American Jezebel (13 page)

With King Charles and Archbishop Laud in power—the latter succeeded Monteigne as Bishop of London in 1628 and became Archbishop of Canterbury, or primate of England, in 1633—the church grew far less tolerant of Calvinism so that not even “doctrine remained to unite Puritan and bishop.” King Charles had a Catholic wife, Henri
etta Maria, of France, and decidedly nonpuritanical and nonevangelical tastes. He enjoyed the rituals of Anglican worship—the vestments, choir, and organ, the kneeling, crossing, and processing, and the candlelight, incense, and chanted prayers that derived from Catholic Rome. Instead of defacing art, he commissioned more, from the likes of Rubens, Raphael, and Van Dyck.

As the royal and ecclesiastic noose tightened around their throats, the Puritan divines gathered at Tattershall Castle, the home of Theophilus Clinton Fiennes, fourth Earl of Lincoln, to discuss their options. If church authorities summoned them to London, they had several choices. They could go to prison, enter the well-organized Puritan underground, become Separatist (leaving the state church, as the Pilgrims had done), or flee the country, usually to Holland, the West Indies, or—starting in the late 1620s—America.

Somehow, even as his Puritan peers were in exile in Holland or preparing to emigrate from England to America, Cotton’s fame still flourished in England. “Of all men in the world I envy Mr. Cotton, of Boston, most,” his colleague the Reverend Samuel Ward observed in 1629, “for he doth nothing in way of conformity, and yet hath his liberty, and I do everything that way, and cannot enjoy mine.”

In the first week of April 1630, as John Winthrop’s fleet assembled near the Isle of Wight on England’s southern coast, John Cotton made the long trip to Southampton to address the Massachusetts Bay Company as it prepared to set sail. This group, the largest body of colonists yet to leave for America, included many of Cotton’s parishioners, among them the Dudleys and the Bradstreets, as well as the third Earl of Lincoln’s daughter, Lady Arbella Clinton Fiennes Johnson, for whom the fleet’s premier ship, the
Arbella,
was named. Hoping to entice Cotton to join them in Massachusetts, the leaders of the Bay Company had invited him to deliver their farewell sermon.

On the wooden dock at Southampton, the equable, black-robed minister stood before the emigrants and assured them that their leaving England was just and holy. “Tradesmen [here] no longer live one by another,” he lamented, “but eat up one another.” He admonished the emigrants to remain holy in the New World, which he said fulfilled the biblical prophecy “I will appoint a place for my people.” Using the passage he chose for the occasion, 2 Samuel 7:10, Cotton exhorted the colonists not to separate from the Church of England but rather to extend it. Before closing, he encouraged their conversion of the “poor native.” In exchange for the privilege of sharing the heathens’ vast land, he said, “Feed them with your spirituals” and “make them partakers of your precious faith.”

After the ships set sail for Massachusetts, Cotton returned contentedly to St. Botolph’s to preach reform while seeming to conform. In 1631, though, disaster befell him and his wife. The couple contracted malaria, or tertian ague, which was common in the Fens, a lush breeding ground for mosquitoes. Gravely ill, the Cottons were moved to a
hospital at a manor house of the fourth Earl of Lincoln. Over the subsequent year, John Cotton slowly recovered and his wife died. He presided over her funeral and burial, and then he began traveling around the country, consulting with other Puritan divines.

On April 25, 1632, John Cotton wed again, to a widow named Sarah Hawkridge Story, who had a little girl. Soon afterward, Cotton learned that Bishop Laud had sent a letter summoning him to the Court of High Commission to answer to the charge of nonconformity. Shedding his clerical garments, Cotton disappeared into the Puritan underground and was nowhere to be found when the court’s messenger arrived in Boston. He remained in hiding for months, writing in September from London to his new wife, “If you should now travel this way, I fear you will be watched and dogged at the heels.”

As for Cotton’s future plans, he was unsure. His ministry in England had become a “torment,” but he had never embraced the idea of emigrating. His colleagues advised him, “Fly for your safety.” Always afraid of confrontation, he did not know what to do.

News of his predicament reached John Winthrop. Hoping to swell the colony, the governor wrote at once to invite the minister to Massachusetts. This invitation made up Cotton’s mind. He wrote to Bishop Williams on May 7, 1633, “I see neither my bodily health, nor the peace of the church [of Saint Botolph’s], will now stand my continuance there…. The Lord, who began a year or two ago to suspend, after a sort, my ministry from that place by a long and sore sickness, the dregs whereof still hang about me, doth now put a further necessity upon me wholly to lay down my ministry there, and freely to resign.”

Before daybreak one morning in early June 1633, Cotton and his wife and her daughter were rowed from the Norfolk Downs out to the
Griffin.
Another noted Puritan divine, Thomas Hooker, who had also studied at Cambridge, was on board the ship as well. Commenting on this confluence, their colleague Thomas Shepard said, “I saw the Lord departing from England when Mr. Hooker & Mr. Cotton were gone.” (Shepard followed two years later, sailing on the
Defense
in the late summer of 1635.) During the eight-week voyage, Sarah Cotton gave birth to her forty-eight-year-old husband’s first child, a healthy boy they named Seaborn. To John Cotton, this happy event was a sign from God that he was pleased with their ocean crossing.

On September 4 the
Griffin
passed Lovell’s Island at the mouth of the harbor of the new Boston, a wide pasture punctuated by three conical hills and a few trees on a peninsula, surrounded by marsh. Thinking of the tiered system of worship that had so suited him in his English church, Cotton composed a poem “upon his removal from Boston to this wilderness.”

On the timbers of the town pier, which lay upon large rocks and wooden piles, Governor Winthrop and Deputy Governor Dudley stood waiting to greet the two eminent divines. In deference to Cotton’s slightly greater eminence, they gave him a post in Boston and sent Hooker to preach in Newtown.

The following Saturday, John and Sarah Cotton were admitted to membership in the church, and their baby became the twenty-third person baptized in the meetinghouse of Boston. For Cotton’s first sermon to the hundred-member congregation, he lectured on the subject of a true church using Canticle 6, or the sixth chapter of the Song of Solomon, which includes the lines, “My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.” A few weeks later Cotton was named teacher of the church, charged with preaching and supervising doctrine, preparing converts, and consoling and advising parishioners. The duties of the pastor, John Wilson, who had served since 1630, included presiding over services and administering sacraments.

In the meetinghouse that was the world’s first congregational church, Cotton was now freed from the burden of preaching to the
reprobate. Only the elect, as discerned by their peers, were allowed membership in this church. Over time, Cotton’s sermons contained fewer references to his doctrine of conditional reprobation. In his theology based on the doctrine of free grace, he had to balance the contrary pulls of grace (which comes from God) and works (which are within human control). Once a person is justified by God’s grace, the person’s actions should, by definition, be good. At the same time, a true saint is overwhelmed by a sense of human helplessness. “When you look at duties,” Cotton said to his congregation, “you are not able to do them, not able to hear or pray aright.” In his view, human works are empty without God. After justification, he believed, the Holy Ghost becomes one with the saint, which led Hutchinson and no doubt many of his parishioners sometimes to feel powerfully close to God.

In response to Cotton’s evangelical enthusiasm, a religious revival ensued. More conversions occurred in Boston in the six months after his arrival—sixty-three souls in all—than had occurred during the entire previous year, under the Reverend Wilson. As might be expected, Cotton encouraged making the standards for church membership even more restrictive. By the end of 1633 Massachusetts Bay ministers had agreed on two new requirements—soundness in doctrine, and evidence of good behavior. Cotton wished to add a third—candidates must testify publicly about their conversion experience and the working of grace in their soul. This was added in early 1636.

Only three months after Cotton’s arrival, Winthrop exulted that “the Lord [gave] special testimony of His presence in the church of Boston, after Mr. Cotton was called to office there. More were converted and added to the church, than to all the other churches in the bay…. Diverse profane and notorious evil persons came and confessed their sins, and were comfortably received into the bosom of the church.” The congregation welcomed his habit of fifth-day, or Thursday, lectures. They followed his lead in honoring the Sabbath for twenty-four hours, beginning at sundown Saturday. In a community “relatively devoid of pastimes,” Cotton’s sermons were great events. Parishioners could copy down his words and then discuss each sermon, in great detail, at home. They could lose themselves in weekly lectures, six or seven hours of preaching each sabbath day, and additional sermons on Fast Days and election days. After the difficulties of worshiping as they
wished in England, Puritans could now indulge themselves in sermons, turning to their ministers and the Holy Spirit for relief from the hardships of the New World.

Each week, and often twice with Pastor Wilson away in England, Cotton obliged his parishioners by walking to the lectern of the meetinghouse of Boston, which still lacked a pulpit, and standing before them as an instrument of the Holy Spirit. He described how those whom God chose he justified and sanctified, giving them spiritual gifts that helped them live a godly life. Neither sanctification (the outward appearance of grace) nor justification (actually being saved) can come to one who was not elect from the beginning of time. All the elect, Cotton said, are sanctified, even if they sin. Instead of seeing the covenant as a sort of bargain, as many did, he preached the utter inability of humans to effect their own salvation. To argue otherwise, he thought, was to open the way for a Roman Catholic covenant of works. In the New World, he preached, the Mosaic Law and even the Gospel itself are “dead” as a means of salvation. Salvation is a completely inner experience, dependent on one’s relationship with the Holy Spirit.

This doctrine had the potential to threaten civic and religious authority because it seemed to allow citizen-saints to act as the Holy Spirit dictated. Cotton’s biographer Larzer Ziff explained the problem: “In a commonwealth where man’s spiritual estate directly affected his civil estate, a doctrine which so distinguished between the Spirit and the word could be expected to find opponents.”

But John Cotton, delighted with his situation in the Bible commonwealth and with his growing family, wrote to English friends to encourage them to emigrate. To remain in England, he suggested, was to become corrupt. On the September day in 1634 when the Hutchinsons’ ship entered Boston harbor, he awaited the family on the dock. He was pleased to continue his spiritual collaboration with the woman who, he wrote not long after her arrival, was “the apple of our eye.” Blessed with what he termed “a sharp apprehension, a ready utterance, and ability to express herself in the cause of God,” Anne Hutchinson was “helpful to many to bring them off from their unsound [doctrinal] grounds and principles.” Almost as though there had been no break in their shared work, Hutchinson began again to prepare souls for John Cotton to convert.

An even more distinguished arrival than the Hutchinsons, thirteen months later, was twenty-two-year-old Henry Vane, with whom Cotton felt so much immediate sympathy that he had the young aristocrat move into his house. A few months later, while still lodging with the Cottons (who now had a baby girl, Sarah, in addition to two-year-old Seaborn and the daughter of Mistress Cotton’s first marriage), Vane arranged for a matching house to be built next door, with the same diamond-shaped windowpanes.

Within three weeks of his arrival, Henry Vane was admitted as a member of the Church of Boston, after reciting his account of being born again, which had occurred when he was fifteen. As he described it, a spring opened in the desert wilderness of his soul, and there came to him a “rich and free grace.” For the first time ever, he felt joy. No longer was he moved by the Anglican worship of his father and the king. From then on, he enjoyed almost daily ecstasies of God’s grace.

In light of Vane’s and other dramatic conversions occurring in Hutchinson’s male peers, it is notable that there is no record of her equivalent experience. She may have been born again, most likely in her late twenties. (A local Alford history infers that “Her religious conversion appears to have occurred during the 1620s,” but there is no evidence of this occurrence.) Unlike Cotton and Vane, Hutchinson had parents and even grandparents who were already Puritan at her birth. While her male peers received this faith experience apart from—and sometimes in defiance of—their parents, she was bred on it. Vane, on the contrary, was a young man who abandoned his father’s church and state and may have found in John Cotton a father figure.

Encouraged by Cotton, Vane began attending Hutchinson’s meetings. Before long, he was given a special seat at her right hand, an honor extended to no one else. His notion of the “inner light of conscience” dovetailed with her ideas about revelation and the “indwelling of the spirit.” The latter, which came from Cotton’s sermons, was the idea that the Holy Spirit unites with the person of the believer, so that the justified person is of two bodies, not one. Vane also admired Hutchinson’s analysis of sermons and of Scripture and her support of religious liberty.

He may have been the highest-status immigrant yet, but Vane was unlike most prominent colonists. At least a generation younger than
they, he had been raised among Stuart courtiers in castles and manor houses. While other notable colonists had university or professional degrees, he had ended his formal education at sixteen when he dropped out of Magdalen College, Oxford, after a few months, during which he never even matriculated because he refused to swear the required oath of allegiance and supremacy to the church and crown. He spent the next few years traveling to France, Switzerland, Austria, and Holland on missions arranged by the court. In Rotterdam on royal business, he visited the Puritan congregation, then led by the Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem. At nineteen, Vane returned to London and told his father that England and its church were too constricting for him. He was interested in religious instruction and sermons, not ritual and liturgy. Distressed, his father asked Archbishop Laud to meet with young Harry and set him straight.

Vane and Laud’s 1634 meeting was a disaster. If the young man’s flowing locks were not enough to infuriate the archbishop, his refusal to take communion kneeling was. You must kneel at the Lord’s Supper, the plump, red-capped, sixty-one-year-old archbishop insisted. But no, Vane replied. His God, unlike Laud’s Aristotelian ideal, was a flame or a fountain—a “mysterium tremendum whose decrees inspired both love and fear, who arbitrarily sent or withheld his grace and who ministered without mediation to the individual soul. To kneel at that communion table would be to deny the God that whispered” in Vane’s ear. The archbishop, who deplored the Calvinist doctrines of predestination, reprobation, and election, angrily dismissed the impudent young man.