In 1648, Virginia banished two more puritan preachers, and not only is this event a good glimpse into issues Virginia faced following Parliamentary victory, it became an event that affected the course of both Virginia and Maryland history.
Introduction
I had meant to talk about Maryland this week, and the story I’m telling was originally supposed to be just a 5-10 minute aside, but as I was writing it, I decided this really deserves its own episode, so we’ll get to Maryland next week. Besides, we haven’t really spent a lot of time in Virginia since the war started. Given the level of intrigue in the colony before Berkeley’s arrival, it’s remarkable how much his leadership had stabilized it, and how much the colony had managed to avoid getting sucked into the drama of the war. For the most part, Virginians were quietly building and flying under the radar.
The king’s surrender, though, all-but ensured that drama would come to Virginia’s shores. Parliament had been open about its desire to interfere in colonial affairs far more than any royal government had, and it had been meddling in New England, Bermuda and especially Barbados in an unprecedented way. Parliament was ultimately going to ensure that every colony conformed to its vision of England, and with the possible exception of the tiny settlements on St. Kitts and Antigua, Virginia stood more firmly against everything Parliament stood for than any other colony, so its drawing government attention was less a matter of if than when.
But what would be the issue around which a conflict with Parliament might revolve? Declaring loyalty to Parliament might be one, but there still technically was a king, and Virginia was legally his colony. Pushing Virginia to do something like that would have been difficult, if not impossible, following the war, because Virginia would resist, and Parliament wouldn’t have a strong legal foundation to stand on. Berkeley as governor? That would face a lot of the same challenges. Bishops? Ha, there were no bishops in Virginia. The colony couldn’t even recruit enough ministers.
The answer is the English Book of Common Prayer. In 1645, Parliament had banned the Prayer Book, and Virginia had responded by strengthening the rules requiring its use. The Prayer Book had been written by some of England’s most beloved religious figures under Edward VI, and it had become a cornerstone of the Elizabethan Settlement which had given direction to England’s religious life after the destruction of the Catholic Church in the country. By this point, it had been a beloved institution, and a point of national pride, for almost a century, and almost the equal of the King James Bible in terms of importance.
More than that, it had been the Prayer Book which had allowed English religious life to continue at all after the Reformation. For a century after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, England didn’t have enough ministers. Oxford and Cambridge did what they could to fill the gap, but in the 1620s, 80% of England’s population had never so much as heard a sermon, and 80% of English parishes still lacked a pastor. Through that, people had looked to the Prayer Book to guide their religious life, to enable them to have some connection to God, and some assurance that they were doing things right, even when they didn’t have the personal guidance of someone who had been educated in ministry.
Furthermore, England had also had a taste of what types of weird behavior might emerge without the unifying power of the Anglican Church and Prayer Book. Back in the days of the Reformation, traditional Catholics had opposed lay people reading the Bible because you didn’t know what weird ideas they might get if they interpreted it wrongly. And, they had kind of been vindicated in that. After a century of having little religious guidance, and simply being left to interpret the Bible on their own, England had a higher-than-average percent of its population that did and believed some pretty freaky, and I mean freaky, stuff, even by today’s standards. There were entire groups of people who felt that, as long as they were guided by what they deemed the Holy Spirit, they could and should separate themselves from all worldly and personal restraint, and it would not have been uncommon to see people running through the streets naked, getting drunk, cussing, swearing, embracing free love and saying they did this all because they were the real saved ones. Puritans had to grapple with these movements, too, but for Anglicans, the answer was as easy as it had been for the Catholics a century before. Tradition, hierarchy and submission to authority will prevent any of this from being a problem, and by 1645, that tradition was rooted firmly in the English Book of Common Prayer. They worried that without unity, there would be anarchy, and while it’s easy to laugh at such a foreign notion from the 21st century, observations at the time would have substantiated that view.
And if those reasons for supporting the Prayer Book were compelling in England, they were even more so in Virginia. If filling all the pulpits in England was a struggle, it was impossible in Virginia. In terms of ministers, Virginia relied on pretty much whoever it could get, which means either people who had a sense of purpose in being in Virginia in particular, or people who were so low quality that they couldn’t get a job anywhere else. With what ministers they had spread thin, perhaps serving 3,000 settlers each over hundreds of square miles, a standard religious service would be a group of family and friends gathering in a home, reading from the Prayer Book and some passages from the Bible.
So, as we move forward with the story, that’s the weight in most people’s minds of the importance of the Prayer Book, and in 1645, the English Parliament didn’t just declare it non-mandatory, but forbade its use altogether.
But, how do we get from that to Virginia banishing a pastor who had been in the colony since the days of the Virginia Company? Yes, they had banished the three in 1643, but those were extremely new arrivals, and since they were from New Haven, smart money says they were both extreme and aggressive in a way that could have been, and certainly seemed, threatening to Virginia’s way of life, and which made it felt like exiling them was nothing more than kicking out three troublemakers from New England before they became a problem, and apart from them, Virginia had mostly left its puritans alone during the war, even though colonists suspected that they had encouraged the 1644 Powhatan Massacre. There’s a big difference between that and getting rid of someone who had been ministering in the colony since before the first Powhatan Massacre, and who had actually served as Berkeley’s pastor in Jamestown. This man’s name was Thomas Harrison, by the way, born in Hull, educated in Cambridge, and known throughout his life for being a particularly good conversationalist.
So how did we get from one to the other, and how did it come to be that Virginia’s aggression toward Puritans came at the exact time as Puritans were solidifying their control of England? The answer lies in a handful of intertwined factors.
The factor initially had very little to do with puritanism at all. Virginia was big. It had thousands of colonists spread over thousands of square miles. Logistically, it was too big to govern from Jamestown, and Berkeley had been working since his arrival to put more power, including religious authority, on the local level. One of the first things the government did under his leadership was to make individual parishes responsible for recruiting and selecting their own pastors. Jamestown did legally require conformity to the Prayer Book, but they also weren’t actively looking for dissenters. It was just a legal precedent in case things got out of hand, one which applied to laymen every bit as much as to pastors. So, when Upper Norfolk County unanimously said they wanted Thomas Harrison as their pastor, even though everyone knew he was a Puritan, no one said anything.
The second factor is predictable, and easy to understand, and powerful, and that’s just the emotional factor. The tenser a situation, the harder it is to accept people who disagree with you. Over the course of the war, the Anglicans of Virginia’s Puritan hubs got less and less happy with Puritan influence in their regions. So, in Upper Norfolk County, which had unanimously voted to confirm Thomas Harrison a couple years before, Harrison started to become a more and more controversial figure, and in April of 1645, almost immediately after news of Parliament’s banning the Prayer Book would have reached Virginia, the Church wardens for Elizabeth River Parish in Upper Norfolk County accused Harrison of nonconformity. They said he hadn’t read the Book of Common Prayer, hadn’t administered Baptism according to English tradition, and hadn’t catechized on Sundays.
But this isn’t when Harrison got kicked out, even though according to the law he should have been. The court referred the case to Berkeley and the governor’s council, but Berkeley let him stay in the colony. We don’t know why. We don’t have any records at all which discuss what was said at the meeting. Some academics have speculated that Harrison promised to change, or that Berkeley hoped he would change, but all of this is pure speculation. We know nothing about the meeting or Berkeley’s decision, but I would argue that it’s not a surprising one. What we do know is that Virginia was desperate for pastors, and in addition to issues of recruitment, the economic devastation of the most recent Powhatan war had made it difficult to actually support pastors via tithes. Harrison was a Cambridge-educated man who had been in the colony through thick and thin, and who seems to have been relatively well liked despite being a puritan, and was apparently tactful enough to even serve as a minister to Berkeley, a dedicated Anglican Royalist. Plus, puritans like Samuel Mathews still served on the governor’s council. Whatever the details of the meeting, giving Harrison another chance was a practical decision.
The third factor does have to do with Parliament, though, and it brings us back to what I was discussing at the beginning of the episode. It was only a matter of time before Parliament turned its attention to making Virginia stop using the Prayer Book. In light of that, decentralization of power also became a way to divert Parliamentary attempts to push Virginia toward puritanism. Once the legal stuff was worked out, Parliament might be able to tell Jamestown what policies to enforce, or to change leadership on the colony level, but it would be much, much more difficult for them to tell each Virginia parish what to do. Virginia’s dispersed population even made it difficult for the colony to enforce its own laws. Enforcing laws from England directly on the population would have been virtually impossible.
As Parliament won the war, Virginia put the power of enforcing its religious laws on the local level. Parishioners could withhold tithes from a pastor who didn’t adhere to the prayer book, and it was up to local counties to enforce the laws. This was a strategic move, and it was one which served Virginia very well as we’ll see, but it also spelled the end for Harrison’s ministry in Virginia. In the 1645 Harrison case, it had been the local people who wanted to get rid of Harrison, and Berkeley who had been lenient. Now, the local people were the ones who had the power.
In 1647, Harrison left Upper Norfolk County for Nansemond County. Why he did this, we don’t know, but one can make an educated guess that he knew the authorities wouldn’t let him keep preaching in Elizabeth River for long. It’s also worth noting that Nansemond was, if anything, an even bigger Puritan center than Upper Norfolk, though it must be emphasized that neither was majority Puritan. Virginia’s combined puritan population was about 300 people out of a population of about 9,000. But, Nansemond had been without a pastor since the New Havenites had been expelled in 1643, and they were happy to have him.
In his place in Elizabeth River, Harrison left his former elder, William Durand. Durand, from what I was able to find, may have been a Huguenot, or descendent of Huguenots, and he was certainly a person with a harsher demeanor than Harrison’s. His greatest influence was New Haven minister John Davenport, and much of his preaching came from notes he’d taken at Davenport’s sermons in London. He was also in close contact with Davenport while in Virginia, and he had been the one who had initially asked New Haven to send the 1643 ministers. In that letter, Durand likened Virginia to Sodom and Gommorrah, though he emphasized that there were plenty of Virginians who would be easy to convert, and that puritanism faced little opposition in Virginia, that “no man openeth his mouth to hinder it or speak against it.” His belligerent attitude was even more unpalatable to the local authorities than Harrison’s preaching had been, and furthermore, his correspondence meant that New England, and also Parliament, would be kept updated about the goings on in Virginia. It was, I’m sure, much more similar to the situation they’d faced from the New Haven ministers in 1643. They’d accused Harrison of nonconformity, but Durand they accused of sedition and mutiny, and they dubbed his followers a “faction,” and they moved fast to crush it.
On May 28, 1648, the Upper Norfolk sheriff burst into one of Durand’s religious meetings, arrested him and ordered the rest of the congregation to disperse, declaring them abettors of much sedition and mutiny. Two of his deputies, however, were puritans, so the deputies broke Durand out of jail and refused to arrest anyone else, or give the sheriff names Durand’s other supporters. This drama soon spilled over into Nansemond County. Harrison wasn’t arrested, but he was accused of nonconformity yet again, and charges were presented against him at the same time as Durand. This time, Berkeley couldn’t have protected Harrison, even if he’d wanted to. He gave both ministers a choice. They could take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, which declared the king the head of the Church, or they could leave the colony. Both refused the oath, so Berkeley gave them until the “third ship at furthest” to leave, and the two went to Maryland.
The people of Nansemond petitioned Parliament to order Berkeley to allow Harrison to stay, saying that he couldn’t be banished for refusing to use the very same Prayer Book which had been banned by an act of Parliament, and Parliament agreed. By the time Parliament’s demand that Virginia reinstate Harrison reached Jamestown, though, Harrison was gone. From Maryland, he’d gone to Massachusetts, where he’d married John Winthrop’s cousin. From there, he would soon return to England, where he would take a job serving Oliver Cromwell’s son, with whom he would go to Ireland in the 1650s.
For Virginia’s puritans, the event created a very real question of whether to stay in the colony. Some had already been trickling into Maryland following the expulsion of the New Haven ministers, and losing Harrison was a significantly bigger blow than that had been. He had been one of the best preachers, and the most effective puritan leader in Virginia. They couldn’t really accomplish much without him, and they also wouldn’t have solid religious leadership without him. When Harrison moved to Massachusetts, they asked him and New England leadership for guidance on what to do. For the time being, New England leadership recommended they stay in Virginia and try to convert more people. If they did have to move, though, New Englanders suggested that they might consider the Bahamas as a new location.
That’s where we’ll leave it for today, and next week we will discuss what’s going on in Maryland, and on a related note, the final decision of these Virginia puritans.