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Francis J. Bremer 654 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY There is no question that seventeenth-century meanings of liberty were of central importance to not only the Pilgrims but to most En- glish settlers across New England. Separatists, other puritans, Bap- tists, and Quakers all prized Christian liberty. “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free,” wrote the Apostle Paul, “and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”41 For the separatist Pilgrims, Christian liberty meant the obligation of true Christians to withdraw from the corrupt Church of England and to form covenanted congregations in which they could elect their offi- cers and exercise church discipline. English settlers also repeatedly voiced their commitment to developing English traditions of political liberty. The Mayflower Compact articulated the principle that the va- lidity of offices and laws rested on the consent of the members ofa body politic. In the later years of the colony, political dissenters used the same reasoning to oppose the establishment of county courts and to withhold taxes from both Edmund Andros and their own magis- trates. Yet even as Plymouth’s settlers stood fast in their liberty, they placed others under the yoke of bondage. 41Galatians, 5:1 (Geneva). John G. Turner is professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University and the author of They Knew They Were Pil- grims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty (2020). “AFTER MR. ROBINSON’S PATTERN”: PLYMOUTH AND THE SHAPING OF THE NEW ENGLAND WAY francis j. bremer N the summer of 1643 the English Parliament invited numer- I ous puritan divines to assemble at Westminster to undertake a re- form of England’s national church. Among those invited were three New Englanders—John Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and John Cot- ton. They anticipated that the call would prompt a transatlantic Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00867 by guest on 02 October 2021 PLYMOUTH AND THE NEW ENGLAND WAY 655 debate over the proper forms of organization and governance for such a church and decided that they would be most effective offering their views in correspondence and tracts. When the Assembly convened, delegates from Scotland advocated for a Presbyterian system similar to that in the northern kingdom. A small group of clergymen recently returned from the Netherlands proposed a congregational order. That group, which included the clergymen Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Jeremiah Burroughs, drew on the works and examples of colo- nial friends, and their polity was referred to by many as “the New England Way.”1 Opponents sought to undermine the congregationalist system by tying it to separatism. In the years leading up to the English Wars of Religion, the majority of puritans, who struggled to reform the national church from within, had loudly denounced those who had separated from the Church of England, often referred to as Brown- ists, after the early separatist Robert Browne. All sorts of radical views were associated with separatist groups, so if congregationalism was in- deed a form of separatism it would undermine the likelihood of that polity being adopted by the nation.2 The Scot Robert Baillie claimed that the Congregational Way was learned from “Master [John] Robinson, [who] did derive his way to his separate congregation at Leyden. A part of them did carry it over to Plymouth in New England. Here Master [John] Cotton did take it up, and transmit it from there to Master Thomas Goodwin.”3 What made the charge more believable was the fact that Baillie quoted a passage in a 1629 letter written by Cotton in which Cotton, then still 1The definitive edition of the proceedings of the Westminster Assembly isChad Van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, 5 vols. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012). Volume I: Introduction contains an overview of the Assembly’s deliberations and sketches of its members. See also El- liot Vernon and Hunter Powell, eds., Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–66 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020). Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puri- tan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), esp.123–91; and Puritan Crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, 1630–1670 (New York: Garland, 1989). 2Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ec- clesiology 1570–1625 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989) discusses some of the ways the various puritan groups distinguished themselves from one another and their reasons for doing so. 3Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errors of the Time (1646), 53. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00867 by guest on 02 October 2021 656 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in England, had accused the church in Salem, Massachusetts of hav- ing been unduly influenced by the Plymouth colonists.4 Responding to the charges levelled by Baillie and others, leading New England clergy embraced their identification with English Con- gregationalists while at the same time denying a separatist heritage. Cotton in 1648 wrote that the colonists “take it ill to be called Brown- ists in whole or part.” He claimed that his own church polity de- rived not from John Robinson and Plymouth, but “by the light of the word from Mr. [Robert] Parker, Mr. [Paul] Baynes, and Dr. [William] Ames: from whom also (from two of them at least) we received light out of the word, for the matter of the visible church to be visible saints; and for the form of it, to be a mutual covenant.”5 John Dav- enport identified Parker, Ames, Baynes, and Henry Jacob as the au- thorities for his views in his challenge to the Amsterdam Presbyterian John Paget. Thomas Hooker likewise pointed to Parker, Ames, and Jacob as his guides.6 All three denied that their intellectual ancestry included separatists, including those at Plymouth.7 Perry Miller accepted colonial denials of a separatist ancestry in 1933 when he examined congregational origins in Orthodoxy in Mas- sachusetts, 1630–1650. In that highly influential book, Miller denied that Plymouth had played a shaping role in the organization of the early Massachusetts churches, arguing that the congregationalism of the Bay Colony was a non-separating form shaped by Ames, Parker, and Baynes—just as Cotton claimed in his response to Baillie. For Miller, the early religious history of Massachusetts would have been no different if Plymouth had not existed. This long remained the 4David D. Hall, “John Cotton’s Letter to Samuel Skelton,” William and Mary Quar- terly 22 (1965): 478. 5John Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648) quoted in Larzer Ziff, John Cotton on the Churches of New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 185, 189. 6For Hooker and Davenport, see David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century, with a new introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 82. For more on the Davenport- Paget dispute, see Francis J. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). For Hooker’s the- ology see Baird Tipson, Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015). 7An earlier debate between English puritans and New England clergy is analyzed in Michael P. Winship, “Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–1640,” in Crawford Gribben and Scott Spurlock, eds., Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 89–111. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00867 by guest on 02 October 2021 PLYMOUTH AND THE NEW ENGLAND WAY 657 received judgement, with many writers diminishing the significance of Plymouth. Theodore Dwight Bozeman argued that Plymouth was “pathetically unimportant.”8 There have been, it should be pointed out, some scholars who have taken a position contrary to that of Miller, most recently Michael Win- ship.9 But as we commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the settlement of the Plymouth colony, it is an appropriate time to reex- amine more fully the relationship between the churches of that colony and those of Massachusetts. The story of Plymouth’s influence on the religious practices ofthe Massachusetts churches begins in the summer of 1628 when John Endecott and about fifty colonists entered Salem harbor as the ad- vance guard of the Massachusetts venture. Over the following months many of the new arrivals began to sicken and die. Endecott wrote to Plymouth’s governor William Bradford asking for assistance. Bradford dispatched Samuel Fuller, who served as his settlement’s physician and was a deacon of the congregation.10 While there is no evidence that Fuller made a difference in the health of Salem, he clearly had an impact on religious practice.11 Hav- ing arrived in New England without a clergyman, the Salem settlers had likely been meeting regularly to pray and discuss their beliefs in an informal conference such as many of them would have known in England. Laymen, likely including Endecott, would have shared their understanding of matters of faith. Fuller, who had preached in Leiden and Plymouth according to the practice of lay prophesying—where congregants could ask questions and offered their views on matters of faith—likely did the same in Salem. Such lay preaching was com- mon not only in many separatist congregations but also in informal 8Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650 (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives (Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1988), 115.
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