CHAPTER VII.
THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW ENGLAND.—PURITANS AND SEPARATISTS IN ENGLAND.
BY GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS,
Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
THERE is no occasion to offer any elaborate plea for making this theme the subject of a chapter of American history, however extended into detail or compressed in its dealing with general themes that history might be. In the origin and development, the strengthening and the triumph, of those agencies which transferred from the Old World to the New the trial of fresh ideas and the experiment with free institutions, the colonists of New England had the leading part. The influence and the institutions which have gone forth from them have had a prevailing sway on the northern half of this continent. Their enterprise—in its seemingly feeble, but from the first earnest and resolute, purpose—took its spring from religious dissension following upon the earlier stages of the Protestant Reformation in England. The grounds, occasions, and results of that dissension thus become the proper subject of a chapter in American history. It is certain that in tracing the early assertion in England of what may be called the principles of dissent from ecclesiastical authority, we are dealing with forces which have wrought effectively on this continent.
The well-established and familiar fact, that the first successful and effective colonial enterprises of Englishmen in New England found their motive and purpose in religious variances within the English communion, is illustrated by an incident anticipatory by several years of the period which realized that result. A scheme was devised and entered upon in England in the interest of substantially the same class of men known as Separatists and Nonconformists, who twenty-three years afterward established themselves at Plymouth, and ten years later in Massachusetts Bay. In the year 1597, there were confined in London prisons a considerable number of men known confusedly as Barrowists or Brownists, who had been seized in the conventicles of the Separatists, or had made themselves obnoxious by disaffection with the government, the forms, or the discipline of the English hierarchy. In that year a scheme was proposed, apparently by the Government, for planting some permanent colonists somewhere in the northern parts of North America. Some of these Separatists petitioned the Council for leave to transport themselves for this purpose, promising fidelity to the Queen and her realm. Three merchants at the time were planning a voyage for fishing and discovery, with a view to a settlement on an island variously called Rainea, Rainée, and Ramees, in a group of the Magdalen Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and they were to furnish two ships for the enterprise. Reinforcing the petition of the Separatists, they asked permission to transport with them “divers artificers and other persons that are noted to be Sectaries, whose minds are continually in an ecclesiastical ferment.” Permission was granted for the removal of two such persons in each of the two ships, the merchants giving bonds that the exiles should not return unless willing to obey the ecclesiastical laws. The four prisoners who embarked for the voyage, April 8, 1597, were Francis and George Johnson, brothers, who had been educated at Cambridge, and Daniel Studley and John Clarke, who shared with them their Separatist principles. One of the vessels was wrecked when near its destination, and the company took refuge on the other, which, proving unseaworthy and scantily provisioned, returned to England, arriving in the Channel, September 1. The four exiles found their way stealthily to a hiding-place in London, and by the middle of the month were in Amsterdam. Their history there connects with the subsequent fortunes of the Separatists in England, and with those of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.[443]
The facts, persons, and incidents with which we have to deal in treating of this special matter of religious contention within the English Church, give us simply the opening in series and course of what under various modifications is known as the history of Dissent. The strife then engendered has continued essentially the same down to our own times, turning upon the same points of controversy and upon contested principles, rights, and methods. The present relations of the parties to this entailed dissension may throw some light back upon the working of the elements in it when it was first opened. The result which has been reached, after the processes engaged in it for nearly four centuries, shows itself to us in a still existing National Church establishment in England, with authority and vested rights, privileges, and prerogatives, yet nevertheless repudiated by nearly, if not quite, half of the subjects of the realm. The reason or the right, the grounds or the justification, of the original workings of Dissent have certainly been suspended long enough for discussion and judgment upon their merits to help us to reach a fair decision upon them.
The indifference, even the strong distaste, which writers and readers alike feel to a rehearsal in our days of the embittered and aggravated strife,—often concerned too, with what seem to us petty, trivial, and perverse elements of scruple, temper, and passion,—in the early Puritan controversy in the Church of England, may be sensibly relieved by the spirit of fairness and consideration in which the subject is treated in the most recent dealing with it by able and judicious writers. There are even now in the utterances of pulpit and platform, and in the voluminous pages of pamphlet, essay, and so-called history, survivals and renewals of all the sharpness and acrimoniousness of the original passions of the controversy. And where this spirit has license, the lengthening lapse of time will more or less falsify the truth of the relation of either side of the strife. One whose sympathies are with either party may rightly claim that it be fairly presented, its limitations, excesses, and even its perversities being excused or palliated, where reasons can be shown. Nor is one who for any fair purpose undertakes a statement or exposition of the views and course of either of those parties to be regarded as also its champion and vindicator. But no rehearsal of the controversy will have much value or interest for readers of our day which does assume such championship of one party. As the Puritans, Nonconformists, or Dissenters, from the beginning up to this day, were substantially defeated, disabled, and made the losers of the object for which they contended, they may fairly claim the allowance of making the best possible statement of their cause.