Thomas Hooker
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS IV Thomas Hooker PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION 1933 "Reprinted November, 1957" TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS Thomas Hooker WARREN SEYMOUR ARCHIBALD HESE years are years of remembrance in New England. We are reminded by these anniversaries of those who, crossing the At- lantic in such little ships as the Arbella and Tthe Griffin, laid down the keels of these ships of state, these free and noble commonwealths in which we have found safety in storms and pure delight in peace. One of the most notable of those journeymen of God was our own great fellow citizen, Thomas Hooker, a statesman of the first rank and a powerful preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thomas Hooker was born in 1586, in the hamlet of Marfield, in the parish of Tilton, in the county of Leices- ter, England. That region is the midland of England, and there in those neighborhoods of Stratford, Bedford, and Huntingdon were born Shakespeare, Bunyan, and Crom- well. From the hilltops in that parish you could see in his day, and you can see today, one of the most beautiful landscapes in that English countryside. On one of those hilltops stands St. Peter's Parish Church; a stone, Gothic church built in the middle of the twelfth century. It was 1 four hundred years old when Thomas Hooker was bap- tized at its old font in 1586, and it is almost eight hun- dred years old today. The parish had few inhabitants in the middle of the sixteenth century, and it had few in- habitants in the middle of the nineteenth. In 1564, when Queen Elizabeth was on the throne, Marfield had six fam- ilies. In 1884, when Victoria was queen, Marfield had five families. Not much change in three hundred years! If Thomas Hooker, like the ghost in Hamlet, could re- visit "the glimpses of the moon," he would have seen, I imagine, in 1931 much that was familiar in 1631. There is the same countryside, there is St. Peter's Parish Church, just as it looked four hundred years ago; there without is the ancient churchyard; there within is the old octagonal font; there is the monument, which he had seen so often as a boy, to Jehan de Digbie, Christ's sol- dier in the Holy Land, his hand on his sword, and a lion at his feet. Yes, if Thomas Hooker returned to Marfield, in Old England, he would find few changes. But if he returned to Hartford, in New England, what a change he would behold from the frontier settlement he helped to found to the goodly city in which we live! He would ex- claim: What wonderful works of men and God have been wrought in this new world! From that little, quiet, hamlet of Marfield and its six families, and its leisurely path of one and a half miles across the fields to St. Peter's Church, Thomas Hooker was sent as a boy of thirteen or fourteen to the grammar school at Market Bosworth, a school established by the generous gift and endowment of Sir Wolstan Dixie in 1586. So the boy and the school had the same age. This was the school where Dr. Johnson, almost two hundred years later, was an "usher." Only twenty-five miles away from the school is Bosworth Field, where Richard III lost 2 his crown and his life. And while this boy Thomas Hooker was studying his Latin and Greek in Bosworth Gram- mar School, another boy from that same midland region was writing a play about that crook-backed king, and his crooked reign, and the battlefield of Bosworth; the play that makes history rise from the dead on Bosworth Field and live again in the living words of men. From that grammar school in Market Bosworth, Hooker went at the age of eighteen to Cambridge Univer- sity where he was first enrolled in Queens', and later in Em- manuel College—the college from which many of the first Congregational ministers graduated. Cambridge Univer- sity, and this college in particular, were then the intellec- tual nurseries for the Puritan Party in England. The spirit of the place was Puritan. Emmanuel was a new college in those days, and represented the new ideas. It had just been founded by a member of the Mildmay family, the same family which had lived for generations in Cheltenham, where, later, Thomas Hooker was to be the lecturer at St. Mary's. Queen Elizabeth had looked with some suspicion on this Puritan college founded by this Puritan family, and had said to Mildmay in her sharp, quick way: "Sir Walter, I hear you have erected a Puri- tan foundation in Cambridge." He replied like a good and acceptable man at court, that he had only planted an acorn, and he couldn't be sure what kind of fruit might grow from this planting. In this Puritan university, and in a period reverberant with great events, Thomas Hook- er received his higher education. Even to this day the college retains this simplicity. In 1930 I visited Thomas Hooker's college. I was fortunate in having one of the resident instructors for a guide. He took me all over the college from cellar to attic. The silver was being cleaned that day, and I was able to see all their 3 treasures, some pieces dating from those early days, though whether Hooker ever saw them or not I cannot be sure. The college has been changed, in one way and an- other, a great deal since Thomas Hooker's years of resi- dence. Much of it was rebuilt in the days of Sir Christo- pher Wren. But there is one old dormitory, and there are some old walls, and the cellars, and the kitchen, which probably Thomas Hooker would recognize as familiar. Here he took his B.A. degree in 1608, his M.A. in 1611, here he remained a student for seven years, and here he continued for three or seven years more. Those were great years in English history. Queen Elizabeth was leaving the stage on which she had played a great part in the grand style. King James, the son of the rival queen whom Queen Elizabeth had ordered beheaded, was now on the throne with his pernicious ideas of divine au- thority. The authorized version of the Bible was pub- lished in 1611, the year Hooker took his M.A. degree. In 1608, the year Hooker received his B.A. degree, Pastor John Robinson and the people of the Scrooby Church sought refuge in Holland. Those were the years which marked the beginning of the long and bitter war between the Stuart kings and parliament; the years which saw the efforts to marry Prince Charles to the Infanta of Spain; the years which witnessed the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. These were the crucial episodes which concerned the minds and conversations of men between 1604 and 1630. No one then concerned with history could have attached much if any significance to a little group sailing in a ship called the Mayflower toward the new world in 1620. Yet how that event has grown into vast meanings and connections, and how many a crisis then considered by contemporaries as prodigious and portentous, has shrunk and faded away 4 into oblivion. It makes one wonder what unconsidered and perhaps unknown trifle of our day will occupy high and bold headlands of history, where the currents of the cen- turies sweep by, displacing forever in the minds of men those events which now occupy transient headlines of the press. In all those contemporary events we can surely be- lieve Thomas Hooker was interested. Others who shared with him attention to their present hour, were the men who were in Cambridge University at that time and who like him came to be great Puritan divines. Among these were Nathaniel Ward, graduated in 1603, later minister in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of the Simple Cob- bler of Agawam; William Ames, afterward associated with Hooker and the English exiles in Rotterdam; Peter Bulkeley, M.A. in 1605, and first minister in Concord, Massachusetts; John Cotton, M.A. in 1606, and minis- ter of the first church in Boston; Francis Higginson, M.A. in 1613, minister in Salem; John Wilson, afterward as- sociated for so long a time with John Cotton in Boston. All these men, afterward so prominent in the founding and development of New England, were Thomas Hook- er's contemporaries in Cambridge, and we can be sure they studied not only their books, but also those strange forces which were shaping the destiny of England. In the year 1620—that year which means so much in our New England history—Thomas Hooker left Cam- bridge University, and was made minister of a little country church in Esher, Surrey, about sixteen miles from Westminster. Sixteen miles from Westminster Bridge is no distance at all now in these days of automobiles; but it was something of a distance in 1620. Esher was then, and is now, a little village near the Thames. And the church was a little village church, not capable of seating at the 5 most, a hundred people. Here Hooker worked as minister for five years, and here he married his wife Susanna. In 1625 he was called to be the lecturer in St. Mary's Church, Chelmsford, Essex. Chelmsford is twenty-nine miles east of London, on the road from London to Har- wich, the port at which so many travellers from Holland debark.