The Court, however, even as constituted as a result of the May election, did not move rapidly enough in the prosecution of Wheelwright, and was summarily dissolved in September. Sixteen members were dropped, and the new Court, comprising forty-two members, contained twenty-two new names.[[414]] Even this purge was not enough, and two deputies were expelled, one for declaring that the Boston petition was lawful, and the other for declaring that he believed Wheelwright was innocent and was being persecuted for the truth.
Meanwhile, Vane had returned to England, and a synod of all the clergy had met and declared that there were eighty-two erroneous or blasphemous opinions involved in the controversy.[[415]] Mr. Cotton, who had no taste for that banishment which he claimed was no hardship, now went over to what was evidently to be the winning side. With a broader mind and wider vision than any of the other clergy of the colony, he had not the courage to stand alone, beyond a certain point, against their unanimity in intolerance. The higher promptings of his nature were crushed by the united voice of the priesthood, as Winthrop's had been so short a time before, and the noblest of the colony's leaders, lay and clerical, from that time tended to sink to the lower level of their fellows.
Events now moved more swiftly. At the November Court, Wheelwright was sentenced to be disfranchised and banished, and was refused the privilege of an appeal to England.[[416]] He was given fourteen days in which to settle his affairs, and at the beginning of winter was on his way to New Hampshire. One of the expelled deputies was disfranchised and threatened with banishment should he “speake anything to disturbe the publike peace.” Another was also disfranchised and banished. Two weeks later, seven of the signers of the petition were disfranchised, and ten more, who acknowledged their “sin” in having signed, were pardoned. The following week, seventy-five men, in the towns of Boston, Salem, Newbury, Roxbury, Ipswich, and Charlestown, were condemned to have all their arms and ammunition taken from them unless they would likewise acknowledge their “sin.” A law was passed that any one who should “defame” any Magistrate or Court, or any of their acts or proceedings, should be fined, imprisoned, disfranchised, or banished.[[417]]
In the meantime, Mrs. Hutchinson had been brought to trial. When, at its beginning, she asked what law had been broken, the Court answered, “the fifth commandment,” which enjoined her to honor father and mother, whereas she had brought reproach upon the “fathers of the commonwealth.”[[418]] When the trial was over, and the sentence given that she should be “banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society,” she said, “I desire to know wherefore I am banished.” “Say no more,” answered the Governor; “the Court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”
It was evident now that no voice could be raised in criticism of any acts of the civil or ecclesiastical authorities, and that the minds and lives of the ten thousand or more inhabitants of Massachusetts had come wholly under the control of their rulers. One man, who with a group of people undertook to organize a church without having secured the permission of the magistrates and clergy, was fined £20 and imprisoned “during the pleasure of Court.” Hugh Buet, being found guilty of “heresy,” was condemned to leave the colony within three weeks or be hanged. Two others were imprisoned for criticizing the government and clergy; and, for the same offense, Katherine Finch was ordered to be whipped.[[419]] In 1635, a law had been passed making church attendance compulsory for all inhabitants, under pain of fine and imprisonment. Three years later, it was enacted that every resident, whether a freeman and church member or not, should be taxed for the support of the ministers. In the Old World, the churches had been satisfied with excommunication, but in Massachusetts, a law was now passed that, if any person was excommunicated by the church, he must endeavor to have himself restored within six months, under penalty of “fine, imprisonment, banishment, or further.”[[420]] That ominous “further” was evidently intended to mean death, and it is difficult to conceive of a measure more conducive to the rearing of a race of conforming hypocrites.
The policy so ruthlessly followed by the leaders can hardly be excused by attributing it to the spirit of the age or to the necessity of maintaining civil order. They were all familiar with the example of religious toleration in Holland; and in neither Plymouth, Rhode Island, nor Connecticut was church membership a legal requisite for the franchise. Moreover, Massachusetts, only a few years later, in annexing the northern settlements, permitted their inhabitants to vote without being church members, although denying that privilege to her own citizens.
Criticism of the leaders' actions was severe and constant, even from their best friends in England. The real father of the colony, the Reverend John White, wrote to Winthrop in alarm, saying that he desired him “to have an eye to one thinge, that you fall not into that evill abroad, which you labored to avoyd at home, to binde all men to the same tenets and practise.” Stansby, in a letter to the Reverend Mr. Wilson, complained that, on account of their strictness, over one half of the people were not admitted to church membership, and that this would do them much harm. Stephen Winthrop, temporarily in London, sent home word to his brother John, that “here is great complaint against us for our severity against Anabaptists. It doth discourage any people from coming to us for fear they should be banished if they dissent from us in opinion.” Sir George Downing, a cousin of the younger Winthrop, in a letter retailing English opinion of the colony, speaks of that “law of banishing for conscience, which makes us stinke everywhere.”[[421]]
Nor must the standpoint of the English citizen be neglected. England's American possessions, in spite of monopolies and charters, were coming more and more to be looked upon as the heritage of the English people, as the land of opportunity for those who fell by the wayside in life's race at home, as well as for religious exiles. Yet here was one of the best parts of the whole continent being monopolized by a band of people who rejected, oppressed, and banished others, or at the least deprived them of all political rights, not because they were undesirable citizens, not because they were immoral, but because they refused to conform to the peculiar church polity and doctrine, neither Church of England nor English Puritan, which the first settlers had evolved in the American wilderness.
Winthrop, in his controversy with Vane over the immigration law, and apologist historians since, have made much of the possible technical rights under the charter possessed by the company members, and their successors in perpetuity, to choose their fellow citizens according to any standard, however fanatical, however unjust, of which they might approve. These rights were questionable, and the controversy has usually ignored those of the potential English colonist at home. But our interest does not lie in legal technicalities: it is concerned with the influences that moulded New England; and from that standpoint, we can only point to the results of the policy of the first leaders and to its baneful effects. As we noted above, Winthrop's finer impulses had been permanently checked, while Cotton, who might have made a noble leader, was now content to follow natures lower than his own. The voices that had pleaded for religious toleration, for civil liberty, and for a religion of love, were silenced. The intellectual life of the colony ceased to be troubled and entered into peace, but it was the peace of death. The struggle for civil freedom did, indeed, go on, and in that alone lay the sole contribution of the colony to the cause of human progress; for the almost complete suppression of free speech and free inquiry surrendered the intellectual life of Massachusetts to the more and more benumbing influence of a steadily narrowing theology.[[422]] For two centuries, from the day that Winthrop pronounced that verdict, “the Court knows wherefore and is satisfied,” the social and religious life of New England as a whole conformed to the rigid lines of Calvinism in its harshest and least attractive aspects. In England, Puritanism had been grafted upon a national stock of abundant sturdiness and health. In the forests of America, uncultured and ungrafted, the wild fruit grew steadily more gnarled and bitter.