Winship_Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity

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Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts PolityAuthor(s): Michael P. WinshipSource: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), pp. 427-462Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877371 .

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Godly Republicanism and the Origins ofthe Massachusetts PolityMichael P. Winship

O N October 19, 1630, the male adults of the raw new colony ofMassachusetts Bay stood in a clearing in Charlestown and lis-tened as John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts BayCompany, made two proposals. One was that they put themselves for-ward to become freemen, or voters, in the company. The other was thatthese freemen would elect assistants, the directors of the company, "whenthere are to be chosen." Any necessary elections were to take place in ayearly meeting of the company's General Court. The assembled colonistsassented to Winthrop's proposals. Thereafter the new freemen's powersrapidly expanded. Annual elections of all the assistants and the governorcommenced in 1632. In 1634 the General Court became the colony's chiefjudicial court and legislative body, meeting four times a year with thefreemen represented by deputies from each town.1 Yet even the initialchanges of 1630 made Massachusetts the only polity within King CharlesI's realms where freemen had final control over all the officials whoimmediately affected their lives. It was the initiation of a process wherebythe colonists created a hybrid political order whose ideological founda-tion can be characterized as godly republicanism.A New England innovation, godly republicanism was a constitu-tional arrangement intended to preserve the purity of the churches andthe liberties of the people. Its roots lay in ecclesiastical agitation bylate-sixteenth-century puritans who brought republican assumptionsabout the nature and dangers of government to questions of churchpolity. Their ecclesiastical republicanism fed into a broader, eventually

MichaelP. Winship s E. MertonCoulterProfessorf Historyat theUniversityof Georgia.He thanksFrancis . Bremer,Tom Cogswell,StephenFoster,MarkA.Peterson,and an anonymous eader or the William ndMaryQuarterlyor theirhelpfulcommentsandsuggestions.The articlealsobenefited rompresentationstthe GeorgiaWorkshop n EarlyAmericanHistoryand Cultureat theUniversity fGeorgia, the 2003 annual meeting of the North American Conference on BritishStudies,and the 2006 WilliamandMary Quarterlynd USC-HuntingtonEarlyModern Studies Institute Workshop.1 Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of theMassachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853), I: 79-80, 95, II7-19. The 1630decision was clarified at the next meeting of the General Court in May 1631, where itwas explained that at the yearly General Court meeting the freemen could add assis-tants or remove them "for any defect or misbehav[io]r" (I: 87).William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LXIII, Number 3, July 2oo6


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428 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYself-consciously republican civic ideology nurtured by the resistance ofmany of Massachusetts' founders to the fiscal innovations of Charles I.The recovery of godly republicanism opens new perspectives on the his-tory of the political cultures of British North America, draws attentionto long-standing ideological fissures in England, and sheds light onneglected political aspects of puritanism itself.Republicanismis perhapsas slippery to define as puritanism and is subjectto even more heuristic abuse. The 197os and I980s saw a swelling flood tideof republicanism sweep over United States historiography. Republicanismwas increasingly perceived as the chief ideological propulsion behindAmerican history, and at its peak this tide carried on its vast explanatorycurrent groups as disparate as eighteenth-century Virginia planters andtwentieth-century factory workers. A prominent 1993 article exposed thevacuousness with which scholars were handling the concept, and the tidereceded with the rapidityof the dot-com crash.2Scholarsof Elizabethan and earlyStuartEngland largelysat this boom-and-bust cycle out. In the early seventeenth century, "republican"was aninsult; "republic" tself was far more often used to mean "commonwealth"in generalrather than specificallya kingless state with accountabilityto the"people";such a kingless state was more commonly described as a "freestate" or popular state than a "republic." J. G. A. Pocock pronouncedEnglish republicanisma structuralimpossibility before the 165os, and his-torians of Anglo-American republicanism routinely began chronologicallywith the English political theorists of that decade.3

2 Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal ofAmerican History 79, no. I (June 1992): 11-38. I tested my impression of thecrash of republicanism on "America: History and Life" (http://serials.abc- cIio. com/active/start?_appname=serials &initialdb=AHL) by doing a search for theword "republicanism" in article titles (excluding book reviews and cases where theterm referred to the political party or to a non-North American context) in thenine-year periods from 1986 to 1994 and from 1995 to 2003, my assumption beingthat Rodgers's article would have started to have an effect by 1995. There were forty-seven results for the first period and twenty-six for the second. The first period hadtwelve articles in journals I identified as major or arguably so (Journal of the EarlyRepublic, Historical Journal, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, JournalofAmerican History, Journal of Urban History, William and Mary Quarterly), whereasthe second had three (Journal of American Studies, Journal of the Early Republic,Journal ofSouthern History).3 John Florio, Queen Anna's New World of Words; Or, Dictionaire of the Italianand English tongues ... (London, 1611),429, for example, translates the Italian word"Repdiblica" as "a Common-wealth, free-state, the weale-publike." Cicero, as aRoman republican, implied in De officiis that Rome had only been a true Respublica(that is, a commonwealth) while under its traditional constitution. This implication,Quentin Skinner suggests, is the impetus for the term's eventual contraction toexclusively mean elected governments (see Skinner, "Machiavelli's Discorsi and the


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 429Nonetheless as the bloom started to fade from American republican-ism, English scholars began making increasingly confident forays across

the Pocockian chronological divide in search of motifs of republicanism.Patrick Collinson detected republican conceptions of the common-wealth underlying Privy Council decisions in the 158os and, on a practi-cal level, steering the operations of town governments. Literary scholarssoon discovered a rich vein of Ciceronian humanism running throughthe literature of Tudor and early Stuart England and identified it withrepublicanism, and they noted how authors deployed republican motifsin imaginative writing. Scholars now expansively speak of an "unac-knowledged republic" of officeholders and even of a "gentry republic" inearly Stuart England. Critics have justly accused such scholars of repeat-ing, in effect, the sins of their recent American forebears by slapping thelabel republican on arguments for limited monarchy and resistance the-ory or on evidence of subjects participating in the government of thekingdom and its localities. Indeed one of the most vigorous investigatorsof hints of early Stuart republicanism, Markku Peltonen, concedes thatduring this period "we do not . . . encounter a coherent republicanmovement." Critics have called for a more rigorous and restricted use ofthe term republicanism even while acknowledging that it can serve as avalid analytic category in this period.4Pre-Humanist Origins of Republican Ideas," in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed.Gisela Bock, Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, Ideas in Context [Cambridge, 1990], 133n. 94); Blair Worden, "Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The EnglishExperience," in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderenand Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2002), I: 323 n. Io; J. G. A. Pocock, TheMachiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thoughtand the Atlantic RepublicanTradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), chap. 11. In this seminal work, Pocock was moreconcerned with explaining the structural reasons that made it impossible, he felt, forpre-Civil War puritans to manifest a republican type of civil consciousness thanwith exploring what they actually said on commonwealth themes. For an evaluationof Pocock and the historiography of classical republicanism in England, seeJonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the EnglishRevolution (Cambridge, 2004), chap. I.4 Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), 1-58; Markku Peltonen,Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-164o(Cambridge, 1995), 12; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry,Rhetoric and Politics, z627-166o (Cambridge, 1999); Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic:The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649-1653 (Stanford, Calif., 1997),201oi ("gentry republic"); Mark Goldie, "The Unacknowledged Republic:Officeholding in Early Modern England," in The Politics of the Excluded, c.15oo-185o, ed. Tim Harris (New York, zooi), 153-94; John Guy, "Monarchy andCounsel: Models of the State," in The Sixteenth Century, 1485-1603, ed. PatrickCollinson (Oxford, Eng., 2002), 123. For reservations about the use of republican-ism, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), Ii, 22, 54-55;Blair Worden, "On the Winning Side: Where Does the English RepublicanTradition Begin?" Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 29, 1999, 5-6; Kevin Sharpe,


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430 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYOne critic, Blair Worden, suggests for clarity'ssake the employmentof terminology that clearly distinguishes between republicanism'sconsti-

tutional and ideological components. The constitutional componentWordencalls, straightforwardly,constitutional epublicanism."By the1630s its varied manifestations ranged from the ancient Roman Republicand Grecian city-states to the contemporary Venetian and Dutchrepublics. Worden calls the ideological component, with imperativesemphasizing virtuous citizens' active participation in government and thedangerof the corruptingeffects of uncheckedpower,"civicrepublican-ism." It is important to keep the two components distinct because manyof civic republicanism'smotifs grew out of a widely diffused classicalandChristian humanist heritage. Those motifs can be found not only in thecontext of constitutional republicanism but also in the context of limitedmonarchy and, at a stretch, absolute monarchy. Thus motifs of civicrepublicanism on their own, without the advocacy of kingless constitu-tional republican forms, are not sufficient to constitute republicanism.5Ecclesiastical civic republicanism was widely dispersed among puritans.They feared the infiltration of the Roman Catholic Church's tyrannyinto the Church of England and advocated the zealous pursuit of soundreligion and morality by clergy and laity alike. Puritan activism stemmedfrom their broader Christian humanist inheritance and from the dynam-ics of a movement that had a heavy degree of lay participation.6Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-CenturyPolitics(Cambridge, 2000), chap. 7; Worden, "Republicanism, Regicide and Republic,"309-14; Johann P. Sommerville, "Literature and National Identity," in TheCambridgeHistory of EarlyModernEnglishLiterature,ed. David Loewenstein andJanel Mueller (Cambridge, 2ooz), 472, 474. For a summary of the positive effect thehunt for republicanism has had on the scholarly understanding of English govern-ment, see Steve Hindle, The State and Social Changein EarlyModernEngland, c.155o-i64o (Basingstoke, Eng., zooo), 26-29.5 Worden, "Republicanism, Regicide and Republic," 307-8. Worden acknowl-edges that his earlier work helped encourage the excessive use of the term. MarkkuPeltonen has a good brief description of civic republicanism (Peltonen, ClassicalHumanismand Republicanism, ); John Guy, Politics, Law, and Counsel n TudorandEarly Stuart England (Aldershot, Eng., 2000), 292-310. Compare with AndrewFitzmaurice,Humanismand America:An IntellectualHistoryof EnglishColonisation,I5oo-I625, Ideas in Context (Cambridge, 2003), 191. For an example from the histo-riography of a more recent period when republicanism means civic republicanism,see Gordon S. Wood, who writes that in the mid-eighteenth century "classicalrepublican values existed everywhere among educated people in the English-speakingworld," also noting that those values were put to the service of reforming theEnglish mixed monarchy or expressing admiration for it, not to the service of itsoverthrow (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution [New York, 1991], 1o9).6 Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order, Ideas inContext (Cambridge, 1987); Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, chap. 5.


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 431For presbyterians, the most radical of puritans, however, civic

republicanism functioned as the underpinning for ecclesiastical constitu-tional republicanism and thus for a coherent republican movement.7This movement has fallen outside the purview of writers on republican-ism for a variety of reasons: it involved church, not civic polity; it jostledfor space in presbyterian treatises with a host of other issues concerningthe nature of the true church and its practices; its theoretical underpin-nings were buried under masses of scripture citations and examples fromthe early church; and it only manifested its civic possibilities on theother side of the Atlantic, some forty years after sustained governmentrepression led to the collapse of English presbyterianism as a viablepolitical movement.Elizabethan presbyterians wished to see the Church of Englandremodeled along the lines of Continental Calvinist churches. Theywanted the Church of England to be governed not by bishops but byclasses and synods, or associations of ruling lay and ministerial eldersfrom individual churches. Individual churches would be internally gov-erned by the elders with the consent of their congregations, who alsohad to consent to the elders' appointments. Historians have frequentlyremarked on that emphasis on consent and participation, though notthe way in which presbyterians sometimes buttressed it by appeals toclassical history and classical authors. Similarly, it has often been notedthat the presbyterianscontrasted their emphasis on participatory govern-ment with the absolute rule and tyranny of the Church of England'sbishops.8 What needs to be stressed is that presbyterians saw theirchurch system not only in opposition to tyranny but also in crucial ways

7 Presbyterians spoke of the government they wanted simply as the discipline,theApostles' iscipline, rthe like.Theiropponentsended o callthemdisciplinar-ians.In England,presbyterianism,eingunofficial, ackedanycoercive apacities,which has caused ome scholars o stress he protocongregationalendencies f itsgatherings. The lineage, in terms of personnel and positions, between Elizabethanpresbyterianismnd the officialPresbyterianismf the WestminsterConfessionsnot straightforward,hichis why scholars arely apitalizepresbyterianismhendiscussing he Elizabethan ersion.For that lineage,see CarolGearySchneider,"GodlyOrder n a ChurchHalf-Reformed:he Disciplinarian egacy,1570-1641"(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1986).8 This summary is based on presbyterian treatises and on presbyterian involve-mentin churchorganizationn the Netherlandsndthe Channel slands.SeeA. F.ScottPearson,ThomasCartwrightndElizabethanuritanism:535-16o3Gloucester,Mass., 1966), 159-61, 380; Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of Englishand ScottishChurchesf theNetherlandsn theSixteenth nd Seventeenth enturies,Studiesn theHistoryof ChristianThought Leiden,Netherlands,982),20-29. Forcomments on the political structure of presbyterianism, see Pearson, Church andState:PoliticalAspectsof SixteenthCenturyPuritanism(Cambridge,1928);Peter Lake,Anglicansand Puritans?Presbyterianismnd EnglishConformistThoughtrom Whitgiftto Hooker (London, 1988), 53-64.


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432 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYas a prophylactic against tyranny, constituted not simply by scripturalprecept but by the classical republican drive to restrain the corruptingeffects of power. Absolute rule, in other words, was not simply the oppo-site of presbyterianism, it was the defining other that gave presbyterian-ism much of its republican logic.The centrality of absolute rule to the argument for presbyterianismruns through its critique of the Church of England. Among the manydire failings of that church, the worst and most fundamental was thebishops themselves: "Popelike" and "proude, pontificall and tyrannous"or "Rebels and traitours unto God."9 But if the problems with theChurch of England stemmed from corrupt and tyrannical bishops, aspresbyterians argued so forcefully, why not simply install godly ones? Ifthe church could be run by men who labored to see powerful preachingin every parish, sought the advice of their clergy, and took care to ensurethat the church'sdiscipline worked effectively, the bulk of the presbyter-ian critique of the Church of England would wither away.The presbyterian answer was that the church's problems could notbe solved by finding good men. The office of bishop, with one man rul-ing over many, was itself fundamentally wrong for two reasons. Firstbishops wrongfully usurped the role of Christ. As Thomas Cartwright,intellectual leader of the Elizabethan presbyterians, explained, "Themonarchy over the whole church, and over every particular church, andover every singular member in the church, is in Christ alone." Secondthe office of bishop was also wrong because it invariably brought to thesurface a sinister force much dreaded in civic republicanism: "excessivepower," as Cartwright put it.1oThis force was so deadly that it supplied the wedge by whichAntichrist first entered the church. As the presbyterian myth of thechurch's fall conveyed it, Antichrist got his toehold in the church when aminister asserted primacy over the other elders in a single congregation.Soon some ambitious minister took a further step, falsely arrogating thename of bishop to himself to correct other ministers, and the slipperypath went downhill from there. Next came preeminence by a single min-ister in a single city, then power over a number of cities, then power overfellow bishops, and finally power over the entire church. "The swelling

9 [John Udall], A Parte of a Register, contayninge sundrie memorable matters ...(Middelburg, Netherlands, 1593), 368 ("Rebels"); W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas,eds.,PuritanManifestoes:Study ftheOrigin fthePuritanRevoltwitha Reprint fthe Admonition to the Parliament and Kindred Documents, i572 (1907; repr., London,I954), 5-6 ("Popelike").10John Ayre, ed., The Works ofJohn Whitgift. . . Containing the Defence of theAnswero theAdmonition, gainsthereply f ThomasCartwright.. (Cambridge,1853), 3: 198, 2: 280 ("excessive power").


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 433waters of the ambition of divers," summarized Cartwright, "could not byany banks be kept in, which, having once broken out in certain places,afterwards covered almost the face of the whole earth." Switching themetaphor, Cartwright'sassociate Walter Travers amented, "So did Sathanin his misterie of iniquitie, make these staires for the mounting ofAntichrist: whereby at the last, he setled him as amongst the starres."11The ideal remedy for unrestrained power was presbyterianism.Though the New Testament remained silent on the point, early presby-terian writers consistently emphasized that the participatory politicalstructures of the New Testament churches were designed to preventtyranny. "Common reason"alone, Cartwright claimed in the absence ofscriptural evidence, "also doth teach that contraries are cured by theircontraries." Thus "to abolish the tyranny of the popish government, [itis] necessary to plant the discipline of Christ." As William Fulkeexplained, "Tyranny is avoyded when no one man (contrarie to theordinaunce of Christe) . . . shall presume to doe anye thing in theChurch, without the advise and consent of others that bee Godlye andwise." In other words power in presbyterianism was diffused, not con-centrated, with the express purpose of avoiding tyranny. "One is easierto be corrupted," warned Cartwright. For one man, such as a bishop, todecide matters of discipline was in itself tyranny, according to Fulke. Itwas for this reason that Cartwright justified the power of synods. Theparticular always gave way to the general; individual churches alwaysgave way to the many. Similarly, according to A SecondAdmonition to theParliament, the right way "to resolve all doubts and questions in religion,and to pacifie all controversies of the churches, [was] to passe from oneor few to moe, & from moe, to moe godly and learned."12Since blocking tyranny, not removing bishops per se, was the pres-byterians' goal, suppressing bishops was only the first step. Presbyterianswere well aware that the potential for excessive power in the church didnot end as soon as ministers enjoyed parity and shared their power withlay elders. A SecondAdmonition to the Parliament bluntly raised the pos-sibility that the elders may "usurpe authoritie over the whole churche

11 [Walter Travers], A Defence of the Ecclesiastical Discipline ordayned of God tobe Used in His Church ([Middelburg, Netherlands, 1588]), 98; Ayre, Works ofJohnWhitgift, 2: 168, 379.12Ayre, WorksofJohn Whitgift, i: 18, 2: 441, 244; [William Fulke], A Briefe andplaine declaration, concerning the desires of all thosefaithfull Ministers, that have and doseekeor theDisciplinendreformationftheChurchfEnglandeLondon, 584), 07,98. For Fulke's authorship of this treatise, see Mathew Sutcliffe, An Answere to aCertaine Libel Sypplicatorie; Or, Rather Diffamatory, and also to certaine CalumniousArticles . . . (London, 1592), 41. [Anonymous], A Second Admonition to theParliament, n Frereand Douglas, PuritanManifestoes, II.


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434 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYwhereby we might caste out the tirannie of the bishops, & bring in anew tyrannie of theirs." Such a result, Travers averred, would "reteynestill the same tyranny in the churche, chaunginge only the persons."Fulke agreed: "We must take heede that we open not a window topopish tyrannie."13The need to forestall the possibility of tyrannical elders justified thecritical presbyterian concept of congregational consent. Fulke explainedthat the possibility for elders to lapse into popish tyranny was preventedby two instruments that "moderated" their "authoritye" and allowedtheir judgment to "be rightly accounted the judgement of the holyChurch." First they received their positions with the assent of theirchurches. Second the churches needed to consent to their decisions.That mechanism of consent, stated A Second Admonition to theParliament, meant that the elders could not usurp authority over theentire church.14This system of checks and balances should have been sufficient, yet,like other political theorists, presbyterians had not completely solved theproblem of creating a foolproof route between the Scylla and Charybdisof the tyranny of absolute rule and what was almost universally feared inthis hierarchical age as the confusion of democratic excess. Only onewriter, Travers, even explored the hypothetical question of what was tohappen when eldership and people found themselves at loggerheads.The solution seemed simple to him: the eldership kept working on theproblem until the people agreed with them. Travers seems to have envi-sioned that, as a last resort, the churches collectively could override thedecisions of a synod.15These early presbyterian tracts show how presbyterianism served as avehicle for and amplification of not only puritan drives for biblicalpurity, community, and discipline but also puritanism'scivic republican-ism. It is no great strain to label what the presbyteriansenvisioned at theheart of England's reformation as a godly republican church order. Thatorder would be sovereign over the monarch's subjects in its own sphereand would allow no religious competition, and monarchs themselveswould enjoy no special privileges or immunities in it. Though therewould be no absolute rule in presbyterian churches, presbyterianswouldremain vigilant for signs of abuse of authority. At least in part to avoidthat abuse, power would be diffused and government would be by

13 [Walter Travers],A full andplaine Declarationof EcclesiasticallDisciplineowtoffthe wordoffGod,andofftheDeclininge ffthe churcheff Englandromthesame([Heidelberg, Germany], 1574), 54; Fulke, Briefe andplaine declaration, 8o; SecondAdmonition to the Parliament, in Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, Ii9.14Fulke, Briefe andplaine declaration, 84, 86.15Travers, Full and plaine Declaration, 54, 135.


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REPUBLICANISMND THEMASSACHUSETTSOLITY 435consent. By envisioning their order as a dynamic attempt to prevent thecorrosive effects of power, presbyteriansattempted to solve what J. G. A.Pocock sees as republicanism's"Machiavellian moment," its fundamentalchallenge: how to remain "morally and politically stable" in a temporalstream "essentiallydestructive of all systems of secular stability."'16There is no reason to be surprised that the ideological preoccupa-tions of classical political theorists migrated into presbyterian texts.Exposure to those writers was a standard component of English educa-tion. As a Cambridge undergraduate in a debate staged before thequeen, Cartwright argued for the superiority of mixed monarchy overabsolute monarchy (he was adjudged to have lost). In his treatises onchurch government, he occasionally appealed to writers on civic govern-ment to back up his points. Travers drew on examples from Greece andRome to illustrate the structural merits of presbyterian government.Presbyterians did not hesitate to describe and validate their polity interms drawn from classical political theory; it was a mixed governmentand, as such, approved by classical authorities as the best kind of govern-ment. They oscillated between describing this mixed government in itsideal and working states. In its ideal state, it was three-fold, incorporat-ing the one, the few, and the many, or monarchy, aristocracy, anddemocracy. Christ was the monarch, while the elders and the congrega-tions represented aristocracy and democracy. In its day-to-day running,presbyterian church government was twofold, with the aristocracy of theelders and the democracy of the congregation. No one at the time wouldneed to be reminded that such a twofold government was republican, ora "status popularis" (popular state), as one of its defenders acknowledgedparenthetically, like the government of the city-state at the center ofContinental presbyterianism, Geneva.l7

16For biblical purity, community, and discipline, see Theodore DwightBozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The PrimitivistDimension in Puritanism (ChapelHill, N.C., 1988), 41-45; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? chap. I; Bozeman, ThePrecisianistStrain: Disciplinary Religionand Antinomian Backlashin Puritanism to1638(ChapelHill, N.C., 2oo004),haps. 2-3. Pocock, MachiavellianMoment,viii.17Travers,Full and plaine Declaration,1-2, 161,178;Thomas Cartwright, Thesecondreplie of ThomasCartwright:AgaynstMaister Doctor Whitgiftes econdanswer,touching he ChurcheDiscipline ([Heidelberg, Germany],I575),228; RichardWatsonDixon, Historyof the Churchof England rom theAbolitionof the RomanJurisdiction(Oxford, Eng., 1902), 6: 16; TadatakaMaruyama, TheEcclesiologyf TheodoreBeza:The Reform of the True Church,Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance (Geneva,Switzerland,1978), 117;Todd, ChristianHumanismand Puritan Social Order,90o-91;Ayre, WorksofJohn Whitgift,1:390, 3: 18o-81;Stephen Brachlow, TheCommunionofSaints: Radical Puritan and SeparatistEcclesiology, 57o-z625, Oxford TheologicalMonographs(Oxford, Eng., 1988),I6o; J[ohn] C[otton], "Copyof a Letter from Mr.Cotton to Lord Say and Seal in the Year1636," n Edmund S. Morgan, ed., PuritanPolitical Ideas, 1558-1794, American Heritage Series (Indianapolis, Ind., I965), 172.


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436 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYJohn Calvin helped write Geneva's laws, and he distrusted monar-chy, claiming that in the state as well as the church, "a system com-

pounded of aristocracy and democracy . . . far excells all others." TheEnglish presbyterians' opponents were all too glad to point out whatthey saw as the subversive relationship between presbyterianism andrepublicanism. The presbyterians "endevour to bring our Church gou-vernment to that of Geneva, which is a popular state," MatthewSutcliffe charged, while Richard Bancroft complained of the presbyteri-ans' "Geneva humor." Cartwright's opponent, John Whitgift, warnedhim: "God hath appointed the multitude, how godly and learned soeverthey be, to obey and not to rule; unless indeed you will make the statepopular, to which all your arguments bend." Queen Elizabeth loathedthe civic and constitutional republicanism of puritanism. It was "danger-ous to a kingly rule," she warned Parliament, "to have every man,according to his own censure, to make a doom . . . of the validity andprivity of his Prince'sgovernment." And presbyterianism was "most prej-udicial unto the religion established, to her crown, to her government,and to her subjects."'8The printing of presbyterian ecclesiastical political theorizing ceasedin the 158os. This new restraint was probably a consequence of the heavycountercharges such theorizing provoked. In the remaining few yearsbefore trials and death sentences ended presbyterianism as an organizedpolitical movement, its polemicists defended their system simply on thebasis that scripture demanded it without drawing on the traditions ofclassical political theory to explain why.19

18 John T. McNeill, ed., Ford Lewis Battles, trans., Calvin: Institutes of theChristian Religion, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia, 1960), 2: 1493 (bk. 4,chap.20, para.8). Calvin'saundiced iew of monarchs ndpreferenceorrepublicsis discussed in Harro H6pfl, The Christian Polity ofJohn Calvin (Cambridge, 1982),chap.7. On Calvin's olein settingup the Geneva itygovernment,eeRobertM.Kingdon, "John Calvin's Contribution to Representative Government," in Politicsand Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of H. G. Koenigsberger, ed.Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob (Cambridge, 1987), 183-98; Matth[ew]Sutcliffe, A Treatise of Ecclesiasticall Discipline: Wherein that confused forme of govern-ment, which certeine underfalse pretence, and title of reformation, and true discipline, dostrive to bring into the Church of England ... (London, [1590]), 2oI; RichardBancroft, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings published and practised within theIland of Brytaine, underpretence of Reformation, and for the Presbiteriall Discipline ...(London, 1593), 18; Ayre, WorksofJohn Whitgift, 3: 275. For Elizabeth's remarks, seeJohn Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, D.D.: The Third and Last LordArchbishop of Canterbury in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth ... (Oxford, Eng., 1822), 1:393, 495. For a discussion of the accusations of "popularity" and disloyalty to monar-chy in the earlier debate between Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift, see Lake,Anglicansand Puritans?6o-62.19 For the trials, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement(Berkeley, Calif., 1967), 403-31. In 1590 minister John Udall was convicted of sedi-


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REPUBLICANISMNDTHE MASSACHUSETTSOLITY 437In the secular political sphere, Elizabethan presbyterians were civicrepublicans but not constitutional ones, regardlessof the accusations oftheir opponents, nor was there any reason why they should have been.Church and state to presbyterians were separate polities with separaterestraints and requirements; Thomas Cartwright went to great pains toexplain why monarchy could be acceptable in civic but not ecclesiasticalgovernment. Presbyterians were aggressive proponents, however, of therule of law and of limited monarchy, as well they might be, given theircivic republicanism and their need to contend with Queen Elizabeth'shostility. For the advancement of their cause, presbyterians fought in the1580s for the protection of the laws of England as they understood them,freedom of speech in Parliament, and restraints on the monarch's pre-rogative. In developments critically foreshadowing future positions inthat decade, they began fusing secular and religious concerns by associ-ating Roman Catholicism with secular tyranny. At least one presbyter-ian, Dudley Fenner, stressed the duty of princes to defend liberty andclaimed that the representative bodies of a kingdom could overthrow atyrannical king.20The liberty that Fenner wanted princes to defend would have car-ried multiplemeanings.It certainlywould have includedthe libertyofChristians o worshipGod correctly.As the pluralnoun "liberties,"twould have embracedrights and privilegessuch as those guaranteedunder England's ancient constitution, including the rights to trial byjury and taxationthroughrepresentation.n the singular t could havetion, which bore the death penalty (not carriedout in this instance), after a judgeruled that criticizing bishops was the same as defaming the queen herself and thusseditious. Minister John Penry was executed for writings he composed beforebecoming a separatist.See Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans;Or, ProtestantNonconformists;rom the Reformationn 1517, to the Revolution n 1688 .. . (London,1837), I: 330-33, 356-6o0;Leland H. Carlson, Martin Marprelate,Gentleman:MasterJob Throkmortonaid Open n His Colors SanMarino, Calif., 1981), 88.20Cartwright argued that ecclesiastical affairs were more difficult than civilaffairsand thus could not be trusted to one man and that ecclesiasticaltyrantsweremore dangerous than secular ones; besides, monarchy as a civic institution wasallowed by God (see Cartwright, Secondreplie,130, 578). Cartwright also pointedout, however, that monarchswere not necessaryin the state any more than in thechurch:"Thereare other good commonwealths,wherein many have like power andauthority"(see Ayre, WorksofJohn Whitgift,2: 263). On the fusing of secular andreligious concerns, see Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue:Philip Sidney'sArcadiaand ElizabethanPolitics (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 59, citing Sidney on RomanCatholicism and tyranny. Sidney set up a presbyterian church at his garrison atFlushing in the Netherlands. See S. L. Adams, "The Protestant Cause: ReligiousAlliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue inEngland, 1585-1630" Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1973), 68. [Dudley Fenner],Sacra Theologia, sive Veritas qua est secundumpietatem . . . in decem libros perDvdleivmFennervmdigesta n.p., [I8J5]), 168, I85.


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438 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYreferrednot simply to the absence of restraints but to a citizen's freedomand obligation to participate in the public affairs of a commonwealth.As scholars have frequently noted, puritans favored this latter, dynamicsense of liberty.The prominentministerArthurHildersamwarned hatpeople who had "no care of the common good" were not among thesaved. John Winthrop described the liberty of the Massachusetts'freemen as not a "barepassive capacitye of freedome or immunity, butsuch a Libertye, as hath power to Acte upon the cheife meanes of itsowne wellfare."21

Liberty, in its various meanings, was widely perceived to be underunprecedented ssaultduringthe reignof KingJamesI (1603-25).Jamesbegan to vigorously assert his prerogatives in his efforts to extractmoney from his subjects. Ambitious clerics hostile to puritanism andadvancing the relatively novel antipresbyterian conception of divineright episcopacy received his protection while they asserted his absoluteauthority. To all his critics, James'sfund-raising efforts threatened tradi-tional English liberties, whereas for puritans the assault included anattack on fundamental Christian liberty. The House of Commonsrepeatedly approved measures that would have provided relief for non-conforming puritan ministers, but they were subsequently blocked. Oneof Parliament's most aggressive and conceptually advanced defenders ofthe liberty of English freemen in their property, Nicholas Fuller, was ano-less-aggressive and conceptually advanced defender of presbyteriansand nonconformists in the law courts, though many of James's mostvociferous parliamentary opponents were not puritans.22

21 "Christian Liberty, is a spirituall benefit ... to the setting free of the faithfull... from the (a) preceptes and traditions of men . . ." (Tho[mas] Wilson, A ChristianDictionarie, Opening the signification of the chiefe words dispersed generally throughHolie Scriptures ... [London, 1612], 292); David Harris Sacks, "Parliament, Liberty,and the Commonweal," in Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to theEnglish Civil War, ed. J. H. Hexter, The Making of Modern Freedom (Stanford,Calif., 1992), IiO; Arthur Hildersam, CLII Lectures on Psalme LI... (London, 1635),125; Allyn Bailey Forbes et al., eds., The Winthrop Papers (Boston, 1944), 4: 468. Fordiscussion of the fusion of classical republican and humanist conceptions of libertywith English common law conceptions, see Quentin Skinner, "The Republican Idealof Political Liberty" in Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, Machiavelli and Republicanism,293-309; Skinner, "Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation and the English CivilWar," in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), 308-43. Forpuritan civic involvement, see Richard Cust, "Politics and the Electorate in the1620s," in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, i6o03-642,ed. Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), 138-39; T. H. Breen, The Character of the

Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 163o-173o, YaleHistorical Publications (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 14-31; Francis J. Bremer,Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American PuritanCommunity, z61o-1692, New England Studies (Boston, 1994), 78-79.22 Clive Holmes, "Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property," in Hexter,Parliament and Liberty, 138-44. Fuller is an important and unduly neglected figure.


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 439Charles I, who ascended the throne in 1625, liked the divine author-

ity of kings and disliked Parliament even more than his father, and hetilted the precarious balance of power in the Church of England furtheraway from Calvinist theology and discrete puritanism. On top of that,he married a French Catholic and proved far more ingenious than Jamesin finding extraparliamentary ways to separate his subjects from theirmoney.These monarchical activities took place within an ominous Europeancontext. The Thirty Years'War, ravaging central Europe from I618 to1648, was the most dramatic manifestation of what seemed to militantEnglish Protestants a desperate Continent-wide struggle of liberty andProtestantism against absolute monarchy and Roman Catholicism.Charles, given his assaults on the status quo of the Church of Englandand the liberties of his subjects, practically invited his opponents to seeEngland as the latest battleground of this war and to fuse together theirreligious and civic concerns. By the end of the 162os, the godliest mem-bers of Parliament were weaving together a tapestry in whichParliament, liberty, property, and religion all appeared under attackfrom a sinister Catholic conspiracy against England with the king acoconspirator, albeit perhaps unwittingly.23The puritan conflation of religion, liberty, and property did not ceaseat the level of rhetoric, and the defense of this agglomeration of religion,liberty, and property did not stay confined within the halls of Parliament.Political consciousness among the people of England was rising in the162os in response to the struggles among the country's leaders. In late1626 Charles demanded an extraparliamentarymassive forced loan fromhis subjects, with slender prospects of its ever being repaid. Widespreadprotest followed, resulting in the jailing of seventy-six gentlemen, the dis-missal of four members of the House of Lords from their local offices, andthe removalof the chief justice for failing to approvethe loan.24See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v., "Nicholas Fuller (1543-162o),"for an introduction.StephenFosterhasa good summary f puritanparliamentaryreligious initiatives in this period and notes that most puritan members of Parliamentwere "active in the ranks of the parliamentary opposition to royal policy" (see Foster,The Long Argument:English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture,I57o0-7oo [Chapel Hill, N.C., i991], 114-22 [quotation, 12i]). See also NicholasTyacke,Aspects fEnglishProtestantism,. i53o-I7oo (Manchester,Eng., 2oo001),4-66.23 For an analysis of the European context of the English disputes, see JonathanScott, England'sTroubles:Seventeenth-CenturynglishPoliticalInstability n EuropeanContext(Cambridge, 2000), chap. 2. For good discussions of these parliamentarydevelopments, see Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629(Oxford, Eng., 1982), 379-81, 404-8; Christopher Thompson, "The DividedLeadershipof the House of Commons in 1629," in Faction and Parliament:EssaysonEarlyStuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford, Eng., 1978), 253, 272.24 F. J. Levy, "How Information Spread among the Gentry, 155o-1640," Journalof British Studies 21, no. 2 (Spring 1982): II-34; Richard Cust, "News and Politics in


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440 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYThe forced loan also resulted in puritan-directed activism inLincolnshire that has been called "one of the most effective protests

against Crown policy in the entire pre-Civil War period." Prominentfuture Massachusetts leaders were deeply involved in this protest.Theophilus Clinton, the Earl of Lincoln, who was active in the organi-zation of the Massachusetts Bay Company, spearheaded it. His confeder-ates included the ministers-to-be of Salem and Boston, Samuel Skeltonand John Cotton, and future Massachusetts assistants Atherton Hough,Isaac Johnson (the earl's son-in-law), William Coddington, RichardBellingham, and John Humphry (another son-in-law), along with futureMassachusetts governor Thomas Dudley (at the time Lincoln's steward).Dudley coordinated the Lincolnshire protest in 1627 while Lincoln wasimprisoned for distributing and probably writing a manuscript pam-phlet against the loan. Protests against the king's behavior typically wentat least through the motion of assuming his benevolent intentions and aharmony of interests between him and his subjects: as one member ofParliament put it in 1629 while savaging the king's policies, the king's"goodness is so clear, that we need not mistrust." The earl's pamphlet,on the other hand, assumed struggle, not harmony. It made no acknowl-edgment of the king's benevolence; the loan was part of a larger projectto "suppresseParlament"and to rob the freemen of England of their lib-erties. Thus to pay the loan would be to "makeour selves the Instrumentsof our owne slavery,"and all those who cared for "the good of the com-mon wealth" were refusing it. The pamphlet and successfully disruptiveLincolnshire protest movement embodied oppositional politics thatwould become familiar in the 1640s.25The issues raised by the forced loan did not overtly overlap withreligious issues, yet a significant geographical connection existedbetween areas of strident protest against the loan and areas of puri-tanism. That geographic connection suggests the extent to which theEarlySeventeenth-CenturyEngland,"Past and Present,no. 112(August1986):60o-90;ThomasCogswell,"ThePoliticsof Propaganda:harles and thePeople nthe 1620S," Journalof BritishStudies29, no. 3 (July1990): 187-215; AdamFox,"Rumour,News and PopularPoliticalOpinion in Elizabethan nd EarlyStuartEngland,"Historicalournal40, no. 3 (September 997):597-620. The standardaccountof the forced oan is Cust, TheForcedLoanandEnglishPolitics, 626-1628(Oxford,Eng.,1987).25 Cust,ForcedLoanandEnglishPolitics, 65-71, 329.This paragraphollowsCust's interpretation.Lincoln's pamphlet survives as State PapersDomesticI6/54/82i,PublicRecordsOffice, London.WallaceNotestein and FrancesHelenRelf, eds., Commons ebatesor I629:Critically ditedandan IntroductionealingwithParliamentarySourcesor theEarlyStuarts (Minneapolis,Minn., 1921), 94.Comparewith ConradRussell, "TheNature of a Parliament n EarlyStuartEngland,"in Before he EnglishCivil War:Essayson EarlyStuart Politics andGovernment,d. HowardTomlinson NewYork,1983), 23-5o.


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 441fight for true religion and the battle against what was perceived as arbi-trary government had become intertwined. Future members of theMassachusetts Bay Company were among the London merchants whorefused to pay the loan. Winthrop kept his imprisoned neighbor, SirFrancis Barrington, informed of the significant resistance to the loan inthe heavily puritan Stour Valley region. "What times are these!"lamented Essex minister John Wilson to Winthrop over the assault onproperty early in 1627. "No man knowes what is his owne, or whitherthat he hath, be not kept for the enemies of god?" A year later Wilsonwrote a supportive electioneering letter to Barrington, commending himand the rest of "those worthy Zelots and patriots" for their care ofchurch and commonwealth. By 1630 Wilson had left with Winthrop forMassachusetts.26The disastrously unsuccessful Parliaments of 1628 and 1629 rein-forced the ominous lessons of the forced loan for puritans. The latterParliament ended with the Speaker of the House of Commons beingheld in his chair by fellow members of Parliament to keep him from call-ing an adjournment at the king's command. Meanwhile the Commonspassed three resolutions read by John Eliot denouncing innovations inreligion and warning of the threat that Charles's financial designs on hissubjects' property presented to the "Liberty of the Kingdome." Therewas widespread concern that this session might be the last meeting ofParliament for an indefinite period; Charles warned that he would notcall another until those whom he regarded as the ringleaders of parlia-mentary opposition had been punished and their followers had "come toa better understanding of us and themselves," not conditions likely toleave puritans waiting in anticipation. Eliot had leisure enough whilesubsequently imprisoned in the Tower of London to copy outWinthrop's arguments for the Massachusetts colony.27

26 Forbes et al., Winthrop Papers, 1: 336-37, 2: 57. For the John Wilson quota-tion, seeKennethWayneShipps,"LayPatronagef EastAnglianPuritanClerics nPre-Revolutionary England" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1971), io8. Cust, ForcedLoan and English Politics, 232-33, chap. 5. For a detailed study of the Essex context ofresistanceto the forced loan, see William Hunt, ThePuritan Moment: TheComingofRevolution in an English County, Harvard Historical Studies (Cambridge, Mass.,1983), chap. 8. See also Francis J. Bremer, "The Heritage of John Winthrop:Religion along the Stour Valley, 1548-1630," New England Quarterly 70, no. 4(December 1997): 515-47; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: CommercialChange, oliticalConflict,ndLondon'sOverseas raders, 50o-1653Princeton,N.J.,1993),226-27. ForWinthrop,Barrington, nd the forced oan, see Bremer, ohnWinthrop:merica'sorgottenoundingatherOxford,Eng.,20o3),143-44.27Forbes et al., Winthrop apers,2: 145-49;Notestein and Relf, CommonsDebatesor 1629, 244;KevinSharpe,ThePersonalRuleof Charles (New Haven,Conn., 1992), 56-57.


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442 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYBy the time of the migration to Massachusetts in 1630, the leadersof the emigration and many of the participants had gone through a

pressure cooker in which long-standing concerns about arbitrarygovern-ment in church and state had been both magnified and fused. It hadbeen driven home to them just how vulnerable Protestantism and sub-jects' liberties were when confronted by arbitrarygovernment and howimportant it was to be willing to take drastic steps to protect both.Liberty and godliness rose or fell together, just as Fenner had argued;puritan ideology now had a pronounced civic as well as religious dimen-sion. "The free fruition of such liberties," according to Massachusettsminister Nathaniel Ward, was "the tranquillitie and Stabilitie ofChurches and Commonwealths. And the deniall or deprivall thereof, thedisturbance if not the ruine of both." It is surely not coincidental that,according to Dudley, planning for the Massachusetts Bay Colony enter-prise commenced in Lincolnshire in 1627 between him and "friends"during the height of resistance to the forced loan.28Historians have no record of preemigration discussions of churchpolity among the leaders of Massachusetts, but those leaders were at thevery least comfortable with the presbyterian tradition. They displayed asingular lack of concern when word reached them about the radicalchurch created in their colonial outpost of Salem in 1629, and theyalmost succeeded in recruiting the famous exiled puritan theologianWilliam Ames. Ames advocated congregationalist modifications to pres-byterian ecclesiology that increased the liberties of individual churchesand of ordinary church members, and those modifications anticipatedand influenced Massachusetts' church order. In a preface to TheDiocesans Tryall,an attack on bishops by his fellow protocongregational-ist Paul Baynes, Ames compared the English in their church order with"the people of Israel, who would not have God for their immediateKing, but would have such Kings as other Nations." In this contrabandbook, Baynes noted how "imparity" in the church led to tyranny. Healso remarked on the people's right to depose their rulers in all butabsolute monarchies, which England was not. The Diocesans Tryallmadea strong impression on puritans migrating to Massachusetts.29

28 [Nathaniel Ward], "A Coppie of the Liberties of the Massachusets Colonie inNew England," in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 178-79; Everett Emerson, ed.,Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638, TheCommonwealth Series (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 70 ("friends").29 In the Jacobean period, the presbyterian tradition was shadowy in England,whereas it continued to evolve among English emigrants and exiles in theNetherlands. For English presbyterianism, see Schneider, "Godly Order in a ChurchHalf-Reformed." For the Netherlands, see Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism; Tyacke,Aspects of English Protestantism, 111-31. On Ames's ecclesiology, see Keith L.Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgroundsof English and


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 443The Massachusetts Bay Company's charter gave the company's stock-holders considerable scope for preventing arbitrary government.Granted by King Charles I in 1629, the charter called for the freemen ofthe company to meet four times a year in a General Court to make lawsfor the company and admit new freemen. In one of those meetings, thecourt was to elect a governor, deputy governor, and Court of Assistantswho would meet monthly. Yet for all the freemen's theoretical power,their role was not so critical in practice. In the short period of the com-pany's operation in England, only a handful of the hundred or morefreemen might show up to the meetings and, according to the charteritself, the presence of either the governor or deputy governor and six ofthe assistants was enough to constitute a quorum; the other freemenwere technically not needed at all for the government of the company tofunction.30The leading men who agreed to migrate to Massachusetts in 1630did so on the conditions they would become the company's governmentand take the charter with them. Governor John Winthrop, deputy gov-ernor Thomas Dudley, and eleven assistants who crossed with them in1630 quickly took on the responsibilities of running the new colony asthe Court of Assistants. With no other freemen of the company inMassachusetts, the Court of Assistants in 1630 seems to have regardeditself at first as an autonomous, self-perpetuating board.31NonethelessAmerican uritanismUrbana, ll., 1972), chap.9. On the recruitment f Ames,seeForbes et al., Winthrop apers,2: 180; Shurtleff, Records f the Governor ndCompany,: 407-8; Sprunger, WilliamAmesandthe Settlement f MassachusettsBay,"New EnglandQuarterly9, no. I (March1966): 66-79. Paul Baynes, TheDiocesans ryall.. ([Amsterdam, etherlands],621), ig. Bv, 68, 85,89.Ames sidentifiedas the editorandauthorof the prefacen the 1641edition. On Baynes'sinfluence, ee DavidD. Hall, TheFaithfulShepherd: History f theNewEnglandMinistryn theSeventeenthentury(ChapelHill, N.C., 1972), 82. On the scarcityand risk of expressionsof resistancetheory in Englandat this time, see J. P.Sommerville, oyalistsndPatriots: olitics ndIdeologynEngland,6o3-r640, ded.(London,1999),71-73.Fora casestudy,seeMargoTodd,"Anti-CalvinistsndtheRepublican hreatn EarlyStuartCambridge,"n PuritanismndItsDiscontents,d.LauraLungerKnoppersNewark,Del., 2003),85-lo5.30 Shurtleff,Recordsf the Governornd Company,: 10-I2, 45, 47, 50. Foraprosopographicalstudy of the company's freemen before the migration toMassachusetts,ee FrancesRose-Troup,TheMassachusettsay CompanyndItsPredecessors,heNew GraftonHistoricalSeries NewYork,1930),chap.16. On theattendance equirementsor meetings,see Shurtleff,Recordsf the GovernorndCompany, : 16. I thank Peter Charles Hoffer for a discussionon this point.

31 Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company, I: 73-78. John GorhamPalfrey suggests that John Clover of Dorchester may already have been a freeman(Palfrey, History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty [Boston, 1865], I: 323).Robert Charles Anderson doubts Palfrey's identification (Anderson, The GreatMigration Begins: Immigrants to New England, d62o-l633 [Boston, 1995], 2: 776).


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444 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYthe court decided at the end of that October to voluntarily place itselfunder the supervision of the colony's adult males.

Historians' explanations of this decision fall into two groups, both ofthem speculative. Some historians see the expansion of the franchise as thedesperateaction of puritan oligarchs. The colony's leaders, these historiansargue, felt pressure from the other colonists to give them some form ofinvolvement, and the assistants chose to give way to that pressurein themost limited manner possible, violating the terms of the charter to givethe new freemen a minimum amount of supervision over the government.There is no evidence, however, that the oligarchswere responding to pres-sure from ordinary colonists, and such pressureseems a fairly precociousconcern in any case; most colonists had only been in Massachusettsfor afew months, and raw survival was the great preoccupation. No other pre-Restoration chartered colony gave voting rights to its inhabitants withinthe first two years, let alone the first three months. Moreover the newfreemen were not the stockholders envisaged in the original charter,andthe court was under no obligation to them. Thus it was arguablynot outof line with the spirit of the charter,though certainly out of line with theletter, that the court in giving the colonists voting privileges to which theywere not entitled did not define these privileges expansively.32

Other, generally later, historians accept that the assistants wereunder no obligation to admit any more freemen and change their formof government. That they did so anyway was due not to hypotheticalpressure from below, these historians argue, but to puritans' theologi-cally driven attraction to covenants: the Massachusetts immigrants hadmade a covenant with God to be a special people to him, but they couldonly carry out this divine covenant by making a covenant among them-selves to form a new government. There is, however, no evidence thatWinthrop and his associates either imagined or had any reason to imag-ine that they were doing anything so grandiose as making a newcovenant and creating a government from scratch. They were proposingto add what amounted at most to a new nonshareholding category offreemen to the company while accordingly changing the voting proce-dures for the magistrates to be consistent with what they argued was thecharter's intention. The Massachusetts Bay Company was a corporationfounded by the free consent of its original members in 1629, and newmembers voluntarily demonstrated their consent by joining it.33

32James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston, 1921), 141-43;Rose-Troup, Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors, Io9-Io; Charles M.Andrews, The Colonial Period ofAmerican History (New Haven, Conn., 1934), I: 434,438; Richard S. Dunn, Puritansand Yankees:The WinthropDynastyofNew England,I63o-17z7 (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 14.33 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge,Mass., 1939); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story ofJohn Winthrop,


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 445In the late 1670s, William Hubbard, the General Court's official his-torian, offered an explanation that has been curiously overlooked by his-

torians for this decision to admit more freemen. Hubbard claimed thatin 1630 (when he was a nine-year-old immigrant) "it was then supposedby some" that "ambition"would "naturally" ncline men "to invade therights and liberties of their brethren";therefore, the actions of the courtwere intended "for the preserving the liberty of the people, and prevent-ing any entrenching thereon by the power of the rulers." Hubbarddescribed the addition of the new freemen as supplying a "foundation"for this goal. The foundation of the "civil polity" itself, he noted, lay inthe 1629 charter.34

Unlike modern interpretations Hubbard's invocation of the fear ofarbitrary power has a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support it.Winthrop later denounced governments "where a people have men settover them without their choyce, or allowance" (which was the case ini-tially in Massachusetts) as "Tiranye, and impietye." One of the assistantspresent at the October 1630 meeting, William Pynchon, later foundechoes of the "Tyrany"of the forced loan in the Connecticut govern-ment's effort to requisition a canoe of his without his consent.35 Thethree ministers hired by the Massachusetts Bay Company who were pre-sent in 1630, Wilson, Skelton, and George Philips, all at various timesbefore or afterward demonstrated their opposition to arbitrary govern-ment; they probably would have encouraged the change. The people atthe 1630 meeting of the General Court came mostly from regions of thegreatest protest against Charles I's activities. In other words concernabout the liberties of the people and the danger of arbitrarygovernmentwas demonstrably so diffuse among those present at this meeting thatthere is ample reason to give credence to Hubbard's claim. The franchisewas expanded, however cautiously, to avoid tyranny and ensure account-able government.It does not seem too far-fetched to call this and subsequent reorder-ings of the government forays into constitutional republicanism. TheyThe Libraryof AmericanBiography(Boston, I958), 78; StephenFoster, TheirSolitaryWay:ThePuritanSocialEthic in the FirstCentury f Settlementn NewEngland,YaleHistoricalPublications New Haven, Conn., 197I), 74. I readthecourt'suse of the term"establishinge"o meanmaking table,notcreating.Takingasingularnterpretiveoad,DarrenStaloffhassuggestedhatthecourt'sactionswithregardo the franchise epresent rituals f culturaldomination"ntended or thecreationof innerand outerparties n a one-party tate(Staloff,TheMakingof anAmericanThinkingClass: ntellectuals nd Intelligentsian PuritanMassachusettsNewYork,1998], 19 [quotation],o).34WilliamHubbard,A GeneralHistory f NewEngland,romtheDiscoveryoMDCLXXX1815;epr.,Boston,1848),114,147-48(quotation).35Forbeset al., Winthrop apers,4: 468; MassachusettsHistoricalSociety,Proceedings October, Ip94-June, 1915 (Cambridge, Mass., I915), 48 ("Tyrany").


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446 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYmade the government entirely answerable to the electorate and were ini-tially instituted to prevent incipient tyranny. The argument for republi-can underpinnings is reinforced by another fast-emerging consensusamong the Massachusetts freemen: a determination to avoid hereditaryrule. Winthrop and some ministers, including Cotton, never lost thesense, implicit in the 163o restructuring of the government, that therulers of the country should have tenure in office for life, subject togood behavior. On the other hand, some freemen as early as 1633 arerecorded as wanting the governor rotated every year and the assistants atleast occasionally, for fear that these positions "be esteemed hereditary."Some of the ministers and others worked unsuccessfully to thwartWinthrop's reelection as governor in 1639 out of that very concern. Thedeputies that year successfully led a drive to end a three-year experimentin which the General Court gave selected ex-assistants lifetime magister-ial power in a standing council, and the next year Winthrop was notreelected. Cotton expressed himself bluntly about the evils of hereditaryrule in 1635 when he answered the demands of William Fiennes, IstViscount Saye and Sele, and other magnates contemplating immigrationbut asking for a hereditary upper house in Massachusetts. "Hereditaryauthority and power" was not a necessary component of government,Cotton explained; it "standeth only by the civil laws of some common-wealths." It was an illogical concept, Cotton went on to tell his titledaudience, since even in commonwealths with hereditary rule, authorityand power did not descend to all of a person's heirs. Cotton warnedthat the commonwealth of Massachusetts would be subjected to"reproach and prejudice" if it were to give authority and power tosomeone whom God had not called to such a position. Winthropappears to have made the case even more forcefully in a now-vanishedletter he wrote to Lord Saye and Sele. Saye and Sele interpretedWinthrop as arguing that hereditary rulership led to tyranny.36Neither36 Emerson,LettersJom NewEngland, 05, 151 quotation);RichardS. Dunn,James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal ofJohn Winthrop, i63o-1649(Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 292, 295, 325;Ellen E. Brennan, "The Massachusetts Council,"New England Quarterly 4, no. I (January 1931): 54-93. See John Cotton, "CertainProposals Made by Lord Say, Lord Brooke, and Other Persons of Quality, as Conditionsof Their Removing to New-England, with the Answers Thereto," in Morgan, PuritanPolitical Ideas, 165;Forbes et al., Winthrop Papers,3: 266-67. William Hubbard appearstohave seen Winthrop's now-vanished letter to which Lord Saye and Sele responded(Hubbard, GeneralHistory of New England, 377). Saye and Sele, after demanding a hered-itary upper house in Massachusetts, made a I8o-degree turn in his own colony ofProvidence Island. He offered to make the wealthier inhabitants of the island freeholderseligible to serve on the colony's council and elect its governor. This offer was part of aneffort to lure the minister Ezekiel Rogers and his congregation there in 1638. Rogersdecided instead to go to Massachusetts, and Winthrop subsequently chivied Lord Sayeand Sele for his inconsistency. On Rogers, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ProvidenceIsland,1630-1641: TheOtherPuritanColonyNew York,I993), 255.


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 447Cotton nor Winthrop explained how hereditary kings might escapetheir chains of logic.

It might be objected that governmental accountability and rejectionof hereditary rule in Massachusetts did not add up to constitutionalrepublicanism. Other English localities had long traditions of charteredself-government, and they could celebrate their traditions in classicalrepublican language. Yet their civic practices and civic consciousness didnot amount to constitutional republicanism, for these polities did notquestion that ultimate power lay with the monarch. As the writer of an"apologie"for London published in 1603 stated, "It is beside the purposeto dispute whether . . . the governement here bee a Democratie, orAristocratie,for . . . London is . . . no free estate . . . indowed with .absolute power." Absolute power, according to the influential late-sixteenth-century political theorist Jean Bodin, was a cognate term forsovereignty. Therein lies the critical distinction between Massachusettsand the local polities of England, for the Massachusetts General Courtclaimed that and behaved as if, in Winthrop's words, "by our Charter wehad absolute power of Government." The freemen of Massachusetts,accordingly, hotly debated the nature of their allegiance, if any, to theEnglish government.37

37 Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, 55-73. T. H. Breen alludesto English corporate towns in accounting for Massachusetts practices (Breen, Puritansand Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America [New York, 1980], 8). The"apologie" can be found at the end of John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. CharlesLethbridge Kingsford (Oxford, Eng., 1908), 2: zo206quotation). Its author was proba-bly the lawyer James Dalton (see David Harris Sacks, "The Corporate Town and theEnglish State: Bristol's 'Little Businesses,' 1625-1641," Past and Present, no. iio[February 1986]: 75). Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes ofa Commonweale ... ,ed. KennethDouglas McRae (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 84; Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, JournalofJohn Winthrop, 648 (quotation), 677. The relevant passage from the charter is"everie such cheife comaunders, captaines, governors, and other officers and minis-ters, as by the said orders . . . of the said Governor and Company . . . shalbe .umploied ... in the government of the saide inhabitants and plantacon ... have fulland absolute power and authoritie to correct, punishe, pardon, governe, and rule all... that shall at any tyme hereafter inhabite within the precincts and partes of NeweEngland aforesaid" (Shurtleff, Recordsof the Governor and Company, I: 17). The char-ter did not anticipate that the officers of the Massachusetts Bay Company them-selves, not just their deputies, would be living in the colony and out of reach of theking's courts. Later charters to self-governing colonies used more restrictive lan-guage. The General Court's charter-granted absolute power to rule and govern theinhabitants of Massachusetts was limited by the requirement that it not make laws"repugnant to the lawes and statutes of our realme of England." The colony gaveonly lip service to that requirement. In 1639 Winthrop stated as one of his objec-tions to a law code for the colony that some Massachusetts practices, such as not sol-emnizing marriages by ministers, were repugnant to the laws of England. To letthese practices grow into law, in the manner of English common law, Winthropargued, would not violate the charter, whereas to codify them would. The GeneralCourt seven years later argued that Massachusetts' laws were not repugnant to the


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448 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYThe leaders of Massachusetts occasionally described their colony interms usually reserved for sovereign republics. Minister Thomas Shepard

classified Massachusetts among "free states w[he]r[e] the governmentdepends on popular electi[on]" in his election sermon of 1638; criticscharged that calling Massachusetts a free state constituted high treason.Winthrop used a similar cognate term for republic when he classifiedMassachusetts in 1637 as a "popularstate," where the people's power was"unlimited in its owne nature." Cotton used the same biblical texts jus-tifying the nonhereditary General Court to Lord Saye and Sele thatEnglish republicans would deploy in the 165os.38When leaders of Massachusetts acknowledged their dependence onthe English government, that acknowledgment was ambiguous and con-troversial at best. Winthrop could scarcely have had King Charles at theforefront of his mind when he spoke of the people's power inMassachusetts as being unlimited. Massachusetts' leaders did not seemto think it lawfully possible for Charles to revoke their charter. "Thatwhich the King is pleased to bestow upon us, and we have accepted, istruly our owne," Winthrop wrote in 1637. As early as 1634, the GeneralCourt responded to rumors that the king was sending a governor-general to take over the colony by fortifying their defenses. The GeneralCourt in 1637 claimed that it was the final court of judicial appeals inMassachusetts ("one of the most principall rights of soveraignetie,"according to Bodin). In response to the Commission for ForeignPlantations' demand for the charter, which had been revoked by theking's bench, the General Court warned in 1638 that, should the courtsurrender it, the "common people" would regardthemselves as indepen-dent of England.39Ambiguities about the location of sovereignty in Massachusetts onlyaccumulated after Parliament and the king went to war in 1642. At thecommon aw of Englandbecausehebasisof the commonawwas"theLawe f God& of RightReason,"s wasalso the case n Massachusetts.nyEnglishawnot cre-atedon thatbasis"was nerror,& not a Lawe"Dunn,Savage, ndYeandle,ournalofJohnWinthrop,14-15, 62["Lawef God"]).38 "ThomasShepard'sElectionSermon n 1638,"New-England istorical ndGenealogicalegisterndAntiquarianournal 4, no. 4 (October 870):362;ThomasHutchinson, TheHistoryof the Colonyand Provinceof Massachusetts-Bay,d.Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), I: 127; [Thomas Hutchinson],HutchinsonPapersAlbany,N.Y., 1865),1:75;Morgan,PuritanPolitical deas,167.For ancient Israel and English republicanism in the I65os, see Blair Worden,"EnglishRepublicanism,"n TheCambridge istory fPoliticalThought,450-1700,ed.J. H. Burnswith MarkGoldie Cambridge,991), 72.39 Hutchinsonapers, :99; Shurtleff,Recordsf the Governornd Company,:117-18;Dunn,Savage, ndYeandle,ournal fJohnWinthrop,23-24, 129;DavidD.Hall, ed., TheAntinomianControversy,636-1638: Documentary istory,2d ed.(Durham,N.C., 1990), 257;Bodin,SixBookesfa Commonweale,68;Hutchinson,History ftheColonyndProvince,: 422.


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 449May 1643 meeting of the General Court, the magistrates dropped theclause in their oaths swearing loyalty to Charles I. At the same 1643 ses-sion, the court authorized negotiations that would soon result in a treatywith Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth to manage their diplo-matic and military affairs collectively, with no reference to either theking or Parliament. Surviving records of debates as to whetherMassachusetts was a "perfectarespublica," and thus completely indepen-dent of England, date back to 1644; when this controversial issue beganto be raised is unknown. Winthrop records some magistrates in 1644 asarguing that Parliament had the right to countermand the GeneralCourt's decisions, a right that would deny the General Court's "absolutepower." Others, however, insisted that Massachusetts was "subject ... tono other power but among ourselves." Winthrop respected the corre-sponding argument that Massachusetts could rightfully claim its inde-pendence from England on the grounds that it bought its land from theIndians. "But if we stand upon this plea," he fretted, Massachusettswould lose Parliament's still-useful protection, and its residents wouldlose their English citizenship ("though we had our liberty, we cannot asyet subsist without England," wrote his fellow magistrate WilliamPynchon). Moreover independence would throw the legitimacy ofMassachusetts' government in doubt, since that legitimacy was derivedfrom its English-granted charter. Winthrop therefore accepted thatParliament had "authority"over Massachusetts, with the implicit under-standing that this authority could not clash with the General Court'sabsolute power over Massachusetts' residents (the General Court alsoclaimed jurisdiction over the sea around Massachusetts). Furthermore,Winthrop claimed, the doctrine of salus populi (the people's welfare),which "the parliament had taught us," gave the General Court the rightto resist any parliamentary commission "or other foreign power" thatwould hurt Massachusetts. Parliament had used that doctrine to justifyits resistance to the king and its governing without the king's participa-tion. Just as Parliament's assertion of saluspopuli amounted to a claim ofultimate parliamentary sovereignty in England, Winthrop's invocationwas a de facto assertion that the General Court's authority ultimatelytrumped the English government's in Massachusetts.40

40 Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 431-32, 526-28, 678;David Pulsifer, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England ...(Boston, 1859), 2: 3-8; William Pynchon to John Winthrop, Jan. 9, 1646, inCollections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 36 (1863): 381. In the one place whereWinthrop could have explained what he would consider a legitimate use of parlia-mentary authority over Massachusetts, he ducked the issue (see Dunn, Savage, andYeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 662). For Parliament's assertion of salus populi,see Michael Mendle, "Parliamentary Sovereignty: A Very English Absolutism," inPolitical Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin


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450 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYIn practice Parliament usually avoided making demands onMassachusetts and the General Court avoided openly clashing with

Parliament, though even the court's minimal compliance-respecting aparliamentary commission to a privateer and allowing safe passagethrough its territory for religious dissidents-generated controversy. InI651, however, Parliament ordered Massachusetts to convene its courtsand issue warrants in Parliament's name and to apply for a new charter.The General Court sent a deferential yet temporizing answer, and theissue disappeared. In the meantime the court set up a generally recog-nized sign of sovereignty, its own mint. Had it taken a new charter, theresults would have been unpredictable. Cotton preached in I651 that themilitia had the authority to dissolve a court that accepted a governor-general from England. Since Winthrop asserted that Massachusetts wasbound neither by the laws of Parliament nor the king's writs, one maywell believe the hostile 1646 Child petition to Parliament when itclaimed that some people in Massachusetts called England's laws "for-eign" and asserted, as Thomas Shepard had, that Massachusetts was a"free state."41Whether Massachusetts was a full-blown sovereign republicwas a matter of debate rather than a settled conclusion, but the colonycould not be likened to an incorporated English town. Massachusettswasa deliberate, if tentative, exercise in republican state formation.Massachusetts'constitutional republicanism was truly distinctive becauseof the polity's voting requirement. On May i8, 1631,at the yearly GeneralCourt, it was "orderedand agreed"that from henceforth "noe man shalbeadmitted to the freedome of this body polliticke, but such as are membersof some of the churches within the lymitts of the same." Massachusettschurches did not hand out memberships easily to begin with, and thestandardsgrew steadily more severe in the 1630s. The MassachusettsBayCompany's freemen, and thus almost certainly its rulers, were to consistof no one but visible saints, a franchise that was unique in Christendomuntil the New Haven colony adopted it in 1639.42Skinner, Ideas in Context (Cambridge, 1993), 97-119. For a general discussion of thedislocationscaused n the Englishcoloniesby the EnglishCivil War,see CarlaGardina estana,TheEnglish tlantic n anAgeofRevolution,i64o-i66I (Cambridge,Mass.,2004).

41 Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 524-28, 6o6, 650-54,662, 707; Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company, 4, pt. I: 71, 84, IIo;Hutchinson, History of the Colonyand Province,I: 149-50, 219, 428-30; FrancisJ.Bremer, "In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I,"William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 37, no. I (January 1980): I21.42 Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, Journal ofJohn Winthrop, 74; Shurtleff, Recordsof the Governor and Company, I: 87. Historians sometimes suggest that the freemenprobably did not participate in this decision, but see B. Katherine Brown,


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 451Evenamongthe English godly, this changein voting requirementswas regardedas unprecedentedand dangerous.Presbyterians,whatever

their civic preferences,had alwaysarguedthat therewas no necessaryrelationshipbetweenchurchgovernmentand civil government.As scrip-ture demonstrated the church existed under a wide variety of civiladministrations.Thus the requirement hat the franchisebe limited to"saints by calling" seemed to thrust the church illegitimately into thecenter of worldlypower.To its godly critics,this Massachusettsnnova-tion evensmackedof RomanCatholicism n that it fosteredthe abusiveinvasionof the civic sphereby the churches.Massachusetts pologists nturnadamantlydefendedthe scripturaloundationsof their franchise. twastrue, they acknowledged,hat the churchcould live underany civilgovernment,yet the Bible also dictatedthe form the civil governmentshould take when the saints had the power to shape it. For the well-being of the church,the saintsshould rule over the saints: the apostlePaulwould haveapproved he Massachusettsmodel. Religiousand civilsphereswere kept separateand no magistratewould lose his positionbecausehe hadbeen excommunicated.43"Freemanship in Puritan Massachusetts," American Historical Review 59, no. 4 (July1954): 869. Most adult male colonists would probably eventually have qualified underthe new restriction, and there is a long-standing historiographical tradition that seesthis franchise as democratic in relation to the English franchise. Yet historians havediscovered the forty-shilling freehold franchise in many regions of England wouldprobably have resulted in a bigger electorate than the Massachusetts requirementallowed. For a summary of two decades of scholarly debate over the size of theMassachusetts franchise in the seventeenth century, see Brown, "The Controversyover the Franchise in Puritan Massachusetts, 1954 to 1974," WMQ 33, no. 2 (April1976): 212-41. On the English franchise in the early seventeenth century, see DerekHirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the EarlyStuarts (Cambridge, 1975), chap. 2. In Connecticut the franchise was not tied tochurch membership. William Hubbard suggests that the difference withMassachusetts was because, unlike in Massachusetts, the Connecticut governmentwas "founded on the consent of the people" (Hubbard, General History of NewEngland, 309). In the New Haven colony, church membership was linked to the fran-chise at the government's founding. In an echo of the constitutional issue presentedin Connecticut, one of the freemen at the New Haven founding meeting wanted itnoted that the freemen did not lose their power to unlink the two. In other wordscivil power in New Haven, this freeman argued, ultimately resided with the people,not with the church members. See Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony andPlantation ofNew Haven, from 1638 to 1649 (Hartford, Conn., I857), 14-15.43 Moderate presbyterian Richard Baxter, in A Holy Commonwealth (1659), how-ever, proposed limiting the English franchise to godly members of Protestantchurches. Perhaps he was influenced by his friend John Eliot. See Baxter, A HolyCommonwealth, ed. William Lamont (Cambridge, 1994), 148-52. For a defense ofMassachusetts' franchise, see John Cotton, A Discourse about Civil Government in aNew Plantation whose Design is Religion (Cambridge, Mass., 1663), 22. The title pagegives Cotton as the author. Cotton Mather, in a good position to know as Cotton'sgrandson, claimed that the title page was wrong; John Davenport was the author.


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452 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLYThough the colony's leaders defended its scriptural basis vehe-mently, the Massachusetts franchise was hardly a product of disinter-

ested Bible study alone. In early 1631 the colony's saints had amplepractical reasons to discover scriptural instructions about the franchisethat no one else had noticed. During the previous winter, news filteredinto Massachusetts that political and religious affairs in England were"asyou left them, and rather worser then any whit amended." News alsoarrived of concern among the godly that the radical church order theMassachusetts emigrants were setting up demonstrated a separatistbias.44On the home front, the Massachusetts authorities had opportuni-ties to recognize that not all in the colony were necessarily sympatheticto theirgoals.These present and potential threats to Massachusetts were sufficientreasons to limit voting to men who had demonstrated a commitment toits church order. Contemporaries explained the franchise change inthose terms, and historians have regarded the explanation as adequate.Cotton, for example, summarized this pragmatic position neatly inresponse to Lord Saye and Sele in 1636; if "worldlymen" were to becomethe majority in Massachusetts, "as soon they might do," they wouldelect worldly magistrates who would "turn the edge of all authority andlaws against the church and its members."45 The saintly franchiseensured the survival of pure religion in New England.Isabel M. Calder argued that Mather was mistaken (Calder, "The Authorship of aDiscourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion,"American Historical Review 37, no. 2 [January 1932]: 267-69). Her argument wasmore assertion than demonstration, though later scholars accepted it. Bruce E.Steiner, however, argued for Davenport's probable authorship (Steiner, "Dissensionat Quinnipiac: The Authorship and Setting of A Discourse about Civil Government ina New Plantation WhoseDesign is Religion," New England Quarterly 54, no. I [March1981]: 14-32). Cotton, "Copy of a Letter," in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 169-70.

44 Grim news from England included Eliot and the other members ofParliament still imprisoned; peace concluded with Spain; Laud commencing hiscrackdown on the godly ministers of Essex; Alexander Leighton receiving for hisrecent book calling on Parliament to remove the antichristian bishops "12 lasheswith a 3 corded whip, one eare cut of, one nostril slit and stygmatized in the face"(Forbes et al., Winthrop Papers, 2: 322-23, 333, 336 [quotations, 322, 336]); Emerson,Lettersfrom New England, 78.45 Dunn, Puritans and Yankees, 68; Breen, Character of the Good Ruler, 5o-51;Cotton, "Certain Proposals," in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, xxix, 167. Thisimportant document and the accompanying "Copy of a Letter" tend to attract onlypassing notice by scholars. See, for example, Breen, Character of the Good Ruler,5o-51, 54, 74-75; Foster, Their Solitary Way, 38. It receives an extended analysis inKaren Ordahl Kupperman, "Definitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: LordSaye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies," Historical Journal32, no. I (March 1989): 17-33, but Kupperman works out of a framework thatseverely exaggerates the extent to which church dominated state in Massachusetts.Contrary to Kupperman, "Bay Colony leaders" did not "purge" (25) any magistrates


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REPUBLICANISMAND THE MASSACHUSETTSPOLITY 453Yet it is insufficient to discuss this development only in terms ofreligious utilitarianism. Even at its very origin, the franchise law was

swathed in conceptual language that had extrascriptural origins andpointed to concerns that extended beyond the preservation of the churchas well as to ideological underpinnings more elaborate than raw pragma-tism. Court records of May 18, 1631, give a single reason why the courtchose to limit the franchise to church members: it was "to the end" that"the body of the co[m]mons may be p[re]served of honest & good men."That explanation, though terse, is enough to plunge historians back intothe political controversies of the 162os. In that decade honest, an adjec-tive evoking civic virtue and a common self-appellation of the godly,took on a political dimension. It signified the "honest patriot," a stoutProtestant who would follow his conscience and defend the public inter-est by opposing the arbitrary actions of the Crown. The Lincolnshirean

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