the world of john winthrop
As we near the 400th anniversary of the colonial settlement of Massachusetts, Dr. Francis J. Bremer, renowned historian and an adviser to the Partnership of Historic Bostons, has produced a series of short articles which together serve as a mini-course on the men and women responsible for the shaping of English New England - with both destructive and constructive consequences of their colonization, not least for Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands. All four articles are published below, the first exploring the beliefs and faith of John Winthrop and those around him in the close-knit community of puritans in England. The second asks why the puritans took the bold step of emigrating to New England in their thousands, while the third explores the development of puritanism in John Winthrop’s Stour Valley, a puritan heartland. The fourth looks at an unexpected feature of puritanism: its relatively liberating role for women.
We are grateful to the Winthrop Society, an organisation of descendants of John Winthrop and those who accompanied him in the Great Migration, for permission to reprint Dr. Bremer’s articles from its publication Fleet News.
the english world: the divine, the devil
In important ways, John Winthrop and his fellow puritans were no different from their neighbors along East Anglia's Stour Valley, in the crowded neighborhoods of London, and in the towns and villages dotting the English landscape from Dorchester in the west to Boston, Lincolnshire, in the east.
English people of the 17th century lived in a premodern world in which there was no clear distinction between the natural order and the supernatural. We need to resist the temptation to regard these people as superstitious or credulous. Lacking our modern understanding of natural and scientific causes of storms, droughts, disease and other such forces that shaped people's lives, the men and women of John Winthrop's world posited supernatural explanations.
For them, God was not only a distant entity who had made the world but was actively involved in its governance, intervening to show favor to those who followed his laws, and to send a message to those who opposed his way. There were also demonic forces in the world that could inflict spiritual and material harm. This was a belief system that provided meaning to otherwise inexplicable events, reflected in and reinforced by the Bible, which recorded the many interventions by the supernatural in the affairs of individuals and nations.
An early English engraving entitled “Understanding,” artist unknown, published by Thomas Jennifer, ca. 1662. Wellcome Library no. 26811i
Everyday life could offer evidence of God's interaction with individual men and women. Misfortunes could be a test from God (as with Job in the Bible), a divine punishment for transgressions, or an affliction from the devil or the witches who were his agent. Prayer was a way of influencing the future and thanking God for the present blessings. But those who prayed also believed that God expected them to combine prayer with use of the gifts God gave them in order to achieve their goals.
On a large level, communities offered prayers for the rain and sun that would lead to a good harvest. They tended their crops and offered thanks if their prayers were answered. Mariners prayed for favorable winds that would carry them to their destination. Afflictions were punishment for sin. In the theatre of God's judgment blasphemers were struck dead and sexual offenses could lead top venereal disease. Plague fell upon a people who had strayed from righteousness.
On a personal level, fathers and mothers prayed for the welfare of their children and looked for signs that those prayers were answered. John Winthrop saw it as providential when his wife detected a large spider in a pot of porridge which she was about to serve to their children, and he believed that God intervened to protect his son Adam from an errant arrow when his boys were practicing archery. He rejoiced when, after struggling to live a godly life, he experienced God's caress, a sense of the presence of God's love.
If the melding of the supernatural and natural orders meant that it was possible to feel the presence of God, it was also possible to be touched by the devil, whom God allowed to tempt, afflict, and recruit men and women. Lightening was believed to be fire hurled at earth by demons. The devil could possess an individual. It needs to be stressed that in a world where misfortune might otherwise appear senseless, such beliefs offered people confidence that everything happened for a reason, even if the reason was not immediately apparent. And they provided tools for shaping communal and personal fortune - prayer and a godly life, but specific actions as well. Ringing church bells would chase away the evil spirits hurling fire from the skies in the form of lightening, and the fact that lightening stopped if the bells were rung loud enough and long enough reinforced their belief in both the cause and the cure.
Witches and demons dance in this English woodcut, 1720. Wellcome Library no. 44116i
The devil could also tempt individuals into his service. The audience that watched the temptation of Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's play of that name believed that they too might be wooed by the devil. While most of those charged with witchcraft throughout Europe and in England at this time were undoubtedly innocents, there were some who clearly sought to obtain from the devil the power God to improve their fortune and to afflict those who had offended them. But all men and women expected to encounter the devil as the tempter who urged them to seek their own interest rather than God's, to sow seeds of despair in their hearts, or lead them astray from the moral life.
In this world where unseen forces were as important as those that were seen religion offered a means of controlling one's destiny, offering a guide as to how to survive in this world and achieve heaven in the next. But while virtually all agreed that it was imperative to follow God's commands and further his plans, knowing his will was challenging because supernatural forces were not visible, and, as St. Paul had put it, believers were struggling to find the truth as they looked through a glass darkly. Englishmen were divided by Catholic and various Protestant interpretations of Christianity.
Winthrop and those who emigrated with him were puritans, Protestants who believed that the English Reformation had not gone far enough in bringing England back to the purity of early Christianity. He and his peers turned to the scriptures and to what history revealed of God's will to find clues for how to lead a godly life. Their struggle to model true faith is what would shape their lives in England and their efforts to create a New England.
The rise of puritanism
Early New England is often referred to as “puritan New England”. But who were the puritans and what do we mean by that term? This is more difficult to answer than it might appear. Scholars have taken to writing puritan with a small "p" to highlight the fact that it was a movement rather than an actual church or denomination, so that there was no recorded membership nor an official creed. The task is complicated by the false stereotype of puritans as steeple hatted men who didn't drink, hated sex, persecuted all who disagreed with them, and had deplorable fashion sense! Today, most scholars who study the movement believe that it represented an effort by people who were seeking to bring their personal lives and their nation into closer accord with the will of God.
Living in the world of faith described above, the puritans were ordinary Englishmen who took their religion more seriously than many of their neighbors. They understood God's will to be set forth in the scriptures, where one could find instructions for how to live a godly life and find the models of church organization established by the earliest Christians. They lived in an age when the printing press made the Bible readily available and they believed that all men and women should learn to read so that each person could, with the help of God's spirit, read and understand the messages to be found there. Emphasizing the priesthood of all believers rather than the views of church leaders made sure that there was always an oppositional element to puritanism, but also that there was unity but not uniformity in the movement.
Their reading of the scriptures persuaded puritans that religious worship should be simple, sermons should be offered regularly, and authority should rest with individual communities of believers. As to behavior, they believed that everything men and women received from God was good and sin came not from using those gifts but from abusing them. Thus, for example, drinking was fine, drunkenness a sin; sex enhanced marital love but had no place outside of marriage; stylish fashions were allowed if one did not seek to dress above one's station in life.
The altar at St. Botolph’s in Boston, Lincolnshire, a puritan stronghold. Credit: David Dorfman
Understanding puritanism in this way means that we can date it as emerging in English Protestantism in the 1530s, representing the efforts of Protestants who approved of the Reformation in their country but felt that it was not progressing far or fast enough.
During the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) reforms, prompted by the king's chief minister Thomas Cromwell and his archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, were incremental. These included the publication of the Bible in English, the abolition of monasteries, and changes in the liturgy. Further changes came in the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553), but reformers still chafed at the retention of practices associated with Roman Catholicism, such as the use of clerical vestments.
All reform came to an end with the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor (1553-1558). During her reign hundreds of English Protestants - the Marian Martyrs - were executed for holding to their faith; many more fled to the Continent where they created exile churches; and yet others maintained their principles in underground churches, especially in London.
Mary's death in 1558 led to the accession of her Protestant sister Elizabeth. The new queen sought to structure the church in a way that wouldn't alienate anyone enough to push them to rebellion. This compromise settlement was Protestant, but with some conservative changes to what was in place when Edward VI had died. Puritanism during Elizabeth's lengthy reign was an effort to push reform further. The chief points on which most of these reformers agreed was Calvinist doctrine, removal of the remaining vestiges of Catholicism (such as clerical vestments), and the importance of a preaching ministry. Underlying these emphases was a belief in the inerrancy of the Scriptures, and a strong opposition to all things Roman Catholic.
During Elizabeth's reign puritan efforts to shift the national church failed, but in regions where local leaders were sympathetic to the movement university trained preachers were installed in pulpits, distasteful ceremonies were ignored, and conferences of lay believers sustained one another's faith. The section discusses how the puritan movement developed in the Stour Valley borderland of the counties of Essex and Suffolk, where the future Massachusetts governor John Winthrop grew up. In other regions such initiatives failed and puritan clergy were cast out of their livings. Some of these ousted clergy joined with lay believers to set up their own congregations separate from local parishes.
The coat of arms of Boston, Lincolnshire, a source of puritan immigration. Credit: wikicommons
When the Scot James I followed Elizabeth to the throne in 1603, puritans hoped that the new king might institute some of the practices of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which he had presided over and which most English reformers admired. But this was not the case and under James greater pressure was place on puritans to conform, leaving more to separate and some to emigrate to the Netherlands, where they established congregations in places such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Leiden.
During the reign of James' son, Charles I (1625-1649) not only was pressure on puritans increased, but it seemed to many that the English church was both diluting its Calvinist teachings and moving backwards toward reinstituting ceremonial Catholicism. Many more English puritans began to emigrate, with many now going to America. There they established the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
JOHN WINTHROP AND THE stour valley’s GODLY SOCIETY
In early modern England the ability of the central government to impose its will on the people was dependent on the support of local authorities in state and church. While not autonomous, county leaders and diocesan officials could determine whether the wishes of kings and archbishops were obeyed or not. During the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the local authorities in the Stour River Valley, the region of south Suffolk and northern Essex, were supporters of a more reformed Protestantism than that desired by Queen Elizabeth and then James I. This was a region that had long been known for forms of religious dissent, going back to the 14th-century Lollard movement.
During the reign of Queen Mary Tudor (1553-1558) there had been notable challenges to that monarch's efforts to reimpose Catholicism on the English people. All but two of the parishioners of Stoke-by Nayland, on the south side of the Stour, refused to receive communion in the Catholic form, and on the north side of the river the Protestant preacher Rowland Taylor was burned in a field outside of Hadleigh as one of the Marian Martyrs.
John Winthrop was born here, in Edwardstone in 1588, and raised in the next-door towns of Groton and Boxford. His grandfather Adam had purchased Groton Manor, former church land seized at the Reformation. John's father Adam Winthrop attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied law at London's Inns of Court. This Adam was closely tied to leaders of the puritan movement in the Stour Valley, where he spent most of his life and where he raised his children, including John.
The church at Groton, Suffolk, where John Winthrop was raised. Credit: Francis J. Bremer
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1553-1603) landed gentry and sympathetic bishops supported, or at least tolerated, the creation of a reformed religious culture that made the region, as one contemporary commented, a "closer approximation to the type of a godly commonwealth than in any part of England in any time." This was reflected in a variety of ways. Supportive landlords furthered the cause of having an educated clergy by appointing puritans, many educated at Cambridge University, to parish livings that were in their control.
In this region, ministers such as John Knewstub in Cockfield and Henry Sandes in Boxford ignored the ceremonial practices of the Church of England of which they disapproved; they explained the basics of Calvinist doctrine to their flocks; and they preached a social gospel based on Christ's command to love all of one's neighbors. In the godly commonwealth one was expected to place the welfare of the community above individual self-interest. Knewstub, for example, told his listeners that the scripture taught that "we are all members of one body"; "The Lord to maintain brotherly love among his, hath made one the store house of necessaries of another;" and "being fellow members of one body, we have our benefit & fare the better for the several gifts of others." John Winthrop would say much the same in his "Christian Charity" lay sermon to his fellow colonists in 1630. Clergy met in regional conferences such as one at Cockfield and another at Dedham, discussing among themselves how best to advance their cause.
Inspired by such preaching and by the suggestion offered by the Essex clergyman Richard Rogers in his Seven Treatises, lay believers formed groups which met regularly to share their experiences, discuss sermons, and sing psalms. Brigit Cooke was the leader of one such group in Kersey, not far from Winthrop's Groton, and Winthrop himself was part of another such communion of saints. Individuals demonstrated their social caring by individual actions, such as Winthrop's donation of some of his land for the building of a poor house.
Meeting in town assemblies the godly in communities such as Dedham, Boxford, Finchingfield, and Braintree developed orders to promote Sabbath observance and to reform manners. Because of the puritan insistence on the importance of Bible reading, some individuals founded and endowed free schools. In Boxford, the community next to Groton, a school was founded in 1595 with the clergymen John Knewstub and Henry Sandes and the laymen Adam Winthrop (John's father), Brampton Gurdon, and William Clopton on the board of governors.
The tomb of Adam Winthrop, John Winthrop’s father, outside the chanel of Groton church. The inscription specifies that he was “patron to this church after the Reformation,” as well as a parent of the future governor of Massachusetts. Credit: Francis J. Bremer
Because puritanism was not a centralized movement there were varying regional emphases in the character of the faith. Following his marriage to Mary Forth in 1605, John Winthrop spent time in south Essex near the town of Great Stanbridge, where the reform cause was more embattled. Over the next few years he found that puritans there rejected practices to which he was accustomed, such as card playing and hunting fowl along creeks. In England, as would be the case in New England, the godly were constantly seeking further understanding of God's wishes for them.
In 1613 John moved his family from the marshlands of southeast Essex and returned to the Stour Valley, where he reconnected with the godly clergy and laymen who had helped shape his faith. He was appointed to the Suffolk commission of the peace (the magistrates who oversaw the administration of the law) and worked to sustain the region's reputation as a godly commonwealth. He was named as an attorney at the Court of Wards in London.
But puritanism was soon imperilled. The rise of energetic conservative forces in the church represented by William Laud (bishop of London and then Archbishop of Canterbury) and the accession of Charles II (1625-1649), a strong supporter of Laudianism, led to a crackdown on puritans everywhere, including in the Stour Valley. Puritan clergy were deprived of their church livings.
It became increasingly difficult for someone like Winthrop to perform his civil duties while being true to his faith. By the late 1620s he began to think of creating a new godly community in a new world.
The title page of the sermon given by John Winthrop, mostly likely not given on board the ship Arbella, but at the Church of the Holy Rood, Southampton, on the eve of the June 1630 puritan departure across the Atlantic. Credit: New York Historical Society
Puritans and Women
Over the years students of the puritans have disagreed on how the puritans regarded women and whether the movement offered opportunities for women that were not available otherwise. This was a subject on which many puritans were divided, and the complexity of their views cannot be fully explored in a short essay. In an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, women had few legal rights and were expected to subordinate themselves to the wishes of their fathers, and then their husbands.
Seen as descendants of Eve, they were more likely to succumb to the temptations of the devil and to try to ensnare men. Women were more likely than men to be accused of and punished for the crime of witchcraft. Rather than expand on these positions, which were generally characteristic of views throughout the western world in the seventeenth century, I wish to explore some of the ways in which religion provided some women important roles society.
Protestants, and puritans more than most, believed that each individual was called to seek God through the reading of the Scripture and, guided by the Holy Spirit, could directly apprehend religious truth. This required women to be able to read, and in New England the law required all children, including females, to be taught to read. As literate believers, it was, the Geneva Bible stated, "the mother's duty to instruct her children.
One scholar points out that this "encouraged mothers to assume such traditional ministerial roles as the explanation of religious doctrine, the explication of scriptural passages, and the interpretation of complex doctrinal treatises." A godly mother would gather her children and the family servants around her in in order to explain and sometimes criticize the message conveyed by the local preacher in his Sunday sermon. Anne Browne Winthrop, John Winthrop's mother, could read Latin and both read and write French. She took her faith seriously and instructed her son and her three daughters.
The pulpit of the Rev. John Cotton, who initially supported Anne Hutchinson’s gatherings to discuss the gospel. Credit:
Some women earned a reputation for godliness and spiritual knowledge that led those outside their household to seek them out. Some conferences, informal gatherings of believers to discuss their faith, were hosted and led by women, most famously those of Bridget Cooke in Kersey, England and Anne Hutchinson in Boston, Massachusetts. Before she began to espouse views that were deemed heretical, John Cotton said that Hutchinson's conferences "did well tend to water the seeds publicly sown" in clerical sermons.
Speaking in church meetings as opposed to private meetings was a different matter. Prophesying was a practice in many puritan churches whereby lay members were allowed to ask questions and offer their own religious insights. Some churches denied women the right, citing St. Paul's statement that "I permit not a woman to teach, neither to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."
Yet other puritans pointed to the passage in the Book of Joel that "your sons and daughters shall prophesy." John Robinson, the Pilgrim's pastor in the Netherlands, cited the example in Acts of the four daughters of Philip the Evangelist "which did prophesy," and women were allowed to prophesy in the Pilgrim congregation in Leyden and then in the Plymouth colony.
Puritan churches were congregational, formed by a group of believers who swore to a covenant towalk in all his ways, made known or to be made known to them according to their best endeavor, whatever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them. Women played a role in the formation of such churches, and on at least one occasion voted in the choice of a minister. After the formation of a congregation many women shared their religious experience in making professions before their fellow believers. Such narratives were used by some congregations to determine whether an individual deserved to be added to the church. But they also were a means by which a woman could help others by sharing the nature of her own quest for God's love.
The testament of faith of Jane Willows, as recorded by the Rev. Thomas Sheppard, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Credit: Lori Rogers-Stokes
A number of women stood out for their public espousal of religious ideas. We all know of Anne Hutchinson, but there were other women of note who advanced ideas that challenged the colony's orthodoxy. Lady Deborah Moody of Salem and Anne Eaton (wife of new Haven's governor) opposed the practice of infant Baptism. Sarah Dudley Keayne, a daughter of Thomas Dudley and daughter-in-law of the merchant Benjamin Keayne, actually preached publicly when in London (and perhaps in Massachusetts). Dudley's other daughter, Anne Dudley Bradstreet, advanced rather than criticized the puritan faith in many of her poems.
All of the above indicates that puritanism could be especially liberating for women. Indeed, the puritan clergyman John Dod criticized those who would still "tie the woman to the wheel and spindle," excluding them "from all conference touching the word of God as absurd and unbeseeming to their sex." Eventually some of these religious liberties were eroded as the clergy sought to restrict the role of lay men and women in the church and increase their own ministerial authority.
But while puritanism provided an expanded role for women, the situation was always complex, something that can be illustrated by looking more closely at John Winthrop. He was disappointed at the indifference of his first wife, Mary Forth, to religious discussion, but lauded the faith of his second wife, Thomasine Clopton, in his account of her death a few years after they had married. His courtship correspondence with Margaret Tyndal is filled with discussions of their faith and their correspondence in subsequent years show that he continued to welcome her religious insights. He praised Anne Hutchinson's contributions to early Boston as leading to an "increase of love, and mutual edification" in the years before her ideas became controversial. He praised Lady Deborah Moody. But as much as he knew and admired many well read and educated women, his judgment on the mental breakdown of Anne Eaton Hopkins, the wife of Connecticut's governor, was that her breakdown was due to having read and written too many books.
Francis J. Bremer, professor emeritus of history at Millersville University, is the author of more than a dozen books on puritanism in the Atlantic world and the editor of the Winthrop papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. His prize-winning John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founder, Puritanism in the Atlantic World, and One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginnings of English New England are essential reading for anyone seeking to understand colonial New England and some of the key forces shaping the future United States. See his other blogs for the Partnership of Historic Bostons, as well as this insightful interview.