To these ultimate questions Bradford turned in his final years, expressing himself no longer in history but in other literary forms. He composed what he called “sundry useful verses”—didactic poems directed to New Plymouth, to Boston, and to New England as a whole. Thus:
O New England, though canst not boast;
Thy former glory thou hast lost.
When Hooker, Winthrop, Cotton died,
And many precious ones beside,
Thy beauty then it did decay,
And still doth languish more away
…
Thy open sins none can them hide,
Fraud, drunkenness, whoredom and pride.
…
Repent, amend, and turn to God
That we may prevent his sharp rod.42
But though he prided himself on such verses, he must have known their limits as expressions of his search for meaning.
More important was his further study of Hebrew, which grew more urgent as he aged, and which he justified at length, in a heartfelt, strangely spaced paragraph.
But it was difficult ever to reach “contente” with one’s knowledge of the tongue with which God and the angels had spoken to the holy patriarchs. He persisted, however, and in eight blank pages of his history of the colony he recorded something of the product of his Hebrew exercises: a glossary of more than a thousand Hebrew words, each painstakingly drawn, each with its English translation or transliteration; a list of eight Hebrew names for the deity; and twenty-five quotations in Hebrew from the Bible.43
A page from William Bradford’s Hebrew glossary, part of his effort to grow closer to God through mastering His divine, biblical language. At the top Bradford lists eight names for God “expressing his nature, essence, power, and most glorious majestie.” (illustration credit 11.1)
But neither verse nor expression in the sacred language could satisfy Bradford’s need to probe and reveal to the world the meaning of his people’s epic. In the end he turned to direct discourse, in the form of an elaborate three-part “Dialogue” between “some yonge-men borne in New England; And sundry Ancient-men that came out of Holand and old England.”44
Bradford began writing the Dialogue, a genre familiar in the polemics of the time, in 1648 and completed it four years later, when he was sixty-two. In these learned colloquies (only two of which survive, in part), Bradford attempted, first, to update and justify the separatist enterprise in general and his own congregation’s distinctive accomplishments in the light of recent history. He felt too the need to make clear to the younger generation the great sacrifices his generation had made in an effort to reach its goals. And beyond that the Dialogue was something more personal—an apologia for his own humble life, now that the end was approaching, and an explanation of the meaning of his personal struggles in light of the unexpected result of the English Civil War and the settlement of the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay.
So much, he wrote, has been misunderstood, and so much could now, in the perspective of history, be clearly seen that earlier had been obscured in the clash of religious and political controversy. His people had never believed “none to be true churches but their own, and condemn[ed] all the churches in the world besides.” That charge was a “foul blot.” In fact, they had believed that all Protestant churches were “true churches” in some degree. The failure of the Church of England under Archbishop Laud lay in the ubiquity of its membership as a national institution—any sinner could belong—and in its hierarchical, coercive prelacy, which was the very opposite of pristine Christianity’s simple, independent conventicles of true believers. Nor did they have fundamental differences with the Boston Puritans. They differed from them only in the process of admission to communion; otherwise there were only “words and terms” that separated them.45
First page of William Bradford’s third Dialogue “betweene some yonge-men borne in New-England; And some Ancient-men, which came out of Holand, and old England.” The three dialogues form an apologia for Bradford’s own life and for the Pilgrims’ exile and settlement in New England. (illustration credit 11.2)
The Pilgrims, Bradford explained to the imaginary young, had never been radical separatists like the “scandalous” Brownists or other extremists who refused all contacts with the ungodly. They had never cut themselves off completely; they had always been willing to commune “in all things in themselves lawful” with any group of reformed (Protestant) Christians, English, Dutch, French, Scotch, or German Lutheran, even though they were “not of the best mould.” Nor had they completely rejected synods or other superior church structures, so long as they were merely consultative and not coercive—empowered only “to admonish one another of what is behooveful.” Yes, they approved of lay prophesying—but so too had the ancient church, and in any case they mainly practiced it “in defect of public ministry,” allowing only the few truly qualified members to engage in it. Were the young surprised that groups like his own and other reformers in England had so quickly become reconciled to the ecclesiastical regime of England’s new Commonwealth? They should not be. In the sweep of history the two sides had grown closer to each other. The evils of the earthly church’s intolerant, coercive prelacy had been exposed and destroyed, and the Pilgrims, who had been “in some things … too rigid,” had modified their views. Rather than being “blasted with reproach to posterity” for their earlier rigidity, they should be pitied for the suffering they endured in those earlier, oppressive times. And suffering they had endured—far more than the Puritans. True, only six separatists had been executed in England (and the death of two of them Queen Elizabeth herself had regretted), but others had died in prison, and innumerable others had been stripped of their possessions and driven from the land, to live in impoverished exile. The Puritans, on the other hand, Bradford wrote, though they had here and there lost their ministries, had largely been protected and had managed to keep their property if not their offices.46
But if all of this were true, Bradford had his youths inquire, what role had the Pilgrims and their cosectarians played in Christian history? What had Bradford’s people—not so radical, it now appeared, as one might have thought, not so cut off from the world as had been believed, and not so singular in their ecclesiastical and theological views—what had they accomplished? What difference had they made?
To answer this Bradford devoted his third Dialogue, which is a treatise on the history of Christianity, from the Apostles to Cromwell’s saints. Citing authorities from Saint Augustine to Grosseteste, from Peter Martyr to Beza, and from Socrates to Petrarch, Calvin, and Whitgift, and quoting sources in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and English, Bradford formulated the story around four ecclesiastical groups—the Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents—coming closer and closer to the true dispensation.
For the Catholics he had only seething contempt. The papacy, he explained to the young, had violated every principle of Christianity. They had imposed a tyrannical regime on their supine people and had sunk into a swamp of corruption. The Roman Church’s history is a tale of “pontifical lasciviousness,” the story of a world where “libidinous beasts” like John XIII were free to satisfy their “fleshly lusts” on captive youths until Rome became “an abominable warehouse of all spiritual and corporal fornications,” where “deflowering, ravishing, incests, and adulteries are but a sport.” Friars, swarming through the land, had followed suit, putting every clerical benefit up for sale and stocking their stately abbeys with whores and concubines, practicing incest and “filthy sodomitrie.”
Episcopacy—that is, the English Church of the Reformation—had wiped out the unspeakable corruption of the Roman Church, but it retained the lordly hierarchy of bishops with coercive powers. No doubt many of the bishops had been worthy people, but the ecclesiastical structure was only a “human devise and intrusion” and had no sanction in scripture. There had been no diocesan bishops until the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, and the only basis for them in Englan
d was the human, legal inventions of Henry VIII and Elizabeth.
The Presbyterian churches were true churches of Christ save for the jurisdiction of their councils, their synods and presbyteries, over local congregations. Some claimed to see advantages in being able to appeal local differences to higher authorities, but Bradford saw none. Appeals simply compounded the controversies at another level and led to “nothing but garboils & troubles in the world.” And to the extent that the English church even now continued the practice of universal membership and a hierarchical structure, it was following the worst rather than the best elements of Presbyterian reform.
Only Independency—the Congregational way—had the sanction of antiquity and scripture. Clusters of believers adopted into fellowship after profession of their faith and commitment to the common good; congregations operating independently but in friendly concert with each other; sanctuaries for people fleeing Episcopal coercion for conscience’s sake—these were the only apostolic churches. However obscure they might have seemed, they, in their suffering and persecution, had ignited concern for the nature of true ecclesiastical discipline all over England. God had used their faith and constancy as his instrument in the world. It had surely been their suffering, glowing in the dark tumultuous years just past, that had convinced Parliament to reform the ecclesiastical state and that had led, as a testimonial of God’s blessing to the humble separatists, to Cromwell’s successes in war.
Far from having been bypassed by the events of the greater world, the Pilgrims, Bradford explained to the young, had been at their very core. They had been the inner light, the flickering beacon, which in the end had illuminated the way. Now their mission seemed diffused, their physical unity was dissipated, the sordidness of profane life pressed against them, and their principles were no longer challenging. Yet their great historical role remained. As a church unique among the churches of the world, they would soon, Bradford recognized to his sorrow, disappear. But theirs had been a special, providential mission, he told the younger generation, and he charged them never to forget their scriptural mandate, the community’s original beliefs and practices, and to follow the “best and most godly expositors … those shining lights that God hath raised up in the reformed churches … and help to propagate the same to generations to come, till the coming of the Lord.”47
FIVE YEARS LATER, in 1657, Bradford died. By then Plymouth’s population of 2,000 was spread out through eleven towns, and the population of New England as a whole exceeded 33,000.
CHAPTER 12
The New-English Sionists: Fault Lines, Diversity, and Persecution
1
THUS THE INNER FLAME of the Pilgrims’ conventicle had gradually dimmed until it had become only a faint point of light in a corner of a populous, dynamic, disputatious world that had suddenly sprung up around it. There were affinities between the Pilgrims’ spiritual aspirations and those of the seemingly multitudinous Puritans who poured into the New England countryside after 1630, but these later comers were people of a different order. Their leaders were anything but humble, and their ambitions were the opposite of modest. They withdrew from the metropolitan world not, like the Pilgrims, to escape it but ultimately to transform it. Substantial gentlemen and merchants connected with some of the movers and shakers in the political and ecclesiastical controversies that were tearing England apart, and preachers of intellectual power, polemical skill, and reputation—they led one of the best organized and most consequential displacements of European peoples that had yet taken place.
Consequential—but not simply because of numbers. The Puritan-led “Great Migration” to New England was part, but only part, of a general stirring and shifting of the British population that would end, by 1700, in the emigration from Britain to the western hemisphere of approximately 400,000 people, with another 180,000 voyaging to and resettling in Ireland. Of all of these, somewhat fewer than 20,000 moved, permanently or temporarily, to New England, most in the single decade after 1630—years in which at least 100,000 English and Scots emigrated to Ireland.1 Yet in its consequences, this relatively small migration to New England was utterly distinctive. It resulted in a world of villages not manifestly different from England’s rural countryside. In outward appearance the Puritans’ New England was similar to certain of the provincial areas of England that had been left behind. But the similarities were superficial and hid fundamental differences.
In this new English world of farms and small villages, the divisive forces in that earlier life, which had been confined by long-established institutions and deep structures of social control, were set free to work themselves out, to exfoliate, almost without restraint. The result was a provincial society that was full of creative energies but contentious, dedicated to the high ideals of reformed Protestantism but riven by conflicting views of how those ideals should be interpreted and realized, and abrasive as it sought to impose on ordinary people the demanding discipline of the Puritans’ worldly asceticism. The fractious history of Puritan New England in its early years—the animosities, the conflicts, the reprisals, the community schisms and forced expulsions: all of this was a product of many conditions and forces—the geopolitical and cultural diversity of the population’s origins, the personalities of the religious and secular leaders, the trauma of displacement and resettlement—but above all it was the result of the basic instability and the inner turbulence of Puritanism itself. And compounding all of these divisive forces was the savagery of race warfare.
MUCH INK HAS BEEN SPILLED on the question of whether or to what extent the Puritans’ migration was principally a religious movement—whether it was a displacement of people who, like the Marian exiles fleeing a Catholic regime a century earlier, were a persecuted minority escaping a tyrannical state church to worship as they pleased, or whether it was chiefly a movement of economically insecure or desperate people, motivated less by religious aspirations than by the desire to resettle where they might find the land, employment, security, and opportunities denied them at home.2
The Great Migration was neither, exclusively, and in part it was both. The movement’s initial leaders were committed church reformers, deeply devoted to the Puritan cause, convinced that in England their religious interests would not survive the Anglican Church’s demand for conformity, and confident that they could create a model society shaped to their religious ideals. But from the start they had with them some who were only more or less sympathetic to the Puritan cause but not deeply committed to it, and many more—servants, artisans, farmworkers, and vagrant laborers—who were not involved at all in the religious passions of the time but who needed employment and some prospect of future security.
There is no way of knowing with any precision the numerical proportions of these groups, but it is clear that the leaders, the men who determined the goals, institutions, and norms of daily life in the resulting communities, were devoted to creating what they believed was a new Sion of God’s desires. Most of the region’s major difficulties were created not by those who cared little about religion and resisted it but by those who cared passionately.3
HOWEVER SMALL it was relative to the major population displacements in the British archipelago, the Puritans’ exodus was concerted, collectively purposeful, and coherent. And it carried with it the expectation of replicating the social order of the world that had been left behind. For though the Puritans were reformist in their religious goals, they were conservative in their social views, and they expected to reconcile the fulfillment of their religious ideals with the maintenance of the social order familiar to them. The difficulties of doing this would appear in subtle forms throughout the history of their settlements; they appeared in obvious form at the start.
Very few of the Puritan migrants were drawn from England’s titled aristocracy, and the few of that rank who did emigrate left little mark on the colony’s life. Three siblings of the Puritan Earl of Lincoln were involved. One of the earl’s sisters, Lady Arbella Fiennes, distinctive enough
in status for John Winthrop to name his flagship after her, had married Isaac Johnson, a devout, wealthy merchant with estates in three counties who had contributed a major share of the financing of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She and her husband both sailed with Winthrop in the fleet of 1630, together with Arbella’s brother, Charles Fiennes. Later Arbella’s sister, Lady Susan, followed with her husband, John Humphrey, another affluent merchant and a lawyer, described by Winthrop as “a gentleman of special parts of learning and activity, and a godly man, who had been one of the first beginners in the promoting of this plantation, and had labored very much therein.”4
Only slightly inferior in status to the Lincoln siblings was Sir Richard Saltonstall, of a well-established landowning Yorkshire family. He had studied at Cambridge and later at the Inns of Court. He had been knighted and had served as a justice of the peace before moving to London to join his merchant kinsmen in finance and overseas trade. There, increasingly devoted to church reform, he had flourished and began a series of substantial investments in the New England and other Puritan enterprises. Closely connected to the major financiers and promoters of the developing exodus—the Earl of Warwick, Sir Nathaniel Rich, and a cluster of influential second-tier London merchants, among them Samuel Vassall, Nathan Wright, and above all Matthew Cradock (“the center of one of the most powerful family-business networks in the American trades”)—Saltonstall went further than almost all of the highly placed sponsors by joining Winthrop’s fleet himself, taking with him five of his six children.5
Saltonstall and the Lincoln connections were exceptions among the initial settlers by virtue of their distinguished lineage. Only one other of similar status would follow: the young Sir Henry Vane, son and heir of the comptroller of the king’s household. But however committed to the Puritans’ cause these few of more elevated status may have been, they had neither the zeal nor the stamina for the harsh task of colonizing an undeveloped frontier or of dealing with the fierce contentions within Puritanism. Within a year Saltonstall left, with three of his children, discouraged by New England’s climate, concerned about his family’s finances, and repelled, it was said, by the heavy diet of “clams, and muscles, and ground-nuts, and acorns” he had endured in the first, desperate winter. Lady Arbella died, age twenty-nine, a few weeks after landing; her husband followed within a month, and her brother Charles never settled at all but returned to England on the first available vessel. As for Vane, shortly after his arrival in 1635 he was elected governor, at age twenty-three, pitched himself at once into the most bruising politico-theological battle ever to rock the colony, was defeated, and left hurriedly for home in 1637.6
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 45