It’s one thing to advocate for change. It’s another, far messier one to actually get an opportunity to implement it. In 1649, New England was experiencing both the rewards and complications of Cromwell’s victory.
Introduction
Once again, thanks for waiting. I really do appreciate those of you who stuck around this long. And you shouldn’t have to wait this long again, because long story short, I will not be teaching next year. So to those of you who have stayed, thank you. To those of you who are new, welcome! And back to where we left off.
We last discussed the second English Civil War, which culminated in the execution of King Charles I, the first modern instance of a king being killed in a revolution, an unspeakable, quasi-sacrilegious act that shocked and appalled all but the most fanatical of puritans.
Now, on paper, New England was quite obviously full of the most fanatical puritans, but the reality was more nuanced. The region’s leadership was absolutely behind Oliver Cromwell, but its ordinary people were just that – ordinary people. Of course they followed their leadership and Cromwell, but they weren’t revolutionaries at heart. They were merchants, artisans and shopkeepers at heart, but merchants, artisans and shopkeepers who had been swayed and inspired by passionate preaching, and who had followed their passionate preachers to the New World. The democratic ideals and values which permeated Puritan thought made sense to these middle class townspeople, but they weren’t looking for and would never have expected the complete overturning of the English established order.
If someone had told the average New Englander that the King would be executed for treason, even in 1648, they would not have accepted the idea. Ever since Charles I had ascended the throne, puritans had been very careful to moderate their language, and to focus on the evil advisors who were leading the king astray. Even as the conflict had led to open war, the rhetoric had very much been “We have to save King Charles from himself.” Both in England and New England, leadership was very careful to avoid pushing people to choose between loyalty to their king and to Parliament.
Arguments about protecting the king from his own bad advisors were the norm any time a monarch was opposed, and they were the norm because they allowed people like New England’s dedicated Puritans to avoid confronting the uncomfortable truth that they were supporting a rebellion to the king. It’s not the royalists they were trying to convince with this rhetoric. It was their own supporters who they had to placate.
Killing the king, though, made use of that argument difficult. To make matters worse, there had already been the conflicts and questions we’ve discussed. The victorious Roundheads had seemed to push New England aside while embracing extreme radicals whose beliefs and practices were truly disturbing to New England’s congregationalist order. “In England, it is not a time of Reformation, but of liberty of conscience,” William Pyncheon wrote, who said that if it didn’t change, it would give “Satan liberty to broach unheard of blasphemie.”
The average person probably wasn’t paying attention to the nuances of this situation. What they saw was that they had righteously rebelled to try to fix a king, and that had led to unheard of heresy and now the execution of their own divinely appointed ruler who might not have been as divinely important as the Cavaliers said but still … I mean, they literally committed a coup, and then put him on trial for a crime that could legally only be committed against him, walked him up a scaffold and beheaded him.
The reaction in New England was, therefore, one of profound discomfort. Actually, it’s interesting to note that there was a stark generational divide. The older generation, who had actually been the ones to leave England, was far more bothered by this than the younger generation, who had grown up in America. These people had grown up far away from any king’s influence, and educated at Harvard, a university specifically intended to ideologically unite New England thought, and which had therefore strongly downplayed any royal importance. These younger people had returned to England in droves to support the Parliamentary cause. They formed one of, if not the, largest mass exodus in American history, if you calculate by percent of the population. So many Harvard graduates sought clerical posts in England that it strained New England’s religious life. And, in England, they were consistently among the most radical and radicalizing forces on the Roundhead side.
For the older generation, though, killing a king was still unthinkable. They had been more and more disturbed by the extent of revolution anyway, and this was far beyond the line. It was so far beyond the line that no one in New England even documented the event in even a tangentially official way. There’s no official mention of it in colonies’ official records. No colonist reactions were documented. None of these things that would have been standard in response to a major event happened. To record this in a way that was both palatable to colonists and sympathetic to Cromwell’s Rump Parliament would have been impossible, so they were silent. They simply went back and edited their history to erroneously give Parliament credit for granting the Massachusetts Charter. There were no celebrations, and no lamentations, just a strong sense of uncertainty and discomfort, and a feeling that this may have been very, very wrong.
There’s only one surviving diary entry which discusses the event, and it says the regicide was “a very solemn and strange act; and God alone can work good by so great a change, both to the nation and to the posterity of the king.”
Even in this, the importance of doing right to the king’s posterity was held as being as unshakeable a value as doing right by the nation.
And New England’s leadership had to figure out what to do about this. Individual colonists sent messages praising Cromwell. This was motivated partially by the fact that they truly did admire him and see him as being their kind of Puritan, and partially by the need to curry favor with a government that would inevitably be expanding Parliament’s policy of increased interference in England’s colonies. Even with this need, though, there was no official message sent. To make any official statement would inevitably mean provoking official disagreement, which would draw attention, and create conflict, so the governments of the various colonies distanced themselves from the issue.
Meanwhile, John Cotton and other ministers worked to help people accept it, encouraging their congregations to trust the act as God’s will, and to put their hope in Cromwell and the good he would bring. This wasn’t our fault, it was just something that happened. And it happened because God wants to use Cromwell to bring about the Millennium.
We’ve talked about Puritans’ Millennialist views in the past, but just as a refresher, this particular idea was that by purging sin, Puritans could prompt Christ to return and create a paradise on Earth, led by His followers. The Thousand Year Rule of the Saints is in the Bible, but the oddity in the particular interpretation advocated by English Independents and Scottish Presbyterians, which essentially no one else agreed with even at the time, was the idea that humans could influence God’s timing by purging sin. I’ve recently heard that in theological circles this is more specifically called postmillennialism, but I’m not 100% sure on that.
Regardless, that was the idea, and Cotton was one of its leading advocates. By purging sin fron England, they could prompt Christ to return and create a paradise on Earth, promises of reward not just in Heaven, but right here, soon, if we can just stay the course. And now, to counteract the discomfort of the regicide, Cotton started hitting that idea hard. Cromwell could bring this. In fact, it was probably God’s will that Cromwell would bring this. This is happening. I know that everything that’s been going on feels weird to you, but it’s all God’s plan to bring us to this goal. We didn’t kill a king. God killed him in order to make way for the return of the true King.
And New Englanders, who had invested so, so much in the cause, had little choice but to trust just a little more. The only other option, really, would be to switch sides, and for an individual, that would require leaving their colony, family, friends and the leadership they’d been following for the majority of their lives. It would require admitting that everything they’d ever done or sacrificed for had been wrong, or at least deeply flawed, and that’s a pretty massive price. So, they trusted, just a little bit more. So they stayed quiet, they trusted leaders who were far, far more educated than they were, they kept up their support, and they waited.
The thing I have to say, though, and the thing to keep in mind as our story progresses, and the reason that I’ve gone so much into depth on the nuances here, is that that really increases the pressure on Cromwell to deliver every single thing that his side used to justify the unjustifiable. By accepting this line of argument, these people were still avoiding confronting the same difficult truths. I’m not really criticising people for being human, but you and I both know that the thousand year reign of the saints didn’t start in 1650, and now we have a whole region of people who is not just putting all their hopes, but also the answer to all their self-doubt, in Cromwell bringing this very thing. If you purge all the sin, you bring the reign of the saints, paradise on earth, equality, democracy, all good things. And the choice was between believing this, and questioning everything they had ever said, done or thought. The psychological pressure on the average person just went up to 11, and you are going to be able to tell as our story progresses.
The first hints of this appear in Plymouth, which was once one of the most tolerant New England colonies. Plymouth’s leadership declared that it would disenfranchise and prosecute anyone who established a congregation or public meeting without government approval, and that it would fine anyone 10 shillings if they criticized an established Church or minister. There would also be a 10 shilling fine for working on the Sabbath, and a year later, they added a 10 shilling fine for absence from public worship.
Here’s the thing, though. If New England was going to put all its trust in a person, they could do much, much worse than Cromwell. His success could easily be seen as divinely ordained. He held all their beliefs, and he promoted New Englanders more than Englishmen to army and government positions. He relied on people like Hugh Peter, John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, and he specifically turned to Cotton for advice interpreting the Book of Revelation. Under his leadership, people from both the Presbyterian and Anabaptist (or Baptist) movements started joining the Congregationalist one.
Life within New England stabilized, too. It was more peaceful, more unified, more prosperous than ever before. 1650 is the first year that New England was noted as an actual trade center for the New World. It wasn’t just up and coming, it was the region which drove a large portion of trade in and to the Western Hemisphere. The region was emerging as the central force of New World shipping (https://sfi.ca/customs check out this link) both building ships and making huge amounts of money trading among American colonies, as well as increasingly between the Old World and the New. Thanks to the disruptions of the war, New England had found the purpose which would continue to define it for centuries – not agriculture, but commerce and, to an extent, industry.
And, the Narragansetts and surviving Pequots were paying yearly tribute to the United Colonies.
New Englanders also started proselytizing the Indians, something they’d been saying they’d do since the foundation of the colonies. At age 62, John Winthrop died, and was succeeded by Thomas Dudley for a year before John Endicott took over. Unlike the early years, though, when Endicott stood out as being particularly harsh, uncompromising and even cruel, he wasn’t as noticeably out of place in Cromwell’s world.
Cromwell also actively supported the New England establishment, to the point of shipping Scottish POWs as unwilling indentured servants to boost the region’s labor force, something which we will discuss next episode, and even hinting at support for armed conflict with the Dutch over the land on the Delaware River.
This conflict involved the New Haven colony, which had gotten its patent a couple years before, and which had been filling up with people ever since. By 1650, they had more people than they had space for them, and they’d started expanding, reviving their old claim to the Delaware River. The rest of the United Colonies had stayed neutral, giving New Haven permission to fight the Dutch, but no active support in doing so.
At the height of the conflict, a group of armed settlers sailed down the river, and were captured and imprisoned. At this point, both New Netherland and New Haven petitioned for United colony support, and the New Haveners asked Edward Winslow to ask for a patent from Cromwell’s Rump Parliament for the region. The Rump essentially told them to keep trying to settle there, and plan to pay the Dutch back later. They didn’t take an official stance, distancing themselves from liability which would result in inevitable conflict with the Dutch, but the advice was there: keep trying.
The Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, point blank refused to allow English settlement within New Netherland’s borders, and in response New England refused to allow the Dutch to trade with Indians in its borders. In response to this, New Netherland declared that it wouldn’t return fugitives who had fled New Haven, meaning it would be a refuge for any prisoners, debtors and indentured servants who were willing to take an oath of allegiance to the Dutch government. And it was these outcasts, including Plymouth’s Isaac Allerton, who would form the first major group of Englishmen in the future New York.
In contrast to New England’s rising status, Rhode Island’s fortunes changed for the worse with Cromwell’s rise. Roger Williams and Rhode Island were politically pushed aside in favor of Coddington, who with the help of Hugh Peter now got control of Rhode Island against the opposition of both Williams and Edward Winslow, who was arguing on behalf of Plymouth. He was given a separate patent, made governor for life and given the power to select his successor. This effectively split what’s now Rhode Island, and what had previously been a united colony, in two, Coddington’s Rhode Island, and Williams’s Providence Plantations. They were two colonies run by dramatically different factions, with Coddington’s faction was more affluent, more acceptable to the United Colonies, and now better connected in England, too.
The Roger Williams’s faction was at a distinct risk of being pushed out entirely, so when Coddington returned with his new patent, Williams sold out all his trading businesses so that he, William Dyer and John Clarke could afford to head back to England to try to get a separate charter to reunite the colony. He left Benedict Arnold in charge, and went to visit his old friend Henry Vane, who immediately started working to undo the Coddington grant. Meanwhile, Coddington recruited Winslow, Stephen Hopkins, John Fenwick and Arthur Haslerig, Fenwick’s brother-in-law, to try to prevent Williams from succeeding. He got a temporary reversal, at least, maintaining the status quo until the issue could be more thoroughly debated, but he and Clarke had to remain in England to continue advocating for the old patent. So this puts Roger Williams in England in the crucial years after Cromwell’s victory. While there, of course, Williams also advocated for his beliefs and wrote pamphlets debating John Cotton. He stayed with Henry Vane, became close friends with John Milton, and even acquaintances with Cromwell.
So, as we leave it for today, it was pretty easy for the average New Englander to accept the argument that while regicide had been unthinkable, it had simply been part of God’s plan to fix things. The economy was great, the United Colonies were supported by the English government, there was no Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian or Gortonist threat, and even Providence Plantations was fading as an entity, with its leadership now in England.
Next episode, which is in two weeks because I do think I’m going to stick with the biweekly thing, we’re going to officially bring Scotland into our story. Scotland was its own country at this point in time, though one shared a king with England, and it hadn’t participated much at all in colonial ventures at this point. The war, however, would bring the first major group of Scots to America, as well as setting the events in motion which would bring more to America in subsequent decades and centuries.