BOOK II.

THE PURITAN MIGRATION.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

_RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM._

I.

[Sidenote: Love of display in Elizabeth's time.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

[Sidenote: Machyn's Diary, 324, note.]

Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth. The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses. Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. High sheriffs and other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends to lend state to their office. Edward VI set out upon a progress in 1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon. She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

[Sidenote: The age of the drama.]

A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.

[Sidenote: Display in dress.]

[Sidenote: Peckard's Life of Ferrar.]

[Sidenote: Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, _passim_.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. It was thus that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Men of the lowest ranks, desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display in people of lower rank. Even the severe Puritan moralists did not object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty rank.

II.

[Sidenote: Observance of ceremonies.]

[Sidenote: Compare _supra_, p. 41.]

[Sidenote: Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54.]

[Sidenote: De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix.]

Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American history. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the "starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor, delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates. There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen, and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of showy red cloaks. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green velvet. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church, and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again aboard the ship where he dwelt.

[Sidenote: Formality at Plymouth.]

[Sidenote: De Rasieres's letter, 2d N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii, 352.]

Even at a later date in the rather hungry little Pilgrim colony at Plymouth almost as much ceremony was observed, though the people were extreme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on Sunday morning the men came to Captain Standish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing a musket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three abreast, led by a sergeant. In the rear walked the governor, in a long robe. On his right was Elder Brewster, wearing a cloak. On the governor's left was Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak and side arms, and carried a small cane as a sort of baton of authority perhaps. Thus "they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."

[Sidenote: Puritanism an outgrowth of the time.]

It was only in an age such as this that resistance to the celebration of rites and the observance of forms could be made a capital article of faith by the Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of a surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on certain occasions, was a matter for scruple and violent debate, for the grave consideration of the lawgiver and magistrate, and for severe penalties.

III.

[Sidenote: Origin of the Puritan movement.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist., book v, sec. iv, 27, 28.]

[Sidenote: 1536.]

In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI there were those who objected to "the vestments," and one may even find what were afterward called Puritan opinions condemned among current errors in the twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII; but Puritanism--as a party protest against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship--had its origin in the persecution of Queen Mary's time. The English Protestants who fled from that fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cities of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva were the places to which these English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and Strasburg became cities of refuge for many of those who were to become leaders of the Anglican or Conservative party, while others who tended to what were afterward called Puritan views went sooner or later to Geneva, where Calvin was the dominant influence.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1553.]

[Sidenote: The English exiles.]

In the cities in which they found safety the exiles organized English churches. More remarkable religious communities were never gathered into single congregations. Five bishops and five deans of the English Church, and more than fifty eminent doctors of divinity, with younger men who were destined to play a leading part in the future, were comprised in these little churches. Such communities soon became centers of animated discussion and debate.

[Sidenote: Outbreak of dissension.]

During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity; but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John Knox--the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish reformation.

[Sidenote: Character of the debates at Frankfort.]

This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence--the little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude. Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the United States.

[Sidenote: The rise of the two great parties.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, resulting now in the exiling from the city of one beaten minority and now in the departure of another, and in the driving away of one leading disputant after another, there appeared at length the features of the two great parties of English Protestantism face to face for the first time. One of these parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the Protestant conscience could be made to bear, insisted upon the superior authority of the clergy, and sought to disturb as little as possible the ancient order of the English church. On the other hand, in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort contentions, the tendency of the ultra wing of the Protestants to the notion of a local and independent church and to a democratic church government was already apparent. Even the peculiarity of two ministers presiding over one church, which was cherished later in New England, appeared among the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this time.

[Sidenote: A purified ritual.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

While attempting to mediate between the parties at Frankfort, Calvin expressed his preference for a ritual of greater purity than that established by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. Extreme Protestants rallied round this ideal of a liturgy purified of human tradition. It was some years later, after the Frankfort church had been dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, that this party came to be known by the name of Puritan--that is, a party not so much bent on purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant worship from mediæval forms.

[Sidenote: Return of the exilies, 1558.]

After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth the English Protestants returned to their own country. The two great parties that were to divide the English church had already begun to crystallize. Those who had settled at Strasburg and Zurich came back hoping to re-establish the Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the Prayer Book of Edward VI. Those who returned from Basel and Geneva had caught the spirit of the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the reformation to a more logical extreme; while the Frankfort church, or what remained of it, had been storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of congregational independence in church government.

[Sidenote: Results.]

The petty squabbles of the English exiles, transplanted to England, grew into bitter feuds and brought forth persecutions and political struggles. The settlement of New England, the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, the growth of non-conformity, the modification of the English Constitution and of all English life, were germinally present in the differences between the exiles at Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Horne at Frankfort-on-the-Main about gowns and litanies and the authority of the priest. It is not often that a great historical movement can be traced through a single rill to its rise at the fountain head.

IV.

[Sidenote: The Puritan debate.]

[Sidenote: Certayne Qvestions concerning silk or vvool in the high priest's ephod, 1605.]

The theological debates that fill so large a place in the history of the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe were mainly concerned with speculative dogmas. However futile controversies may seem that seek to reduce to formulas the relations between God and man, they have at least a topical dignity. But the debates about ceremonies and vestments which the exiles brought back to England from the Continent, and which held first place there during the reign of Elizabeth and James, were bitter without being serious. A life-and-death struggle concerning the wearing of "white surplices" or the making of the sign of the cross in baptism can not but seem frivolous to the modern mind. Learned scholars like Broughton and Ainsworth thought it not beneath them to write tractates discussing the material of which the ephod of a Jewish high priest was made. It was learnedly demonstrated that the ephod was of silk, and there were sober essays on the linsey-woolsey side of that controversy. To the fine-spun mind of that time the character of the Jewish ephod was thought to settle the propriety of the Christian surplice. To the modern reader the whole debate about vestments and liturgies would be amusing if it were not so tedious. It is necessary to steady one's judgment of that age by remembering that deeper things sometimes lay concealed under these disputes regarding the contemptible mint and cumin of ecclesiasticism. Puritanism at its rise was an effort to escape from formalism, the outgrowth of an aspiration for greater spirituality in worship; but it gradually passed into an opposite formalism as rigid as that from which it had escaped.

[Sidenote: Uniformity not possible.]

It was in vain that Elizabeth tried to compel uniformity. The difference between the radical and the conservative is constitutional, and is manifest in every period of agitation. Neither the mediation of moderate men nor the compulsion of authority can bring these two sempiternal divisions of the human race into agreement. The conservative English churchman limited his Protestantism to the rejection of the pope's authority, and to certain moderate reforms in church government and ritual. He shuddered with alarm at every proposal to reconstruct religious institutions which were moss-grown with ancient sentiment. The extreme Puritan, on the other hand, went about his work in the spirit of a Jehu. He saved all his reverence for the precepts of the Bible, now becoming common in the vulgar tongue. He applied biblical phraseology to the affairs of life in a way that would have been impossible had he possessed any sense of humor. He felt himself impelled by the call of God to carry out in England the changes that had taken place in the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, and to go even further. He would have no surplices, no sign of the cross, no liturgy, no church holy days. Away with these rags of Antichrist, was his cry. Let us get back to the simplicity of the primitive ages. The Anglican, on the other hand, felt himself an Englishman above all, and without a stately liturgy, great bishops in square caps and lawn sleeves, Christmas feasts, solemn Good Fridays, and joyous Easters, there would have remained for him no merry England.

V.

[Sidenote: Growth of party spirit.]

The party line between Anglican and Puritan was not at once sharply drawn. It was only after debates growing ever more acrimonious, after persecutions and numberless exasperations, that the parties in the Church of England fell into well-defined and hostile camps. If there had been some relaxation of the requirements of uniformity, if a conciliatory policy had been pursued by the government, the ultimate division might have been postponed until party spirit had cooled; but in that day blows took the place of words, and words had the force of blows. The queen herself could write to a bishop who scrupled to do what she desired, "By God, I will unfrock you!" and moderation in debate was not to be expected from lesser folk.

[Sidenote: Puritanism the party of opposition.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

When the reformer has warmed to his work he looks about him for new abuses to fall upon. The dominant discontent of any age is prone to spread its wings over other grievances, and feebler movements seek shelter from the strong. Puritanism no doubt gathered momentum from the widespread agrarian and industrial disturbance in this and the preceding reigns. The profit from sheep-raising had induced many manor lords to inclose the wastes on which the peasants had pastured their cattle for ages. The humble copy-hold tenant, having no longer grass for his cows or mast for his pigs, was driven to distress by agricultural progress. In some cases even the common fields, cultivated in allotments from ancient times by the members of the village communities, first as serfs and later as tenants, were turned into sheepwalks, and hamlets of tenants' cottages were torn down to make room for more profitable occupants of the soil. The worst offenders were the greedy courtiers who had secured the estates of the English monasteries. Workmen ruined by the dissolution of the guilds were added to the ranks of the unhappy. All the discontent begotten of these transitions from mediæval life tended to strengthen the leading opposition--and that leading opposition was Puritanism.

VI.

[Sidenote: Widening the field of protest.]

Puritanism also progressively widened its field of protest. Beliefs that Protestants rejected were symbolized by the vestments of bishop and clergy. Advanced Protestants insisted that the shadows should be banished with the substance, that the symbol should disappear with the dogma. We have seen that in Frankfort the inchoate Puritan party wished to abolish the litany and purge the service book of all the remains of the old religion. This controversy raged in England, and the Puritan side did not at first lack support even among the bishops. But Elizabeth, the real founder of Anglicanism, molded the church to her will, putting down Catholics and Puritans with a hard hand. The more advanced of the party came at length to believe that all "stinted" prayers "read out of a book" were contrary to the purity and simplicity of Christian worship. The hostility of the bishops to that which the Puritans believed to be the cause of God no doubt helped to convince the persecuted party that the episcopal office itself was contrary to Scripture.

[Sidenote: Puritanism becomes dogmatic.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

Most of the Puritans of Elizabeth's time, under the lead of the great Cartwright, became Presbyterian in theory and sought to assimilate the Church of England to the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, holding that theirs was the very order prescribed by the apostles. Another but much smaller division of the Puritans tended toward independency, finding in the New Testament a system different from that of Cartwright. Both the Presbyterians and those who held to local church government wished to see their own system established by law. Neither faction thought of tolerating Anglican practices if the Anglicans could be put down. The notion of a state church with prescribed forms of worship enforced by law was too deeply imbedded in the English mind to be easily got rid of, and the spirit of persecution pervaded every party, Catholic or Protestant. Every one was sure that divine authority was on his side, and that human authority ought to be.

VII.

[Sidenote: Anglicanism becomes dogmatic.]

A corresponding change began to take place in the Episcopal party. The earlier defenders of Elizabeth's establishment argued, somewhat as Hooker did later, that the "practice of the apostles" was not an "invariable rule or law to succeeding ages, because they acted according to the circumstances of the church in its infant and persecuted state." Episcopal government they held to be allowable, and maintained the attitude of prudent men who justify their compromise with history and the exigency of the time, and advocate, above all, submission to civil authority. But the tendency of party division is to push both sides to more positive ground. There arose in the last years of Elizabeth a school of High-churchmen led by Bancroft, afterward primate, who turned away from Hooker's moderation and assumed a more aggressive attitude. Like the Presbyterians and the Independents and the Catholics, these in turn maintained that their favorite system of church economy was warranted by divine authority, and that all others were excluded.

[Sidenote: Failure of Elizabeth's policy.]

When the High-church leaders had reached the dogmatic assertion of apostolic succession and a divinely appointed episcopal form of government as essentials of a Christian church, the fissure between the two ecclesiastical parties in England was complete. Each had settled itself upon a supposed divine authority; each regarded the other as teaching a theory contrary to the divine plan. Elizabeth's policy of repression had produced a certain organic uniformity, but the civil war of the seventeenth century was its ultimate result.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Bitterness of the debate.]

The controversy between the two Protestant parties naturally grew more bitter as time went on. The silencing of ministers, the Fleet Prison, the inquisitorial Ecclesiastical Commission, and other such unanswerable arguments did not sweeten the temper of the Puritans. The bitterness of the controversy reached its greatest intensity in 1588, when there appeared a succession of anonymous tracts, most of them signed Martin Marprelate. They seem to have been written mainly by the same hand, but their authorship has been a matter of debate to this day.

[Sidenote: The Marprelate tracts.]

[Sidenote: 1588.]

[Sidenote: The Marprelate tracts in Lenox Library.]

The sensation produced by these violent assaults is hardly conceivable now. There were no newspapers then, and there was but little popular literature. Here were little books printed no one knew where, written by no one knew whom, concerning a religious controversy of universal interest. They were couched in the phrase of the street, in the very slang and cant of the populace, and were violent and abusive, sometimes descending to sheer blackguardism. Marprelate went gunning for large game; his deadliest abuse he let fly as from a blunderbuss at the very heads of the English church. The Dean of Salisbury he calls "Doctor of Diviltrie and Deane of Sarum." It was the first time in the history of polemics that any one had addressed a high dignitary of the church with such irreverent titles as "You grosse beaste!" "You block, you!" Sometimes Martin bends his knees with mock reverence, as when he calls the clergy "right poysond, persecuting and terrible priests." He blurts out epithets against "the sinful, the unlawful, the broken, the unnatural, false, and bastardly governours of the church; to wit, archbishops and bishops"; and addresses them as "you enemies to the state, you traytors to God and his worde, you Mar-prince, Mar-land, Mar-magestrate, Mar-church, and Mar-commonwealth." The spice of the books, that which gave them their popularity, was doubtless their rollicking impudence. "Wo--ho, now, Brother London!" he cries to the Bishop of London. "Go to, you Asse!" is a kind of kennel eloquence relished by the populace. Martin seems even to giggle and sneer and hiss in type in such expressions as "tse, tse, tse."

[Sidenote: An Admonition to the People of England, p. 25.]

The little books went everywhere. The Bishop of Winchester sadly confessed that these "slanderous pamphlets, freshe from the presse," were "in men's hands and bosoms commonly." The queen and courtiers read them, and students had nothing better to laugh at. Who will not stop in the street to hear one clown rail cleverly at another? But to see the bishops collectively and the primate and others severally put into a pillory and pelted in this daring fashion by a man who knew that his life would pay the forfeit for his libel if he could by any means be discovered, was livelier sport than bull-baiting.

[Sidenote: Nugæ Antiquæ, ii, 89, 90.]

Dr. Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, replied to the first pamphlet somewhat ponderously, as became a bishop who feels that the proprieties forbid his being too interesting. Marprelate wanted nothing better than a bishop for an antagonist; and while the whole constabulary force of the kingdom was hunting him for his life, the nimble Martin was chuckling over the excitement made by a new tract of his, headed with the well-known street cry of a tub-mender, which played derisively on Bishop Cooper's name, "Hay any worke for Cooper?" This tract professed to be "printed in Europe not farre from some of the Bounsing priestes." In this paper Martin shows to what depth a religious debate in Elizabeth's time could descend; he stoops to make the bishop ridiculous by twitting him with the infidelity of his wife, a scandal which the unfortunate prelate had treated with "Socratical and philosophical patience."

[Sidenote: Lenox Collection, N. Y. Pub. Library.]

[Sidenote: Comp. Bacon's An Advertisement touching Controversies, etc.]

There were not wanting many imitators of Martin's grossness on the other side of the controversy, who were just as libelous but for the most part less clever. One of the tracts in reply was called An Almond for a Parrat. The author says he had heard that Martin was dead, or, as he expressed it, "that your grout-headed holinesse had turned uppe your heeles like a tired jade in a medow and snorted out your sorrowefull soule, like a mesled hogge on a mucke-hille." This is beastly without being vivacious. While the press and the stage were occupied with coarse retorts on Martinism, there appeared tracts in favor of peace. There are other evidences of the existence of a moderate party that lamented the excesses of both sides in this debate.

IX.

[Sidenote: Advance of Puritan opinions.]

Puritanism was evolutionary from the beginning. Its earlier disputes about vestments and litanies grew by degrees to a rejection of all liturgies as idolatrous. Even the reading of the Bible as a part of the service came at last to be reprehended by extremists, and the repetition of the Lord's Prayer was thought dangerously liturgical. The advanced Puritans sought to exclude from Christian worship everything pleasing to the æsthetic sense, confounding bareness with simplicity. Compromises continued to be made inside the church, but in the ultimate ideal of Puritan worship there remained, besides the sermon, nothing but long extemporary prayers and the singing by the untrained voices of the congregation of literal versions of the Hebrew Psalms--doggerel verse in cobblestone meters.

X.

[Sidenote: Opposition to May-poles.]

[Sidenote: 1549.]

[Sidenote: Rushworth, Pt. III, vol. ii, 749. A. D. 1644.]

In its early stages Puritanism was a crusade against idolatry, and drew its inspiration in this, as in nearly everything else, from the Old Testament. To the word "idolatry" it gave an inclusiveness not found in the Jewish Scriptures, and puzzling to a mind accustomed to modern ways of thinking. There was hardly any set observance of the church in which constructive idolatry did not lie concealed. All holy days except Sunday were abhorred as things that bore the mark of the Beast. Even in the reign of Edward VI, long before the name of Puritanism was known, the May-poles round which English people made merry once a year were denounced as idols in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross by Sir Stephen--the "Sir" being a polite prefix to a clergyman's name. This Stephen, curate of St. Catherine Cree, was a forerunner of Puritanism, who sometimes defiantly preached from an elm tree in the chuchyard and read the service standing on a tomb on the north side of the church. He wanted the saintly names of churches and the heathen names of days of the week changed, so keen was his scent for idolatry. The parish of St. Andrew Undershaft had received its distinctive name from a very tall May-pole that overtopped the church steeple. This pole was erected annually, and it rested from one May to another on hooks under the eaves of a row of houses and stalls. In the newborn Protestant zeal against idols Sir Stephen denounced especially the lofty shaft of St. Andrew. The people in their rage took it from the hooks and sawed it in pieces, and its sections were appropriated by the several householders who had given it shelter and who presently heaped its parts upon one great bonfire. Puritanism kept up its Don Quixote battle against May-poles until there was hardly one standing to seduce the people to idolatry. When the Puritan party came into power, nearly a hundred years after the days of Sir Stephen of St. Catherine Cree, one of its earliest laws ordered that all May-poles--"an heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness"--be taken down.

XI.

[Sidenote: Austerity in morals.]

From denouncing constructive idolatry in organ music, litanies, and May-poles, the transition to attack on the more real and substantial evils in ordinary conduct was inevitable. History has many examples of this pervasiveness of scrupulosity. The Puritan conscience had been let loose to tear in pieces the remnants of old superstitions. It was certain to break over into the field of conduct. Having set out to reform the church, it took the world by the way.

[Sidenote: Pickering's ed., p. 172.]

As early as 1583 Philip Stubbes, a Puritan lawyer, issued his hot little book, The Anatomie of Abuses. It deals with the immoralities and extravagances of the time. Stubbes repeats the early Puritan objection to the May-pole: it is a "stinckyng idol," he declares, which the people bring from the woods, "followyng it with greate devotion." And when they have set it up they "leape and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles." But Stubbes takes a step forward and objects to the all-night May frolics on account of their immorality. He says, "I have heard it credibly reported by men of great gravitie, credite and reputation, that of fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woods over night, there have scarcely the third parte of them returned home againe undefiled." As men of "great gravitie, credite and reputation" were not likely to know the facts in this case, some of the immorality with which Stubbes charges the young people may have been as fanciful as the heathenism attributed to them. Imputed unrighteousness was a part of the Puritan system. He denounces the wild excesses in dress and the other follies of the time with a lack of a sense of proportion which already foreshadows later Puritanism.

This secondary development of Puritanism by which its energies were turned toward the regulation of conduct, as the disputes of the Reformation period lost their violence, gave to the name Puritan a new and higher sense. It is a phase of its history more important than all its primary contentions over gowns and liturgies and hierarchies, or its later debates about the five points of Calvinism and a sabbatical Sunday. One may easily forget its austerity and extravagance, for by the reform of manners this movement made the English race its debtor. In no succeeding reaction have English morals reverted to the ante-Puritan level. It is only by the religious ferments infused successively by new sects and movements, of preaching friars, Lollards, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Salvationists, that the great unleavened mass of men is rendered gradually less sodden.

XII.

[Sidenote: Puritan decline.]

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 115.]

[Sidenote: Rogers's Pref. to the 39 Articles.]

The last years of Elizabeth's long reign were years of apparent Puritan decline. The old bugbear of popery was receding into the past, and a new generation had come on the stage that had no memory of the struggles of the reigns of Henry and Edward and Mary. The danger from the Armada had brought English patriotism to the point of fusion. Even the persecuted Catholics rallied to the support of the queen against Philip. The government of Elizabeth rose to the zenith of its popularity on the overthrow of the Armada. It was just at this inopportune moment, when the nation had come to feel that the England of Elizabeth was the greatest England the ages had known, that there came forth from a small coterie of the oppressed ultra-Puritans the Martin Marprelate tracts. However effective these may have been at first in making the bishops ridiculous, there followed a swift reaction. The Puritans were dubbed Martinists, and henceforth had to bear the odium of the boisterous vulgarity and libelous exaggeration of the Marprelate lampoons. The queen's government, stronger now than ever in the affection of the people, put in force severe ecclesiastical measures against nonconformists in the church, and sent Brownists, or Separatists, to die by the score in loathsome prisons. Half a dozen of their leaders were dispatched by the shorter road of the gallows. The long reign of the queen had by this time discouraged those who hoped for a change of policy at her death. Hooker's masterful and delightful prose, informed by a spirit of winning moderation, was arrayed on the side of the Anglicans by the publication of parts of his Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594 and 1597. But Puritanism suffered most from the persistence of Archbishop Whitgift and others in efforts to suppress all nonconformity in the church. These champions of Anglicanism, in the swaggering words of one of them, "defended the prelacy, stood for the power of the state, put the new doctors to the foil, profligated the elders, set upon the presbytery, and so battered the new discipline as hitherto they could never nor hereafter shall ever fortify and repair the decay thereof." The presbyteries which Cartwright and his friends had formed within the Church of England were swept out utterly by the archbishop's broom. The Puritan movement which had begun almost simultaneously with Elizabeth's reign seemed to be doomed to languish and die with the old queen who had been its resolute and lifelong antagonist.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Seeking a positive ground.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

For the first thirty years or more of its existence Puritanism was mainly a bundle of negations, and no bundle of mere negations is a sufficient reason for maintaining a party. No vestments, no ceremonies, no bishops, were effective cries in the hot Reformation period. But the new generation had ceased to abhor these left-overs of Romanism. Bishops, gowns, prayer books, had become Protestant to most of the people by association. To find additional reasons for differing from Anglican opponents was a party necessity. The new debates which sprang up in the last years of the sixteenth century were not deliberately planned by the Puritans, as some of their opponents asserted. They came by a process of evolution. But a period of temporary decline in a movement of this sort hastens its natural unfolding. The leaders are forced to seek the advantage of such new issues as offer when the old ones fail. In the last years of Elizabeth, Puritanism was molting, not dying.

XIV.

[Sidenote: The Puritan Sabbath.]

The great reformers of the sixteenth century had sought to strip from the Christianity of their time what they deemed the second-hand garments of Judaism. Along with the theory of a priesthood they declared also against a doctrine known in the church at least from the fifth century, that the fourth commandment enforced on Christians the keeping sacred in some sense of Sundays and other church holy days. Luther maintained that a commandment to keep the Sabbath "literally understood does not apply to Christians, for it is entirely outward, like other ordinances of the Old Testament." He thought a festival day important for rest and for attending religious worship; but with characteristic oppugnancy he says: "If anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, ... then I order you to dance on it, and feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty." The Augsburg Confession makes a similar statement of the Protestant position. Calvin considered the fourth commandment binding on Christians only in a sense mystical and highly Calvinistic. It signified that "we should rest from our own works" under the Christian dispensation. He even suggested that some other day of the week might be chosen as a day of rest and worship at Geneva for an exhibition of Christian liberty in this regard. His practice was conformed to his theory. It is incidentally related that when John Knox once visited the Genevan reformer on Sunday, he found him playing at bowls. Knox was not more a sabbatarian than Calvin.

XV.

[Sidenote: Rise of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Compare Marsden's Early Puritans (1850) page 242, where Becon's Catechism and Coverdale are quoted.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Social Hist. of the Southern Counties, p. 239.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

Writers on this subject have generally agreed in dating the rise of the Puritan Sabbath from the appearance, in 1595, of Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and of the New Testament. But the doctrine of the strict keeping of Sunday may be traced farther back. In truth, the difference between the English and the Continental Sunday dates from the Reformation. The protests of Luther and Calvin go to show that Sunday had in the church before the Reformation, theoretically if not in practice, the sanctity of a church feast. The English Reformation was conservative, like all other English revolutions. English reformers retained the Catholic Sunday, as they did the vestments and national hierarchy of the old church. Thomas Hancock has been styled "the Luther of the southwest of England." He was the great preacher of Poole in the days of Edward VI. That he, like other English reformers, did not agree with Luther in rejecting the obligation to rest on Sunday is shown by the record, for the voice of Poole was the voice of Hancock. About 1550 the juries in the Admiralty Court of Poole were charged to inquire into Sunday fishing; and so advanced was the premature Puritanism of Edward's time that even the leaving of nets in the sea over Sunday was to be investigated. Here was a strictness unknown in Catholic times.

XVI.

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 16.]

[Sidenote: Early English Text Society Reprint, 106, 107, 108.]

The word Sabbath does not occur in these early entries. But in the troubles among the Marian exiles at Frankfort, where so many other traits of Puritanism first came above the horizon, it is significant that one finds Sunday called the Sabbath. Sabbath as applied to Sunday occurs first in literature, perhaps, in 1573, and then it is considered necessary to explain it. Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, a work of considerable popularity, first appeared as early as 1564. In the edition of 1573 there was inserted a new passage not found in the earlier issue. Mendax is relating incredible tales of travel in lands unknown, after the manner of David Ingram and other returned adventurers. Up to this point all is pure lying merely for the fun of the thing, or perhaps to ridicule the exaggerations of travelers. But the interpolated passage is not of a piece with the old garment into which it is patched. It is less grotesque and humorous, and it smacks of incipient Puritanism in several flavors. It treats first of all of the "Kepyng of the Saboth Daie," "whiche is the seventh daie, that is sondaie," in the imaginary city of "Nodnol," an anagram of London. The gates are shut, and nobody is allowed to "goe, neither ride forth of the Citie duryng that daie, except it be after the euenyng praier; then to walke honestlie into the sweete fieldes, and at every gate in the time of service there are warders." "What so ever hee be he muste kepe hollie the Sabboth daie, and come to the churche both man, woman, young and olde." "There were no people walking abroad in the service tyme; no, not a Dogge or catte in the streate, neither any Taverne doore open that daie, nor wine bibbyng in them, but onely almose, fasting and praier." This is perhaps the oldest extant statement of an early Puritan ideal of Sabbath-keeping.

XVII.

[Sidenote: Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, _sub anno_.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 238, 239.]

[Sidenote: 1583.]

[Sidenote: 1588.]

Scruples regarding recreations on Sunday come distinctly into view in the title of a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1576. In 1580 the magistrates of London secured from the queen a prohibition of the performance of plays within the limits of the city on Sundays. In other municipalities--Brighton, Yarmouth, and Lyme--ordinances were made about this time against such offenses as the prosecution on Sunday of the herring fisheries, cloth working, and other labors, and even against the Sunday practice of archery, formerly thought a patriotic exercise. There are other evidences of a movement, especially in the south of England, in favor of a stricter Sabbath in these and the following years. Stubbes does not fail to denounce "heathnicall exercises upon the Sabbaoth day, which the Lorde would have consecrated to holy uses." The Puritan mode of Sabbath-keeping already existed among the chosen few. "The Sabboth daie of some is well observed," says Stubbes, "namely, in hearing the blessed worde of God read, preached, and interpreted; in private and publique praiers; in reading of godly psalmes; in celebrating the sacraments; and in collecting for the poore and indigent, which are the true uses and endes whereto the Sabbaoth was ordained." He records the opposite belief of his opponents that Sunday was ordained "onely to use what kinde of exercises they thinke good themselves." In practice this was the rule of the English people at large. These opposite opinions come into view when Martin Marprelate a few years later berates the Bishop of London for playing at bowls on Sunday.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Bownd on the Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: 1595.]

[Sidenote: 1592.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and the New Testament, which, if we may believe its opponents, was nearly ten years "in the hammering," was the outcome of a sentiment already rising among the Puritans, and not wholly confined to that party. It was preceded by a little work of Richard Greenham which seems to have been circulated for some years in manuscript after a fashion of that time, and to have had at first more influence on practice than Bownd's formal treatise. Greenham was Bownd's stepfather, and his work was the parent of Bownd's, which is distinctly more extreme. But Dr. Bownd's book is none the less memorable as a point of departure, because in it the opinions on this subject which have since prevailed so generally in all English-speaking lands "were for the first time broadly and prominently asserted in Christendom"; at least, they were here first systematically propounded and defended. Bownd held that the fourth commandment is partly moral, in the phrase of the casuists. He shifted the obligation to the first day of the week by arguments now familiar, and he laid down rules for the observance of the day. Honest recreations and lawful delights he flatly forbids on Sundays, but he rather obsequiously makes some allowance for the "feasts of noblemen and great personages on this day." People of rank do not wholly escape him, however, for he points a moral with the story of a nobleman whose child was born with a face like that of a dog, because the father had hunted on the Lord's Day. He allows the ringing of only one bell to call the people to church on Sunday. Chimes were quite too pleasing to accord with a severe Sabbath.

XIX.

[Sidenote: Spread of Bownd's opinions.]

[Sidenote: Cartwright's Admonition to Parliament, 1572.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 37, 38.]

Such rigor fell in with the passion of that age for formal observance and with the exigent temper of the Puritans by whom Bownd's views were rapidly and universally accepted. The stricter divines might well be glad of a new lever for reforming the old English Sunday, which was devoted, out of service time, to outdoor games, to the brutally cruel sports of bull and bear baiting, to merry morris-dances, in which the performers were gayly decked and hung with jingling bells in different keys, as well as to coarse farces called interludes, which were played on stages under booths and sometimes in the churches. As an austere reaction against frivolity, Puritanism pushed Sabbath-keeping to its extreme, reprobating even the most innocent and domestic recreations, and changing a day of rest and refreshment into one of alternate periods of application to religious devotion and of scrupulous vacuity. Bownd's rather ultra propositions were carried yet further when reproduced by high-strung preachers. It is said that some of these declared that the ringing of more than one bell to call people to church on the Sabbath was as great a sin as murder, adultery, or parricide. The lack of a sense of proportion is the specific distinction of the zealot and the polemic. This lack was not peculiar to the Puritans, however. Joseph Hall, afterward a well-known bishop, could address men so worthy as John Robinson and his colleague in such words as these: "Your souls shall find too late ... that even whoredoms and murders shall abide an easier answer than separation." Perhaps one may rather say that a lack of the sense of proportion in morals was a trait of that age, an age of zealots and polemics.

XX.

[Sidenote: Prevalence of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist. of Britain, book ix, sect. viii, 20, 21.]

In such a time Dr. Bownd's book easily captivated the religious public, and there arose a passion for a stricter Sabbath. According to Fuller, the Lord's Day, especially in towns, "began to be precisely kept, people becoming a law to themselves, forbearing such sports as yet by statute permitted; yea, many rejoicing at their own restraint herein. On this day the stoutest fencer laid down the buckler; the most skillful archer unbent the bow, counting all shooting beside the mark; May-games and morris-dancers grew out of request; and good reason that bells should be silenced from jingling about men's legs, if their very ringing in steeples were adjudged unlawful." Some learned scholars were impressed by Bownd's argument, and others who did not agree with his conclusions thought it best not to gainsay them, "because they tended to the manifest advance of religion." And indeed the new zeal for Sabbath-keeping must have incidentally promoted morals and good order in so licentious an age.

[Sidenote: Opposition to Bownd.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Church History, book ix, sect. viii, 21.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

But a violent opposition quickly arose. Some opposed the book as "galling men's necks with a Jewish yoke against the liberty of Christians," and many of the clergy of the new high-church type resented the doctrine of a Christian Sabbath, asserting that it put "an unequal lustre on the Sunday on set purpose to eclipse all other holy days to the derogation of the authority of the church." There were those who asserted that the "brethren," as they styled them, had brought forth Bownd's book, intending by this "attack from an odd corner" to retrieve lost ground. The manifest advantage to Puritanism from the shifting of the ground of debate, aroused Archbishop Whitgift. In 1599 he made the tactical mistake of ordering the book called in, and in 1600 Chief-Justice Popham forbade the reprinting of it. The price of the work was doubled at once, and it was everywhere sought for, books being "more called on when called in," as Fuller says. When it could not be had in print, it was transcribed by enthusiastic admirers and circulated "from friend to friend" in manuscript. As soon as Whitgift's "head was laid," a new and enlarged edition was published.

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

[Sidenote: 1611.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

The theory of a Sunday-Sabbath, which from the first was not confined to the Puritans, permeated English and American thought and life. But from that time forward the Puritans made rigid Sabbath-keeping the very mark and password of the faithful. From England the theory spread northward to Scotland, where it found a congenial soil. The strict observance of Sunday was embodied in those Laws, Divine, Moral, and Martial, under which Sir Thomas Dale oppressed Virginia, years before the earliest Puritan migration carried it to the coast of New England. On that coast Bownd's Sabbath took on its deepest hue, becoming at last as grievous an evil, perhaps, as the frivolity it had supplanted.

XXI.

[Sidenote: Effect on Puritanism.]

The Puritans protesting against Hebraism in vestments, in priesthood, in liturgy, and in festivals, fell headlong into the Pharisaism of the rigid Sabbath. History records many similar phenomena. To escape from the spirit of one's age is difficult for an individual, impossible perhaps for a sect or party. Nevertheless, the Sabbath agitation had given a new impulse to the Puritan movement--had, indeed, given it a positive party cry, and had furnished it with a visible badge of superior sanctity.

[Sidenote: The new Puritanism.]

The Calvinistic controversy which broke out almost simultaneously with that about the Sabbath and prevailed throughout the reign of James I, added yet one more issue, by making Puritanism the party of a stern and conservative orthodoxy, as opposed to the newer Arminianism which spread so quickly among the High-Church clergy. From all these fresh developments Puritanism gained in power and compactness, if it lost something of simplicity and spirituality. Standing for ultra-Protestantism, for good morals, for an ascetic Sabbath, for a high dogmatic orthodoxy, Puritanism could not but win the allegiance of the mass of the English people, and especially of the middle class. It was this new, compact, austere, dogmatic, self-confident Puritanism, when it had become a political as well as a religious movement, that obliterated Laud and Charles and set up the Commonwealth. And in studying the evolution of this later Puritanism we have been present at the shaping of New England in Old England.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 99.]

Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was appointed Sheriff for Surrey and Sussex before they were disjoyned. He had 116 servants in liverys, every one livery'd in greene sattin doublets. Divers gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garbe and habit, which at that time (when 30 or 40 was the usual retinue of a High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great matter.... He could not refuse the civility of his friends and relations who voluntarily came themselves, or sent in their servants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir George Yeardley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the king had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia, "which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down the streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. 110, Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving men is sharply called in question in a tract entitled Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, 1579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of a serving man's position, while its decline is confessed in A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both of these tracts are reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe Library, 1868. The serving man was not a menial. He rendered personal services to his master or to guests, he could carve on occasion, and as a successor to the military retainers of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any of his master's quarrels; but his principal use was to lend dignity to the mansion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first Jamestown emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have seen.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 100.]

The Anatomie of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes, 1583, Pickering's reprint, pages 16, 17: "It is lawfull for the nobilitie, the gentrie and magisterie to weare riche attire, euery one in their callyng. The nobility and gentrie to innoble, garnish, and set forth birthes, dignities, and estates. The magisterie to dignifie their callynges.... But now there is suche a confuse mingle mangle of apparell, and suche preposterous excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he lusteth himself, or can get by any kinde of meanes. So that it is very hard to know who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shal haue those which are neither of the nobilitie, gentilitie nor yeomanrie ... go daiely in silkes, veluettes, satens, damaskes, taffaties and suche like; notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birthe, meane by estate, and seruile by callyng. And this I compte a greate confusion, and a generall disorder in a Christian common wealth."

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 106.]

A Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 1564, is the primary authority. It is almost beyond doubt that Whittingham, Dean of Durham, a participant in the troubles, wrote the book. The Frankfort struggles have been discussed recently in Mr. Hinds's The Making of the England of Elizabeth, but, like all writers on the subject, Hinds is obliged to depend almost solely on Whittingham's account. The several volumes of letters from the archives of Zurich, published by the Parker Society, give a good insight into the forces at work in the English Reformation. See, for example, in the volume entitled Original Letters, 1537-1558, that of Thomas Sampson to Calvin, dated Strasburgh, February 23, 1555, which shows the Puritan movement half fledged at this early date when Calvin's authoritative advice is invoked. "The flame is lighted up with increased vehemence amongst us English. For a strong controversy has arisen, while some desire the book of reformation of the Church of England to be set aside altogether, others only deem some things in it objectionable, such as kneeling at the Lord's Supper, the linen surplice, and other matters of this kind; but the rest of it, namely, the prayers, scripture lessons and the form of the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper they wish to be retained."

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 106.]

There are many and conflicting accounts of the origin of the name. In the Narragansett Club Publications, ii, 197-199, there is an interesting statement of some of these by the editor of Cotton's Answer to Roger Williams, in a note.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 111.]

That the Puritans early made common cause with the suffering tenantry is not a matter of conjecture. Philip Stubbes, in 1583, in the Anatomie of Abuses, pp. 126, 127, writes: "They take in and inclose commons, moores, heathes, and other common pastures, where out the poore commonaltie, were wont to haue all their forrage and feedyng for their cattell, and (whiche is more) corne for themselves to liue vpon; all which are now in most places taken from them, by these greedie puttockes to the great impouerishyng and vtter beggeryng of many whole townes and parishes.... For these inclosures bee the causes why riche men eate vpp poore men, as beastes dooe eate grasse." One might cite recent economic writers on the effect of inclosures, but the conservative laments of the antiquary Aubrey, in his Introduction to the Survey of Wiltshire, written about 1663, give us a nearer and more picturesque, if less philosophical, view. He says: "Destroying of Manours began Temp. Hen. VIII., but now common; whereby the mean People live lawless, no body to govern them, they care for no body, having no Dependance on any Body. By this Method, and by the Selling of the Church-Lands, is the Ballance of the Government quite alter'd and put into the Hands of the common People." Writing from what he had heard from his grandfather, he says: "Anciently the Leghs i. e. Pastures were noble large Grounds.... So likewise in his Remembrance was all between Kington St. Michael and Dracot-Ferne common Fields. Then were a world of labouring People maintained by the Plough.... There were no Rates for the Poor in my Grandfather's Days ... the Church-ale at Whitsuntide did the Business.... Since the Reformation and Inclosures aforesaid these Parts have swarm'd with poor People. The Parish of Caln pays to the Poor 500£ _per annum_.... Inclosures are for the private, not for the publick Good. For a Shepherd and his Dog, or a Milk-Maid, can manage Meadow-Land, that upon arable, employ'd the Hands of several Scores of Labourers." Miscellanies on Several Curious Subjects, now first published, etc., 1723, pp. 30-33. It will fall within the province of another volume of this series to treat of the systems of landholding brought from England, and I shall not go further into the subject of inclosures here. A portion of the agricultural population seemed superfluous in consequence of inclosures, and colonization was promoted as a means of ridding the country of the excess of its population.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 112.]

In the matter of Church government Puritanism passed through three different periods. In the reign of Elizabeth the Church-Puritan was mainly Presbyterian under Cartwright's lead. But there was even then a current that set toward Independency. Separatism was the outward manifestation of this tendency, and according to Ralegh's estimate, cited in the text, there were about twenty thousand declared Separatists in England in 1593. After the suppression of the presbyteries within the Church in the last years of Elizabeth, and the crushing out of the Separatists by rigorous persecutions, questions of the particular form of Church government fell into abeyance among the Puritans for about forty years. "Indiscriminate anti-prelacy was the prevailing mood of the English people," says Masson, "and the distinction between Presbyterianism and Independency was yet caviare to the general." Life of Milton, ii, 590. Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine (as quoted by Masson), confesses in 1641 that until that year he had never thought what Presbytery or Independency was, or ever spoke with a man who seemed to know it. See also Hanbury's Memorials, ii, 69. Writers on this period do not seem to recognize the fact that the two views were in some rivalry among the early Puritans, and that the theory of the independence of the local church seems to have been at least foreshadowed in the opinions at Frankfort. But there was a long generation in which these differences among the Puritans were forgotten in their life-and-death conflict with the Episcopal party. Then, as Puritanism came into power, the example of other Protestant European countries drew England toward Presbyterianism, while the voice of New England came from over the sea pleading for Congregationalism.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 123.]

A letter of Sandys, afterward Archbishop of York, to Bullinger, quoted by Marsden, Early Puritans, 57, shows that though Puritanism by 1573 had become something other than it was at Frankfort, it was still mainly negative. Sandys writes: "New orators are rising up from among us; foolish young men who despise authority and admit of no superior. They are seeking the complete overthrow and uprooting of the whole of our ecclesiastical polity; and striving to shape out for us I know not what new platform of a church." He gives a summary under nine heads. The assertion that each parish should have its own "presbytery" and choose its own minister, and that the judicial laws of Moses were binding, are the only positive ones. No authority of the magistrate in ecclesiastical matters, no government of the Church except by ministers, elders, and deacons, the taking away of all titles, dignities, lands, and revenues of bishops, etc., from the Church, the allowing of no ministers but actual pastors, the refusal of baptism to the children of papists, fill the rest of this summary. One misses from this skeleton the insistence on Sabbath-keeping, church-going, "ordinances," and ascetic austerity in morals that afterward became distinctive traits of the party.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 125.]

Augustine and other early doctors of the Church held to a Sunday-Sabbath in the fifth century, basing it largely on grounds that now seem mystical. Compare Coxe on Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, 284, note, and Cook's Historical and General View of Christianity, ii, 301, cited by Coxe. The question was variously treated during the middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas and other schoolmen taking the prevalent modern view that the fourth commandment was partly moral and partly ceremonial. There is a curious story, for which I do not know the original authority, of Eustachius, Abbot of Hay, in the thirteenth century, who on his return from the Holy Land preached from city to city against buying and selling on Sundays and saints' days. He had with him a copy of a document dropped from heaven and found on the altar of St. Simon, on Mount Golgotha. This paper threatened that if the command were disobeyed it should rain stones and wood and hot water in the night, and, as if such showers were not enough, wild beasts were to devour the Sabbath-breakers. That there was a difference of opinion in that age is shown by the fact that Roger Bacon, later in the thirteenth century, thought it worth while to assert that Christians should work and hold fairs on Sunday, while Saturday was the proper day for rest. He showed no document from heaven, but, like a true philosopher of that time, the learned friar appealed to arguments drawn from astrology. Hearne's Remains, ii, 177, cites Mirandula. Legislation by Parliament regarding Sunday observance was rare before the Reformation. A statute of 28 Edward III incidentally excepts Sunday from the days on which wool may be shorn, and one of 27 Henry VI forbids the keeping of fairs and markets on Sundays, Good Fridays, and principal festivals except four Sundays in harvest. In 4 Edward IV a statute was passed forbidding the sale of shoes on Sundays and certain festivals.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 125.]

In the "Injunctions by King Edward VI," 1547, Bishop Sparrow's Collection, edition of 1671, p. 8, there is a remarkable statement of what may be called the Edwardean view of Sunday as distinguished from the opinions and practice that had come down from times preceding the Reformation: "God is more offended than pleased, more dishonoured than honoured upon the holy-day because of idleness, pride, drunkenness," etc. The religious and moral duties to which the "holy-day," as it is called, should be strictly devoted are there specified. But, true to the position of compromise, halfwayness, and one might add paradox, which the English Reformation took from the beginning, there is added in the same paragraph the following: "Yet notwithstanding all Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, shall teach and declare unto their Parishioners, that they may with a safe and quiet conscience, in the time of Harvest, labour upon the holy and festival days and save that thing which God hath sent. And if for any scrupulosity, or grudge of conscience, men should superstitiously abstain from working upon those days, that then they should grievously offend and displease God." See also "Thacte made for thabrogacion of certayne holy-dayes," in the reign of Henry VIII, 1536, in the same black-letter collection, p. 167. In this act "Sabboth-day" occurs, but apparently with reference to the Jewish Sabbath only. "Sonday" is used for Sunday.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 129.]

Dr. Bownd's Sabathum Veteris et Novi Testamenti is exceedingly rare. There is a copy in the Prince Collection of the Boston Public Library. It is the only one in this country, so far as I can learn. I am under obligations in several matters to Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, to the same author's Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, and to Hessey's Bampton Lectures for 1860.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 131.]

It is Thomas Rogers, the earliest opponent of the doctrine of Greenham and Bownd, who sees a deep-laid plot in the publication of their books. "What the brethren wanted in strength they had in wiliness," he says. "For while these worthies of our church were employing their engines and forces partly in defending the present government ecclesiastical, partly in assaulting the presbytery and new discipline, even at that very instant the brethren ... abandoned quite the bulwarks which they had raised and gave out were impregnable: suffering us to beat them down, without any or very small resistance, and yet not careless of affairs, left not the wars for all that, but from an odd corner, and after a new fashion which we little thought of (such was their cunning), set upon us afresh again by dispersing in printed books (which for ten years' space before they had been in hammering among themselves to make them complete) their Sabbath speculations and presbyterian (that is more than kingly or popely) directions for the observance of the Lord's Day." Preface to Thirty-nine Articles, paragraph 20. He also says, with some wit, "They set up a new idol, their Saint Sabbath."

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 132.]

The doctrine of a strict Sabbath appears to have made no impression in Scotland until the seventeenth century was well advanced. In the printed Burgh Records of Aberdeen from 1570 to 1625 there is no sabbatarian legislation in the proper sense; but there are efforts to compel the people to suspend buying and selling fish and flesh in the market, the playing of outdoor games and ninepins, and the selling of liquors during sermon time only. Take as an example the following ordinance--as curious for its language as its subject--dated 4th October, 1598, twenty-four years after Knox's death:

"Item, The prouest, bailleis, and counsall ratefeis and approves the statute maid obefoir, bering that na mercatt, nather of fische nor flesche salbe on the Sabboth day in tyme cumming, in tyme of sermone, vnder the pane of confiscatioun of the same; and lykvayes ratefeis the statute maid aganis the playeris in the linkis, and at the kyillis, during the time of the sermones; ... and that na tavernar sell nor went any wyne nor aill in tyme cumming in tyme of sermone, ather on the Sabboth day or vlk dayes, under the pane of ane vnlaw of fourtie s., to be vpliftit of the contravenar als oft as they be convict."

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 132.]

New England Puritanism took a position more ultra even than that of Bownd. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, Mass., developed from some Sermons on the Subject a work with the title, Theses Sabbaticæ, or the Doctrine of the Sabbath. After a considerable circulation in manuscript among New England students of divinity, it was printed at London in 1650 by request of all the elders of New England. From the time of Augustine the prevailing theory of advocates of a Sunday-Sabbath has been that the fourth commandment is partly moral, partly ceremonial; but Shepard, who does not stick at small logical or historical difficulties, will have it wholly moral, by which means he avoids any option regarding the day. The rest of the Sabbath, according to this authoritative New England treatise, is to be as strict as it ever was under Jewish law, and is to be rigidly enforced on the unwilling by parents and magistrates. In the spirit of a thoroughpaced literalist Shepard argues through fifty pages that the Sabbath begins in the evening. He admits that only "servile labour" is forbidden, but he reasons that as "sports and pastimes" are ordained "to whet on worldly labour," they therefore partake of its servile character and are not tolerable on the Sabbath. It appears from his preface that there were Puritans in his time who denied the sabbatical character of Sunday and spiritualized the commandment.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

_SEPARATISM AND THE SCROOBY CHURCH._

I.

[Sidenote: Importance of the Separatists.]

To the great brotherhood of Puritans who formed a party within the church there was added a little fringe of Separatists or "Brownists," as they were commonly called, who did not stop with rejecting certain traits of the Anglican service, but spurned the church itself. Upon these ultraists fell the merciless hand of persecution. They were imprisoned, hanged, exiled. They were mostly humble people, and were never numerous; but by their superior boldness in speech and writing, by their attempts to realize actual church organizations on apostolic models, they rendered themselves considerable if not formidable. From this advance guard and forlorn hope of Puritanism, inured to hardship and the battle front, came at length the little band of New England pioneers who made a way into the wilderness over the dead bodies of half their company. The example of these contemned Brownists led to the Puritan settlement of New England. Their type of ecclesiastical organization ultimately dominated the Congregationalism of New England and the nonconformity of the mother country. For these reasons, if for no other, Brownism, however obscure it may have been, is not a negligible element in history.

II.

[Sidenote: Nonconformity in the Church.]

The great body of the Puritans seem to have agreed with Bishop Hall that it was "better to swallow a ceremony than to rend a church," and they agreed with him in regarding Separatism as criminal. They were, indeed, too intent on reforming the Church of England to think of leaving it. They made no scruple of defying ecclesiastical regulations when they could, but in the moral code of that day schism was the deadliest of sins.

[Sidenote: Scrambler, Bishop of Peterborough, to Burghley, 13th April, 1573, in Wright's Elizabeth and her Times.]

[Sidenote: Rogers's Preface to Articles. Parker Soc. ed., p. 10.]

In the early part of Elizabeth's reign, before the beginning of the rule of Whitgift and the High Commission Courts, Puritan divines slighted or omitted the liturgy in many parishes. This became more common after the rise of Cartwright and the Presbyterian movement, about 1570. For example, in the town of Overston, in 1573, there was no divine service according to the Book of Common Prayer, "but insteade thereof two sermons be preached" by men whom the bishop had refused to license. The village of Whiston was also a place of Puritan assemblage, "where it is their joye," writes the Bishop of Peterborough, "to have manie owte of divers parishes, principallie owte of Northampton towne and Overston aforesaid, with other townes thereaboute, there to receive the sacramentes with preachers and ministers to their owne liking, and contrarie to the forme prescribed by the publique order of the realme." Thomas Rogers says, "The brethren (for so did they style them-selves) would neither pray, nor say service, nor baptize, nor celebrate the Lord's Supper, nor marry, nor bury, nor do any other ecclesiastical duty according to law."

At this time some of the Puritan divines held high positions in the church. Whittingham, who had been on the Puritan side of the quarrels in Frankfort, and who had received only a Genevan ordination, succeeded in holding his deanery of Durham until his death, in 1579. In 1563 Dr. Turner was sneering at bishops as "white coats" and "tippett gentlemen," while himself Dean of Durham.

[Sidenote: The Semi-Separatists.]

[Sidenote: Bancroft in Barlowe's Svmme and Svbstance.]

[Sidenote: Heresiography, p. 82.]

But Elizabeth after a while filled the bishoprics with men to her liking, whose heavy hands made the lot of Puritans in the church harder and harder. Many ministers were silenced, but there were many who, by evasion or by straining their consciences, held their benefices. Some Puritan clergymen, when they were to preach, preferred "to walk in the church-yard until sermon time rather than to be present at public prayer." Some Puritan laymen had their own way of conforming to the church. "There is a sort of Semi-Separatist," says Pagitt, as late as 1646, "that will heare our Sermons but not our Common-prayers; and of these you may see every Sunday in our streets sitting and standing about our doores; who, when Prayers are done, rush into our Churches to hear our Sermons."

III.

[Sidenote: Causes of Separatism.]

[Sidenote: Thomas Scott in Pagitt, 80.]

[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantation, p. 8.]

The growth of Separatist churches was due to two causes. An almost incredible reverence for the letter of the Scriptures had taken the place of older superstitions. There was a strong tendency to revert to the stern spirit of the Old Testament and to adopt the external forms of the New. Religious idealists saw a striking contrast between the discipline of the primitive and almost isolated bands of enthusiastic believers in the apostolic time and the all-inclusive parishes of the hierarchical state church. And in that age of externalism the difference in organic form between the Anglican church and the little synagogues of Christian seceders founded by Paul in the Levant weighed heavily upon the minds of earnest people. It did not occur to them that this primitive organization was probably brought over from the neighboring Jewish congregations from which the converts had withdrawn, and that there might not be any obligation to imitate it under different skies and in a remote age. The Separatist was an idealist. "He lives by the aire," said an opponent, "and there he builds Castles and Churches; none on earth will please him; ... he must finde out Sir Thomas More's Utopia, or rather Plato's Community, and bee an Elder there." But Separatism was undoubtedly promoted by persecution. Bradford says that the sufferings inflicted on them by the bishops helped some of the Puritans "to see further into things by the light of the word of God. How not only these base and beggerly ceremonies were unlawfull, but also that the lordly and tiranous power of the prelats ought not to be submitted unto." Drawn thus by the letter of the biblical record, while stung by cruel oppression and galled by the opposition of the constituted authorities to what they deemed the truth divine, it is not strange that religious enthusiasts began to long for societies organized like those of the apostolic age, from which the profane should be excluded by a strict discipline.

IV.

[Sidenote: Robert Browne and Brownism.]

[Sidenote: 1581 to 1586.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

The beginning of Separatism has been commonly attributed to Robert Browne, a contentious and able advocate of Separatist doctrines. After a brief and erratic career as an advocate of these opinions, and after suffering the penalty of his zeal and proving the sincerity of his belief in thirty-two different prisons, in some of which he could not see his hand at noonday, Browne at length began to waver--now inclined to return to the church, now recoiling toward dissent. Worn out in nerves by controversy and persecution, this eccentric man was so alarmed by a solemn sentence of excommunication from a bishop, that he repented and made peace with the English church. He accepted a benefice, but employed a curate to preach for him. Browne lingered on to an unhonored age, imperious and contentious, not able to live with his wife, and held in no reverence by churchmen, while he was despised by Separatists. He died at eighty, in Northampton jail, to which he had been carried on a feather bed laid in a cart. The old man had been committed to prison this thirty-third time in his life for striking a constable who sought to collect a rate.

[Sidenote: Rise of Separatism.]

[Sidenote: Barclay's Inner Life, pp. 13, 53.]

[Sidenote: Dialogue of 1593 quo. by Waddington.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Dialogue.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

[Sidenote: Josias Nichols, The Plea for the Innocent, 1602, in Hanbury, i. 3.]

[Sidenote: Stephen Breadwell, 1588, in Dexter, 255.]

Separatism in some form existed before Browne's zeal made it a thorn in the side of the bishops. Something like a separation existed in 1567. In 1571 there was an independent church of which we know little but the pastor's name. Bradford even dates independency back to the reign of Mary. In truth, the rise of this sect, from which came the earliest New England colony, appears to be lost in obscurity. Significant movements are usually cradled in rustic mangers, to which no learned magi think it worth their while to journey. The beginning of Separatism was probably in the little conventicles held by devout Puritans who, in the words of one of their own writers, "met together to sing a psalm or to talk of God's word." But Browne, so far as we know, was one of the earliest to organize independent churches, with officers named and classified after those of the petty hierarchies of the early Christian congregations, or rather according to such deductions regarding them as he was able to make from the Epistles of Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to Browne's activity, was not founded by him. Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five years when he began to vacillate. A great part of this time was spent in exile, much of it in prison, and very little of it about London. But before 1587 London seems to have been the center of the Separatists, from which they had "sparsed their companies into severall partes of the Realme."

[Sidenote: H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, 255-257.]

It seems that their rise in London came from the devout meetings of those who had begun to repudiate the Church of England as antichristian. Without any officers or organization apparently, these people, when we first get sight of them, were wont to assemble in the summer time in the fields about London, sitting down upon a bank while the Bible was expounded now by one and now by another of the company. In the winter it was their custom to spend the whole Sunday together from five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in company and paying for it by a collection. They responded in prayer only by spontaneous groans or sobs, much after the fashion of the early Quakers, Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later time. If one of their members returned to a parish assembly, they pronounced him an apostate and solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he should repent.

V.

[Sidenote: Barrowism.]

When they began to organize themselves formally into a church the London Separatists in their turn resorted to the apostolic epistles. These had already been treated like the magician's bottle that is made to yield white wine or red at pleasure. From them whatsoever form of discipline was desired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had been derived, and now a still different discipline was deduced, a mean betwixt Presbyterian and Brownist theories. This is known now as Barrowism. It was the form of church government brought by the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and substantially that which prevailed in New England throughout the seventeenth century.

[Sidenote: Separatists in Amsterdam, 1593.]

The London Separatists suffered miserably from persecution. Many of them languished and died in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their leaders, were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated to Amsterdam, while the rest maintained a furtive church in London. Those in Amsterdam, having no lingering abuses of the English church to reform, set every man's conscience to watch his neighbor's conduct. Having seceded from the communion of the Church of England on account of scandals, they were scandalized with the least variation from their rigorous standard by any of their own church members, and they were soon torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this vicariousness of conscience. The innocent vanity of the pastor's wife who could never forego a "toppish" hat and high-heeled shoes was the principal stumbling-block.

Though Separatism had been almost extirpated from England by the close of Elizabeth's reign, there remained even yet one vigorous society in the north which was destined to exert a remarkable influence on the course of history.

VI.

[Sidenote: The cradle of the Pilgrims.]

On the southern margin of Yorkshire the traveler alights to-day at the station of Bawtry. It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn. More than a mile to the southward, in Nottinghamshire, lies the pleasant but commonplace village of Scrooby. About a mile to the north of Bawtry is Austerfield, a hamlet of brick cottages crowded together along the road. It has a picturesque little church built in the middle ages, the walls of which are three feet thick. This church will seat something more than a hundred people nowadays by the aid of a rather modern extension. In the seventeenth century it was smaller, and there was no ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the roof while shuddering with cold in the grottolike interior. The country around is level and unpicturesque.

[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, 24, 25.]

But one is here in the cradle of great religious movements. In Scrooby and in Austerfield were born the Pilgrims who made the first successful settlement in New England. A little to the east lies Gainsborough, from which migrated to Holland in 1606 the saintly Separatist John Smyth, who gave form to a great Baptist movement of modern times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in Lincolnshire, lies Epworth, the nest from which the Wesleys issued more than a hundred years later to spread Methodism over the world. Religious zeal seems to have characterized the people of this region even before the Reformation, for the country round about Scrooby was occupied at that time by an unusual number of religious houses.

The little Austerfield church and the old church at Scrooby are the only picturesque or romantic elements of the environment, and on these churches the Pilgrims turned their backs as though they had been temples of Baal. In the single street of Austerfield the traveler meets the cottagers of to-day, and essays to talk with them. They are heavy and somewhat stolid, like most other rustic people in the north country, and an accent to which their ears are not accustomed amuses and puzzles them. No tradition of the Pilgrims lingers among them. They have never heard that anybody ever went out of Austerfield to do anything historical. They listen with a bovine surprise if you speak to them of this exodus, and they refer you to the old clerk of the parish, who will know about it. The venerable clerk is a striking figure, not unlike that parish clerk painted by Gainsborough. This oracle of the hamlet knows that Americans come here as on a pilgrimage, and he tells you that one of them, a descendant of Governor Bradford, offered a considerable sum for the disused stone font at which Bradford the Pilgrim was baptized. But the traveler turns away at length from the rustic folk of Austerfield and the beer-drinkers over their mugs in the inn at Bawtry, and the villagers at Scrooby, benumbed by that sense of utter common-placeness which is left on the mind of a stranger by such an agricultural community. The Pilgrims, then, concerning whom poems have been written, and in whose honor orations without number have been made, were just common country folk like these, trudging through wheat fields and along the muddy clay highways of the days of Elizabeth and James. They were just such men as these and they were not. They were such as these would be if they were vivified by enthusiasm. We may laugh at superfluous scruples in rustic minds, but none will smile at brave and stubborn loyalty to an idea when it produces such steadfast courage as that of the Pilgrims.

[Sidenote: Magnalia, Book II, chap. i, p. 2.]

And yet, when the traveler has resumed his journey, and recalls Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield, the stolid men and gossiping women, the narrow pursuits of the plowman and the reaper, and remembers the flat, naked, and depressing landscape, he is beset by the old skepticism about the coming of anything good out of Nazareth. Nor is he helped by remembering that at the time of Bradford's christening at the old stone font the inhabitants of Austerfield are said to have been "a most ignorant and licentious people," and that earlier in that same century John Leland speaks of "the meane townlet of Scrooby."

VIII.

[Sidenote: Elder Brewster.]

But Leland's description of the village suggests the influence that caused Scrooby and the wheat fields thereabout to send forth, in the beginning of the seventeenth century and of a new reign, men capable of courage and fortitude sufficient to make them memorable, and to make these three townlets places of pilgrimage in following centuries.

[Sidenote: Itinerary, i, 36, in Hunter's Founders, p. 20.]

[Sidenote: Bradford, 410.]

[Sidenote: _Supra_, Book I, chap. ii, iii.]

[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantations, 411.]

"In the meane townlet of Scrooby, I marked two things"--it is Leland who writes--"the parish church not big but very well builded; the second was a great manor-place, standing within a moat, and longing to the Archbishop of York." This large old manor-place he describes with its outer and inner court. In this manor-place, about half a century after Leland saw it, there lived William Brewster. He was a man of education, who had been for a short time in residence at Cambridge; he had served as one of the under secretaries of state for years; had been trusted beyond all others by Secretary Davison, his patron; and, when Elizabeth disgraced Davison, in order to avoid responsibility for the death of Mary of Scotland, Brewster had been the one friend who clung to the fallen secretary as long as there was opportunity to do him service. Making no further effort to establish himself at court, Brewster went after a while "to live in the country in good esteeme amongst his freinds and the good gentle-men of those parts, espetially the godly and religious." His abode after his retirement was the old manor-place now destroyed, but then the most conspicuous building at Scrooby. It belonged in his time to Sir Samuel Sandys, the elder brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, whose work as the master spirit in the later history of the Virginia Company has already been recounted. At Scrooby Brewster succeeded his father in the office of "Post," an office that obliged him to receive and deliver letters for a wide district of country, to keep relays of horses for travelers by post on the great route to the north, and to furnish inn accommodations. In the master of the post at Scrooby we have the first of those influences that lifted a group of people from this rustic region into historic importance. He had been acquainted with the great world, and had borne a responsible if not a conspicuous part in delicate diplomatic affairs in the Netherlands. At court, as at Scrooby, he was a Puritan, and now in his retirement his energies were devoted to the promotion of religion. He secured earnest ministers for many of the neighboring parishes. But that which he builded the authorities tore down. Whitgift was archbishop, and the High Commission Courts were proceeding against Puritans with the energy of the Spanish Inquisition. "The godly preachers" about him were silenced. The people who followed them were proscribed, and all the pains and expense of Brewster and his Puritan friends in establishing religion as they understood it were likely to be rendered futile by the governors of the church. "He and many more of those times begane to looke further into things," says Bradford. Persecution begot Separatism. The theory was the result of conditions, as new theories are wont to be.

IX.

[Sidenote: The Scrooby Church.]

[Sidenote: Magnalia, Book ii, c. i, 2.]

Here, as elsewhere, the secession appears to have begun with meetings for devotion. By this supposition we may reconcile two dates which have been supposed to conflict, conjecturing that in 1602, when Brewster had lived about fifteen years in the old manor-house, his neighbors, who did not care to attend the ministry of ignorant and licentious priests, began to spend whole Sundays together, now in one place and now in another, but most frequently in the old manor-house builded within a moat, and reached by ascending a flight of stone steps. Here, Brewster's hospitality was dispensed to them freely. They may or may not have been members of the Separatist church at Gainsborough, as some have supposed. It was not until 1606 that these people formed the fully organized Separatist church of Scrooby. It was organized after the Barrowist pattern that had originated in London--it was after a divine pattern, according to their belief. Brewster, the nucleus of the church, became their ruling elder.

[Sidenote: The ruling elder.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Plimoth Plantation, 408-414.]

[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders, _passim_.]

[Sidenote: Winsor's Elder William Brewster, a pamphlet.]

[Sidenote: F. B. Dexter in Narrative and Crit. Hist., iii, 257-282.]

It was in these all-day meetings at the old manor-house that the Separatist rustics of Scrooby were molded for suffering and endeavor. The humble, modest, and conscientious Brewster was the king-post of the new church--the first and longest enduring of the influences that shaped the character of these people in England, Holland, and America. Brewster could probably have returned to the court under other auspices after Davison's fall, but as master of the post at Scrooby, then as a teacher and as founder of a printing office of prohibited English books in Leyden, and finally as a settler in the wilderness, inuring his soft hands to rude toils, until he died in his cabin an octogenarian, he led a life strangely different from that of a courtier. But no career possible to him at court could have been so useful or so long remembered.

X.

[Sidenote: John Robinson.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

But Brewster was not the master spirit. About the time the Separatists of Scrooby completed their church organization, in 1606, there came to it John Robinson. He had been a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a beneficed clergyman of Puritan views. He, too, had been slowly propelled to Separatist opinion by persecution. For fourteen years before the final migration he led the Pilgrims at Scrooby and Leyden. Wise man of affairs, he directed his people even in their hard struggle for bread in a foreign country. He was one of the few men, in that age of debate about husks and shells, who penetrated to those teachings concerning character and conduct which are the vital and imperishable elements of religion. Even when assailed most roughly in debate he was magnanimous and forbearing. He avoided the bigotry and bitterness of the early Brownists, and outgrew as years went on the narrowness of rigid Separatism. He lived on the best terms with the Dutch and French churches. He opposed rather the substantial abuses than the ceremonies of the Church of England, and as life advanced he came to extend a hearty fellowship and communion to good men in that church. Had it been his lot to remain in the national church and rise, as did his opponent, Joseph Hall, to the pedestal of a bishopric or to other dignity, he would have been one of the most illustrious divines of the age--wanting something of the statesmanly breadth of Hooker, but quite outspreading and overtopping the Whitgifts, Bancrofts, and perhaps even the Halls. Robert Baillie, who could say many hard things against Separatists, is forced to confess that "Robinson was a man of excellent parts, and the most learned, polished, and modest spirit that ever separated from the Church of England"; and long after his death the Dutch theologian Hornbeeck recalls again and again his integrity, learning, and modesty.

Shall we say that when subjected to this great man's influence the rustics of Scrooby and Bawtry and Austerfield were clowns no longer? Perhaps we shall be truer to the probabilities of human nature if we conclude that Robinson was able to mold a few of the best of them to great uses, and that these became the significant digits which gave value to the ciphers.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 146.]

The eccentricities, moral and mental, of Browne were a constant resource of those who sought to involve all Separatists in his disgrace. Odium has always been a more effective weapon than argument in a theological controversy. Browne's enemies alleged that even while on the gridiron of persecution his conduct had not been free from moral obliquity. I have not been able to see Bernard's charges on this score, but John Robinson, in his Justification, etc. (1610), parries the thrust in these words: "Now as touching Browne, it is true as Mr. B[ernard] affirmeth, that as he forsook the Lord so the Lord forsook him in his way; ... as for the wicked things (which Mr. B. affirmeth) _he did in the way_ it may well be as he sayeth, ... as the more like he was to returne to his proper centre the Church of England, where he should be sure to find companie ynough in any wickednesse." Edition of 1639, p. 50. One of the most learned accounts of Browne is to be found in H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, the lecture on Robert Browne. It is always easy to admire Dr. Dexter's erudition, but not so easy to assent to his conclusions. See also Pagitt's Heresiography, p. 56 and _passim_; Fuller's Church History, ix, vi, 1-7; and Hanbury's Memorials, p. 18 and following.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 146.]

John Robinson, in Justification of Separation from the Church of England, p. 50, edition of 1639, says: "It is true that Boulton was (though not the first in that way) an elder of a Separatist church in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's dayes, and falling from his holy profession recanted the same at Paul's Crosse and afterwards hung himself as Judas did." Compare Cotton's The Way of the Congregationall Churches Cleared, p. 4, and various intimations in Hanbury's Memorials, which imply the existence of Independent congregations in London and elsewhere in the early years of Elizabeth's reign. But Hanbury's handling of the valuable material he collected with commendable assiduity is sometimes so clumsy that the reader is obliged to grope for facts bearing upon most important questions. One gets from Hanbury's notes and some older publications a vague notion that the Flemish Protestants, recently settled in England in great numbers, exerted an influence in favor of Independency. Robert Browne began his secession in Norwich, a place where the people from the Low Countries were nearly half the population, and Browne was even said to have labored among the Dutch first. Fuller, ix, sec. vi, 2.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 156.]

Robinson's character may be judged from his works. His good qualities are very apparent in the wise and tender letters addressed to the Pilgrims when they were leaving England and after their arrival at Plymouth, which will be found in Bradford's Plimoth Plantations, 63, 64, 163. See Bradford's character of him, ibid., 17-19. See also Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 473-482. Ainsworth's tribute is in Hanbury's Memorials, 95. See also Winslow's Brief Narration in Young's Chronicles, 379. George Sumner, in 3d Massachusetts Historical Collections, ix, has a paper giving the result of his investigations in Leyden. He quotes Hornbeeck as saying, twenty-eight years after Robinson's death, that he was the best of all the exiles as well as the most upright, learned, and most modest. Hornbeeck's words are: "Optimus inter illos." "Vir supra reliquos probus atque eruditus." "Doctissimi ac modestissimi omnium separatistorum."

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

_THE PILGRIM MIGRATIONS._

I.

[Sidenote: Accession of James I.]

[Sidenote: Neal, ii, 28. Compare Burns's Prel. Diss. to Wodrow, lxxiv.]

The accession of James of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 raised the hopes of the Puritans. James had said, in 1590: "As for our neighbour kirk of England, their service is an ill-said masse in English; they want nothing of the masse but the liftings." Later, when the prospect of his accession to the English throne was imminent, James had spoken with a different voice, but the Puritans remembered his lifelong familiarity with Presbyterian forms, and his strongly expressed satisfaction with the Scottish Kirk. They met him on his way to London with a petition for modifications of the service. This was known as the Millinary Petition, because it was supposed to represent the views of about one thousand English divines.

[Sidenote: Hampton Court conference.]

[Sidenote: Svmme and Svbstance, _passim_.]

[Sidenote: Prel. Diss. to Wodrow, lxxiv.]

[Sidenote: Ch. Hist., x, vii, 30.]

[Sidenote: Nugæ Antiquæ., i, 181.]

In January, 1604, the king held a formal conference at Hampton Court between eleven of the Anglican party on one side, nine of them being bishops, and four Puritan divines, representing the petitioners. Assuming at first the air of playing the arbiter, James, who dearly loved a puttering theological debate, could not refrain from taking the cause of the churchmen out of their hands and arguing it himself. The reports of the conference are most interesting as showing the paradoxical qualities of James, who, by his action at this meeting, unwittingly made himself a conspicuous figure in the history of America. The great churchmen were surprised at the display made by the king of dialectic skill. They held Scotch learning in some contempt, and were amazed that one bred among the "Puritans" should know how to handle questions of theology so aptly. James, though he had declared the Church of Scotland "the sincerest kirk in the world" because it did not keep Easter and Yule as the Genevans did, now had the face to assure the prelates that he had never believed after he was ten years old what he was taught in Scotland. His speeches in the conference are marked by ability, mingled with the folly which vitiated all his qualities. Quick at reply and keen in analysis, he even shows something like breadth of intelligence, or at least intellectual toleration, but without ever for a moment evincing any liberality of feeling. His manifest cleverness is rendered futile by his narrow and ridiculous egotism, his arrogance in the treatment of opponents, and his coarse vulgarity in expression. "In common speaking as in his hunting," says Fuller, "he stood not on the cleanest but nearest way." The Puritans were no more able to answer the arguments of the king than was Æsop's lamb to make reply to the wolf. Laying down for his fundamental maxim "No bishop, no king," he drew a picture of the troubles that would beset him when "Jack and Tom and Will and Dick" should meet and censure the king and his council. He would have no such assemblage of the clergy until he should grow fat and pursy and need trouble to keep him in breath, he said. It could not occur to his self-centered mind that so grave a question was not to be settled merely by considering the ease and convenience of the sovereign. "He rather usede upbraidinges than argumente," says Harrington, who was present. He bade the Puritans "awaie with their snivellinge," and, in discussing the surplice, made an allusion that would be deemed a profanation by reverent churchmen of the present time.

[Sidenote: The king and the bishops.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

[Sidenote: Compare Nugæ Antiquæ, ii, 25, 26.]

With characteristic pedantry he spoke part of the time in Latin, and his clever refutation of the hapless Puritans sounded like the wisdom of God to the anxious bishops. In spite of the downright scolding and vulgar abuse with which the king flavored his orthodoxy, the aged Whitgift declared that undoubtedly his Majesty spoke by the special assistance of God's Spirit; but one of the worldly bystanders ventured, in defiance of the episcopal dictum, to think that whatever spirit inspired the king was "rather foul-mouthed." Bancroft, Bishop of London, theatrically fell on his knees and solemnly protested that his heart melted within him with joy that Almighty God of his singular mercy had given them such a king "as since Christ's time the like hath not been seen." The king in his turn was naturally impressed with the sagacity of a bishop who could so devoutly admire his Majesty's ability, and, when soon afterward a fresh access of paralysis carried off Whitgift, it was not surprising that Bancroft should be translated from London to Canterbury over the heads of worthier competitors. From the moment of Bancroft's accession to the primacy the lot of the Puritans and Separatists became harder, for he plumed himself doubtless on being the originator of the high-church doctrine, and he was a man whose harsh energy seems not to have been tempered by an intimate piety like that of Whitgift.

[Sidenote: Results.]

[Sidenote: Svmme and Svbstance, 35.]

[Sidenote: Compare Bacon's Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification of the Church of England.]

When James rose from his chair at the close of the debate on the second day he said, "I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of this land, or else do worse"; and he wrote to a friend boasting that he had "peppered the Puritans soundly." But the king had missed, without knowing it, the greatest opportunity of his reign--an opportunity for conciliating or weakening the Puritan opposition, and consolidating the church and his kingdom. James could think of nothing but his own display of cleverness and browbeating arrogance in a dispute with great divines like Reynolds and Chaderton. The conference had been for him a recreation not much more serious than stag-hunting. That it was pregnant with vast and far-reaching results for good and evil in England and the New World he, perhaps, did not dream. By his narrow and selfish course at this critical moment he may be said to have sealed the fate of his son, if not the doom of his dynasty; and his clever folly gave fresh life to the bitter struggle between Anglican and Puritan which resulted in the peopling of New England a quarter of a century afterward.

II.

[Sidenote: The storm of persecution.]

[Sidenote: Bacon's Observation on a Libel.]

Every proscription of the Puritans within the church was accompanied by a crusade against the Brownists without, who were counted sinners above all other men. Though Ralegh in 1593 had estimated the Brownists at twenty thousand, they were by this time in consequence of oppression "about worn out," as Bacon said. Upon those who remained the new persecution broke with untempered severity. Badgered on every side by that vexatious harrying which King James and his ecclesiastics kept up according to promise, the little congregation at Scrooby in 1607 resolved to flee into Holland, where they would be strangers to the speech and to the modes of getting a living, but where they might worship God in extemporary prayers under the guidance of elders of their own choice without fear of fines and prisons.

[Sidenote: Toleration in the Low Countries.]

[Sidenote: Errours and Induration, p. 27.]

That which is most honorable to the Low Countries, from a historical point of view, namely, that their cities were places of refuge for oppressed consciences, was esteemed odious and highly ridiculous in the seventeenth century. In one of the plays of that time there is a humorous proposition to hold a consultation about "erecting four new sects of religion in Amsterdam." The Dutch metropolis was called a cage of unclean birds, and a French prelate contemned it as "a common harbor of all opinions and heresies." At a later period Edward Johnson, the rather bloodthirsty Massachusetts Puritan, inveighs against "the great mingle mangle of religion" in Holland, and like a burlesque prophet shrieks, "Ye Dutch, come out of your hodge podge!" Robert Baylie, in a sermon before the House of Lords as late as 1645, says of the toleration by the Dutch, that "for this one thing they have become infamous in the Christian world."

[Sidenote: Flight of the Pilgrims.]

To the asylum offered by the Low Countries the Scrooby Separatists resolved to flee. The pack of harriers let loose by James and Bancroft were in full cry. The members of the Scrooby church found themselves "hunted and persecuted on every side," having their houses watched night and day, so that all their sufferings in times past "were but as flea bitings in comparison." But the tyranny that made England intolerable did its best to render flight impossible. In various essays to escape, the Separatists were arrested and stripped of what valuables they had, while their leaders were cast into prison for months at a time.

[Sidenote: The Pilgrims in Amsterdam.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Plimoth Plantation 16.]

At length by one means or another the members of this battered little community got away and met together in Amsterdam. To plain north country folk this was indeed a strange land, and one can see in the vivid and eloquent language of Bradford of Austerfield, who was a young man when he crossed the German Ocean, the memory of the impressions which these cities of the Low Countries made on their rustic minds. But "it was not longe before they saw the grimme and grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man, with whom they must bukle and incounter."

III.

[Sidenote: Removal to Leyden.]

[Sidenote: Bradford's Plimouth Plantation.]

[Sidenote: Winslow's Relations.]

Robinson discovered that he was not of a piece with those Separatists who had preceded him to Amsterdam. In one division of these, questions of whalebone in bodices, of high-heeled shoes and women's hats, distracted scrupulous minds. In the other, which came from the same part of England as Robinson's church, the agitations were of a theological nature. Questions about the baptism of infants and the inherent righteousness of man and the portion of his nature that Christ derived from his mother, with discussions of the right of a man to be a magistrate and a church member at the same time, were seething in the heated brain of the scrupulous but saintly pastor. Robinson saw that these controversies would involve the Scrooby church if it remained in Amsterdam. In Robinson the centrifugal force of Separatism had already spent itself, and his practical wisdom had set bounds to the course of his logic. To leave the Dutch metropolis for a smaller place was to reduce the Scrooby exiles to still deeper poverty, but nevertheless the Pilgrims fled from discord as they had fled from persecution, and removed to the university city of Leyden, called by its admirers "the Athens of the Occident." After their departure English Separatism in Amsterdam went on tearing itself to pieces in a sincere endeavor to find ultimate theological truth, but Robinson's people in spite of their poverty were united, and were honored by those among whom they sojourned. Others, hearing of their good report, came to them from England, and the exiled church of Leyden was fairly prosperous.

IV.

[Sidenote: Danger of extinction.]

But when ten years of exile had passed the outlook was not a pleasant one. The life in Leyden was so hard that many chose to return to their own land, preferring English prisons to liberty at so dear a rate. The "tender hearts of many a loving father and mother" were wounded to see children growing prematurely decrepit under the weight of hard and incessant toil; "the vigor of Nature being consumed in the very bud as it were." Some of the young people were contaminated by the dissoluteness of the city, others joined the Dutch army or made long voyages at sea, acquiring habits very foreign to the strictness of their parents. The result of a contest between the rigid Puritanism of the little church and the laxity prevalent in Holland was not to be doubted. Human nature can not remain always at concert pitch. Intermarriages with the Dutch had already begun, and all that was peculiar in the English community was about to be swallowed up and lost forever in the great current of Dutch life which flowed about it.

[Sidenote: Emigration planned.]

[Sidenote: Compare Winslow in Young, 387.]

Puritanism was in its very nature aggressive, even meddlesome. It was not possible for a Puritan church, led by such men as Robinson, and Brewster, and Carver, and Bradford, and Winslow, to remain content where national prejudices and a difference in language barred the way to the exertion of influence on the life about them. With destruction by absorption threatening their church, these leaders conceived the project of forming a new state where they "might, with the liberty of a good conscience, enjoy the pure Scripture worship of God without the mixture of human inventions and impositions; and their children after them might walk in the holy ways of the Lord."

V.

[Sidenote: Puritans and American settlements.]

[Sidenote: Waddington's Cong. Hist., ii, 113, 114.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

What suggested in 1617 the thought of migration to America we do not know. Just twenty years earlier, in 1597, some imprisoned Brownists had petitioned the Privy Council that they might be allowed to settle "in the province of Canada," an indefinite term at that time. Francis Johnson with three others went out in that same year to look at the land. The voyage was an unlucky one, and the settlement of Johnson as pastor of the church in Amsterdam was the result. The persecutions which followed the accession of Bancroft to the archbishopric had started as early as 1608 a widespread agitation among the Puritans in favor of emigration to Virginia, but, when only a few had got away, the primate secured a proclamation preventing their escape from the means of grace provided for them in Courts of High Commission.

[Sidenote: Condition of Virginia.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

[Sidenote: Inventory of books.]

[Sidenote: Winsor's pamphlet on Elder Brewster.]

The year 1617, in which the agitation for emigration began among the Pilgrims, was the year after Dale's return with highly colored reports of the condition of the Virginia colony. It is noticeable that among the books owned by Elder Brewster at his death was a copy of Whitaker's Good Newes from Virginia, published in 1613. Whitaker was minister at Henrico in Virginia, and was the son of a Puritan divine of eminence who was master of St. John's College, Cambridge. It is possible that he was known to Brewster, who had been at Cambridge, or to Robinson, who had resigned a fellowship there to become a Separatist. Whitaker himself was Puritan enough to discard the surplice. His Good Newes is an earnest plea for the support of the colony for religious reasons. "This plantation which the divell hath so often troden downe," he says, "is revived and daily groweth to more and hopeful successe." At the very time when the Pilgrims first thought of migrating there was beginning a new and widespread interest in Virginia. This was based partly on religious enthusiasm, such as Whitaker's book was meant to foster, and partly on the hope of new and strange commodities, particularly silk. Even this silk illusion may have had its weight in a secondary way with the Leyden people, for Bradford, afterward governor at Plymouth, was a silk-weaver in Leyden, and there were two books on silkworms in Brewster's library at his death.

[Sidenote: Alternatives.]

To European eyes all America was one; even to-day the two Americas are hardly distinguished by most people in Europe. The glowing account of Guiana given by Ralegh helped to feed the new desire for an American home; and it was only after serious debate that North America was chosen, as more remote from the dreaded Spaniard and safer from tropical diseases. One can hardly imagine what American Puritanism would have become under the skies of Guiana. Not only did the Pilgrims hesitate regarding their destination, but there was a choice of nationalities to be made. England had not been a motherly mother to these outcast children, and there was question of settling as English subjects in America, or becoming Dutch colonists there.

VI.

[Sidenote: Application to Sandys.]

[Sidenote: Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, pp. 22, 23.]

The Pilgrims preferred to be English, notwithstanding all. But they wished to stipulate with England for religious liberty. In this matter they had recourse to Sir Edwin Sandys, the one man who would probably be both able and willing to help them. Brewster had lived, as we have seen, in an old episcopal manor at Scrooby. Sandys, Archbishop of York, had transferred this manor by a lease to his eldest son, Sir Samuel Sandys, who was Brewster's landlord and brother of Sir Edwin Sandys. Of Sir Edwin the great liberal parliamentary statesman, Fuller says, "He was right-handed to any great employment." In 1617 he was already the most influential of the progressive leaders of the Virginia Company, its acting though not yet its nominal head, and in 1619 he was elected governor of the Company. Brewster's fellow-secretary under Davison was a chosen friend of Sandys, and, in view of both these connections, we may consider it almost certain that the two were not strangers. To Sir Edwin Sandys was due much of the new interest in Virginia. He and his group seem to have been already striving to shape the colony into a liberal state.

[Sidenote: Failure to secure formal toleration.]

[Sidenote: Bacon's Advice to Villiers.]

[Sidenote: Archdale's Carolina, 26.]

To meet the views of the Leyden people, Sandys endeavored by the intervention of a more acceptable courtier to gain assurance from the king, under the broad seal, that their religion should be tolerated if they migrated to Virginia. But James's peculiar conscience recoiled from this. He intimated that he would wink at their practices but he would not tolerate them by public act. And, indeed, the Pilgrims reflected afterward that "a seale as broad as the house flore would not serve the turne" of holding James to his promise. At the king's suggestion the archbishops were applied to, but neither would they formally approve such an arrangement. Nor can one wonder at their unwillingness, since the most profound, liberal, and far-seeing thinker of that age, Lord Bacon himself, was so far subject to the prejudices of his time that he could protest against allowing heretics to settle a colony, and could support his position by a mystical argument fit to be advanced by the most fantastic theologian. "It will make schism and rent in Christ's coat, which must be seamless," he says. He even goes so far as to group Separatists with outlaws and criminals, and to advise that if such should transplant themselves to the colonies they should be "sent for back upon the first notice," for "such persons are not fit to lay the foundation of a new colony." Much more fit than is a speculative philosopher to draw the lines on which practical undertakings are to be carried forward. The transplanting of English speech and institutions to America would have languished as French colonization did, if none but orthodox settlers had been allowed to fell trees and build cabins in the forest. Ever since the age of stone hatchets colony planters have been drawn from the ranks of the uneasy. An early Quaker governor of South Carolina puts the matter less elegantly but more justly than Bacon when he says: "It is stupendious to consider, how passionate and preposterous zeal, not only vails but stupefies oftentimes the Rational Powers: For cannot Dissenters kill Wolves and Bears as well as Churchmen?"

VII.

[Sidenote: Relations with the Virginia Company.]

[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co., Feb. 2, 1620.]

[Sidenote: Winslow's Briefe Narration, Young, 383.]

The liberal and practical mind of Sir Edwin Sandys harbored none of the scruples of Bacon, and his more wholesome conscience knew nothing of the fine distinctions of James and the archbishops between formal toleration and a mere winking at irregularities. He embraced the cause of the Pilgrims and became their steadfast friend, passing through the Virginia Company successively two charters in their behalf, and the general order which allowed the leaders of "particular plantations"--that is, of such plantations as the Leyden people and others at that time proposed to make--to associate the sober and discreet of the plantation with them to make laws, orders, and constitutions not repugnant to the laws of England. This was a wide door opening toward democratic government. The patent given to the Pilgrims was also a liberal one, and it was even proposed to put into their hands a large sum of money contributed anonymously for the education of Indian children, but to this it was objected that the newcomers would lack the confidence of the savages. One of the Virginia Company, possibly Sandys himself, lent to the Leyden people three hundred pounds without interest for three years. When we consider that the Pilgrims had to pay in their first year of settlement thirty and even fifty per cent, interest on their debts, and that this three hundred pounds, the use of which they received without interest, would be equal in purchasing power to five or six thousand dollars of our money, we may readily believe that this loan and the semi-independence offered them under their "large patent" from the company, were the considerations that decided them in favor of emigration after the English Government had refused a guarantee of toleration, and the Dutch Government had declined to assure them of protection against England.

[Sidenote: Authors of the Plymouth Government.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

That group of liberal English statesmen who were charged with keeping "a school of sedition" in the courts of the Virginian Company founded the two centers of liberal institutions in America. The Earl of Southampton, the Ferrars, Sir John Danvers, and above all and more than all, Sir Edwin Sandys, were the fathers of representative government in New England by the charter of February 2, 1620, as they had been of representative government in Virginia by the charter of November 13, 1618. When the Pilgrims found themselves, upon landing, too far north to use their "large patent" from the Virginia Company, they organized a government on the lines laid down in the general order of the company. The government established by them in their famous Compact was precisely the provisional government which the Virginia Company in the preceding February had given them liberty to found "till a form of government be here settled for them." Under this compact they proceeded to confirm the election of the governor, already chosen under the authority derived from the charter, now invalid.

[Sidenote: Charges against Sandys.]

[Sidenote: Duke of Manchester, papers, Royal Hist. MSS. Comm. viii, II, 45.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

The enemies of Sir Edwin Sandys did not fail to make use of his friendship for the Leyden people to do him injury. It was afterward charged that he was opposed to monarchical government, and that he had moved the Archbishop of Canterbury "to give leave to the Brownists and Separatists to go to Virginia, and designed to make a free popular state there, and himself and his assured friends were to be the leaders." That Sandys thought of emigration is hardly probable, but he succeeded in establishing two popular governments in America which propagated themselves beyond all that he could have hoped to achieve.

VIII.

[Sidenote: The farewell to Europe.]

[Sidenote: Plimoth Plantation, 59.]

"Small things," wrote Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln in the first months of the Massachusetts settlement--"small things in the beginning of natural or politic bodies are as remarkable as greater in bodies full grown." The obscure events we have recited above are capital because they had a deciding influence on the fate of the Pilgrim settlement. It is not within our purpose to tell over again the pathetic story of that brave departure of the younger and stronger of the Pilgrims from Leyden to make the first break into the wilderness, but courage and devotion to an idea are not common; courage and devotion that bring at last important results are so rare that the student of history, however little disposed to indulge sentiment, turns in spite of himself to that last all-night meeting in Pastor Robinson's large house in the Belfry Lane at Leyden. "So," says Bradford, as if penning a new holy scripture, "they lefte that goodly and pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place near 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie and quieted their spirits." Nor is it easy to pass over the solemn parting on the quay at Delft Haven, where, as the time of the tide forced the final tearful separation, while even the Dutch spectators wept in sympathy, the voice of the beloved Robinson in a final prayer was heard and the whole company fell upon their knees together for the last time.

[Sidenote: Robinson's influence.]

[Sidenote: Winslow's Briefe Narration, Young, 397.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

These things hardly pertain, perhaps, to a history of life such as this. It is with the influences that are to mold the new life while it is plastic that we are concerned. Chief of these is Robinson himself, a Moses who was never to see, even from a mountain top, the Canaan to which he had now led his people. He must stay behind with the larger half of the church. Rising to the occasion, his last words to this little company are worthy his magnanimous soul. He eloquently charged them "before God and his blessed angels to follow him no further than he followed Christ." ... He was confident "the Lord had more truth and light to break forth out of his holy word." In whatever sense we take them these were marvelous words in the seventeenth century. Robinson understood the progressive nature of truth as apprehended by the human mind in a way that makes him seem singularly modern. In the same address he declared it "not possible that ... full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once." He bade them not to affect separation from the Puritans in the Church of England, but "rather to study union than division."

Admirable man! Free from pettiness and egotism. Fortunate man, who, working in one of the obscurest and dustiest corners of this noisy and self-seeking world, succeeded in training and sending out a company that diffused his spirit and teachings into the institutions and thoughts of a great people!

IX.

[Sidenote: The landing.]

[Sidenote: Morton's Memorial, 6th edition, p. 22, note.]

[Sidenote: Compare Asher's History of W. I. Company in Bibl. Essay.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

On a chain of slender accidents hung the existence of New England. Had the claims of Guiana prevailed, had the tempting offers of the Dutch changed the allegiance of the Robinsonian Independents, had the Mayflower reached her destination in what is now New Jersey, the current of American history would not have flowed as it has. A South American New England, a Dutch New England, or a non-peninsular community of English Puritans west of the Hudson with good wheat fields and no fisheries or foreign trade, would have been different in destiny from what we call New England, and its influence on events and national character could not have been the same. It will always remain doubtful whether or not Jones, the captain of the Mayflower, was bribed by the Dutch, as the Plymouth people came to believe. Nothing could be more probable in view of the general bad character of the seamen of that time and the eagerness of one political party in Holland to secure a foothold for the Dutch in America; but whether Jones, who seems to have borne a bad reputation, was bribed, or, as he pretended, became entangled in the shoals of Cape Cod and turned back in real despair of finding his way, is of no moment. He turned back and came to anchor in Provincetown Harbor. Here the threats of the brutal seamen, unwilling to go farther, and the clamor of the overcrowded and sea-weary passengers did the rest. To continue longer closely cabined in the little ship was misery and perhaps death. Here was land, and that was enough. And so, after exploration of the whole coast of Cape Cod Bay, the place already named Plymouth on John Smith's map was selected for a settlement. Here the landing was made on the 10th of November, O.S., 1620.

[Sidenote: Elements of New England.]

Camden has preserved to us an old English saying accepted in the days of the Pilgrims, to the effect that "a barren country is a great whet to the industry of a people." It was the wedding of an austere creed to an austere soil under an austere sky that gave the people of New England their marked character, and the severe economic conditions imposed by the soil and climate were even more potent than Puritanism in producing the traits that go to make up the New England of history.

X.

[Sidenote: Earlier attempts to colonize New England.]

The unwise management that ruined nearly all projects for colonization in that age and that produced such disasters in Virginia, had defeated every earlier attempt to plant English people on the New England coast. Gosnold had taken a colony to Elizabeth Island in Buzzard's Bay in 1602, but the men went back in the ship in order to share the profit of a cargo of sassafras. Captain George Popham was the head of a party that undertook to colonize the coast of Maine in 1607, but having suffered "extreme extremities" during the winter, the colonists returned the following year. In 1615 Captain John Smith himself set out with sixteen men, only to be taken by a French privateer. These and other attempts ending in failure, and many disastrous trading voyages, led to a belief that the Indian conjurers, who were known to be the devil's own, had laid a spell on the northern coast to keep the white people away. This enchanted land might long have lain waste if Captain Jones of the Mayflower, sailing to Hudson River or the region south of it, had not run foul of the shoals of Cape Cod.

XI.

[Sidenote: Sufferings at Plymouth.]

The Pilgrims suffered, like their predecessors, from the prevailing unskillfulness in colony-planting. They had escaped from the horrors of the Mayflower, but how much better was the wild land than the wild sea; the rude, overcrowded forest cabins than the too populous ship? "All things stared upon them with a weather-beaten face," says Bradford. The horrors of the first winter in Virginia were repeated; here, as at Jamestown, nearly all were ill at once, and nearly half of the people died before the coming of spring. The same system of partnership with mercenary shareholders or "adventurers" in England that had brought disaster in Virginia was tried with similar results at Plymouth, and a similar attempt at communism in labor and supply was made, this time under the most favorable conditions, among a people conscientious and bound together by strong religious enthusiasm. It resulted, as such sinking of personal interest must ever result, in dissensions and insubordination, in unthrift and famine.

[Sidenote: Bradford.]

The colony was saved from the prolonged misery that makes the early history of Virginia horrible by the wise head and strong hand of its leader. William Bradford, who had been chosen governor on the death of Carver, a few months after the arrival at Plymouth, had been a youth but eighteen years old when he fled with the rest of the Scrooby church to Holland. He was bred to husbandry and had inherited some property. In Holland he became a silk worker and on attaining his majority set up for himself in that trade. He was still a young man when first chosen governor of the little colony, and he ruled New Plymouth almost continuously till his death--that is, for about thirty-seven years. He was of a magnanimous temper, resolute but patient, devotedly religious, but neither intolerant nor austere. He had a genius for quaintly vivid expression in writing that marked him as a man endowed with the literary gift, which comes as Heaven pleases where one would least look for it.

XII.

[Sidenote: Abolition of communism.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

After two years of labor in common had brought the colony more than once to the verge of ruin, Bradford had the courage and wisdom to cut the knot he could not untie. During the scarce springtime of 1623, he assigned all the detached persons in the colony to live with families, and then temporarily divided the ancient Indian field on which the settlement had been made among the several families in proportion to their number, leaving every household to shift for itself or suffer want. "Any general want or suffering hath not been among them since to this day," he writes years afterward. The assignment was a revolutionary stroke, in violation of the contract with the shareholders, and contrary to their wishes. But Bradford saw that it was a life-and-death necessity to be rid of the pernicious system, even at the cost of cutting off all support from England. In his history he draws a very clear picture of the evils of communism as he had observed them.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Significance of Plymouth.]

Why should the historian linger thus over the story of this last surviving remnant of the "Brownists"? Why have we dwelt upon the little settlement that was never very flourishing, that consisted at its best of only a few thousand peaceful and agricultural people, and that after seventy years was merged politically in its more vigorous neighbor the colony of Massachusetts Bay? Historical importance does not depend on population. Plymouth was the second step in the founding of a great nation. When Bradford and the other leaders had at last successfully extricated the little settlement from its economical difficulties, it became the sure forerunner of a greater Puritan migration. This tiny free state on the margin of a wilderness continent, like a distant glimmering pharos, showed the persecuted Puritans in England the fare-way to a harbor.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 162.]

Sir John Harington says: "The bishops came to the Kynge aboute the petition of the puritans; I was by, and heard much dyscourse. The Kynge talked muche Latin, and disputed wyth Dr. Reynoldes, at Hampton, but he rather usede upbraidinges than argumente; and tolde the petitioners that they wanted to strip Christe againe, and bid them awaie with their snivellinge: moreover, he wishede those who woud take away the surplice mighte want linen for their own breech. The bishops seemed much pleased and said his Majestie spoke by the power of inspiration. I wist not what they mean; but the spirit was rather foule mouthede." Nugæ Antiquæ, i, 181, 182. James took pains to put an example of his bad taste on paper. In a letter on the subject he brags in these words: "We haue kept suche a reuell with the Puritainis heir these two dayes as was neuer harde the lyke, quhaire I haue pepperid thaime as soundlie as ye haue done the papists thaire.... I was forcid at the last to saye unto thaime, that if any of thaim hadde bene in a colledge disputing with their skollairs, if any of their disciples had ansoured thaim in that sorte they wolde haue fetched him up in place of a replye, and so shoulde the rodde haue plyed upon the poore boyes buttokis." Ellis Letters, Third Series, iv, 162. The principal authorities on the Hampton Court Conference are, first, "The Svmme and Svbstance of the Conference, which it pleased his excellent Majestie to have," etc., "Contracted by William Barlovv, ... Deane of Chester"; second, Dr. Montague's letter to his mother, in Winwood's Memorials, ii, 13-15; third, the letter of Patrick Galloway to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, in Calderwood, vi, 241, 242; and, fourth, a letter from Tobie Mathew, Bishop of Durham, to Hutton, Archbishop of York, in Strype's Whitgift appendix, xlv. Compare Nugæ Antiquæ, 181, 182, and the king's letter to Blake, in Ellis's Letters, third series, iv, 161, which are both cited above. Mr. Gardiner has shown (History of England, i, 159) that this letter is addressed to Northampton. There are several documents relating to the conference among the state papers calendared by Mrs. Greene under dates in January, 1604. Of the vigorous action taken against the Puritans after the conference, some notion may be formed by the letter of protest from the aged Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, to Lord Cranborne, in Lodge's Illustrations of British History, iii, 115, and Cranborne's reply, ibid., 125.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 168.]

Stith has not the weight of an original authority, but he is justly famous for accuracy in following his authorities, and he had access to many papers relating to the history of Virginia which are now lost. Under the year 1608 he says: "Doctor Whitgift, Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, ... having died four Years before this, was succeeded to that high Preferment by Dr. Richard Bancroft.... He had very high Notions with Relation to the Government of both Church and State; and was accordingly a great Stickler for, and Promoter of, the King's absolute Power, and failed not to take all Occasions, to oblige the Puritans to conform to the Church of England. This Prelate's Harshness and Warmth caused many of that People to take the Resolution this Year of settling themselves in Virginia, and some were actually come off for that Purpose. But the Arch-bishop, finding that they were preparing in great Numbers to depart, obtained a Proclamation from the King, forbidding any to go, without his Majesty's express Leave." History of Virginia, 1747, p. 76.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 168.]

For Whitaker's filiation, Neill's Virginia Company, 78. Whitaker's Good Newes from Virginia is no doubt intended by the entry in the inventory of Brewster's goods, "Newes from Virginia." I know no other book with such a title. That Alexander Whitaker was himself touched with Puritanism, or at least was not unwilling to have Puritan ministers for colleagues, is rendered pretty certain from passages in his letters. For instance, he writes to Crashaw from Jamestown, August 9, 1611, desiring that young and "godly" ministers should come, and adds, "We have noe need either of ceremonies or bad livers." British Museum, Additional MSS., 21,993. (The letter is printed in Browne's Genesis, 499, 500.) In a letter given in Purchas and in Neill, 95, dated June 18, 1614, he says that neither subscription nor the surplice are spoken of in Virginia. It has escaped the notice of church historians that Whitaker's semi-Puritanism seems to have left traces for many years on the character and usage of the Virginia church. The Rev. Hugh Jones writes as late as 1724 in his Present State of Virginia, p. 68, that surplices were only then "beginning to be brought in Fashion," and that the people in some parishes received the Lord's Supper sitting.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 173.]

The late Dr. Neill was the first, I believe, to call attention to this fact, though he did not state it quite so strongly as I have put it in the text. It is worth while transferring Neill's remarks from the New England Genealogical Register, vol. XXX, 412, 413: "The action of the passengers of the Mayflower in forming a social compact before landing at Plymouth Rock seems to have been in strict accordance with the policy of the London Company, under whose patent the ship sailed. On June 9, 1619, O.S., John Whincop's patent was duly sealed by the Company, but this which had cost the Puritans so much labor and money was not used. Several months after, the Leyden people became interested in a new project. On February 2, 1619-'20, at a meeting at the house of Sir Edwin Sandys in Aldersgate, he stated to the Company that a grant had been made to John Peirce and his associates. At the same quarterly meeting it was expressly ordered that the leaders of particular plantations, associating unto them divers of the gravest and discreetest of their companies, shall have liberty to make orders, ordinances, and constitutions for the better ordering and directing of their business and servants, provided they be not repugnant to the laws of England." Bradford, in his Plimouth Plantation, 90, says they "chose or rather confirmed Mr. John Carver, ... their Governour for that year"--that is, for 1620. Mr. Deane, the editor of Bradford, has lost the force of this by misunderstanding a statement in Mourt's Relation, so called. See Deane's note, page 99, of Bradford. The statement in Mourt is under date of March 23d. I quote from the reprint in Young, 196, 197: "and did likewise choose our governor for this present year, which was Master John Carver," etc. Young applies Bradford's words, "or rather confirmed," to this event, and Deane also supposes that Bradford confuses two elections. Carver was no doubt chosen in England or Holland under authority of the charter to serve for the calendar year, and confirmed or rechosen after the Compact was signed. What took place on the 23d of March was that a governor was elected for the year 1621, which, according to the calendar of that time, began on the 25th of March. For the next year they chose Carver, who was already "governor for this present year," and whose first term was about to expire. Both Deane and Young failed to perceive the pregnant fact that Carver was governor during the voyage, and so lost the force of the words "or rather confirmed." Bradford, in that portion of his History of Plimouth Plantation which relates to this period, gives several letters illustrating the negotiations of the Pilgrims with the Virginia Company. The MS. Records of the Company in the Library of Congress, under dates of May 26 and June 9, 1619, and February 19, 1620 (1619 O.S.), contain the transactions relating to the Whincop Charter, which was not used, on account of Whincop's death, and the Pierce Charter, which the Pilgrims took with them.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 174.]

The charge against Sandys is in the Duke of Manchester's papers, Royal Historical MS. Commission viii, II, 45. It is remarkable that the dominant liberal faction in the Virginia Company is here accused of seeking to do what the Massachusetts Company afterward did--to wit, to found a popular American government by virtue of powers conferred in a charter. That liberal government in New England had its rise in the arrangements made with the London or Virginia Company before sailing, and not, as poets, painters, and orators have it, in the cabin of the Mayflower, is sufficiently attested in a bit of evidence, conspicuous enough, but usually overlooked. Robinson's farewell letter to the whole company, which reached them in England, is in Bradford, 64-67, and in Mourt's Relation. It has several significant allusions to the form of government already planned. "And lastly, your intended course of civill communitie will minister continuall occasion of offence." The allusion here seems to be to the joint-stock and communistic system of labor and living proposed. In another paragraph the allusion is to the system of government: "Whereas, you are become a body politik, using amongst your selves civill governmente, and are not furnished with any persons of spetiall emencie above the rest, to be chosen by you into office of governmente," etc., "you are at present to have only them for your ordinarie governours, which your selves shall make choyse of for that worke." That the government under the Virginia Company was to be democratic is manifest. The compact was a means of giving it the sanction of consent where the patent and the general order did not avail for that purpose.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 176.]

Winslow's Briefe Narration appended to his Hypocrisie Vnmasked is the only authority for Robinson's address. Dr. H. M. Dexter has with characteristic wealth of learning and ingenuity sought to diminish the force of these generous words of Robinson in his Congregationalism, 403 and ff. But the note struck in this farewell address was familiar to the later followers of Robinson's form of Independency. Five of the ministers who went to Holland in 1637 and founded churches, published in 1643 a tract called An Apologeticall Narrative Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament. By Thomas Goodwin, Phillip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jer. Borroughs, William Bridge. London, 1643. From the copy in the British Museum I quote: "A second principle we carryed along with us in all our resolutions was, Not to make our present judgment and practice a binding law unto ourselves for the future which we in like manner made continuall profession of upon all occasions." On page 22 Robinson's words are almost repeated in the phrase "they coming new out of popery ... might not be perfect the first day." Robinson's early colleague, Smyth, the unpractical, much-defamed, but saintly "Anabaptist," says in a tract published after his death, "I continually search after the truth." Robinson wrote a reply to a portion of this tract. See Barclay's Inner Life, appendix to Chapter V, where the tract is given. This holding of their opinions in a state of flux, this liberal expectancy of a further evolution of opinion, was a trait to be admired in the early Separatists in an age when modesty in dogmatic statement was exceedingly rare.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 177.]

Neill, in the Historical Magazine for January, 1869, and the New England Genealogical Register, 1874, identifies the Mayflower captain with Jones of the Discovery, who was accounted in Virginia "dishonest." But honest seamen were few in that half-piratical age. That he was hired by the Dutch to take the Pilgrims elsewhere than to Hudson River is charged in Morton's Memorial, and is not in itself unlikely. But the embarrassments of Cape Cod shoals were very real; a trading ship sent out by the Pilgrims after their settlement, failed to find a way round the cape.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 177.]

Early New England writers were not content with giving the Pilgrims the honor due to them. Hutchinson asserts that the Virginia Colony had virtually failed, and that the Pilgrim settlement was the means of reviving it. This has been often repeated on no other authority than that of Hutchinson, who wrote nearly a century and a half after the event. The list of patents for plantations in Virginia as given by Purchas, in which appears that of Master "Wincop," under which the Pilgrims proposed to plant, is a sufficient proof that Virginia was not languishing. "These patentees," says Purchas, "have undertaken to transport to Virginia a great multitude of people and store of cattle." Virginia had reached the greatest prosperity it attained before the dissolution of the company, in precisely the years in which the slender Pilgrim Colony was preparing. It is quite possible to honor the Pilgrims without reversing the order of cause and effect.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 181.]

Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, 135, 136: "The experience that was had in this commone course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanitie of that conceite of Platos and other ancients, applauded by some of later times--that the taking away of propertie, and bringing in communitie into a comone wealth, would make them happy and florishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this communitie (so fare as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment that would have been to their benefite and comforte. For the yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour and service did repine that they should spend their time and streingth to worke for other mens wives and children with out any recompence. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in devission of victails and cloaths, then he that was weake and not able to doe a quarter the other could; this was thought injuestice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalised in labours, and victails, cloaths, &c., with the meaner and yonger sorte, thought it some indignite and disrespect unto them. And for mens wives to be commanded to doe servise for other men, as dresing their meate, washing their cloaths, &c., they deemd it a kind of slaverie, neither could many husbands well brooke it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to doe alike, they thought them selves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so if it did not cut of those relations that God hath set amongest men yet it did much diminish and take of the mutuall respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have bene worse if they had been men of another condition."

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

_THE GREAT PURITAN EXODUS._

I.

[Sidenote: Result of the Pilgrim settlement.]

Men who undertake a great enterprise rarely find their anticipations fulfilled; they are fortunate if their general aim is reached at last in any way. The Pilgrims had migrated, hoping to be "stepping-stones to others," as they phrased it. They thought that many like-minded in matters of religion would come to them out of England, but the Separatist movement had been worn out by persecution. There were few open dissenters left, and the Pilgrims, by their long exile, had lost all close relations with their own country. Among those that came to Plymouth from England were some whose coming tended to dilute the religious life and lower the moral standards of the colony. The fervor of the Pilgrims themselves abated something of its intensity in the preoccupations incident to pioneer life. The hope of expanding their religious organization by the rapid growth of the colony was not fulfilled; discontented Puritans were not eager to settle under the government of Separatists, and ten years after their migration the Plymouth colony contained little more than three hundred people.

[Sidenote: The religious motive.]

None the less the hope of the Pilgrims was realized; they became stepping-stones to thousands of others. Captain John Smith laughed at the "humorous ignorances" of these "Brownist" settlers, but, humorous or not, ignorant or not, the "Brownists" remained on the coast while other emigrants retreated. In spite of their terrible suffering none of the Pilgrims went back. This is the capital fact in their history. A new force had been introduced into colonization. Henceforth persecuted or discontented religionists, prompted by a motive vastly more strenuous and enduring than cupidity, were to bear the main brunt of breaking a way into the wilderness.

[Sidenote: Commercial settlements.]

[Sidenote: John White's The Planter's Plea, in Young's Chronicles of Mass.]

The first effect of the slender success at Plymouth was to stimulate speculative and merely adventurous migration. From 1607 until the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 no English colony had landed on the northern coast; but after the Pilgrims came, fish-drying and fur-buying stations began to appear on the banks of the Piscataqua and the coast eastward in 1622 and 1623. These tiny settlements were germs of New Hampshire and Maine, the only New England plantations begun without any admixture of religious motives. A commercial colony was tried in Massachusetts Bay as early as 1622, but it failed. There were other like attempts. In 1624 some men of Dorchester, headed by John White, the "Patriarch" Puritan clergyman, sent out a colony to Cape Ann. The members of this company were to grow maize to supply fishing ships, and in the season the same men were to lend a hand on board the ships, which would thus be saved the necessity for carrying double crews. But this plausible scheme proved a case of seeking strawberries in the sea and red herrings in the wood. Farmers were but lubbers at codfishing, and salt-water fishermen were clumsy enough in the cornfield. Losses of several sorts forced the Dorchester Company to dissolve. Four members of their futile colony, encouraged by a message from White, remained on Cape Ann. Removing to the present site of Salem, they waited at the risk of their lives for the coming of a new colony from England.

[Sidenote: Individual settlers.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

Solitary adventurers of the sort known on nearly every frontier were presently to be found in several places. The scholarly recluse was represented by Blackstone, who had selected for his secluded abode a spot convenient to a spring of good water where the town of Boston was afterward planted; the inevitable Scotch adventurer was on an island in Boston Harbor; Samuel Maverick, a pattern of frontier hospitality and generosity, took up his abode on Noddle's Island; while the rollicking and scoffing libertine was found in Thomas Morton, who with some rebellious bond servants got possession of a fortified house in what is now Braintree. Here Morton welcomed renegade servants from Plymouth and elsewhere. He wrote ribald verses which he posted on his Maypole, and devised May-dances in which the saturnine Indian women participated. He broke all the commandments with delight, carried on a profitable trade in selling firearms to the savages in defiance of royal proclamations, and wrought whatever other deviltry came within his reach, until his neighbors could no longer endure the proximity of so dangerous a firebrand. Little Captain Standish, whom Morton derisively dubbed "Captain Shrimp," descended on this kingdom of misrule at last and broke up the perpetual carnival, sending Morton to England.

The settlement of New England was thus beginning sporadically and slowly. If the Massachusetts Puritans had not come, these feeble and scattered plantations might have grown into colonies after a long time, as such beginnings did in New Hampshire and Maine, and later in North Carolina, but having no strong neighbor to support them, it is likely that they would all have been driven away or annihilated by some inevitable collision with the Indians.

II.

[Sidenote: Puritanism at the accession of Charles I.]

English Puritanism throughout the reign of James I had been the party of strict morals, of austere and Pharisaic scrupulosity, of rigid Sabbath observance, and of Calvinistic dogmatism. During that reign it had passed through its last transformation in becoming a political party--the party of anti-Catholic politics at home and abroad. Because Parliament was on its side, the mere course of events had made the Puritan party favor the predominance of Parliament, and this brought it to represent liberalism in politics. By his unconcealed partisanship, James had contrived to make the Puritans a permanent opposition suspected of disliking monarchy itself. Charles I was even more the antagonist of Puritanism than James.

[Sidenote: Later Puritanism conservative.]

In one other respect the position of Puritanism had been gradually changed by mere parallax. In Elizabeth's reign it had been the party of innovation. It was no longer the party of change in religion when Charles came to the throne. The adoption of the Arminian system of doctrine by many of the High-churchmen, and the reactionary innovations now proposed by ecclesiastics like Laud, had left Puritanism to stand for Protestant conservatism. It was immeasurably the gainer with the mass of slow-moving people by this change of relative position. The parliamentary struggle with James and Charles added to the religious Puritans a numerous body of political Puritans who, without much care about religion, were fain to ally their political discontent with the discontent of those who resisted ecclesiastical retrogression. This compact party, powerful after all its defeats, was bound by its position to cherish every aspiration for the improvement of morals, every indignant movement for the suppression of abuses, and it became the ally of every popular resentment against royal absolutism or episcopal encroachment, and the advocate, almost to fanaticism, of an anti-Spanish foreign policy, and a domestic policy in which repression and persecution of Roman Catholics held first place.

III.

[Sidenote: Rise of Laud.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

But the king and the High-churchmen were the party in possession. Buckingham, in the first years of Charles, was more than ever dominant at court, and Buckingham's favorite, just rising above the horizon, was Dr. Laud, Bishop of St. Davids at the death of James, and soon afterward translated to Bath and Wells and then to London. It soon came to be understood that he was only waiting for the death of his opponent, Archbishop Abbott, to take the primacy, much of the power of which he had already contrived to grasp. On the death of Buckingham, Laud succeeded him as chief favorite at court. The one great and real service which this able and indefatigable divine rendered the world is the last he would have chosen. He was the main spur to the settlement of Puritan colonies in New England.

[Sidenote: Character of Laud.]

[Sidenote: Letter to Selden in Chalmers, art. Laud.]

Do our best, we moderns shall hardly avoid injustice in our opinion of Laud. The changes of time and the advance of ideas have rendered a sympathetic judgment of him difficult. Ecclesiastic above all, he was not, like Whitgift and Bancroft, a Protestant High-churchman. He sought to make the English church Catholic and mediæval, yet he would on no account attach it to Rome. Like Whitgift, he made the church dependent on royal authority, and in this he was far removed from the earlier churchmen. There was nothing spiritual in his nature; his personal devotion had neither agony nor exaltation. He had none of the mediæval enthusiasm that prompted the vigils of his contemporary, Nicholas Ferrar, for example, and elevated the master of Little Gidding to a saintship, amiable and touching. Notwithstanding the energy of Laud's devotion, his nature was as shallow and objective as it was sincere. It has been remarked that when Laud spoke of the beauty of holiness he meant no more than decorum in public worship, the beauty of a well-ordered church and of proper intonation and genuflexion. He seemed to touch a modern note when he proposed to suppress the futile debate between Calvinists and Arminians because it tended to disturb Christian charity; but Laud's Christian charity, like his holiness, was purely external; it was merely quiet submission to one ritual and one form of discipline. His relentless, vindictive, and even cruel temper toward opponents showed him incapable of conceiving of charity in any spiritual sense. He disliked controversy because it put obstacles in the way of uniformity, and he had no taste for speculative debate because it tended to undermine authority. His intellect was utterly practical and phenomenally acute. It was incredibly energetic, and its energy was intensified by its narrowness. His attachment to the church had no relation to the beneficent utilities of the church. The church was a fetich for which he was ready to die without a murmur. In his zeal he was reckless of personal danger and sometimes unmindful of the moral complexion of his actions. His egotism was so interblended with his zeal that he could not separate one from the other, nor can the student of his character. A disservice to him was an affront to Almighty God. The very honesty of such a man is pernicious; a little duplicity might have softened the outward manifestations of his hard nature. Unhappily, there was not even indolence or self-indulgence to moderate his all but superhuman activity, which pushed his domination to its possibilities, and, with a vigilance aspiring to omniscience, penetrated to the minutest details in the administration of church and state. He even filed papers giving the elements of the debates on good works as an evidence of sanctification carried on between Hooker and Cotton in the cabin meeting-houses of New England. For the rest he presents the paradoxes one expects in so marked a character. While he had no taste for the credulous dogmatism of his time, he showed a certain relish for superstitions in recording dreams and omens, yet he had none of the timidity of superstition. He was, moreover, fearless in peril, and he faced unpopularity without flinching. Stubborn and inflexible with the clergy and the populace, obdurate and pitiless with those who had offended him or his king or his church, he was flexible and insinuating in his relations with those in power. His unworthy yielding to his early patron, the Earl of Devonshire, in a matter which concerned his ecclesiastical conscience, gave him a bitter and lifelong repentance. His complacence to Buckingham, and his servile devotion to Charles, seem a little despicable. He was even willing at the last to make terms with Parliament, when it became plain that Parliament was the new master. Though obsequious, he was the farthest possible from a coward, and he accepted death on the scaffold with the serene composure of a martyr.

IV.

[Sidenote: Political conditions promote emigration.]

[Sidenote: Gorges's Briefe Narration.]

The great migration to New England set in soon after the beginning of Laud's ascendency in the ecclesiastical government of England. It waned as he declined, and ceased forever with his fall. There is a witty justness in the phrase by which a colonial historian dubs Laud "the father of New England." Other archbishops had contented themselves with crushing the Separatists, but, with characteristic boldness and logical thoroughness, Laud struck at the powerful Puritan party which had contrived for more than half a century to remain in the Church of England while protesting against the discipline and service of the church. The arbitrary government of the new king, the dissolution of Parliament, and the imprisonment of liberal leaders cut off hope of securing church reform or a relaxation of oppressive laws. High-church pulpits resounded with arguments in favor of the king's absolute authority and the duty of unquestioning obedience, while the declared principles of the king and his court left the property, liberty, and life of the subject exposed to the rapacity or the vindictiveness of those in power. In view of these things, some of the Puritans began to think the American wilderness a better place of residence than England.

V.

[Sidenote: Religious motives for Puritan emigration.]

The state of the church was even more a reason for removal than the oppressions of the government. Persecution had failed to drive Puritan ministers or their followers into what they deemed the capital sin of schism. They hated the domination of the bishops, communion with the ungodly, and the absence of a rigid discipline. But they had been sustained through long years of waiting by the hope of delivering the church from those who oppressed and defiled her. They proposed, whenever they could gain power, to winnow the chaff from the wheat, and they probably destined the chaff to swift destruction. But the hope of seeing a church without spot or wrinkle, prayer book or bishop, died under the reactionary policy of Buckingham and Laud, and many came to look with favor on a project whose full import was only whispered in the ear, to found in the wilds of America a "particular church," as they phrased it--a new church with a right of priority in a new land and backed by the sanction of the government of the country. It was no modern generalized love of liberty, civil or religious, but a strenuous desire to find a place where they might make real their ideal of church organization that brought the Puritans out of their comfortable nests in England to dwell in poor cabins in a wilderness. It is a motive for braving dangers by sea and land hard of comprehension in our Sadducean age.

[Sidenote: Fear of judgments.]

[Sidenote: Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 390, 313.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

There was one other consideration still more difficult for men of our day to understand. Political and military reverses had apparently well-nigh wrecked Protestantism on the Continent. Many Protestants in the Palatinate and elsewhere were making peace by becoming Roman Catholics. "All other churches of Europe are brought to desolation, & our sinnes, for which the Lord beginnes allreaddy to frowne upon us & to cutte us short, doe threatne evill times to be comminge upon us." These words are set down in the Reasons for New England as the second consideration. In another part of the same paper it is urged that the "woefull spectacle" of the ruin of "Churches beyound the Seas," "may teach us more wisdome to avoide the Plauge when it is foreseene & not to tarry as they did till it overtake us." The dominance of Old Testament ideas is easily seen here. But this fleeing from judgments that were to fall not on the lives or possessions of men, but on the churches themselves--judgments of a spiritual nature, apprehended only by inference--was a refinement of Hebraism never known to the Hebrews. The delusion that Laud meant to hand over the English church bound hand and foot to Rome may have made such judgments seem visibly imminent.

VI.

[Sidenote: Rise of the Massachusetts Company.]

[Sidenote: Compare The Planter's Plea.]

The project for a Puritan colony languished at first on account of the failure of the semi-Puritan, semi-commercial Dorchester farming and fishing colony on Cape Ann; but White of Dorchester continued to agitate the planting of a colony. He had, no doubt, efficient help in the proceedings against the Puritan clergy. From Dorchester the plan was carried to London, where it soon became, in the phrase of that time, "vulgar," or, as we should say, popular. Its countenance to the world, and especially toward the government, was that of a commercial venture like the planting of Virginia, but in its heart it was a religious enterprise. In March, 1628, the Council for New England gave to the Massachusetts projectors a patent for lands extending from the Merrimack to the Charles and three miles beyond each river. The western boundary of this tract was the Pacific Ocean, for holders of grants could afford to be generous in giving away the interior of an unexplored continent about which nothing was known but that it abounded in savages.

VII.

[Sidenote: Leadership and character of Endecott.]

[Sidenote: 1628.]

[Sidenote: Bentley's Description of Salem.]

[Sidenote: Eliot's Biography, 195.]

In June a small colony was sent to Massachusetts under John Endecott. The next year another company of emigrants was added. Endecott, who was one of the patentees, loved a bold enterprise, and readily consented to take charge of the forerunners of the colony. He lacked the moderation and saneness needed in a leader, and his long career in connection with Massachusetts was marked from the beginning by mistakes born of a rash temper and impulsive enthusiasm. Two of the gentlemen emigrants who had been named by the company in London as members of the local Council were not willing to go to the unexpected lengths Endecott favored in the organization of the Salem church, though they were probably Puritans of a moderate type. They held a separate service with a small company, using the prayer book. Endecott appears to have made no effort at conciliation; he promptly shipped John and Samuel Browne, pack and prayer book, back to England. This was precisely the course that even Lord Bacon advised in the treatment of schismatics who should contrive to gain access to a colony, and there is no occasion for surprise that a quixotic enthusiast like Endecott did not hold broader views than those of a philosopher of the same period. But Endecott's rash action endangered the whole enterprise, which required at this stage the extreme of prudence. The alarmed managers in England contrived to settle with the Brownes in private, and the affair had no other result than to ruin Endecott's reputation for prudence. Endecott, however, went on fighting the Lord's battles against the Apollyons of his fancy, regardless of results. Soon after his arrival he marched to the den of Morton, the profligate master of "Merrymount." In the absence of Morton he hewed down the profane Maypole in God's name, and solemnly dubbed the place Mount Dagon, in memory of the Philistine idol that fell down before the ark of the Lord. At a later period he cut one arm of the cross out of the English colors of the Salem trainband, in order to convert the Union Jack to Protestantism. One of the many manifestations of his pragmatical conscience was his Tartuffian protection of modesty by insisting that the women of Salem should keep their faces veiled at church. He was also a leader in the crusade of the magistrates against the crime of wearing wigs. A strange mixture of rashness, pious zeal, genial manners, hot temper, and harsh bigotry, his extravagances supply the condiment of humor to a very serious history--it is perhaps the principal debt posterity owes him. But there was a side to his career too serious to be humorous. Bold against Maypoles and prayer books and women who presented themselves in church immodestly barefaced, and in the forefront against wigs, he was no soldier either in prudent conduct or vigor of attack. When intrusted with the command of an expedition to demand satisfaction of the Pequots, he proved incapable of anything but a campaign of exasperation. When late in life he was governor of Massachusetts, and had become, after the death of Winthrop and Dudley, the dominant political leader, the putting to death of Quakers left an ineffaceable blot on the history of the colony he had helped to found. When the colony was brought to book in England for this severity, Endecott showed himself capable of writing one of the most cringing official letters on record, as full of cant as it was of creeping servility. In him we may clearly apprehend certain unamiable traits of Puritanism and of the early seventeenth century which appear in his character in exaggerated relief. This hearty and energetic bigot must have been representative of a large, though not of the better, element in Massachusetts Puritanism, for he was chosen to the governorship oftener than any other man during the continuance of the old charter government.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Leadership of Winthrop.]

It is a pleasure to turn from Endecott to one who was, like him, a seventeenth-century man, and who did not escape the scrupulosity and ridiculosity of Puritanism, but whose amiable personality, magnanimity, and qualities of leadership made him the principal figure in the Puritan migration. Winthrop, like two or three of the conspicuous actors in our later history, owes his distinction to the moral elevation of his character quite as much as to his considerable mental gifts; for character multiplied into sagacity is better than genius for some kinds of work.

[Sidenote: Rise of the great migration of 1630.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

He was a late comer in the enterprise. In the year after Endecott had brought over a colony composed mostly of servants of the company and of the individual patentees, a second company of emigrants had been sent over with a commission to Endecott as governor on the place, assisted by a council. A church had been formed at Salem. Now set in a larger agitation in favor of migration to New England. The course of events in England was so adverse to Puritanism that those who were devoted to that purified church, which was as yet invisible, except to the eye of faith, began to look toward America. Every door for public action in state or church was closed to the Puritans in England, closed and barred by Courts of High Commission, by the Star Chamber, and by the Tower. Into one of the gloomiest rooms of the latter had lately gone, at the arbitrary command of the king, that high-spirited martyr to constitutional liberty, Sir John Eliot. Finding no way by which to come out again except a postern of dishonor, Eliot deliberately chose to languish and die in prison. The almost hopeless outlook at home, the example set by Endecott's emigration to New England in 1628, and by that of Higginson's company in 1629, perhaps also the ever-active propagandism of "Father White" of Dorchester, set agoing among the Puritans a widespread interest in the subject. Some of the leading minds thought it a noble work to organize a reformed church in a new country, since, in their view, the Church of England, under Laud, had taken up its march backward. This purpose of planting a Puritan church in America now began to take the first place; even the conversion of the Indians, which had been the chief avowed purpose hitherto, fell into the background.

[Sidenote: Winthrop's paper.]

The manuscript paper entitled Reasons for New England, to which reference has already been made, was widely but secretly circulated, and frequently copied, after a fashion of that time, prevailing especially in the case of tracts or books of a kind to shrink from print. It contained arguments in favor of removing to New England, with answers to the various objections made against emigration. Several copies of these Reasons, or Considerations, have come down to us in various handwritings, and the authorship has been attributed now to one, now to another; to Winthrop, to White of Dorchester, to Sir John Eliot himself. It appears to have been in its earliest form the production of Winthrop. There were horseback journeys, some of them by night, made about this time for the purpose of secret consultation.

[Sidenote: His character.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

Winthrop, a country gentleman of Groton, in Suffolk, and an attorney in the Court of Wards, was a strict Puritan, desiring above all a reformed church and "the ordinances of God in their purity," as the phrase of the time went. Precocious in everything, and inclined to ideal aims, he had been religious from boyhood, had married at a little over seventeen years of age, and had been made a justice of the peace while still very young. He studied divinity, and only the dissuasion of friends kept him from entering the ministry. Of judicial temper, he came to be often consulted upon points of conscience, which gave much trouble in that age of casuistry and abounding scruples. His kindly visits to those who were in any trouble of spirit were highly prized. He himself makes much of the corruptions of his own nature and of his juvenile aberrancy, but generosity and purity of spirit like his are born and not acquired. His devoutness, accompanied by a habit of self-criticism in the presence of Infinite Justice, doubtless gave additional vigor to his virtues. For the rest, he was a man of independent estate, of prudent and conciliatory carriage, of a clear but not broad mind. What, as much as anything else, fitted him for his function was, that all his virtues were cast in Puritan molds and all his prejudices had a Puritan set.

[Sidenote: His influence.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

When the question of emigration was under discussion other gentlemen who thought of going turned to Winthrop as the natural leader, declaring that they would remain in England if he should desert them. He was not only the official head, but he was indeed the soul, of the migration of 1630, and he went to America confident of a call divine like that of Moses.

IX.

[Sidenote: Cradock.]

It is a fact worthy of note that the three primary steps toward the establishment of free government in America were due to Englishmen who did not themselves cross the sea. The Great Charter of 1618 to the Virginia colony, and the "large patent" to the Plymouth Pilgrims, were granted, as we have seen, under the leadership of Sir Edwin Sandys, Governor of the Virginia Company of London. The third of the measures which placed colonial government on a popular basis was due to the governor of another corporation engaged in colony planting.

[Sidenote: Cradock's plan.]

[Sidenote: Mass. Records, July 29, 1629.]

[Sidenote: Sainsbury's Calendar, May 17, 1626.]

On the 28th of July, 1629, while Winthrop and his friends were debating their removal to New England, Mathew Cradock, a wealthy and liberal merchant, who held the office of governor, or, as we should say, president, of the Massachusetts Company, read in a "general court" or meeting of the company "certain propositions conceived by himself," as it is carefully recorded. He proposed "that for the advancement of the plantation, the inducing and encouraging persons of worth, quality and rank to transplant themselves and families thither and for other weighty reasons"--reasons which probably it was not thought best to spread upon the records, but which were the core of the whole matter--for these reasons Cradock proposed to "transfer the government of the plantation to those that shall inhabit there," and not to continue it in subordination to a commercial company in London. The sorrows of the Virginia colony under the administration of Sir Thomas Smyth and the disagreements between the Pilgrims and their "adventurers" in London had taught a wholesome lesson. Three years earlier Sir Francis Wyatt, the best of all the early governors of Virginia, had set forth in an elaborate report that the principal cause of the "slow proceeding of the growth of the plantation" was that the government had been divided between England and Virginia. Massachusetts escaped from this embarrassment.

X.

[Sidenote: Evolution of the Mass. government.]

[Sidenote: Hubbard, chap. xviii.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

The evolution of the Massachusetts government may now be traced through its several stages. A company was formed, partly of Dorchester men, but chiefly of residents of London. This company secured a patent to lands in Massachusetts Bay from the Council for New England. The patentees intended both a commercial enterprise and a Puritan settlement. They sent Endecott, one of their number, as agent or superintendent, with a company of servants and others, to prepare the way for the migration of other patentees. In March, 1628, they secured a liberal charter from the king, which gave them the right to establish in Massachusetts a government subordinate to the company. The plan was to settle a government in the form rendered familiar by that of the Virginia Company. The Massachusetts Company in London sent a commission to Endecott as governor on the place, subject to the orders of the company in England. A council of assistants was associated with him, but there was as yet no provision for giving the people a voice in the government.

[Sidenote: The change of plan.]

Winthrop and his coterie of gentlemen appear to have been dissatisfied with the prospect of living under a government directed from England, and thus subject to English stockholders and liable to interference from the court. Cradock had been a leader and the most liberal investor in the enterprise. He, no doubt, readily foresaw the great advance that the colony would make if Winthrop and his friends should embark their lives and fortunes in it, and he may have intended to emigrate himself. The annulling of the charter of the Virginia Company on frivolous pretexts had shown how easily the Massachusetts charter might meet the same fate in a reign far more devoted to arbitrary government than that of James and entirely hostile to Puritanism. There could hardly be a doubt that the charter would be revoked as soon as its projectors should develop their true purpose before the all-observing eyes of Laud, who was now rising rapidly to dominant influence in the government. It was at this juncture probably that Cradock conceived his ingenious plan. He would resign his place and have the officers of the company chosen from gentlemen about to embark for the plantation. The charter prescribed no place of assembling to the company, which had been left free apparently to make its headquarters at its birthplace in Dorchester or at its new home in London. It was also free to meet in any other place. The meetings of the company might therefore be held in Massachusetts, where the Puritanism of its proceedings would attract less attention. The governor and other officers would then be chosen in the colony; the company and the colony would thus be merged into one, and the charter transported to Massachusetts would perhaps be beyond the reach of writs and judgments.

XI.

[Sidenote: The Cambridge agreement.]

[Sidenote: 1629.]

No doubt the influential company of friends who were debating a removal to New England were informed of Cradock's proposition before it was mooted in the company on the 28th of July. The plan was probably thought of in consequence of their objection to emigration under the Virginia system. Cradock's proposition was at least the turning point of their decision. Nearly a month later, on the 26th of August, the leaders of Winthrop's party assembled to the number of twelve, at Cambridge, and solemnly pledged themselves, "in the presence of God who is the searcher of all hearts," "to pass the Seas (under God's protection) to inhabit and continue in New England." The preamble states the object of this migration. It was not civil liberty, the end that political Puritans had most in view, and certainly there is no hint of a desire for religious liberty. Even the conversion of the Indian is not uppermost in this solemn resolve. "God's glory and the church's good" are the words used. This has the true ring of the Puritan churchman. The whole pledge is couched in language befitting men who feel themselves engaged in a religious enterprise of the highest importance.

This pledge contained a notable proviso. The signers agreed to emigrate only on condition that "the whole government together with the patent for said plantation" should be transferred and legally established in the colony by order of the General Court of the Company, and that this should be done before the last of the ensuing month. There was opposition to the removal of the government, and this peremptory condition was necessary. Three days later, after a debate, the company voted that its government should be transferred to Massachusetts Bay.

[Sidenote: Removal of the charter.]

[Sidenote: 1629.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Compare Palfrey, i, 371, and Deane's note in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. 1869, p. 185.]

[Sidenote: Hutchinson's Hist. Mass., p. 31.]

On the 20th of October Cradock resigned his governorship and Winthrop was chosen in his stead. Puritan ministers were at once elected to the freedom of the company, in order that its proceedings might not want the sanction of prayer. The next year the charter crossed the wide seas, and in 1630 a court of the company was held in the wilderness at Charlestown. But a subordinate government "for financial affairs only" was maintained in London, with Cradock, the former president, at the head. This seems to have been an effectual blind, and probably the king's government did not know of the flight of the charter until the Privy Council in 1634 summoned Cradock to bring that document to the Council Board. Thomas Morton, the expelled master of Merrymount, writes of the wrath of Laud, who had been foiled by this pretty ruse: "My lord of Canterbury and my lord privy seal, having caused all Mr. Cradock's letters to be viewed and his apology for the brethren particularly heard, protested against him and Mr. Humfries that they were a couple of imposturous knaves." Laud had thought to crush the government of Massachusetts by destroying the company, whose office remained in London, with Cradock still apparently its head. The archbishop found too late that he had eagerly pounced upon a dummy. He devised many things afterward to achieve his purpose, but the charter remained over seas.

XII.

From the point of view of our later age, the removal of the charter government to America is the event of chief importance in this migration of Winthrop's company. The ultimate effect of this brilliant stroke was so to modify a commercial corporation that it became a colonial government as independent as possible of control from England. By the admission of a large number of the colonists to be freemen--that is, to vote as stockholders in the affairs of the company, which was now the colony itself, and a little later by the development of a second chamber--the government became representative.

[Sidenote: The main purpose.]

But we may not for a moment conceive that the colonists understood the importance of their act in the light of its consequences. In their minds the government was merely a setting and support for the church. The founding of a new church establishment, after what they deemed the primitive model, was the heart of the enterprise. This is shown in many words uttered by the chief actors, and it appears in strong relief in an incident that occurred soon after the arrival of Winthrop's company. Isaac Johnston, the wealthiest man of the party, succumbed to disease and hardship, but "he felt much rejoiced at his death that the Lord had been pleased to keep his eyes open so long as to see one church of Christ gathered before his death." Here we have the Puritan passion for a church whose discipline and services should realize their ideals--a passion that in the stronger men suffered no abatement in the midst of the inevitable pestilence and famine that were wont to beset newly arrived colonists in that time.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Influence of Plymouth.]

One salient fact in the history of the Massachusetts Bay colony is the dominant influence of the example of Plymouth. The Puritans of the Massachusetts colony were not Separatists. No one had been more severe in controversy with the Separatists than some of the Puritans who remained in the Church of England. They were eagerly desirous not to be confounded with these schismatics. When the great migration of 1630 took place, the emigrants published a pathetic farewell, protesting with the sincerity of homesick exiles their attachment to the Church of England, "ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation we have received in her bosom and sucked at her breasts."

[Sidenote: Differences among the Puritans.]

It is to be remembered that these Puritans did not agree among themselves. Puritanism was of many shades. There were some, like the Brownes whom Endecott sent out of the colony, that were even unwilling to surrender the prayer book. The greater part of the earlier Puritans had desired to imitate the Presbyterianism of Scotland and Geneva, and in Elizabeth's time they had organized presbyteries. Nothing seemed more probable beforehand than the revival in New England of the presbyteries of the days of Cartwright. But what happened was unexpected even by the Puritans. The churches of Massachusetts were formed on the model of John Robinson's Independency.

[Sidenote: Effect of emigration.]

[Sidenote: Roger Clap's Memoirs, 40.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

There must have been a certain exhilarant reaction in the minds of the Puritans when at last they were clear of the English coast and free from the authority that had put so many constraints upon them. There were preachings and expoundings by beloved preachers with no fear of pursuivants. The new religious freedom was delightful to intoxication. "Every day for ten weeks together," writes one passenger, they had preaching and exposition. On one ship the watches were set by the Puritan captain with the accompaniment of psalm-singing. Those who all their lives long had made outward and inward compromises between their ultimate convictions and their obligations to antagonistic authority found themselves at length utterly free. It was not that action was freed from the restraint of fear, so much as that thought itself was freed from the necessity for politic compromises. Every ship thus became a seminary for discussion. Every man now indulged in the unwonted privilege of thinking his bottom thought. The tendency to swing to an extreme is all but irresistible in the minds of men thus suddenly liberated. To such enthusiasts the long-deferred opportunity to actualize ultimate ideals in an ecclesiastical vacuum would be accepted with joy. What deductions such companies would finally make from the hints in the New Testament was uncertain. The only sure thing was that every vestige of that which they deemed objectionable in the English church would be repressed, obliterated, in their new organization.

[Sidenote: Rise of the Congregational form in New England.]

[Sidenote: Cotton to Salonstall in Hutch. Papers.]

[Sidenote: Hubbard's Hist. of New Eng., 117.]

With the evils and abuses of the English church more and more exaggerated in their thoughts, the sin of separation readily came to seem less heinous than before. There was no longer any necessity for professing loyalty to the church nor any further temptation to think ill of those at Plymouth, who, like themselves, had suffered much to avoid what both Separatists and Puritans deemed unchristian practices. A common creed and common sufferings, flight from the same oppression to find refuge in what was henceforth to be a common country, drew them to sympathy and affection for their forerunners at Plymouth. The Plymouth people were not backward to send friendly help to the newcomers. The influence of the physician sent from Plymouth to Endecott's party in the prevailing sickness soon persuaded the naturally radical Endecott to the Plymouth view of church government. Winthrop's associates, or the greater part of them, drifted in the same direction, to their own surprise, no doubt. There was a lack of uniformity in the early Massachusetts churches and some clashing of opinion. Some ministers left the colony dissatisfied; one or more of the churches long retained Presbyterian forms, and some stanch believers in presbyterial government lamented long afterward that New England ecclesiastical forms were not those of the Calvinistic churches of Europe. But the net result was that Robinsonian independency became the established religion in New England, whence it was transplanted to England during the Commonwealth, and later became the prevailing discipline among English dissenters.

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Thus the church discipline and the form of government in Massachusetts borrowed much from Plymouth, but the mildness and semi-toleration--the "toleration of tolerable opinions"--which Robinson had impressed on the Pilgrims was not so easily communicated to their new neighbors who had been trained in another school.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 191.]

Morton's settlement has become the subject of a literature of its own, and of some rather violent and amusing discussion even in our times. Morton's New English Canaan has been edited by Mr. C. F. Adams for the Prince Society. His defensive account of himself leaves the impression that the author was just the sort of clever and reckless rake who is most dangerous to settlements in contact with savages, and who might be expelled neck and heels from a frontier community holding no scruples of a Puritan sort. The Royal Proclamation in Rymer's Foedera, xvii, 416 (and Hazard's State Papers, i, 151), 1622, sets forth the evil of the sale of arms to the savages, but it was leveled at earlier offenders than Morton. Compare Sainsbury's Calendar, September 29 and November 24, 1630, pp. 120, 122. There are also references, more or less extended, to Morton in the Massachusetts Records, Winthrop's Journal, Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, Dudley's Letter to the Countess of Lincoln in Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, and in other early accounts.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 193.]

Abbott's account of Laud's rise, Rushworth, i, 440, is traced with a bitter pen, no doubt, but the student Laud, as Abbott draws him, is so much like his later self that one can not but believe that the description of him picking quarrels with the public readers and carrying information against them to the bishop has a basis of fact.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 199.]

Rushworth, writing under the later date of 1637, says: "The severe Censures in Star Chamber, and the greatness of the Fines, and the rigorous Proceedings to impose Ceremonies, the suspending and silencing Multitudes of Ministers, for not reading in the Church the Book for Sports to be exercised on the Lord's day, caused many of the Nation, both Ministers and others, to sell their Estates, and to set Sail for New England (a late Plantation in America), where they hold a Plantation by Patent from the King." Part II, vol. i, p. 410.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 204.]

"We trust you will not be unmindful of the main end of our Plantation, by endeavouring to bring the Indians to a knowledge of the Gospel." Cradock's letter to Endecott, February 16, 1629, Young's Chronicle, 133; also the official letter, ibid., page 142, where the "propagation of the Gospel" among whites and Indians is the "aim." The Royal Charter itself declared that "to win and invite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind ... is the principal end of this Plantation." (A similar provision was inserted in the Connecticut Charter in 1662, in imitation of that of Massachusetts.) The common seal of the Massachusetts colony, sent over in 1629, bore an Indian with the inscription, "Come over and help us." Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, 155, Instructions to Endecott. The paper of "Reasons," attributed to Winthrop, keeps the conversion of the Indians in view, but it is blended with that which was in his mind the main end, the founding of a Puritan church. The first paragraph reads, "It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse of the Gentiles, & to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of Ante-Christ which the Jesuites labour to reare up in those parts." Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 309. The copy of this paper in Sir John Eliot's handwriting has a preamble written in a nervous style that may well be Eliot's own. This preamble goes back to the conversion of the Indians as a main purpose. The Antapologia of T. Edwards, 1644, declares that White of Dorchester and others had the conversion of the Indians in view in promoting emigration to New England. Edwards says, page 41, that the establishing of Congregational churches "was not in the thoughts of them that were the first movers in that or of the ministers that were sent over in the beginning." The statement is quite too strong, but the ecclesiastical purpose seems to have grown rapidly when the number of emigrants revealed the greatness of the opportunity.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 204.]

Cotton Mather says, Magnalia, Book II, chap. iv, 3, that Winthrop was made a justice at eighteen, but Mather's account of anything marvelous needs support. Winthrop held his first court at Groton Hall several months after he had attained his majority. Life and Letters, i, 62. Compare page 223 of the same volume.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 205.]

Of his election to the governorship he wrote to his wife, "The onely thinge that I have comforte of in it is, that heerby I have assurance that my charge is of the Lorde & that he hath called me to this worke." Life and Letters, i, 340.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 208.]

The government of the colony under Endecott was substantially that prescribed for "particular plantations" in the general order of the Virginia Company at the time the charter for the Pilgrim colony was granted, and like that which was formed at Plymouth under the Compact. The Massachusetts form may have been borrowed from Plymouth. This may be considered the primary form of colony government in the scheme of the Virginia Company. The plan antedates the formation of the Virginia Company by at least twenty years, for it was a form proposed by Ralegh when, in 1587, he organized his colony under the title: "The Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh in Virginia." The secondary form of government was that prescribed for Virginia in the charter of 1618, which added a lower house elective by the people. This fully developed government could come only when the population had become large enough to render a representative system possible.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 210.]

It has been maintained by several writers that the charter had been worded with a view to removal. See, for example, Palfrey's New England, i, 307. But a paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, and printed in the Proceedings for December, 1869, by the late Charles Deane, shows that such a presumption is groundless. In calling the subordinate government of Endecott "London's Plantation in Massachusetts Bay in New England," the company showed that it proposed to keep its headquarters in London. It is open to question, however, whether Deane does not go too far in denying that the charter gave authority for the transfer. In that technical age the letter of the instrument would probably be counted more conclusive than at present, and the evidence of the dockets would have less weight. The removal of the government was not one of the charges made in the _quo warranto_ proceedings against the company. On the main question compare also the very significant treatment of the subject by Winthrop in his paper on Arbitrary Government, Life and Letters, ii, 443, where he expressly says that it was intended to have the chief government in England, "and with much difficulty we gott it abscinded." It is to be remembered that the exercise of governmental functions by a commercial corporation was not a novel spectacle in that age. In 1620 the English and Dutch East India Companies, after having been at war while the two nations were allies, concluded a treaty of peace. No doubt the exercise of such powers by trading companies had been made familiar by the mingling of the functions of government with those of commerce by the merchants of the Hanse cities. The East India and the Hudson Bay Companies continued to exercise territorial jurisdiction until a very recent period.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 214.]

This rebound from their previous attitude of compromise is well exemplified in the church covenant adopted at Dorchester, Mass., in 1636, under the lead of Richard Mather, which contains these words: "We do likewise promise by his Grace assisting us, to endeavour the establishing amongst ourselves all His Holy Ordinances which He hath appointed for His church here on Earth, ... opposing to the utmost of our power whatsoever is contrary thereto and bewailing from our Hearts our own neglect hereof in former times and our poluting ourselves therein with any Sinful Invention of men." Blake's Annals of Dorchester. Robinson of Leyden, in his Justification of Separation, 1610, declared that the Puritans would soon separate if they might have the magistrates' license; and Backus, who quotes the passage (i, pp. 2, 3), remarks on the confirmation which the history of Massachusetts gives to Robinson's theory of conformity.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 215.]

In his Way of the Churches Cleared, controversial necessity drove Cotton to assert that Plymouth had small share in fixing the ecclesiastical order of Massachusetts, but he is compelled to admit its influence. "And though it bee," he says, "very likely, that some of the first commers might helpe their Theory by hearing and discerning their practice at Plymmouth: yet therein the Scripture is fulfilled, 'The Kingdome of Heaven is like unto leaven,'" etc., pp, 16, 17.