Restoration Declensions, Divine Consolations: The Work of John Foxe in 1664 Massachusetts
anne g. myles
“ HAT the living speak, is no wonder: but that the dead T speak, is more then miraculous,” wrote the Reverend John Norton near the opening of Abel being Dead yet Speaketh (1658), his biography of the recently deceased John Cotton, his immediate predecessor as teacher of Boston’s First Church. “The greatest Object out of Heaven is the life and death of such upon Earth, who are now in Heaven,” he explained, adding “’Tis better to have a name in the Book of Martyrs then in the Book of Chronicles.”1 Norton’s work has been described as the first biography published in New England, and it is no accident that the genre emerged during this period. As the spiritual leaders of the first generation died off and as the colonies faced a series of political, religious, and social challenges that left them increasingly uncertain of their role in shaping the future of the English church and their standing in God’s eyes, the witness of past lives steadily gained power as both challenge and inspiration.2 Abel being Dead ends on an anxious note, the conviction that with Cotton’s death New England is standing on the brink of change: “Now our Candlesticks cannot but lament in darkness, when their Lights are gone....What
The author wishes to thank the College of Humanities and Fine Arts of the Uni- versity of Northern Iowa for a Major Grant, which supported research on this project. 1John Norton, Abel being Dead yet speaketh; or, the Life and Death of that de- servedly Famous Man of God, Mr. John Cotton (London, 1658), pp. 3–4, 5. 2On the work’s significance as biography, see Stephen Carl Arch, Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), p. 92.
The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXX, no. 1 (March 2007). C 2007 by The New England Quarterly. All right reserved.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 36 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the counsel of the Lord is concerning the bereaved Churches of New-England, is a solemn and awful meditation.”3 By the time Norton himself died five years later, fears of impending crisis had multiplied. Politically, the colony was di- vided over relations with the newly restored Charles II; reli- giously, it was in the throes of a debate over the legitimacy of the measures recommended by the 1662 synod, known as the Halfway Covenant. Ever more stringent measures, which had culminated in four executions, had not stemmed the “invasion” of Quaker preachers, while at the same time New England was experiencing simultaneous miseries of drought, crop loss, and illness. To honor the deceased Norton, his Boston congrega- tion published a collection of three of his final sermons in 1664. The first of these, “Sion the Out-cast Healed of her Wounds,” preached at the Court of Election in 1661, displays a shift- ing tone in Puritan discourse. Basing his sermon on Jeremiah 30:17, Norton declared that “Sions Apostacy brings upon Sion sad Calamity,” and he urged, “Let us shew it, that we mistook not our selves, pretending to come into this Wilderness to live under the Order of the Gospel.”4 The language of communal dis-ease and mourning that weaves its way through the text, as through other works of the same period—for example, Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 poem God’s Controversy with New England and John Higginson’s 1663 sermon The Cause of God and His People in New England—signals the origins of the jeremiadic rhetoric that would dominate New England dis- course for much of the remainder of the century.5 In 1664, the same year in which Norton’s 1661 election ser- mon was published, another text appeared in New England that addressed itself to the uncertainty of the present by once again reaching back into the past—in this case, the past of over a
3Norton, Abel being Dead, p. 46. 4John Norton, Three Choice and Profitable Sermons upon Several Texts of Scripture (Cambridge, Mass., 1664), pp. 5, 14. 5For a discussion of the importance of the period 1663–75 in the formation of the jeremiad, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), chap. 10, pp. 311–43.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 37 century earlier—to let the dead speak. The anonymous tract, titled Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion, published without an imprint, has survived in only two copies, one in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and one at Trinity College in Dublin. Listed in the English Short-Title Cat- alog but never included in Evans’s Early American Imprints, Divine Consolations has apparently gone entirely unnoticed in the history of Puritan scholarship. While the tract is clearly problematic in matters of attribution and publication, it also has much to offer us as we seek to understand the mental- ity of 1660s Massachusetts and the history of the book in early America. Comprised of a preface directed toward the people of Boston and New England, followed by an extract that reprints the section of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments related to the examination and letters of Marian martyr John Careless, com- bined with several letters from other Protestant martyrs, Divine Consolations is by far the first publication in America of any portion of the work best known as the Book of Martyrs; more than that, it seems to represent the first occasion on which ma- terial previously published in England—albeit an extract rather than a book proper—was printed in New England.
First published in London in 1563 and issued in at least nine more editions prior to 1700, John Foxe’s massive martyrol- ogy traces the history of persecution from the early Christians through the medieval church and the Protestant Reformation, focusing in its best-known final section on the persecutions of English Protestants in the reign of Queen Mary (1553–58). In addition to providing stirring, and often lurid, accounts of faith- ful lives and triumphant deaths, Acts and Monuments attacked the Catholic Church and made the case that the Protestant Church of England was not a new institution but rather rep- resented the contemporary embodiment of the true church as it could be traced back through history. Published repeatedly during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth, Foxe’s work pro- foundly shaped England’s sense of itself as a Protestant nation
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 38 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and also provided generations of Protestant readers with a rich compendium of spiritual exemplars.6 The role Foxe played in New England, however, has been less well understood, though scholars have long assumed that his work was as central for New English Puritans as for their English brethren. In a recent essay, Puritan historian Francis J. Bremer has recorded the results of his bibliographic survey of Foxe’s appearance in the literature of seventeenth-century New England; he finds, surprisingly, that evidence suggesting widespread ownership of the Book of Martyrs is scant and that, moreover, it was not extensively cited in the known literature. While Bremer locates numerous passing references to Foxe, he insists that they amount to mere “traces.” “It truly seems that in dealing with the Actes and Monuments in New England we are talking of something that was so much a part of the culture that it did not have to be written about or discussed,” Bremer reasons. “The scent of Foxe is in the air wherever we turn, but there are few clear tracks left on the record.”7 Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion forces us to reconsider this conclusion. On first glance, Divine Consolations gives the impression of being a straightforward reprinting of a small section of the Acts and Monuments. The full title emphasizes that the work is de- signed to speak directly to the present: Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion: Being an Extract of Certain Choyce Epistles of Dying Martyrs to each other, and to their Fellow-Prisoners for the Cause of Christ, in the Times of Cruell and Fiery
6John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church ...(London, 1563). Although not its official title, the Acts and Monuments has been commonly referred to as the Book of Martyrs from Foxe’s time until the present, and the names have long been used interchangeably. The classic study of the role Foxe’s great work played in the development of English nationalism is William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963). 7Francis J. Bremer, “Foxe in the Wilderness: The Book of Martyrs in Seventeenth- Century New England,” in John Foxe at Home and Abroad, ed. David Loades (Burling- ton, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004), p. 115. Bremer writes in a note, “While my focus has been on the Actes and Monuments the same can be said of truncated versions of the work in New England” (p. 107,n.12), but he does not specify what, if any, such works he has found.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 39 Persecution. Wherein is much Variety of suitable matter of Meditation for all such who are burthened under the Pressure of their Sins and Sorrows in these Evil Times. The remainder of the title page includes two epigraphs from Matthew 5:4 and Psalm 126:5–6, both of which concern sorrow and comfort; at the bottom of the page is the notation “Printed in the Year 1664.” The text proper opens with a preface of several pages that addresses “the Christian Reader.” Here the text’s compiler discusses the importance of faith and love, powerfully exempli- fied in the lives of the saints; next talks about the “innumerable helps the Lord hath this way granted us, especially from the un- wearied Labours of that man of God, of blessed memory, Mr. Iohn Foxe”; and finally turns to a jeremiadic lament: “Is not the Lord now crying aloud, as sometimes to Jerusalem, Oh New England! Oh Boston! When wilt thou be made clean? ...When shall thy Pride and Prophaness, Licentiousness, Uncleanness and Unrighteousness, with so much cleaving to Self-Interest cease to lodge within thee?” The main body of Divine Consolations is introduced by a table of contents that lists the materials to follow: the exami- nation of John Careles[s] before Dr. Martin, as found in Foxe; twenty-three letters, mostly written by Careless, but also in- cluding letters from two martyrs who corresponded with him and, most unexpectedly, two letters from “a constant Martyr called Guy de Brez.”8 While the order of the letters is largely as found in the Careless section in later editions of Foxe, there are some discrepancies. The first reprinted letter, from the martyr John Philpot to Careless, is imported from the Philpot section of Acts and Monuments (although the indices to seventeenth- century editions of Foxe note its existence next to the entry
8In Divine Consolations the name is printed “Careles,” following the spelling in seventeenth-century editions of Foxe; in this essay I have chosen to follow the standard spelling. “Guy de Brez” is Guy or Guido de Bres` (1522–67), a Flemish martyr and author of the Belgic Confession, an important continental Calvinist document; again, the nonstandard spelling originates in Foxe. The American Antiquarian Society copy of Divine Consolations cutsoffatpage72, presumably from wear, so the de Bres` letters listed in the table of contents are not actually present, though copies can be found in seventeenth-century editions of Foxe.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 40 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY for Careless). The final three letters, however, have no relation to Careless at all; the first, from John Bradford “to a faithfull Woman in her heaviness and trouble,” appears in Foxe, but not in close proximity to the Careless section; the two de Bres` let- ters with which the text concludes are not from Foxe proper at all but are deeply buried within an appendix that first appears in the 1632 edition of Acts and Monuments: A Continuation of the Histories of Forreign Martyrs: From the happy Reign of the most Renowned Queen Elizabeth, to these times.9 Though there is no way to prove the authorship of Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion, what initially seems to be its strangest and most random feature, the inclusion of the de Bres` letters, in fact leads to a likely attribution, to which other evidence lends compelling support. There is only one New England Puritan writer who would have been particularly eager to honor de Bres:` Joshua Scottow (1618–98), a Boston merchant of a long, varied, and at points controversial career, fervently orthodox convictions, and a persistent literary bent.10 Best known for two works published near the end of his life, Old Mens Tears for their Own Declensions (1691)andA Narra- tive of the Planting of the Massachusets Colony (1694), Scottow had earlier published two editions of his translation of de Bres’s` 1565 French history of the Anabaptist uprising in Munster: the first, Johannes Becoldus Redivivus, or, The English Quaker the German Enthusiast Revived, in London, in 1659;thesec- ond, The Rise, Spring, and Foundation of the Anabaptists, or
9John Foxe, Acts and Monuments most Speciall and Memorable, happening in the Church, with an Universall Historie of the Same ...(London, 1632). It appears that Scottow was using the latest, 1641 edition of Acts and Monuments, as I discuss below. 10Biographical discussions of Scottow include Paul Royster, “Joshua Scottow,” in American Writers before 1800: A Biographical and Critical Dictionary, ed. James Levernier and Douglas Wilmes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), vol. 3, pp. 1283–84; “Sigma” (pseudonym), “Memoir of Joshua Scottow,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser., vol. 4 (Boston, 1816), pp. 100–104;“Sketch of Captain Joshua Scottow,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 10 (Boston, 1906), pp. 370–78. All of these sources are reprinted in Joshua Scot- tow Papers, ed. Paul Royster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Digital Commons, 2005
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 41 Re-Baptized of our Time, in Massachusetts, in 1668.11 The two editions nicely bracket the 1664 publication of Divine Con- solations, and Scottow had evidently been thinking about de Bres—and` martyrdom—in the intervening years: whereas in the preface to the 1659 edition, Scottow had asserted that the author of the book was “unknown to us, but by his works which now follow him,” in 1668, he devoted half his preface to introducing and constructing de Bres` as a martyr, dwelling on his heroic faithfulness (“his rejoicing in God, when hands and feet were so laden with Iron Chains, as they eat through his flesh to the very bones; his glorying in their ratling, more then if they had been Chains of Gold”) and listing the pages in the appendix to Foxe where the account of de Bres` could be found.12 That precise citation indicates that Scottow was among the relatively few New Englanders who owned—or, at the very least, had ready access to—a copy of the 1641 edi- tion of Acts, to which his page numbers correspond. Scottow was clearly enamored of the legacy of “eminent Witness[es] of Christ’s Truth” and, more broadly, drawn to the power of
11Joshua Scottow, Old Mens Tears for their Own Declensions, Mixed with Fears of their and Posterities further falling off from New England’s Primitive Constitu- tion (Boston, 1691), reprint, ed. Paul Royster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Digital Commons, 2005
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 42 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY translation, not only from French (a language he used regularly in the Acadian trade) to English but also from past to present. The capacity of a century-old work to speak with undiminished power to new contexts and new audiences is the very same design that shapes Divine Consolations.13 Joshua Scottow arrived in Massachusetts Bay as a teenager between 1630 and 1634 and was admitted to the Boston church in 1639;bythe1660s, he was a wealthy and politically active member. He was evidently something of a book collector and, though he did not attend university, a man of some learning: in 1649 he donated a four-volume Greek thesaurus to Harvard College, reserving the right for himself or any child of his to recall it for use at any point.14 That Scottow was a layman who wrote a number of religious books—not a common phe- nomenon in seventeenth-century New England—has certain interesting implications for Divine Consolations. At the sim- plest level, it might suggest why Scottow was not identified on the title pages of his books and only once within them: his name did not carry authority the way a minister’s would have; he was not famous for either his learning or his experiences. Scottow’s lay status also speaks to one of the most obvious questions raised by Divine Consolations: of all the martyrs cel- ebrated by Foxe, why select John Careless? A recognized writer of spiritual epistles but far from unique in that regard, Care- less was not in the same league with such well-known figures as Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer. Careless was, instead, an educated layman, a weaver from Coventry.15 So, if Scottow
13Scottow, Rise, Spring, and Foundation of the Anabaptists, preface, n.p. Scottow never lost his affinity for the French reformed churches and their martyrs, citing them approvingly even in his final work thirty years later (A Narrative of the Planting, pp. 53–54, 57). 14Thomas Goddard Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620–1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), p. 41 n. 67. 15While Careless has not come down in popular memory as one of the “big names” among the Marian martyrs, his importance should not be minimized. His letters were reprinted in two additional early works, Miles Coverdale’s Certain most godly, fruit- ful, and comfortable letters of such true Saintes and holy Martyrs of God (London, 1564) and Nicholas Ridley’s A Pituous Lamentation of the Miserable Estate of the Churche of Christ in England (London, 1566). Careless’s appreciation of his own intellect is evident in a letter he wrote to Henry Adlington, in which he refers to
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 43 was in fact the compiler of the Divine Consolations, he would naturally have been attracted to a lay martyr, despite the dominant clerical emphasis in both Foxe and in New Eng- land Puritan literature. As David D. Hall writes, “It was the ministers ...who exemplified the ideal Christian. Though Foxe included hundreds of lay men and women in his massive history of faith enduring fiery trial, he gave pride of place to a handful of heroic clergy.”16 While the other correspondents included in Divine Consolations were in fact ministers, and while Scottow celebrates early New England ministers throughout his writ- ing, he also consistently claims that laymen share with them responsibility for shaping a godly society. Scottow’s commitment to speaking to and for the New En- gland Way is vividly displayed in his 1691 and 1694 tracts, in which he established himself as an important historian of the colony’s early years and one of the most passionate voices lamenting later generations’ perceived loss of godliness. Indeed, the very term “declension,” which has been the standard way of referring to this change since Perry Miller so dubbed it, may be directly traced to Scottow’s 1691 title.17 In his tracts, Scottow contrasts the loving, godly intimacy that characterized the early years—when “the Body of this People was animated as with one Soul” and they found spiritual joy even in a “Mud- wall Meeting House with wooden Chalices”18—with the loss of true church order and a drift into social depravity. “[N]ow we may and must say,” Scottow despairs,
Adlington as “but a simple man” and writes out a script for him to draw on dur- ing interrogation, lest the authorities seek “to trouble [him] with many questions, to cumber [his] knowledge, and then seem to triumph over [him]” (Divine Consolations, p. 43). 16David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 128. 17Royster, “Joshua Scottow,” p. 1284. On Perry Miller’s declension thesis, see his “Declension in a Bible Commonwealth,” in Nature’s Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 14–49,andThe New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 205–23. On Scottow as historian, see Arch, Authorizing the Past, pp. 145–46, and Dennis Powers, “Purpose and Design in Joshua Scottow’s Narrative,” Early American Literature 18 (Winter 1983): 275–90. 18Scottow, Narrative of the Planting, pp. 13, 36.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 44 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
New-England is not to be found in New-England, nor Boston in Boston; it is become a lost Town, ...we must now cry out, our Leanness, our Leanness, our Apostacy, our Atheism, Spiritual Idol- atry, Adultery, Formality in Worship, carnal and vain confidence in Church-priviledges forgetting of God our Rock, and multitude of other horrid Abominations.19
The “Old Relict Planter’s” longing for the first generation—“the Triumvirate Ministry of the first three Successive Johns” and the “company of plain, pious, humble and open hearted Chris- tians, call’d Puritans”—is acute. Yet he insists that, although they are gone, their spiritual efficacy persists: “This Prophet [Norton] is Dead, and our Fathers where are they?” he queries mournfully. “Yet the words then spoken, left such a Convinc- ing Impress upon our hearts & Souls, as is not obliterated to this day, and in this Hour of Distress, Trouble, and Conster- nation, is now revived.”20 While such rhetoric is hardly unique to Scottow, it is consistently pronounced in his writing, and it resonates with the concerns and language that animate the preface to Divine Consolations.21 All of these factors (together with the absence of evidence pointing toward any other figure) make a convincing case that Scottow is, in fact, the compiler of Divine Consolations. Scottow evidently celebrated martyrs he found personally in- spiring and hoped that their words might encourage spiritual renewal in the present generation, but another motive may have prompted him to compile Divine Consolations as well. Consciously or unconsciously, he may have wanted to resolve tensions between his spiritual calling and his earthly vocation as a merchant who, in Bernard Bailyn’s formulation, “kept as
19Scottow, Old Men’s Tears, p. 4. 20Scottow, Narrative of the Planting, pp. 37, 11. 21Notable rhetorical similarities include the New England–Boston pairing followed by a list of abstract sins in both the passage quoted from Old Men’s Tears and the Divine Consolations preface as well as how that preface’s reference to New Englanders having “sate in peace whilest our Brethren lay bleeding” is echoed in Old Men’s Tears: “when as our dear Nation was involved in a cruel War, and almost all Europe was Harrass’d; New-England was as a Babe rockt in the Cradle to quiet it thereby” (Old Men’s Tears, p. 11). Scottow attributes this phrasing to Cotton.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 45 sharp a watch for opportunities in business as he did for moral lapses.”22 In the early 1660s, Scottow apparently engaged in some suspicious ventures. In 1661, several merchants, most no- tably Thomas Deane, accused Scottow of dealing in smuggled French goods. The General Court was not able to assemble sufficient evidence to prosecute, but Deane continued to talk up the matter in England. In 1665 an extremely unpopular royal commission arrived in Massachusetts. The Scottow case was among those it attempted, unsuccessfully, to use as proof that the colony had failed to abide by the navigation acts.23 The commission had made a preliminary appearance in 1664, so one wonders how an awareness of his vulnerability may have influenced Scottow’s decision to compile Divine Consolations: was he hoping to shore himself up in some way, either publicly or privately? Was he feeling persecuted by forces beyond his control? Whether or not there is any direct link between Scot- tow’s experiences as a merchant and his choices as a man of letters, he was a Puritan who, despite his intense piety, could step outside the bounds of the colony’s laws when convenient. That fact may illuminate the other troubling question concern- ing Divine Consolations: who published it? There is no absolute proof that Divine Consolations was printed in New England; indeed, some works written for a New England readership—and not only those of dissenters— were published in London. Bibliographer Sidney A. Kimber, however, considers the work a Cambridge, Massachusetts, im- print because the acorn-motif border that decorates its title page is identical to that of most Cambridge books of the early
22Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 122. On tensions at the societal (if not necessarily the individual) level between Puritan beliefs and economic growth, see Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), chap. 1. 23Bailyn, The New England Merchants, pp. 120–23 and p. 220 n. 24. For a discus- sion of other controversial incidents in Scottow’s career, involving his (later retracted) support in 1656 for the accused “witch” Ann Hibbens and what may have been morally dubious behavior as a captain in King Philip’s War, see Louise A. Breen, Transgress- ing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 187–88.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 46 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY 1660s (the press owned only ten decorative sorts in total), and it is listed as such in the English Short-Title Catalog.24 Religious books and books of history (such as Foxe’s) were prominent among the genres that formed what David D. Hall describes as both England and New England’s “traditional world of print.”25 The Cambridge press, founded to support the Puritans’ spiritual and political mission, was tightly controlled in the 1660s.26 As Hugh Amory has put it, the Cambridge press had “some of the features of a mint, setting an official seal of authenticity on a text.”27 I believe that Divine Consolations, which in effect pirates selections from Foxe, is one of the first texts to be published in New England without official approval. Though there is nothing manifestly dangerous or unorthodox about the text, such illegitimacy would go a long way toward explaining why it appeared in the form it did. Closer attention to the history of the Cambridge press helps us construct a plausible account of why Divine Consolations emerged in 1664 with a conspicuously incomplete title page and an unsigned preface. In the early 1660s, the press was consumed with the massive task of printing John Eliot’s Indian Bible and related works as well as a series of pamphlets de- bating the merits of the new Halfway Covenant. At the same time, the press was riven by tensions between the sometimes competing interests of colonial authorities and the London- based Society for Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), which was
24Sidney A. Kimber, Cambridge Press Title-pages, 1640–1665: A Pictorial Represen- tation of the Work Done in the First Printing Office in British North America (Takoma Park, Md.: Walter L. Kimber, 1954), p. 85. 25David D. Hall, “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth- Century New England,” Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 80–91. 26By the 1690s, when Scottow’s later works were published, restrictions had been relaxed: Old Men’s Tears was printed in Boston by Benjamin Harris and John Allen, and A Narrative of the Planting by Harris. On the tensions affecting issues of lay authorship, see David D. Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 144, 145–46. 27Hugh Amory, Bibliography and the Book Trades: Studies in the Print Culture of Early New England, ed. David D. Hall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 108.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 47 supporting Eliot’s work. These tensions involved as well the character and status of the two main press employees, printers Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson. Some works were is- sued under both names together, some under one or the other. Green was a member of the Cambridge church, printed the business of the General Court, and is listed on various works by ministers and on other “official” texts. Johnson’s story is considerably more colorful. In 1660, contracted by the SPG, he arrived from England to assist in printing the Indian Bible. Although respected as the colony’s first professionally trained printer, he was not yet a Puritan and was something of a roman- tic hothead. In 1661–62 he was called to account for passion- ately courting Green’s daughter without her father’s consent and for urging her to elope. After he was presented to the General Court, it was discovered that Johnson had a wife back in England. He was ordered to return to her, but for reasons and under circumstances that remain unclear, he stayed in the colony instead. In May 1663, when his three-year contract ex- pired, the commissioners in England discharged Johnson, but, seemingly due to Eliot’s intervention, he was kept on for an additional year. About a year later, he was discharged again, but he remained in Massachusetts until October 1664,when he was sent to London to buy new type for Eliot’s Indian tracts. By this point, a Massachusetts authority felt able to testify that “though [Johnson] hath bene in former times loose in his life and conversation, yet this last yeere he hath been very much reformed.”28 When he arrived back in Massachusetts in May
28For the detailed history of the press, see Robert F. Roden, The Cambridge Press, 1638–1692: A History of the First Printing Press Established in America, together with a Bibliographical List of the Issues of the Press (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1905), esp. pp. 92–104, and George Parker Winship, The Cambridge Press, 1638–92: A Reexamination of the Evidence concerning the Bay Psalm Book and the Eliot Indian Bible as well as other contemporary books and people (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), esp. pp. 200–288. See also Hugh Amory, “Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638–1713,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, chap. 3.The1664 letter on Johnson’s reformation, written by President Chauncy of Harvard, is quoted from Winship, The Cambridge Press, p. 266. On John- son’s career, see Roden, The Cambridge Press, pp. 105–29, and James P. O’Donnell, “Marmaduke Johnson,” in Boston Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers, 1640–1800, ed. Benjamin Franklin V (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980), pp. 303–9; and on Johnson
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 48 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY 1665, however, within a few weeks the General Court had en- acted a new censorship order against him. Johnson and Green would ultimately find a way to work together, yet Johnson con- tinued to get in trouble for printing unapproved texts. In 1668 he was issued a fine, which he asked to be remitted, pleading the act arose from financial necessity and “no intent or design to contemn authority.”29 The years 1663–64 were, then, busy and muddled ones for the press. It is not possible to reconstruct its activities precisely or to know what Marmaduke Johnson did with his time be- tween being discharged from his work on the Eliot projects in thespringof1664 and departing for London in October. Yet it is hard to imagine that he would have strayed far from the printing press, for he presumably needed some means of sup- port. Given his entrepreneurial tendencies, it seems entirely possible that Johnson might accept a private commission from a wealthy Boston merchant, one who was, like him, not averse to a little extralegal activity, be that the smuggling in of French goods or English martyrs. He could have rationalized that the commission’s content, at least, did not contradict his newly “reformed” character. We can also reason backward to establish a relationship be- tween the two men. In 1668, Johnson was listed as the publisher of the Cambridge edition of Scottow’s anti-Anabaptist tract, one of a series of more diverse works he attempted to market in those years. In 1664, however, the men would have been right- fully unwilling to put either of their names on an unapproved publication produced by a printer who had at the moment no legal footing. A title-page border alone was not likely to at- tract attention from average readers. The goal may have been to produce a generic-looking work that people might pick up and read without thinking about where it had been printed. Perhaps someone did notice, though, and that provided an impetus toward the licensing act issued by the General Court
as would-be bigamist, see Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 136–37. 29Johnson’s letter is quoted in Winship, TheCambridgePress,p. 287.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 49 on 27 May 1665 forbidding “any person ...to print any copie but by the allowance first had & obteyned under the hands of such as this Court shall from time to time impower” or else “be disabled from using any such profession w[ith]in this jurisdiction.”30 The extreme rarity of Divine Consolations may suggest that relatively few copies were printed and/or that a number of them were destroyed. Other unapproved titles from the 1660s are similarly rare, and indeed many titles advertised for sale by Johnson have vanished altogether.
Whatever the text’s origins, a more significant question re- mains, and that is how we should read Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion within its historical context; in other words, what cultural work was its compiler attempting to perform by reprinting selections from Foxe for Massachusetts readers of the early 1660s? How does the sixteenth-century material speak anew when it is translated into a New England setting? As we begin to consider this cluster of questions, it is helpful to rec- ognize that within its first century of existence, the Book of Martyrs was at no point a unitary, fixed entity. It was pub- lished repeatedly, undergoing both textual changes and rhetor- ical redefinitions. The first four editions (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583) were all what David Loades calls “establishment tract[s],” for they supported Queen Elizabeth’s royal supremacy, though the tone shifts from a joyful celebration of the new Protes- tant monarch to a much more “qualified optimism” twenty years later.31 The editions of 1610, 1632,and1641 expanded
30Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston, 1854), vol. 4,pt.2,p.141.A1662 act restricting the liberty of the Cambridge press had been repealed in 1663. Roden explains that the act was directed at Johnson, designed to prevent him from setting up a press in Boston (TheCambridgePress,pp. 110–11). 31See David Loades, “Afterword: John Foxe in the Twenty-First Century,” in John Foxe and His World, ed. Christopher Highly and John N. King (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002), p. 282, and Loades, “The Early Reception of the Acts and Monuments,”inFoxe’s Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition Online (version 1.1),
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 50 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the text with additions that rearticulated its message while en- gaging dramatically shifting circumstances. The 1632 edition, for example, published during the period in which Archbishop William Laud was persecuting nonconformists, incorporates a section on foreign martyrs, prefaced by a didactic lecture, “A Treatise of Afflictions and Persecutions of the Faithful, prepar- ing them with Patience to suffer Martyrdom,” that emphasized the continuing threat within England.32 Scottow, or whoever compiled Divine Consolations, thus worked within a tradition that had been established for generations. For over a cen- tury, the Book of Martyrs had served as a tract for the times, and mid-seventeenth-century Puritans as much as Elizabethan Protestants would have respected the wisdom it had to offer. Although Divine Consolations does not explicitly refer to contemporary political issues, it would seem likely, given the strained relations between Massachusetts and the Crown at the time, that the text at some level grapples with the fraught issue of royal authority. The Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 raised questions about Massachusetts’ de facto inde- pendence: to what degree was the colony’s ultimate allegiance to its charter (and, implicitly, its religious mission) and to what degree to the king? Tensions were high as carefully worded let- ters were sent back and forth across the Atlantic. In 1662, John Norton and Simon Bradstreet were dispatched to London, and although their mission appeared to go well, it did not prevent the king, later that year, from requesting toleration of Anglicans and extension of the franchise to all orthodox freeholders, an appeal that deeply affronted the colony. Norton died in 1663 reviled by many for his role in what appeared to them a be- trayal of the colony’s liberties. Rumors spread that England, eager to assert more direct control in the colony, was about to install a governor or a bishop or, even, to intervene with a military force. Those fears seemed at least partially confirmed
32For an overview of the reception and transformations of Foxe, see Loades, “Af- terword,” pp. 283–84. The seventeenth-century editions have not yet been the sub- ject of extensive historical scholarship, with the significant exception of Nussbaum, “Appropriating Martyrdom,” pp. 178–91.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 51 when the royal commissioners arrived in May 1664, protected by a large company of soldiers and charged with the task of investigating the colony’s handling of various official matters. The colony was sharply divided over what stance it should take toward the Crown. Factions involved a small group of royalists, a sharply resistant commonwealth contingent, and a group of moderates, including ministers such as John Norton and merchants such as Joshua Scottow. The moderates were committed to maintaining the integrity of the New England Way, and they resented the king’s interference in colony af- fairs; still, understanding the reality of the colony’s dependent relationship, they also wished to foster good relations with their monarch, insofar as possible. In 1664, the commonwealth fac- tion was in control and the moderates were demoralized, a condition that would have deepened Scottow’s woeful mood. As writers of the period lamented a loss of harmony and broth- erhood, then, they were not referring solely to religious declen- sion; ill will and mistrust were also being generated by political divisions. This context was, as Perry Miller put it, “the hidden background of the jeremiads” of the 1660s.33 While it would be going too far to read Divine Consola- tions as a political allegory, it does raise potent questions for a period readership: if Foxe’s original design celebrates the ad- vent of a godly monarch by recording the persecutory reign of a “bloody” Catholic queen, how does Charles II fit into that
33Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 128. The most detailed account of these conflicts is found in Paul R. Lucas, “Colony or Commonwealth: Massachusetts Bay, 1661– 1666,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 24 (January 1967): 88–107.Idrawfrom Lucas the names characterizing the different factions and the important role of the moderates. For an account of contemporary events by another moderate who was, like Scottow, a pious Boston merchant, see “The Diaries of John Hull,” in Archaelogica Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 3 (Boston, 1857; reprinted, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971), p. 190ff. Other discussions of Restoration politics in New England include David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), chap. 10; Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chap. 5; and Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 8.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 52 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY dichotomy? In 1662, his government passed the Act of Unifor- mity, which made using the Book of Common Prayer compul- sory in religious services (thus implicitly outlawing Puritanism) and, in 1664, the Conventicle Act, which prohibited religious assemblies of more than five people outside the authority of the Anglican church. Even if a moderate like Scottow would have stopped far short of accusing Charles of being a successor to Bloody Mary, Massachusetts Puritans in 1664 would have looked to England and worried. Although English groups such as the Quakers were the main target of persecution so far, what prevented the laws from being applied to the colonies? Given such a troubling prospect, colonists would have found the examination of John Careless to be particularly pertinent. While much of the examination focuses on Careless’s beliefs about matters of predestination and election, the final portion takes up the issue of the obedience owed one’s monarch.34 Asked whether he is willing to do Queen Mary service, Care- less responds, “Indeed Sir I hope to be meet and ready unto all things that pertaineth unto a true Christian Subject to do. And if her Grace, or her Officers under her, do require me to any thing contrary unto Christ’s Religion, I am ready also to do my service in Smithfield for not observing it.”35 This unequiv- ocal and eloquently stated position must have resonated with New Englanders, especially moderates like Scottow, as they at- tempted to walk a fine line between being good Englishmen andtruecitizensofGod’sIsrael. The only direct allusion to the broader political world in Di- vine Consolations, however, concerns not impending trials but the degree to which New England has been sheltered from them over the last three decades. Midway through the preface,
34Editions of Foxe from 1570 on included a shortened version of Care- less’s examination. A considerable portion of the version that appears in 1563 was deleted because it revealed too much about doctrinal differences among Protestants. See the editorial commentary to bk. 11 of the Acts and Mon- uments in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition Online (version 1.1),
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 53 in a passage earlier quoted in part, the author writes, “God is greatly threatening on every side, even us who have sate in peace whilest our Brethren lay bleeding; yea, were filled with plenty, whilest they were stripped of their comforts, and even brought to desolation.” While it is hard to pinpoint ex- actly what “desolation” the author is thinking of—the Laudian persecutions? the troubles of the English Civil War? any of sev- eral international conflicts that occurred since 1630: the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the Franco-Spanish War (1635–59), or the first Anglo-Dutch war (1652–54)?—or, likewise, whether “our Brethren” refers to Puritans in England or to the Protes- tant Church more generally, the language reflects an uneasy sense that New Englanders have gotten off lightly, and to what end? Whatever its reference, the comment creates the image of a New England that has sat fat and passive while the drama of history has played out elsewhere. Thus, it highlights the awkward situation New Englanders are in with regard to the discourse of martyrdom that is to follow: the question might well be asked, who are they to lay claim to that inheritance, having failed to do their part to support a Puritan government in England? I would suggest that the colony’s ambiguous position might provide yet another rationale for the compiler’s decision to focus on John Careless. Perhaps the most telling reason for Careless’s relative lack of fame is that he fell short of achieving a martyr’s glorious end: although “he longed for nothing more earnestly, then to come to that promotion to dye in the fire for the profession of his Faith ...yet it so pleased the Lord to prevent him with death, that he came not to it, but dyed in the Prison, and was buried in the fields in a dunghill” (pp. 5– 6). This failure to obtain “that which he so much thirsted for” is cited in the preface as well—and indeed Careless’s letters repeatedly express his impatience to capture the oft-deferred “honor” of martyrdom. The very fact that Careless was not executed and did not suffer dramatic physical torments ren- ders him a peculiarly apt spiritual counselor for New Eng- land. He, like the colony, in some sense missed out on the greatest fulfillment; no intimidating hero, he presents a witness
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 54 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of fidelity and joy maintained in the face of frustration and powerlessness. Despite its political overtones, then, Divine Consolations is, I believe, less involved with Massachusetts’ relation to its sovereign than with its internal sense of unease; in other words, the text marks not so much the transition from Commonwealth to Restoration as from the first to the second generation of Pu- ritanism. The text’s preface dramatically enacts this transition through a rhetorical shift between its first and second halves. The preface opens in a notably affirmative mode: “Among all the sweet and precious fruits and graces of the Spirit of God held forth unto us in the Holy Scriptures, how much are those of Faith and Love commended unto us, as the principal and leading Graces unto all other the sweet fruits of the Spirit wrought in the hearts of the Elect of God?” The author con- tinues tracing these twin “graces” through several biblical allu- sions, beginning with “Abel, that blessed servant of the Lord, and Proto-Martyr of the world.” He cites a minister who re- cently compared them to “the two arms that clasped Christ round about” in Canticles and quotes from the fourth verse of chapter three the speaker’s expression of desire for the “Spouse”: “I found him whom my soul loveth; I held him, and I would not let him go.”36 Never, the author writes, “do these precious gifts of the Holy Ghost so affect the hearts of the people of God, as when the saints are drawn forth to cause this Light to shine forth in their lives and actings, which usually appears in them most clearly in times of greatest sufferings.” After mentioning the legacy of Foxe and introducing Careless as the focus of the material to follow, the first half of the preface concludes as the author reiterates the motif of a lovers’ union by alluding to 1 Samuel 18:1: “To those who have tasted how good the Lord is, these following Epistles may through mercy prove unto them as that speaking of David did to Ionathan, who no sooner heard him, but his Soul was knit unto the Soul of David, and he loved him as his own Soul.”
36The author erroneously cites the passage as Canticles 3:5.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 55 The preface’s first section matches the character of the first generation not only because its style is basically affirmative, in contrast to the jeremiad that takes over in the second half, but because it echoes the themes of a foundational New England discourse, John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity.” That lay sermon, too, emphasizes a society knit together by the bonds of love, as evidenced in the attraction between David and Jonathan: “Jonathan a valiant man endued with the spirit of love, soe soone as he discovered the same spirit in David had presently his hearte knitt to him by this ligament of love; soe that it is said he loved him as his owne soule.”37 Michael Warner has discussed how this sermon, among other works, reveals an “erotics of affinitive society,” a quality, based on the principle (in Winthrop’s words) of “simile simili gaudet, or like will to like,” that animates early orthodoxy.38 The concept of a commu- nity grounded in a deeply felt union among believers clearly had a hold on Joshua Scottow, for he referred to it again in the 1690s as he mourned the loss of a time of fellowship when “face answered to face, and lively characters of the same Grace, line for line appearing, as in those who were made partakers of the same Spirit.”39 The motif is also integral to the letters of the Foxean martyrs. As John R. Knott explains, if the narrative and dialogic sections of Acts and Monuments highlight the “solitary heroism” of martyrs facing the pyre, the letters that comprise a significant portion of the text, written from individuals in prison to friends and supporters, celebrate the profound communal- ity of the Protestant resistance.40 The selection of those letters reprinted in Divine Consolations thus functions as a crucial
37John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., vol. 7 (Boston, 1838), p. 43. 38Michael Warner, “New English Sodom,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 330–58. 39Scottow, Old Men’s Tears, p. 10. A Narrative of the Planting uses similar language, referring to how “the hearts of multitudes in this Design [of settlement] responded, as Face to Face in Water; thus the Body of this People was animated as with one Soul” (p. 13). 40John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 84. See also Knott, “John Foxe and the Joy of Suffering,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (Autumn 1996): 721–34.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 56 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY hinge in time, reminding readers of the most emotionally ful- filling aspects of first-generation Puritanism—indeed, of the energies animating spiritual fellowship throughout the Protes- tant Reformation—at the point when those energies seem to be dissipating. As Scottow later commented about the power of the epistolary witness that emerged from the founding gen- eration, “a Letter then from New-England ...was Venerated as a Sacred Script.”41 The transition from a discourse of past affinities to present danger occurs within the short, central paragraph in which the love of David and Jonathan serves as a model for how the Foxe letters are intended to work on the souls of readers. “To this very end,” the author writes, “is this small thing drawn out of [the Book of Martyrs], that the sorrowful Souls of such as are affected with Gods threatnings in this hour of darkness and temptation, may find some refreshing and support; to which end they were also first written.” From this point forward, the author launches into his lament over God’s displeasure with a proud and profane New England. But perhaps, he prays, God will “give his People an heart to hearken to his voice” and to repent; “it may be,” he hopes, “that the Lord God of Hosts will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.” Within the short space of about three pages, the author has effected a transition from the language of the first plantation to the full emergence of the jeremiad.42 If we place ourselves in the world of 1664, we can readily understand why, to its inhabitants, New England must have seemed a land out of kilter. There was a major drought in 1662 (the occasion for Wigglesworth’s Gods Controversy with New England) and another in 1664; and each year “canker-worms” or “caterpillars” devastated trees and crops. Boston merchant
41Scottow, A Narrative of the Planting, p. 20. On the centrality of affective bonds within seventeenth-century Puritanism, see Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Com- munion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994). 42On the transformation of the “visionary rhetoric of ‘peace’ and ‘love’” in the first generation to the jeremiad and its emphasis on contention, see Hall, The Faithful Shepherd, p. 227.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 57 John Hull wrote in his diary in September 1664,“Thewheat throughout our jurisdiction mostly blasted: in sundry towns, scarce any left. The latter part of the summer likewise very droughty; much of the grass scorched up.” Waves of illness, which Hull referred to as the “epidemical cold,” had been washing over the colony since 1658.43 Social ills were per- ceived to be accelerating as well. In May 1662 alawwas passed against “excesse in apparel ...whereby the rising gen- eration are in danger to be corrupted and effeminated,” and two years later another imposed fines on young people acting “uncivilly or wantonly, singing rudely, or making a noyse” in places of public entertainment.44 Fast days were appointed with increasing frequency in the early 1660s; in 1664,the Massachusetts General Court appointed them for 15 June, 1 September, and 16 November. The order for 1 September reads in part,
This Court, being sencible of the Lords frounes vpon us in taking away the fruites of the earth in so great a measure as appears in the present harvest, accompanied w[ith] many tokens of his displea- sure in sundry other respects, justly occasioning such as are serious to have many sad thoughts of heart, least that his anger should be further kindled against his people in this place, & by our sins be provoked to w[ith]drawe his shepheardly care from over his churches & people ... also considering that it is an hower of sad triall to the people of God in other places, doe there- fore com[m]end to all the people of this jurisdiction the first of next moneth to be kept a solemne day of humilliation, & spent in fasting & prajer, for the humbling of ourselves before the Lord.”45
The author of the preface may well be thinking of this very order when he writes in the jeremiad section, “Blessed be the Lord, who hath affected the hearts of the Rulers, so as to call
43“The Diaries of John Hull,” pp. 213, 197. 44Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, vol. 4,pt.2, pp. 41, 101–2. 45Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, vol. 4,pt.2,p.118. For further discussion of Puritan fast days in the period, see W. DeLoss Love Jr., The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, 1895), chap. 13, esp. pp. 178–88.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 58 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY for seeking God for the obtaining mercy in the day of thy distress.”46 This fast-day atmosphere of ritual penitence provides the background for the text’s titular and internal emphasis on “mourners in Sion.” The phrase appears at least three times in the Careless letters, but the New England compiler pulls it into prominence and uses it to call attention to his theme: the consolation of mourners, including its underlying message that sorrow among the godly is often a good sign. This note emerges in the first letter from John Philpot, written when John Careless was evidently experiencing spiritual hardship. Philpot reassures him: That GOD giveth you so contrite an heart for your sins, I cannot but rejoice to behold the lively mark of the children of God, whose property is to think more lowly and vilely of themselves then of any other, and oftentimes do set their sins before them, that they might the more be stirred to bring forth the fruits of Repentance, and learn to mourn in this world, that in another they might be glad and rejoice. Such a broken Heart is a pleasant Sacrifice unto God: ...Be of good comfort therefore, Mine own dear heart, in this thy sorrow, for it is the Earnest-peny of Eternall Consolation. [P. 13]
The compiler imported the Philpot letter from another sec- tion of the Acts and Monuments, and, in light of the “con- solations” theme, his rationale for placing it at the beginning of the epistolary section is clear: Philpot introduces the mo- tif that Careless later picks up in his own spiritual counseling. Writing to his “dear Brother” Thomas Upshur, for example, Careless refers to Upshur’s “troubled minde, which now mour- neth with a godly mourning, and therefore shall it be full well comforted with [the] sweet peace of God....Oh happy [Up- shur] in whose mourning company I had rather be, then in the house of mirth and banqueting of such as see not what cause they have to mourn and be sorry” (p. 36). The same message
46If, as I contend in the first section of this essay, Divine Consolations was illicitly printed by Marmaduke Johnson between his official dismissal from the Cambridge press in spring 1664 and his departure for London in October of that year, this places the writing of the preface very plausibly within the highly anxious summer of 1664.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 59 is conveyed in a letter pulled in from yet another section of Foxe and placed near the conclusion of Divine Consolations. John Bradford writes to a troubled woman, Joyce Hales, “Ah my dear Joyce, how happy is the state wherein you are? Verily you are even in the blessed state of God’s Children: for they mourn, and do not so you? ... How should God wipe away the tears from your eyes in Heaven, if now on earth you shed no tears?” (p. 70). As a text produced for New England Puritans in 1664, then, Divine Consolations does not so much insist that the commu- nity mourn as it seeks to reassure its godly members that, in mourning, they are presenting evidence of their salvation. Thus, beyond simply offering support in a time of sorrow and appre- hension, the text addresses the deeper anxiety of the Puritan faithful in a time of perceived declension; it addresses the ever- present question, how does one know one is really among the elect? Throughout his correspondence, John Careless affirms principles of election and predestination that appear virtually indistinguishable from the tenets of New England orthodoxy. Yet he is notably less anxious than the typical New England Puritan. Careless delights in reassuring his friends that, how- ever uncertain they may feel at moments, he is quite certain that they have been saved. “I do (I say) pronounce to thee,” he writes to Upshur in a long ecstatic passage in a letter I have not previously quoted, “that thou art already a Citizen of Heaven” (p. 48). He consoles Agnes Glascock, tormented by guilt over having consented to attend Mass, “And though sometimes [God] do let his elect stumble and fall, yet (no doubt) he will raise them up again to the further increase of their comfort, and to the setting forth of his glory and praise. Which thing ...I trust shall be well verified on you” (p. 58). Whether distraught over their own sinfulness or grieving for those around them, New Englanders would have appreciated the reminder that they were still beloved of God. And John Foxe was an ideal choice to deliver that good news. Susan- nah Brietz Monta points out that during his lifetime, Foxe “was recognized as an expert in comforting people with regard to the doctrine of election”; indeed, one of the functions of
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 60 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the Book of Martyrs was to confront the central issue of how believers might know they were among the elect “by model- ing how answers might be found at moments of persecutory crisis and then by insisting that the processes which lead mar- tyrs to their answers should be followed in readers’ spiritual lives.”47 Divine Consolations is less concerned with setting forth a specific internal process worthy of emulation, however, than it is in demonstrating the efficacy of a community of believ- ers. Extending community beyond those who can gather to- gether, the text celebrates the power of the written word as embodied in the pastoral letter. Careless urges his friend Au- gustine Bernhere, for example, not to put himself in danger by unnecessary public appearances when letters will suffice, “for writing sticketh longer in the memory then words do” (p. 39). Thus, the fact that the martyrs lived and died a cen- tury before is of little import: they exist in their letters, where their voices are fully and atemporally present. Their ability to provide comfort to later readers is also related to the epis- tolary form. In adhering to the structure of Pauline epistles, the Marian letters invoke the apostolic community of the early church;48 but while thus looking backward, they also simul- taneously extend the sixteenth-century community for whom they were written forward to the seventeenth century in which they are presently being read. And yet, despite the letters’ capacity to forge community, they are also, in a sense, more personalized than the congregational setting of a contemporary worship service, since reading is typically a private experience and, with a couple of exceptions, the letters included in Di- vine Consolations are addressed to individuals, not groups.49
47Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 20, 14. 48On Pauline epistles as a model for Foxe’s letters, see Knott, Discourses of Mar- tyrdom, pp. 87–93. 49While a work such as this one might certainly be read to a group, for example during a family devotional, there is no evidence that this was the main way it would be encountered. For a further discussion of Puritan reading practices, see Hall, “Readers and Writers,” pp. 117–51; David D. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England,” in Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book, pp. 36–78; and Matthew
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 61 Indeed, the work’s preface envisions an intimate relationship between reader and letters that mirrors the love between David and Jonathan; within the logic of this trope, the letters come to life as “soul[s]” with which the reader’s own may be knit. In the moment of crisis in which the compiler of Divine Consolations evidently found himself and his fellow believers, he evoked, in focusing on John Careless, a voice more rhetor- ically inclusive and hopeful than what we find in most of the New England literature of the time. Despite the intense male homosociality they reveal, the letters chosen for the text have the capacity to speak vividly to all readers, laywomen as well as men: eight of the twenty-three letters are written to women, and Careless addresses his spiritual sisters in a notably inclusive and respectful spirit. In addition to praising various women’s virtues and in two cases responding to their concerns as wives, he recognizes them as spiritual equals, including them within the community of martyrs through frequent use of the pro- noun “us” and acknowledging their apprehension of their faith: writing to E. K., Careless comments, “I could recite divers Texts of the Scriptures to confirm [my] point: but I need not, for I am well assured that you do know them most perfectly already” (p. 53). Although the Foxe letters are strikingly consis- tent with New England orthodoxy in their underlying theology, in their style they are notably more flowing and expressive than the New England ministry’s published writings of the pe- riod. Therefore, the letters are particularly attractive as devo- tional literature—perhaps too attractive, the compiler may have thought, to gain official approval for publication. Knott claims that Careless “writes with a distinctive exuberance. He swells his salutations to paragraphs, delights in linguistic play, and seems always to be stretching affective language to its limits.”50 This quality reminds readers that faith is meant to produce delight as well as sorrow, a theme that the letters themselves
P. Brown, “The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devotional Reading,” PMLA 121 (January 2006): 67–86. 50Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, p. 91.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 62 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY stress as believers are urged to temper their mourning with mirth. Even though Divine Consolations is stylistically distinct from anything being published in 1660s Massachusetts, it was not distinct from everything being written out of the New En- gland experience. Within their own idiosyncratic symbolic style, Quakers produced, in their lives and texts, new narratives of persecutory suffering at the hands of the English and New En- glish authorities. These vivid accounts, which Quakers sent to both individuals and groups, echoed those in Acts and Monu- ments, whether deliberately or obliquely.51 In Massachusetts, an escalating series of anti-Quaker measures, dating from 1656 on, had proved disturbingly ineffective in stemming the influx of Quaker preachers from overseas, their movements across colonies, and their persistent habit, in contrast to earlier dis- senters, of returning to Massachusetts after they had been banished. The situation reached a climax during 1660 and 1661, when four Friends were hanged in Boston. Those ac- tions gave Quaker writers cause to issue full-blown martyr nar- ratives, equal (at least in their eyes) to any the world had yet seen for their demonstration of joyous witness to the power of truth. Accounts of the interrogations, prison letters, and deaths of the martyrs (William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra) were circulating in a num- ber of London-published works, including Edward Burrough’s tellingly titled A Declaration of the Great and Sad Persecution
51Scholars of early Quaker writing offer differing views on the degree to which Friends modeled their performances of martyrdom on Foxe (as opposed to their more often cited model of the early church). See Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, p. 223; Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: The Quakers in Britain, 1646–1666 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), pp. 161–62; and Carla Pestana, “Martyred by the Saints: Quaker Executions in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 179–180. In my view, the evidence suggests that Foxe was an important model for the Quakers, though they might not have wanted to acknowledge such a textual exploration. Ellis Hookes, for example, an important early Friend, published The Spirit of Christ, and the Spirit of the Apostles, and the Spirit of the Martyrs is Arisen (London, 1661), and several subsequent texts with similar titles, which draw heavily on Foxe as they hold up past martyrs as examples to support Quaker testimonies and to parallel Quaker sufferings.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 63 and Martyrdom in 1660 and the first edition of George Bishop’s New England Judged in 1661. It was Burrough’s direct inter- vention with Charles II that most directly secured the “King’s Missive” commanding Massachusetts to desist from further ex- ecutions.52 Yet the material for further narratives of Quaker sufferings was far from depleted. In 1661, Massachusetts re- sponded to the king’s order by instituting the “Cart and Whip Act”: Quakers, upon their release from prison, were to be tied to a cart and whipped from town to town until they reached the colony’s border. Though the intensity of persecution would moderate after 1665, the Quakers would not be legally tolerated until Massachusetts grudgingly passed legislation in 1689.53 Even if the sharpest crisis of 1660–61 had eased, in 1664 New England was still gravely concerned about the Quakers, who showed potential to gain adherents, especially from among the increasing number of people who were not members of the orthodox churches. For this very reason, some scholars see the Quaker threat as a major impetus for adopting the Halfway Covenant.54 In 1665, John Wilson preached his final sermon, A Seasonable Watch-word unto Christians against Dreams and Dreamers of this Generation, which was later published with a preface that identified it as an anti-Quaker tract. Yet while it legislated and punished, New England did not mount any
52Edward Burrough, A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyr- dom of the People of God, called Quakers in New England (London, 1660); George Bishop, New England Judged, not by Man’s, but the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1661). The best study to date of the evolving narratives of New England Quaker martyrdom is Carla Pestana, “The Quaker Executions as Myth and History,” Journal of American History 80 (September 1993): 441–69. 53In addition to the many accounts in both Puritan and Quaker primary sources, studies focused on New England’s response to the Quaker “invasion” include David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 6; Jonathan M. Chu, Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985); and Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984). Historical accounts from a markedly pro-Quaker perspective include Richard Hallowell, The Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts (Boston, 1887) and Rufus Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966). A more recent historical study is Arthur Worrall, Quakers in the Colonial Northeast (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1980). 54See, e.g., Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class, pp. 134–35.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 64 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY compelling literary response to the Quakers’ dramatic narra- tives of suffering. The major anti-Quaker work to emerge from Massachusetts was John Norton’s The Heart of New-England Rent, a tightly argued but relatively dry treatise that, while pre- senting a convincing explanation of the Quaker danger, was unlikely to grip the imagination of ordinary readers.55 And so, our compiler must have reasoned, once again disseminating a century-old orthodox martyr discourse would be a logical means of counteracting the attractive power of the Quakers’ drama of martyrdom—so deeply familiar and culturally resonant. And if that text was indeed assembled by Joshua Scottow, it was almost certainly intended to be in oppositional dialogue with Quaker writing, for Scottow had published his first de Bres` transla- tion specifically as an anti-Quaker work in 1659, the same year Norton’s tract appeared.56 Thus, in addition to its other levels of meaning, Divine Con- solations was, I believe, intended to reclaim the contested property and the affective power of martyrdom for Puritan orthodoxy. There are various ways in which the text can be thus interpreted, too numerous to explore fully here. Certainly Careless expresses a predestinarian theology wholly divergent from Quaker beliefs; moreover, his behavior, and that of the other martyrs, is studiously passive rather than confrontational, as the Quakers often were. But I wish to bring my remarks to a close by drawing at- tention to a final, notable element in the Careless letters and
55John Norton, The Heart of New-England rent at the Blasphemies of the Present Generation (Cambridge, Mass., 1659). 56While in the preface to his 1659 translation Scottow urges readers to note strong resemblances between Anabaptists and “those which pass under the name of Quakers,” thetimingandtitleofhis1668 edition suggest that it was directed against the Baptists. The Baptists had formed a church at Charlestown in 1665, and following a major public debate in April 1668 between six orthodox clergymen and Baptist ministers, their leaders were banished by the General Court and toleration of the sect forbidden. On Scottow’s 1668 text, see Winship, TheCambridgePress,pp. 284–85 (Winship misidentifies the author), and Hall, “The Uses of Literacy,” p. 92n. On the history of the Baptists in early New England, see William McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630– 1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 3–78, and Carla Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 44–84.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 65 by suggesting yet one more way in which the focus on Care- less serves the author’s purposes. In something of a departure from the letters’ characteristic concerns, the two letters that conclude the Careless selection—written separately to Augus- tine and Elizabeth Bernhere, who had recently married—are substantially devoted to laying out “certain fruitfull Precepts of Matrimony” (p. 61). Careless urges Augustine to “keep the band of love, and beware that there never spring up the root of bitterness between you....If you have cause to speak sharply, and sometimes to reprove, beware that you do not the same in the presence of other: but keep your words until a conve- nient time ...and then utter them in the spirit of meekness, and the groaning spirit of perfect love” (p. 63). He reminds Elizabeth to be grateful to God for having given her “a most godly, learned, gentle, loving, quiet, patient, thrifty, diligent, and sober Husband, by whom he will nourish, cherish, keep and defend you, instruct and teach you, yea care and pro- vide for you and your Children ...such things as be necessary for you” (pp. 65–66). A recent Foxe scholar claims that of all the figures in Acts and Monuments who offer insight into the period’s family relations, Careless expresses the clearest vision of Protestant marriage—and of appropriate gender roles within it.57 Within his present moment of 1664 Massachusetts, Divine Consolations’ compiler undoubtedly selected these letters to address the increasing social instability that was threatening family order in New England.58 The centrality of the family had been implicitly affirmed by the Halfway Covenant, which emphasized the godly family’s role in ensuring the continuity
57D. Andrew Penny, “Family Matters and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” Histori- cal Journal 39 (September 1996): 608. The classic study of the family ideal in New England is Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). The family as a foundation for notions of order and hierarchy in early New England is considered extensively in Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 58Evidence for serious concern about sexual disorder is provided by a law passed by the General Court in 1665 allowing stronger penalties for fornication. See Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, vol. 4,pt.2,p.143.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 66 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of the church into succeeding generations. The Careless let- ters go further to highlight the true martyrs’ commitment to the importance of godly marriage within spiritual life. Again, the letters serve to distinguish the orthodox from the early Quakers, who were seen as defying appropriate norms of mas- culine and (especially) feminine behavior and were recurrently accused in early tracts of violating marriage and family order, be it through sexual excess, buggery, or the doctrine of mar- ital celibacy adopted by some 1650s New England Quakers. At multiple levels, as several scholars have pointed out, the Quakers’ radical spiritual fellowship and their transgression of gender and class boundaries led New England’s orthodox to view them not only as religious heretics and political rabble- rousers but as sexual deviants and family deserters as well.59 “It is a sinfull neglect of their families and callings which we speak against ...thats apparent in their constant wanderings up and downe,” Thomas Weld declared in 1654.60 Tellingly, the de Bres` work Scottow translated half a decade later like- wise lamented that the Anabaptists encouraged their followers to abandon “polluted” marriages and “walked as Vagabonds through the Countrey ...leaving their wives and children.”61 Read in this light, the marriage letters in Divine Consolations (as well as the letters in which Careless and de Bres` offer a final farewell to their spouses) work together to venerate the loving and settled (if necessarily ultimately sacrificial) marital
59On Quakerism as deviance, see Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: John Wiley, 1966), and, with a historical rather than sociological orientation, Carla Gardina Pestana, “The City upon a Hill under Siege: The Puritan Perception of the Quaker Threat to Massachusetts Bay, 1656–1661, New England Quarterly 56 (September 1983): 323–53. The most extensive discussion of how the Quakers were construed as a sexual threat in New England can be found in my “Border Crossings: The Queer Erotics of Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming 2007). For a discussion of the potentially homoerotic elements within Foxean martyrology itself, see James Truman, “John Foxe and the Desires of Reformation Martyrology,” ELH 70 (Spring 2003): 35–66. 60Thomas Weld, A Further Discovery of that Generation of Men called Quakers (Gateside, 1654), p. 14. 61Scottow, The Rise, Spring, and Foundation of the Anabaptists, pp. 49–50;on charges against Quakers, see my “Border Crossings.”
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 FOXE IN MASSACHUSETTS 67 relationships of true Protestant martyrs. And, ultimately, the letters underline the essential fact that such exemplary figures provide a model for New Englanders not just as they face death but as they construct godly lives.
“This is a time for the Prudent to keep silence, for it is an evil time, as the Prophet saith,” the preface author writes in his final paragraph, echoing his phrasing at the end of the work’s long title.62 The comment seems ironic at one level, since pub- lishing a book hardly constitutes a silent act. Yet the statement may provide the ultimate insight into why Scottow (let us as- sume) decided to reprint a portion of Acts and Monuments. Withholding his own words, he chose to let past martyrs speak in his stead, insisting that readers engage with those miracu- lous dead saints and find their comfort—or their anguish— there. And while Scottow would probably not have noticed this added benefit, given its character as a reprint of older material, the work’s uniquely muted, indirect speech actually enhances its expressive power. Because, outside its preface, the work speaks in a mode different from the conventionalized rhetoric of the jeremiad or any other familiar discourse of the period, Divine Consolations for Mourners in Sion allows us to hear the voices of 1660s New England orthodoxy freshly, in their emotional as well as their ideological notes of affirmation and anxiety, mourning and consolation. From a scholarly perspec- tive, the text is exciting as well for the striking series of divi- sions it mediates: between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism, between England and Europe and America, be- tween first- and second-generation Massachusetts Puritanism, between Puritans’ and Quakers’ opposed convictions of being heirs of the martyrs’ faith, between the spiritual order of family life and the frequently homosocial bonds of religious commu- nity. For all these reasons, as it emerges from the past and from its long, archival silence, Divine Consolations isaworktobe
62The allusion, cited in the margin, is to Amos 5:13–15.
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.1.35 by guest on 27 September 2021 68 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY treasured for the notable contribution it makes to our ever more nuanced understanding of seventeenth-century New England.
Anne G. Myles is Associate Professor of English at the Uni- versity of Northern Iowa and currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Early American Literature. Her work has appeared in EAL, William & Mary Quarterly, and a number of collections, including the recent Feminist In- terventions in Early American Studies, edited by Mary C. Carruth. She is working on a book on martyrdom and dis- senting identity in seventeenth-century New England.
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