The Reformation In England And Scotland
Henry VIII and the separation from Rome
In the meantime the Reformation had taken hold in England. The beginning there was political rather than religious, a quarrel between the king and the pope of the sort that had occurred in the Middle Ages without resulting in a permanent schism and might not have in this instance save for the overall European situation. The dispute had its root in the assumption that the king was a national stallion expected to provide an heir to the throne. England did not have the Salic law, which in France forbade female succession, but England had just emerged from a prolonged civil war, the Wars of the Roses, and the new dynastyneeded a male heir to maintain its hold on the throne and to prevent the resumption of civil war. Catherine of Aragon, the queen of Henry VIII, had borne him numerous children of whom only one survived, the princess Mary, and more were not to be expected. The ordinary procedure in such a case was to discover some flaw in the marriage that would allow an annulment or a divorce. In this instance the flaw was not difficult to find, because Catherine had been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, and canon law, following the prohibition in the book of Leviticus (20:21), forbade the marriage of a man with his deceased brother’s widow. At the time of the marriage the pope, Julius II, had given a dispensation to cover this infraction of the rule. The question now was whether the pope had the authority to dispense from the divine law. Catherine said there had been no need for a dispensation because her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated and there had been no impediment to her marriage to Henry. The knot would have been cut by some casuistry had Catherine not been the aunt of Emperor Charles V, who was not prepared to see her cast aside in favour of another wife. Clement VII, wishing neither to provoke the emperor nor to alienate the king, dallied so long that Henry took the matter into his own hands, repudiated papal authority, and in 1534 set up the independent Church of England, with the king as the supreme head. The spiritual head was the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who married Henry to Anne Boleyn. She bore the princess Elizabeth, and still another wife, Jane Seymour, bore the future Edward VI.
Henry’s basic concern was political, but the alterations in the structure of the church gave scope for a reformation that was religious in character. Part of the impulse came from the survivals of Lollardy, part from the Lutheran movement on the Continent, and even more from the Christian humanism represented by Erasmus. Although Henry retained much Catholic doctrine, especially transubstantiation, and ecclesiastical organization, he did introduce important changes, including the suppression of the monasteries, the introduction of the Bible in the vernacular in the parish churches, and permission to the clergy to marry, though this last reform was later revoked. The resistance to Henry’s program was not formidable, and the executions resulting were not numerous. Henry was impartial in burning some Lutherans who would not submit to his later reactionary legislation and toward some Catholics who would not accept the royal supremacy over the church, notably John Fisher and Thomas More.
On his ascent to the throne in 1547, young Edward VI was hailed as England’s Josiah, the young 7th-century-BCE king of Judah who enforced the Deuteronomic reform. Edward, it was held, would rid the land of idolatry so that England might be blessed. Protestantism advanced rapidly during his reign through the systematic reformation of doctrine, worship, and discipline—the three external marks of the true church. A reformed confession of faith and a prayer book were adopted, but the reformation of the ecclesiastical laws that would have defined the basis of discipline was blocked by the nobility in Parliament.
The death of Edward and England’s return to Roman Catholicism in 1553 under Queen Marywas interpreted by Protestants as God’s judgment that England had not taken the Reformation seriously enough. Many, including Cranmer, died as martyrs to the Protestant cause, and others fled to the European continent. Those in exile experimented with more radical forms of worship and discipline, and published material justifying rebellion against an idolatrous ruler. Exiles also produced two large volumes of incalculable consequence for English religious thought, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, popularly known as The Book of Martyrs, and the Geneva Bible. The most popular books in England for many years after their publication, they provided a view of the country as an elect nation chosen by God to bring the power of the Antichrist (understood to be the pope) to an end.
Foxe, John: The Book of Martyrs
Page from the eighth edition of The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, woodcut depicting (top) zealous reformers stripping a church of its Roman Catholic furnishings and (bottom) a Protestant church interior with a baptismal font and a communion table set with a cup and paten, published in London, 1641; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Photograph by Veronika Brazdova. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Museum no. CLE.W9
Elizabeth I, assumed the throne in 1558 and was hailed as the glorious Deborah (a 12th-century-BCE Israelite leader), the “restorer of Israel.” She did not, however, restore it far enough for some English Protestants, particularly the Puritans. Indeed, she distrusted the challenge to authority and feared the disorder that either extreme evangelical zeal or extreme Catholic zeal could cause. Two statutes promulgated in her first year the Act of Supremacy, stating that the queen was “supreme governor” of the Church of England, and the Act of Uniformity, ensuring that English worship should follow The Book of Common Prayer defined the nature of the English religious establishment. In 1571 the Convocation of Canterbury, one of the church’s two primary legislative bodies (along with the Convocation of York), defined standard doctrine in the Thirty-nine Articles, but attempts to reform the prayer book further and to produce a reformed discipline failed. Defeated in the convocation, the reformers came to rely more on Parliament, where they could always depend on strong support.
The role of John Knox
In Scotland the Reformation is associated with the name of John Knox, who declared that one celebration of the mass is worse than a cup of poison. He faced the very real threat that Mary, Queen of Scots, would do for Scotland what Mary Tudor had done for England. Therefore, Knox defied her in person on matters of religion and, though a commoner, addressed her as if he were all Scotland. He very nearly was, because in the period prior to 1560 many an obscure evangelist had converted much of the Lowlands to the religion of John Calvin. The church had been given a Presbyterian structure, culminating in a General Assembly, which had actually as great and perhaps a greater influence than the Parliament. Because of her follies, and very probably her crimes (complicity in the murder of her husband), Mary had to seek asylum in England. There she became the focus of plots on the life of Elizabeth until Parliament decreed her execution. Presbyterianism was established in Scotland, making possible the union of Scotland with England.
Knox is frequently reproached for his intolerance regarding the celebration of mass, but one must remember that the year 1560 marked the peak of polarization between the confessions. Similar intolerance had been mounting at Rome. Paul III, after an abortive attempt at reform, had introduced the Roman Inquisition in 1542. His successor, Paul IV, placed everything that Erasmus had ever written on the Index. The Council of Trent began sitting in 1545, introducing rigidity in dogma and austerity in morals. The Protestant views of justification by faith alone, the Lord’s Supper, and the propriety of clerical marriage were sharply rejected. All deviation within the Catholic fold was rigidly suppressed. When Carranza, the archbishop of Toledo, returned to Spain in 1559, after assisting Mary in the restoration of Catholicism in England, he arrived in time for the last great auto-da-fé of the Lutherans. Under suspicion for ideas no more heretical than those of Erasmus, he was incarcerated for 17 years in the prison of the Inquisition. The liberal cardinal Giovanni Morone was imprisoned during the pontificate of Paul IV, and under Pius V, Pietro Carnesecchi, an Erasmian and one-time secretary of Clement VII, was burned in Rome. Knox and Pope Pius V represent the acme of divergence between the confessions.Roland H. BaintonJames C. SpaldingThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The rise of Puritanism
Origins
Puritanism first emerged as a distinct movement in a controversy over clerical vestments and liturgical practices during the reign of Elizabeth. Immediately following the Elizabethan Settlement, Protestant clergy could, within reason, choose what to wear while leading worship. Many preachers took this opportunity to do away with the formal attire as well as other practices traditionally associated with the Roman Catholic mass. In 1564, however, Elizabeth demanded that Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury, enforce uniformity in the liturgy. He did so somewhat reluctantly with the publication of his Advertisements in 1566. Those who refused to wear the prescribed garb were mockingly called “Puritans” or “precisians” for their unwillingness to submit in these seemingly minor points to the supremacy of the queen.
The form of church government was a second controversial issue among Elizabethan Protestants. In 1570 Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603) delivered a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge proposing that presbyterian government, or government by local councils of clergy and laity, might be an improvement over the current system of archbishops, bishops, and appointments. Cartwright was dismissed for his opinions and fled to Geneva. Two years later John Field and Thomas Wilcox anonymously published an Admonition to the Parliament, which pushed Cartwright’s ideas even further. In reply John Whitgift, the vice-chancellor at Cambridge, maintained that the government of the church should be suited to the government of the state and that episcopal government best suited monarchy. In this dispute most Puritans shied away from extremes and supported some form of episcopacy, but a small number went beyond even Cartwright and Field in seeking to effect immediately a “reformation without tarrying for any.” These Separatists, such as Robert Browne (died 1633), broke with the established parish system to set up voluntary congregations that covenantedwith God and with themselves, chose ministers by common consent, and put into practice the Puritan marks of the true church.
The leaders of the Puritan movement, however, including Cartwright (who had returned to England in 1585) and Field, repudiated the Separatists and sought to set up “presbyterianism in episcopacy,” or a “church within the church.” This compromise between presbyterianism and episcopacy was preferred by the most prominent Puritans, who instituted a system of informal public meetings of clergy and laity, called “prophesyings,” to expound and discuss the Bible. Edmund Grindal, who had succeeded Parker as archbishop of Canterbury in 1576, favoured these meetings because of their educational value for the rural population. But the prophesyings were also occasions for local Puritan clergy, laity, and gentry to mobilize, and they were viewed by Elizabeth as a political threat. An increasingly clear alliance between Puritans and certain factions within Parliament did not allay Elizabeth’s fears.
Thus, the queen ordered Grindal to suppress the prophesyings. When he refused, Elizabeth effectively suspended him from the exercise of his office. This suspension further alienated Puritans. Meetings continued, often in a modified form, called classis or conferences, which were loosely coordinated by Field in London. Following Grindal’s death in 1583, Whitgift, Cartwright’s old opponent, advanced to Canterbury. Whitgift had no hesitance in closing down the prophesyings, but he proceeded with caution in formal prosecution of Puritans. Extended ecclesiastical hearings by the Court of High Commission, under the leadership of John Aylmer, and civil proceedings by the Star Chamber were accompanied by the imprisonment of only a few of the most prominent Puritans.
Whitgift’s policy, along with the death of Field and other Puritan leaders between 1588 and 1590, effectively ended any grand plan for a continuing reformation of the English church under Elizabeth. The generally moderate Elizabethan Puritan movement was over, and the forces of reform dispersed into various parties and programs ranging from nonseparating congregationalism (as advocated by William Ames) to open subversion of the established hierarchy as in the anonymous Marprelate Tracts (1588–89). Despite failure to promote reform in matters of church structure, the Puritan spirit continued to spread throughout society. Protestants with Puritan sympathies controlled colleges and professorships at Oxford and Cambridge, had the ears of many leaders in the House of Commons, and worked tirelessly as preachers and pastors to continue the preaching of Protestantism in its distinctively “hot” Puritan form to the laity.
Puritanism under the Stuarts (1603–49)
Events under James I
Puritan hopes were raised when James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth as James I of England in 1603. James was a Calvinist, and he had once signed the Negative Confession of 1581 favouring the Puritan position. In 1603 the Millenary Petition (which claimed 1,000 signatures) presented Puritan grievances to the king, and in 1604 the Hampton Court Conference was held to deal with them. The petitioners were sadly in error in their estimate of James, who had learned by personal experience to resent Presbyterian clericalism. At Hampton Court he coined the phrase “no bishop, no king.” Outmaneuvered in the conference, the Puritans were made to appear petty in their requests.
The situation remained tense during James’s reign as he pursued monarchist and episcopal policies that failed to resolve contemporary difficulties. Following the Hampton Court Conference he appointed Richard Bancroft as Whitgift’s successor as archbishop of Canterbury and encouraged the Convocation of 1604 to draw up the Constitutions and Canons against Nonconformists. Conformity in ecclesiastical matters was imposed in areas where nonconformity had survived under Elizabeth. Furthermore, the enforced reading from pulpits of James’s Book of Sports, dealing with recreations permissible on Sundays, in 1618, was an additional affront to those who espoused strict observance of the sabbath, making compromise more difficult. For many Puritan groups compromise was unacceptable anyway, and in 1607 a congregation from Scrooby, England, fled to Holland and then migrated on the Mayflower to establish the Plymouth Colony on the shore of Cape Cod Bay in North America in 1620. Of those who remained in England, a number of clergy were deprived of their positions, but others took evasive action and got by with minimal conformity. Members of Parliament supported the Nonconformists and argued that the canons of 1604 had not been ratified by Parliament and therefore did not have the force of law. Moreover, men of Puritan sympathies remained close to the seat of power during James’s reign.
Events under Charles I
Despite the presence of controversy, Puritan and non-Puritan Protestants under Elizabeth and James had been united by adherence to a broadly Calvinistic theology of grace. Much of Whitgift’s restraint in handling Puritans, for instance, can be traced to the prevailing Calvinist consensus he shared with the Nonconformists. Even as late as 1618 the English delegation to the Synod of Dort supported the strongly Calvinistic decisions of that body. Under Charles I, however, this consensus broke down, creating yet another rift in the Church of England. Anti-Puritanism in matters of liturgy and organization became linked with anti-Calvinism in theology.
The leaders of the anti-Puritan and anti-Calvinist party, notably Richard Montagu, whose New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624) first linked Calvinism with the abusive term Puritan, drew upon the development of Arminianism in Holland. In contrast to Calvinists who emphasized God’s predestination of a few to salvation and damnation of the rest of humanity, Arminians stressed God’s offer of salvation to all humankind. English Arminians added to this an increased reverence for the sacraments and liturgical ceremony. Richard Neile, the bishop of Durham, was the first significant patron of Arminians among the hierarchy, but by the time William Laud was appointed bishop of London in 1628, he was the acknowledged leader of the anti-Puritan party. London was regarded as the stronghold of Puritanism, and a policy of thorough anti-Puritanism was begun there.
Laud, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, was clearly a favourite of Charles. He promoted Arminians to influential positions in the church and subtly encouraged the propagation of Arminian theology. His fortunes turned, however, when he attempted to introduce into the Church of Scotland a liturgy comparable to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. When “Laud’s Liturgy” was introduced at the Church of St. Giles at Edinburgh, a riot broke out leading to a popular uprising that restored Presbyterianism in Scotland.
Charles sought to put down the Scots in the so-called Bishops’ Wars. To wage war Charles needed to raise revenue, but the only institution that could approve new taxes was Parliament, which had feuded with Charles in the 1620s and was dissolved by him in 1629. In April 1640 the Short Parliament met but was quickly dissolved by Charles because its members wanted to discuss a list of grievances before approving funds for the war. Charles proceeded against the Scots but, his armies were no match for Scottish forces. In 1640 he was faced with an army of occupation in northern England demanding money as a part of its settlement. Short of funds, Charles was forced to call Parliament again, and this time he would be forced to deal with it.
Religion played perhaps the key role in the parliamentary elections, and Calvinists came to dominate the House of Commons. Puritans, increasingly alienated from the ecclesiastical and civil hierarchy since the mid-1620s, saw an opportunity to turn the Church of England from Arminianism and to carry out reforms that had been held in check since the Elizabethan Settlement. Arminianism in theology, liturgy, and government was linked in the popular mind with Catholicism, as fears of a Spanish conspiracy to undermine Protestant England became widespread. The first act of the Long Parliament (1640–53), as it came to be called, was to set aside November 17, 1640, as a day of fasting and prayer. Cornelius Burges and Stephen Marshall were appointed to preach that day to members of Parliament. Their sermons urged the nation to renew its covenant with God in order to bring about true religion through the maintenance of “an able, godly, faithful, zealous, profitable, preaching ministry in every parish church and chapel throughout England and Wales” and through the establishment of a civil magistracy that would be “ever at hand to back such a ministry.” Hundreds of similar sermons were preached on monthly fast days and on other occasions before Parliament during the next few years, urging the people to adopt “true doctrine,” “pure worship,” and “the maintenance of discipline” as a means to claim God’s blessing so that England might become “our Jerusalem, a praise in the midst of the earth.”
Civil war
Charles, it had become apparent, was the patron of the Arminians and their attempt to redefine Anglican doctrine. Arminians in turn favoured Charles’s causes against Puritans and Parliament. This alliance held despite increasing pressure on Charles to cooperate with Parliament on economic and military matters. The resulting civil war between the forces of the king and those of Parliament was hardly just a religious struggle between Arminians and Calvinists, but conflict over religion played an undeniably large role in bringing about the Puritan Revolution. As Protestantism split, so did English society.
Fighting broke out in 1642, and after the first battles members of Parliament called together a committee of over 100 clergymen from all over England to advise them on “the good government of the Church.” This body, the Westminster Assembly of Divines, convened on July 1, 1643, and continued daily meetings for more than five years.
A majority of the Puritan clergy of England probably would have accepted a modified episcopal church government. Parliament, however, needed Scotland’s military help. It adopted the Solemn League and Covenant, which committed the Westminster Assembly to develop a church polity close to Scotland’s presbyterian form. A small, determined assembly group of “Dissenting Brethren” held out for the freedom of the congregation, or “Independency.” Others, called Erastians, argued that the church was subordinate to the state and wanted to limit the offenses under the power of church discipline. Because both groups had support in Parliament, the reform of church government and discipline was frustrated.
Dissent within the assembly was negligible compared with dissent outside it. Pamphlets by John Milton, Roger Williams, and other Puritans pleaded for greater freedom of the press and of religion. Such dissent was supported by the New Model Army, a Parliamentarian force of 22,000 men led by Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–71) as commander in chief and Oliver Cromwell(1599–1658) as second in command. The army’s support for this dissent was made all the more significant because its leaders had become the real power in England after their defeat of Royalist forces. Late in 1648 the victors feared that the Westminster Assembly and Parliament would reach a compromise with the defeated Charles that would destroy their gains for Puritanism. In December 1648 Parliament was purged of members unsatisfactory to the army, and in January 1649 King Charles was tried and executed.
The age of Cromwell (1649–60)
Although the House of Lords was abolished, both Parliament and the assembly continued to sit on a “rump” basis (containing only a remnant of their membership after the purges). In May 1649 the government of the Commonwealth was declared and Cromwell emerged as England’s lord protector. He was a typical Puritan who saw the judgment and mercy of God operating in human affairs and believed that his military success was a sign of God’s blessing of his work.
The Independent clergyman John Owen guided the religious settlement under Cromwell. He maintained that the “reformation of England shall be more glorious than of any Nation in the world, being carried on, neither by might nor power, but only by the spirit of the Lord of Hosts.” Doctrinal error was a problem for both Cromwell and Owen, but, as Owen explained, it was better for 500 errors to be scattered among individuals than for one error to have power and jurisdiction over all others.
Such was the basis for a pluralistic religious settlement in England under the Commonwealth in which parish churches were led by men of Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, or other opinions. Jews were permitted to live in England, but Roman Catholics and Unitarians were not allowed to hold religious views publicly. Cromwell was personally willing to tolerate The Book of Common Prayer, but Parliament was not. Voluntary associations of churches were formed, such as the Worcestershire Association, to keep up a semblance of order among churches and pastors of differing persuasions.
In the upheaval brought on by the wars, radical groups appeared that both challenged and advanced the Puritan vision of the New Jerusalem. The Levellers (a republican and democratic political party) in the New Model Army in 1647 and 1648 interpreted the liberty that comes from the grace of God freely offered to all through Christ as having direct implications for political democracy. In 1649, the Diggers (agrarian communists) planted crops on common land first at St. George’s Hill near Kingston and later at Cobham Manor, also near Kingston to bring forth God’s millennial kingdom, which they understood to be an unstructured community of love with a communal economy. In the same year, the Fifth Monarchy Men (an extreme Puritan millennialist sect), presented their message of no compromise with the old political structure and advocated a new one, composed of saints joined together in congregations with ascending representative assemblies, to bring all men under the kingship of Jesus Christ. As distinct units these groups were short-lived. A more enduring group was founded by George Fox (1624–91) as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which pushed the Puritan position against popery to its logical conclusion by rejecting the need for ministers, sacraments, or liturgy in the church. Puritanism had never been a monolithic movement, and accession to power generated factionalism. The limits of the Puritan spirit showed clearly in the widespread persecution of the Quakers.
The Restoration (1660–85)
After the death of Cromwell, chaos threatened, and in the interest of order even some Puritans supported the restoration of Charles II as king. They hoped for a modified episcopal government, such as had been suggested in 1641 by the archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher(1581–1656). Such a proposal was satisfactory, however, to many Episcopals, Presbyterians, and Independents. When some veterans of the Westminster Assembly went to Holland in 1660 to meet with Charles before he returned, the king made it clear that there would be modifications to satisfy “tender consciences.”
These Puritans were outmaneuvered, however, by those who favoured the strict episcopal pattern. A new Act of Uniformity was passed on May 19, 1662, by the Cavalier Parliament that required reordination of many pastors, gave unconditional consent to The Book of Common Prayer, advocated the taking of the oath of canonical obedience, and renounced the Solemn League and Covenant. Between 1660 and when the act was enforced on August 24, 1662, almost 2,000 Puritan ministers were ejected from their positions.
As a result of the Act of Uniformity, English Puritanism entered the period of the Great Persecution. The Conventicle Act of 1664 punished any person over 16 years of age for attending a religious meeting not conducted according to The Book of Common Prayer. The Five Mile Act of 1665 prohibited any ejected minister from living within five miles of a corporate town or any place where he had formerly served. Still, some Puritans did not give up the idea of “comprehension” (the idea that all ecclesiastical factions might yet find common ground). There were conferences with sympathetic bishops and brief periods of indulgence for Puritans to preach, but fines and imprisonment were frequent. Consequently, Puritanism became a form of Nonconformist Protestantism.
Charles, who converted to Roman Catholicism on his death bed, had steered a course through the turmoil among the various religious factions, but his successor and openly Catholic brother, James II (1685–88), could not. Fear of Roman Catholic tyranny and James’s poor judgment united both establishment and Nonconformist Protestants. This new unity brought about the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), establishing William and Mary on the throne. The last attempt at comprehension failed to receive approval by either Parliament or the Convocation under the new rulers. In 1689 England’s religious solution was defined by an Act of Tolerationthat continued the established church as episcopal but also made it possible for dissenting groups to have licensed chapels. The Puritan goal to further reform the nation as a whole was transmuted into the more individualistic spiritual concerns of Pietism or else the more secularconcerns of the Age of Reason.
Puritanism in the English colonies
Virginia
A decade before the landing of the Mayflower (1620) in Massachusetts, a strong Puritan influence was established in Virginia. Leaders of the Virginia Company who settled Jamestown in 1607 believed that they had a covenant with God, and they carefully read the message of their successes and failures. A typical Puritan vision was held by the Virginia settler Sir Thomas Dale. His strict application of laws disciplining the colony probably saved Jamestown from extinction in 1611, but he also earned a reputation as a tyrant. Dale thought of himself as a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, as a member of Israel building up a “heavenly New Jerusalem.” Like Cromwell later, Dale interpreted his military success as a direct sign of God’s lending “a helping hand.”
Puritan clergy saw an excellent opportunity for their cause in Virginia. The Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the “apostle of Virginia,” wrote to his London Puritan cousin in 1614: “But I much more muse, that so few of our English ministers, that were so hot against the surplice and subscription, come hither where neither is spoken of.” The church in Virginia, however, became more directly aligned with the English establishment when the settlements were made into a royal colony in 1624.
Massachusetts Bay
In New England, however, the Puritans had their greatest opportunity. Between 1628 and 1640 the Massachusetts Bay Colony was developed as a covenant community. Governor John Winthrop stated the case in his lay sermon on board the Arbella:
Thus stands the cause between God and us; we are entered into covenant with Him for this work; we have taken out a commission; the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles…Now if the Lord shall be pleased to hear us and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our Commission, [and] will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it.
The failure to perform the articles, in this view, would bring the wrath of God down upon them.
Church organization in the colony was determined by John Cotton, who pursued “that very Middle-way” between English Separatism and the presbyterian form of government. Unlike the Separatists he held the Church of England to be a true church, though blemished; and unlike the Presbyterians he held that there should be no ecclesiastical authority between the congregation and the Lordship of Christ. Cotton proposed that the church maintain its purity by permitting only those who could make a “declaration of their experience of a work of grace” to be members. Cotton’s plan ensured that church government should be in the hands of the elect.
Inspired by Thomas Cartwright, the Puritans of the Bay Colony fashioned the civil commonwealth according to the framework of the church. Only the elect could vote and rule in the commonwealth. The church would not govern, but it would prepare the “instruments both to rule and to choose rulers.” Biblical law was the primary law for ordering both church and state.
The colony prospered; thus it seemed evident that God was blessing Puritan performance. As a result the leadership could not take kindly to those who publicly criticized their basic program. Hence Roger Williams in 1635 and Anne Hutchinson in 1638 were banished from the colony even though they could declare their experience of the work of grace. More troublesome than these dissenters were persons such as Mary Dyer. She and other Quakers who returned again and again after being punished and banished were finally hanged. It was difficult for the state to keep the church pure.
Fearing that the Westminster Assembly, established by the Parliament to reform the church, would impose a new form of church government on them, churches from the four Puritan colonies—Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven—met in a voluntary synod in 1648. They adopted the Cambridge Platform, in which the congregational form of church government was worked out in detail. The standard for church membership came into question when it was found that numbers of second-generation residents could not testify to the experience of grace in their lives. This resulted in the Half-Way Covenant of 1657 and 1662 that permitted baptized, moral, and orthodox persons to share in the privileges of church membership except for partaking of communion.
Late in the 17th century it was apparent to all that the ideal commonwealth was not being maintained. Ministers pointed to wars with the Native Americans and other problems as signs of God’s judgment. Another sign of the failure of the commonwealth and God’s displeasure was the appearance of what many people thought were witches. The Salem witch trials and hangings took place in 1692 during a period of declining confidence in the old ideal.
Other colonies
Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven were not the only variations on the main theme of realizing the holy commonwealth in America. Roger Williams and the other founders of Rhode Island must also be regarded as Puritans with the “one principle, that every one should have liberty to worship God according to the light of their consciences.” William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania represented the Quaker variation of the Puritan experiment. When Penn became owner of this vast tract of land, he saw it as a mandate from God to form an ideal commonwealth. In New Jersey, Puritans from the New Haven colony who were dissatisfied with the Half-Way Convenant sought to reestablish the pristine Puritan community at Newark. Maryland, which had been established under Roman Catholic auspices, soon had a strong Puritan majority among its settlers. Indeed, there was no colony in which Puritan influence was not strong, and one estimate identifies 85 percent of the churches in the original 13 colonies as Puritan in spirit.
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