were coarsely telling their minister that he was mistaken as to their motive in travelling to America – ‘our main end was to catch fish’. For fishing proved almost as lucrative as John Smith had foreseen. The New Englanders soon ventured to the Grand Banks and steadily improved the design of their fishing vessels. The result was that in 1641 alone 300,000 barrels of cod were exported; herring, mackerel, alewives and delicious bass also found ready markets. Great Britain had her own fishermen, but Europe was happy to take the best of New England’s catches; the middling grades were sold to farmers of the American back-country, the worst fed slaves on West Indian plantations. Prosperity was fostered by the fur-trade too, which, lucrative in itself (though rapidly declining after the first decade of settlement), also opened up the back-country of New England to farmers. It proved impossible to export the region’s plentiful timber, labour and transportation costs being so high, but the shipbuilders of Boston and the coast made good use of it, as they did of other marine stores. For overseas trade boomed. Some of its ingredients have been mentioned. Others were, for export: pipe-staves, barrel-staves, clapboard, sheep, goats, hogs, horses, barley, wheat, oats, rye, dried beef, pork, rum, cheese, butter, soap, frames of houses, peas; for import: from the West Indies, molasses (for making rum), sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, slaves; from Europe, wine, salt, fruits, raisins, silk, olive oil, laces, linen, cloth; from the southern English colonies, tobacco, corn, beans, meat. Trade became a fascination for the children of the Puritans, and the ministers found that they were distressingly ready to tell lies to help it, and their fortunes, along. There were even graver consequences. As early as 1634 a sumptuary law had to be passed forbidding the use of ‘lace, silver, gold’ in clothing, and ‘slashed clothes, other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back; also, all cutworks, embroidered or needlework caps, bands and rails’. To no effect: forty years later it was frequently necessary to fine humble persons for impudently wearing the fabric of their betters, silk. Then, drink, that staple of the trade, had distressing effects: in 1673 a minister lamented ‘How has wine and cider, but most of all rum, debauched multitudes of people, young and old?’ Most dreadful, however, was the distracting effect of mere prosperity itself. By 1660 Boston was a thriving town of 3,000 people, clear evidence of God’s favour; but to what avail if it had forgotten its mission? Ministerial outcries became incessant: ‘It concerneth New England always to remember that originally they are a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade.’ No use – the gloomy verdict could not be avoided: ‘Outward prosperity is a worm at the roots of godliness, so that religion dies when the world thrives.’
Matters were no better in the back-country. On their arrival the Puritans had quickly sensed how well adapted the traditional English manor-village was to their purposes; so they organized the New England countryside accordingly. This was a superficially more significant importation than the Essex weatherboarding which covered their houses and barns; yet it has left less of a mark on the American landscape. Weatherboarding can now be found in quantity in every state of the Union; the godly township of the Puritans’ plans, nowhere. Yet the idea had seemed so good! The nuclear village, surrounded by fields farmed in strips, such as the settlers had known in England, would be economically self-sufficient and keep the villagers close under the minister’s eye. It would make easy the maintenance of a school, and the Christian training of servants and children. It would prevent the intellectual and moral stagnation in isolation of adults, and facilitate local self-government, since town-meetings could easily be arranged. Thus a congregation, whether meeting as a civil or as an ecclesiastical community, could observe the principles of its institution, and its members (powerfully egged on by a preaching minister’s eloquence) could act against any backsliding.
To a wonderful extent the New England township achieved all these things; and, in purely secular form, it lingers still, with its characteristic institutions, the town-meeting and the selectmen (annually elected administrative officers), in the quieter corners of New England. But land-hunger in Connecticut and Massachusetts continued to be strong. Land was plentiful; and, until the looming of the English Civil War dried up the supply of new immigrants, there was, as has been stated,23 an eager market for agrarian products of all kinds. Prices collapsed, it is true, in 1642; but they gradually recovered as New England sailors found markets abroad. Soon the demands of the market made themselves felt again on the farm; and, thus assured of profit, the farmers opened up more and more new land. They could not be kept within range of the towns and the ministers, and their land-hunger made them somewhat unreceptive to exhortations. ‘Outlying places’, said one preacher, ‘were nurseries of ignorance, profaneness and atheism.’ Said another, ‘The first that came over hither for the Gospel could not tell what to do with more land than a small number of acres, yet now men more easily swallow down so many hundreds and are not satisfied.’ A third exclaimed, ‘Sure there were other and better things the People of God came hither for than the best spot of ground, the richest soil.’ No doubt: but the People of God chose to forget it. They chose to live in America, not as members of a close-knit community of piety, but as individualist farmers, each seeking his and his family’s salvation, economically and spiritually, on his own. Had they cared to they could have argued that they were the truest Puritans, individual salvation being the central value of Puritanism; no wonder that, in propitious circumstances (and the frontier of settlement in North America was very propitious), the value was followed to its logical, ‘he travels fastest who travels alone’, conclusion. But by the perhaps excessively strict standards of its founders the city on the hill began to look less like Jerusalem than like a displaced Sodom or Gomorrah; and Bradford shook his head over the degeneracy of Plymouth, too.
So perhaps it was as well that the eyes of all people were directed elsewhere; but this, too, was a cause of distress and saddened John Winthrop before his death. First there was Laud: they had fled him. Then there was the Presbyterian Parliament: they defied it. Then Cromwell arose, an Independent, one of their own – and instead of adopting the New England way of compulsory Congregationalism, as exemplified in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven, he took up the ideas of the black flock among them, Roger Williams’s sheep of Rhode Island, that hotbed of religious liberty! ‘Toleration’ was all the cry.24 The New England Puritans were rising to the peak of their political strength: Connecticut and New Haven were settled, and in 1652 Massachusetts asserted its dominion over the regions of New Hampshire and Maine to the north, where many of the ungodly had been rash enough to settle within reach of the saintly commonwealth’s long arm. In the same year it assumed one of the chief attributes of sovereignty and began to mint its own money. But to what avail? The errand into the wilderness had failed. Very success was corrupting the new Canaan from within; and the Puritans they had left behind were neglecting the lessons of Massachusetts orthodoxy. What could it matter to an English Independent that Master Thomas Shepard, the minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had declared it ‘Satan’s policy, to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration’? To the men of Bunyan’s generation only the adoption of such a policy could save them from Bedford jail. To their eyes (some of them began to say so as early as 1643, when Roger Williams, seeking, successfully, to protect Rhode Island from Massachusetts expansionism, went to England for help) the compulsory orthodoxy of New England was cold and sterile. Later holders of this opinion were to talk of the ‘glacial age’ of the New England mind. The saga was over.
Had it nothing to show but anticlimax? The diminuendo of a commercial republic where the founders had intended to build the City of God? ‘Thus stands the case between God and us,’ John Winthrop had boasted in 1630, ‘we are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a Commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own Articles, we have professed to enterprise these Actions upon these and these ends, we have hereupon besought him of favour and blessing.’ He had earnestly warned his followers that there must be no backsliding, for fear of the Lord’s judgement; and he had promised them God’s blessing if they were faithful. Perhaps the promise was a presumptuous mistake. ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ They had backslid; and yet, to judge by all earthly standards, God had blessed them. It was more than a little awkward and absurd. A sense of humiliating failure haunted the ministers at the end of the seventeenth century. New England was no longer the land of the covenant. They could take no comfort in its sublunar achievements: a high, and improving, standard of living for all; a free and stable society; a thriving life of the mind and spirit.25 Where was Zion?
Perhaps there was one answer which would have comforted them somewhat. At any rate it must be offered today. Puritanism, it must be said again, influenced the whole of English Protestantism, being only its most radical form. Its most characteristic note was one of intense introspection, intense concern with individual salvation. As it seeped through England and conquered America it deeply affected the lives of countless men and women, many of whom were anything but Puritans in the strict sense. The result was that, in spite of clerical jeremiads, the English and American character, at its best and most effective, was sober, respectable, self-reliant, energetic, content on the whole with decent, homely pleasures. Its dominant traits of earnestness and uprightness can be found as much in Jane Austen and Dr Johnson as in John Adams and Dr Franklin, and lay behind the greatest achievements of the Victorians. It was the most remarkable work of the English Reformation, and might, however reluctantly, have been accepted as a sufficient justification by those ministers who tried so earnestly to create a godly people. They well knew, after all, how inevitably far short of perfection all human endeavour must fall.
In America, the New England character became almost proverbial. We shall see it making the Revolution, the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution. Its greatness lay in its reasonableness, earnestness and zeal for righteousness; its weakness in a tendency towards hypocrisy, covetousness and self-righteousness. Through it Puritanism persisted into later times. The city on a hill failed; but it was one of greater authority even than John Winthrop’s who promised that ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within you’. The course of American history would have given a Puritan reason to suppose that this promise, at least, had been kept.