As for the second source of the New Englanders’ impertinence, the Magna Carta, it came about for the same reason so many landmarks of liberty, including the Declaration of Independence, were established in the English-speaking world—because the upper middle class balked at paying taxes. In 1215, armed English barons, sick of being bilked to pay for King John’s wars in France, captured London. Seeking a truce, the king met the barons at Runnymede, a meadow by the river Thames, and they hammered out an agreement in Latin that came to be called Magna Carta, the Great Charter.
Many of the Magna Carta’s sixty-three clauses enumerate antiquated rules about knights, forests, wine measurement, removing fish-weirs from the Thames, owing money to Jews, and, in case anyone is worried, restoring “the son of Llywe lyn and all the hostages from Wales.” But two concepts in it stuck. Clause 39 states, “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” In other words, the king can’t just jail his subjects on a whim. Clause 40 declares, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” In other words, a prisoner cannot be locked up indefinitely without a sentence. Thus the basic gist of the Magna Carta is that no one—including the king—is above the law of the land.
In 1628, two years before the Winthrop fleet sailed for Massachusetts, the Magna Carta was enjoying something of a comeback thanks to the Five Knights Case and the Petition of Right. In 1627, Charles I jailed five Members of Parliament who refused to pay a forced loan to underwrite his war in Spain. Charles, who had held a grudge against Spain ever since the court at Madrid turned down his proposal of marriage to the Spanish princess, had dispatched his armies, under the command of his incompetent best friend, the Duke of Buckingham, to go to war with Spain. Things were not going well. Buckingham’s expedition to attack Cadiz in 1625, for example, was pure slapstick—English troops stumbled onto warehouses stocked with Spanish wine and got too drunk to fight. So when five English knights (members of the landed gentry) refused the king’s demand of a “loan” (which would probably never be repaid) to fund such foreign-policy buffoonery, Charles had them thrown in jail for who knows how long.
Parliament rallied to the knights’ cause, arguing that the Magna Carta denied the king the right to jail his subjects on a whim and forever. Edward Coke, the most important English legal mind of the seventeenth century, led the charge against the king, famously proclaiming to Parliament, “Take heed what we yield unto! Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.” Coke helped author Parliament’s landmark response in 1628, the Petition of Right. It states:
It is declared and enacted, that no freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.
(By the way, the confrontational Coke was the mentor and benefactor of that most confrontational of New England colonists, Roger Williams. Coke paid for Williams’s education. Williams would later write Coke’s daughter that her father’s “example, instruction, and encouragement have spurred me on to a more than ordinary, industrious and patient course.” Williams might have also picked up his sometimes impenetrable writing style from Coke. Coke’s
Institutes of the Laws of England
was still the standard legal textbook more than a century later when Thomas Jefferson went to law school—much to Jefferson’s dismay; he complained of Coke, “I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life.” Once, in one of his many letters to Winthrop, Williams confessed his fear that “my lines are as thick and over busy as mosquitoes.”)
Coke and Parliament goaded Charles I into signing off on the Petition of Right. Of course, Charles pretty much ignored it, and canceled Parliament the following year, prompting some of the jitters that made so many Englishmen, including Winthrop, flee to New England. Nevertheless, the Petition was on the books. Its reframing of the Magna Carta’s call for due process, writes Winston Churchill, is “the main foundation of English freedom.” He continues, “The right of the Executive Government to imprison a man . . . for reasons of State was denied; and that denial, made good in painful struggles, constitutes the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”
Is this not stirring? Churchill wrote that in his
History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
and every time I read those words I am proud to be an English-speaking person.
All of which to say, those penny-pinching barons at Runnymede, those knights and Coke and Parliament standing up to the crown, made it thinkable for Thomas Dudley, John Winthrop, and the other assistants in Massachusetts Bay Colony’s court to build a fort and train militias and construct a beacon to guard against an invasion by their own king.
That said, just because something is thinkable doesn’t mean it’s doable, much less desirable. The idea of American independence from Britain is a tea not nearly finished steeping. Though the court quietly readies for war, it does its damnedest to crack down on unnecessarily incendiary talk against the king.
Cue Roger Williams. On November 27, 1634, Winthrop’s journal notes that the Court of Assistants got word that Williams “had broken his promise to us, in teaching publicly against the king’s patent, and our great sin in claiming right thereby to this country.”
In fact, Williams was calling it a “national sin” for the colony to claim the right to Indian lands based on the Charter granted them by the king of England. John Cotton later claimed that Williams was agitating in Salem that in order for the colonists to repent of this sin, it was “a national duty to renounce the patent,” which Cotton fears would have “subverted the fundamental state and government of the country.” Cotton also reported that among Williams’s arguments was a repudiation of England’s justification for colonization, that the natives were not using the land because they were not cultivating it properly, not raising cattle. According to Cotton, Williams pointed out that the Indians were using the land—not for farming but for hunting. The Indians, Williams said, “burnt up all the underwoods in the country, once or twice a year.” This stewardship, he maintained, was not unlike that of English nobles who “possessed great parks, and the king, great forests in England only for their game, and no man might lawfully invade their property.”
John Cotton, in a letter to Williams, rolls his eyes at this logic, cracking, “We did not conceive that it is a just title to so vast a continent to make no other improvement of millions of acres in it, but only to burn it up for pasture.” Besides, English nobles don’t just use their forests for hunting, “but for timber.”
It was Cotton, after all, who, in his 1630 farewell sermon to the Winthrop fleet, “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” proclaimed, “In a vacant soil, he that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his right it is.” Upon whose authority? God’s, of course, in “the grand charter given to Adam and his posterity.” The Massachusetts Bay Charter, therefore, is merely the legal subset of the original patent God granted His very first human creation. Cotton cites Genesis 1:28: “Multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” He continues, “If therefore any son of Adam come and find a place empty, he hath liberty to come, and fill, and subdue the earth there.”
The Charter Winthrop and his friends hold dear as the legal mandate for their American rights and property was therefore in jeopardy from two sides—Laud’s commission ordering it be returned to London, and some loudmouth in Salem bellowing that the king had no authority to issue a charter in the first place (news of which might egg on Laud all the more).
Five months later, the magistrates summon Williams to explain why he was preaching in Salem that they should not administer an oath to a “wicked” man. Oaths—loyalty oaths to the colony and testimonial oaths before the court—were a sacred tool of justice to the magistrates. Williams argued that an oath is a promise in the eyes of God, and a wicked man making an oath is a violation of the Third Commandment, causing the sinner “to take the name of God in vain.” Now, that is what I call creative commandment interpretation.
Let’s pause here and try and look past Williams’s seemingly teenage behavior—past his tendency toward fussy and abrasive theological scrutiny, past his loopy Christian navel gazing, past his grating inability to make any of the small, charitable compromises involved in getting along with other people. Williams’s greatness lies in his refusal to keep his head down in a society that prizes nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety. And while his pursuit of truth leads him to some eccentric, if not laughable, applications of the Ten Commandments, his quest also leads him to some equally eccentric beliefs about racial equality, self-determination, and religious liberty that good people now hold dear. In his tormented, lonesome, obsessive, Calvinist way, he is free. I find him hard to like, but easy to love.
Until scholar Perry Miller took a hard look at Roger Williams in the 1950s, Williams enjoyed a reputation as a sort of proto-Thomas Jefferson. A Williams biography published in 1940 was entitled
Irrepressible Democrat.
I can see why. Even though there is no evidence Jefferson ever read any of Williams’s tracts, Williams’s writings do occasionally prefigure Jefferson’s to an eerie degree. Williams’s description of what he sees as England’s crime of stealing American Indians’ land as a “national sin” sidles up to Jefferson’s line about “the original sin of slavery” in the United States. In his 1802 letter to Connecticut’s Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson called for a “wall of separation” between church and state, an oft-mentioned endorsement of the establishment clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But Jefferson was not the first person to use that phrase—it was Williams, bemoaning that the state-sponsored church “opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Williams wanted to rebuild that wall, replant that hedge to keep out the state. Williams wanted to protect believers from their government. So he’s not so much the proto-Jefferson as the un-Jefferson, a man who devotes his life to keeping government out of the church—not the other way around.
Still, as an American citizen whose only religion is the freedom of religion, I’m cheered to follow along as Williams exercises his First Amendment rights 156 years before the First Amendment gets ratified. In the United States, the story of the freedom of religion starts, obviously, with religion—with Roger Williams’s (and later, Anne Hutchinson’s) war of words with the court and clergy of Massachusetts Bay in general and with John Winthrop in particular.
Winthrop and Williams personify not just the conflict between orthodox Massachusetts and what would become madcap Rhode Island, the freewheeling colony Williams is about to found. They personify what would become the fundamental conflict of American life—between public and private, between the body politic and the individual, between we the people and each person’s pursuit of happiness. At his city-on-a-hill best, Winthrop is Pete Seeger, gathering a generation around the campfire to sing their shared folk songs. Williams is Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport, making his own noise.
From this end of history, Roger Williams’s specific gripes with Winthrop and Co.—denouncing the blasphemy of ungodly persons swearing oaths, taking issue with magistrates prosecuting Sabbath breakers—seem like ridiculous, antiquated quibbles. But Williams’s larger project is to guard against any intrusion of the civil sphere into the religious sphere. He’s after the thing free people always enjoy, yearn, or fight for; he calls it “soul-liberty.”
I
n 1635, Williams’s surging obsession with his wall of separation between church and state turns him into a bricklayer straight out of Poe—barricading himself into his lonely little garden until no other person gets in, not even his wife. Winthrop’s journal notes that one of Williams’s half-baked notions du jour is that visible saints should only pray with other confirmed visible saints to the exclusion of all others, even if said others include his wife and child. How did that go over chez Williams?
Sorry, honey, you know I love you guys, but if you want me to say grace over this bowl of mushy corn, you and the kids are going to have to leave the room.
John Cotton later reveals his compassion for poor Mrs. Williams, a woman “of meek and modest spirit” who suffered Williams’s “offensive course which occasioned him for a season to withdraw communion in spiritual duties, even from her also.”
Once, Roger Williams was away from home and got word his wife was seriously ill. He wrote her a letter, later published as the pamphlet
Experiments in Spiritual Life and Health,
that gives a reader an inkling of what it must have been like to be married to him.
He addresses Mrs. Williams as “My Dearest Love and Companion in This Vale of Tears,” a pleasant enough start. “I now send thee that which I know will be sweeter to thee than honey,” he writes, “and of more value than if every line and letter were . . . gold and silver.” And what is this gift a girl wants more than jewelry? A sermon on proper Christian behavior, of course.
“For as the Lord loveth a cheerful giver,” he points out, “so he also [loves] a cheerful preacher.”
Flowers would have been nice. Can’t go wrong with flowers. Oh, but that’s exactly how Williams sees this how-to manual—as a bouquet. “I send thee (though in winter) a handful of flowers made up in a little posy for thy dear self, and our dear children, to look and smell on, when I as the grass of the field shall be gone, and withered,” he writes. See? This is better than regular flowers. Regular flowers can’t boss her around from the grave. “All my flowers shall be some choice example, or speech of some son or daughter of God, picked out from the garden of the holy Scriptures.”