Archbishop Laud typified and embodied the spirit of the dominant church, and in addition he had unwearied energy, industry, and determination. Sincere, practical, and brave, but narrow-minded and unsympathetic, he set about the work of reducing the church of England to absolute uniformity in accordance with the law as he interpreted it. The Nonconformists had no rest; Puritan clergymen must conform; Puritan laymen must suffer under the power of the church, which, dominated by its bishops and wedded to its idols, was becoming steadily more powerful and all-inclusive. The reign of Charles was not marked by the passage of harsher laws against the Puritans, but it was distinguished from all periods that preceded or followed it by the continuous, steady, and thorough-going application of those already in existence.
It was under this regime that the great Puritan migration to America took place. The Puritans represented a class of society which was much more ready to emigrate than the Catholics. As early as 1597 some imprisoned Brownists sent a petition to the Privy Council asking that they might be allowed to settle in America; and four men of the same persuasion even went on a voyage to examine the land. [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 167.] In 1608 many Puritans seem to have prepared to emigrate to Virginia, when by Archbishop Bancroft's influence they were forbidden by the king to go, except with his express permission in each individual case. [Footnote: Stith, Hist, of Virginia, book II., year 1608.]
The Separatists early became wanderers on the face of the earth, a now famous group of them leaving their English homes for Amsterdam, migrating thence to Leyden, and then, after hesitating between a Dutch and an English colony and between North and South America, a portion settling themselves on Plymouth Harbor. [Footnote: Griffis, Pilgrims in Their Three Homes.] In all the history of early colonization there have been few such occasions as that of the year 1638, when fourteen ships bound for New England lay in the Thames at one time, and when three thousand settlers reached Boston within the same year. [Footnote: Authorities quoted in Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation, 344] Almost all the Englishmen who were ever to emigrate to New England left their homes during the twelve years between 1628 and 1640. Unfavorable economic conditions at home and the prospect of greater prosperity in the colony doubtless had their influence; but of the more than twenty thousand who passed from the old England to New England during that time, it is fair to presume that by far the greater number were more or less influenced by their Puritan opinions.
The most decisive proof of this motive for emigration is the slacking of the tide of Puritan expatriation after 1640. When Parliament, after eleven years of intermission, met in that year at Westminster in the full appreciation of its power, one of its first actions was to order the impeachment and arrest of Archbishop Laud. At last the Puritans had their turn, and the assembling of Parliament found them no longer a scattered, disorganized, diversified element in the English church and nation; but, thanks to long persecution, a compact body, austere in morals, dogmatic in religious belief, ready to make use of political means for religious ends, and determined to impose their asceticism and their orthodoxy on the English people so far as they might be able. [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 133.]
A majority of Parliament, small but sufficient, were Puritans, as had probably been true of every Parliament for many years, had they been free to act. Their intentions showed themselves in a prompt inception of reforms in the church, and the burdens of official ecclesiastical oppression were rapidly transferred to the shoulders of those who had previously bound the loads upon Puritan backs. In 1641 orders were issued by the House of Commons for the demolition of all images, altars, and crucifixes. [Footnote: Commons Journals, II., 279.] A commission known as the "Committee of Scandalous Ministers" was appointed, and proceeded to discipline the clergy and to harass the universities. Demands for the harsher treatment of priests and Jesuits were soon followed by plans for the diminution of the power of archbishops and bishops of the established church. The Court of High Commission was abolished July 5, 1641. [Footnote: 16 Chas. I., chap. ii.] The archbishops and bishops were removed from the House of Lords and the Privy Council by the act of February 13, 1642. [Footnote: Ibid., chap, xxvii.]
The Solemn League and Covenant of September 25, 1643, pledged Parliament and the leaders of the now dominant party to extirpate "church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors and commissaries, deans, deans and chapters, archdeacons, and all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy"; and to reform religion in England "in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government, according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed churches." [Footnote: League and Covenant, Sub Section 1, 2.]
By this time the quarrel between Charles and Parliament had been put to the arbitrament of the sword, and the distinction of Cavalier and Roundhead to a certain extent superseded that between Anglican and Puritan. In 1645 came the catastrophe of Naseby, then the long series of futile negotiations ending in the execution of the king at Whitehall in 1649. From the general confusion emerged the commonwealth, "without any king or House of Lords," the church organized on Presbyterian lines, the spirit of Puritanism dominating, although there was toleration for every form of Christian belief, "provided this liberty be not extended to popery or prelacy." [Footnote: Instrument of Government, Section 37.] For full twenty years the Anglican church was under a cloud, first Presbyterianism and then Independency being the official form of the church of England. The ill-fortunes of the royalist party in the civil war and under the commonwealth, and the religious oppression imposed by the Puritans upon churchmen, now combined to send to the colonies the very classes which had so recently been the persecutors. From 1640 to 1660 Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas received an influx of English churchmen escaping from conditions at home as intolerable to them as, those which drove the Pilgrims and Puritans to New England during the previous decades.
The commonwealth was not merely a triumph of Puritanism, it was a birth-time of new religious sects. The excitement of a period of civil war, the breaking down of old standards, the disappearance of old authority, the opportunities offered by the quasi-democracy of the commonwealth, the preoccupation of the seventeenth-century mind with questions of religion, all combined to cause almost a complete disintegration of religious organization. Here and there a man began to preach religious truth and duty as they looked to him; he obtained adherents, a congregation was organized, the tenets of this body spread, and branches were formed; till shortly a new religious society had come into existence, with its creed, organization, missionary spirit, and more or less vigorous hope of converting all men and absorbing all other religious organizations. An almost indefinite number of such religious bodies arose during the middle years of the seventeenth century—Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy Men, Baptists or Anabaptists, Quakers, Ranters, Notionists, Familists, Perfectists, and others. Most of them died out within the brief period which gave them birth, but some survived to become great religious denominations, extending into America as well as throughout England. [Footnote: Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, chap. viii.]
Of these the Quakers are the most interesting in their relations to the New World. The spirit from which they arose was closely similar to that which gave birth to the Baptists of England, the Anabaptists, Mennonites, Pietists, and Quietists of the Continent. Their movement was an extreme revolt against the formalism, corporate character, and externality of established religion. It contained a deep element of mysticism. The Quakers declared all believers, irrespective of learning, sex, or official appointment, to be priests. [Footnote: Fox, Letters, No. 249.] They asserted the adequacy of the "inner light" to guide every man in his faith and in his actions. They opposed all forms and ceremonies, even many of those of ordinary courtesy and fashion, such as removing the hat or conforming the garb to changing custom.
George Fox, the representative of these ideas, began his public preaching in 1648, and his doctrines at once found wide acceptance. In 1652 there were said to be twenty-five Quaker preachers passing through the country; by 1654 there were sixty, some of whom were women, who, by the principles of their teachings, should preach as freely as men. Their missionary journeys led them to Scotland and Ireland, and later even to Holland and Germany and the far east of Europe. Organization among the Quakers proceeded somewhat slowly. This was due partly to the individualist character of their beliefs, partly to the lack of constructive interest on the part of Fox and the other leaders during the early period of their missionary work. Nevertheless, "meetings" were gradually organized, took definite shape, and kept up regular communication with one another, so that there came to be a net-work of such bodies over the whole country. In 1659 it is estimated that there were thirty thousand Quakers in England.