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Controversy becomes crisis

The Antinomian Controversy spread beyond Boston and grew more and more heated in 1637.  As it did, it took on similarities to problems at home.  Shady political maneuvering, private court cases, considering silencing preachers for dissenting opinions and passing the Alien Law.  By August, no one would listen to Wilson preach, Winthrop was an outcast in Boston, Vane permanently left for England, and the rift showed no signs of healing.

Cotton and Shepard – moderates on opposing sides – felt the only way to fix the divisions was to hold a synod, with ministers from Massachusetts Bay, New Haven and Connecticut all invited.

 

Transcript

Welcome back to the American History Podcast!  Before I start the episode, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been listening.  Today is the six month anniversary of the day I launched, and I really appreciate each one of you who has listened and reached out in these first few months.  It’s been so motivating and so helpful, so thank you!

When Henry Vane told the magistrates that his stepping down as governor wasn’t because of urgent business in England, but rather because he was worried about the impending public disaster, it changed their decision to allow his resignation.  The deputies said they didn’t feel bound to let him go if his motivation was simply getting himself out of a sticky political situation.  Some of them agreed with his position, and they certainly didn’t want their standard bearer to leave.  Vane took back his statement, saying he’d just gotten emotional, and lost his judgment, and that he did need to go back home to take care of his estate.  Magistrates were split on the issue, but the final decision was cemented when Boston Church Members sent a committee to insist that Vane not be permitted to leave.

Introduction

Vane said he was an obedient child of the Church and wouldn’t leave without its permission.  He would remain governor until his term was up.  After that little bit of drama, they voted on whether to proceed with a new election, and decided to defer the election until the regular time in May.

Some people felt that Vane’s vacillation had been manipulation, plus the status quo of the unpopular party remaining in power had been maintained, and the controversy was already pretty intense, so the non-Opinionists started to prepare for the next election.  They met with Winthrop while Wilson, Weld and Peters led a group of clergy to confront Cotton directly, knowing that his refusal to distance himself from the Opinionist cause had given it strength and perceived legitimacy.  Peters’s group wrote a list of all the specific ways in which the Opinionists said Cotton differed from them, and asked him to tell him, point-by-point, whether he agreed with it.  Cotton agreed to do it.

At the end of December, the ministers and Court came together to officially discuss the situation.  It was pretty much the type of bickering which had become standard at this point, with Peters and Weld leading the charge against Vane and Cotton.  At one point, however, after a sarcastic remark from Vane about the private meetings among ministers, Peters accused Vane of seeking to restrain the liberty of the clergy.  Vane quickly backed down, but Peters continued the attack, saying that until Vane came, less than two years before, the now-troubled churches had been at peace.  When Vane replied that the light of the Gospel brings a sword, Peters told him to consider his youth and short experience in the things of God, and to avoid being too rigid in his decisions, which he seemed to tend to be.  All of the colony’s new opinions and divisions could be tied back to Vane, Peters said, and he wasn’t exactly wrong.

Peters’s rant about liberty and an overly rigid leader, though,s hearkened back to problems at home, and from this point, the conflict took on more and more similarities to the fight between Laud and the Puritans, or King Charles and the Puritans.  By leaving England, the Puritans had only removed opposing voices.  They hadn’t come with well-formed ideas of liberty, just the notion that they wanted to run a society as they saw fit.  Now, the colony faced internal division and those same arguments, tyranny, division, unity, troublemaking dissenters, were beginning to re-emerge.

A couple days later, the group of ministers summoned Hutchinson to a meeting to debate her directly.  Peters, again, was the spokesman of the meeting.  He immediately demanded to know why she thought he and his allies were so different from Cotton, and why she so openly asserted that they taught a Covenant of Works.  Peters was intimidating, and much like Vane, Hutchinson was shocked, and initially started to deny the allegations, but again Peters pushed harder.  Soon, she regained her composure and started to fight back.  She doubled down on every opinion, and said the fact that they couldn’t see the meant they were no more able ministers of the Gospel than the disciples were before the resurrection of Christ.  When Cotton grew uncomfortable and objected to the comparison, she insisted.  Then she started pointing at individual ministers, Shepard of Newtowne and Weld of Roxbury.  Phillips of Watertown chimed in, knowing she’d never seen him preach, and asking in what ways his ministry differed from Cotton’s, to which she replied that he wasn’t sealed, either.

The group then began interrogating Cotton, who criticized Wilson for teaching sanctifying methods which were severely exacting, while he taught self-assuring heart piety.  He answered their questions, but as the interrogation got more intense, he threw up his hands and said “Let Calvin answer for me!”

That was the end of the year, and the end of civil attempts to resolve the crisis.  As 1637 began, people were actively hostile to each other.  Members of the Boston Church started to disturb other Churches, objecting to their doctrines and publicly challenging the ministers.  Peters criticized the double-seal the Bostonians seemed to embrace.  Meanwhile, Bostonians were furious at the outcome of the debate, and particularly angry with Wilson, who seemed to have criticized the entire body of his Church, including Cotton and Vane.  It was in some ways as hotly contested as the division between Protestants and Catholics in Europe.

When Wilson returned, the Boston Church demanded he explain his statements, in public.  Wilson explained that he hadn’t intended to reflect on the Boston Church as a whole.  His only statements had been targeted at Vane and Hutchinson, who were members of the Church.  His statements weren’t about all, just some, them in particular.  This wasn’t a satisfactory answer, it didn’t seem particularly true, and even if that was his intended meaning most of the Church agreed with his stated targets, so Boston prepared to condemn Wilson publicly.  He was arraigned in February, with Vane violently leading the attack.

Winthrop was one of only 2-3 to defend Wilson, and reflected later how weird it was that ordinary people with no real legal or theological understanding of the issues were so eager to jump on the bandwagon, not only condemning Wilson, who they’d known for years, but doing so with such vitriol.

And as for Wilson, he was pretty much helpless.  He sat quietly, answering accusations as well as possible, but knowing he wouldn’t be heard.  The majority of people wanted to immediately pass a vote of censure, and it was Cotton who prevented that.  He explained that the rules of the Boston Church required a vote of censure to be unanimous, and there were 2-3 people who disagreed with the majority.  Cotton wasn’t on Wilson’s side, though, and immediately after stopping the vote of censure, he turned to Wilson and chastised him in front of the entire congregation, something which was deeply humiliating and completely unheard of.  But, what could Wilson do?  He stood quietly and listened to Cotton’s every word.

After the arraignment, Wilson stayed quietly in the background, doing his duties without drawing attention to himself, but Winthrop was incensed at the event.  He spent the next month in a heated written debate with Cotton about Wilson and the opinionists.

And, at the same time, differences among the Opinionists were starting to emerge.  They may have all opposed Wilson’s preparation theology, but Wheelwright in particular was uncomfortable with some of the statements emerging from his supporters.  Hutchinson’s spiritual revelations were increasingly un-Biblical, and neither Vane nor Wheelwright were fully comfortable with them.  Others, were putting forth even more radical opinions, like the idea that faith wasn’t important for salvation, and the idea that Jesus wasn’t God CHECK.  That wasn’t in the Bible, it was just things people said were revealed to them by God.  It was beginning to look crazy, and there was a gradient.  This didn’t have any real practical consequences, but it’s an important aspect of the controversy to mention.  The Opinionists were united on a few core convictions, but as so frequently happens in situations like this, there were people who went much, much further than the majority agreed with.  Some people were just following along, and some wanted to remain more moderate than the rest of the group.  Hutchinson, however, didn’t shy away from even the most extreme opinions.  Her belief in personal revelations, it soon became clear, superceded her belief in the Bible, and that was a conviction which would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Antinomian cause in America.

By the end of January, the Pequot War was looming, the Thirty Years War was going terribly for the Protestants, and the situation in England was looking no better for the Puritans.  So, the Massachusetts Bay Colony held a fast-day to pray for an end to the increasing troubles.  Cotton, of course, presided over Boston’s services that Day, and Wheelwright was there, too.  In fact, after Cotton spoke, he called Wheelwright to the pulpit to speak as a private citizen, and perhaps unsurprisingly, both sermons were full of veiled criticisms of Wilson.  Wheelwright’s sermon went further than Cotton’s, completely focused on Antinomian theology.

In fact, Wheelwright’s speech was so extreme that it attracted the attention of surrounding towns, and the clergy called for another meeting with Cotton.  They presented him with another list of 16 points of contention, and asked him to explain his position on each one.  This time, they weren’t convinced of his explanations.  They also decided to cease elections for the next three weeks, so they could focus all their attention on the quarterly General Court meeting.

A few weeks later was the first General Court meeting of the year, and the ministers attended as an advisory council.  But, while the non-Boston ministers were united in their condemnation of the Opinionists, the Court was much more divided.  Vane was the governor, which gave the Opinionists both political strength and credibility, and even more importantly, Court sessions took place in Boston.  It was the Opinionists’ home turf.  They could send more people to vote in the elections, and they could send more people to demonstrate at Court Sessions.  Politically, they had to proceed with caution.  The vast majority of Massachusetts settlers opposed the Opinionists, but they needed to maneuver politically to take control of the colony.

Step one was to test their strength, so they summoned a man named Stephen Greensmith, who had said that Cotton, Wheelwright and Hooker were the colony’s only ministers not under a Covenant of Works.  They fined him 40 pounds with a 100 pound surety.  They also tried to get evidence they could use to convict Wheelwright, but he wouldn’t give it.  Still, they had convicted someone against Vane’s wishes.  They could move on to more aggressive actions, specifically, reviewing the Boston Church’s arraignment of Wilson.  They ruled that no member of the Court, and no person speaking at the Court’s request, could be publicly questioned elsewhere for something said to the Court.  The Boston Church’s actions were ruled illegal, and Wilson was invited to speak.  He took the stand, and made pointed criticisms of Vane, with the Court granting its wholehearted approval.

Then, they summoned Wheelwright, and produced a verbatim transcript of his fast-day sermon, and prepared to use the document to support accusations of sedition.  Unbeknownst to him, someone had been sitting in the Boston Church that day, recording every word he said.  Now, in a generally favorable environment in front of the General Court, they produced them without warning, and asked Wheelwright to admit their correctness.  He didn’t directly answer their question, instead giving them his own manuscript of the event.  The Court adjourned for the rest of the day as the magistrates read his transcript.  When they summoned him again, less than a day later, the Boston Church sent a petition signed by nearly every one of its members demanding the case (and all future judicial proceeding) be conducted publicly, and to leave all matters of conscience to the Church alone.

The Court dismissed the petition, calling it presumptuous, and proceeded to interrogate Wheelwright ex officio, meaning under oath.  Having a court privately prosecute a clergyman for differences of religious opinion sounded a LOT like the star chamber Puritans had been fighting for generations.  In fact, this had been the very core of Puritan opposition to royal prerogative and the Church of England.  Laud’s increase of use of the Star Chamber against Puritans had been one of the biggest complaints against King Charles, and biggest accusations of persecution.  It was not going to go unnoticed, or unchallenged in Massachusetts.

Wheelwright’s allies in the Court started to shout that the non-Opinionists were re-creating the worst of Laud’s persecutions, and Wheelwright took the opportunity to refuse to answer any further questions.

The Court backed down and made further proceedings against Wheelwright public, and when he was summoned again the room was absolutely packed.  Now, Wheelwright could defend his sermon with the majority of attendants on his side, ready to loudly oppose those questioning him.  At this point, their best course of action was to show just how extreme the sermon had been by asking each minister to state whether they walked according to Wheelwright’s definition of a Covenant of Works, and all but Cotton said they did.  If Wheelwright was right, every single minister outside of Boston wasn’t just wrong, they were barely even Christian.  If he was wrong, he had been the person to wrongfully accuse every minister outside of Boston of heresy.

The stakes were extremely high at that point, and the Court and ministers spent the next two days privately debating whether or not to pronounce Wheelwright guilty of contempt and sedition.  Winthrop and Vane, again, were the leaders of the opposing forces.  After two days, the ministers convinced two magistrates to vote guilty, giving them the majority.  The Court announced its decision, and Vane tendered his protest.  The Court refused to note his protest on the record, saying everything had been done right.

In response, Boston wrote a new petition, a Remonstrance of the Court, protesting its action against Wheelwright.  This time, 60 people had signed.

The Clerical party had won, but they couldn’t follow up on it.  They couldn’t effectively sentence Wheelwright, and they couldn’t act further against the Opinionists.  They decided to leave further actions until the next Court session, and the only remaining question was whether to silence Wheelwright as a preacher in the meantime.  And, the answer was, there is no possible way we would get away with that.  If the other side had thought a private court was too reminiscent of life in England, the government silencing a preacher for dissenting views would remove all doubt.

Something had to change, though.  The Opinionists had disproportionately strong political control because of the Governor and the location of Court meetings.  And, they had the governor they wanted because of the location of Court meetings, which was the setting of colony elections.  Elections were held by people who showed up in Boston for the meetings, so a greater percentage of Bostonians showed up to elections than people from surrounding towns.  Not to mention that Bostonian mobs had shown their willingness to flood Court meetings and demand their way, and the local Church had decided it could be a board of revision for any political action the Court took.  The Clerical Party had one last order of business before adjourning, and that was to change the location of the next meeting – the annual election – to Newtown.

Vane knew what they were doing, and refused to entertain the motion.  Now, Winthrop, who supported the move, knew he couldn’t press the issue because he was a Boston resident.  His pushing power away from Boston in order to override Boston’s wishes would not go over well.  So, the person to do it was Endicott.  He submitted the question to a vote, and declared it carried.

When the next Court session happened, Winthrop and Vane were predictably put forward as opposing candidates.  There were tons of people there representing each side, but before the election could begin, Boston submitted another petition.  This was a simple appeal regarding Wheelwright’s sentence, but it was more importantly an attempt to defeat the election using one of the last tools they had left – delaying.  They knew they were likely to lose this election badly, so they just wanted to keep it from happening as long as possible, and Vane supported the attempt.  He was presiding officer of the meeting, and insisted on having the paper read.  Winthrop, of course, objected, saying that the election took priority.  Vane stood firm, there was yet another angry debate, but Winthrop had the benefit of location and therefore, popular support.  He proposed a vote on whether to read the petition, and the majority was for proceeding with the election without reading it.  Now, there could be no question of what the election outcome would be.  People on both sides gave passionate speeches, and people had started to physically push each other around.  Physical violence was a distinct possibility, but the Opinionists were outnumbered and backed down.  Vane still refused to budge, and Winthrop replied that if he refused to proceed, the Court would simply go on without him.  Vane submitted to the inevitable, and the election resulted in the complete and utter defeat of the Opinionists, with Vane not only unseated as governor but left out of the magistracy entirely, along with two former magistrates who had been in Wheelwright’s congregation at the Mount – William Coddington and William Hough.  For the first time in three years, Winthrop and Dudley were governor and deputy, but this time they were on the same side.  And, as thanks for his work moving the election to Newtown, Endicott was elected as a lifelong member of the standing council, an honor which was only ever given to him, Winthrop and Dudley.

There wasn’t one Opinionist elected that session, but Boston’s freemen had one last card to play.  They’d intentionally deferred their local election of delegates for the new Court until after the election.  When Vane, Coddington and Hough weren’t re-elected, Boston simply chose them as the town’s representatives.  The Court refused to accept the results, saying that two citizens hadn’t been notified of the election, but of course two votes weren’t going to make a difference, so Boston simply held a re-election, which confirmed that Vane, Coddington and Hough would be its delegates.

They again didn’t sentence Wheelwright, but when they dismissed him they told him he should change his stance if he hoped for a favorable sentence.  The moderates in the new Court hoped this leniency would contribute to a peaceful resolution of the controversy.

Besides, the new Court had bigger fish to fry.  There was a ship full of people who agreed with Wheelwright, including some of his relatives, headed to New England at that very moment, and they needed to minimize the political impact of this ship’s arrival.  To do this, they passed a law, known as the Alien Law, which imposed a 40 pound fine on any individual who let a new arrival stay with him without the Court’s permission for more than three weeks.  The fine would then be 20 pounds for every month the offense continued.  Towns would also be subject to a 100 pound fine, but any individual who entered his dissent with a magistrate – in other words, told the Court what was going on – would not be required to pay.  When the ship arrived, its passengers stayed in Boston for three weeks before leaving Massachusetts’s borders entirely and founding the town of Exeter in future New Hampshire.  One of the people turned away was named Samuel Hutchinson.

So, basically Winthrop’s government had prevented the friends and families of Bostonians from settling in Boston because they agreed with Boston’s politics.  And Boston was every bit as furious as you’d expect.  Winthrop and Wilson became outcasts in the very town they’d helped to build.  The guards who had accompanied Vane when he was governor refused to accompany Winthrop, saying that they’d voluntarily guarded Vane because he was a person of quality.  This caused enough scandal that other towns offered their own guards until Boston backed down, but Winthrop still had to choose his own servants to be the sergeants.

On the Sunday after the election, for the first time since he’d arrived, Vane refused to sit with the magistrates at Church, choosing to sit with the Deacons instead.  Coddington accompanied him.  Winthrop invited them to come back and sit with them, but they refused.  Vane’s example was replicated throughout the town.

And then, when Wilson was chosen by lot as chaplain to accompany soldiers in the Pequot War, not one Boston Church member agreed to go.  They would not accompany Wilson into battle.

Cotton even considered moving to New Haven.  New Haven was the third colony that would one day make up Connecticut, and it was founded around this time by a group of London Merchants without bothering to get a Charter.  Its 250 settlers were led by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, and it quickly became the most extreme colony in New England.  Cotton decided not to relocate for the time being, but Vane decided to return to England, along with Lord Leigh, son of the Earl of Marlborough.  He left Cotton his house, and Cotton lived there for the rest of his life.

As Vane went to the boat, his supporters accompanied him with a formal procession of arms, including cannons.  As the barges bearing him sailed away, they saluted with repeated volleys of small arms and ordinance.  And, when Vane arrived in England, the country welcomed him happily, and he started helping Saye-and-Sele with the Connecticut settlement.

Vane’s departure was an irreparable loss to Wheelwright, who was now left without any political protection at all.  When the Pequot War ended and Wilson returned to Boston in August, Bostonians were even more extreme than when he’d left.  They were accusing moderates of being every bit as bad as the extreme anti-Opinionists, and people wouldn’t even listen to Wilson preach.

A group of Bostonians asked to be made into a permanent militia, but the Council refused, saying that a standing military could easily overwhelm the civil government.

Shepard had suggested months before that a Synod was the only way to fix the controversy and heal the rifts in the colony, and Cotton agreed.  Shepard hoped to heal the division, and Cotton hoped to prove that his theology had nothing to do with it.  Now, Vane was gone and the war was ended, so they could hold the Synod.