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Transcript
It is perhaps ironic that the Parliament that New England had done so much to support, soon after it started to win the war, threatened to interfere in the region in an unprecedented and, at least for Boston leadership, alarming way.
Introduction
To start today’s episode, I thought I would introduce you to a man named William Vassall. It would be easy to overlook Vassall as a minor character in 1640s New England, a Plymouth resident who sympathized with the Presbyterian push for religious toleration in New England, but there were plenty of people who thought he was the central unifying figure of New England dissent in the mid 1640s. Plenty of people, including Edward Winslow, who were thoroughly convinced he was the man behind the scenes, going so far as to say he secretly attended hearings and General Court meetings to help coordinate rebellions against the established Congregationalist order – including the Hingham Militia Affair.
William Vassall, whose brother Samuel was on Warwick’s Commission for Foreign Plantations, had first traveled to Massachusetts on the same ship as John Winthrop, but returned to England after that first winter, and only permanently settled in America years later. When he first moved back, he lived with the staunchly Presbyterian Roxbury minister, and so-called Apostle to the Indians, John Eliot. And when choosing the place to build his new home, he carefully selected land beside Massachusetts, indeed beside the town of Hingham, but within Plymouth boundaries, in a town called Scituate. Scituate was already a rather unique town, and will feature disproportionately heavily in our future religious discussions, but Vassall soon founded a new, Presbyterian Church there. He was initially friends with Plymouth leadership, especially Edward Winslow, whose son Vassall’s daughter married, but the changing religious landscape of New England soon drove a wedge between the two. Winslow was the second most cosmopolitan of Plymouth’s original Brownist settlers, and had come to embrace the Massachusetts Congregationalist establishment more than the majority of Plymouth residents. On the other hand, Vassall was a Presbyterian with very strong ideas about religious liberty, indeed liberty in general, and a strong desire to agitate for it. As this became the divisive issue within the Puritan movement, hostility between the two overwhelmed their friendship and soon they became bitter enemies.
In Plymouth, Vassal’s agitation in favor of religious liberty was overt. The influx of Massachusetts residents, problems with people like Samuel Gorton, and the general push toward uniformity in New England had caused people like Bradford, Winslow and Thomas Prence to consider implementing Massachusetts-style laws in Plymouth, banishing people who didn’t toe the religious line. In response, Vassall wrote a petition to the Plymouth government, asking for religious toleration, citing its Brownist history and history of religious toleration and separation of Church and state. It was precisely these things which had driven many New Englanders to settle in Plymouth rather than the more affluent colonies. And, though Plymouth’s laws did get stricter, they didn’t get as severe as those in Massachusetts.
In Massachusetts, though, as a non-resident, Vassall had no real right to interfere with government affairs. He played no official role in the Hingham Militia Case. He could play no official role in the Hingham Militia Case. But, Winslow strongly believed that it was Vassall’s idea for the Hobarts to appeal to the Deputies. And, he said that when the Hobarts had gone to Boston, Vassall had gone with them, secretly staying in a room in the Courthouse, where the others could consult with him several times a day. I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but from all we can tell, it wouldn’t have been out of character for him.
So that’s William Vassall, the glue who holds this pair of episodes together. And as a refresher, as the War progressed, the cracks in New England society were becoming more and more visible. The Hingham Militia Case had really pushed a wedge into those cracks, and things were changing. Resentments were building, and the increasing radicalism in England was causing some of Massachusetts’s more conservative residents to question the course Puritanism and Parliamentarianism were taking. In 1644, Presbyterian Nathaniel Rogers had caused a sensation in English Royalist Propaganda when he’d criticized Parliament for its disrespectful attitude and harsh, personal opposition to the King. Contempt for a monarch, Rogers said, was against both Scripture and the Solemn League and Covenant. A Plymouth resident also challenged government leaders when they didn’t administer the oath of supremacy.
Massachusetts, quickly followed by New Haven, then made it illegal to declare loyalty for the King over Parliament, and by 1646 Massachusetts had rewritten its official histories to give Parliament credit for issuing its beloved Charter, rather than the King. Ministers worked to explain why everything Parliament did was ok, and magistrates worked to legally quash dissent. But, there were still people who weren’t completely convinced.
And, in addition to all of this, you still had the magistrates and deputies, just as combative as ever, with the issue du jour being whether or not to allow a larger portion of the population to vote. A couple bills to this effect had been put forth, and one debated.
But while all of this was happening, and indeed around the time of the conflict in Hingham, Massachusetts had received an external shock from Warwick’s Parliamentary committee. As everyone was bickering, a group of Samuel Gorton’s followers, including the nearly executed William Holden, had arrived from England, with letters granting Gorton all disputed land in and around Shawomet, and ordering Massachusetts to allow Gorton and his followers to freely travel within the colony. They had effectively allowed Gorton to appeal the colony’s legal decisions, and overridden the Court’s decisions, without even allowing Massachusetts to defend them. Massachusetts didn’t even know that Gorton had gone to England in the first place. They were horrified, they didn’t know what to do, but in 1644 they had more pressing issues to deal with, so they put the issue on the backburner to figure out a little later.
How did this happen? The answer to that question, like so many others, lies in the political landscape of Civil War England. Gorton was a charismatic radical who opposed the established New England order. So, the Presbyterians supported him in the hope of weakening Congregationalist Massachusetts, and in the fear that if they did support religious persecution in New England, that the Presbyterians would be future victims. And the Congregationalists couldn’t oppose Gorton for fear of fracturing the Independent alliance. New England’s oppression of anabaptists had already caused problems, so supporting Gorton was a good way for English Congregationalists to signal to their radical allies that they favored toleration more than New England did.
It did take a couple years for Parliament to actually get to Gorton’s case, but when they did, Gorton found himself in front of a thoroughly sympathetic committee. In contrast to Roger Williams, who had had to fight tooth and nail for a tiny margin of victory, Warwick’s commission was almost united in support of Gorton. And to make things even more extreme, since Massachusetts authorities didn’t even know Gorton was in England, they didn’t send anyone to argue against his appeal. Massachusetts agent Thomas Welde did learn about the the hearing while it was going on, and he tried to go argue in favor of Massachusetts, but since he’d left New England long before the conflict with Gorton had begun, he found himself walking into Parliament halfway through a case he knew virtually nothing about, indeed one in which he hadn’t even heard the early testimony, and trying to argue against one of the most charismatic figures of the age. His ignorance of the facts was immediately obvious, and he had no real chance to make a difference anyway. So Gorton got everything he asked for, including Massachusetts’s only potential window to the Narragansett Bay, and he renamed Shawomet Warwick in honor of the Earl.
Gorton’s men then returned to New England, but Gorton remained in England for the time being, preaching, writing and preparing to defend his victory if necessary. And there, Gorton became a bit of a cult hero. He’d always been charismatic, and he had always appealed to populist ideals which were starting to become more and more popular in war-torn England. He appealed to the types of people and ideas which formed the foundation of the leveller, digger and quaker movements, and continued preaching until the outbreak of the second Civil War.
But back to Massachusetts, the shock was severe. Not only had Parliament sided with Gorton, they had effectively acted as a court of appeals for the Massachusetts General Court. The whole point of bringing the charter to America had been to cut the colony off from English regulation, but Gorton had re-established that connection. The King had threatened the colony from time to time, but now Parliament had truly set the precedent for eliminating the colony’s autonomy, at a time when Massachusetts was more fractured than ever. Any disgruntled resident who didn’t like what the colony was doing could now appeal to Parliament, who would seemingly decide what should happen based on its own political situation. I mean if they would unify behind Samuel Gorton, then what was the limit? And Massachusetts had its fair share of disgruntled residents at this point in time.
Which brings us back to William Vassall, who now saw his opportunity to get involved in pushing for religious liberty in Massachusetts. He couldn’t be the face of the conflict, but he could ally with and support others with similar sympathies. Which brings us to a man named Robert Child.
Child was actually a fairly interesting individual, too. And yes, there may be an excessive number of introductions here for such a short series of episodes, but I think part of immersing ourselves in the time period is getting acquainted with some of the less-known individuals, and getting a broader idea of the kinds of people who lived back then, and their ideas, ideals and ideologies. Born in Kent and educated in medicine, Child had traveled extensively through Europe, including to Spain and even Rome. In fact, he had spent a fair amount of time with the Jesuits, and even praised them, though he was a Puritan. His heart lay in science, the new science of Bacon and Descartes, and which would soon be espoused by people like Newton and Hooke. So, he had joined an emerging science scene in England, specifically a group known as Hartlib Circle, led by a man named Samuel Hartlib. Members of this group included both Parliamentarians like Benjamin Worsley, and Royalists, even Catholics like Kenelm Digby.
They were united in the pursuit of knowledge, though, and specifically, the types of knowledge and thinking which would ultimately lead to the Industrial Revolution. They wanted science to have tangible benefits and outcomes, and they believed in pragmatism and practicality, foregoing things like alchemy for pursuits which would directly benefit people and the economy. Natural sciences, efficacy, technology, mining, free communication, widespread information, and variations of an idea that would later be refined into that of a free market economy, though Child’s idea was a distinctly Puritan variation of that.
Child was a Presbyterian, but it wasn’t Puritanism that first brought him to New England. It was his scientific and economic pursuits. He had traveled throughout the Americas, and from 1638-41 had gone on foot from the Delaware to Maine, surveying economic conditions in each colony. He had a vision for America, but it was an economic one, a continent operating with the same level of agricultural and industrial sophistication as England, to the benefit of both. And in New England, he met at least a few people with similar ideas, people like Henry Vane and Hugh Peter. So he’d returned to England in 1641 to lay the foundations for a variety of economic ventures, and four years later he’d returned to Massachusetts, hoping the move would be permanent.
And, he’d helped set up at least five major projects, most notably the Saugus Ironworks, supplying capital, and encouraging Massachusetts to lessen its restrictions on immigration to bring in the workers and skill necessary to make them work. And, he worked with prominent colonists to make that happen. John Winthrop, Jr., William Pynchon, Simon Bradstreet, Richard Bellingham, Jr., Robert Sedgwick and Winthrop’s brother-in-law, Emmanuel Downing.
And the group of them worked to try to figure out how best to advance New England’s economy. It’s in this very year that Downing wrote to Winthrop emphasizing how helpful slavery would be in growing New England’s economy.“I do not see how we can thrive until we can get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business, for our children’s children will hardly see this great continent filled with people so that our servants will desire freedom to plant for themselves, and not stay but for very great wages. And I suppose you know very well how we shall maintain 20 Moores cheaper than one English servant.”
This didn’t work because the cold climate killed 40% of Africans within two years of arriving in New England, but it’s worth noting.
Child and his allies just chipped away. They convinced the General Court to resentfully allow non Puritan workers to come to the colony, and in return the General Court imposed quotas and demanded the ability to interfere any time it deemed it necessary, though that wasn’t often. But this intertwined economic development with resented religious tolerance was a situation which would inevitably lead to conflict, especially because Child himself was a dedicated Presbyterian, a belligerent supporter of religious liberty, in fact one of its core agitators.
While Independents in England were becoming the voice for religious toleration for Protestants, in New England this was Presbyterians. Along with some of his business associates, but more adamantly than any of them, every time Massachusetts increased its religious regulations, or regulations on colony newcomers, he would come before the General Court to explain that this made it harder to promote economic growth, and that it created and increased religious schisms rather than healing them. And that it was perhaps most appalling of all that they were willing to inflict this on people who had actively fought for the Parliamentary cause they shared such a dedication to. He confided to Hartlib that he, himself, could easily be banned if his opinions were scrutinized, and clearly there was some truth to this. Both Winslow and Hugh Peter’s brother, Thomas, accused him of being a Jesuit spy.
“Truly, I suppose, that all things would prosper in this place if they would give liberty of conscience, otherwise I expect nothing to thrive.”
Child was also a man without voting and political rights in a colony which was increasingly starting to embody the type of intolerance that we think of when we think of early New England – the type Nathaniel Hawthorne criticized, ears cut off, public whippings, exile, things which had always been an aspect of life there, but were becoming more and more commonplace as the threat of dissent loomed. He also questioned the justice of the war with the Narragansetts which emerged in 1645, both because he wasn’t sure if it was the right way to deal with the Indians, and because he was sure it was wrong to tax him and his workers, and draft them, without their being able to influence whether or not the colony went to war in the first place. He just disagreed with everything the colony did, because he felt it was both morally questionable and severely destructive to the colony’s future.
“Every day we have breach upon breach, both in Church and commonwealth, between magistrate, ministers, people, members, nonmenbers, and truly things cannot stand thus long or all will be lost.”
So, Vassall and Child were united in a harsh, belligerent dislike of the Massachusetts government, for many of the same reasons, and unlike Vassall, Child was actually a resident of the colony. And, both had influential contacts in England who could support them. They were logical allies, and in the wake of Gorton’s victory, they got to work. They drafted a petition, known as the Remonstrance of 1646, to present to the General Court, which would have one of two potential outcomes – either enough disgruntled New Englanders would stand up to change things, or they would appeal to Parliament and have things changed from England.
In drafting the Remonstrance, they brought up every divisive issue in the Bay Colony, claiming to represent all the inhabitants who had been deprived of their “due and natural rights as freeborn subjects of the English nation.” The disenfranchised, the Presbyterians, the deputies, people whose religious ideas were slightly more radical than the norm, all of these were potentially ready bases of support, and the petition brought up all of their grievances, and it pulled absolutely no punches.
It railed about how there was no sufficient Body of Laws, and arbitrary power, unequal justice, the La Tour issue, the negative voice, excessive fining and taxation, and an economic depression showing that those in power had failed. They said the colony had gone not only beyond the bounds of a charter which simply authorized the creation of a corporation which should operate strictly under English law, but which was instead acting instead like a free state, but they also said Massachusetts was also against that very same charter. This, they said, made colonists less secure in their lives, liberties and estates than if the colony just acted like a normal colony. They wanted religious liberty, either by opening all Churches to all people who weren’t unrepentent sinners, or by allowing the creation of Presbyterian Churches in Massachusetts. This last part was ambiguously worded, and the ambiguous wording was used to discredit the petition later on, because there were a couple of begrudgingly tolerated Presbyterian Churches in Massachusetts. The problem was, though, that by Massachusetts law, every town could only have one Church, so Presbyterians who didn’t live in the towns served by the Presbyterian Churches still had nowhere to go. In the context of the document, it sounds to me like they were saying “if not allowing all people into all Churches, then allowing Churches to open which will serve all people.” But Massachusetts could easily laugh and say “we have two Presbyterian Churches, so clearly this is absurd and the petitioners are grasping at straws.” But regardless, they wanted Churches in the colony to serve every colonist. The failure to do so, they said, is what had led to sectarianism and economic problems, as well as the colony’s deteriorating reputation in England. And on the issue of the vote, they equated the position of everyone denied the vote to “perpetual slavery and bondage,” saying “we suppose ourselves in a worse case here and less free than the natives amongst whom we live.”
The Remonstrance was so unrelentingly scathing in its criticisms, in fact, that some have speculated that the petitioners actively wanted the Court to reject it so that they could take their appeal to England. I’m not completely sure that that was the case, given that Child and Vassall had both expressed similar ideas similarly harshly before, and they were working to appeal to a range of people with similarly antagonistic criticisms, but they had certainly planned for the possibility. In the document, they expressly claimed the right as English citizens to appeal local decisions to Parliament.
Five other men joined Child in signing the Remonstrance to present to the Court, and they were an interesting array of people actually. There was Thomas Fowle, who was already planning to leave Massachusetts. There was Thomas Burton, a Presbyterian whose daughters had all been baptized by Peter Hobart. There was David Yale, a fellow advocate for universal religious toleration, a young merchant who was at the time taking care of his formerly intellectual sister who had had of the same ideas, but who had suffered some sort of an extreme mental or neurological illness which incapacitated her. There was John Smith, a Rhode Islander who technically didn’t have any right to participate in the petition. There was John Dand, an elderly grocer who was so ideologically opposed to the intolerance of Massachusetts society that he had essentially disengaged with it to the point that no one really knew his personal opinions on anything. He ran his store, didn’t talk to anyone and just did his own thing. And then, there was Samuel Maverick, one of those settlers who had moved to New England in the 1620s and been displaced when Massachusetts had moved in in 1630. People like that had been told they could only remain in the lands they’d settled if they would accept Massachusetts jurisdiction over their now-invalidated patents, so while Maverick was an Anglican, he had begrudgingly accepted the new Puritan government. But, he had consistently supported the colony’s subversives, including playing a role in the Antinomian Controversy, even entertaining Henry Vane after Winthrop defeated him in the 1637 election.
So, sort of a motley crew of the people most antagonistic to the Massachusetts government, and a petition which was antagonism corporealized.
But we have seen how the Massachusetts General Court dealt with dissent in the past. A harsh petition would inevitably elicit a harsh response from a harsh government, and the General Court wasted little time. They postponed a hearing on the remonstrance until the fall session, and immediately got to work preparing for their response.
The ministers started planning for a new synod of New England Churches. The magistrates tried to prevent deputy support for the petition by weakly signalling potential support for compiling a Book of Laws, which the deputies had been pushing for for years. They only offered the authorization of a committee to explore the idea, so nothing real, but a small gesture at least. And they started considering sending someone to England to act as an agent for the colony in case things did get out of hand. And, they worked to both gage public opinion and sway it by trying to discredit the petition and petitioners.
There was some public support for the remonstrance. Hingham, Ipswich, Rowley, Salem, Nashaway, Marblehead, Saugus – all of these towns had significant numbers of people who supported the Remonstrance. All were in those Norfolk/Essex outskirts, were working on the kind of economic development Child was supporting, supported the deputies and had relatively high numbers of non freemen, as well as a relatively strong Presbyterian populations. Fellow Saugus Ironworks investors like William Pynchon, Saltonstall, Bellingham, Bradstreet, and their political allies also sympathized with the ideas behind the Remonstrance.
But even among people who were inclined to support the ideas behind the remonstrance, there was hesitation to support something so very hostile. The deputies and Presbyterians had both lost the Hingham Militia Case, and a fair amount of public support in the process, precisely because they were too aggressive, and this was even more so, especially because it claimed the right to appeal to Parliament. Claiming that right fundamentally changed the dynamic of the debate. It wasn’t just whether or not they supported a complete change of government in the colony. It was whether that change was important enough to risk destroying the colony’s autonomy. And for most people, ending Massachusetts autonomy was too high a price to pay for political reform, and this was particularly true of the deputies. So even among people who supported the ideas in the Remonstrance, support for the Remonstrance as it was, was relatively limited, and even less popular when the ministers explained that it was full of sedition, and subversive to both Church and commonwealth. And, they asked people to consider whether they actually wanted to surrender their government to Parliament, or deal with the issues by themselves later? In Essex and Norfolk, these decent points were also paired with particularly personal attacks on the petitioners to further discredit the Remonstrance.
William Pynchon was one of the people who supported the ideas in the Remonstrance, but felt it was too extreme to support, and his statement is particularly interesting in its wording. “Their petition doth justly call for reformation. We are not a free state, neither do I think it our wisdom to be a free state though we had our liberty we cannot as yet subsist without England.” As yet. Already, the idea was in the air that one day, New England colonies might decide to subsist without England, as free states.
But as the magistrates and ministers worked to oppose the Remonstrance, petitioners were also circulating it, to the point that copies even reached Virginia and Bermuda.
Come October, the magistrates felt ready to attack the Remonstrance with the level of severity they felt they needed to. The threat of Parliamentary oversight had put the deputies firmly on their side, and most of the population had ultimately rejected the petition, too. The petitioners had been thoroughly disparaged and name called, so there was little chance of the intense personal influence people like Hutchinson and Gorton had built. Of the petitioners, only Child had been a particularly noteworthy or respected citizen in the first place, and even that was questionable. So, the Court laid out their argument, dismissing every single claim in the petition. They compared their government to the Magna Carta and Common Law, and even the deputies joined in the complete dismissal of concerns about the negative voice and arbitrary power, and pretty much everything they’d been fighting for for the past decade, as petty rabble rousing. The Court asked, if diversity was a factor in prosperity, why Rhode Island was so poor. And they said they did, in fact, operate completely under the laws of England, which is not actually true. Massachusetts had just the year before executed two people for adultury, something which decidedly did not happen in 17th Century England. It was a response meant more for the courts of England than for use in Massachusetts.
Within Massachusetts, the Court immediately stopped considering any legislation which anyone could interpret as having been passed because of pressure from the Remonstrance, including the bill which would potentially have widened the franchise.
But immediately, I mean immediately, after the Court issued its decision, Vassall and Fowle prepared to go to England. The Court had anticipated some sort of an appeal attempt, but the sheer speed of their action caught the Court by surprise. It threw them. All of their timing, all of their preparation, had been miscalculated, and now they again faced petitioners appealing to Parliament before Massachusetts could prepare its defense of its actions.
The magistrates were shocked, and started working with the ministers to prepare a document voicing their concern about this turn of events, but the deputies had always been harsher on average than the magistrates, and they had a more effective solution. They pushed for legal charges to be brought against Fowle, delaying his return to England. Vassall couldn’t present the appeal without Fowle because he was a Plymouth resident. And this solution sounded good to the magistrates. They arrested Fowle and Smith, and that’s where we’ll leave it for today.
Next week, we’ll discuss how the fight over the Remonstrance played out on both sides of the Atlantic, and its effect on the future of New England.