I made it possible by the 1630s for some vestries to select their own rectors. By 1643, the legislature abandoned its claim to designate clergy and incorporated vestry appointment in its religious statutes.32 The Virginia precedent would not be followed by the Church of England in all of the remaining colonies, however. When, for example, the English government established the Church of England in Maryland at the end of the century, it gave to the governor the authority to assign clergy. After the American Revolution, however, the Virginia practice became the general rule in the American church.33
Virginia vestries attempted to revise English vestry-clergy relations in another way. English clergy, once inducted into their parishes, could only be dismissed by their bishops and then only for grave offenses.34 In a similar way, clergy in the Virginia colony, once inducted into their parishes by the governor, had life tenure; their vestries could not dismiss them. Colonial vestries tried to get around this situation by neglecting to present their new rectors to the governor, offering their clergy a series of one-year contracts instead. In most cases, these contracts were renewed each year, producing a stable relationship between vestry and clergy. Where disputes did arise, however, nonpresentation provided the vestry with an effective weapon.35 Again, not all the colonies would follow the Virginia practice of nonpresentation during the colonial era. But after the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church in the United States adopted a canon (1804) that bore some resemblance to the de facto Virginia arrangement; it made it possible for vestries in dispute with their clergy to appeal to their bishops for a termination of the rector’s tenure in circumstances that would never have been allowed under English canon law of the same period.
The second way in which Charles’s religious policy affected colonial religion was through emigration. In 1630, whole communities of members of the Church of England who favored congregational polity took advantage of a generous royal charter and moved to New England. Almost from its inception, this settlement was larger in population than Virginia. Indeed, the colonists soon moved beyond the Massachusetts Bay territory into what would later become the separate colonies of New Hampshire and Connecticut. Going beyond the innovations of the settlers in Virginia, they limited church membership to those who could give accounts of their conversion and abandoned use of the Book of Common Prayer. With king and bishops safely distant in London, they were in little danger of being contradicted. On the contrary, John Winthrop (1588–1649) and other members of the new colony hoped that their innovations would provide a model that would be followed back home.
The religious policy of the growing New England colony distanced it not only from the church in England but also from the Virginia colony to the south. The two colonies, separated geographically by the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, attracted colonists from different parts of England. Two-thirds of the New England colonists came from the eastern counties of England’s East Anglia.36 The clergy in Virginia, whose geographical patterns usually matched those of the parishioners whom they served, came predominantly from the north and west of England.37 Differences that already existed in England were only amplified in America.
Massachusetts Bay was not the only new colony chartered by Charles. Interested in the fortunes of Roman Catholics at the royal court, he also gave his Roman Catholic secretary of state, George Calvert (1580?–1632), permission to create a colony (Maryland, charted in 1632). The first colonists sailed two years later. The majority of the wealthier emigrants would be Roman Catholics, but from the start they only constituted a minority of the settlers. Many of the lower-income colonists were Protestant in sympathy.
In the following decade, Charles was no longer in a position to authorize new colonization. He was locked in a losing power struggle with the puritans that required all his attention. In 1640 Scottish presbyterians, unhappy with the episcopacy and the Scottish Book of Common Prayer (1637), invaded England. Charles summoned two sessions of Parliament to raise money for an English army, but a presbyterian majority in the House of Commons allied itself with the Scots against the king. The presbyterians joined with the army of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), composed primarily of puritan independents (congregationalists), to win the resultant Civil War. The victors executed both Archbishop Laud (1645) and Charles I (1649). With the king and archbishop removed, the Parliament reshaped the Church of England, abolishing the prayer book, the episcopate, and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. An assembly of puritan divines, summoned by the Parliament to meet at Westminster Abbey, drew up a new confession of faith (the Westminster Confession of Faith) and liturgy (Directory for Public Worship of God, 1645).
The victory of the presbyterian party was, however, only partial. Backed by Oliver Cromwell, independent puritans were able to resist Parliament’s efforts to bring all of English puritanism under the new presbyterian form of church government. In 1653, Cromwell asserted his authority over the Parliament more openly; he dissolved the legislative body and ruled alone as England’s Lord Protector. He continued to rule until his death in 1658.
English colonists in the New World acted in a predictable manner. New Englanders, from the same East Anglian towns that were centers of presbyterian and congregational opposition to the crown, supported the Parliament. The colonists in Virginia, Maryland, Bermuda and Barbados, from areas of England in which loyalist sentiments were strong, generally favored the royal family. A third group of colonists, dissenters who objected not only to the episcopal but also to the presbyterian and congregational forms of discipline and doctrine, took advantage of the confusion in England to form a colony in Rhode Island (first charter in 1644) and to establish a dissenting foothold in the Bahamas (arrival of dissenters from Bermuda in 1648). Cromwell sent an expedition to the Caribbean in 1655 that would add Jamaica to the English colonial possessions, taking it from the Spanish.
The Civil War in England may have contributed to a second attack on the colonists by Native Americans. In 1644 Opechancanough, angered by the growing English encroachment on Native American land, sent warriors to drive out the colonists, attacking and destroying their homes, crops, and livestock. The English responded in kind and by 1646 had captured and executed the elderly Opechancanough, enslaved Native American combatants, and imposed annual tribute payments on the remaining Native Americans. By the reckoning of at least one colonist, it was awareness of the civil war taking place in England that led the Native Americans to attack when they did.38
The Colonies after the Restoration
Charles I’s son, Charles II (king, 1660–85), returned to England from exile on the continent in 1660, invited by a Parliament that was dissatisfied with Richard Cromwell’s attempt to succeed his father. With Charles II’s restoration, the episcopal party recaptured the Parliament and ended the Church of England’s experiment with presbyterian government. Anxious to prevent any repetition of the Civil War, the episcopal party in Parliament not only reestablished the episcopacy, the prayer book (Book of Common Prayer 1662), and the traditional Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, but also enacted legislation to guarantee continued dominance in the Church of England. The Parliament required, for example, that all clergy in the Church of England who were ordained during the presbyterian years be reordained by bishops or forfeit their positions. It also strengthened the language in the prayer book’s preface about the requirement that clergy read Morning and Evening Prayer daily. The new edition of prayer book also contained a provision about confirmation that members of the Church of England in the colonies used to advantage. Earlier editions of the Book of Common Prayer included a rubric requiring confirmation as a prerequisite for reception of communion. The 1662 edition amended that rubric to say that one had to “be confirmed,
