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Home , Brownist, Henry Jacob, John Robinson (pastor), Millenary Petition, Philip Nye, Richard Clyfton

654 THE NEW 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 . Separatists, other , 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 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 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: 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

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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 proposed a congregational order. That group, which included the clergymen , Philip Nye, and , 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 . 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 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 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.

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in England, had accused the church in Salem, 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 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 as the au- thorities for his views in his challenge to the 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, “’s Letter to ,” 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.

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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 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 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. 9Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 10Francis J. Bremer, One Small Candle: the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 230. Fuller had no formal medical training that we know of, but as a deacon he was responsible for aiding the ill members of the congregation, which might have led him to acquire the medical knowledge he had. 11Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, as Recorded in Wills and Inventories, 1633–1692 (Leiden, Neth: Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, 2018), 24–30.

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conferences that puritans formed with their fellow believers in En- glish communities.12 The Abigail, the ship that carried the Endecott group to Salem, had brought some members of John Robinson’s Leiden congregation who were rejoining their friends in Plymouth, so there would have been opportunities for Endecott and others to learn about the Plymouth church even before their arrival in New England.13 Fuller could of- fer more information, and in a letter to Bradford in May 1629, En- decott acknowledged his debt to the Plymouth deacon. He had come to believe that the puritans of the Bay and those of Plymouth were “servants of one master and of the same household.” He realized that “God’s people are all marked with one and the same mark, and sealed with one and the same seal, and have for the main one and the same heart, guided by one and the same spirit of truth, and where this is there can be no discord, nay, here must be sweet harmony.”14 Endecott was not merely referring to agreement on articles of faith, which tended to be similar across the whole puritan spectrum, sep- aratists included.15 William Hubbard, the seventeenth-century Mas- sachusetts clergyman who drew on personal recollections when he wrote a history of the colony, indicated that Endecott had found Fuller “well versed in the way of church discipline practiced by Mr. Robinson’s church.”16 Writing to Bradford, Endecott stated that he was “satisfied touching your judgments of the outward form ofGod’s worship,” and was convinced that no other [such form] . . . is war- ranted by the evidence of truth.” He expressed the hope that “we may, as Christian brethren, be united by a heavenly and unfeigned love, bending all our hearts and forces in furthering a work beyond

12I have discussed lay prophesying extensively in Lay Empowerment and the De- velopment of Puritanism (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 2015). 13“Of Plimoth Plantation” by William Bradford: The 400th Anniversary Edition, ed. Kenneth P. Minkema, et al. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts and New England Historic and Genealogical Society, 2020), 341 (hereafter, Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation). 14John Endecott to William Bradford, May 11, 1629, in “Governor William Brad- ford’s Letter Book,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 3 (1794): 46–47 (orig. 1794 repr. Boston: Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1906). 15John Coffey, “The Bible and Theology,” in John Coffey, ed., The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume 1: The Post- Era, c.1559–c.1689 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 390. 16William Hubbard, A General History of New England (Cambridge, MA: Mas- sachusetts Historical Society, 1815), 115.

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our strength with reverence and fear, fastening our eyes always on him that only is able to direct and prosper all our ways.”17 While attention properly focuses on Fuller’s trip to Salem, this was not the only way in which the new settlers learned of Plymouth prac- tices. There is evidence of the visit of some Salem colonists visiting Plymouth. Charles Gott, one of the passengers on the Abigail and later a leader of the Salem church, wrote to William Bradford in 1629 thanking him for the governor’s hospitality when he had visited Ply- mouth with his wife and asking Bradford to extend his thanks as well to Elder William Brewster and other members of the congregation. Such visits would have provided opportunities not only to hear more about Plymouth’s religious practices, but also to attend services and perhaps share their views in a prophesying session.18 The challenges facing Salem were how to form a church without the involvement of bishops or kings and how to do so without the initial involvement of clergymen. It was a question that the Plymouth settlers could speak to, since it related to how their church had come into being. It was a story of lay empowerment, beginning when a group of godly men and women in Scrooby, England, had formed a congregation by covenanting together and only then chosen a min- ister, and when it was impossible for John Robinson to come to Ply- mouth in 1620, had been led by their lay elder, William Brewster.19 Based on the information gathered and discussions conducted, Salem colonists in the summer of 1629 organized a church. Some of them had, according to Hubbard’s account, “sufficient experience and acquaintance one with another” to discern the godly among them- selves, and those individuals “resolved to enter into a church fel- lowship together.” They “consulted with one another about settling a reformed congregation according to the rules of the gospel,” and drew up and subscribed to a church covenant.20 Given that Endecott had been communicating his acceptance of the congregational forms in

17Endecott to Bradford, May 11, 1629, in “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 46– 47. 18Charles Gott to William Bradford, July 30, 1629, in “Governor Bradford’s Letter- book,” 47–48. 19Bremer, One Small Candle, esp. 94–124. Robinson’s absence was originally due to a decision that he remain in Leiden with members of the congregation who could not yet leave. In later years he was prevented from journeying to Plymouth by the machi- nations of the colony’s financial backers, who feared that his presence would highlight the separatist character of the settlement; Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 260. 20Hubbard, History, 116–17.

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May, it is likely that the church was formed before the arrival on June 29 of Samuel Skelton and , ministers sent by the Massachusetts Bay Company. As described by William Hubbard, the process was essentially that used by the Scrooby congregation decades earlier—those deemed godly “accepted of one another, according to some general profession of the gospel, and the honest and good intentions they had towards one another and so by some sort of covenant soon molded themselves into a church.”21 In his July 30 letter to Governor Bradford, Charles Gott described what had come next. John Endecott appointed July 20 as a date for the church to hold a day of prayer, on which occa- sion the congregants proceeded to choose their clerical officers. They first determined the criteria they would use and then chose Samuel Skelton as pastor and Francis Higginson as teacher. 22 The two men then assumed their posts not by virtue of their Church of England or- dination but, as separatists did, by the laying on of hands by leading members of the congregation.23 Formation of a church by a lay subscription to a covenant, with the laity choosing their ministers and the congregational ordination of clergy were the hallmarks of separatism in the form espoused by the Plymouth church. And so the leaders of that church were invited to Salem to join the new church on August 6 for a day of fasting and prayer to include the election of the remaining congregational offi- cers. Bradford and representatives of the Plymouth congregation ac- cepted the invitation. Delayed by cross-winds on their journey, they missed the start of the day’s proceedings but were there in time to give the Salem church “the right hand of fellowship, wishing all pros- perity and a blessed success unto such good beginnings.”24 Further evidence of the influence of Plymouth on the Salem church was that, according to Nathaniel Morton, William Bradford’s

21Hubbard, History, 181–82. 22Gott to Bradford, July 30, 1629, “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book.” Bradford copied the letter into Of Plimoth Plantation, 357–59. Virtually all modern historians offer a narrative whereby the covenant was drawn up after the arrival of Skelton and Higginson and with their assistance. Over a hundred years ago, Williston Walker, in The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1893), made clear that there was a church and members before the July 20 election of officers and certainly before the August 6 meeting establishing the church and installating of clergy. 23Bremer, One Small Candle, 142. 24Nathaniel Morton, New Englands Memorial, or, A brief relation of the most mem- orable and remarkable passages of the Providence of God . . . with Special reference to . . . New-Plymouth (Boston, 1669), 75.

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nephew and an early historian of Plymouth, “Letters did pass between Mr. Higginson and Mr. Brewster, the reverend Elder of the Church of Plymouth” on the subject of infant . Some separatists, in- cluding the Amsterdam “Ancient Church”’s John Smyth, had adopted Anabaptist views, but the Robinson church had not. Higginson and Brewster agreed on the validity of infant baptism and that when those children reached adulthood, “they being not scandalous, they were to be examined by the church officers, and upon their approbation of their fitness, and upon the children’s public and personal owning of the covenant, they were to be received unto the Lord’s Supper.”25 The new congregation was not welcomed by all the residents of Salem. To become a member an individual had to profess their faith and be recognized as godly by the existing congregants. Only mem- bers could receive the sacraments. Worship departed from the En- glish Prayer Book, though the details of it are not known. John Browne, a member of Endecott’s council, and his brother Samuel, a lawyer, protested the practices, accusing those who formed the con- gregation of being separatists and even Anabaptists and then orga- nized their own meetings joining with others in readings from the Prayer Book. When they could not be reconciled to the new order, Endecott shipped them back to England.26 The complaints of the Brownes threatened the future of the colony. News of the controversy reached England in September 1629. The General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Company had already de- cided to move its charter to New England, which would make it harder for the royal government to act against the colony, but that did not happen until the following spring. If the colony were seen as a separatist enclave, it might have prompted a seizure of the char- ter. At the least it might have inhibited others from migrating at a time when the Company was planning to send a large influx of new settlers. Consequently, the General Court took steps to bury the ac- cusations of the Brownes. An arbitration panel was established on September 19 with the Brownes choosing four representatives and the Company choosing the same number, including and John Davenport.27 That process dragged on for over a year.

25Morton, Memorial, 79. 26Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 166–67. 27Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 5 volumes (Boston, 1853), 1:51 (hereafter Recs. of Mass. Bay).

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Ultimately, the Brownes were reimbursed for their investment in the Company. Meanwhile, at its September 29th meeting, the Gen- eral Court decided that since letters sent by the Brownes to English friends on company ships likely “had defamed the country of New England and the Governor and government there,” that the letters be detained, opened, and preserved as possible evidence against them.28 Late in March 1630 the was ready to sail from Southampton. Many of the passengers gathered, likely in the Church of the Holy Rood, to hear two sermons. One was that which we have come to call “a Model of Christian Charity” preached by John Winthrop. The other was by John Cotton, who had accompanied members of his parish who were joining the emigration. Cotton’s ser- mon was soon printed as God’s Promise to his Plantation (1630).29 Among those in attendance was one of Cotton’s parishioners, . He was a merchant, had studied law and re- sisted Charles’s efforts to circumvent Parliament in raising funds.30 Having decided to emigrate to New England, he was elected one of the assistants of the Massachusetts Bay Company and travelled along with other Bostonians on one of the ships that left Southampton in the spring of 1630. After his arrival in Massachusetts, Coddington told Plymouth’s Samuel Fuller that it was “Mr. Cotton’s charge that they should take advice of them at Plymouth and should do nothing to offend them.”31 The printed version of Cotton’s sermon does not contain any such statement, but that is because the colonial officials likely wanted to avoid alerting the English authorities and potential emigrants that the churches of the Bay might follow the example of the Plymouth colonists, who most Englishmen viewed as separatists. When Cotton offered his advice to follow the example of Ply- mouth, he might not have realized all that this would entail. When the Winthrop fleet arrived in Salem, that congregation refused toal- low John Winthrop, , William Coddington, and others to receive the Lord’s Supper, though they did allow a member of John Lathrop’s Southwark congregation, formerly ministered to by Henry Jacob, to participate in that sacrament and to have a child baptized.

28Shurtleff, ed., Recs. of Mass. Bay, 60–61, 52–53. 29Bremer, John Winthrop, 173–75. 30For Coddington’s background see Robert Charles Anderson, ed., The Great Mi- gration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633 (Boston, MA: New England Historic and Genealogical Society, 1995), 1. 31Samuel Fuller to William Bradford, June 28, 1630, “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 56–57.

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This implied that the Jacob-Lathrop separatist congregation was rec- ognized as a true church but Church of England parishes were not. Cotton protested against this to his friend Samuel Skelton and at- tributed it to Skelton and the Salem church following the practices of John Robinson and the Plymouth church.32 It is certainly possible that Cotton, in encouraging emigrants to fol- low the Plymouth example, had not anticipated that members of his own English church and the colony’s new governor and deputy gov- ernor would be excluded from the sacraments. But it is also possible that his intention in writing the letter, which was not a private com- munication but circulated in England, was another attempt to antici- pate and reject charges of separatism against Massachusetts.33 Actions spoke louder than words, and the churches formed by those denied the sacraments in Salem soon demonstrated the continuing influence of Plymouth. Just as Plymouth had sent Fuller to assist the Salem settlers in 1629, it sent him to Massachusetts in the spring of 1630. Once again, Fuller combined ministering to the health of the colonists with dis- cussions of church practice. He wrote to Governor Bradford that he had held many conferences with the puritans of the Bay. John Ende- cott remained a “dear friend, and a friend to all of us.” Fuller consid- ered Endecott a “second Burrow,” referring to the separatist martyr Henry Barrow34 and met with Coddington and Winthrop, finding the

32This letter, discussed previously, has been an important document in the discus- sion over how much Salem owed to Plymouth and whether Cotton himself and the puritan clergy who would come to New England followed Plymouth or drew on their own, non-separatist beliefs. See Sargent Bush Jr., ed., The Correspondence of John Cot- ton (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2001), 141–49. For a different commentary see Hall, “Cotton’s Letter,” 478–85. 33Hall, “Cotton’s Letter,” (479) points out that the letter was intended for an En- glish audience and to “reassure English puritans—not to mention the Crown—that the Company was still loyal to the Church of England.” Prior to their departure from En- gland in April 1630, the leaders of the expedition had similarly sought to allay fears by signing a public letter, the Humble Request, in which they denied any desire to sep- arate from the Church of England and asserted that “such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation we have received in her bosom and sucked it from her breasts.” Bremer, John Winthrop, 175. 34Samuel Fuller to William Bradford, June 28, 1630, “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 56–57. A contemporary of William Brewster’s at Cambridge and described by a contemporary as “a spokesman of great fire and genius,” Barrow was a separatist who had been arrested along with John Greenwood in 1593, imprisoned, and later executed. Brewster carried a copy of Barrow’s A Brief Discovery of the False Church (1590) with him to New England. Tim Cooper, “Congregationalism,” in Coffey, Dissenting Traditions, 117.

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latter “a godly, wise, and humble gentleman, and very discreet, and of a fine and good temper.” To Fuller, Winthrop acknowledged that the Plymouth church had “some privy enemies in the Bay” but more friends. Advising Fuller both privately and before others, “opposers there is not wanting, and satan is busy.”35 In July Fuller was still in Massachusetts with two other members of the Plymouth congregation, Edward Winslow and Isaac Allerton. In consultations about the dispersal of settlers into separate towns, Winthrop said “they would do nothing without our advice”36 so the Plymouth agents recommended that the residents of Charlestown, Watertown, and Dorchester hold a day of fast and humiliation to ask God’s aid. Then, “such godly persons that are amongst them and known to each other ...[should] make known their godly desire and practice the same, viz., solemnly to enter into covenant with the Lord to walk in his ways.” Having formed their churches, they should avoid “intending rashly to proceed to the choice of officers,” wait- ing until they could do so with proper deliberation. Winslow also re- quested that the Plymouth church offer prayers for their friends in the Bay.37 Following a fast day held on July 30, a congregation in Charlestown formed what became the Boston First Church. Fuller writing again to Bradford indicated that he had run out of medicine and could no longer help the settlers as a physician. He was returning to Ply- mouth, and both and John Endecott planned to ac- company him; however, Johnson died before he could make the trip, and Winthrop expressed his wish to visit Plymouth but was too busy. Other “honest Christians,” Fuller wrote, “are desirous to see us [Plymouth]; some out of love which they bear to us, and the good persuasion they have of us; others to see whether we be so evil as that have heard of us.”38 During his stay in the Bay, Fuller discussed some of the issues that helped shape congregational polity. He visited Mattapan (later Dorchester) “at the request of Mr. [John] Warham.” Members of that

35Fuller to Bradford, June 28, 1630, in “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 56–57. 36Fuller to Bradford, June 28, 1630, in “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 57. This phrase was not included in the copy of the letter which Bradford included in Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation 369–70. 37Samuel Fuller and Edward Winslow to William Bradford, William Brewster, and Ralph Smith, July 26, 1630, in “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 57–58. 38Fuller to Bradford, August 2, 1630, “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 58– 59.

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community believed that “the visible church” should not be confined to those deemed to be God’s elect—recipients of saving grace—but of ungodly people as well. Fuller “had conference with them till I was weary,” though in the end he could not persuade them that only the godly should be members of a congregation and left with the hope that “the Lord will give a blessing” so they might receive further light. In Watertown he conferred with George Phillips, who accepted the position that a minister had to be called and ordained by a partic- ular congregation. Phillips told Fuller that if the Watertown church wished him to “stand minister by that calling which he received from the prelates in England, he will leave them.”39 The first churches of Massachusetts clearly followed the guidance of Plymouth in organizing by way of believer covenants, congrega- tional choice and ordination of officers, and other matters such as lay prophesying. But the discussions Samuel Fuller had with John Warham and George Phillips point to the fact that there were some positions on which not everyone agreed. Historians who have tried to shove early puritan churches into distinct denominational categories do a disservice to the varieties of belief and practice that character- ized the movement. As David D. Hall has pointed out, this was the flaw in Perry Miller’s approach in Orthodoxy in Massachusetts.40 Hall has described the early evolution of the congregational way in New England as a fluid process.41 John Robinson, after time spent in Lei- den, told those members of his congregation going to America that he “was very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet tobreak forth out of his holy word.”42 Winthrop acknowledged the same thing when he told those journeying with him that if they did their best to serve God in the land to which they were going, then they would “see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with us.”43

39Fuller to Bradford, June 28, 1630, “Governor Bradford’s Letter Book,” 56– 57. 40David D. Hall, introduction to Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630– 1650 (orig. pub. 1933 rept. New York: Harper & Row, 1970), xiv–xv. 41Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 83. Michael Winship discusses some of the key works that debate the origins of congregationalism in Godly Republicanism, 276–77n6. 42Edward Winslow recalled Robinson’s words in Hypocrisy Unmasked (1646), 97– 98. 43John Winthrop, “Christian Charity,” in Winthrop Papers: 1623–1630 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), 2:292.

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Explaining the nature of the Plymouth church and its influence on the New England Way in the 1650s, Bradford told the young men of the colony that “the most who settled in the land did agree to model themselves after Mr. Robinson’s pattern.” Plymouth puritans had helped the “first comers” of Massachusetts form their churches, their ideas and practices being as the leaven described in Matthew 13.44 The Plymouth church that helped shape the faith of the Bay had itself evolved over the course of its history and tracing the changes sheds further light on the debate over Plymouth’s influence on Salem and the other churches of Massachusetts. The Plymouth congregation traced its origin to a conference of godly men and women from various local English parishes who had gathered early in the seventeenth century in the manor house of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire to deepen their faith. They were hosted at the manor house by the layman William Brewster, originally from Scrooby, who had studied at Cambridge University, worked for a time for William Davison, a secretary of state for Queen Elizabeth, and then retired back to his home village after Davison had lost his post at court because of his involvement in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. During his time at Cambridge and as a result of his own reading and his exposure to the when he ac- companied Davison to the Netherlands, Brewster had become a pu- ritan. The men and women who gathered under his roof at Scrooby, among them the young Bradford, also favored reform. They discussed sermons they had heard, prayed, sang psalms, and shared their in- sights into the scripture. Referred to as a “conference” by puritans, such gatherings were termed “conventicles” by the church authorities, who saw them as subversive and tried to suppress them.45 Giving up hope for changing the church, around 1606 “the Lord’s free people joined themselves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in the fellowship of the Gospel to walk in all his ways, made known, or to be known unto them (according to their best

44The quotation is from one of three dialogues (one of which has been lost) in which Bradford described discussions between the “ancient men” and the “young men” of the congregation. “A Dialogue: or the sum of a conference between some young men in New England, and some ancient men which came out of Holland and Old En- gland, 1648,” in “Plymouth Church Records, 1620–1859, Part 1,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications, (1920), 22:123. The version included in Plymouth Church Records include modifications of the original manuscript, which is in the Special Col- lections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 45Bremer, One Small Candle, 41.

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endeavors), whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.”46 Shortly thereafter they chose , a minister who had been deprived of his living in nearby , as their pastor and added another ejected clergyman, John Robinson, to their ministry. The congregation soon found itself “hunted, & persecuted on every side; . . . some were taken, & clapped up in prison, others had their homes beset & watched night and day.”47 Facing such per- secution, the congregation decided to emigrate to the Netherlands, which had a reputation for tolerating English separatists. After a se- ries of failed attempts, most of the congregants reunited in Amster- dam and then moved on to Leiden in 1609. Clyfton chose to remain in Amsterdam, and Robinson was chosen pastor and Brewster the lay elder. At the time the congregation left England, it was clearly identified as an illegal separatist group. Robinson’s A Justification of the Separa- tion from the Church of England, published in Amsterdam in 1610, stressed the rejection not only of the Church of England but of all who remained within it. As Robinson’s biographer has described it, this “policy of exclusion” was based on the concept that sin was “con- tagious and transferable.” Joining in voluntary association with like- minded believers only, such separatists sought to build a “Sion ...on the top of every hill.”48 This was a position, identified at the time with Robinson and his followers, that reformist puritans in the Church of England would have been quick to denounce because it denied its legitimacy. But it was not the position espoused by Robinson’s followers in Plymouth in the 1620s, or what the first settlers of Massachusetts found in 1628. While the Plymouth congregation continued to hold to its belief in churches formed by the covenant of godly believers, lay empowerment in the selection of church officers and decision mak- ing, and lay involvement in prophesying, in other respects their beliefs had evolved during their years in Leiden. The Leiden years exposed Robinson, Brewster, Fuller, and other members of the congregation to a variety of religious leaders whose views led them to reconsider their own positions. They had con- tact with the theology faculty at the University of Leiden and Dutch

46Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 98–99 47Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 100. 48Timothy George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982), 106.

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religious leaders such as Willem Teelinck.49 Teelinck had spent time in England, where he had been influenced by puritan pietism. In the Netherlands he became a leader of the Dutch Nadere Reformatie or “Further Reformation.” Towards the end of his life, after the settle- ment of Plymouth, Robinson would call on Teelinck to assist his own son in preparing for the ministry.50 Robinson and Teelinck met with Robert Durie, the pastor of the non-separatist English Reformed Church in Leiden and, following Durie’s death in 1616, with his successor, Hugh Goodyear. Goodyear was a friend and correspondent of John Cotton and had sent stu- dents to reside with Cotton in Boston, Lincolnshire. Cotton would have been well informed about the practices of the Robinson church in Leiden.51 Goodyear was also a longtime friend and correspondent of Ralph Smith, who became pastor of the Plymouth church in 1629. Years after Robinson’s death, the remnants of his Leiden congregation merged with Goodyear’s church in 1644.52 Most significant, particularly in light of what Cotton and his fel- low New Englanders claimed to be the source of their views, were contacts in Leiden with three puritan visitors—, , and Henry Jacob. Looking back on the Leiden years, Brad- ford wrote that members of the congregation “knew Mr. Parker, Doc- tor Ames, and Mr. Jacob in Holland when they sojourned for a time in Leiden,” even living together for a time.53 These were, of course, the individuals whom New Englanders in the 1640s cited as being the source for the New England Way and the fact was that John Robin- son helped shape their views just as they helped move Robinson away from his strict separatism.54

49In Leiden Robinson became involved in the debates over the Arminian posi- tion on predestination and on the relationship between church and state. See Jeremy Dupertius Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundation of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, MA: General Society of Mayflower De- scendants, 2009) and George, John Robinson. 50Willem J. op ‘t Hof, “The Eventful Sojourn of Willem Teelinck (1579–1629) at Banbury in 1605,” Journal for the History of Reformed Pietism (2015), 1:5–34 and Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 360–61. 51For correspondence between Cotton and Goodyear, see Bush, Cotton Correspon- dence, 39–40, 139–41. 52Bremer, One Small Candle, 56–57, 130–31. 53“First Dialogue,” 131. 54Michael Winship provides an excellent discussion of these interactions in Leiden in Godly Republicanism, especially chapter four.

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Jacob’s story is particularly relevant to the concerns of this es- say. A reformist puritan who signed the Millenary Petition of 1603 asking James I for church reforms, he had been frustrated by the fail- ure of the and thereafter advocated for the independence of individual churches within the national church. By 1610 he was in Leiden and was surprised by his contacts with Robinson, Brewster, and other members of the Pilgrim congregation, finding that they were “very far off from being so evil ascommonly they are held to be.”55 Returning to England in 1616 he, together with other believers, drew up and subscribed to a covenant, forming a church of their own in the London suburb of Southwark.56 While in a separatist congregation—which ecclesiastical authorities regarded as an unlawful conventicle—Jacob allowed members to attend services in Church of English parishes, and even to have their children bap- tized in them. In a departure from his earlier position, John Robinson recognized the Jacob congregation as a true church. Members of the Leiden congregation likely worshipped at Southwark occasionally when they were in England. But the Ancient Church in Amsterdam, which took a strict separatist position, refused to acknowledge its legitimacy. That difference became notable when Sabine Staresmore, one of the orig- inal members of the Jacob congregation, was welcomed as a member by the Leiden church, which employed him in their negotiations with the Virginia Company. The Ancient Church refused Staresmore per- mission to worship with them, which became a source of contention between Robinson and the Amsterdam congregation.57 Jacob left En- gland in 1622 to settle in Virginia, and his place as pastor was taken by John Lathrop. It will be remembered that a member of that con- gregation arrived in Salem in 1630 and was admitted to communion while Winthrop, Coddington, and other godly puritans were refused, much to the chagrin of John Cotton. The Salem church had gone so far in imitating Plymouth when it adopted its judgement of the Southwark congregation.58

55Jacob quoted in Winship, Godly Republicanism, 99–100. Jacob did add that the Robinson congregation was “in some matters . ..,stricterthanIwishtheywere.” 56An important discussion of Jacob’s views is found in Polly Ha, ed., The Puritans on Independence: The First Examination, Defence, and the Second Examination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 57Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 584; George, John Robinson, 165. 58Another indication of the fluidity of the division between non-separating and sep- arating puritans may be found in the publishing of reform works. William Brewster’s

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During the Leiden years Robinson was, in the recollection of Brad- ford, “ever desirous of any light, and the more able and learned the persons were the more he desired to confer and reason with them.”59 In a treatise, Religious Communion, Private and Public (1614), and again in the posthumously published Treatise of the Lawfulness of Hearing the Ministers of the Church of England (1634), Robinson accepted interaction with godly members of the Church of England. Furthermore, as the members of his congregation were departing, he instructed them to “avoid the name of , being a mere nick- name and brand to make religious odious,” and urged them to “close with the godly party of the Kingdom of England, and rather to study union than division,” looking to see how they “might possibly without sin close with them.”60 It was this modified separatism that Fuller described to John Endecott and that became the model for the early churches of Massachusetts. The relationship between the Plymouth congregation and the churches of the Bay that Fuller helped shape in 1629 and 1630 con- tinued over the following decades. A brief review of some of those contacts reinforces the role played by Plymouth. In 1632, Winthrop and Boston’s pastor John Wilson travelled to Plymouth and partic- ipated in a congregational prophesying. Ralph Smith was then the Plymouth pastor and served as the teacher. Williams propounded a question, Smith offered his views, as did Bradford and Brewster. The visitors were then asked to offer their views.61 The fol- lowing year the Boston church sought the advice of Plymouth as to “whether one person might be a civil magistrate and nominated to be a Ruling elder at the same time.” Plymouth responded in the negative and Massachusetts followed that advice.62 When Massachusetts dealt with the Free Grace Controversy spurred by the teachings of Anne

Pilgrim Press in Leiden published works by clergymen representing all factions in the movement. The London printer John Bellamy, who was a member of the Jacob- Lathrop congregation, published works by leading New Englanders as well as sepa- ratists such as . I thank David Lupher for pointing this out. 59“First Dialogue,” 138. 60Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked (1646), 58. This was a recollection by Winslow of what Robinson had said over twenty years earlier. But many who were there when Robinson offered these comments were still alive and no one appears to have chal- lenged the account. 61Bremer, One Small Candle, 111–12. 62The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 71.

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Hutchinson, Plymouth’s Smith and Ralph Partridge, then pastor of the Plymouth colony town of Duxbury, were invited to the 1637 synod in Cambridge to identify and condemn errors.63 Years later, in 1646, Bradford and Partridge represented their churches at the Cambridge Synod. Partridge was one of the three clergymen asked to prepare a draft of the synod’s platform, though was not the one chosen as the final draft.64 Bradford was pleased to claim that his Plymouth congregation was the source of the development of the New England Way writing that “as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light kindled here has shone unto many.”65 Of course, Bradford clearly had an interest in asserting his colony’s importance. John Cotton in 1629 and with his colleagues in the 1640s had an interest in disassociating themselves from the Robinson congregation and from separatism in general. But such denials are misleading. They could claim that they were influ- enced by Parker, Ames and Jacob rather than Robinson, but we have seen how that conveniently ignores the fact that the three men had interacted with Robinson and that the four of them had influenced each other. The puritan movement was characterized by dialogue among lay and clerical reformers seeking to learn more of God’s truth. They studied the scriptures and tried to find meaning in them by consult- ing the works of theologians and other religious writers and learn- ing from one another in various forms of conferences. Granted, some would reach a point where they believed they had discovered what they were searching for, became dogmatic, and refused to consider moving further. Robinson expressed this when talking about the Ref- ormation in general. He bemoaned “the state and condition of the Reformed Churches, who [sic] would come to a period in Religion, and would go no further.” Thus, “for example the Lutherans, they could not be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw, for whatever part of God’s will he had further imparted and revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it. And so also,” he continued, “you see

63Smith’s involvement is confirmed in a letter he sent to Hugh Goodyear in 1638, printed in D.Plooij, The Pilgrim Fathers from a Dutch Point of View (New York: New York University Press, 1932), 114. Smith was likely one of those who dissented from the synod’s findings. See Charles Chauncey, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743), vii. 64Walker, Creeds and Platforms, 175, 184. A copy of the Partridge draft is in the Mather Papers at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. 65Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 371.

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the Calvinists, they stick where he left them, a misery much to be lamented; for though they were precious shining lights in their times, yea, God had not revealed his whole will to them.”66 There is a fluidity that can be obscured if we try to pinpoint the exact influence of Plymouth on Massachusetts. The Plymouth church in 1629 was not the same as the Scrooby congregation of 1606 or the Leiden congregation of 1618. It had evolved its own way of or- ganizing its religious life. As for early Massachusetts, the historian Stephen Foster has pointed out that given the colonists’ arrival in a land with no existing religious structures and no ordained clergy- men, some form of congregational formation was inevitable.67 But even if John Endecott and other residents of Salem may have read works by Ames and others, the fact is that they were able to listen to Samuel Fuller’s views and question him on how congregational ideas worked in practice. Following his advice they laid the founda- tion of their churches. While the nature of those churches continued to evolve, their congregational character remained the hallmark of the New England Way.

66Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, 57–58. 67Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991), 154.

Francis J. Bremer is professor emeritus of history at Millersville Uni- versity of Pennsylvania and Coordinator of New England Beginnings. He has published over a dozen books on puritanism in the Atlantic world. Most recently, he co-edited “Of Plimoth Plantation” by William Bradford. The 400th Anniversary Edition (2020) and is the author of One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puri- tans and the Beginning of English New England (2020).

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