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JOHN WHITE REVISITED By David Underdown Since I wrote about John White in Fire From Heaven I have continued my wanderings as an historian, though naturally I have regretted that they are no longer centred in Dorset. In the course of the journey I went completely off my old seventeenth-century map and wrote a book on eighteenth-century cricket, which was a welcome change from the familiar heavy terrain of politics and religion in the Stuart period in which I had previously dwelt. But it’s always interesting to return from one’s travels to look at subjects that loomed so large in earlier days, and to see how different they seem in the light of further experience, and of what has been written by others in the meantime. I am grateful for the opportunity to do that. There has been a continuing, intimidating, torrent of books and articles on the broader subject of Puritanism in the years since Fire From Heaven came out. When I was writing that book some of the trendier members of the historical profession were trying to jettison the terms ‘Puritan’ and ‘Puritanism’ altogether, but a look at any list of recent publications suggests that they didn’t have much success. The sceptics did make one useful contribution, though, in requiring us to be careful about defining those terms before we use them, and I’ll have more to say about that later when I look at the question of in what sense of the word John White was a Puritan. Anyway, there has been no shortage of new writing for anyone who has wanted to pursue the general subject during the past fifteen years This paper comprises the text of a lecture given on 23 June 2006 at St. Peter’s Church, Dorchester, Dorset, by Professor David Underdown of Yale University, to mark the 400th anniversary of the appointment of John White as Rector of Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s Churches Dorchester. © David Underdown 2006. It is reproduced on the John White pages of the Parish of Dorchester website by kind permission. 2 or so. On White himself there has been relatively little: the inadequate entry in the old Dictionary of National Biography life has been updated by Professor Rory Cornwall in the splendid new, expanded edition of that great reference work, and there’s another short summary of his career in a brand-new two-volume encyclopedia on Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America, edited by Francis Bremer and Tom Webster. * * * So how has all this recent writing changed the way I think about our Dorchester Patriarch? Not very much, I am bound to say - which may be a relief to some of you, who will be saying ‘That was a nice short talk, now we can all have a drink and go home’. But sorry, there is more to say, if only because there were a couple of aspects of White’s career that I touched on only briefly in my book. One of these was his connection with colonization, which anyone returning to the seventeenth century is bound to have to think about, if only because England’s place in what has come to be called ‘Atlantic history’ has been such a popular topic recently. It’s not quite clear to me why this has happened, though it’s true that our country’s history, like our politics, has constantly been the subject of a tug-of-war between our European and transatlantic connections, and when British policies have been going in one direction, however misguidedly some may think, I suppose it’s only natural that our history should be bending that way too. When I was writing Fire From Heaven I felt that I could give the Massachusetts project fairly limited attention because it had been done in such detail in that old, but still valuable, biography of White by Frances Rose-Troup, published in 1930. More recently I have several times been reminded how important this aspect of Dorchester history is to Americans, having several times attended conferences of a society composed entirely of descendants of settlers who went over in the Mary and John in 1630 and founded Dorchester, Massachusetts. 3 Rose-Troup’s book is still the best guide to White’s achievements in the founding of the Dorchester Company, and to its efforts before it was absorbed by the better-known Massachusetts Bay Company. She showed that White was almost certainly the author of several of the key documents relating to early Massachusetts - the ‘General Observations for the Plantation of New England’, the ‘Planters’ Plea’ and others, and that although he was never quite pushed into emigrating, he was still an important figure in early Massachusetts history. If I was writing about this again I think I should stress two things even more strongly than I did before. One would be White’s insistence that any new colony should avoid the total separation from the Church of England that had happened with the Pilgrims at Plymouth and some of the settlers at Salem. The other would be the importance of the wise counsel that he gave to John Winthrop at Boston in later years. His words to Winthrop in 1636 have plenty of relevance to our own time. Warning the governor against allowing profiteering in the markets, White commented that although some would say that ‘all manner of restraint is prejudicial to liberty’ he still wondered what benefit for the public there was in ‘making half a dozen rich by pinching more than so many thousands.’ We know something about the relations between the old Dorchester and the new American one - and about the history of many of the colonists as the settlements expanded westward, especially to Windsor, Connecticut. I only wish we knew more. There must have been letters between friends and relatives separated by 3,000 miles of the Atlantic - these were, after all, mostly literate people. Historians often make mental wish-lists of records that they would most like to find - if only. - and mine would certainly include the letters that must have passed between Hannah Gifford, the marvellous primary-school teacher in old Dorchester and her siblings in New England. Such a find would add a depth to 4 our imaginative grasp of the Puritan migration that even the best modern research methods still cannot achieve. * * * Returning from the colonial world to England and our own Dorchester, it’s worth spending a little time reflecting on the enormous importance of the events that occurred during the Patriarch’s years here. The appearance of the King James Bible in 1611 - though the Holy Trinity churchwardens’ accounts reveal that this particular parish only acquired one ten years later. The Synod of Dort in 1618, which confronted the differences within the European Calvinist churches (including the Church of England) and condemned the teachings of the Armenians that were to become so contentious during the reign of Charles I. The outbreak of the Thirty Years War in the same year, a war followed with such breathless apprehension in England, until the victories of King Gustavus of Sweden seemed to bring providential salvation for the Protestant cause. The two periods of crisis in England itself - one during the 1620s which led to the Puritan migration I have just been talking about, and the other beginning in the following decade and culminating in the civil wars. As I pointed out in Fire From Heaven, many people - John White among them - felt that they were living ‘at one of the great turning- points, perhaps the greatest turning-point, of history; at the final stage of the eternal conflict between light and darkness, between good and evil, between Christ and Antichrist.’ We may think - and rightly - that we live in terrifyingly unsettling times, but the men and women of John White’s days must have found their world equally unstable, equally frightening. Somehow John White had to guide his own way, and more important from his point of view, his people’s way, through these years of contention and catastrophe. That for the most part he succeeded in doing so is evident in his own reflections at the end of his life, that he could look back with ‘much comfort’ on 5 his achievements in Dorchester, and equally evident in the general consensus of later historians about his success as a pastor to his flock. I say ‘for the most part’ because White was a human being, with his own share of imperfections, and there are some things in his life which I suspect he might have wanted to do differently. To me, his most serious lapse was his failure to stay with his flock when the royalist armies approached in 1643. There are some obvious excuses: he may not even have been in Dorchester at the time; he had important work to do in London as one of the key figures in the reform of the national church; and anyway, the town was clearly not defensible; he was getting old and what could he have done to protect his people against the voracious Cavaliers? After the civil war he gave the townsmen the lame excuse that ‘although your Teachers have been driven into corners, yet they have been preserved for your farther service, and are now restored to you in safety.’ But when all is said, the flight of the ministers, and of a good proportion of the corporation, dealt a shattering blow to the cause of godly reformation. Some of them took with them whatever valuable possessions they could cart away.

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