Removal of the charter. On the 20th of October Cradock resigned his governorship and Winthrop was chosen in his stead. 1629. Puritan ministers were at once elected to the freedom of the company, in order that its proceedings might not want the sanction of prayer. The next year the charter crossed the wide seas, and in 1630 a court of the company was held in the wilderness at Charlestown. [Note 8.] But a subordinate government "for financial affairs only" was maintained in London, with Cradock, the former president, at the head. This seems to have been an effectual blind, and probably the king's government did not know of the flight of the charter until the Privy Council in 1634 summoned Cradock to bring that document to the Council Board. Thomas Morton, the expelled master of Merrymount, writes of the wrath of Laud, who had been foiled by this pretty ruse: "My lord of Canterbury and my lord privy seal, having caused all Mr. Cradock's letters to be viewed and his apology for the brethren particularly heard, protested against him and Mr. Humfries that they were a couple of imposturous knaves." Compare Palfrey, i, 371, and Deane's note in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. 1869, p. 185. Laud had thought to crush the government of Massachusetts by destroying the company, whose office remained in London, with Cradock still apparently its head. Hutchinson's Hist. Mass., p. 31. The archbishop found too late that he had eagerly pounced upon a dummy. He devised many things afterward to achieve his purpose, but the charter remained over seas.
XII.
From the point of view of our later age, the removal of the charter government to America is the event of chief importance in this migration of Winthrop's company. The ultimate effect of this brilliant stroke was so to modify a commercial corporation that it became a colonial government as independent as possible of control from England. By the admission of a large number of the colonists to be freemen—that is, to vote as stockholders in the affairs of the company, which was now the colony itself, and a little later by the development of a second chamber—the government became representative.
But we may not for a moment conceive that the colonists understood the importance of their act in the light of its consequences. In their minds the government was merely a setting and support for the church. The main purpose. The founding of a new church establishment, after what they deemed the primitive model, was the heart of the enterprise. This is shown in many words uttered by the chief actors, and it appears in strong relief in an incident that occurred soon after the arrival of Winthrop's company. Isaac Johnston, the wealthiest man of the party, succumbed to disease and hardship, but "he felt much rejoiced at his death that the Lord had been pleased to keep his eyes open so long as to see one church of Christ gathered before his death." Here we have the Puritan passion for a church whose discipline and services should realize their ideals—a passion that in the stronger men suffered no abatement in the midst of the inevitable pestilence and famine that were wont to beset newly arrived colonists in that time.
XIII.
Influence of Plymouth. One salient fact in the history of the Massachusetts Bay colony is the dominant influence of the example of Plymouth. The Puritans of the Massachusetts colony were not Separatists. No one had been more severe in controversy with the Separatists than some of the Puritans who remained in the Church of England. They were eagerly desirous not to be confounded with these schismatics. When the great migration of 1630 took place, the emigrants published a pathetic farewell, protesting with the sincerity of homesick exiles their attachment to the Church of England, "ever acknowledging that such hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation we have received in her bosom and sucked at her breasts."
Differences among the Puritans. It is to be remembered that these Puritans did not agree among themselves. Puritanism was of many shades. There were some, like the Brownes whom Endecott sent out of the colony, that were even unwilling to surrender the prayer book. The greater part of the earlier Puritans had desired to imitate the Presbyterianism of Scotland and Geneva, and in Elizabeth's time they had organized presbyteries. Nothing seemed more probable beforehand than the revival in New England of the presbyteries of the days of Cartwright. But what happened was unexpected even by the Puritans. The churches of Massachusetts were formed on the model of John Robinson's Independency.
Effect of emigration. There must have been a certain exhilarant reaction in the minds of the Puritans when at last they were clear of the English coast and free from the authority that had put so many constraints upon them. There were preachings and expoundings by beloved preachers with no fear of pursuivants. The new religious freedom was delightful to intoxication. Roger Clap's Memoirs, 40. "Every day for ten weeks together," writes one passenger, they had preaching and exposition. On one ship the watches were set by the Puritan captain with the accompaniment of psalm-singing. Those who all their lives long had made outward and inward compromises between their ultimate convictions and their obligations to antagonistic authority found themselves at length utterly free. It was not that action was freed from the restraint of fear, so much as that thought itself was freed from the necessity for politic compromises. Every ship thus became a seminary for discussion. Every man now indulged in the unwonted privilege of thinking his bottom thought. The tendency to swing to an extreme is all but irresistible in the minds of men thus suddenly liberated. To such enthusiasts the long-deferred opportunity to actualize ultimate ideals in an ecclesiastical vacuum would be accepted with joy. What deductions such companies would finally make from the hints in the New Testament was uncertain. The only sure thing was that every vestige of that which they deemed objectionable in the English church would be repressed, obliterated, in their new organization. [Note 9.]
Rise of the Congregational form in New England. With the evils and abuses of the English church more and more exaggerated in their thoughts, the sin of separation readily came to seem less heinous than before. There was no longer any necessity for professing loyalty to the church nor any further temptation to think ill of those at Plymouth, who, like themselves, had suffered much to avoid what both Separatists and Puritans deemed unchristian practices. A common creed and common sufferings, flight from the same oppression to find refuge in what was henceforth to be a common country, drew them to sympathy and affection for their forerunners at Plymouth. The Plymouth people were not backward to send friendly help to the newcomers. The influence of the physician sent from Plymouth to Endecott's party in the prevailing sickness soon persuaded the naturally radical Endecott to the Plymouth view of church government. Winthrop's associates, or the greater part of them, drifted in the same direction, to their own surprise, no doubt. There was a lack of uniformity in the early Massachusetts churches and some clashing of opinion. Cotton to Salonstall in Hutch. Papers. Some ministers left the colony dissatisfied; one or more of the churches long retained Presbyterian forms, and some stanch believers in presbyterial government lamented long afterward that New England ecclesiastical forms were not those of the Calvinistic churches of Europe. Hubbard's Hist. of New Eng., 117. But the net result was that Robinsonian independency became the established religion in New England, whence it was transplanted to England during the Commonwealth, and later became the prevailing discipline among English dissenters.
Thus the church discipline and the form of government in Massachusetts borrowed much from Plymouth, but the mildness and semi-toleration—the "toleration of tolerable opinions"—which Robinson had impressed on the Pilgrims was not so easily communicated to their new neighbors who had been trained in another school. [Note 10.]