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The origins of the Great Migration
King Charles was an Arminian – a Protestant who believed in high church ritual, Episcopal succession, social hierarchy, and royal prerogative. The Puritans believed in the opposite – simple services, no bishops, and a society built around the family unit and local community. As conflict between the two was escalating, a group of Puritans prepared to go to New England to set up a model society which could inspire England to reform – a City on a Hill.
Transcript
In 1628, religious tension in England came to a head. It had been building for generations, but the country had finally divided along the lines which would soon lead to war. And, it was in this year that the biggest English migration to America started – the Great Migration, in which 21,000 Puritans would head to New England to set up a new, model society.
Introduction
Now, the thing you need to understand before we get into the details of the conflict is that in the 17th Century, it was taken pretty much as a given that countries should be unified under one church. Ideally, the whole of Christendom, but at the very least, individual countries.
That’s something that goes against modern sensibilities, but there were reasons for the belief. First and foremost, unity of a country in terms of religion meant order, and a higher level of satisfaction with government. In a more unified country, it was less likely that you’d do something that delighted half the population while inciting the other half to riot. Peace, order, harmony and stability started with unity, and a unified church was one of the biggest parts of that.
When King James spoke against separatists, it was because they threatened this unity. James was already the king of two separate countries with entirely different denominations of Christianity. The last thing he needed was for the countries themselves to split internally. His Archbishop, Bancroft, said that fragmenting England in terms of religion would ultimately lead to Civil War between factions, and it did, as we’ll soon see. And, the separatists themselves often spoke of wanting to influence policy, they just thought that creating an ideal church outside of the established one was the way to do that, as Browne termed it “reformation without tarrying for any.”
The other benefit of unity was that a united church would be better able to stand against corrupt people abusing their wealth and power, who tried to take it over. An individual congregation could be used for personal profit or manipulated by some rich person hoping to gain power, but a unified church could withstand such assaults. A unified church with bishops could withstand these assaults even better, because the bishops would answer to the king, in a system of, essentially, checks and balances.
When King James died in March 1625, his son Charles inherited his divided kingdom. He also inherited his father’s desire for unity, both within England, and in terms of bringing England and Scotland together into a United Kingdom. He inherited his father’s ideas about the importance of Episcopal succession, and about the divine right of kings.
In many ways, though, he was the opposite of his father. Whereas James’s court had been a source of embarrassment for the English, Charles was extremely disciplined. He’d been so sickly as a child that he wasn’t really expected to survive, but through disciplined exercise he grew to be very athletic by the time he was crowned. He minimized his severe speech impediment by learning to sing. By the time he was crowned, he was one of the best educated and most cultured people in England, with exquisite artistic taste and a love of order and discipline.
But, he was deeply shy, and didn’t necessarily read people well. He certainly wasn’t as combative or successful in political maneuvering as his father had been.
Charles believed in a relatively new flavor of Protestantism called Arminianism. Apart from the fact that both Calvinism and Arminianism were Protestant denominations, they couldn’t have been more different. Arminianism emphasized ornate rituals and worship, whereas Calvinism preached simplicity. Calvinists believed in predestination, whereas Arminians emphasized the role of the person in choosing to follow God. Calvinism said there should be no bishops or hierarchical leadership, and Arminianism said the Episcopacy was one of the most important parts of the church.
For Charles, Arminianism meant beauty, order, social stability and a hierarchy with people serving both those above and below them. Those were all things he valued, so Arminianism was a perfect fit for his vision of an ideal English society. He also felt – as had James and Elizabeth I – that Puritanism with too much power would put an end to the monarchy, with the monarch either eliminated or left as nothing more than a puppet.
Lots of people agreed with Charles, lots disagreed with him, and the majority just didn’t really care about such debates. The problem was that the people who disagreed with Charles, namely, the Puritans, were among the richest and most powerful people in England at the time. Puritans were politically organized and held a huge number of seats in Parliament, especially in the House of Commons, but also in the House of Lords, thanks in part to James’s selling of titles. Puritans tended to be fairly affluent, which is why they had disproportionately been the people able to buy peerages from King James.
Instead of a wider society of hierarchy, Puritans emphasized the nuclear family and community uniformity as the basic units of social order. To them, “no bishop, no king” wasn’t a threat, it was a dream. They wanted to push the Protestant Reformation farther, to make the Church a series of Calvinist congregations, and they approved of laws which regulated behavior to an extreme. They would eliminate all vestiges of popery, and replace them with a society in which all sin was regulated and legislated out of existence, with community enforcers ready to punish people who deviated from the accepted norms.
But Puritanism wasn’t just a religious movement. It wasn’t exactly a group of, well, depending on your personal feelings, devout or fanatical Christians who were meticulously applying the Bible. It was a movement with a very distinct cultural center, in an area with a long history of political radicalism. Puritanism took a number of unique characteristics, most of which were deeply connected to the culture and history of East Anglia, and that’s something we’re going to see time and time again as this series progresses.
East Anglia is a place in Eastern England around Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, etc. Britain is actually a shockingly diverse little island. It’s been shaped by wave upon wave of invaders with different ideas, values, beliefs and systems of government. East Anglia was a seafaring region, whose economy came from trading, and whose main threat was raids by other mariners – starting with the Vikings and ending with the Catholic Dunkirkers. It had poor soil, and even in 1630, two towns nailed the skins of marauding Danes to their church doors. The raiders didn’t always come, steal and leave, though. Over the centuries, many had decided to stay and shaped the region’s culture and economy. It had a huge Dutch presence, too, with trade, immigrants, architecture, religion and culture all coming from the Netherlands.
The combination of these factors had created a society within England that heavily favored the middle class, with fewer servants, and fewer nobles than elsewhere. Of course, the lower class people who were there were treated terribly, often driven out to prevent their being a burden to society, and nobles had no real interest in subpar land. So East Anglia started to become more of a part of that European sea-town-network that we discussed in the Brownist episode, and somewhat less with the rest of English culture. East Anglia enjoyed a much higher rate of literacy and education than most other places in England, too, again thanks to this middling status.
Over the centuries, uprisings which occurred there tended to focus on these themes. As part of Robert Kett’s Rebellion, Kett sat under an oak tree called the “tree of reformation,” while gentry were tried and terrorized before a makeshift jury of their former victims. In Wat Tyler’s rising, a group of people marched from East Anglia to London, where they killed anyone they could find associated with the Royal Government, and burned the city’s legal district, The Temple. It sparked a widespread peasant’s revolt, and was prompted by the sermons of a radical East Anglian priest named John Ball. John Ball was a Lollard, which was a pre-Luther movement which advocated many of the future Protestant ideas – vernacular Bible readings, no transubstantiation, and no Catholic rituals. Lollardy was an English movement, and it was very strong in East Anglia. And when Luther did come along, you guessed it, the Reformation took hold in East Anglia more than elsewhere in England. 225 of 273 Marian Martyrs came from there, and Boston, Lincolnshire which is part of the region was the maternal home of Anne Boleyn, the Thomas Cromwell’s family, and John Fox.
In the 17th century, the stereotype of an East Anglian, regardless of class or social status, was dour, stubborn, fond of argument, fond of litigation, and Puritan.
By 1625, though, Puritans had spread their influence throughout England. East Anglian clergy preached in all but two English counties, one in the far north and the other on the Welsh border. They even sent “missionaries” to Yorkshire, which still had too much Catholicism for their liking. This helped with their political organization, and they had a strong presence in Parliament, like I said.
In short, there were two Protestant schools of thought, completely opposite in essentially every way, and while the King supported one, the majority of rich and politically connected people supported the other. The differences weren’t just theological, they were cultural, economic and political, and just about the only thing they could agree on was that England should be rid of the Pope, and it should be internally unified. The monarchy was at its weakest in generations, while Puritanism was at its strongest ever. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, a good place to start would be the Duke of Buckingham, James’s most hated advisor, and justifiably so. He had the confidence and panache that Charles himself lacked, and the two were good friends. Charles really had no family left when he ascended to the throne, parents and brother all dead and sister married to the Bohemian king. He relied on Buckingham, and was loyal to him to a fault.
The Thirty Years War was raging on the continent, so tensions were already high, and while Parliament wanted to support Protestants, they didn’t actually want to spend the money to do so. England’s government had been chronically underfunded for over a century, and war was a big expenditure. Elizabeth I and King James both knew that Parliamentary support for war didn’t necessarily mean they’d vote to support it financially, but Charles assumed that if Parliament wanted to help support Continental Protestants, they would give him the money needed to do it successfully.
Then, Charles became the first Protestant king ever to marry a Catholic, which required Papal approval, and a treaty saying that Charles would roll back oppression of English Catholics, suspending the enforcement of penal laws, and releasing people who had been imprisoned for their Catholic faith. To make matters worse, she wasn’t a quiet Catholic. Henrietta Maria was openly Catholic, surrounded herself with Catholic ministers, made a pilgrimage to Tyburne in bare feet to pay respects to Catholic martyrs, and would end up converting a fair number of people within England.
So, that’s a start.
Then, Parliament made an unprecedented political move. Parliament refused to grant Charles lifetime duties on wine and imports, known as tonnage and poundage. This was the only money the crown got independently of Parliament. Anything above and beyond tonnage and poundage, and the king had to call a Parliament, and essentially negotiate with it. Giving tonnage and poundage for a year only, meant that Charles would have to call Parliament again in a year, and politically negotiate with them. If they continued to do this, the king would be subservient to Parliament, politically unable to do anything Parliament really disagreed with without suffering major repercussions.
Then, they voted for two subsidies to help Charles fight the Spanish at Cadiz, but only 1/10th of what was needed to fund an effective war. 10% of the money Charles had anticipated, to fight one of the most powerful countries in Europe. They refused to grant any more funding unless they could supervise its expenditure.
Six months later, the English raided Cadiz with undersupplied troops, and Buckingham in charge, so the confrontation was predictably a disaster. Then, Charles had to call a Parliament, and Buckingham was so unpopular he was close to being impeached, and not just by the Puritans. Charles then dissolved Parliament. This, of course, meant Charles’s year-long tonnage and poundage ended without being renewed, so he had no income. This is all one year into Charles’s reign.
To get around the lack of tonnage and poundage, Charles turned to the forced loan. Now, Charles was far from the first king to use this tactic. It had been relatively common in Tudor times, and James I had issued them, too. Because Charles stated his intention to use some of the money to aid Protestants in Europe, most people were actually fine with paying it, and soon he had 250,000 pounds.
The loan did, however, provide a perfect rallying point for everyone opposed to the concept of royal preorogative. There were dozens of people who refused to pay, in particular five knights and a man named John Hampden – all East Anglian puritans. And, even outside the scope of Parliament, they could use the courts to sue Charles on the policy, and hopefully diminish Royal popularity and prerogative. The judges sided with Charles against the knights, but it was a very damaging confrontation for the king.
Then, King Charles started promoting Arminian bishops, including one named William Laud. In 1633, Laud would become the Archbishop of Canterbury, and wouldn’t be long before Laud was the most hated person in England. He came to Charles, predictably, through Buckingham, who it’s worth noting was a Protestant but born to Catholic parents. So, if anyone was looking for connections between Arminianism and Popery, they didn’t have to look too hard. Laud was extremely opposed to Puritanism. I mean, Bancroft had gone after Puritans, but he himself was a Calvinist. Now, in Charles, Puritans saw a king with a Catholic wife and a pretty much Catholic archbishop who could, at any day, put England back under the religious authority of Rome.
Early on, Laud submitted to Charles a list of Bishops categorized as either being Orthodox or Puritan. He and the Arminian bishops also gave sermons explaining the king’s rights and encouraging people to support the king. As archbishop, he began to aggressively use the Star Chamber. If you listened to the first episode on the Pilgrims, you know that even under King James, the Star Chamber was a venue for and symbol of royal prerogative which was deeply hated and aggressively attacked by people who didn’t support the Royal prerogative. To eliminate the Star Chamber would drastically increase Parliamentary control over the country, so it was already a contentious issue. Laud brought the issue into the spotlight. He used it in part to protect poor people from rich, would-be oppressors. He was a man of humble origins, himself. He also used it to go after Puritans. The chamber had been used to go after Catholics and Separatists, but Laud was going after the people with money, and power. And they could fight back, not only against Laud, but against the court, itself. Most famously, in 1634, he went after a man named William Prynne, a prolific writer who believed in overall state control of religious matters, and in particular criticized plays in a way and with a timing that made it look very much like he was calling the queen a whore. So, Laud tried him, had him imprisoned, fined, and chopped his ears off. Compared to Tudor punishments it was benign, and in later years some Royalists would claim that Charles’s lack of ruthlessness was what allowed the political climate to get out of hand. But Prynne’s sentence was another great rallying cry for Puritans.
Also in 1627, though, came the siege of La Rochelle in France, which ended up being an even bigger fiasco than Cadiz. Charles still didn’t have that much money, Buckingham still wasn’t a good military leader, and the English essentially accomplished nothing. 4,000 people died, and people were again furious at Buckingham, but Charles took the blame on himself.
Then, he tried his next money-raising scheme by demanding SHIP MONEY. Multiple counties refused to pay, and Charles backed down, and called a new Parliament.
At the next Parliament, wrath bypassed Buckingham and turned directly toward Charles. People were angry about the forced loans, and the imprisonment of the five knights. Charles was presented with a Petition of Right. At first, Charles only said he’d acknowledge the petition within the existing legal framework, noting that the House was pressing not upon abuses of power, but upon power itself, meaning an attempt to limit royal sovereignty. Then, he again backed down, taking a seat in the Lords, removing his previous inconclusive response and confirming the petition’s legality, saying that now that he’d done his part, if the Parliament didn’t have a happy conclusion he was free of the sin. Then, Commons went into committee on the subject of the crown’s finances, preparing a remonstrance attacking Charles’s use of customs duties and other taxes without Parliamentary consent. Before the debate, Charles prorogued the assembly and reverted back to his first answer on the Petition of Right. His acceptance was still legally valid, though.
In 1628, Buckingham was killed by a disgruntled army officer who hadn’t been paid and had been passed over for promotion, and who declared himself an executioner rather than an assassin.
After the death of Buckingham and the Petition of Right, though, the lines were drawn in the sand. Some people said Parliament had gotten what it wanted, and that now king and people could come together in a perfect unity. The most famous person to make the transition was Thomas Wentworth, now the Earl of Strafford, who had been one of the leading voices supporting the Petition of Right.
It was now, though, that the topic turned to religion, itself. Charles had a soon-to-be Archbishop who said the Church had the authority to decree ceremonies and decide on controversies. The House of Commons said that only Parliament could decide on the religion of the country. One Puritan MP said that the Arminians wanted “to break Parliament, lest Parliament should break them.” When Charles sent his Speaker of the Commons to adjorn Parliament for a week, which again was standard procedure, members stood up shouting “no, no!” The Speaker stood up, which officially ended Parliament, but other MPs forced him back into his seat saying “God’s wounds, you shall sit ‘till we please to rise!” When other MPs tried to leave, the doors were blocked, locked, and the key put away. Then they threatened to punish the Speaker for doing his duty to the king instead of Parliament.
Then, an MP proposed three resolutions: Anyone who tried to introduce Popery or Arminianism into the kingdom would be considered a capital enemy. Anyone who advised the levying of customs duties without Parliament would be considered an enemy, and if any merchants voluntarily paid the duty they’d be called a betrayer of and enemy to the kingdom. The resolutions were adopted, Parliament was adjourned, and dismissed for the next eleven years. Some members were arrested, and a fair number of people agreed with Charles’s actions and rationale.
This is the environment in which Puritans started planning a mass emigration to the New World. The first ships to Jamestown and Plymouth had carried about 100 settlers each, but the first fleet to Massachusetts Bay carried 1000 people, plus livestock, supplies and belongings aboard 11 ships. The next fleet was so big that ships at the head of the fleet mistook the tail for a whole different group of ships, assumed they were French pirates, and only realized their mistake after loading their cannons and guns, and shooting a flaming arrow into the water.
And the people? Well, they were Puritans. They were largely affluent, almost all educated, but rarely aristocrats. They brought most of what they needed in terms of livestock and provisions, and meticulously chose the people who were allowed to participate in the venture. No one too poor to pay their own way, and only the Godly. Most of them came from within 60 miles of the town of Haverhill in Suffolk. The ones who didn’t come from there, by and large had either lived there or had pastors who did. It was an intensely regional migration.
This was also a different mission than before. Neither the Jamestown nor the Plymouth settlers had moved to America with the intent of changing policy at home, but English Puritans in 1627 cited that as a major motivation. They could be free of Laud’s policies in the Netherlands, but they couldn’t really influence policy from there. In America, they would attract attention, and in America, they could set up what they considered to be the ideal reformed society, and use that, the New England Model, to push for changes at home and in Europe.
In the next couple months, we’ll see exactly what this meant, and what this ideal was, or if it was a unified idea at all. The New England model would indeed impact politics in England, but we’ll get to that.