The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards

EXPERIMENT

Francis J. Bremer

THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT

New England Society from Bradford to Edwards

REVISED EDITION

University Press of New England

Hanover and London

Published by University Press of New England,

One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766

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© 1995 by University Press of New England

First edition published by St. Martin’s Press in 1976

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ISBN–13: 978–0–87451–728–6

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Cover Illustration: Guild Hall Embroidery, Plymouth Congregational Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Designed by Pauline Baynes, 1970. © 1971 by Plymouth Congregational Church. Used by permission.

University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

for the children of my children:

KEEGAN, ......., ....

CONTENTS

Preface

Chronology

1. The Origins and Growth of the Puritan Movement

2. Puritanism: Its Essence and Attraction

3. Sources of the Great Migration

4. Massachusetts: The Erection of a City on a Hill

5. Variations on a Theme: Connecticut, New Haven, Rhode Island, and the Eastern Frontier

6. Orthodoxy in New England: The Colony Level

7. Orthodoxy in New England: The Community

8. New England and Puritan England

9. The New England Way in an Age of Religious Ferment

10. Changes in Restoration New England

11. Challenges to the Faith: Pluralism and Declension

12. An Oppressed People: New England’s Encounters with Metacom, Governor Andros, and the Witches

13. Art and Science in Colonial New England

14. Race Relations

15. New Directions: Puritanism in the Neglected Decades

16. Enlightenment and Evangelicalism

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

Illustration

PREFACE

The Puritan Experiment was first published in 1976. It originated from a series of notes I had developed for my doctoral study group at Columbia University. I had undertaken that task because there was no single volume that introduced nonspecialists to the breadth of colonial New England studies—the theology and the demography, the periphery as well as Massachusetts Bay. The confidence of Chilton Williamson, Jr., at St. Martin’s Press and the encouragement of Alden Vaughan, my supervisor at Columbia, made it possible to turn those notes into a book. The Puritan Experiment was written as an interpretive synthesis, though I tried to bring to the work my own sense of the importance of a trans-Atlantic perspective on Puritanism and my awareness of the variations within the orthodox New England Way. I have been gratified by many reports indicating that it has proved useful, even in xerox copies after it had gone out of print!

Twenty years later, countless valuable new monographs have further enriched our understanding of the subject, but there is still no other book that seeks to integrate the many dimensions of New England studies. In revising this volume I have tried to come to terms with this new scholarship, but I find that my understanding of the subject has not fundamentally changed. What has changed is that the trans-Atlantic dimension features even more prominently than before; the early chapters contain some new insights that reflect the rich current scholarship on Tudor-Stuart religion; and I have totally restructured a number of chapters and have made some changes in all of them. While I have once again incorporated my own insights where appropriate, the strengths of The Puritan Experiment continue to be its reflection of the richness of the field and its tribute to the scholarship of those who share my enthusiasm for the seventeenth century. I hope that it will not only introduce readers to the New England colonists but will inspire those readers to delve into the specialized literature.

All historians are indebted both to the scholars who have gone before them and to the colleagues with whom they agree and disagree. The special rewards of studying the Puritans come from the number and quality of one’s fellow investigators. Over the past two decades I have had the pleasure of reading the newer works suggested at the end of this volume for further reading, as well as the pleasure of meeting many of those scholars and profiting from their friendship and advice. Anyone who is familiar with the field will recognize my debt to my peers and the thanks I owe them. But I would like to give a special thanks to Michael McGiffert for the suggestions he provided on some of the chapters he was kind enough to review.

I would like to thank the staff of the University Press of New England for their interest in bringing this study back to life and for their help in doing so.

Finally, I would like to thank those members of my family as well as my friends and former students who have provided encouragement and support during the preparation of this revision. Among the former I want to single out my wife, Bobbi; my children, Heather, Kristin, and Megan; my son-in-law Craig; my grandson, Keegan; my mother, Marie Bremer; and my mother-in-law, Alice Woodlock. Among friends on both sides of the Atlantic I wish to give special thanks to Dennis Downey, Donald Yacovone, John Morrill, Tom Webster, and Martin Wood. In the twenty years that have elapsed since the first edition of this study my understanding of the subject and my ability to communicate my ideas clearly have been enhanced by exchanges with a number of exceptional students, among whom are Dan Richter, Steve Ward, Dave Jaeger, Pat Levin, Chris Fritsch, Dan Martin, Monica Spieise, Tim Whisler, Susan Whisler, Richard Rath, Melody Herr, Ellen Rydel, and Terri Sales.

CHRONOLOGY

Events in the World of the Puritans, from the English Reformation through the Great Awakening

THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT

Chapter One

THE ORIGINS AND GROWTH OF THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

On 6 February 1556, in the reign of Queen Mary, Bishop John Hooper was brought to Glouchester, the seat of his diocese, where he was burned at the stake. A confirmed religious reformer who had traveled to the centers of continental Protestantism during the reign of Henry VIII, Hooper had returned to England upon the accession of Edward VI so as to work for further reform of the English church. His opposition to the wearing of clerical vestments had resulted in a quarrel with Archbishop Cranmer and a brief spell in prison as a result. But whatever his differences had been with Cranmer, he stood firm with the archbishop against Roman Catholicism and in the effort to shape a new England modeled after the practice of the early church. And, with Cranmer, he became a victim of the Marian persecutions.

Almost seventy years later John Winthrop, the lord of Groton Manor and a respected member of the English gentry, led a Puritan exodus to the wilderness of America. Many who had ventured to the New World before him had never gotten there, falling prey to shipboard diseases or North Atlantic tempests. And the story of those who had reached the American shores offered little comfort to Winthrop and those who journeyed with him. The mortality rate of the Virginia colony had been horrifying—between 1619 and 1625 over two-thirds of the English colonists had perished from disease, Indian attack, or starvation. Yet John Winthrop gave up his home, his position as a justice of the peace, and the comforts of his English life to try to build a model community on the coast of New England.

When we ask what Puritanism was we are seeking to understand the nature of a faith that had profound significance for tens of thousands of Englishmen and Americans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chapters that follow attempt to describe what Puritanism meant at various times and in different settings, primarily in the seventeenth-century world. In the process we wish to bear in mind that men such as Winthrop, though they were more likely to play public roles, were not the only Puritans. Women such as Anne Askew suffered for their faith in Reformation England; Anne Bradstreet poetically expressed the meaning of Puritan piety as well as many of her male counterparts; and women formed the majority of the members in New England’s churches. It should also be kept in mind that Puritanism, like any vibrant and living system of faith, adapted to its times, and that, valuable as it is to understand the spirit that Hooper, Winthrop, and Bradstreet shared, it is equally important to recognize the changes that occurred in Puritanism over time.

Henry VIII and Edward VI

Where does the story of the Puritans and Puritanism begin? Marshall Knappen, in his classic study of Tudor Puritanism, opened his discussion with William Tyndale’s criticism of the inadequacies of the reforms initiated by Henry VIII when the king took England out of the Catholic community in the 1530s. And while Knappen has been taken to task by some scholars for this early dating of the movement, his approach has the merit of identifying as the earliest and most constant characteristic of Puritanism the belief that the Church of England had not been sufficiently purged of the theology and worship of Roman Catholicism. As the clergyman-founder of Connecticut, Thomas Hooker, later phrased it, Henry VIII’s mistake was that he cut off the head of Popery, but left the body of it yet within his realm! That, of course, was about what the king intended. For while the Reformation on the continent was, since its beginnings with the teachings of Martin Luther, primarily religious in intent and leadership, England’s alignment with Protestantism was begun by its monarch for essentially political reasons.

The church in England, upon the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, was divided into twenty-seven dioceses, each with a bishop at its head. Administratively, these dioceses were grouped into two provinces—York in the north and Canterbury in the south—each under an archbishop who oversaw not only his own diocese but also the others in his province. While officially coequal, the archbishop of Canterbury held greater political and ecclesiastical influence than his counterpart of York because of his proximity to the center of government and the inclusion in his province of the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Both archbishops were traditionally responsible only to the pope for their conduct of church affairs, and this ecclesiastical loyalty had often in English history irritated relations between the monarchy and the papacy. That friction reached its peak in Henry’s reign.

English Catholics, including internationally respected scholars such as Thomas More and John Colet, had frequently criticized the operations of the church in England, pointing to the clergy’s sparse education, an abundance of superstitious practices, and the mismanagement of church finances. But when Henry asserted his independence from Rome he was not inspired by a desire to reform ecclesiastical abuses. His motivation was essentially political, spurred by the pope’s refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, a refusal that itself had as much to do with international politics as it did with canon law. Nevertheless, despite his own continued belief in Roman Catholic dogma and his acceptance of its devotional practices, Henry was forced to make occasional concessions to Protestant religious reform. Isolated from Catholic Europe, the king had to relax pressure on English reformers if he hoped to gain support from Protestant nations. The course of reform was an uncertain one because it depended more on Henry’s assessment of changing domestic and