Winship - Godly Republicanism and The Origins of The Massachusetts Polity

Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity Author(s): Michael P.
Winship Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), pp. 427-462 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877371 . Accessed: 14/02/2011 22:04
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Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity

Michael P. Winship October 19, 1630, the male adults of the raw new colony of Massachusetts Bay stood in a clearing in Charlestown and listened as John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, made two proposals. One was that they put themselves forward to become freemen, or voters, in the company. The other was that these freemen would elect assistants, the directors of the company, "when there are to be chosen." Any necessary elections were to take place in a yearly meeting of the company's General Court. The assembled colonists assented to Winthrop's proposals. Thereafter the new freemen's powers rapidly expanded. Annual elections of all the assistants and the governor commenced in 1632. In 1634 the General Court became the colony's chief judicial court and legislative body, meeting four times a year with the freemen represented by deputies from each town.1 Yet even the initial changes of 1630 made Massachusetts the only polity within King Charles I's realms where freemen had final control over all the officials who immediately affected their lives. It was the initiation of a process whereby the colonists created a hybrid political order whose ideological foundation can be characterizedas godly republicanism. A New England innovation, godly republicanism was a constitutional arrangement intended to preserve the purity of the churches and the liberties of the people. Its roots lay in ecclesiastical agitation by late-sixteenth-century puritans who brought republican assumptions about the nature and dangers of government to questions of church polity. Their ecclesiastical republicanism fed into a broader, eventually MichaelP. Winshipis E. MertonCoulterProfessor Historyat the University of of Georgia. thanksFrancis Bremer, He Tom Cogswell,StephenFoster,MarkA. J. readerfor the William MaryQuarterly their and for Peterson,and an anonymous The at helpfulcommentsand suggestions. articlealso benefitedfrompresentations the Georgia on American of Historyand Cultureat the University Workshop Early
Georgia, the 2003 annual meeting of the North American Conference on British Modern Studies Institute Workshop. 1 Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853), I: 79-80, 95, The 1630 II7-19. decision was clarified at the next meeting of the General Court in May 1631, where it was explained that at the yearly General Court meeting the freemen could add assistants or remove them "for any defect or misbehav[io]r" (I: 87). William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LXIII, Number 3, July 2oo6
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and Studies, and the 2006 Williamand MaryQuarterly USC-HuntingtonEarly
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self-consciously republican civic ideology nurtured by the resistance of many of Massachusetts' founders to the fiscal innovations of Charles I. The recovery of godly republicanism opens new perspectives on the history of the political cultures of British North America, draws attention to long-standing ideological fissures in England, and sheds light on neglected political aspects of puritanism itself. Republicanism is perhaps as slippery to define as puritanism and is subject to even more heuristic abuse. The 197os and I980s saw a swelling flood tide of republicanism sweep over United States historiography. Republicanism was increasingly perceived as the chief ideological propulsion behind American history, and at its peak this tide carried on its vast explanatory current groups as disparate as eighteenth-century Virginia planters and twentieth-century factory workers. A prominent 1993 article exposed the vacuousness with which scholars were handling the concept, and the tide receded with the rapidity of the dot-com crash.2 Scholars of Elizabethanand early Stuart England largely sat this boomand-bust cycle out. In the early seventeenth century, "republican" was an insult; "republic"itself was far more often used to mean "commonwealth" in general rather than specifically a kingless state with accountability to the "people";such a kingless state was more commonly described as a "free state" or popular state than a "republic." J. G. A. Pocock pronounced English republicanism a structural impossibility before the 165os, and historians of Anglo-American republicanism routinely began chronologically with the English political theorists of that decade.3
2 Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History 79, no. I (June 1992): 11-38. I tested my impression of the crash of republicanism on "America: History and Life" (http://serials.abc - c I io. com/active/start?_appname=serials &initialdb=AHL) by doing a search for the word "republicanism" in article titles (excluding book reviews and cases where the term referred to the political party or to a non-North American context) in the nine-year periods from 1986 to 1994 and from 1995 to 2003, my assumption being that Rodgers's article would have started to have an effect by 1995. There were fortyseven results for the first period and twenty-six for the second. The first period had twelve articles in journals I identified as major or arguably so (Journal of the Early Republic, Historical Journal, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Journal ofAmerican History, Journal of Urban History, William and Mary Quarterly), whereas the second had three (Journal of American Studies, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal ofSouthern History). 3 John Florio, Queen Anna's New World of Words; Or, Dictionaire of the Italian and English tongues ... (London, 1611),429, for example, translates the Italian word free-state, the weale-publike." Cicero, as a "Repdiblica" as "a Common-wealth, Roman republican, implied in De officiis that Rome had only been a true Res publica (that is, a commonwealth) while under its traditional constitution. This implication, Quentin Skinner suggests, is the impetus for the term's eventual contraction to exclusively mean elected governments (see Skinner, "Machiavelli's Discorsi and the
AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY REPUBLICANISM
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Nonetheless as the bloom started to fade from American republicanism, English scholars began making increasingly confident forays across the Pocockian chronological divide in search of motifs of republicanism. Patrick Collinson detected republican conceptions of the commonwealth underlying Privy Council decisions in the 158os and, on a practical level, steering the operations of town governments. Literary scholars soon discovered a rich vein of Ciceronian humanism running through the literature of Tudor and early Stuart England and identified it with republicanism, and they noted how authors deployed republican motifs in imaginative writing. Scholars now expansively speak of an "unacknowledged republic" of officeholders and even of a "gentry republic" in early Stuart England. Critics have justly accused such scholars of repeating, in effect, the sins of their recent American forebears by slapping the label republican on arguments for limited monarchy and resistance theory or on evidence of subjects participating in the government of the kingdom and its localities. Indeed one of the most vigorous investigators of hints of early Stuart republicanism, Markku Peltonen, concedes that during this period "we do not . . . encounter a coherent republican movement." Critics have called for a more rigorous and restricted use of the term republicanism even while acknowledging that it can serve as a valid analytic category in this period.4
Pre-Humanist Origins of Republican Ideas," in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, Ideas in Context [Cambridge, 1990], 133 n. 94); Blair Worden, "Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience," in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2002), I: 323 n. Io; J. G. A. Pocock, The Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), chap. 11. In this seminal work, Pocock was more concerned with explaining the structural reasons that made it impossible, he felt, for pre-Civil War puritans to manifest a republican type of civil consciousness than with exploring what they actually said on commonwealth themes. For an evaluation in England, see of Pocock and the historiography of classical republicanism
Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English
Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), chap. I. 4 Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), 1-58; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-164o (Cambridge, 1995), 12; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, z627-166o (Cambridge, 1999); Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649-1653 (Stanford, Calif., 1997), Mark Goldie, "The Unacknowledged Republic: republic"); 201oi ("gentry in Early Modern England," in The Politics of the Excluded, c. Officeholding 15oo-185o, ed. Tim Harris (New York, zooi), 153-94; John Guy, "Monarchy and Counsel: Models of the State," in The Sixteenth Century, 1485-1603, ed. Patrick Collinson (Oxford, Eng., 2002), 123. For reservations about the use of republicanism, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), Ii, 22, 54-55; Blair Worden, "On the Winning Side: Where Does the English Republican Tradition Begin?" Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 29, 1999, 5-6; Kevin Sharpe,
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Worden calls, straightforwardly, "constitutionalrepublicanism." the By

1630s its varied manifestations ranged from the ancient Roman Republic and Grecian city-states to the contemporary Venetian and Dutch republics. Worden calls the ideological component, with imperatives emphasizing virtuous citizens' active participation in government and the
One critic, Blair Worden, suggests for clarity's sake the employment of terminology that clearly distinguishes between republicanism's constitutional and ideological components. The constitutional component
dangerof the corruptingeffects of uncheckedpower, "civicrepublicanism." It is important to keep the two components distinct because many of civic republicanism's motifs grew out of a widely diffused classical and Christian humanist heritage. Those motifs can be found not only in the context of constitutional republicanism but also in the context of limited monarchy and, at a stretch, absolute monarchy. Thus motifs of civic republicanism on their own, without the advocacy of kingless constitutional republican forms, are not sufficient to constitute republicanism.5 Ecclesiastical civic republicanism was widely dispersed among puritans. They feared the infiltration of the Roman Catholic Church's tyranny into the Church of England and advocated the zealous pursuit of sound religion and morality by clergy and laity alike. Puritan activism stemmed from their broader Christian humanist inheritance and from the dynamics of a movement that had a heavy degree of lay participation.6
Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics
(Cambridge, 2000), chap. 7; Worden, "Republicanism, Regicide and Republic," "Literature and National Identity," in The 309-14; Johann P. Sommerville, Janel Mueller (Cambridge, 2ooz), 472, 474. For a summary of the positive effect the hunt for republicanism has had on the scholarly understanding of English govern-
CambridgeHistory of Early Modern English Literature,ed. David Loewenstein and
ment, see Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.
155o-i64o (Basingstoke, Eng., zooo), 26-29. 5 Worden, "Republicanism, Regicide and Republic," 307-8. Worden acknowledges that his earlier work helped encourage the excessive use of the term. Markku Peltonen has a good brief description of civic republicanism (Peltonen, Classical Early Stuart England (Aldershot, Eng.,
2000),
Humanismand Republicanism, John Guy, Politics, Law, and Counselin Tudorand 2);
292-310.
I5oo-I625, Ideas in Context (Cambridge, 2003), 191. For an example from the historiography of a more recent period when republicanism means civic republicanism, see Gordon S. Wood, who writes that in the mid-eighteenth century "classical republican values existed everywhere among educated people in the English-speaking world," also noting that those values were put to the service of reforming the English mixed monarchy or expressing admiration for it, not to the service of its overthrow (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution [New York, 1991], 1o9). Context (Cambridge, 1987); Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, chap.
Fitzmaurice, Humanismand America:An IntellectualHistoryof English Colonisation,
Compare with Andrew
6 Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order, Ideas in
5.
REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY
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For presbyterians, the most radical of puritans, however, civic republicanism functioned as the underpinning for ecclesiastical constitutional republicanism and thus for a coherent republican movement.7 This movement has fallen outside the purview of writers on republicanism for a variety of reasons: it involved church, not civic polity; it jostled for space in presbyterian treatises with a host of other issues concerning the nature of the true church and its practices; its theoretical underpinnings were buried under masses of scripture citations and examples from the early church; and it only manifested its civic possibilities on the other side of the Atlantic, some forty years after sustained government repression led to the collapse of English presbyterianism as a viable political movement. Elizabethan presbyterians wished to see the Church of England remodeled along the lines of Continental Calvinist churches. They wanted the Church of England to be governed not by bishops but by classes and synods, or associations of ruling lay and ministerial elders from individual churches. Individual churches would be internally governed by the elders with the consent of their congregations, who also had to consent to the elders' appointments. Historians have frequently remarked on that emphasis on consent and participation, though not the way in which presbyterians sometimes buttressed it by appeals to classical history and classical authors. Similarly, it has often been noted that the presbyterians contrasted their emphasis on participatory government with the absolute rule and tyranny of the Church of England's bishops.8 What needs to be stressed is that presbyterians saw their church system not only in opposition to tyranny but also in crucial ways or the Apostles' tendedto callthemdisciplinardiscipline, the like.Theiropponents ians. In England,presbyterianism, being unofficial,lackedany coercivecapacities, which has causedsome scholars stressthe protocongregational to tendencies its of
gatherings. The lineage, in terms of personnel and positions, between Elizabethan
7 Presbyterians spoke of the government they wanted simply as the discipline,
of and Confessionis presbyterianism the officialPresbyterianism the Westminster not straightforward, which is why scholarsrarelycapitalizepresbyterianism when version. For that lineage, see Carol GearySchneider, discussingthe Elizabethan The "GodlyOrderin a ChurchHalf-Reformed: Disciplinarian Legacy,1570-1641" ment in churchorganization the Netherlands the ChannelIslands.See A. F. in and Thomas ScottPearson, and Puritanism: (Gloucester, Cartwright Elizabethan 1535-16o3
Mass., 1966), 159-61, 380; Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English comments on the political structure of presbyterianism, to Hooker (London, 1988), 53-64. see Pearson, Church and (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1986). 8 This summary is based on presbyterian treatises and on presbyterian involve-
and Scottish Churches the Netherlands the Sixteenth Seventeenth in and Centuries, of Studiesin the Historyof Christian Netherlands, 1982),20-29. For Thought(Leiden,
State:PoliticalAspectsof SixteenthCenturyPuritanism(Cambridge, 1928);Peter Lake, and Anglicansand Puritans? Presbyterianism English ConformistThought from Whitgift
432
as a prophylactic against tyranny, constituted not simply by scriptural precept but by the classical republican drive to restrain the corrupting effects of power. Absolute rule, in other words, was not simply the opposite of presbyterianism, it was the defining other that gave presbyterianism much of its republican logic. The centrality of absolute rule to the argument for presbyterianism runs through its critique of the Church of England. Among the many dire failings of that church, the worst and most fundamental was the bishops themselves: "Popelike" and "proude, pontificall and tyrannous" or "Rebels and traitours unto God."9 But if the problems with the Church of England stemmed from corrupt and tyrannical bishops, as presbyterians argued so forcefully, why not simply install godly ones? If the church could be run by men who labored to see powerful preaching in every parish, sought the advice of their clergy, and took care to ensure that the church's discipline worked effectively, the bulk of the presbyterian critique of the Church of England would wither away. The presbyterian answer was that the church's problems could not be solved by finding good men. The office of bishop, with one man ruling over many, was itself fundamentally wrong for two reasons. First bishops wrongfully usurped the role of Christ. As Thomas Cartwright, intellectual leader of the Elizabethan presbyterians, explained, "The monarchy over the whole church, and over every particular church, and over every singular member in the church, is in Christ alone." Second the office of bishop was also wrong because it invariably brought to the surface a sinister force much dreaded in civic republicanism: "excessive power," as Cartwright put it.1o This force was so deadly that it supplied the wedge by which Antichrist first entered the church. As the presbyterian myth of the church's fall conveyed it, Antichrist got his toehold in the church when a minister asserted primacy over the other elders in a single congregation. Soon some ambitious minister took a further step, falsely arrogating the name of bishop to himself to correct other ministers, and the slippery path went downhill from there. Next came preeminence by a single minister in a single city, then power over a number of cities, then power over fellow bishops, and finally power over the entire church. "The swelling 9 [John Udall], A Parte of a Register, contayninge sundrie memorable matters ... (Middelburg, Netherlands, 1593), 368 ("Rebels"); W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas,
A Revolt witha Reprint eds., Puritan Manifestoes:Study the Origin thePuritan of of of

the Admonition to the Parliament and Kindred Documents, i572 (1907; repr., London,
I954), 5-6 ("Popelike"). 10
Answer theAdmonition, to the . Against reply Thomas of Cartwright.. (Cambridge,

1853), 3: 198, 2: 280 ("excessive power").
John Ayre, ed., The Works ofJohn Whitgift. . . Containing the Defence of the
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waters of the ambition of divers," summarized Cartwright, "could not by any banks be kept in, which, having once broken out in certain places, afterwards covered almost the face of the whole earth." Switching the metaphor, Cartwright'sassociate Walter Traverslamented, "So did Sathan in his misterie of iniquitie, make these staires for the mounting of Antichrist: whereby at the last, he setled him as amongst the starres."11 The ideal remedy for unrestrained power was presbyterianism. Though the New Testament remained silent on the point, early presbyterian writers consistently emphasized that the participatory political structures of the New Testament churches were designed to prevent tyranny. "Common reason" alone, Cartwright claimed in the absence of scriptural evidence, "also doth teach that contraries are cured by their contraries." Thus "to abolish the tyranny of the popish government, [it is] necessary to plant the discipline of Christ." As William Fulke explained, "Tyranny is avoyded when no one man (contrarie to the ordinaunce of Christe) . . . shall presume to doe anye thing in the Church, without the advise and consent of others that bee Godlye and wise." In other words power in presbyterianism was diffused, not concentrated, with the express purpose of avoiding tyranny. "One is easier to be corrupted," warned Cartwright. For one man, such as a bishop, to decide matters of discipline was in itself tyranny, according to Fulke. It was for this reason that Cartwright justified the power of synods. The particular always gave way to the general; individual churches always gave way to the many. Similarly, according to A SecondAdmonition to the Parliament, the right way "to resolve all doubts and questions in religion, and to pacifie all controversies of the churches, [was] to passe from one or few to moe, & from moe, to moe godly and learned."12 Since blocking tyranny, not removing bishops per se, was the presbyterians' goal, suppressing bishops was only the first step. Presbyterians were well aware that the potential for excessive power in the church did not end as soon as ministers enjoyed parity and shared their power with lay elders. A SecondAdmonition to the Parliament bluntly raised the possibility that the elders may "usurpe authoritie over the whole churche
11 [Walter Travers], A Defence of the Ecclesiastical Discipline ordayned of God to be Used in His Church ([Middelburg, Netherlands, 1588]), 98; Ayre, Works ofJohn Whitgift, 2: 168, 379. 12Ayre, Works ofJohn Whitgift, i: 18, 2: 441, 244; [William Fulke], A Briefe and plaine declaration, concerning the desires of all thosefaithfull Ministers, that have and do
98. For Fulke's authorship of this treatise, see Mathew Sutcliffe, An Answere to a Certaine Libel Sypplicatorie; Or, Rather Diffamatory, and also to certaine Calumnious A Second Admonition to the Articles . . . (London, 1592), 41. [Anonymous],
seeke theDiscipline reformation theChurch Englande and (London, 1584), for of of 107,
III. Parliament,in Frereand Douglas, PuritanManifestoes,
434
whereby we might caste out the tirannie of the bishops, & bring in a new tyrannie of theirs." Such a result, Travers averred, would "reteyne still the same tyranny in the churche, chaunginge only the persons." Fulke agreed: "We must take heede that we open not a window to popish tyrannie."13 The need to forestall the possibility of tyrannical elders justified the critical presbyterian concept of congregational consent. Fulke explained that the possibility for elders to lapse into popish tyranny was prevented by two instruments that "moderated" their "authoritye" and allowed their judgment to "be rightly accounted the judgement of the holy Church." First they received their positions with the assent of their churches. Second the churches needed to consent to their decisions. That mechanism of consent, stated A Second Admonition to the Parliament, meant that the elders could not usurp authority over the entire church.14 This system of checks and balances should have been sufficient, yet, like other political theorists, presbyterians had not completely solved the problem of creating a foolproof route between the Scylla and Charybdis of the tyranny of absolute rule and what was almost universally feared in this hierarchical age as the confusion of democratic excess. Only one writer, Travers, even explored the hypothetical question of what was to happen when eldership and people found themselves at loggerheads. The solution seemed simple to him: the eldership kept working on the problem until the people agreed with them. Travers seems to have envisioned that, as a last resort, the churches collectively could override the decisions of a synod.15 These early presbyterian tracts show how presbyterianism served as a vehicle for and amplification of not only puritan drives for biblical purity, community, and discipline but also puritanism's civic republicanism. It is no great strain to label what the presbyterians envisioned at the heart of England's reformation as a godly republican church order. That order would be sovereign over the monarch's subjects in its own sphere and would allow no religious competition, and monarchs themselves would enjoy no special privileges or immunities in it. Though there would be no absolute rule in presbyterian churches, presbyterians would remain vigilant for signs of abuse of authority. At least in part to avoid that abuse, power would be diffused and government would be by
13
([Heidelberg, Germany], 1574), 54; Fulke, Briefe andplaine declaration, 8o; Second Admonition to the Parliament, in Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, Ii9. 14 Fulke, Briefe andplaine declaration, 84, 86. 15Travers, Full and plaine Declaration, 54, 135.
off the wordoff God,and off theDeclininge the churche England off off from thesame
[Walter Travers],A full and plaine Declarationof Ecclesiasticall Disciplineowt
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consent. By envisioning their order as a dynamic attempt to prevent the corrosive effects of power, presbyterians attempted to solve what J. G. A. Pocock sees as republicanism's "Machiavellian moment," its fundamental challenge: how to remain "morally and politically stable" in a temporal stream "essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability."'16 There is no reason to be surprised that the ideological preoccupations of classical political theorists migrated into presbyterian texts. Exposure to those writers was a standard component of English education. As a Cambridge undergraduate in a debate staged before the queen, Cartwright argued for the superiority of mixed monarchy over absolute monarchy (he was adjudged to have lost). In his treatises on church government, he occasionally appealed to writers on civic government to back up his points. Travers drew on examples from Greece and Rome to illustrate the structural merits of presbyterian government. Presbyterians did not hesitate to describe and validate their polity in terms drawn from classical political theory; it was a mixed government and, as such, approved by classical authorities as the best kind of government. They oscillated between describing this mixed government in its ideal and working states. In its ideal state, it was three-fold, incorporating the one, the few, and the many, or monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Christ was the monarch, while the elders and the congregations represented aristocracy and democracy. In its day-to-day running, presbyterian church government was twofold, with the aristocracy of the elders and the democracy of the congregation. No one at the time would need to be reminded that such a twofold government was republican, or a "status popularis" (popular state), as one of its defenders acknowledged parenthetically, like the government of the city-state at the center of Continental presbyterianism, Geneva.l7
16 For biblical purity, community, and discipline, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 41-45; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? chap. I; Bozeman, The PrecisianistStrain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2oo004), chaps. 2-3. Pocock, MachiavellianMoment,viii. 17 Travers, Full and plaine Declaration,1-2, 161, 178; Thomas Cartwright, The secondreplie of ThomasCartwright: secondanswer, AgaynstMaister Doctor Whitgiftes touchingthe Churche Discipline ([Heidelberg, Germany], I575), 228; RichardWatson Dixon, Historyof the Churchof Englandfrom the Abolition of the RomanJurisdiction Beza: (Oxford, Eng., 1902), 6: 16; Tadataka Maruyama, The Ecclesiology Theodore of The Reform of the True Church, Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance (Geneva, Switzerland,1978), 117; Todd, ChristianHumanismand Puritan Social Order,90o-91; Ayre, Works ofJohn Whitgift,1:390, 3: 18o-81; Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and SeparatistEcclesiology,157o-z625, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford, Eng., 1988), I6o; J[ohn] C[otton], "Copy of a Letter from Mr. Cotton to Lord Say and Seal in the Year 1636,"in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan
Political Ideas, 1558-1794, American Heritage Series (Indianapolis, Ind., I965), 172.
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John Calvin helped write Geneva's laws, and he distrusted monarchy, claiming that in the state as well as the church, "a system compounded of aristocracy and democracy . . . far excells all others." The English presbyterians' opponents were all too glad to point out what they saw as the subversive relationship between presbyterianism and republicanism. The presbyterians "endevour to bring our Church gouvernment to that of Geneva, which is a popular state," Matthew Sutcliffe charged, while Richard Bancroft complained of the presbyterians' "Geneva humor." Cartwright's opponent, John Whitgift, warned him: "God hath appointed the multitude, how godly and learned soever they be, to obey and not to rule; unless indeed you will make the state popular, to which all your arguments bend." Queen Elizabeth loathed the civic and constitutional republicanism of puritanism. It was "dangerous to a kingly rule," she warned Parliament, "to have every man, according to his own censure, to make a doom . . . of the validity and privity of his Prince's government." And presbyterianism was "most prejudicial unto the religion established, to her crown, to her government, and to her subjects."'8 The printing of presbyterian ecclesiastical political theorizing ceased in the 158os. This new restraint was probably a consequence of the heavy countercharges such theorizing provoked. In the remaining few years before trials and death sentences ended presbyterianism as an organized political movement, its polemicists defended their system simply on the basis that scripture demanded it without drawing on the traditions of classical political theory to explain why.19
18 John T. McNeill, ed., Ford Lewis Battles, trans., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia, 1960), 2: 1493 (bk. 4, viewof monarchs preference republics for and chap.20, para.8). Calvin's jaundiced is discussed in Harro H6pfl, The Christian Polity ofJohn Calvin (Cambridge, 1982),
Kingdon, "John Calvin's Contribution to Representative Government," in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of H. G. Koenigsberger, ed. Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob (Cambridge, 1987), 183-98; Matth[ew] Sutcliffe, A Treatise of Ecclesiasticall Discipline: Wherein that confusedforme of government, which certeine under false pretence, and title of reformation, and true discipline, do strive to bring into the Church of England ... (London, [1590]), 2oI; Richard Bancroft, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings published and practised within the Iland of Brytaine, under pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbiteriall Discipline ... (London, 1593), 18; Ayre, Works ofJohn Whitgift, 3: 275. For Elizabeth's remarks, see John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, D.D.: The Third and Last Lord Archbishop of Canterbury in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth ... (Oxford, Eng., 1822), 1: 393, 495. For a discussion of the accusations of "popularity" and disloyalty to monarchy in the earlier debate between Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift, see Lake,
M. see chap.7. On Calvin'srole in settingup the Genevacity government, Robert
Anglicansand Puritans?6o-62.
19 For the trials, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, Calif., 1967), 403-31. In 1590 minister John Udall was convicted of sedi-
POLITY AND REPUBLICANISM THE MASSACHUSETTS
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ried multiple meanings.It certainlywould have included the liberty of it Christiansto worship God correctly.As the plural noun "liberties," such as those guaranteed would have embraced rights and privileges In jury and taxation through representation. the singularit could have
tion, which bore the death penalty (not carried out in this instance), after a judge ruled that criticizing bishops was the same as defaming the queen herself and thus seditious. Minister John Penry was executed for writings he composed before becoming a separatist. See Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans; Or, Protestant in Nonconformists; from the Reformation 1517, to the Revolutionin 1688 .. . (London, Master 1837), I: 330-33, 356-6o0;Leland H. Carlson, Martin Marprelate,Gentleman: Laid Openin His Colors(San Marino, Calif., 1981), 88. Job Throkmorton 20 Cartwright argued that ecclesiastical affairs were more difficult than civil affairsand thus could not be trusted to one man and that ecclesiastical tyrants were more dangerous than secular ones; besides, monarchy as a civic institution was allowed by God (see Cartwright, Second replie, 130, 578). Cartwright also pointed out, however, that monarchs were not necessary in the state any more than in the church: "There are other good commonwealths, wherein many have like power and authority" (see Ayre, Worksof John Whitgift,2: 263). On the fusing of secular and religious concerns, see Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue:Philip Sidney'sArcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 59, citing Sidney on Roman Catholicism and tyranny. Sidney set up a presbyterian church at his garrison at Flushing in the Netherlands. See S. L. Adams, "The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585-1630"(Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1973), 68. [Dudley Fenner], Sacra Theologia, sive Veritas qua est secundumpietatem . . . in decem libros per DvdleivmFennervm digesta(n.p., [I8J5]), 168, I85.
In the secular political sphere, Elizabethan presbyterians were civic republicans but not constitutional ones, regardless of the accusations of their opponents, nor was there any reason why they should have been. Church and state to presbyterians were separate polities with separate restraints and requirements; Thomas Cartwright went to great pains to explain why monarchy could be acceptable in civic but not ecclesiastical government. Presbyterians were aggressive proponents, however, of the rule of law and of limited monarchy, as well they might be, given their civic republicanism and their need to contend with Queen Elizabeth's hostility. For the advancement of their cause, presbyterians fought in the 1580s for the protection of the laws of England as they understood them, freedom of speech in Parliament, and restraints on the monarch's prerogative. In developments critically foreshadowing future positions in that decade, they began fusing secular and religious concerns by associating Roman Catholicism with secular tyranny. At least one presbyterian, Dudley Fenner, stressed the duty of princes to defend liberty and claimed that the representative bodies of a kingdom could overthrow a tyrannical king.20 The liberty that Fenner wanted princes to defend would have car-
under England's ancient constitution, including the rights to trial by
438
referred not simply to the absence of restraints but to a citizen's freedom and obligation to participate in the public affairs of a commonwealth. As scholars have frequently noted, puritans favored this latter, dynamic
sense of liberty.The prominentministerArthurHildersamwarnedthat

people who had "no care of the common good" were not among the saved. John Winthrop described the liberty of the Massachusetts' freemen as not a "bare passive capacitye of freedome or immunity, but such a Libertye, as hath power to Acte upon the cheife meanes of its owne wellfare."21 Liberty, in its various meanings, was widely perceived to be under
began to vigorously assert his prerogatives in his efforts to extract money from his subjects. Ambitious clerics hostile to puritanism and advancing the relatively novel antipresbyterian conception of divine right episcopacy received his protection while they asserted his absolute authority. To all his critics, James'sfund-raising efforts threatened traditional English liberties, whereas for puritans the assault included an attack on fundamental Christian liberty. The House of Commons repeatedly approved measures that would have provided relief for nonconforming puritan ministers, but they were subsequently blocked. One of Parliament's most aggressive and conceptually advanced defenders of the liberty of English freemen in their property, Nicholas Fuller, was a no-less-aggressive and conceptually advanced defender of presbyterians and nonconformists in the law courts, though many of James's most vociferous parliamentary opponents were not puritans.22
21 "Christian Liberty, is a spirituall benefit ... to the setting free of the faithfull from the (a) preceptes and traditions of men . . ." (Tho[mas] Wilson, A Christian ... Dictionarie, Opening the signification of the chiefe words dispersed generally through Holie Scriptures ... [London, 1612], 292); David Harris Sacks, "Parliament, Liberty, and the Commonweal," in Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War, ed. J. H. Hexter, The Making of Modern Freedom (Stanford, Calif., 1992), IiO; Arthur Hildersam, CLII Lectures on Psalme LI... (London, 1635), 125; Allyn Bailey Forbes et al., eds., The Winthrop Papers (Boston, 1944), 4: 468. For discussion of the fusion of classical republican and humanist conceptions of liberty with English common law conceptions, see Quentin Skinner, "The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty" in Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, Machiavelli and Republicanism, 293-309; Skinner, "Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation and the English Civil War," in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), 308-43. For puritan civic involvement, see Richard Cust, "Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s," in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, i6o03-642, ed. Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), 138-39; T. H. Breen, The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 163o-173o, Yale Historical Publications (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 14-31; Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, z61o-1692, New England Studies (Boston, 1994), 78-79. 22 Clive Holmes, "Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property," in Hexter, Parliament and Liberty, 138-44. Fuller is an important and unduly neglected figure.
assaultduringthe reignof KingJamesI (1603-25).James unprecedented
439
Charles I, who ascended the throne in 1625, liked the divine authorof kings and disliked Parliament even more than his father, and he ity tilted the precarious balance of power in the Church of England further away from Calvinist theology and discrete puritanism. On top of that, he married a French Catholic and proved far more ingenious than James in finding extraparliamentary ways to separate his subjects from their money. These monarchical activities took place within an ominous European context. The Thirty Years' War, ravaging central Europe from I618 to 1648, was the most dramatic manifestation of what seemed to militant English Protestants a desperate Continent-wide struggle of liberty and Protestantism against absolute monarchy and Roman Catholicism. Charles, given his assaults on the status quo of the Church of England and the liberties of his subjects, practically invited his opponents to see England as the latest battleground of this war and to fuse together their religious and civic concerns. By the end of the 162os, the godliest members of Parliament were weaving together a tapestry in which Parliament, liberty, property, and religion all appeared under attack from a sinister Catholic conspiracy against England with the king a coconspirator, albeit perhaps unwittingly.23 The puritan conflation of religion, liberty, and property did not cease at the level of rhetoric, and the defense of this agglomeration of religion, liberty, and property did not stay confined within the halls of Parliament. Political consciousness among the people of England was rising in the 162os in response to the struggles among the country's leaders. In late 1626 Charles demanded an extraparliamentarymassive forced loan from his subjects, with slender prospects of its ever being repaid. Widespread protest followed, resulting in the jailing of seventy-six gentlemen, the dismissal of four members of the House of Lords from their local offices, and the removal of the chief justice for failing to approve the loan.24
See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v., "Nicholas Fuller (1543-162o),"
religious initiatives in this period and notes that most puritan members of Parliament were "active in the ranks of the parliamentary opposition to royal policy" (see Foster,
I57o0-7oo
23
for an introduction. of StephenFosterhas a good summary puritanparliamentary

The Long Argument:English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture,
[Chapel Hill, N.C., i991],
114-22
[quotation,
c. 64-66. Tyacke, Aspects ofEnglishProtestantism, i53o-I7oo (Manchester,Eng., 2oo001),
12i]). See also Nicholas
Leadershipof the House of Commons in 1629," in Faction and Parliament:Essayson EarlyStuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford, Eng., 1978), 253, 272.
24 F. J. Levy, "How Information Spread among the Gentry, 155o-1640," Journal of British Studies 21, no. 2 (Spring 1982): II-34; Richard Cust, "News and Politics in
see Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629 developments, "The Divided (Oxford, Eng., 1982), 379-81, 404-8; Christopher Thompson,
Scott, England'sTroubles: Seventeenth-Century EnglishPolitical Instabilityin European Context (Cambridge, 2000), chap. 2. For good discussions of these parliamentary
For an analysis of the European context of the English disputes, see Jonathan
440
The forced loan also resulted in puritan-directed activism in Lincolnshire that has been called "one of the most effective protests against Crown policy in the entire pre-Civil War period." Prominent future Massachusetts leaders were deeply involved in this protest. Theophilus Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, who was active in the organization of the Massachusetts Bay Company, spearheaded it. His confederates included the ministers-to-be of Salem and Boston, Samuel Skelton and John Cotton, and future Massachusetts assistants Atherton Hough, Isaac Johnson (the earl's son-in-law), William Coddington, Richard Bellingham, and John Humphry (another son-in-law), along with future Massachusetts governor Thomas Dudley (at the time Lincoln's steward). Dudley coordinated the Lincolnshire protest in 1627 while Lincoln was imprisoned for distributing and probably writing a manuscript pamphlet against the loan. Protests against the king's behavior typically went at least through the motion of assuming his benevolent intentions and a harmony of interests between him and his subjects: as one member of Parliament put it in 1629 while savaging the king's policies, the king's "goodness is so clear, that we need not mistrust." The earl's pamphlet, on the other hand, assumed struggle, not harmony. It made no acknowledgment of the king's benevolence; the loan was part of a larger project to "suppresseParlament"and to rob the freemen of England of their liberties. Thus to pay the loan would be to "makeour selves the Instruments of our owne slavery,"and all those who cared for "the good of the common wealth" were refusing it. The pamphlet and successfully disruptive Lincolnshire protest movement embodied oppositional politics that would become familiar in the 1640s.25 The issues raised by the forced loan did not overtly overlap with religious issues, yet a significant geographical connection existed between areas of strident protest against the loan and areas of puritanism. That geographic connection suggests the extent to which the Early Seventeenth-Century England,"Past and Present,no. 112 (August1986): I ThomasCogswell,"ThePoliticsof Propaganda: Charles and the Peoplein 60o-90; the 1620S," Journalof BritishStudies29, no. 3 (July 1990): 187-215; AdamFox, News and PopularPoliticalOpinion in Elizabethan and EarlyStuart "Rumour, Historical 1997):597-620. The standard Journal40, no. 3 (September England," Loanand English 1626-1628 accountof the forcedloan is Cust, TheForced Politics, (Oxford, Eng.,1987). 25 Cust, Forced follows Loanand English Politics,165-71, 329. This paragraph Cust's interpretation. Lincoln's pamphlet survives as State Papers Domestic I6/54/82i, Public RecordsOffice, London.WallaceNotestein and FrancesHelen Editedand an Introduction Relf, eds., Commons Debates I629:Critically Dealing for with Parliamentary Sources the EarlyStuarts (Minneapolis,Minn., 1921), 94. for Comparewith Conrad Russell, "The Nature of a Parliamentin Early Stuart England," in Beforethe EnglishCivil War:Essayson Early StuartPoliticsand Tomlinson(NewYork,1983), ed. Government, Howard 123-5o.
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fight for true religion and the battle against what was perceived as arbitrary government had become intertwined. Future members of the Massachusetts Bay Company were among the London merchants who refused to pay the loan. Winthrop kept his imprisoned neighbor, Sir Francis Barrington, informed of the significant resistance to the loan in the heavily puritan Stour Valley region. "What times are these!" lamented Essex minister John Wilson to Winthrop over the assault on property early in 1627. "No man knowes what is his owne, or whither that he hath, be not kept for the enemies of god?" A year later Wilson wrote a supportive electioneering letter to Barrington, commending him and the rest of "those worthy Zelots and patriots" for their care of church and commonwealth. By 1630 Wilson had left with Winthrop for Massachusetts.26 The disastrously unsuccessful Parliaments of 1628 and 1629 reinforced the ominous lessons of the forced loan for puritans. The latter Parliament ended with the Speaker of the House of Commons being held in his chair by fellow members of Parliament to keep him from calling an adjournment at the king's command. Meanwhile the Commons passed three resolutions read by John Eliot denouncing innovations in religion and warning of the threat that Charles's financial designs on his subjects' property presented to the "Liberty of the Kingdome." There was widespread concern that this session might be the last meeting of Parliament for an indefinite period; Charles warned that he would not call another until those whom he regarded as the ringleaders of parliamentary opposition had been punished and their followers had "come to a better understanding of us and themselves," not conditions likely to leave puritans waiting in anticipation. Eliot had leisure enough while subsequently imprisoned in the Tower of London to copy out Winthrop's arguments for the Massachusetts colony.27 of Clericsin tion, see Kenneth WayneShipps,"Lay Patronage EastAnglianPuritan
resistanceto the forced loan, see William Hunt, ThePuritan Moment: The Comingof
26 Forbes et al., Winthrop Papers, 1: 336-37, 2: 57. For the John Wilson quota-
Pre-Revolutionary England" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1971), io8. Cust, Forced Loan and English Politics, 232-33, chap. 5. For a detailed study of the Essex context of Revolution in an English County, Harvard Historical Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), chap. 8. See also Francis J. Bremer, "The Heritage of John Winthrop: Religion along the Stour Valley, 1548-1630," New England Quarterly 70, no. 4 (December 1997): 515-47; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial
PoliticalConflict, London's and Overseas Traders, (Princeton, 550o-1653 N.J., Change, and 1993),226-27. For Winthrop,Barrington, the forcedloan, see Bremer, John Father America's (Oxford, Forgotten Winthrop: Founding Eng.,20o3),143-44. 27 Forbeset al., Winthrop Papers,2: 145-49; Notestein and Relf, Commons I Debates 1629, 244; Kevin Sharpe,ThePersonal Ruleof Charles (New Haven, for
Conn., 1992), 56-57.
442
By the time of the migration to Massachusetts in 1630, the leaders of the emigration and many of the participants had gone through a pressure cooker in which long-standing concerns about arbitrarygovernment in church and state had been both magnified and fused. It had been driven home to them just how vulnerable Protestantism and subjects' liberties were when confronted by arbitrary government and how important it was to be willing to take drastic steps to protect both. Liberty and godliness rose or fell together, just as Fenner had argued; puritan ideology now had a pronounced civic as well as religious dimension. "The free fruition of such liberties," according to Massachusetts minister Nathaniel Ward, was "the tranquillitie and Stabilitie of Churches and Commonwealths. And the deniall or deprivall thereof, the disturbance if not the ruine of both." It is surely not coincidental that, according to Dudley, planning for the Massachusetts Bay Colony enterprise commenced in Lincolnshire in 1627 between him and "friends" during the height of resistance to the forced loan.28 Historians have no record of preemigration discussions of church polity among the leaders of Massachusetts, but those leaders were at the very least comfortable with the presbyterian tradition. They displayed a singular lack of concern when word reached them about the radical church created in their colonial outpost of Salem in 1629, and they almost succeeded in recruiting the famous exiled puritan theologian William Ames. Ames advocated congregationalist modifications to presbyterian ecclesiology that increased the liberties of individual churches and of ordinary church members, and those modifications anticipated and influenced Massachusetts' church order. In a preface to The Diocesans Tryall,an attack on bishops by his fellow protocongregationalist Paul Baynes, Ames compared the English in their church order with "the people of Israel, who would not have God for their immediate King, but would have such Kings as other Nations." In this contraband book, Baynes noted how "imparity" in the church led to tyranny. He also remarked on the people's right to depose their rulers in all but absolute monarchies, which England was not. The Diocesans Tryallmade a strong impression on puritans migrating to Massachusetts.29
28 [Nathaniel Ward], "A Coppie of the Liberties of the Massachusets Colonie in New England," in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 178-79; Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638, The Commonwealth Series (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 70 ("friends"). 29 In the Jacobean period, the presbyterian tradition was shadowy in England, whereas it continued to evolve among English emigrants and exiles in the Netherlands. For English presbyterianism, see Schneider, "Godly Order in a Church Half-Reformed." For the Netherlands, see Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism; Tyacke, see Keith L. Aspects of English Protestantism, 111-31. On Ames's ecclesiology,
Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgroundsof English and
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The Massachusetts Bay Company's charter gave the company's stockholders considerable scope for preventing arbitrary government. Granted by King Charles I in 1629, the charter called for the freemen of the company to meet four times a year in a General Court to make laws for the company and admit new freemen. In one of those meetings, the court was to elect a governor, deputy governor, and Court of Assistants who would meet monthly. Yet for all the freemen's theoretical power, their role was not so critical in practice. In the short period of the company's operation in England, only a handful of the hundred or more freemen might show up to the meetings and, according to the charter itself, the presence of either the governor or deputy governor and six of the assistants was enough to constitute a quorum; the other freemen were technically not needed at all for the government of the company to function.30 The leading men who agreed to migrate to Massachusetts in 1630 did so on the conditions they would become the company's government and take the charter with them. Governor John Winthrop, deputy governor Thomas Dudley, and eleven assistants who crossed with them in 1630 quickly took on the responsibilities of running the new colony as the Court of Assistants. With no other freemen of the company in Massachusetts, the Court of Assistants in 1630 seems to have regarded itself at first as an autonomous, self-perpetuating board.31 Nonetheless American Puritanism of Ill., (Urbana, 1972), chap.9. On the recruitment Ames,see Forbes et al., Winthrop and Papers,2: 180; Shurtleff, Records the Governor of "William Amesand the Settlement Massachusetts of Company, 407-8; Sprunger, I: 39, Bay,"New EnglandQuarterly no. I (March1966): 66-79. Paul Baynes, The Diocesans Netherlands], ... 1621),sig. Bv, 68, 85, 89. Amesis Tryall ([Amsterdam, identifiedas the editorand authorof the prefacein the 1641edition. On Baynes's A influence,see David D. Hall, TheFaithful Shepherd: History the New England of in Century(ChapelHill, N.C., 1972), 82. On the scarcity Ministry the Seventeenth and risk of expressionsof resistancetheory in Englandat this time, see J. P. and and Politics Ideology England, in Sommerville, 2d Royalists Patriots: 16o3-r640, ed. and (London,1999),71-73. For a casestudy,see MargoTodd, "Anti-Calvinists the Threatin Early in and ed. StuartCambridge," Puritanism ItsDiscontents, Republican Laura Del., 2003),85-lo5. (Newark, Lunger Knoppers 30 Shurtleff, Records the Governor Company, 10-I2, 45, 47, 50. For a and of I: prosopographical study of the company's freemen before the migration to see and Massachusetts, FrancesRose-Troup,TheMassachusetts Company Its Bay The Series(NewYork,1930),chap.16. On the Predecessors, New Grafton Historical for and attendancerequirements meetings,see Shurtleff,Records the Governor of
31 Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company, I: 73-78. John Gorham Palfrey suggests that John Clover of Dorchester may already have been a freeman (Palfrey, History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty [Boston, 1865], I: 323). Robert Charles Anderson doubts Palfrey's identification (Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, d62o-l633 [Boston, 1995], 2: 776).
Company, 16. I thank Peter Charles Hoffer for a discussion on this point. I:
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the court decided at the end of that October to voluntarily place itself under the supervision of the colony's adult males. Historians' explanations of this decision fall into two groups, both of them speculative. Some historians see the expansion of the franchise as the desperate action of puritan oligarchs. The colony's leaders, these historians argue, felt pressure from the other colonists to give them some form of involvement, and the assistants chose to give way to that pressure in the most limited manner possible, violating the terms of the charter to give the new freemen a minimum amount of supervision over the government. There is no evidence, however, that the oligarchs were responding to pressure from ordinary colonists, and such pressure seems a fairly precocious concern in any case; most colonists had only been in Massachusetts for a few months, and raw survival was the great preoccupation. No other preRestoration chartered colony gave voting rights to its inhabitants within the first two years, let alone the first three months. Moreover the new freemen were not the stockholders envisaged in the original charter, and the court was under no obligation to them. Thus it was arguably not out of line with the spirit of the charter, though certainly out of line with the letter, that the court in giving the colonists voting privileges to which they were not entitled did not define these privileges expansively.32 Other, generally later, historians accept that the assistants were under no obligation to admit any more freemen and change their form of government. That they did so anyway was due not to hypothetical pressure from below, these historians argue, but to puritans' theologically driven attraction to covenants: the Massachusetts immigrants had made a covenant with God to be a special people to him, but they could only carry out this divine covenant by making a covenant among themselves to form a new government. There is, however, no evidence that Winthrop and his associates either imagined or had any reason to imagine that they were doing anything so grandiose as making a new covenant and creating a government from scratch. They were proposing to add what amounted at most to a new nonshareholding category of freemen to the company while accordingly changing the voting procedures for the magistrates to be consistent with what they argued was the charter's intention. The Massachusetts Bay Company was a corporation founded by the free consent of its original members in 1629, and new members voluntarily demonstrated their consent by joining it.33
32 James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston, 1921), 141-43; Rose-Troup, Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors, Io9-Io; Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period ofAmerican History (New Haven, Conn., 1934), I: 434,
I63o-17z7
The Winthrop 438; Richard S. Dunn, Puritansand Yankees: DynastyofNew England,

(Princeton, N.J., 1962), 14. 33 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1939); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story ofJohn Winthrop,
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In the late 1670s, William Hubbard, the General Court's official historian, offered an explanation that has been curiously overlooked by historians for this decision to admit more freemen. Hubbard claimed that in 1630 (when he was a nine-year-old immigrant) "it was then supposed by some" that "ambition" would "naturally"incline men "to invade the rights and liberties of their brethren"; therefore, the actions of the court were intended "for the preserving the liberty of the people, and preventing any entrenching thereon by the power of the rulers." Hubbard described the addition of the new freemen as supplying a "foundation" for this goal. The foundation of the "civil polity" itself, he noted, lay in the 1629 charter.34 Unlike modern interpretations Hubbard's invocation of the fear of arbitrary power has a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support it. Winthrop later denounced governments "where a people have men sett over them without their choyce, or allowance" (which was the case initially in Massachusetts) as "Tiranye, and impietye." One of the assistants present at the October 1630 meeting, William Pynchon, later found echoes of the "Tyrany"of the forced loan in the Connecticut government's effort to requisition a canoe of his without his consent.35 The three ministers hired by the Massachusetts Bay Company who were present in 1630, Wilson, Skelton, and George Philips, all at various times before or afterward demonstrated their opposition to arbitrary government; they probably would have encouraged the change. The people at the 1630 meeting of the General Court came mostly from regions of the greatest protest against Charles I's activities. In other words concern about the liberties of the people and the danger of arbitrary government was demonstrably so diffuse among those present at this meeting that there is ample reason to give credence to Hubbard's claim. The franchise was expanded, however cautiously, to avoid tyranny and ensure accountable government. It does not seem too far-fetched to call this and subsequent reorderings of the government forays into constitutional republicanism. They The Libraryof AmericanBiography(Boston, I958), 78; Stephen Foster, Their in SolitaryWay:ThePuritanSocialEthic in the First Century Settlement New of Yale HistoricalPublications(New Haven, Conn., 197I), 74. I read the England, to use court's of the term"establishinge" meanmaking stable,not creating. Takinga that road,DarrenStaloffhas suggested the court'sactionswith singular interpretive to "rituals culturaldomination" of intendedfor the regard the franchise represent creationof inner and outerpartiesin a one-party state (Staloff,TheMakingof an to A 34WilliamHubbard, General of History New England, from the Discovery MDCLXXX repr.,Boston,1848),114,147-48(quotation). (1815; 35Forbeset al., Winthrop HistoricalSociety, Papers,4: 468; Massachusetts
Proceedings October, Ip94-June,
1915 (Cambridge, Mass., I915), 48 ("Tyrany").
AmericanThinkingClass:Intellectuals and Intelligentsiain PuritanMassachusetts [New York, 1998], 19 [quotation], 2o).
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made the government entirely answerable to the electorate and were initially instituted to prevent incipient tyranny. The argument for republican underpinnings is reinforced by another fast-emerging consensus among the Massachusetts freemen: a determination to avoid hereditary rule. Winthrop and some ministers, including Cotton, never lost the sense, implicit in the 163o restructuring of the government, that the rulers of the country should have tenure in office for life, subject to good behavior. On the other hand, some freemen as early as 1633 are recorded as wanting the governor rotated every year and the assistants at least occasionally, for fear that these positions "be esteemed hereditary." Some of the ministers and others worked unsuccessfully to thwart Winthrop's reelection as governor in 1639 out of that very concern. The deputies that year successfully led a drive to end a three-year experiment in which the General Court gave selected ex-assistants lifetime magisterial power in a standing council, and the next year Winthrop was not reelected. Cotton expressed himself bluntly about the evils of hereditary rule in 1635 when he answered the demands of William Fiennes, Ist Viscount Saye and Sele, and other magnates contemplating immigration but asking for a hereditary upper house in Massachusetts. "Hereditary authority and power" was not a necessary component of government, Cotton explained; it "standeth only by the civil laws of some commonwealths." It was an illogical concept, Cotton went on to tell his titled audience, since even in commonwealths with hereditary rule, authority and power did not descend to all of a person's heirs. Cotton warned that the commonwealth of Massachusetts would be subjected to "reproach and prejudice" if it were to give authority and power to someone whom God had not called to such a position. Winthrop appears to have made the case even more forcefully in a now-vanished letter he wrote to Lord Saye and Sele. Saye and Sele interpreted Winthrop as arguing that hereditary rulership led to tyranny.36Neither
36 Emerson, Letters Richard Dunn, S. 105, 151(quotation); fJom New England, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal ofJohn Winthrop, i63o-1649 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 292, 295, 325; Ellen E. Brennan, "The Massachusetts Council," New England Quarterly 4, no. I (January 1931): 54-93. See John Cotton, "Certain Proposals Made by Lord Say, Lord Brooke, and Other Persons of Quality, as Conditions of Their Removing to New-England, with the Answers Thereto," in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 165; Forbes et al., Winthrop Papers, 3: 266-67. William Hubbard appears to have seen Winthrop's now-vanished letter to which Lord Saye and Sele responded (Hubbard, General History of New England, 377). Saye and Sele, after demanding a hereditary upper house in Massachusetts, made a I8o-degree turn in his own colony of Providence Island. He offered to make the wealthier inhabitants of the island freeholders eligible to serve on the colony's council and elect its governor. This offer was part of an effort to lure the minister Ezekiel Rogers and his congregation there in 1638. Rogers decided instead to go to Massachusetts, and Winthrop subsequently chivied Lord Saye and Sele for his inconsistency. On Rogers, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island,1630-1641: TheOtherPuritanColony (New York,I993), 255.
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Cotton nor Winthrop explained how hereditary kings might escape their chains of logic. It might be objected that governmental accountability and rejection of hereditary rule in Massachusetts did not add up to constitutional republicanism. Other English localities had long traditions of chartered self-government, and they could celebrate their traditions in classical republican language. Yet their civic practices and civic consciousness did not amount to constitutional republicanism, for these polities did not question that ultimate power lay with the monarch. As the writer of an "apologie"for London published in 1603 stated, "It is beside the purpose to dispute whether . . . the governement here bee a Democratie, or Aristocratie,for . . . London is . . . no free estate . . . indowed with . absolute power." Absolute power, according to the influential latesixteenth-century political theorist Jean Bodin, was a cognate term for sovereignty. Therein lies the critical distinction between Massachusetts and the local polities of England, for the Massachusetts General Court claimed that and behaved as if, in Winthrop's words, "by our Charter we had absolute power of Government." The freemen of Massachusetts, accordingly, hotly debated the nature of their allegiance, if any, to the English government.37
37 Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, 55-73. T. H. Breen alludes to English corporate towns in accounting for Massachusetts practices (Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America [New York, 1980], 8). The "apologie" can be found at the end of John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. Charles (quotation). Its author was probaLethbridge Kingsford (Oxford, Eng., 1908), 2: zo206 bly the lawyer James Dalton (see David Harris Sacks, "The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol's 'Little Businesses,' 1625-1641," Past and Present, no. iio [February 1986]: 75). Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes ofa Commonweale ... ,ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 84; Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 648 (quotation), 677. The relevant passage from the charter is "everie such cheife comaunders, captaines, governors, and other officers and ministers, as by the said orders . . . of the said Governor and Company . . . shalbe . umploied ... in the government of the saide inhabitants and plantacon ... have full and absolute power and authoritie to correct, punishe, pardon, governe, and rule all ... that shall at any tyme hereafter inhabite within the precincts and partes of Newe England aforesaid" (Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company, I: 17). The charter did not anticipate that the officers of the Massachusetts Bay Company themselves, not just their deputies, would be living in the colony and out of reach of the king's courts. Later charters to self-governing colonies used more restrictive language. The General Court's charter-granted absolute power to rule and govern the inhabitants of Massachusetts was limited by the requirement that it not make laws "repugnant to the lawes and statutes of our realme of England." The colony gave only lip service to that requirement. In 1639 Winthrop stated as one of his objections to a law code for the colony that some Massachusetts practices, such as not solemnizing marriages by ministers, were repugnant to the laws of England. To let these practices grow into law, in the manner of English common law, Winthrop argued, would not violate the charter, whereas to codify them would. The General Court seven years later argued that Massachusetts' laws were not repugnant to the
448
The leaders of Massachusetts occasionally described their colony in terms usually reserved for sovereign republics. Minister Thomas Shepard classified Massachusetts among "free states w[he]r[e] the government depends on popular electi[on]" in his election sermon of 1638; critics charged that calling Massachusetts a free state constituted high treason. Winthrop used a similar cognate term for republic when he classified Massachusetts in 1637 as a "popular state," where the people's power was "unlimited in its owne nature." Cotton used the same biblical texts justifying the nonhereditary General Court to Lord Saye and Sele that English republicans would deploy in the 165os.38 When leaders of Massachusetts acknowledged their dependence on the English government, that acknowledgment was ambiguous and controversial at best. Winthrop could scarcely have had King Charles at the forefront of his mind when he spoke of the people's power in Massachusetts as being unlimited. Massachusetts' leaders did not seem to think it lawfully possible for Charles to revoke their charter. "That which the King is pleased to bestow upon us, and we have accepted, is truly our owne," Winthrop wrote in 1637. As early as 1634, the General Court responded to rumors that the king was sending a governorgeneral to take over the colony by fortifying their defenses. The General Court in 1637 claimed that it was the final court of judicial appeals in Massachusetts ("one of the most principall rights of soveraignetie," according to Bodin). In response to the Commission for Foreign Plantations' demand for the charter, which had been revoked by the king's bench, the General Court warned in 1638 that, should the court surrender it, the "common people" would regard themselves as independent of England.39 Ambiguities about the location of sovereignty in Massachusetts only accumulated after Parliament and the king went to war in 1642. At the commonlawof England because basisof the commonlawwas"theLawe God the of & of RightReason," wasalso the casein Massachusetts. English not creas law Any atedon thatbasis"was error, not a Lawe" an & and (Dunn,Savage, Yeandle, Journal of 662 314-15, ["Lawe God"]). ofJohnWinthrop, ElectionSermonin 1638," 38 "Thomas Historical and Shepard's New-England and 24, 1870):362;Thomas Genealogical Register Antiquarian Journal no. 4 (October ed. Hutchinson, The Historyof the Colonyand Provinceof Massachusetts-Bay,
Hutchinson N.Y., 1865),1:75; Morgan,PuritanPolitical Ideas,167. (Albany, Papers in "English 1450-1700, Republicanism," TheCambridge History PoliticalThought, of ed. J. H. Burns with MarkGoldie(Cambridge, I991),472. 39 Hutchinson 1: Records the Governor Company, and Papers, 99; Shurtleff, of I: and Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, 117-18; Journal 123-24, 129; DavidD. ofJohnWinthrop, A Hall, ed., TheAntinomian 1636-1638: Documentary Controversy, History,2d ed. (Durham, N.C., 1990), 257;Bodin,Six Bookes Commonweale, Hutchinson, ofa 168; and I: History theColony Province, 422. of
For ancient Israel and English republicanism in the I65os, see Blair Worden,
Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), I: 127; [Thomas Hutchinson],
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May 1643 meeting of the General Court, the magistrates dropped the clause in their oaths swearing loyalty to Charles I. At the same 1643 session, the court authorized negotiations that would soon result in a treaty with Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth to manage their diplomatic and military affairs collectively, with no reference to either the king or Parliament. Surviving records of debates as to whether Massachusetts was a "perfecta respublica," and thus completely independent of England, date back to 1644; when this controversial issue began to be raised is unknown. Winthrop records some magistrates in 1644 as arguing that Parliament had the right to countermand the General Court's decisions, a right that would deny the General Court's "absolute power." Others, however, insisted that Massachusetts was "subject ... to no other power but among ourselves." Winthrop respected the corresponding argument that Massachusetts could rightfully claim its independence from England on the grounds that it bought its land from the Indians. "But if we stand upon this plea," he fretted, Massachusetts would lose Parliament's still-useful protection, and its residents would lose their English citizenship ("though we had our liberty, we cannot as yet subsist without England," wrote his fellow magistrate William Pynchon). Moreover independence would throw the legitimacy of Massachusetts' government in doubt, since that legitimacy was derived from its English-granted charter. Winthrop therefore accepted that Parliament had "authority"over Massachusetts, with the implicit understanding that this authority could not clash with the General Court's absolute power over Massachusetts' residents (the General Court also claimed jurisdiction over the sea around Massachusetts). Furthermore, Winthrop claimed, the doctrine of salus populi (the people's welfare), which "the parliament had taught us," gave the General Court the right to resist any parliamentary commission "or other foreign power" that would hurt Massachusetts. Parliament had used that doctrine to justify its resistance to the king and its governing without the king's participation. Just as Parliament's assertion of saluspopuli amounted to a claim of ultimate parliamentary sovereignty in England, Winthrop's invocation was a de facto assertion that the General Court's authority ultimately trumped the English government's in Massachusetts.40
Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 431-32, 526-28, 678; David Pulsifer, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England ... (Boston, 1859), 2: 3-8; William Pynchon to John Winthrop, Jan. 9, 1646, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 36 (1863): 381. In the one place where Winthrop could have explained what he would consider a legitimate use of parliamentary authority over Massachusetts, he ducked the issue (see Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 662). For Parliament's assertion of salus populi, see Michael Mendle, "Parliamentary Sovereignty: A Very English Absolutism," in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin
40
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In practice Parliament usually avoided making demands on Massachusetts and the General Court avoided openly clashing with Parliament, though even the court's minimal compliance-respecting a parliamentary commission to a privateer and allowing safe passage through its territory for religious dissidents-generated controversy. In I651, however, Parliament ordered Massachusetts to convene its courts and issue warrants in Parliament's name and to apply for a new charter. The General Court sent a deferential yet temporizing answer, and the issue disappeared. In the meantime the court set up a generally recognized sign of sovereignty, its own mint. Had it taken a new charter, the results would have been unpredictable. Cotton preached in I651 that the militia had the authority to dissolve a court that accepted a governorgeneral from England. Since Winthrop asserted that Massachusetts was bound neither by the laws of Parliament nor the king's writs, one may well believe the hostile 1646 Child petition to Parliament when it claimed that some people in Massachusetts called England's laws "foreign" and asserted, as Thomas Shepard had, that Massachusetts was a "freestate."41Whether Massachusetts was a full-blown sovereign republic was a matter of debate rather than a settled conclusion, but the colony could not be likened to an incorporated English town. Massachusetts was a deliberate, if tentative, exercise in republican state formation. Massachusetts' constitutional republicanism was truly distinctive because of the polity's voting requirement. On May i8, 1631, at the yearly General Court, it was "orderedand agreed" that from henceforth "noe man shalbe admitted to the freedome of this body polliticke, but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of the same." Massachusetts churches did not hand out memberships easily to begin with, and the standards grew steadily more severe in the 1630s. The Massachusetts Bay Company's freemen, and thus almost certainly its rulers, were to consist of no one but visible saints, a franchise that was unique in Christendom until the New Haven colony adopted it in 1639.42 dislocationscausedin the Englishcolonies by the EnglishCivil War, see Carla Atlantic anAgeof Revolution, in The Gardina Pestana, English i64o-i66I (Cambridge, Mass.,2004).
41 Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 524-28, 6o6, 650-54, 662, 707; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company, 4, pt. I: 71, 84, IIo; Hutchinson, History of the Colonyand Province, I: 149-50, 219, 428-30; Francis J. Bremer, "In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 37, no. I (January 1980): I21. 42 Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 74; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company, I: 87. Historians sometimes suggest that the freemen probably did not participate in this decision, but see B. Katherine Brown,
Skinner, Ideas in Context (Cambridge, 1993), 97-119. For a general discussion of the
451
Even among the English godly, this change in voting requirements whatever was regardedas unprecedentedand dangerous.Presbyterians, their civic preferences,had always argued that there was no necessary relationshipbetweenchurchgovernmentand civil government.As scripture demonstrated the church existed under a wide variety of civil Thus the requirementthat the franchisebe limited to administrations. innovacenterof worldlypower.To its godly critics, this Massachusetts tion even smackedof Roman Catholicismin that it fosteredthe abusive invasionof the civic sphereby the churches.Massachusetts apologistsin foundationsof their franchise.It turn adamantlydefendedthe scriptural that the church could live under any civil was true, they acknowledged, the Bible also dictated the form the civil government government,yet should take when the saints had the power to shape it. For the wellbeing of the church, the saints should rule over the saints: the apostle model. Religiousand civil Paulwould have approvedthe Massachusetts were kept separateand no magistratewould lose his position spheres becausehe had been excommunicated.43
"Freemanship in Puritan Massachusetts," American Historical Review 59, no. 4 (July 1954): 869. Most adult male colonists would probably eventually have qualified under the new restriction, and there is a long-standing historiographical tradition that sees this franchise as democratic in relation to the English franchise. Yet historians have discovered the forty-shilling freehold franchise in many regions of England would probably have resulted in a bigger electorate than the Massachusetts requirement allowed. For a summary of two decades of scholarly debate over the size of the Massachusetts franchise in the seventeenth century, see Brown, "The Controversy over the Franchise in Puritan Massachusetts, 1954 to 1974," WMQ 33, no. 2 (April 1976): 212-41. On the English franchise in the early seventeenth century, see Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975), chap. 2. In Connecticut the franchise was not tied to with William Hubbard suggests that the difference church membership. Massachusetts was because, unlike in Massachusetts, the Connecticut government was "founded on the consent of the people" (Hubbard, General History of New England, 309). In the New Haven colony, church membership was linked to the franchise at the government's founding. In an echo of the constitutional issue presented in Connecticut, one of the freemen at the New Haven founding meeting wanted it noted that the freemen did not lose their power to unlink the two. In other words civil power in New Haven, this freeman argued, ultimately resided with the people, not with the church members. See Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation ofNew Haven, from 1638 to 1649 (Hartford, Conn., I857), 14-15. 43 Moderate presbyterian Richard Baxter, in A Holy Commonwealth (1659), however, proposed limiting the English franchise to godly members of Protestant churches. Perhaps he was influenced by his friend John Eliot. See Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, ed. William Lamont (Cambridge, 1994), 148-52. For a defense of Massachusetts' franchise, see John Cotton, A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation whose Design is Religion (Cambridge, Mass., 1663), 22. The title page gives Cotton as the author. Cotton Mather, in a good position to know as Cotton's grandson, claimed that the title page was wrong; John Davenport was the author.
"saints by calling" seemed to thrust the church illegitimately into the
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Though the colony's leaders defended its scriptural basis vehemently, the Massachusetts franchise was hardly a product of disinterested Bible study alone. In early 1631 the colony's saints had ample practical reasons to discover scriptural instructions about the franchise that no one else had noticed. During the previous winter, news filtered into Massachusetts that political and religious affairs in England were "asyou left them, and rather worser then any whit amended." News also arrived of concern among the godly that the radical church order the Massachusetts emigrants were setting up demonstrated a separatist bias.44 On the home front, the Massachusetts authorities had opportunities to recognize that not all in the colony were necessarily sympathetic
to their goals.
These present and potential threats to Massachusetts were sufficient reasons to limit voting to men who had demonstrated a commitment to its church order. Contemporaries explained the franchise change in those terms, and historians have regarded the explanation as adequate. Cotton, for example, summarized this pragmatic position neatly in response to Lord Saye and Sele in 1636; if "worldly men" were to become the majority in Massachusetts, "as soon they might do," they would elect worldly magistrates who would "turn the edge of all authority and laws against the church and its members."45 The saintly franchise ensured the survival of pure religion in New England.
Isabel M. Calder argued that Mather was mistaken (Calder, "The Authorship of a Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion," American Historical Review 37, no. 2 [January 1932]: 267-69). Her argument was more assertion than demonstration, though later scholars accepted it. Bruce E. Steiner, however, argued for Davenport's probable authorship (Steiner, "Dissension at Quinnipiac: The Authorship and Setting of A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion," New England Quarterly 54, no. I [March 1981]: 14-32). Cotton, "Copy of a Letter," in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 169-70. 44 Grim news from England included Eliot and the other members of Parliament still imprisoned; peace concluded with Spain; Laud commencing his crackdown on the godly ministers of Essex; Alexander Leighton receiving for his recent book calling on Parliament to remove the antichristian bishops "12 lashes with a 3 corded whip, one eare cut of, one nostril slit and stygmatized in the face" (Forbes et al., Winthrop Papers, 2: 322-23, 333, 336 [quotations, 322, 336]); Emerson, Lettersfrom New England, 78. 45 Dunn, Puritans and Yankees, 68; Breen, Character of the Good Ruler, 5o-51; Cotton, "Certain Proposals," in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, xxix, 167. This important document and the accompanying "Copy of a Letter" tend to attract only passing notice by scholars. See, for example, Breen, Character of the Good Ruler, 5o-51, 54, 74-75; Foster, Their Solitary Way, 38. It receives an extended analysis in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Definitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies," Historical Journal 32, no. I (March 1989): 17-33, but Kupperman works out of a framework that severely exaggerates the extent to which church dominated state in Massachusetts. Contrary to Kupperman, "Bay Colony leaders" did not "purge" (25) any magistrates
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Yet it is insufficient to discuss this development only in terms of religious utilitarianism. Even at its very origin, the franchise law was swathed in conceptual language that had extrascriptural origins and pointed to concerns that extended beyond the preservation of the church as well as to ideological underpinnings more elaborate than raw pragmatism. Court records of May 18, 1631, give a single reason why the court chose to limit the franchise to church members: it was "to the end" that "the body of the co [m]mons may be p [re]served of honest & good men." That explanation, though terse, is enough to plunge historians back into the political controversies of the 162os. In that decade honest, an adjective evoking civic virtue and a common self-appellation of the godly, took on a political dimension. It signified the "honest patriot," a stout Protestant who would follow his conscience and defend the public interest by opposing the arbitrary actions of the Crown. The Lincolnshire anti-forced loan pamphlet, for example, had addressed itself to all honest men. According to a member of the House of Commons in 1628, one mark of an honest man was imprisonment for refusing to pay the forced loan.46 Thus honesty by the early 163os required piety and resistance to arbitrary rule, and the Massachusetts audience hearing the court announce its desire for an honest electorate would have heard civic anxieties intertwined with religious ones.
in 1637 for unorthodox religious doctrines; the freemen voted them out of office (the
tion"(24). The only civil rightthatapprobation a congregation of conferred the was

franchise itself. The ministers in Massachusetts did not have any more of a "prescribed governmental role" (23) in Massachusetts than they did in Kupperman's foil
petition that the court considered seditious). Nor was the "key principle" (26) that no magistrate would be removed from civil office because of excommunication ignored at this time, for no magistrate was excommunicated. Nor did ordinary colonists enjoy "access to civil rights only through the approbation of the congrega-
General Courtexpelled deputies, magistrates, two not whenthe deputies a defended
to Massachusetts, LordSayeand Sele'scolony of Providence Island,influencenot constraint theirpower on role, beingthe sameas a prescribed andthe congregational
of excommunication gave them in some ways less capacity for civic disruption in
Massachusetts in Providence than Island.Criticism Massachusetts' of intolerance of as was not opinionswidelyregarded heterodox a CivilWarphenomenon, a religious does not necessarily illustrate defpre-CivilWarone, thussuchcriticism conflicting initionsof libertybeforethe CivilWar,as Kupperman argues.
46
"Wentworth's 'Changeof Sides' in the 162os," in ThePoliticalWorld Thomas of Earl ed. Wentworth, of Strafford, 1621-1641, J. F. Merritt(Cambridge, 1996), 72; Cust, ed., ThePapers Sir Richard Grosvenor, Bart.(1585-1645)(Oxford,Eng., Ist of Loanand EnglishPolitics,173. On honesty, civic 1996), xxvi-xxvii; Cust, Forced Citizens and virtue,andreligion,see PhilWithington,ThePolitics Commonwealth: of Freemen Early in Modern (Cambridge, England 2oo5), 118-19, 246-47, 251, 253.MY thanksto SimonMiddletonfor alerting to Withington's me book and for a discussion on the topic.
Shurtleff,
Records of the Governor and Company, I: 87; Richard Cust,
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Abundant subsequent evidence demonstrates that the colonists conceived of the innovative godly franchise as a boon to the state, not just the churches. Cotton claimed that the people's liberty of election gave them the power "either to establish or subvert the commonwealth." That power was all the more reason that the franchise be based on saintliness, not wealth. If the electors needed to be saints, so did those whom they elected. Cotton rejected out of hand the standard argument, raised by Lord Saye and Sele, that someone could have the civic virtues necessary for magistracy without being a saint. Such men, even with the "best gifts and parts," no matter how strongly they started, would eventually "turn aside by crooked ways." Cotton (or Davenport) warned that these men may appear "civilly honest, and morally just" but people could "have no assurance of their justice." Since all men who had not been converted were "unrighteous," they would create factions and pervert justice. Only saints by calling could be truly faithful to either God or man. The only reliable source of civic virtue was godliness. The preacher of the 1638 election sermon, Thomas Shepard, put forth the secular stakes of the godly franchise no less bluntly. A governor who was not a church member would be "an enemy unto the strictnes of churches," and would "ruine church [and] ruine state."47According to Cotton and Shepard, the best commonwealth, even on its own civic terms, was a saintly one such as was being set up in Massachusetts. The ministers' invocation of virtue and strictness points to the root of their confidence that the godly franchise would benefit church and state. That franchise extended a fundamental value of the presbyterian tradition to the heart of civic government: discipline, or moral and spiritual supervision and regulation. The Massachusetts churches maintained disciplinary watch over the freemen and the magistrates; the freemen kept disciplinary watch over the magistrates when they elected and removed them; the magistrates, through wholesome laws and their vigorous enforcement, kept disciplinary watch over the entire colony. Elizabethan presbyterians had warned that decline of discipline led to the downfall of states such as Athens and Sparta, and indeed there was significant overlap between the values of classical republicanism and godly discipline: industry, frugality, honesty, public-spiritedness, selfrestraint, and sobriety.48The Massachusetts colonists, by identifying the body politic as closely as possible with the body of Christ, had thus about Puritan Political 166 47 Morgan, Ideas, (quotations), Cotton,Discourse 167; Historical Genealogical and CivilGovernment, 20-22; New-England 24: Register 366. 48 Travers, Full and plaine Declaration, I-2; Blair Worden, "Milton's Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven," in Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, of see Machiavelli Republicanism, For Massachusetts' and "culture discipline," 230. Bremer,JohnWinthrop, 245-46. 210--II,
455
come up with permanent solutions to the age-old problems of decay that beset state and church: the decay of republican government in the state would be prevented by the saintly franchise, and godly magistrates would help prevent spiritual decay in the church. This was not just a Machiavellian moment for Massachusetts' civil government; it ensured that Antichrist would not be able to commence building the staircase of absolute power in the church. That Massachusetts' constitutional arrangements represented a new wrinkle in political theory was acknowledged and analyzed at the time. Lord Saye and Sele warned Cotton that the colony's alleged democratic tilt would "cast the commonwealth into distractions, and popular confusions." In reply Cotton trumped the classical model of balanced, mixed government with a godly one. The framers of Massachusetts aimed at three goals, he explained: "authority in magistrates, liberty in people, purity in the church." Those three aims reinforced each other, for "purity, preserved in the church, will preserve well ordered liberty in the people." Through edification and discipline, in other words, the churches ensured a responsible electorate that in turn ensured "well-ballanced authority in the magistrates." Though Cotton did not spell this point out, he and Saye and Sele understood the magistrates as nursing fathers to the churches, ensuring the churches' purity and thereby perpetuating the harmonious balance. Cotton was not alone in his high theoretical appreciation of the structure of the colony's government; he claimed that what he argued was "the best discerning of many of us (for I speake not of myselfe)." Winthrop breathtakingly told Saye and Sele that the church was not compatible with any other kind of government.49 Massachusetts puritans never touted their civil polity across the Atlantic in the same way as their ecclesiastical polity; salvation depended on churches, not governments. Their government, as John Winthrop claimed, may have been the only one genuinely capable of preserving true churches, yet the intellectuals in their ranks put the bulk of their mental labor into theorizing their church order, not their government. Moreover there is no indication that the Massachusetts settlers-at least when not caught up in millennial fervor-regarded their polity, however ideal in itself, as a viable model for England. By contrast they were remarkably indifferent, to say the least, to the disruption caused among the godly in England by their letters back home about their new church practices.50 In the civil sphere, at least, they were republican opportunists, not revolutionaries. et Puritan Political Ideas, Forbes al.,Winthrop 3: 172; Morgan, Papers, 267. I66o for the misfortune of havinghis manuscript biblically callingfor Englandto adopta republican,
49
Courtslapped 50 The General John Eliot on the wristin
456
Thus such significance as their civil polity has for English history is exemplary, rather than causal. If historians accept that Massachusetts instituted a deliberate and theorized constitutionally republican government in the 163os, how does it factor into the English historiography of the period, which has focused on far weightier topics than the doings of a few thousand immigrants on the other side of the Atlantic? According to some strands of that historiography, Massachusetts appears an impossibility. It has been argued that there were no serious ideological rifts in early Stuart England and that the country was dominated by a moderate monarchical ideological consensus. That position has been vigorously with which the and certainly the determination contested, Massachusetts settlers eliminated the possibility of hereditary rulership suggests an extremely broad range of English perspectives on government, one of which clearly was republicanism.51 The colonists' inextricable linkage of religion and liberty also offers a neat bridge from the I62os to the 1640s, the existence of which has been denied by some revisionist historians emphasizing short-term causes of the English Civil War: "If revolutionary puritanism was a cause rather than a consequence of the Civil War, it was the child of a decade beyond the 62zos,"as Kevin Sharpe puts it. The Massachusetts emigrants may not have been revolutionaries (whatever meanings that term may carry), but they were impressively alienated from Charles's government by the end of the 162os. Moreover, the silence of the archives notwithstanding, it is safe to assume that the emigrants were not the only people in their circles of advanced Protestantism to have concluded that England's constitutional arrangements had proven far from ideal in the 162os. Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and others were certainly not drawing exclusively on their understanding of colonies when they proposed to Massachusetts, circa 1635, that they might emigrate if the colony set up a two-house parliament (hereditary and elected) that reviewed its executive officers yearly, "the better to stop the way to insolence and ambition."52 Besides serving as a vehicle in for in return inspired government preparation Christ's appear printat the timeof the Restoration Charles See Dunn, Savage, Yeandle, of and II. Journal ofJohn Winthrop, Records theGovernor Company, pt. 2: 5-6. Eliot's and Shurtleff, 136-37; 4, manuscript of in had been circulating Englandsince at least 1651. JamesHolstun,A Rational See
Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York, 1987), 148; Alan Macfarlane, ed., The Diary ofRalphJosselin, 1616-z683 (London, 1976), 218. 51 Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, Conn., 1996); Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 6o03-i642 (University Park, Pa., 1993). Burgess is fiercely critiqued in Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, 224-65. 52 Kevin Sharpe, "Introduction: Parliamentary History, 1603-1629: In or Out of Perspective?" in Faction and Parliament, 23; Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, I63.
POLITY AND REPUBLICANISM THE MASSACHUSETTS
457
for further church reform, New England offered an alternative to the constitutional inadequacies of the English state. And since that alternative was republican and had roots in Calvinism, it may be worthwhile to glance back at the road of puritanism and the rise of liberty historiography. That road, tainted by Whiggish teleology, is currently shunned by European scholars, and some of those scholars have been doing their best to demolish even the slightest hint that aggressively republican church structures may have some incompatibility with the absolutist pretensions of monarchs. Their efforts are sometimes more notable for their noise than their accuracy. Nonetheless the spur that the reaction against Whig historiography has given to the scholarly removal of Calvinist church government from any larger political narrative has been impressive: the author of a recent sweeping survey of early Calvinism swiftly dismissed any possible relationship between Calvinist church polity and the processes that led to modern secular representative government.53
Kevin Sharpe, in keeping with the argument that there was a broad ideological consensus in England, suggests that Lord Saye and Sele and Warwick's despair at the 1638 ruling that ship money was legal stemmed from realizing the English constitution was against them and that they had no "alternativeideology" (Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, 730). He argues that Warwick continued to address the king "through the traditional modes of petition and counsel," further demonstrating this ideological consensus (ibid., 714). But Saye and Sele and Warwick were clearly already thinking of alternative ways to strengthen the constitution before the ship money case. The proposal to Massachusettsof circa 1635foreshadowedthe constitutional proposals of 1641. 53 Calvinists were first and foremost looking for stable regimes that would support their churches and geopolitical goals. All that is being arguedhere is (i) that it is not devoid of historical significance that, with very few exceptions, Calvinist church ordersdid not arisewhere absolutist rulersconceived of the churchesas an arm of the state; (2) that, correspondingly, it is not coincidental that in the one place where Calvinists could create a political order from scratch, New England, the order they createdwas republican;and (3) that some historians, on the recoil from Whig history, have lost all sense of proportion in their desire to eradicate any hint that Calvinist church order might be related to secular political choices. See Richard Tuck, 1572-1651, Ideas in Context (Cambridge, 1993), 182-83, Philosophyand Government, and Heinz Schilling, Civic Calvinismin NorthwesternGermanyand the Netherlands: Sixteenthto Nineteenth Centuries,Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, Mo., 1991), 103, for example; both invoke the support of Dutch Calvinists for the stadtholder in the political strugglesin that realm in the mid-seventeenth century to prove a disjunction between Calvinism and republicanism.But that support demonstrates only that Dutch Calvinists had a preference for an aggressivelyconfessional state with a strong executive, not that they were antipathetic to republicanism.See J. L. Price, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century, European History in Perspective (New York, 1998), 82. Philip Benedict narrowly argues that Calvinist church structuresin generaldid not encouragethe participationof ordinarylaity and could not have encouraged the rise of modern representational government A (Benedict, Christ's ChurchesPurely Reformed: Social History of Calvinism [New
458
One would think, however, that it would take an almost superhuman act of renunciation to refuse any connection between early English presbyterians who warned about corruption of power while asserting the need for balanced, nonmonarchical ecclesiastical government and earlyseventeenth-century puritans who claimed those presbyterians as their spiritual ancestors as they set up a godly republic. One might even muster some sympathy for King Charles I and his closest supporters'conviction in the 162os that their opponents were closet republicansor Queen Elizabeth's belief that presbyterianism was incompatible with monarchy. J. G. A. Pocock'sassertion that puritanism and republicanismwere incompatible or Blair Worden's claim that "a reaction against Calvinist orthodoxy" was "a unifying characteristic of seventeenth-century republicans" may apply as observations about England's republic of the early I65os, which was largely an unintended by-product of the execution of the king. But as broad generalizations spanning the seventeenth century, they require that one of the seventeenth century'sfree states simply be ignored.54 The ideologically driven nature of Massachusetts' government has much to say not only about England but also about Massachusetts itself. It broadens the matrix of motivation for the immigrants by allowing scholars to move beyond the old religion versus economics quarrel. One need not enter into the hoary, hazy debate over the definition of puritanism to note that the colonists' ideological anxieties and commitments as puritans had a major political dimension that played an important role in shaping New England. And once having gotten a better grasp of the breadth of the founders' anxieties and commitments, historians can better understand
Haven, Conn., 2002], 536-37). Benedict then denies that religion itself played a causal role in the formation of early modern state systems, citing two sweeping but brief synthetic books that make no attempt to assess religion's role. See Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1992); Thomas Ertman, Birth of
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(Cambridge, 1997). For contrast, see Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003). 54 William Laud, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D.D., Sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, Eng., 1847), I: 83; L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989), 132; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, chap. ii; Worden, "Milton's Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven," 230. In 1649 Presbyterians bitterly opposed the execution of the king. It is entirely possible that Elizabethan presbyterians may have as well, given the strong sectarian tendencies of Cromwell's army, which they would have feared and loathed. But in any case the Presbyterian movement of the 1640s was a complex coalition driven by political necessity and not a direct descendant of Elizabethan presbyterianism. Compare with Schneider, "Godly Order in a Church Half-Reformed," 527-28.
459
the foundations of New England's peculiar church order itself. While in England the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company may have felt comfortable with the presbyterian tradition, yet that comfort is not enough to account for the highly mutated Congregationalist version, formally separated from presbyterianism by the 1640s, that they created in Massachusetts. This version emphasized local autonomy, the people's liberties, and the accountability of their lay and ministerial elders. New
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insist that in terms of classical political theory, theirs was a mixed government, but even less than in Elizabethan presbyterianism could popish tyranny come creeping through the back door of elders and synods.55 Historiansgenerallyseek to account for Massachusetts Congregationalism within the confines of ecclesiastical history, yet the profound concerns of the lay and clerical settlers about arbitrary government and the liberties of the people surely played a role in determining their ecclesiastical choices. It is not coincidental that George Philips, who led a tax revolt in 1632, was said to have had a precocious understanding of Congregationalism, and his revolt was only the beginning of substantial documented ministerial resistance to signs of arbitrary civil government. One should look to a common understanding-forged out of presbyterian antecedents and recent political experience of how any political body, secular or ecclesiastical, functioned best-to explain much about the structures of church and state in Massachusetts. William Hubbard, dismissing the argument that civic and church governments in Massachusetts were too "popular,"noted of both that "such a constitution of government as doth sufficiently secure the liberties of the people from oppression is the safest."56 After the Restoration of King Charles II in I66o, the General Court's claim to absolute power in Massachusetts slowly eroded, ground down
55 [Richard Mather], Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed, In an Answer of the Elders of the severall Churches in New-England To two and thirty
therein (London, 1643), 47-48; John Cotton, The True Constitution Of A particular visible Church, proved by Scripture ... (London, 1642), 9. 56 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; Or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England ... (1702; repr., Hartford, Conn., 1853), 1: 376; Hubbard, General History
to in their sent Ministers England, declare judgments Questions, overto themby divers
of claimed the large-scale that William Hubbard 185-86. agitation the of NewEngland, role a to freemen clipthe magistrates' discretionary powerandgivethemselves larger in
the government in 1634 was influenced by Thomas Hooker, who arrived late in 1633 (ibid., I65). The Connecticut Fundamental Orders of 1639, which gave more power to ministers to defeat Winthrop to lessen the chances of hereditary rule have been discussed previously. In addition, see James F. Cooper Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The in Massachusetts (New York,1999). Congregationalists Colonial
Hubbard's claim.The effortsof some the freementhan in Massachusetts, supports
460
between internal factional struggles and the determination of the English Crown to assert control over the colony. It died entirely when an English monarchy sinking into absolutism and Roman Catholicism revoked Massachusetts' charter in 1684. The monarchy's descent was reversed when the Whigs successfully brought William and Mary to the throne with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Whigs, with their celebration of Protestant limited monarchy as a bulwark against ecclesiastical and civil tyranny, absorbed many of the imperatives and personnel of the English republicanism that had emerged in the 1650s. In the eighteenth century, republican served as a smear word, even in Massachusetts, whose residents learned to live with religious tolerance for fellow Protestants and to prize their membership in a powerful monarchical empire whose constitution protected liberty and true religion.57 Yet the civic and social structures of Massachusetts ensured that the residents of the province would view their membership in the empire through the lens of a particularly vigorous civic republicanism: a social base of independent yeomen, a wide franchise with much opportunity for holding public office, an unusually powerful assembly, and a republican web of churches. Tyranny continued to be the other against which
57 For accountsof Massachusetts' with the Crownin the late sevenstruggles teenthcentury,see PaulR. Lucas,"Colony Commonwealth: or Massachusetts Bay, as 1967):88-107 (thoseLucasdescribes favorI66I-1666,"WMQ24, no. I (January are DavidS. stance); ing Massachusetts' independence usuallyadopting Winthrop's Revolution America in R. (New York,1972); Richard Johnson, Lovejoy,TheGlorious to The Colonies theEraof theGlorious in Revolution, Adjustment Empire: NewEngland 1675-1715 (New Brunswick,N.J., 1981);J. M. Sosin, EnglishAmericaand the Revolution 688:Royal Administration the Structure Provincial and Government of of of see (Lincoln,Neb., 1982).For the transformation Englishrepublicanism, ZeraS. An in in Fink, TheClassical Republicans: Essay the Recovery a Pattern Thought of of Seventeenth Ill., (Evanston, 1945), chap. I; CarolineRobbins,The England Century Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), chap. I; Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722 (Manchester, Eng., 2003), chaps. 4-6. For Massachusetts, see Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985); Thomas S. Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven, Conn.,
461
Massachusetts liberty was defined, with Antichristian tyranny an ongoing reality in a region that bloodily contested the borders of French Canada's sphere of influence. The pulpits regularly sounded with reminders that the forefathers fled arbitrary government in search of ecclesiastical and civil liberty, augmenting the memories passed down more informally "by fathers or grandfathers," as John Adams put it.58 Institutional structures and cultural traditions helped see to it that the foundational anxieties of the colony were vigilantly sustained. That vigilance is just what the founders would have hoped for. Historians treat Massachusetts' eighteenth-century Whiggery as a new import to the colony that stemmed from 165os England, yet many of its motifs had a more ancient local history. When eighteenth-century New Englanders read in Cato'sLetterswarnings of the corrupting dangers of unlimited power and of the necessity to keep magistrates within bounds to preserve the people's liberties, they were sampling old, indigenous wine in new bottles. The ongoing reproduction of foundational anxieties ensured a tumultuous reaction to the imperial innovations of the 176os and 1770s. A historian of the seventeenth century gets an eerie sense of vu ddj~t when reading of them: bishops seeking to extend their tyrannical rule to America and even erect a palace next to Harvard College; Catholic influence increasing at the British court, according to rumor; George III appearing increasingly hostile to the liberties of his subjects and in the end proving a "Protestant Popish King." The crises may have prompted renewed appreciation for the colony's puritan founders and as in 2004). On "republican" an insult, see W. Paul Adams, "Republicanism colonistsstill had to deal with complaints that they were too republican still and
Political Rhetoric before 1776," Political Science Quarterly 85, no. 3 (September 1970): 397-421. Despite the paucity of professed republicans in Massachusetts,
acted as if Massachusetts were an independent country. See Bushman, King and People, 83-84; John Gorham Palfrey, History of New England from the Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Boston, 1892), 4: 407, 44758 Breen, Character of the Good Ruler, 15o-67; Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, Conn., 1977), 44-54; Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 2: 265; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986), 166-72,
240-44.
462
WILLIAMAND MARYQUARTERLY
their charter, and it is hardly surprising that Massachusetts residents found themselves for the second time at the vanguard of the transformation of civic to constitutional republicanism.59
59This point has probably been neglected because the early works that formed what was to become the republicansynthesis in American history started with writers from the English Civil War and commonwealth period, perhaps because of the then-routine insistence that there were no republicans in England before the Civil War, which rested on Pocock's theoretical affirmation (Robbins, EighteenthCentury Commonwealthman; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, Mass., 1967]; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the AmericanRepublic,1776-1787[Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969]). For an account of how the widespread concept of commonwealth principles became associated with the political position of republicanism in the 1650s, see Scott, CommonwealthPrinciples, 34-39. Israel Mauduit, A Short Viewof the Historyof the Colonyof Massachusetts Bay, with Respectto their Chartersand Constitution, 3d ed. (London, 1774), 20; Carl and Politics, Faiths, Ideas,Personalities, Bridenbaugh,Mitre and Sceptre:Transatlantic 1689-1775 (New York, 1962); Harry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writingsof Samuel Adams (1904; repr., New York, 1968), I: IIS-22; Taylor, PapersofJohn Adams,3: 333; New Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery:Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary England, Contributions in American History (Westport, Conn., 1995), 52 (quotaPublic Discoursein tion); Christopher Grasso, A SpeakingAristocracy: Transforming Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 259-60; Ray Raphael, The Eighteenth-Century and Concord FirstAmericanRevolution: (New York, 2002), 171-72. BeforeLexington

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Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity Author(s): Michael P.

Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity

and Studies, and the 2006 Williamand MaryQuarterly USC-HuntingtonEarly

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY REPUBLICANISM

Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican

Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Worden calls, straightforwardly, "constitutionalrepublicanism." the By

CambridgeHistory of Early Modern English Literature,ed. David Loewenstein and

Fitzmaurice, Humanismand America:An IntellectualHistoryof English Colonisation,

Compare with Andrew

REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

A Revolt witha Reprint eds., Puritan Manifestoes:Study the Origin thePuritan of of of

I954), 5-6 ("Popelike"). 10

Answer theAdmonition, to the . Against reply Thomas of Cartwright.. (Cambridge,

REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY

III. Parliament,in Frereand Douglas, PuritanManifestoes,

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[Walter Travers],A full and plaine Declarationof Ecclesiasticall Disciplineowt

REPUBLICANISM THE MASSACHUSETTS AND POLITY

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

M. see chap.7. On Calvin'srole in settingup the Genevacity government, Robert

POLITY AND REPUBLICANISM THE MASSACHUSETTS

under England's ancient constitution, including the rights to trial by

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sense of liberty.The prominentministerArthurHildersamwarnedthat

assaultduringthe reignof KingJamesI (1603-25).James unprecedented

AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY REPUBLICANISM

for an introduction. of StephenFosterhas a good summary puritanparliamentary

c. 64-66. Tyacke, Aspects ofEnglishProtestantism, i53o-I7oo (Manchester,Eng., 2oo001),

12i]). See also Nicholas

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AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY REPUBLICANISM

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

The Winthrop 438; Richard S. Dunn, Puritansand Yankees: DynastyofNew England,

REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY

AmericanThinkingClass:Intellectuals and Intelligentsiain PuritanMassachusetts [New York, 1998], 19 [quotation], 2o).

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY REPUBLICANISM

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), I: 127; [Thomas Hutchinson],

REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY

"saints by calling" seemed to thrust the church illegitimately into the

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

REPUBLICANISM AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY

tion"(24). The only civil rightthatapprobation a congregation of conferred the was

General Courtexpelled deputies, magistrates, two not whenthe deputies a defended

Records of the Governor and Company, I: 87; Richard Cust,

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY REPUBLICANISM

Courtslapped 50 The General John Eliot on the wristin

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

POLITY AND REPUBLICANISM THE MASSACHUSETTS

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

AND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY REPUBLICANISM

Hubbard's claim.The effortsof some the freementhan in Massachusetts, supports