Cousins Wars

HarperCollins Publishers

Chapter One

The Protestant
Background of
Anglo-American
Expansion and the
Cousins' Wars

The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world.

--Otto Von Bismarck, 1815-1898

The most important arena [in the rise of capitalism] is England, because it is in England, with its new geographic position as the entrepôt between Europe and America, its achievement of internal unity two centuries before France and two and a half centuries before Germany, its constitutional revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie of bankers, shipowners and merchants that the transformation of the structure of society is earliest, swiftest and most complete.

--R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926

English settlement of the new world was a Protestant activity....

--A. L. Rowse, The Expansion of Elizabethan England, 1955

*

    Three hundred and seventy years ago, before the languageof George Washington and George III was confirmed as thelingua anglica of global communications and finance, there was anotherAtlantic community, much smaller, where it all began: fivemillion people in England and Wales, forty thousand on theseaboard of North America, mostly in New England.

    In this patch of time and place, in the decades leading up to theEnglish Civil War, finance and communications were relativebackwaters, the domain of goldsmiths, moneylenders, and clerks.Palaces, castles, and cathedrals were still the architecture ofpower. Religion shaped the principal texture of men's minds. Protestantism,in turn, was the particular banner Englishmen carriedonto the moral and physical battlefield.

    By the 1630s, English Protestantism itself was splitting--intoranks of Anglicans, Puritans, and separatists, High Churchmenand Low Churchmen, conformers and dissenters, advocates ofepiscopacy and inveterate haters of bishops. Religious divisions,under many labels, will preoccupy us for several chapters becausethey so clearly preoccupied both English-speaking peoples, inAmerica and the British Isles, for several centuries. More than anythingelse, they were the seedbed of the cousins' wars, especiallythe English Civil War, which provided much of the framework forthe second English-speaking civil war fought in North America130 years later.

    However, to understand how the three wars and their outcomes,lessons, and warnings helped to move Anglo-America toward itseventual eminence, we cannot simply begin with the opening clashof steel and armor at Edgehill in 1642. The gestation goes backfarther: to late medieval England in the 1480s and the emergenceof the House of Tudor which would turn England's mind and faithto Protestantism and its commercial face and settlement towardthe Atlantic and the New World.

From Angles to Anglos

Early Tudor England, on the verge of a great change, had its centerof gravity in the eastern counties that faced across the Channeland the North Sea to France and the Low Countries. Before theNew World shaped a new economic equation, England's greatestwealth was in London, Kent, Sussex, and East Anglia. As Map 1.1shows, East Anglia was the bulge of English seacoast, fens, andflat farmland that had taken its name from the Angles,sixth-century invaders from western Denmark. They also imprinted theirname on England--the land of the Angles--and then, through anothersettlement wave in the seventeenth century, on NewEngland. Even the county names of East Anglia reflect these origins.Norfolk was the county of the North Folk--the NorthernAngles. Suffolk, just below, held the South Folk. Essex, betweenSuffolk and London, was the home of the East Saxons.

    Queen Elizabeth's greatest counselors, Lords Burghley andCecil, lived in the core area northeast of London. The great "woolchurches," built with the profits of the fourteenth-century clothingtrade, were in East Anglia. Local ports like Boston, Harwich,King's Lynn, Great Yarmouth, and Colchester ranked with Doverand Folkestone on the English Channel. The famous Cromwells--Thomas,who served Henry VIII, and Oliver, who dominated theEnglish Civil War--came from the east.

    Ultimately, the emigration stream from this region encircled theglobe--and that, plus the extraordinary cultural legacy of theAngles, is what warrants such attention to its geographic cradle.Anglican churches and cathedrals girdle the globe from the NorthAtlantic to the South Pacific, from St. John, Newfoundland, to TeAna and Christ Church in New Zealand and Nandi, Fiji. CulturalAnglophiles crowd the libraries of Bombay and the polo groundsof Buenos Aires. In California, projected to be America's firstThird World state, pre-medieval folk descriptions have becomebroad ethnic nouns. The word Anglo--as distinct from Asian,African-American, or Hispanic--now includes Greeks, SephardicJews from North Africa, the Armenian melon growers and truckfarmers of the great central valley, and Southern California's quarter-millionexpatriate Iranians.

    Fin-de-siécle Anglo-America, transcending its early outlines, isincreasingly a linguistic community and decreasingly a boundedpolitical, religious, or ethnic one. The vital role that Protestant religionplayed in the earlier expansion of the sixteenth to nineteenthcentury has ended. If the Anglicization of Norman warlords andWelsh borderers, and, more recently, of French Huguenots andScots Highlanders, cannot happen again with the Yemeni of NewYork and Bangladeshi of East London, that hardly matters.Language, more than ethnicity or religion the last legacy of theAngles, is the slowly emerging bond, which is not without precedent.Rome--or, more accurately, its language--played a similarworld role in A.D. 200, at which point Rome's evolution was manycenturies removed from its parochial beginnings.

    However, long before the late twentieth-century English linguisticand communications hegemony, to which we will return manychapters hence, religious and nationalistic forces drove English-speakingexpansion during the critical era when Anglo-Americaoutdistanced its rivals. Mere narratives of exploration or colonializationdo not cut to the imperial core: how these peoples, internallydivided and bickering, sorted their tensions and forces soadvantageously in the earlier centuries of modern Europe that theywere able to prevail in the nineteenth and create the commercialand linguistic hegemony of the twentieth. Narratives of religion,sectarianism, politics, and the great internal wars provide betterexplanations. The setting of the cousins' wars was itself a grandbackdrop: England's expansion into North America, following thepolitical unification of the British Isles, was the decisive fact of themodern world. While the twenty-first century may see Anglo-Americafade, for over four centuries its commercial, political, andmilitary prowess succeeded in overwhelming all challengers.

The Atlanticization of England:
A Protestant Undertaking

Simply put, any broad context for the English Civil War mustemphasize two interlaced phenomena: Protestantism and Atlanticization.Anglo-America, the English-speaking community of theAtlantic, developed out of the westward reorientation of England,which itself began with the Tudors and the Protestant Reformation.Between 1485 and 1642, England avoided serious internalwarfare while much of continental Europe was being trampled bymarching armies, torn by religious conflict, and bankrupted byreckless rulers. The Tudor monarchs, from Henry VII to Elizabeth,turned their kingdom away from old territorial preoccupations onthe continent and toward the Atlantic. The political unification ofthe British Isles, shown in Map 1.2, which included English resettlementin parts of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, furthered the newwestward mind-set. This, in turn, pulled England toward NorthAmerica.

    The annexation of Cornwall and Wales, England's two westernCeltic-language neighbors, was complete by 1536. The 1560s sawElizabeth I begin the modern conquest of Ireland. And when hercousin, King James VI of Scotland, succeeded in 1603 as James Iof England, the two Crowns were united. As ruler on both sides ofthe perpetually strife-torn Anglo-Scottish border, the new Kingpromptly cracked down on its folkways of border raids, cattle-stealing,family feuds, and "reiving"--a Celtic-flavored lawlessnessthat would live centuries longer in the ethnically kindredeighteenth- and nineteenth-century borderlands of the UnitedStates.

    By the seventeenth century, an increasingly Atlantic Englandwas moving into position to accomplish four essential transformations:to grow into Great Britain, not the mere land of the Angles;to secure North America's future as a largely English-speakingcontinent; to become Europe's most politically and commerciallyadvanced nation (during an era in which Spain, France, Austria,and others were in some ways regressing toward autocracy); andthen to assume center stage as the world's leading maritime and industrialempire. By the late eighteenth century, this had beenachieved.

    The analyst must ask why: What forces over two centuriestransformed Tudor England into the leading world empire andturned thirteen small North American colonies into the successorempire, the United States? Of the many ingredients, from commerceand individualism to sea power and parliamentary government,the most important initially was Protestantism. The talkabout God being an Englishman only began when He--with somepolitical assistance from Henry VIII in 1533--established theChurch of England, eliminating the Pope in Rome as an intermediary.Protestantism quickly became one of England's strongest self-identifications.Religion and English nationalism began whatwould be a memorable convergence.

    To the north, Scotland, too, was moving in a kindred direction.If the prayer "O Lord God, save Thy chosen people of England"could be attributed to Edward VI in 1553, the founder of ScottishPresbyterianism, John Knox, was only a few years behind inclaiming continuity in covenant for Scotland with Israel. Andwhen the Scottish and English Crowns were united, enthusiasticpreachers were quick to depict England and Scotland as Judah andIsrael, which the Lord in Ezekiel 37:22 had promised to make onepeople with one king. One hundred and seventy-two years later,commitment to a new United States would be especially strongamong the diasporas of both chosen peoples--the Puritandescendants in New England, still naming Connecticut towns forCanaan, Goshen, Bethlehem, and Sharon as late as the 1730s,and the Scotch-Irish of the American Ulster (south-centralPennsylvania), in which ministers of towns named Londonderry,Antrim, and Coleraine sent soldiers off to fight another king withsermons about Kirk and Covenant.

    For two hundred years after Martin Luther, Europe remained sodominated by the Reformation and by the ensuing CatholicCounter-Reformation that politics, like war, was typically conductedin God's name. And despite the enthusiasms of Englishkings and Scottish ministers, God was hardly Protestant.Catholicism, too, had been a conquering army from the Crusadesto Spain's recapture of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors andthe Spanish-Portuguese exploration of the New World. And itwould be again for His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XIV, onmany late seventeenth-century German and Low Country battlefields.Innovative republican governments--Florence and Venice--had arisen amidst Latin liturgies. Likewise for the high culture ofthe Renaissance and the capitalism that furbished it, fromLombardy to Antwerp. To attribute the latter's rise simply to theriches of its hinterland--the woolens and worsteds of Flanders,the tapestries of Brussels and Oudenarde, and the iron ofNamur--or to the acumen of its Flemish merchants sidesteps thelargely Catholic religious and cultural context. The earliestGerman merchant bankers, the Fuggers, had become counts of theHoly Roman Empire. Antwerp, in its day, had become the economiccrossroad of Europe under Catholicism, and the Rotterdamof Erasmus its philosophic center, just as Amsterdam and thenLondon would under Protestantism.

    There is no need to pursue whether a changing faith is moreaccompaniment to national change than explanation. What seemsobvious is that Protestantism did preside over a vital new political,commercial, and religious momentum in northwestern Europe, andEngland was in the vanguard. Save for the France of Louis XIV,which profited from its own substantial Calvinist minority for acentury before their ruthless suppression and expulsion, Europe's newachiever states were the Atlantic-facing nations converted by theReformation. The late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accomplishmentof England, in particular, was that of a nation no longersheltering behind island walls, but mastering its surrounding seas.Under Elizabeth, Oliver Cromwell, and William and Mary, Englandmade the championship of global Protestantism a powerful wind inits international sails, however melodramatic that now sounds.

    Authors by the hundreds have recounted just how ready TudorEngland was to be stirred. The earlier, Catholic kingdom had beena sluggish economic and maritime power. Pre-1485 internal warshad been a hindrance. That earlier England had also been inhibitedby a pre-Reformation acceptance of the Pope's division of theNew World between Spain and Portugal, by the constraints ofmassive church landownership, and by church strictures on economicpractices. Protestantism, probably more out of greed thancredo, led England to a more active domestic and global economics.The seizure and distribution of the Catholic monastic landsunder Henry VIII put new capital to work in agriculture, industry,and on the high seas. Glastonbury Abbey became a worsted manufactory,Rotherham College a malthouse, and the eliminations ofsaints' days were said to be worth £50,000 each in increased economicactivity, By the 1560s, English ship captains, sailing fromports like Southampton, Plymouth, and Bristol, were "singeing theKing of Spain's beard," attacking his colonies and seizing his treasuregalleons up and down the Spanish Main, the fabled northerncoast of South America from the Isthmus of Panama to Maracaiboat the mouth of the Orinoco River.

    The extent to which England's fortune was made by Atlanticizationand the opening of America is a Protestant sermon anddrumroll in itself. A. L. Rowse, the principal historian of the expansionof Elizabethan England from 1557 to 1603, is unrestrainedabout "how much this country owed its future to theElizabethan drive across the Atlantic to the New World." Religionwas an unmistakable spur. This seafaring and opening-up of theNew World, to Rowse, "was a Protestant activity," both in commercialspirit and anti-Spanish motivation. No small part ofEngland's growing mid-sixteenth-century Atlantic expertise wasowed to the collaboration of France's Protestant minority: theHuguenots, imperiled at home, already trying to implant coloniesin Brazil, Florida, and South Carolina.

    Militant Protestant sea captains, together with English volunteersin the fight for Dutch independence, gave English rivalry withSpain a crusadelike character that periodically embarrassed theless belligerent queen, for all her bold nickname of Gloriana. Asseventeenth-century France began to succeed a weakening Spain asEurope's mightiest power, England sometimes wound up fightingboth Bourbon Catholic monarchies--Spain and France. TheFrench also made frequent backstairs attempts to subvertProtestant England by sending subsidies, Jesuit priests, royalprincesses in marriage, and secret treaties (which often promisedFrench armies) to a succession of monarchs from the House ofStuart, whose Protestantism and even patriotism thereby becameincreasingly suspect.

    To a considerable percentage of seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryEnglish-speakers, as we have seen, Protestantism intermingledwith their perceived national mission as a people and as anation. Before 1776, Catholics were not allowed to vote or holdoffice in most of the American colonies. England barred themfrom voting or holding office in the years between the GloriousRevolution of 1688 and the enactment of Catholic Emancipationin 1829. The Catholic kings of France and Spain, with whom theStuarts corresponded about subsidies, marriages, treaties, andtroops, allowed far fewer elections and even less religious tolerance,which helped prolong the Protestant apprehension. Throughmost of the eighteenth century, Spain and France remained autocracieshostile to the basic notions of parliamentary governmentand political liberty practiced in England and Holland.

    Clerics and historians on both sides employed volumes of theoryand self-justification. Spain maintained its Inquisition againstheretics--non-Catholics--from 1479 through the eighteenth century.Spanish Jews and Moors were the original targets, but duringthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hundreds of capturedEnglish Protestants were burned at the stake. By the eighteenth century,France had become Britain's principal religious, political, andmilitary foe. The French kings, after allowing freedom of worship toHuguenot Protestants in the Edict of Nantes (1598), rescinded thatpermission in 1685. Even before the infamous "Revocation,"Huguenot emigration accelerated under pressures like the "dragonnades,"in which troops of dragoons were quartered in Protestantvillages of Languedoc and adjacent sections of southern France tosupervise their religious reconversion. By 1686, the cumulativeflight of France's Huguenots involved several hundred thousand in apopulation of 18 million. British North America was a favoredrefuge, along with Holland and England, drawing the first Fanueils,Bowdoins, Reveres, and Olivers to Boston; the first Delanceys, Jays,Boudinots, and Bayards to New York; and the first Dabneys(D'Aubigne) and Battles (Battaille) to Virginia.

    British historians are relatively matter-of-fact about that era's religiousanimosity. Professor Rowse, shuddering at his own visit tothe marketplace in Seville where the Spanish burned Protestantheretics, added that "one must not--in the rational quietude, theskeptical disbelief, of a later age--underestimate the force of thehatred for Spain all this piled up among the Protestants of Europe.It was unrelenting, undying, ubiquitous among them: as such itwas an historic force of momentous consequence." Linda Colley,a British historian at the London School of Economics, in explainingProtestant nationalism and anti-Catholic feeling in Englandand Scotland up through the nineteenth century, has pointed outthat the signers of the massive popular petitions delivered toParliament in 1828-1829 opposing enfranchisement of Catholics"saw themselves, quite consciously, as being part of a native traditionof resistance to Catholicism which stretched back for centuries."What is sometimes forgotten--and should not be--is howmuch the colonies, created by England's Atlantic expansion, werepart of the same tradition.

The "Execrable" Stuarts and the
Beginnings of the Cousins' Wars

The fervor of so many of their Protestant subjects made it unacceptablethat several of the Stuart monarchs, Anglican in public, wereCatholic in their private sympathies. Fearful Puritans saw a black-robedCounter-Reformation lurking in Stuart palace anterooms. Inthe words of British historian John Morrill, "Talk of `popery' is nota form of white noise, a constant fuzzy background in the rhetoricand argument of the time.... This falsifies the passionate belief ...that is the ground of action, that England was in the process of beingsubjected to the force of Antichrist, that the prospects were ofanarchy, chaos, the dissolution of government and liberties."

    There was some basis, in the decade before the English Civil Warand then again in the 1680s, for the popular fear that the pro-Frenchpolicies of the Stuarts were aligning the monarchy with what criticssummed up as popery and absolutism. James I and Charles I hadCatholic queens. In the late 1630s, Charles's court had intervals ofCatholic fashionability. Noblemen and privy counselors announcedtheir conversions to the Church of Rome. A half century later, CharlesII, who had a Portuguese Catholic consort, converted to Catholicismon his deathbed; and James II, married to Mary of Modena, wasopenly Catholic on his accession. The Stuart political heritage, moreover,was to envy the continental autocrats, mostly Catholics, whocould at will execute critics, install cardinals or bishops as their chiefministers, and disregard base-born parliaments. The male Stuart kings,all four, resented England's being the principal exception in a Europeantrend toward increasingly powerful central monarchies.

    Together, the Stuart provocations and Protestant paranoia madereligious acrimony a staple of seventeenth-century English politics.Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century chroniclers have portrayedthe House of Stuart as a millstone on England's constitutional andcommercial emergence. A different twist is that the century-longchallenge of removing that weight, besides occupying English politics,government, and economics, also sharpened these sectors.

    This interpretation was especially powerful in the Americancolonies, where eighteenth-century revolutionaries whetted theirrhetoric and constitutional sensitivity on Stuart transgressions.John Adams, the second president of the United States, lookedback on the Stuarts as "execrable."

    To replace and then keep in exile this one royal family, Englandhad more than a half dozen military confrontations and incursions,beginning with the English Civil War of 1640-1649 and notending until the failure of the last attempt to restore the Stuart linein 1745. The first and bloodiest of these conflicts commands noreal agreement on its name or even its chronology. A few scholarsapply the term First Civil War to the events of 1642 to 1645.Others refer more sweepingly to the English Revolution of1640-1649. A few even discuss the British Civil War. Those whodescribe the events of 1642-1645 as a First Civil War usually saythat a Second Civil War began in 1647, when King Charles I, aftermaking a military alliance with the Scots, lost first the battle ofPreston (1648) and then his own head to the executioner (1649).Appendix III to this book includes a time line that matches the importantdates and events. The involvement of the Scots and Irishdoes support, superficially at least, describing the fighting as theBritish Civil War. On the other hand, the battles and internalcausations were separate in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Besides,as yet there was no Britain. The simplest label is that of theEnglish Civil War, dated from the crisis of 1640 to the King's deathin 1649.

    Not that it matters much. Whatever one calls the English CivilWar, its causes, hostilities, and alignments echoed for many generations.One of England's best-known historians, ChristopherHill, has described The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, asthe arena of England's most vital political transformation. Afterbeing crowned in 1603, to rule by divine right (or so he claimed),James I, the first of the Stuarts, was able to choose and dischargehis own ministers. He could dismiss Parliament at will, commandingrevenue and authority enough not to need them foryears. In this England, which still had more than a whisper ofmedievalism, bishops could and did hold high government office.Religious heretics were burned at the stake. The king himselfcould raise customs duties, fix prices, and create monopolies.Internationally, the kingdom of James I was a second-classpower. Colonization of the New World by England was just beginning.

    When this profoundly redefining "century" ended with thedeath of Queen Anne and the upholding of the ProtestantSettlement in 1714, a much-changed Great Britain--England andScotland had united in 1707--had become a leading world empire.The new Protestant monarch, George I, plucked from the second-tierElectorate of Hanover, spoke no English and could ruleonly through Parliament, which had awarded him the crown overother better-pedigreed claimants. Parliament fully controlled thepower of the purse, as well as most royal appointments. AmongProtestants, at least, religious dissent was protected. Bishops wereno longer employable as civil officials. Church courts scarcelymattered. The principal battlegrounds of the transformation wereobvious: the civil war of 1640-1649 and the Glorious Revolutionof 1688, its conservative follow-up.

    Historians and commentators in the late twentieth-centuryUnited States have shrunk from emphasizing religion in their explanationsof seventeenth- and eighteenth-century affairs.Ecumenicalism to an extent has suppressed candor. Yet whenmid-nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Macauley describedProtestant North America as humming with enterprise whileCatholic Mexico and Quebec stagnated, his remarks paralleled theobservations of equally famous mid-nineteenth-century NewEngland chronicler Francis Parkman. Even the "flowering of NewEngland" in the literature of Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow,to say nothing of historians like Parkman and William Prescott,took place on the stem of Puritan tradition.

    In Britain, by the time of the American Revolution, anti-Catholicconcern was muting among pragmatic elites. TheEnlightenment broadly nurtured tolerance, but on the fingers ofministerial political calculation, anti-Catholicism was also reducedby the mid-century disappearance of the Stuart political threat inScotland and Ireland, the Crown's desire to enlist Catholic soldiers,and the increasing numbers of Catholics in the empire--inQuebec, Newfoundland, Gibraltar, British Honduras, and some ofthe sugar islands. In the 1790s, the anti-clericalism and churchransackings of the French Revolution also worked to create a newrapprochement between Europe's Catholic hierarchies and theBritish crown. Cardinals and bishops now saw British conservatismas a bulwark against the Robespierres and Bonapartes.Governments in Catholic Europe muted some of their own practices,and Britain's imperial preoccupation now encouraged toleranceas well as jingoism. Anti-Catholicism still remained strongamong the British common people, witness London's Gordon riotsof 1780, as well as the popular outpouring against Catholic enfranchisementa half century later. The era of religious wars, however,was over.

    The popular culture of the thirteen colonies leading up to 1775has been called a warmed-over "Radical Whig" or a "Commonwealthman"viewpoint because of its taproots in seventeenth- andearly eighteenth-century ideas and anti-Stuart memories. Below thegentry level, however, political thinking was less an intellectuallegacy than a powerful folk memory steeped in the Low Church anddissenting Protestant religious suspicions of 1640 to 1745. Doubtsabout Catholicism were a given just as they were among the Britishcommon people. But after the Revolution, the larger force would beecumenical. National elites with a more cosmopolitan outlook, inPhiladelphia, Richmond, New York, Charleston, and even Boston,would impose religious tolerance on late eighteenth-century stateand federal constitutional deliberations.

    Practicality pushed in the same direction. The same religioushodgepodge of dissenting Protestantism that had spurred revolutionin the 1640s and 1770 would, by its sheer multiplicity, compeltolerance and disestablishment in the new United States. Thiswas especially true of the Presbyterians and Baptists, but after thewar, Methodism added its own growing voice. Edmund Burke hadnot been greatly exaggerating in 1775 when he told Parliamentthat the people of the northern colonies were Protestants "of thatkind which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind andopinion," so that their religion "is a refinement on the principle ofresistance." Ultimately, this made for tolerance rather than astate-supported church, for all that Puritan New England gaveground grudgingly.

    While church establishment in Britain would continue, by the1830s the Congregational church would be disestablished in itsthree remaining New England bastions, and latitudinarian and ecumenicalviewpoints would move to the fore--all absolutely essentialto America's attractiveness to immigrants and expandingworld role. The duality of the English-speaking nations took hold.In the nineteenth-century United States, democratic politics andreligious pluralism would unfold together.

New England and the Puritan Hegira

Worry about the political, religious, and moral course of StuartEngland had already made disgruntled Puritans the principal architectsand settlers of New England in the two decades before1640. East Anglia and surrounding old Saxon districts were at theheart of the emigration. Carl Bridenbaugh, the American historian,has identified much of the exodus between 1629 and 1640 asoriginating within a circle fifty miles in each direction from theEast Anglian town of Groton, Suffolk. (Map 1.3 shows the countyboundaries of the mid-seventeenth century.) Many who plotted theNew World settlements or captained the Parliamentary fightagainst the king shared these origins. Cromwell's nativeHuntingdonshire was inside the circle. The Buckinghamshire residenceof his cousin, John Hampden, was at its edge.

    Groton itself was home to John Winthrop, who led the greatmovement to Massachusetts Bay in 1630. One early Massachusettsbiographer likened him to Nehemiah--the biblical hero who led theIsraelites back from Babylon to the Promised Land, this one transatlantic.So many of the towns in this border area of Suffolk andEssex have names that also live on in Massachusetts andConnecticut that visitors from New England can be forgiven for seeingancestral ghosts in front of the half-timbered buildings. ThomasHooker, who in 1635 planted Connecticut's main settlement inHartford, had been an itinerant preacher in Essex and then a controversialchurch lecturer in its county town of Chelmsford. RogerWilliams, prior to establishing Rhode Island in 1636, had also spenttime in Essex--as a chaplain of sorts in the Hatfield Broad Oakhousehold of Cromwell's aunt, Lady Joan Barrington.

    In England as a whole, Puritans might have been 10 to 20 percentof the population. But in East Anglia, their great citadel, thatstrength was probably 30 to 40 percent. The county of Essex itself,to the northeast of London in the territory that would beParliament's "Eastern Association" stronghold during the civilwar, could fairly be called the buckle of the seventeenth-centuryEnglish Bible Belt. To High Church Anglicans, it was a nursery ofheresy. Identified during the reign of Henry VIII as England's moststrongly Protestant county, Essex bore a similar reputation for thestaunchest Puritanism by the outbreak of the civil war in 1642.

    The other new strands of English Protestantism circa 1640--theQuakers, Baptists, Diggers, and Ranters--besides being more radicalin their beliefs, were much less numerous and important, althoughtheir influence would grow as the war dragged on. Thoseinsisting on separation from the Church of England had been punishedin the 1590s under Queen Elizabeth I, but they began to proliferatein the open religious climate of the 1640s. Quakers andBaptists would have numbered only a few thousand even in 1647or 1648, for all that there might have been half a million of themby 1660. The Ranters, and so-called antinomians in general, believedthat their personal relationship with God freed them fromnormal morality and church rules. Presbyterian congregationswere important in Scotland, but not in England. Puritans, ofwhom there could have been nearly a million, constituted by farand away the strongest opposition to High Church Anglican orthodoxyas the 1640s began to unfold.

    Distilling the essence of seventeenth-century English Puritanthinking is more controversial. One well-known historian haswryly described the label as "an admirable refuge from clarity ofthought." Others have insisted on its original and very narrowmeaning: the religion of all those who wished either to "purify"the established Church of England from what they called the taintof Popery, or to worship separately by new forms so purified. Asof 1640, the overwhelming majority were still within the establishedchurch, which adds to the difficulty of precise definition.

    Godly Puritans, however, shared a distinctive lifestyle in whichbiblical study, predestinarian theology, and suspicion of Romewere more evident than in the lives of most other Church ofEngland communicants. Sundays were days of intense religiouspreoccupation. Belief that the English were a Chosen People wasespecially strong, and those who counted themselves among thiselect body worried constantly about losing God's favor throughsome shortcoming, especially failure to promote moral reformation.By and large, Puritans opposed the apostolic authorityclaimed by bishops and resisted efforts to enforce doctrinal andliturgical conformity to the Prayer Book and canon law. Virtuallyall looked to the Bible for daily guidance, which made sermonsand the interpretive abilities of ministers all-important. Rare werethe Puritans who did not deplore the drunkenness, indolence, debauchery,and revels they saw rife in the land.

    Beyond these widely shared basics, their views by the 1630scould differ because of practicality as well as theology. The effectson England of three-quarters of a century of destructive price inflation,rising crime, and social decay caused some men to favormore drastic constraints than others. Puritans, as loosely defined,were especially prominent in law and commerce, and as politicalreaction against the Stuarts mounted, some of their most notableinfluence was in Parliament. In this, their ultimate pre-civil warpower base, they were a powerful force even in the early seventeenthcentury.

    The unparalleled wave of departures for the New World in the1630s mirrored more than broad dissatisfaction with Charles I.East Anglia had its own particular problems: poor harvests, gruesomeplagues, and lean times in the locally important cloth industry.The persecution of Puritans within the established Church ofEngland, which had increased after High Churchman WilliamLaud became Bishop of London in 1628 and then Archbishop ofCanterbury, was particularly intense in these same eastern shires.They soon had England's highest ratios of dismissed, jailed, andexiled preachers. Nearly a century earlier, the same true-believingarea had claimed four-fifths of the "Marian Martyrs"--Protestantsexecuted during the brief English Counter-Reformationunder Catholic Queen Mary in the mid-1550s. This, too, waspart of the intensity brought to New England.

    Emigration from England, a trickle in 1607, deepened into astream in 1620 and a flood in 1629. Some eighty thousandEnglish--2 percent of the national population--left the countrybetween 1620 and 1640 for the American colonies, the Caribbean,or Holland. Twenty-one thousand went to New England.Assuming that population in the temperate North Americancolonies more or less doubled every twenty-five years, demographershave suggested that by the mid-eighteenth century, thiszealous early emigration was the principal source of pre-RevolutionaryNew England's half a million people.

    Neither of the early Stuarts, James I or Charles I, gave England'sfledgling colonies in the Americas particular support. Settlement inthe New World was generally connected to the non-Stuart opposition--underJames, to Lord Southampton and Sir Edwin Sandys;under Charles, to Lords Warwick and Saye, as well as to Pym andHampden. Nor was the sea itself a particular interest of Stuartkings. Mariners lamented that Holland was outstripping Englandat sea; Dutch merchantmen carried more than half the trade inand out of English ports, so that by 1620, London-owned shippingwas only half its former tonnage.

    The Royal Navy was too weak to protect shipping in theEnglish Channel. Algerian pirates, guided by English renegades,captured 466 English merchant vessels between 1609 and 1616.During a ten-day period in 1625, a thousand English seamen werecarried off as slaves and twenty-seven vessels were seized.Voyagers to Virginia and New England were among those taken."Pirates rode, ravaging and kidnapping, up the wooded creeks ofDevon and Cornwall, where Drake and Raleigh had prepared thedeath of Spain," wrote one chronicler. "Trinity House had the(beacon) light on the Lizard extinguished, because it guided the piratesof Sallee, one of whom was captured in the Thames itself."James was equally supine in failing to avenge the massacre ofEnglish at Amboyna in the Dutch East Indies.

    Charles I was especially concessionary to the French. As part ofthe arrangement by which he married Princess Henrietta Maria ofFrance in 1625, England was to provide ships to help Louis XIIIsuppress the French Protestants of La Rochelle. However, theEnglish crews to be put at French disposal mutinied. Then, in1632, Charles ceded Canada to France, confirming the NorthAmerican foothold of the rival power that would bottle up Englishcolonization on the Eastern Seaboard for another 130 years. ForNew England, the assistance of the Stuarts was principally negative:stirring a discontent among Englishmen and then being unableto hold back the resulting great emigration that laid so muchfoundation for the future.

    In 1634, Charles set up a Commission for the Plantations,which scholars have described as more concerned with sellingprivileges in the New World than expansion. Population movementto the New World had already become a concern of theCrown, not an ambition. Not long after the King's chartering ofthe Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, royal authorities,stunned by the surge of emigration, ordered officials in westernseaports from Bristol to Liverpool to block the departure of passengerswithout licenses, but without much success.

    To end such "promiscuous and disorderly parting out of theRealme," the Royal Commission in 1634 handed down an extraordinaryorder. No emigrants, it said, could leave without two certificates--oneattesting that the applicant had taken the oaths ofsupremacy and allegiance, and the second from the minister of hisparish vouching for his religious conformity. Within another fewmonths, King Charles forbade any subjects save soldiers, mariners,and merchants to leave the realm without a license from him or hiscouncil. The purpose was to stop the emigration, to both Hollandand America, by Puritans "whose only end is to live as much asthey can without the reach of authority."

    In 1635, the Commission, now chaired by Archbishop Laud, foeof the Puritans, directed the attorney general to open suit in theCourt of the King's Bench for an even stronger remedy: recision ofthe charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. When the Courtcomplied in May 1637, Charles Stuart announced that he was assumingmanagement of New England. The colony's leaders wereonly moderately concerned. Massachusetts had already built fortson Castle Island and at Charlestown, brought in 540 [pounds sterling] ofsaltpeter and match from Holland, and ensured that Boston could mustertwo regiments of militia, "able men and well-armed and exercised."By 1638 and 1639, the King had too many other problemsto act. Yet in one historian's view, had a royal governor actuallybeen sent, "It is hard to doubt that Massachusetts would havetried to resist him. The first overt rebellion against Charles I mighthave taken place in Boston harbor instead of Edinburgh."

    In Massachusetts, but also elsewhere in New England, thestamp of East Anglia, its people and ideas, was writ large. Map1.4 shows the imprint of the eastern counties on Massachusettsand Connecticut. Besides the East Anglian town names that clusterin eastern Massachusetts, even the accent has persisted. Linguistsidentify unmistakable traces of the nasal "Norfolk Whine" in localintonations. The long, wide public greens of Suffolk, Essex,and Hertfordshire--especially notable examples remain in Writtleand Matching, Essex and Long Melford, Suffolk--were transferredto New England en masse, thereafter migrating westwardwith New Englanders. Southeast England was the principal regionwhere houses and barns were made of wood, although by the seventeenthcentury it was growing scarce. Immigrants seeing the potentialfor lumber in Cape Ann and the Charles River Valley gladlyreverted to still-familiar old-country house-building techniques.

    Transplanted East Anglians also kept familiar Old World neighbors.Most of the East Anglian coast, from Boston, Lincolnshire,and The Wash south to Harwich and Colchester, facing across thesea to the Netherlands, shows a strong and unique Dutch imprintor resemblance in its land reclamation, engineering, agriculture,art, and architecture. Market gardens are common, even fields oftulips. In 1622, the Essex town of Colchester, facing Holland, hadsome fifteen hundred people of first- and second-generation Dutchextraction, roughly a third of the population. Fenland southernLincolnshire, where no small part of today's acreage was reclaimedfrom the sea with the help of seventeenth-century Dutchengineers, was for many years called the Holland district.Occasional old Dutch gabled houses from there south to Essex stillremind the visitor how much architectural style was borrowedfrom the Netherlands and Flanders. Examples include old brightlycolored quayside buildings of King's Lynn, the Dutch church inNorwich, and the row houses of the Dutch quarter of Colchester.Even the most famous school of British art represented by Suffolkbornpainters John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough, whoselandscapes emphasized lofty dramatic skies and broad horizons,drew on the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of the similarvistas across the North Sea.

    Three thousand miles away, the fledgling New England settlementswould have a similar proximity to and cultural overlap withthe New Netherlands--for which East Anglian memories and antecedentswere presumably an asset, despite occasional squabbles.Like its principal parent region, New England easily assimilated itsscattering of Dutch, French Huguenot, Fleming, and Walloon immigrants.Without them, someone other than Paul Revere wouldhave to have made his famous ride.As befit a region of intensive household industry from yarn-spinningto cheese-making, East Anglia also had a disproportionof craftsmen and tradesmen. Many of the Puritans among thembecame emigrants to New England, and besides the transatlanticinfusion of their religion and culture, their vocational descriptionslive on as well-known patronymics: Chandler, Cooper, Currier,Cutler, Draper, Fletcher, Gardiner, Glover, Mason, Mercer, Miller,Sawyer, Saddler, Sherman, Thatcher, Tinker, Turner, Waterman,Webster, and Wheelwright. Names like these remain numerous inthe Swamp-Yankee rural townships--and, even more vividly inthe nineteenth- and twentieth-century directories of New Englanduniversity graduates, doctors, ministers, and military officers.They became an elite in the New World to an extent they nevermanaged in the Old.

    Yet the most important impact of East Anglia in shaping NewEngland was neither architectural, linguistic, nor patronymic, butinstead political and governmental--in a civic culture of high literacy,town meetings, and a tradition of freedom reaching back toSaxon days. The Parliamentary side in the English Civil War upheldthis heritage in the early years, but lost its way in the later excessesof the Rump Parliament and the Protectorate. The NewEngland of the 1770s, as befit its origins in liberty-minded but orderlyEast Anglia, had learned some lessons and spread its influenceacross America along with its population.

    Carl Bridenbaugh, David Hackett Fischer, and others, in settingout the traits and qualities that different English groups brought todifferent parts of America, have dwelt on the East Anglian originsof New England town government. Centers like Framingham,Braintree, and Dedham--three names that reappeared inMassachusetts--had the equivalent of town by-laws and townmeetings. In some, officials were called selectmen. On another dimensionof civic-mindedness, Suffolk and Essex were the countieswith seventeenth-century England's highest literacy rates, roughly50 percent. An estimated 85 percent of Puritan men in Massachusettscould sign their names to documents, which was abouton a level with yeomen and their wives in East Anglia. OfEngland's nine "publick libraries" outside London before 1640,five were in Lincolnshire and Norfolk, and a sixth was inDorchester, the Puritan citadel of the West Country.

    From Lincolnshire south to Kent, the eastern counties were distinctivepolitically as well as educationally. These areas settled bythe Angles and Jutes differed from others in having comparativelylarge ratios of freemen and small numbers of servi and villani.More than any other part of England, the east was associated withinsurrections against arbitrary power--the risings and rebellionsof 1381 led by Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and John Ball in London andmost of the eastern counties. Clarence's Rising in 1477 also tookplace largely within the future bounds of the Eastern Association,whose insurgent cavalry under Cromwell finally did ride down amonarch. Robert Kett's rebellion of 1548 centered in Norfolk.Even Anglo-Saxon opposition to the Normans had lasted longestin the eastern fen country. This was a heritage of liberty NewEnglanders were proud to share--and would refer to many timesin 1774-1775.

    John Adams, James Otis, and others cherished the Saxon analogybecause it stood for politics more resembling self-determination,free male suffrage, and a consensual social contract--the open-airfolk-moots and assemblages in places like Spellow, Norfolk (whichmeant "hill of speech"). New Englanders, like some English republicansof the 1640s, contrasted these practices with the harsher royalauthority, edicts, and codes of the Normans, exemplified by thestatutory provisions that determined local authority in places likethe Channel Islands, Wales, and the Isle of Man.

    Otis, extending other theorists, lauded the ancient Saxon originsof the English constitution: Anglo-Saxon England, in Massachusettseyes, was a kind of pre-feudal elysium until it was conqueredand yoked by the Normans. Thomas Jefferson was alsoan ardent exponent of the Saxon example, but these views wereless common in the plantation colonies. By the time the lastcousins' war rolled around, the American Southern states had acontrary twist, as chapter 8 will discuss. Northerners were theSaxons, but Southerners were the cavaliers, the knightly Normanstock that conquered them.

    From the first, Massachusetts and Connecticut, the principalPuritan colonies, were to be religious and political NewJerusalems. Stuart England, in the eyes of church elders, had beenlosing its Elizabethan role as God's chosen nation. A new Israelacross the sea might have to take up the burden. John Winthropwrote to his wife in 1629 that "I am veryly persuaded God willbringe some heavy affliction upon this lande" of England. JohnCotton, preaching to emigrants bound across the Atlantic at quaysidein Gravesend, read from II Samuel 7:10: "And I will appoint aplace for my people Israel, and will plant it, that they may dwell ina place of their owne, and move no more, neither shall wickedpeople trouble them any more as before time." From the start,New Englanders followed in the footsteps of the Puritans in consideringthemselves a chosen people. Each time--in 1642, in 1775,and in 1861--their ministers sent them off to battle with the requisiteassurances that their God was with them.

    This, however, is getting ahead of the game. New England historianshave correctly called the peak emigration from England in the1630s the Puritan hegira, likening it to the Prophet Mohammed'sseventh-century decision to ensure his new religion's future influenceby migrating from Mecca to Medina. East Anglia and southeastEngland were Mecca; after the Stuart Restoration, NewEngland would indeed be Medina. It would spread the faith, morein a cultural than a strictly religious sense, and ultimately help leadthe United States to Britain's support in two world wars and to primacyin the twentieth-century Anglo-American community.

The Advent of Civil War

Puritan voices had been influential at the court of Elizabeth I,among them Lords Burghley and Leicester, two of the Queen'strusted advisers, along with Archbishop Grindal and Bishop Jewel,two of the boldest architects of the new Church of England, andthe two Hakluyts, John Sr. and John Jr., preeminent chroniclers ofEnglish settlements and prospects in the Americas during the Ageof Expansion.

    The breadth of Puritan endeavor further expanded in the seventeenthcentury, despite the wariness of James I. Sympathizers werein the forefront of English seafaring and colonization, of earlyindustrialization--cloth-making, in particular--and almost everykind of small-capitalist assertiveness. Strongest in the larger townsand seaports, London, Bristol, Norwich, and others, the Puritanswere correspondingly weak in conservative rural areas. This wasespecially true in the north and west, most recently brought to heelby the Tudors, where garrisoned castles, Roman Catholicism, andfeudal relationships lingered. The aggressiveness of Puritanism,more than any other single factor, may have been the catalyst forthe polarization that took over in the 1640s.

    R. H. Tawney, in his early twentieth-century masterworkReligion and the Rise of Capitalism, argued that "the growth, triumphand transformation of the Puritan spirit was the most fundamentalmovement of the seventeenth century." Puritanism, hecontended, "and not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the trueEnglish Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old orderthat an England which is unmistakably modern emerges."This seems excessive. The Tudors played an essential role in thepolitical and dynastic success of the Reformation. The Puritans,however, were the principal advance agents of constitutionalchange and early market capitalism. And they and their heirswould be a catalyst in each of the cousins' wars, not just the firstone.

    Like their Yankee descendants, English Puritans mixed theologyand capitalism provocatively and often to great personal profit.The first and second Earls of Warwick, the richest of the Puritanpeers, counted warring against Spain not only as patriotism, but asenterprise. Warwick's privateers--on some occasions, pirates--pouncedon Spanish merchant ships and treasure galleons frombases in England, Holland, and the West Indies. The sun neverset on his (and the Puritans') war with Spain. When England madepeace with Madrid, Warwick ships fought Spain under letters ofmarque from Holland, and when the Dutch, too, damped theirfuses, his vessels fought under the commission of the far-off Dukeof Savoy. In Warwick's shadow, John Hancock and the eighteenth-centuryNew Englanders who made fortunes from smuggling andprivateering were small fry.

    After Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629, the Earl and hisallies used meetings of their Providence Island Company, foundedto establish a Puritan settlement and anti-Spanish privateeringbase in the Caribbean, as an alternative venue for politicking theyhad hitherto conducted in Westminster corridors and anterooms.For weeks at a time, the collaborators would visit at Warwick'shouse in London or Lord Brooke's. John Hampden's famous lawsuitagainst Ship Money, the innovative, irksome royal tax thathelped sow the seeds of the Civil War, was plotted at these dinnertables.

    Yet despite the undoubted frustrations of Puritans and othercritics, as late as 1638 relatively few Englishmen would have feltcompelled to take up arms against the King, despite unhappinessover his choice to rule for what would be eleven years withoutconsulting Parliament. What changed this was a succession of religiousupheavals in Scotland (1638-1640) and then a rising inIreland (1641), both of which helped draw England into an internalconfrontation of its own. Without these events in Scotlandand Ireland, the broader conflict might have been avoided for awhile longer.

    The specific misjudgment that brought matters to a head inScotland was Charles Stuart's insistent Anglican orthodoxy. In1638, after he had for several years demanded unpopular changesin the Scottish Protestant ritual and prayerbooks, the gentry andcommon people of Scotland, aroused by what they called "plainproofs of popery," united in a Solemn Covenant from which supporterstook their name--Covenanters. They also mobilized anarmy. When the Scots troops marched up to the English border in1639, many in Parliament and in the English population regardedthem as allies, not as threatening foes.

    By August 1640, after a second mobilization in which ScotsCovenanters--the Presbyterian, nearest north-of-the-border equivalentof English Puritans--crossed the River Tweed and capturedNewcastle, the King was in a trap. To obtain money to fight theScots, he had to call a new Parliament to replace the one he haddismissed eleven years earlier. This "Short Parliament" in thespring of 1640 brought English dissension to a boil. Many in theHouse of Commons, disliking the previous eleven years as theKing's "personal tyranny," preferred to keep the Scots army inplace as "a guarantee of English liberties." Cromwell himself is reportedto have said that he would rather help the Scots fight theKing than vice versa. The Short Parliament was sent home.

    In October 1640, Charles agreed to call for a second assemblageand got an even less friendly one--the famous Puritan-dominatedLong Parliament. After a year of slow progress on broadly supportedreforms, this Parliament wound up in late 1641 confrontingthe King with the Grand Remonstrance, a lengthycompendium of alleged royal abuses. Parliamentary leaders wentso far as to have its sweeping constitutional, religious, and economiccharges printed and distributed, a rare appeal to popularopinion. The King, in his famously impolitic response severalweeks later, marched soldiers into the House of Commons to seizefive Parliamentary leaders on charges of treason. When he failedon that January morning of 1642--all five Puritan blackbirds hadflown--civil war became a strong possibility, perhaps a probability.By June, when the King predictably rejected a measure to restricthis powers, Parliament's Nineteen Propositions, the lineswere drawn.

    Charles, lacking financial resources because the Parliament controlledthe purse, took months to gather an army. By the time ofthe first major battle at Edgehill in October 1642, hundreds ofPuritan emigrants were returning from Massachusetts Bay andConnecticut to fight alongside their cousins and to help make history.More than half of those who graduated from Harvard between1640 and 1650 went back. For Massachusetts, the EnglishCivil War was more than a far-off fight; it was a magnet--and itwould be an enduring memory.

Continues...
Excerpted from Cousins Warsby Kevin P. Phillips Copyright © 2000 by Kevin P. Phillips. Excerpted by permission.
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