The common thread in our last two episodes was that the end of the English Civil War had forced its North American colonies into a defensive position. The world was suddenly very uncertain, and colonies like Virginia and Maryland found themselves having to assess exactly how they would protect their own ways of life in the face of that uncertainty. Even though New England supported the winning side, it found itself having to make the same sorts of decisions.
Introduction
New England had started to realize after Parliament won that Puritan victory wasn’t going to be as simple an improvement as they’d hoped. In some ways, victory was even messier than defeat, because the answers to pressing questions of how exactly to move forward were far less clear. Here they had taken control of the country, only to find that everyone’s idea of what to do with that control was slightly different. Possibly even worse, they would have to adopt some of the very same positions that they’d used so effectively to discredit the king.
I mean it’s been 4 years of war, and not just that, but it’s a completely new world. A decade earlier, the situation England was in in 1647 would have been unthinkable. The country hadn’t had a conflict like this in 150-200 years, and even then, I don’t know if the Wars of the Roses had any sort of a similar societal impact. I’ve heard people argue both sides, and I just don’t know which is true, so just say at least 150-200 years.
At the end of all of this, and in the midst of all of this, Parliament has control of the country, and the entire English speaking world at this point is going “Alright, you got your power. Maybe I even supported you. I certainly paid a high price for this regardless of which side I was on, and regardless of which side I was one, I’m now depending on you to govern properly, in a way that makes me actually happy you won. What are you going to do now?” And they couldn’t agree on what that should be. Answers ranged from “We pretty much just want what we had in 1643” to things which by today’s standards sound like communism. Who was going to win? What was England going to look like 1, 5, 10 years from now? No one could even begin to guess.
New England as a whole never wavered in its allegiance to the Parliamentary cause. In fact as soon as the king was defeated, it started revising its history books to erroneously give Parliament credit for issuing their beloved charter. Being on the winning side, though, didn’t make it immune to the uncertainty that the defeat of its enemies had created. They’d already had to appeal to Parliament to avoid their autonomy being subverted. Perhaps even more alarmingly, New England Congregationalists found themselves surrounded by Presbyterians on one side, and Independents on the other, and they fit in with neither group. The Presbyterians were too similar to the Anglicans. They supported hierarchy and widespread Church membership. To get back to the classroom versus clique comparison I used months and months ago, Presbyterians were the only Puritan group which favored the classroom method of Church governance. On the other side, though, Independents had come to embrace groups that New England Congregationalists considered schismatic and heretical and every bit as unacceptable. English Independents also took great pains to avoid being associated with New England. By necessity, they had had to embrace diversity and liberty of conscience as their ideals in order to rival the Presbyterians, and these were two things New England had no intention of accepting. When they’d sent the 3 New Haven ministers to Virginia, residents of Barbados had also requested ministers, but the United Colonies decided against doing that because they had read that Barbados had too great a Familist influence. New England, therefore, found itself with no real allies in the Parliamentary world, and its popularity in England was waning. There were a fair number of former colonists now running around England having criticized it for being intolerant, like Robert Child, Samuel Vassal, Thomas Lechford and Samuel Gorton. Henry Vane, too, was a massive Parliamentary figure, and even if he was friends with John Winthrop, he wasn’t exactly an advertisement for New England’s tolerance.
So this was the English world from New England’s perspective. They were happy, but also vulnerable, and the United Colonies had just gotten through the fight over the Remonstrance of 1646, which you may recall was an attempt to put colony leadership under direct Parliamentary control. In light of all of this, they decided to create a document which would outline the principles of the New England Way, the Congregationalist way, a way which would allow Churches to avoid both hierarchy and heresy. A group of ministers asked the General Court to set this up so that the United Colonies could produce both a unified declaration of faith, and a description of appropriate Congregationalist Church governance.
The first attempt to do this didn’t get the kind of traction they wanted. The General Court wasn’t even sure if it was ok for civil governments to call a Synod, so they just decided to request that Church leaders attend. Even that was too much for some of the ministers, particularly those in Boston and Salem, and Peter Hobart of Hingham obviously had no real desire to attend an event which was so against Presbyterianism in New England. Connecticut, New Haven and Plymouth ministers were happy to join, and while Concord’s pastor was happy to join, he was also sick, so he stayed home.
It was kind of a wash, but the ministers who attended planned to meet the next year, and they asked that before that meeting, three ministers draw up plans for what their declaration might look like. The ministers they chose were Boston’s John Cotton and Richard Mather, and Duxbury’s Ralph Partridge. They would discuss the proposals at the next meetings before selecting and finalizing one.
In 1648, virtually all the ministers of the United Colonies gathered at Harvard College. As the opening sermon was delivered, a snake slithered into the room. One of the pastors crushed it with his heel, and the assembly felt it was a sign that it was there that they would overthrow satan. The three ministers presented their proposals, and it actually only took 10 days for them to finalize everything.
They actually made a fairly interesting choice regarding theology, which was that they just accepted the statement of the Westminster Assembly. They didn’t write their own. They just said “we read yours, and we agree with it.” This was a strategic move, because it highlighted their theological similarities to Presbyterians, and it emphasized that their only disagreements were on matters of polity. It showed English Puritans, especially Presbyterians, that they were still fundamentally aligned, and prevented any nitpicking or perception of theological differences. Plus, if there ever did come an attempt to impose the largely-Presbyterian results of the Westminster Assembly on the colonies, it would put the United Colonies in the position to argue that they were both theologically identical and averse to the chaos of the Independents, so they should be able to keep their own system of Church governance.
On matters of polity, however, they were uncompromising. They selected Richard Mather’s proposal and went on to debate some of the more important details. New England was not a region of Independents, nor of Presbyterians. It was a region of Congregationalists. They followed their wholehearted acceptance of Presbyterian theology with a more severe rejection of Presbyterian polity more severely than they had ever written in the past. Church membership would be restricted to visible saints only. There was a little bit of debate on how firm to be on this most important point. Connecticut Churches were actually ok with the idea of embracing wider baptism, but John Davenport was adamant that Congregationalist Churches could not waver on this principle. He said it was absolutely fundamental, an issue of the highest importance. He said it was the greatest protection the Church had against corruption, and in the case of New England, that was not untrue. They had eliminated tradition and hierarchy as methods of protecting the Church from division and false teachings. I mean let’s go back to that “classroom vs. clique” analogy. How do cliques maintain their unity and identity? They restrict membership. It’s the exact same thing here. Congregational Churches were democratic and hierarchical, but they still wanted everyone to agree and see things similarly. The only way, the only way, to achieve both of those things simultaneously, is if they only allowed in the people who agreed and saw things similarly. Everyone else would be spectators. Davenport ultimately swayed the majority of the Synod to side with him. Congregations would elect their elders. Congregations were distinct and equal.
This vital point decided, everything else fell into place. While congregations were encouraged to cooperate, they were, at the end of the day, distinct from one another, and equal to each other. No congregation, and no group of congregations, could coerce another, but they could join together to support or rebuke other Churches to keep each other on track. Every congregation would be responsible for electing its own elders and ministers. Ministers and elders would not be selected by either civil magistrates or bishops, and their ordination would be nothing more than assuming their given roles.
That said, if a Church did become problematic, if it was embracing teachings against those of the Westminster Assembly, and if its members wouldn’t submit to the gentle correction other Churches were authorized to give, that’s when civil authorities would intervene. If things got that bad, they would be able to do what they needed to to restore regional order. Ultimately, maintaining order and protecting against heresy were the highest priorities, and if a congregation misused its privileges, the civil government would stop them as it had in the past.
So, that’s a basic overview of what a New England Congregational Church would look like according to what became known as the Cambridge Platform, and if you have listened to this podcast for any appreciable amount of time, it should sound extremely familiar. It’s essentially how their congregations had been operating for over a decade at this point, since the earliest years of the colony.
Much like Maryland’s Toleration Act, this was a codification of ideals written in order to both solidify and defend the continued adherence to those ideals. And, much like the Toleration Act, this became a massively important document for American history, though in a somewhat different way. Firstly, the ideals set forth in the Cambridge Platform underpin a massive percentage of American Churches to this day. It was used explicitly for 200 years, by Orthodox Congregationalists, unitarians, Baptists, universalists, Disciples of Christ and other denominations, but more than that it articulated what would become the fundamentally American approach to religion. Yes, there have been a few alterations through the centuries, but almost everything you think about American religion comes down to this document. It’s about independent control with wider cooperation.
One of the articles I read about the Synod reflected that, though Christian beliefs don’t really change over time, polity always reflects the society in which the Church exists, and that was an interesting observation to me. They said beliefs aren’t what changes. Governance is the thing that changes, and it changes in a way that’s a reflection of what’s going on around people at the time. This observation led them to feel that the Cambridge Synod’s solidifying of this congregational model, this model of independent local control with wider cooperation, led to the township civil government model which de Tocqueville felt in the 19th century was so important to American liberty, and even to the state federal model which emerged in the Constitution. I don’t know to what extent this theory is true, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt.
Regardless, this means that 1648 was the year that two of the most important documents in American Colonial history were written, and both were a result of their respective colonies looking around at the end of the First English Civil War, realizing just how much their ways of life were in jeopardy, assessing what was most important to defend about those ways of life, what would protect everything else they valued, and drafting laws to protect these things. Virginia had done the same thing, but it had decided on tradition, and this put it on a somewhat unique course which we’ll discuss over time. It’s kind of a trio, though – liberty, tradition and order – and how familiar does that sound even today? Extending our focus a little bit, Barbados had tried to choose personal civility, but was by 1648 losing the battle to defend this. Poor Barbados. And extending our focus even further, you could even connect it to the attitude of the clubmen – if I can just protect my town, it’ll be ok.
For all its impact, the Cambridge Platform had its problems, too, especially when adopted in its entirety and not just in spirit. In true New England style, it was rigid and uncompromising, and it did nothing to alleviate criticisms that the region was intolerant. It created this one specific way that Churches had to work, and embraced a fairly strict theological vision, and this excluded a lot of the colony from participation in any real colony decision-making. It also left enforcement up to the General Court, so that anytime a person or region deviated from the norm, they could be punished. A couple weeks ago, I said that Puritans would have to contend with the same issues of radicals and heretics that Anglicans did, and that they, especially more conservative Independents, would have to figure out how to do this without appealing to tradition and hierarchy. For Congregationalists, the answer was in conformity which was passively maintained by excluding most people, and which could be actively maintained by civil punishment.
If we look forward a few years to the persecution that people like the Quakers endured in New England, and which they endured there far more severely than in any other English colonies, a lot of the foundation for that was also a result of that New England Congregational model which was solidified here.
So, this was just a very New England thing, with all the successes and all the failures which so strongly characterized the region.
Apart from the Cambridge Platform, there are a couple of things worth noting before we go. Much like other colonies, the end of the First English Civil War pushed New England into a new era. This era saw the Massachusetts deputies and magistrates united, which led to a few reforms, albeit highly moderated ones. For instance, Massachusetts widened its franchise in 1647, but it didn’t include non Church members as the Deputies had originally wanted, except in purely local elections. They also passed a Book of Lawes, which was something else the Deputies had always pushed for.
This era also saw the United Colonies to embrace their rigidity in a way that they hadn’t really done before. In one way, it freed them to be severe in a way the king wouldn’t have accepted, but they also wanted to avoid the chaos which was engulfing England. Plus, there was that idea that by creating a sin-free society, they could bring about the millennium, that thousand year rule of the saints, and all of that combined to encourage the colony to embrace its lowest instincts. The tendency toward excessive rigidity had always been there, witnessed again and again in things like cutting off Phillip Ratcliffe’s ears, the exile of Roger Williams and the Antinomian Controversy and the treatment of Robert Keayne, but there had also been the urge, embodied in people like Winthrop, to at least moderate it, and that really disappeared in the aftermath of the war.
Given this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that 1648 brought another first to New England, when Margaret Jones of Charlestown was tried and executed for witchcraft. This was done according to the methods prescribed by Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins in his book, which had been published in England the year before. The story is so familiar it’s almost cliche. Jones was a midwife who practiced medicine. Some of her patients said that she had told them they would never get better without her medicine, and that sometimes they didn’t recover when they should have, and sometimes people reacted more strongly than expected to her medicine. Sometimes she predicted things which came true, and she had a minor deformity. When she was put in jail, people reported seeing supernatural things, like a small child who then disappeared. She was furious and frantic when she was tried, and she was furious and frantic when she was executed the same day. Her husband left the colony, and when the ship he was on started to experience turbulence, he was put in its jail, and the ship reportedly steadied. Years later, a man named John Hale added his voice to the record. He had been 11 when she was executed, had been her neighbor and had visited her in jail. Later, he had become a minister who had tried witches, until his own wife was accused of witchcraft and he turned against the practice. At this point in life, he wrote this account, and said the whole thing had started when she got into an argument with her neighbors. They went to the General Court and accused her of witchcraft, saying that some of their livestock had gotten sick after the argument.
This was only the first of three wars, though, and in 1648 the fighting in England would resume, bringing with it a whole new set of challenges. That’s what we’ll get to next week.
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