in.
They were proud to be English. The place names alone show that: a small selection includes Cambridge, Ipswich, Norwich, Boston, Hull, Bedford, Falmouth and Plymouth, of course. This was evidence of homesickness perhaps, but also a determination to keep the connection and hold faith with the faith of those they had left behind. It was a new baptism, but also an assertion of their Englishness. There were many who came for reasons other than a search for a place in which to plant a purer Puritan faith. But for many generations it was the religious self-exiles who dominated. By the time the make-up of the population of the New World had grown and changed and its history been forged in godliness, slaughter, injustice and risk, it was these founding Puritans and Separatists who had put down their mark. Their covenant with each other through their faith in the teaching and in the language of the Bible had made its harsh Protestant character the first draft of the new America.
There was something else going on, more profound and, I think, difficult to grasp in our age. There grew with increasing force in seventeenth-century England, among the Puritans, the belief, frightening to these faith-filled souls, that ‘God was leaving England’.
In this, as in so much about the seventeenth century, I am indebted to Christopher Hill. Here is a quotation with which he opens the chapter called ‘God Is Leaving England’, in his book The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. He begins with a reference, one of many, taken from the Old Testament.
‘The Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.’ The land referred to was now thought to be England. The fear was growing that the threat of Catholicism and the Antichrist was not being countered with sufficient rigour. Charles’s court flirted with Catholicism and it was becoming dangerously drawn back into its orbit.
In Europe the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics was swinging perilously and savagely against the Protestants. England refused to get involved. Just as Israel had faced the larger powers of Egypt and Babylon, so England now faced the far greater powers of France and Spain. The Puritans thought that their country was not alive to the danger. Why did King Charles not take up arms against the Catholics? God would not stay with people who did not deserve Him.
In 1622, John Brinsley, in his influential The Third Part of the True Watch, wrote: ‘The withdrawing of the Lord’s precious presence from his church is both an evident sign of his displeasure and a manifest threatening of his departure.’ England needed to repent its sins. Preacher after preacher called out, but in vain. A verse of one new hymn ran:
Preserve this hopeless place
And our disturbed state
From those that have more wit than grace
And present counsels hate.
Less than a decade later, in 1631, Thomas Hooker, in a sermon called ‘The Danger of Desertion’, left no one in any doubt. ‘As sure as God is God, God is going from England . . . Stop him at the town’s end and let not thy God depart . . . God makes account that New England still be a refuge . . . a rock and a shelter for his righteous ones to run to.’
Which they did; the hundreds turned into thousands. There were those who remained to continue the fight in the Puritan cause in the Civil War and to see their triumphant victory and the Protestant ‘Commonwealth’ under Oliver Cromwell. This seemed to promise to reunite New and Old England for ever. But before that, the decisive transatlantic shift, the flight which was to create the character of America, had been made. The dreadful warning, that ‘God is leaving England’, had been heeded and taken literally. And as a consequence the New World was founded on the rock of a tough, Bible-bound, deep-thinking Protestantism.
There had been expeditions and attempted settlements in America before the Pilgrim Fathers – in Virginia, for instance, under Walter Raleigh in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. There was Jamestown, established in 1607. This was Anglican, rather middle class and more easy-going than those fanatically driven communities further north. Not that the English gentry avoided going to the north. The immigrants of the 1630s were a wide social mix, but it was the Puritans who were dominant for a sealing length of time. ‘From the beginning,’ as Diarmaid MacCulloch the distinguished theological historian has written, ‘they were a ‘Commonwealth’, whose government lay in the hands of godly adult males who were the investors and the colonists.’ Most of them were Puritans: the Separatists – extreme Puritans – were a minority, but, in the early days, disproportionately influential.
The first Governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, like his Puritan contemporary Oliver Cromwell, was an East Anglian gentleman. One of the most striking things these Puritans did was to set up a university college, Harvard, in a town they named Cambridge. It was for the training of new clergy. In 1650 Massachusetts had one minister for every 415 persons. In Virginia it was one for 3,239. And by law every householder in Massachusetts had to pay a tax for the church or meeting house and by law go there for two hours twice on Sundays and for a two-hour lecture in the week.
This and their devotion to the daily study and reading of the Bible and other religious works made them, MacCulloch again, ‘possibly the most literate society then existing in the world’. Almost every Puritan town had a school. What bound them was the central notion of ‘the covenant’ they had made with God, with each other and with the future. What lined their minds was the Bible, by now, the 1630s, the King James Version.
Their implacable stance saw life as a battle between God and Satan. This set in motion yet another persisting strain in American life: persecution. If you were not with them you were against them, as Jesus Christ Himself had said. And if you were against them you were to be attacked, defeated and, if necessary, destroyed. They used the Old Testament but also English common law to justify the persecution of what they saw as ‘immorality’. This included breaking the Sabbath or blasphemy, which were criminalised. Hysterical insanity could take over. In 1642, the New Haven authorities examined a piglet whose face, they said, bore a resemblance to one George Spenser. He was convicted of bestiality. He confessed and was hanged; and so was the sow.
Non-Puritans were not encouraged to come to New England and one of the leading men of the Chosen spoke of ‘the lawlessness of liberty of conscience’. Dissenters were given, as another Puritan said, ‘free liberty to keep away from us’. When the intellectually adventurous Quakers came, they were prosecuted and their ears were cropped and they were expelled. When four of them returned between 1659 and 1661, they were hanged.
One unexpected consequence of this was that Roger Williams, a minister in Salem in the 1630s, was moved to say that the Puritans had gone too far. He fled to found what became Rhode Island, unique in the English-speaking world for welcoming exiles and Dissenters, Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers and also those from another religion – one both deeply allied and historically alien – Jews.
These New England Puritans hunted down witches. It was a period when medicine was primitive and when magic and ‘signs’ would be sought out to fill the gaps in knowledge. The devil was held to be ceaseless in his attempts to deform, damage, disrupt, distort and dismantle the plans and purposes of the best of God’s people. It was a time of the dramatically inexplicable and in that fear-fraught and fortressed society, vengeance seemed an essential defence. And though ‘vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’, the Old Testament furnished many dramatic examples not only of a vengeful God but also of vengeful Israelites and their enemies. It was there in the book and so it could be followed as an example.
Witches were a prime target. Overwhelmingly women and mostly of the poorer class. These were usually women canny in their knowledge of traditional country cures. They were powerless and easy to capture. For those in authority they were useful, perhaps in some primitive way: they were essential victims. For such furious and strained
