Here we arrive at the reason why this here tale of American Puritans is more concerned with the ones shipping off from Southampton for Massachusetts in the
Arbella
in 1630 than with the Pilgrims who sailed from Southampton toward Plymouth on the
Mayflower
in 1620: because the Plymouth colonists were Separatists and the Massachusetts Bay colonists were not.
Before I explain that, I will say that the theological differences between the Puritans on the
Mayflower
and the Puritans on the
Arbella
are beyond small. Try negligible to the point of nitpicky. I will also say that readers who squirm at microscopic theological differences might be unsuited to read a book about seventeenth-century Christians. Or, for that matter, a newspaper. Secular readers who marvel every morning at the death toll in the Middle East ticking ever higher due to, say, the seemingly trifling Sunni-versus-Shia rift in Islam, might look deep into their own hearts and identify their own semantic lines in the sand. For instance, a devotion to
The Godfather Part II
and equally intense disdain for
The Godfather Part III.
Someday they might find themselves at a bar and realize they are friends with a woman who can’t tell any of the
Godfather
movies apart and asks if
Part II
was the one that had “that guy in the boat.” Them’s fightin’ words, right?
Anyway, England, 1630. Question: Why is the aforementioned John Cotton standing in front of the aforementioned John Winthrop and his shipmates, watering the seeds of American exceptionalism that will, in the twenty-first century, blossom into preemptive war in the name of spreading democracy in the Middle East that temporarily unites even some factions of the aforementioned Sunni and Shia Mus lims, who hate each other’s guts but agree they hate the bully America more? Answer: Because Henry VIII had a crush on a woman who was not his wife.
In order to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn, Henry had to divorce England from Rome. When the pope, for some reason, refused to annul the marriage vows Henry made to Catherine more than two decades earlier, Henry rebelled and established himself as the head of the Church of England in 1534. This was seventeen years after Martin Luther nailed Rome’s abuses by nailing his “95 theses” to a church door in Germany, thereby welcoming in the Protestant Reformation.
Luther was outraged when the pope sent emissaries up north to raise money for St. Peter’s Basilica by selling “indul gences,” essentially coupons a buyer could use to pay off the pope to erase sins from the Judgment Day ledger. Luther’s point was that, according to Scripture, salvation is not a bake sale: “They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.” His larger message became the core ethos of Protestantism: the Bible, not any earthly pope, is the highest authority.
The word of God, not a man of God, is The Man. For that reason, Luther translated the Bible into German so Germans could read it for themselves. Which inspired various international Protestants to do the same in their own native tongues. And, in one of history’s great collisions, this sixteenth-century fad for vernacular Bible translations comes about not long after Luther’s countryman Johan Gutenberg had invented movable type in Europe, making it possible to print said translations on the cheap and in a hurry.
So an English subject of Henry VIII who already had a soft spot for the innovations of Luther rejoiced at the king’s break with Rome (while trying not to picture Henry and Anne Boleyn doing it in every room of every castle). That is, until the Protestant sympathizer went to church and noticed that the Church of England was just the same old Catholic Church with a king in pope’s clothing. Same old hierarchy of archbishop on down. Same old Latin-speaking middlemen standing between parishioners and the Bible, between parishioners and God. Same old ornamental gewgaws. Organ music! Vestments! (It is difficult to understate the Puritan abhorrence of something as seemingly trivial as a vicar’s scarf.) Same old easily achieved, come-as-you-are salvation. Here’s what one had to do to join the Church of England: be English.
But we want getting into heaven to be hard!
said the Puritans.
And not for everybody!
So the English Protestants protest. One of their heroes was William Tyndale, who had exiled himself to Germany in 1524 in order to commit the crime of translating the Bible into English. Captured at Henry’s request, Tyndale was strangled, then burned at the stake in 1536; his reported last words were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!” This prayer was answered two years later when Henry commissioned the so-called Great Bible, the first official Bible in English—based largely on the translations of, guess who, William Tyndale.
In the near century between Henry’s breakup with Rome and the Massachusetts Bay colonists’ departure, members of the Church of England, which is to say the English, quar reled constantly about how Protestant to become or how Catholic to remain. No surprise that the monarchs and the clergy, at the top of the cultural hierarchy, tended to be in favor of cultural hierarchy and skewed Catholic. For instance, the late King James, son of the famously Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, threatened to “harry” the Puritans out of England.
So in Southampton, when Cotton promises the colonists that where they are going “the sons of wickedness shall afflict them no more,” they know he is referring to James’s son, King Charles I, and his Anglican henchmen, including the Puritans’ nemesis, the Bishop of London, William Laud.
One reason Winthrop and his shipmates are hitting the road in 1630 is that Charles had dissolved the Parliament, the one check on his power, the year before. The Protestant-leaning House of Commons had passed incendiary resolutions limiting the king’s powers of taxation and proclaiming the practices of “popery and Arminianism” a capital offense. Arminianism, the dogma that a believer’s salvation depends merely on faith, is at odds with the Puritans’ insistence that salvation is predetermined by God. Laud, a portly and haughty gentleman in a puffy robe in his National Portrait Gallery likeness, is pretty much Mr. Arminianism. It’s worth remembering that, while Laud is the bogeyman in Puritan history, his more open-minded and openhearted view of how Christians get to heaven won out in Protestantism worldwide. Which is not to deny the fact that Laud was both a ruthless ogre toward the Puritans and a suck-up to Charles, delivering sermons on the divine right of kings.
(The subtext of Cotton’s sermon to the voyagers is the question “Can I come, too?” Laud becomes more and more powerful and thus more threatening to Puritans. It is no coincidence that 1633, the year Laud becomes Archbishop of Canterbury, is also the year Cotton finally emigrates to Massachusetts, where he becomes Winthrop’s own minister.)
Believers who wanted to “purify” the Church of England of its Catholic tendencies came to be known by the put-down “puritan.” They mostly called themselves “nonconformists,” or the “godly.” Or, occasionally, “hot Protestants.”
The more radical Puritans who severed ties to the Church of England came to be known as Separatists; they shook off all allegiance to grandiose national religion and concentrated on their own congregations, worshipping in plain, little meet inghouses. Hence the Separatists who hightailed it to Holland and then Cape Cod on the
Mayflower.
Puritans who wanted to reform the Church of England from the inside came to be known as Nonseparatists, which is to say they came to be simply unhappy. Hence, the simultaneously hopeful and guilt-ridden men and women listening to John Cotton before boarding the
Arbella,
wondering if it is right to be abandoning England at all.
I admire the
Mayflower
Pilgrims’ uncompromising resolve to make a clean break, and their fortitude, so fundamental to the American national character that Sinclair Lewis called one of our core ideals “Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm.”
Still, I find the
Arbella
passengers’ qualms messier and more endearing. They were leaving for the same reasons the Pilgrims left, but they had either the modesty to feel bad about it or the charitable hypocrisy to at least pretend to. Maybe it’s because I live in a world crawling with separatists that I find religious zealots with a tiny bit of wishy-washy, pussy-footing compromise in them deeply attractive. Plus, half the entertainment value of watching Massachusetts Bay come to life is witnessing all the tiptoeing and deference—frequently just a pretense of deference—to the crown. Winthrop will spend most of his time as magistrate tripping all over himself to make sure King Charles doesn’t get wind of any of the colony’s many treasonous infractions. Because, unlike the Plymouth Separatists, the nonseparating Bostonians left England pledging to remain as English as behead ings and clotted cream.
In fact, Winthrop and six of the highest-ranking officers of the Massachusetts Bay Company sent an open letter to the king and the Church of England before their departure in 1630 titled “ The Humble Request.” They beseeched His Majesty and their countrymen for “their prayers, and the removal of suspicions, and misconstructions of their intentions.” The Church of England is especially cajoled as “our dear mother,” whom they bid adieu with “much sadness of heart and many tears in our eyes, ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation we have received in her bosom, and sucked it from her breasts.” (Cotton will pick up on this mammary metaphor in his farewell sermon, reminding the colonists not to forget England, “the breast that gave them suck.”)
“ The Humble Request” is so servile it boils down to this panicky appeal:
Nothing uppity about us, Your Majesty, we’re just hobos in the woods!
To hammer home the image of themselves as unthreatening and pitiable, they remind the king and his bishops that “we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness.”
In private, however, Winthrop will soon tell his fellow colonists the very opposite. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” he says.
I
n “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” when John Cotton tells the seafarers before him that their exodus is as natural as a bee ditching a cramped hive, it is an act of kindness, especially to John Winthrop. Not all of Winthrop’s old comrades have been so quick with a
bon voyage.
When he asked his friend Robert Reyce for advice on whether or not to emigrate, Reyce sent him a churlish warning not to, starting with the fact that, at the age of forty-two, Winthrop was too damn old. “Plantations are for young men,” Reyce wrote, “that can endure all pains and hunger. . . . But for one of your years to undertake so large a task is seldom seen but to miscarry.” He added that the scheme would ruin Winthrop’s family, and that even on the off chance his ship avoids shipwreck, he’ll live across the sea on the dole, forever dependent on England “for supplies.” (It must have taken all of Winthrop’s considerable restraint not to ship Reyce a boat-load of so-there! corn upon Boston’s first harvest.) Finally, Reyce tries to dissuade Winthrop with the wilderness’s shocking lack of reading material, carping, “How hard will it be for one brought up among books and learned men, to live in a barbarous place, where is no learning and less civility?”
Not so hard, it turns out. Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children’s children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox. One of the Puritans’ descendants, Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, embodied the wordy tradition passed down to him when he announced, “The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man.” As the twentieth-century critic F. O. Mat thiessen would complain of Emerson’s bookish bent, “It can remind you of the bias of provincial New England, whose higher culture had been so exclusively one of books that it had grown incapable even of appraising the worth of other modes of expression.”
The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary. Their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives—not land, not money, not power, not fun. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.
History is written by the writers. The quill-crazy New Englanders left behind libraries full of statements of purpose in the form of letters, sermons, court transcripts, and diaries. Most of what we know about the history of early New England is lifted straight out of Winthrop’s wonderful journal and William Bradford’s also wonderful
Of Plymouth Plantation.
The seventeenth-century Puritans are seen as the ancestors of today’s anti-intellectual Protestant sects—probably because of high school productions of Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible,
a fictionalization of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, an exercise in stupidity that took place more than forty years after John Winthrop’s death. In fact, today’s evangelicals owe more to the Great Awakening revival movement of the eighteenth century, in which a believer’s passion and feelings came to trump book learning. Subsequent Great Awakening sequels over the next two centuries brought forth recent innovations, including the ecstatic outbursts known as speaking in tongues.
There wasn’t any speaking in tongues going on in Massachusetts Bay, unless you count classical Greek. The Puritans had barely nailed together their rickety cabins when they founded Harvard so their future clergymen could receive proper theological training in Hebrew and other biblical languages.
The magnitude of the Puritan devotion to higher education is on display in a letter Reverend Thomas Shepard, Jr., wrote to his son upon the lad’s admission to Harvard. (The elder Shepard was a graduate of Harvard’s class of 1653.) The father is full of advice on how his son can be a better student—read history for wisdom and poetry for wit, admit when he doesn’t understand something, etc. But Shepard’s note is not so much a letter to his son as a love letter to learning, expressing how he hopes the boy will approach his studies “with an appetite.” He continues, “So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.” Then he signs the letter “Pater tuus”—“your father,” in Latin.