John Winthrop's first journal entry in January 1631 notes that "a house at Dorchester was burnt down." The next entry, in February, states that a Mr. Freeman's house in Watertown burned down but "being in the daytime, his goods were saved." It speaks of the grind of ongoing misery that Winthrop sees a daytime blaze as a sign that things are looking up. Of course he was unaware that he would spend the next few years trying to put out fires of a different sort.
Enter Roger Williams. On February 5, 1631, Winthrop's journal notes the arrival of the ship Lyon. Lyon. "She brought Mr. Williams, (a godly minister), with his wife." "She brought Mr. Williams, (a godly minister), with his wife."
Williams was probably twenty-seven years old. A London-raised, Cambridge-educated theologian, he had most recently worked in Essex as a private chaplain to the family of one of Oliver Cromwell's cousins.
When Williams next appears in Winthrop's journal, two months later, the governor is all riled up. He says that the Boston court (which he runs) wrote a letter to John Endecott, asking him to explain why the Salem church just offered to hire Williams as its teacher.
The bigger Puritan churches employ two equally important clergymen, a pastor and a teacher. Influenced by John Calvin's notion of a fourfold division of church offices (ordained pastor and teacher, lay elders and deacons), the Cambridge Platform of 1648, a sort of manifesto about church organization written by a committee of New England divines, described the difference between the job descriptions: " The pastor's special work is to attend to exhortation, and therein to administer a word of wisdom; the teacher is to attend to doctrine and therein to administer a word of knowledge." The two work side by side, the teacher delivering brainy lectures about Scripture, the pastor giving earthier, encouraging talks about living a devout daily life. (For instance, Cotton Mather described Samuel Newman, the pastor at Dorchester and Weymouth, as "a very lively preacher, and a very preaching liver.") If the pastor is the church's heart, the teacher is its brain. John Cotton, the future teacher at Boston, sounds like a fervent researcher when he describes his own "love to the truth, which is to be searched after more than hidden treasure." It makes sense that Williams would be offered the job of teacher-he cares more about searching for the truth than making friends, his ideas outnumbering his social skills.
Both teacher and pastor are elected positions. The members of each congregation choose their own clergy. There is no difference between Puritan clergymen and Anglican priests in terms of authority and the respect and obedience worshippers are supposed to have for that authority. A Puritan teacher or pastor, like a priest, is supposed to guide the worshippers in spiritual life and study. The difference between Puritan clergy and Anglican priests is how they are chosen-a priest from the top down (the top being the Archbishop of Canterbury) and a teacher from the bottom up (that being the congregation). Each congregation in New England is to be its own autonomous authority.
When Winthrop and the other Boston settlers formed their church the previous August, they had chosen John Wilson as their teacher. Wilson, however, was sailing back to England on the Lyon Lyon's return trip to retrieve his wife. This is a setback for the Boston church. Winthrop admires Wilson, calling him "a very sincere, holy man." Winthrop writes approvingly in his journal that Wilson confessed that before coming to Massachusetts, he dreamed "that he saw a church arise out of the earth, which grew up and became a marvelous goodly church." It's clear Winthrop wants to make sure Wilson's dream comes true. With Wilson's leave of absence upon them, Winthrop pens a sad little entry about holding a prayer meeting in his home at which Wilson encourages Winthrop and Dudley to preach lay sermons while he's gone.
The fact that Williams, a minister, came in on the very ship that was to sail away with Boston's minister must have seemed pretty much perfect, as if heaven's Human Resources Department had sent Williams their way. However, they would soon suspect that Roger Williams was the preacher from hell.
Winthrop notes that in the letter the Boston court sent to Endecott in Salem, "Mr. Williams had refused to join with the congregation at Boston, because they would not make a public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the churches of England, while they lived there." In other words, the congregation of Boston, people whose faith led them to Massachusetts, people who had somehow survived that first, grim winter with all its hardships and loss, are being told by some upstart new guy that they haven't done enough for their God, that they are damned until the entire congregation publicly apologizes for having ever worshipped in Church of England churches back in England. These Nonseparatists still consider themselves to be members of the Church of England, reformers trying to set a new example and fix the church from within. In fact, when the Bostonians chose Wilson as their teacher the previous summer, Winthrop writes in his journal as if the Archbishop of Canterbury is looking over his shoulder, confirming that the teacher's election does not mean that "Mr. Wilson should renounce his ministry he received in England."
To Williams, the Bay colonists' way of walking the Separatist walk while refusing to talk the Separatist talk was hypocrisy. But besides being a survival tactic meant to keep them in the good graces of King Charles, Boston's insistence on maintaining its ties and affection for their brethren back in England is also compassionate. Giles Firmin, a onetime deacon of the Boston church, in his 1652 tract Separatism Examined, Separatism Examined, explained, "When I raise a house new from the ground, I may then do as I please, but if I be mending an old house, I must do as well as I can, repair by degrees." explained, "When I raise a house new from the ground, I may then do as I please, but if I be mending an old house, I must do as well as I can, repair by degrees."
So after the Boston church is kind enough to extend an offer to Roger Williams to fill one of the roughly two paying church job openings in all of New England, Williams would later recall, "I conscientiously refused . . . because I durst not officiate to an unseparated people, as, upon examination and conference, I found them to be."
If Roger Williams had any ambition at all, he would have accepted the Bostonians' offer on the spot with, if not hugs and giggles, then whatever modicum of humble joy a Puritan is allowed. The position of teacher in Boston is the most plum appointment in seventeenth-century New England theology. When the already famous go-getter John Cotton arrives in Boston two years later, he will assume that position until his death and in doing so he goes down in history as the most important and influential clergyman of the era.
Roger Williams might be the most ambitious of all the New England Puritans, but his ambitions are strictly spiritual. He fears no man, only God. He desires heavenly riches, not earthly influence. He seeks absolute communion with his Creator and he does not in 1631, nor will he ever, care about anything more. His fellow New Englanders find his zeal kind of inspirational but awfully off-putting.
So from the get-go Roger Williams comes off as a fully formed crank, a man whom even Puritans dismiss as a tad too fanatical. By turning down the Boston teacher job, he is nitpicky, annoying, galling, and rude. But he is nevertheless principled, self-confident, forthright, and true to himself. In this earliest run-in, he also makes a small, preliminary stand that hints at his later legacy of calling for the separation of church and state. Along with rebuffing the Bostonians' job offer, Williams informs Winthrop and his fellow magistrates that, by the way, they have no right (records Winthrop) "to punish breach of the Sabbath, nor . . . any other breach of the first table."
The first table is the first four of the Ten Commandments, the ones having to do with God-not worshipping another god, not making idols, not taking the Lord's name in vain, and keeping the Sabbath holy. Keeping the Sabbath holy is Massachusetts Bay law and therefore punishable by the General Court. Williams believes that adhering to the first four commandments is a religious matter and not the business of civil magistrates. Williams makes a distinction between a sin and a crime.
Getting wind of this, the civil magistrates must have screamed a collective "Goddamnit!" Or would have but for Commandment Three. Threatening to take away a Puritan magistrate's right to punish is like yanking the trumpet out of Louis Armstrong's hands. As Williams will soon find out, punishment is what the General Court is for. for. Winthrop erupts, and not only at Williams. He's just as upset with Endecott's church in Salem. How dare they elect Williams as their teacher after that troublemaker insulted Boston's church and magistrates? Winthrop erupts, and not only at Williams. He's just as upset with Endecott's church in Salem. How dare they elect Williams as their teacher after that troublemaker insulted Boston's church and magistrates?
When Endecott receives the court's scolding letter, the Salem church withdraws its job offer to Williams, so Williams heads to Separatist Plymouth, where he will stay until he realizes even Plymouth is not quite Separatist enough. Plymouth's Governor Bradford calls Williams "a man godly and zealous . . . but very unsettled in judgment." Bradford says that when Williams "exercised his gifts among us," his teaching was "well-approved." Bradford blesses God for sending Williams to him and even claims to be "thankful to [Williams] even for his sharpest admonitions and reproofs, so far as they agree with the truth." His point being, a lot of Williams's reprimands were full of crap. Williams, said Bradford, "fell into some strange opinions . . . which caused some controversy between the church and him."
One of these strange opinions involved Williams reprimanding Plymouth residents who, when visiting friends and family back in England, would go to church with them-Church of England church. If a godly American so much as accompanied his elderly English mother to tea with her vicar, Williams had a fit, bemoaning those who profess "to be a separate people in New England . . . and yet communicating with the parishes in Old." So Williams departs Plymouth "abruptly," says Bradford, and returns once again to Salem, a town not immune to strange opinions.
Roger Williams is hardly the only argumentative Jesus freak within John Winthrop's jurisdiction. Winthrop's problem with Williams isn't so much that he says strange things, it's that Williams persists in believing strange things after he has been shown the errors of his ways. Winthrop's journal is chockablock with grievances to mediate and wrongheaded people to set straight. There's no agreeing to disagree in Massachusetts Bay. There is only agreeing to agree. Winthrop's perpetual task is consensus-building.
For example, it seems the Watertown pastor has been telling his flock that "the churches of Rome were true churches." Wrong! So Winthrop, along with Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley and a Boston church elder, hurries to Watertown to organize a debate before the congregation and the pastor. Perhaps Winthrop whips out that Geneva Bible with its marginal note in the Book of Revelation about the pope being the Whore of Babylon. Can a true church have the Whore of Babylon in charge-can it really? Luckily, everyone in the congregation "except three" admits his error and all's well. (Then, later on, one of the dissenters will be excommunicated for a few hours until he finally concedes he's mistaken and is un-excommunicated and welcomed back into the fold and all is well yet again.) On November 2, 1631, Margaret Winthrop, along with John Jr., arrives, prompting something of a town party in Boston. Winthrop writes that the "assistants and most of the people . . . came to welcome them," bringing hogs and poultry, venison and geese, "so as the like joy and manifestation of love had never been seen in New England." This out-pouring of foodstuffs and goodwill must have convinced Margaret that she had married Mr. Popularity. She'll soon discover that her husband will need an ally at home more than ever, as he has a nemesis at work.
If Nancy Drew were trying to get to the bottom of Winthrop's petty rivalry with Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, the book might be titled The Mystery of the Pretentious Wainscoting. The Mystery of the Pretentious Wainscoting. What happened was, the assistants had agreed to build a fortified new town across the Charles River from Boston, which, per New England's usual creativity with naming things, they called "New Town." (It would eventually be renamed Cambridge, after they founded a university there. Because what else would men who attended England's Cambridge University name a university town?) So Winthrop and Dudley started building houses there. Then Winthrop's Boston neighbors cajoled the governor not to abandon them, and so he promised "he would not leave them." When Winthrop has his servants start dismantling his New Town house, Dudley is miffed. So Dudley quits his post as deputy governor in a huff. Which was, notes Winthrop in his journal, "not allowed." What happened was, the assistants had agreed to build a fortified new town across the Charles River from Boston, which, per New England's usual creativity with naming things, they called "New Town." (It would eventually be renamed Cambridge, after they founded a university there. Because what else would men who attended England's Cambridge University name a university town?) So Winthrop and Dudley started building houses there. Then Winthrop's Boston neighbors cajoled the governor not to abandon them, and so he promised "he would not leave them." When Winthrop has his servants start dismantling his New Town house, Dudley is miffed. So Dudley quits his post as deputy governor in a huff. Which was, notes Winthrop in his journal, "not allowed."
Following a meeting on May 1, 1632, Winthrop writes that Dudley defends his resignation as a gesture of keeping the "public peace," that when he airs his hurt feelings "he saw that bred disturbance." Supposedly, the purpose of the meeting is for everyone to kiss and make up. But the Winthrop of "Christian Charity," the one who admonished that "the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor," presses Dudley on why he just sold some corn to poor people at too steep a price. "There arose hot words," writes Winthrop, who continues, "The governor"-Winthrop frequently refers to himself in the third person-"took notice of these speeches, and bore them with more patience than he had done." Then, in another dumb diplomatic move, given how sensitive Dudley is on the subject of new houses in New Town, Winthrop slams Dudley for building a fancy mansion there, unseemly "in the beginning of a plantation." Winthrop's complaint? Adorning the house with ostentatious wainscoting. Doesn't Winthrop realize that part of "rejoicing together," as he put it in "Model of Christian Charity," is complimenting one another's wood paneling? Dudley is surely offended and protests that his wainscoting "was for the warmth of his house . . . being but clapboards nailed to the wall in the form of wainscot."
A week later, Winthrop would be reelected governor and Dudley "accepted his place again" as deputy. At which time Winthrop enthuses, " The governor and he being reconciled the day before, all things were carried very lovingly." But by August, Dudley was complaining about Winthrop's abandonment of New Town again, and questioning Winthrop's authority and decisions. This is when Dudley levels that charge about letting Philip Ratcliffe hang around too long after being banished the previous winter. Dudley also accuses Winthrop of lending twenty-eight pounds of gunpowder to Plymouth during some Indian troubles without the court's consent. Winthrop writes, "The Governor answered, it was of his own powder."
Winthrop sat there calmly, lapping up the insults dished out by Dudley. To his journal he explains his approach to Dudley this way: "To clear his reputation with those to whom the deputy had accused him, he was willing to give him satisfaction . . . that he might free him of such jealousy." Nice try.
These are, after all, Englishmen, a people with such a knack for infighting that the coming decade carries their countrymen back home into civil war. Throughout the 1630s, Winthrop's journal documents a Massachusetts Bay always on the brink of arguing itself into oblivion. The body politic constantly threatens to kill itself, and Winthrop is the guy who puts in a lot of late nights manning the suicide hotline.
Just as Watertown got the crackdown for kind thoughts about the Catholic Church and thus not being puritanical enough, Winthrop also has to rein in those Puritans he fears will purify the colony to pieces. Case in point, the uproar over the red cross on the king's flag.
It might seem strange that such a gung-ho group of Christians would abhor the symbol of the cross, the very wooden structure that makes possible their savior's sacrifice. But the Puritans think of the cross as a graven image that therefore breaks the Second Commandment against idol worship. A cross, to a Puritan, is not a symbol of Christ-it is a symbol of the pope. In his journal Winthrop notes that once, coming home to Boston after a visit to Plymouth, he "came to a place called Hue's Cross." He continues, "The governor being displeased at the name" because it might "give the Papists occasion to say that their religion was first planted in these parts, changed the name, and called it Hue's Folly."
As for the flag controversy, one day in 1634, a certain Salem resident who shall remain John Endecott, noticed the king's flag with its red cross of Saint George whipping in the wind. So he ordered the cross to be cut out of the flag. In his journal, Winthrop is conflicted. On the one hand, Endecott has a point: "the red cross was given to the king of England by the pope, as an ensign of victory, and so a superstitious thing, and a relic of antichrist." (He is referring to the Crusades, when the red cross of Saint George was England's pope-approved battle flag.) On the other hand, if news of this got back to England, "it would be taken as an act of rebellion . . . in defacing the king's colors."
In a later entry, Winthrop describes hosting a powwow of the assistants at his house. They know that gossip this juicy is not going to stay on this side of the Atlantic for long, so they agree to appease the king by writing an open letter to Winthrop's brother-in-law in England, telling "the truth of the matter . . . therein we expressed our dislike of the thing, and our purpose to punish the offenders."
Eventually the court condemns Endecott, according to Winthrop, not so much for defacing the flag, but for acting "rash" and on his own, for "not seeking the advice of the court." They find Endecott "uncharitable," making a unilateral decision for Salem that the officers of the General Court had a right to discuss and debate and come to a collective agreement about. Endecott is also taken to task for "laying a blemish also upon the rest of the magistrates, as if they would suffer idolatry . . . and giving occasion to the state of England to think ill of us." I.e., Endecott made the court look sloppy, as if it had been oblivious to an idol of popery in its midst. Endecott is censured from holding public office for a year, receiving this mild sentence and not, say, having his ears sliced off with his own flag-ripping sword, because he acted "out of tenderness of conscience, and not any evil intent." In other words, they agreed with what he did, just not the showboating way he did it.
Winthrop is wise to fear the king's wrath. For starters, a few of the men Winthrop and his court had banished back to England, including the earless Philip Ratcliffe-who, for some reason, holds a grudge-were stirring up trouble against the colony, petitioning the king to the effect that Massachusetts Bay is set on "rebellion, to have cast off our allegiance, and to be wholly separate from the church and laws of England." They also complained that the "ministers and people" of Massachusetts "did continually rail against the state, church, and bishops there."
Of course, there was plenty of railing against the state and especially against the bishops, going on back in England, too; especially against Bishop Laud, King Charles's closest ally in the clergy, whom Charles would officially appoint Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Laud is as firm a believer in the Church of England as the Puritans are firm in their beliefs. Which is highly, severely, vindictively, insanely firm. Laud's rather understandable problem with Calvinism's harsh insistence on predestination made him proclaim, "My very soul abominates this doctrine, for it makes God, the God of all mercies, to be the most fierce and unreasonable tyrant in the whole world." An excellent point. Yet how does the highest authority in the Church of England choose to counter the Puritans for having turned God into a tyrant? With unfettered tyranny, of course.
Laud oversaw a network of informants around England whose job it was to report Anglican ministers who slacked off in providing their parishioners with the finer things-the organ music, the vestments, the candles, and kneeling-that sickened Puritan-leaning clergymen. Trespassing preachers were hauled before Laud's Court of High Commission, and if they failed to repent they were thrown in jail.
In 1633, a friend warned John Cotton that just such a letter demanding he appear before Laud's commission was on its way to him. According to his grandson Cotton Mather, Cotton's friend broke it to him "that if he had been guilty of drunkenness, or uncleanness, or any such lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon; but inasmuch as he had been guilty of . . . puritanism, the crime was unpardonable; and therefore, said he, you must fly for your safety." So Cotton went into hiding. He was forty-eight, he was venerable, and he was on the lam. He found refuge in the houses of other like-minded ministers and friends, but wrote his wife, Sarah, not to visit him because "I fear you will be watched, and dogged at the heels. But I hope, shortly God will make way for thy safe coming."
Hearing of Cotton's predicament, John Winthrop invited him to Boston. And on September 4, 1633, Winthrop's journal notes Cotton's arrival, along with Puritan firebrand Thomas Hooker, on the ship Griffin. Griffin. "They gat out of England with much difficulty," writes Winthrop, Cotton and Hooker both having been "long sought for to have been brought into the high commission." Their fellow minister Thomas Shepard, who would soon follow them to America, remarked, "I saw the Lord departing from England when Mr. Hooker and Mr. Cotton were gone." "They gat out of England with much difficulty," writes Winthrop, Cotton and Hooker both having been "long sought for to have been brought into the high commission." Their fellow minister Thomas Shepard, who would soon follow them to America, remarked, "I saw the Lord departing from England when Mr. Hooker and Mr. Cotton were gone."
The Boston congregation reassigned John Wilson as their pastor and elected Cotton their teacher. (The studious Cotton would later justify escaping to America to avoid prison in London, "where there would be no opportunity for books or pens.") Cotton's preaching was a big hit. Within three months, Winthrop remarks in his journal, many "profane and notorious evil persons came and confessed their sins, and were comfortably received into the bosom of the church" in Boston.
John Cotton arrives in 1633 just in time to help Massachusetts Bay board up its theological windows. Hurricane Roger is a coming. Winthrop reports in his journal that he turns to Cotton for advice. It seems Roger Williams has arrived at some exciting new conclusions, which he has generously decided to share with his fellow colonists.
Neither Williams nor Cotton will ever get over their arguments of 1633-35. The two will spend the rest of their lives irking each other so much they would engage in the seventeenth-century New England version of a duel: pamphlet fight! Since the contemporary record of Massachusetts Bay's quarrel with Williams, and vice versa, consists mostly of Winthrop's journal, Williams and Cotton's later publications are handy for getting the skinny on what the original fuss was about. Williams publishes "Letter of Mr. John Cotton," unbeknownst to its sender; then Williams publishes his own rebuttal, "Mr. Cotton's Letter Examined and Answered." Cotton then publishes "John Cotton's Answer to Roger Williams." After which Williams publishes a pamphlet taking Cotton to task, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. Then Cotton slams Williams right back with Then Cotton slams Williams right back with The Bloudy Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb. The Bloudy Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb. Then Williams counterattacks with Then Williams counterattacks with The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy. The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy. Only death prevented Cotton from finishing his final sequel, Only death prevented Cotton from finishing his final sequel, The Bloudy Tenent: Attack of the Clones. The Bloudy Tenent: Attack of the Clones.
On December 27, 1633, Winthrop writes in his journal that he has met with the court of assistants and some of "the most judicious ministers," which would include Cotton, about a "treatise" Williams sent to the governor of Plymouth "wherein, among other things, he disputes their right to the lands they possessed here, and concluded that, claiming by the king's grant, they could have no title, nor otherwise, except they compounded with the natives." In other words, Williams says the royal charter that gave Plymouth the rights to Plymouth is illegal because what Plymouth really needed was a deed from the Indians. Williams is under the impression the land belonged to its original inhabitants.
Winthrop continues that the magistrates and the ministers are also "much offended" by Williams's description of the late King James as a liar who committed the blasphemy of "calling Europe Christendom, or the Christian world."
Roger Williams is God's own goalie-no seemingly harmless pleasantry gets past him. To Williams, "Christendom," that affable word describing Europe and its colonies, is an affront to Christ. For this, he blames Constantine the Great.
Is he referring to Constantine, the first Roman emperor to legalize Christianity in the year 313, thereby allowing Christians to worship in peace after centuries in the Coliseum as lion food? Yep, that's the jerk.
In The Bloudy Tenent, The Bloudy Tenent, Williams points out that Constantine "did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes." At least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that's when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the state. Williams explains that under Constantine, "the gardens of Christ's churches turned into the wilderness of national religion, and the world (under Constantine's dominion) to the most unchristian Christendom." Legalizing, legitimizing the Church turned Christianity into just another branch of government enforced by "the sword of civil power," i.e., through state-sponsored violence. Williams points out that Constantine "did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes." At least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that's when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the state. Williams explains that under Constantine, "the gardens of Christ's churches turned into the wilderness of national religion, and the world (under Constantine's dominion) to the most unchristian Christendom." Legalizing, legitimizing the Church turned Christianity into just another branch of government enforced by "the sword of civil power," i.e., through state-sponsored violence.
On the one hand, there is no surer sign that Williams should probably ease up his Christian truth quest than when the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay find him to be too theologically intense. I just feel sorry for him that he lived in an age before air quotes; maybe he would have calmed down about use of the word "Christendom" if he could make sarcastic hand gestures every time he heard or said it.
On the other hand, Williams makes an interesting point. Remember that Christendom, at the moment he complains about King James once using that word on a charter, is at war with itself, that being the Thirty Years' War. Catholics are slaughtering Protestants in France and Protestants are slaughtering Catholics in Germany. A year after Williams arrived in Boston, the town held a day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the fall of Munich at the hands of Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden's Protestant king. Williams would later write, "The blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the wars of present and former ages, for their respective consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace."
Winthrop issues a warning to John Endecott in Salem, where Williams was living, pointing out that Williams's treasonous put-downs are not confined to the late king but include the current one. Winthrop alludes to Williams citing three particularly mean verses from the Book of Revelation that he "did personally apply to our present king, Charles."
Williams backs down-for now. He writes "very submissively" to Winthrop and the council that he regrets the hubbub and permits his treatise "to be burnt." A few weeks later, Winthrop is pleased to report that the Reverends Cotton and Wilson were mollified by Williams's "retraction."
In May of 1634, Winthrop writes in his journal, "The court chose a new governor, viz., Thomas Dudley, Esq., the former deputy." Winthrop is elected deputy governer. In other words, he is now his rival's number two. He is surely embarrassed but his diary contains no bellyaching. It was of course God's will, so he deserved it. In fact, Winthrop has all the assistants over for dinner. Though, perhaps to cheer himself up about his accomplishments while governor, he does write a letter to a friend in England a few days later talking up the colony's improved mortality stats. "There hath not died above two or three grown persons and about so many children all the last year," he boasts.
In July of 1634, the assistants receive a letter from Matthew Craddock, the Massachusetts Bay Company's man in England. The Commission for Regulating Plantations, headed by the king's pet, Bishop Laud, is recalling the patent, i.e., the Charter. Craddock "wrote to us to send it home," records Winthrop. Ship back the Charter and they might as well pack up the whole colony in the same trunk. The assistants agree to reply to Craddock's letter, but without the Charter, and without "any answer or excuse." Poor Craddock-ordered by Laud to procure a document and all he gets in return is a letter about how the weather sure is hot in Boston? Winthrop records that Craddock fires back, enclosing in his reply, hint-hint, a copy of the government order "whereby we were required to send over our patent." Unnerved, the assistants nevertheless write Craddock back that they couldn't possibly legally return the Charter to England "but by a general court," which would not be held until the following September.
In Winthrop's next entry, the assistants meet on Castle Island in Boston Harbor where they conspire to build a fort. Remember the apocalyptic paranoia that inspired the passengers on the Winthrop fleet to quit England in the first place? Well, that was mostly superstitious conjecture based on pessimistic readings of biblical prophets and worries that the Thirty Years War might spread to England. This business of the king's committee recalling the charter is an actual concrete threat to their hard-won way of life. Winthrop was born the year his country's fleet defeated the mighty Spanish Armada; he knows English monarchs are not shy about dispatching their battleships when provoked.
In August, Winthrop gets word that the colony's enemies in England, led by men banished from Massachusetts, have made "railing speeches and threats against this plantation and Mr. Winthrop in particular." They succeeded in getting Laud's committee to appoint a governor to come to Massachusetts with a military escort and take over. By January, Winthrop says, the assistants and ministers hold a meeting in Boston to discuss "what we ought to do, if a general governor should be sent out of England."
In his journal, Winthrop records their answer to that cat aclysmic question of how the men of Massachusetts should respond to the arrival of a royal interloper sent to put an end to their city on a hill: "We ought not to accept him."
Remember this is almost a century and a half before the Boston Tea Party, before Lexington and Concord, before the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown burns down that tavern built on the site of Winthrop's first American house. John Winthrop is no Son of Liberty. He's a Puritan father of communal control. But behind the politeness of that line, "We ought not to accept him," Winthrop reveals himself. He is a pussy-footing pragmatist who will clap his own hand over Roger Williams's mouth and confiscate John Endecott's sword if it keeps from riling up King Charles. But we know from Winthrop's journal that he left England with a recipe for gunpowder. That same journal is clear about this: if the king's men come for Massachusetts, Massachusetts will be ready.
Where do these men get such cheek? They are the king's subjects, not citizens. What are the sources of their defiance? There are, I think, primarily two: the Bible and the Magna Carta.
The Bible is full of anecdotes that prime the pump of treason. We have already read of King James's irritation with the way the Geneva Bible's marginal notes spell out how it is biblically sanctioned to defy the Egyptian pharaoh (and therefore all monarchs) when he commands that Hebrew babies be murdered. But those prickly Protestant marginal notes are simply amplifying what's already in the text. I grew up on the King James Version of the Bible, the translation that was, by definition, supposed to be more tolerable to kings, and I would like to point out that by the time I was eight I had already put on a puppet show about how people of faith are required to stand up to wrongheaded kings.
Every summer when I was a kid I attended vacation Bible school. It was like arts-and-crafts camp, only churchier-firing and glazing ceramic praying-hands bookends, that sort of thing. We studied the Book of Daniel's third chapter, in which Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, commissioned a gold idol that his subjects were required to bow down to. Anyone failing to kneel before the image "shall be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace." Kneeling before a false idol being an obvious violation of the Second Commandment, three Jews on Nebuchadnezzar's payroll refuse to worship another god. The three lawbreakers, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are hauled before the king, who tells them that when he said that thing about the fiery furnace he really meant it. They reply that perhaps God will save them from the flames, "But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up."
Those words are insolent and bold, even when spoken by a felt puppet with glued-on googly eyes. The three hope God will save them, but if not they will gladly burn. Nebuchadnezzar is happy to help them find out. He has Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thrown into the furnace. To mimic the flames, my fellow Bible students and I rattled flashlights at the puppets, who remained perfectly still and perfectly unharmed, not a yarn hair on their heads singed. " They have no hurt," marveled the king, who decreed that anyone from anywhere who spoke against "the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort." A happy ending-the faithful defy the king and the king admits he was wrong.
The lessons of that story-be true to yourself, be not afraid to defy authority, be willing to die for what you believe in-had a profound influence on my own moral backbone, and I am not alone. In his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr., writes of the lawbreaking that landed him in the clink: "Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake."
In 1940, when more than 300,000 British and French troops were trapped on the beach in the Belgian coastal town of Dunkirk, awaiting certain death at the hands of the approaching German army, the British commander there sent a three-word message to England of his men's resolve to stick it out and fight: "But if not." Stirred by the subtle reference to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the British people jumped into their yachts and fishing boats by the thousands and raced across the English Channel to ferry the soldiers to safety.
"God's people have been immovable, constant, and resolved to the death in refusing to submit to false worships, and in preaching and professing the true worship, contrary to the express command of public authority," wrote Roger Williams in The Bloudy Tenent. The Bloudy Tenent. He continued, "So the three famous worthies against the command of Nebuchadnezzar." He continued, "So the three famous worthies against the command of Nebuchadnezzar."
Of course a mischief-maker like Williams would make Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego his personal mascots. But the more mild-mannered Winthrop read the same Bible, including the Geneva Version, where the notes on the Book of Daniel are typically feisty toward royal authority. Perhaps Winthrop, his peripheral vision ever scanning the horizon for the warships of King Charles, perused Daniel 3:19, when Nebuchadnezzar instructs the furnace operators to crank up the heat "seven times" hotter for his three victims. The Geneva marginal note to that verse reads: This declares that the more that tyrants rage, and the more crafty they show themselves in inventing strange and cruel punishments, the more is God glorified by his servants, to whom he gives patience and constancy to abide the cruelty of their punishment.
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 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.") 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, History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and every time I read those words I am proud to be an English-speaking person. 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. 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. 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."
In 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. 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." 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, Experiments in Spiritual Life and Health, that gives a reader an inkling of what it must have been like to be married to him. 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."
This charming, romantic get-well card includes this recurring image of a repeat sinner: a dog vomiting, then lapping up its own vomit. There is the comforting reminder that Mrs. Williams should regard her bout of the sniffles as a "warning from heaven to make ready for a sudden call to be gone from hence," i.e., as good practice for death. There is the section in which the women sleeping with biblical men try (and fail) to distract their men from devotion to their Creator: "Hence Job in his great passions and cursings could not be brought (no not by his wife) to speak ill of God." Or: "Samson, though carried away first by a Philistine wife, and then by a Philistine whore, yet can he not be carried away so from the God of Israel." There's the part where Williams invites his wife on a sort of weekend getaway "into the valley of the shadow of death," holding hands perhaps as they "view the rotten skulls of so many innumerable thousands of millions of millions of men and women, like ourselves, gone, gone forever from this life."
"Between a loving couple," writes Williams, "it is not easy to keep in the first flame of love . . . although the fire of the truth and sincerity of marriage love never die, or be extinguished." While that statement is in keeping with the not-so-hot-and-bothered sweet nothings of this document, it's worth noting his reference to the "first flame of love." Apparently, there was one once.
The United States is often called a Puritan nation as a lazy way of saying Americans are sexually repressed. Which seems true, because we all read The Scarlet Letter The Scarlet Letter in ninth grade. The Puritans were troubled by adultery, and who can blame them? It is, at the very least, a lapse of common courtesy. But the Puritans were actually quite gung-ho about sexual intercourse for married couples because they believed God came up with it. In fact, a handful of colonial New England women successfully sued for divorce on the grounds of impotence, including Anna Lane of Massachusetts Bay, who accused her husband in 1658 of failing to perform "the duties of a husband," a detail not disputed by Mr. Lane. And speaking of marriage, in colonial New England weddings were "a civil thing," civil unions one might say, performed by magistrates, not clergy. Because a wedding wasn't trumped up as the object in life that saves one's soul-that would be God-but rather more like what it actually is, a change in legal status, an errand at the DMV, with cake. in ninth grade. The Puritans were troubled by adultery, and who can blame them? It is, at the very least, a lapse of common courtesy. But the Puritans were actually quite gung-ho about sexual intercourse for married couples because they believed God came up with it. In fact, a handful of colonial New England women successfully sued for divorce on the grounds of impotence, including Anna Lane of Massachusetts Bay, who accused her husband in 1658 of failing to perform "the duties of a husband," a detail not disputed by Mr. Lane. And speaking of marriage, in colonial New England weddings were "a civil thing," civil unions one might say, performed by magistrates, not clergy. Because a wedding wasn't trumped up as the object in life that saves one's soul-that would be God-but rather more like what it actually is, a change in legal status, an errand at the DMV, with cake.
So marital intercourse for Puritans was perfectly permissible and necessary, but every Puritan's heart belonged to Jesus. Spiritual passion is the one area in a Puritan's life in which he or she is allowed out-and-out abandon. We're talking outpourings of ardor bordering on smut.
Even John Winthrop, upstanding pillar of the community, was not above soft-core mash notes addressed to the Lord inspired by the Song of Solomon. "Draw us with the sweetness of thine odors," he asked Jesus, "that we may run after thee, allure us . . . that thou may possess us as thine own . . . in the love of marriage." He continues, "Let us hear that sweet voice of thine, my love, my dove, my undefiled: spread thy skirt over us and cover our deformity, make us sick with thy love: let us sleep in thine arms and awake in thy kingdom."
"God's children," Williams tells his wife, "like true lovers, delight to be private, and fervent with their heavenly father and husband."
Williams's attraction to Jesus inspires him to write the lyrics to hackneyed pop songs, including, "Let Him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine."
Williams in Salem is such a myopic researcher of biblical truth he doesn't care who gets hurt. His intellectual fervor, coupled with a disregard for practical consequences, reminds me of nuclear physicist J. Robert Op penheimer, running his secret Manhattan Project lab in Los Alamos with single-minded zeal, then quoting the Bhagavad Gita as the first test of his atomic bomb lights up the desert. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," he said.
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Bay General Court and John Winthrop are trying to keep their precarious little world intact. Williams's singular rhetoric has become too disturbing to the public peace.