1. YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL
CALVINIST THEOLOGY AND ITS EFFECT ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE IN
THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY, 1630–1649
A THESIS
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY
OF
THE DIVINITY SCHOOL
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF SACRED THEOLOGY
BY
PHILIP DEAN STOLLER
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
MAY 2015

2. ii
Copyright © 2015 by Philip Dean Stoller
All rights reserved.

3. iii
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of United States, 1865

4. iv
ABSTRACT
CALVINIST THEOLOGY AND ITS EFFECT ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE IN
THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY, 1630–1649
BY
PHILIP DEAN STOLLER
May 2015
This thesis addresses critical issues regarding the initial intent of the Puritan
leadership who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Much of this thesis
explores issues that have either never been addressed, or that have not been adequately
addressed before. Clearly, the primary intent of Mr. John Winthrop and other members of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony to quit Old England to go to North America was not to
build that mythical shining “city upon a hill” serving as an example to Old England as to
how to teach the unenlightened Anglicans to gather and live in a godly community and
fully reform their Church of England so as to rid it of any remnants of papist influence.
Rather, their primary goal was to establish their own nation ab initio that was distinct,
separate, and apart from that of Old England. Also addressed was the critical need for the
development of Man-made jurisprudence in the form of temporal written law codes,
which were frequently at odds—or totally different—than laws found in the Bible. The
key factor, however, that forged their unique system of Massachusetts Bay jurisprudence
was the incorporation into its single system the concept of “equity.” Examined fully is

5. v
why and how, for a period of nearly fifty years, the Puritan legal system towered over
that of Old England’s, particularly in regard to its fairness of outcome and mercy shown
toward most criminal defendants. Ironically, their magnificent jurisprudence developed
due to sheer necessity and circumstance. Key to this development were two factors: 1)
Bay magistrates had to combine, into a single courtroom with a single magistrate, both
law and equity, unlike in Old England where law and equity were handled separately, and
2) because of where the original concept of equity, or “Christian Charity,” derived: the
New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount—or more precisely, God. Being human, the
Puritans did not develop a perfect system. They did, however, develop a system that was
light years ahead of its time, and many light years ahead of the system that was used in
Old England.
Keywords: Early Massachusetts Bay Colony, Emigration to North America,
Original Intent to Settle, Criminal Law, Law, Equity, Old Testament, New
Testament, Sermon on the Mount, Theology.

6. vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to acknowledge some very special people who made work on my STM
Thesis possible during my final year at Yale Divinity School.
It is with the greatest appreciation and personal pleasure that I was able to have as
my thesis advisors two of the world’s leading experts in the field of Early Colonial
American history: Harry S. Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American
Christianity and the General Editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale University,
and Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema, the Executive Editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards
and of the Jonathan Edwards Center and Online Archive at Yale University. I also wish
to thank Suzanne Estelle-Holmer, Acting Director of the Yale Divinity Library for her
ever-watchful eye and critically important advice provided to me so graciously as I
proceeded with my work. Without the assistance and wisdom of these three scholars I am
certain this paper would never have been completed in the manner in which it was. Thank
you all.

7. vii
CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1
The Impossible Dream:
Reasons for the Great Migration of 1630–1640 ......................................................... 16
εκπατρισµός:
The Problem of Remigration ..................................................................................... 41
Continued Nation Building:
On the Quiet ............................................................................................................... 49
CHAPTER 2
The Execution of the Biblical Code:
The Puritan Dilemma.................................................................................................. 60
CHAPTER 3
Inerrancy of the Bible ................................................................................................ 93
CHAPTER 4
The Urgency for Equity in Faraway Places:
The Gift from God that Made the System Work ...................................................... 106
CONCLUSION
Where the English Common Law Does Not Exist,
England Does Not Exist............................................................................................ 125
ILLUSTRATIONS........................................................................................................ 139
BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................... 140

8. viii
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
1. The English Flag, c. 1636 ............................................................................................139
2. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Flag, c. 1636.............................................................139

9. 1
INTRODUCTION 1
This thesis contains four chapters as well as an introduction and a conclusion.
Each chapter addresses a distinct and essential area of this complex tale. Each chapter
may, if desired, be read as a single piece or, as is suggested, be read as one entire whole
which addresses, to my mind, one of the most fascinating periods of early Colonial-
American religious and legal history.
In England, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, during the reign
of James I, and later, his son Charles I, there lived a people who, though ethnically
English, found themselves to be at great odds with the established ruling monarchy and
its state church. Though there were other religious groups which also did not quite fit into
the English king’s plan for a single unified church, and nation,2
James I3
had successfully
suppressed the bulk of these groups. By the third decade of the seventeenth century most
of these other fringe groups were either non-existent or no longer a threat of any
significance to the king’s established church. Two dissident groups, however, remained a
thorn in the king’s side, obstructing his grand plan for a unified national church. By that
time the ecclesiastical line had been scrawled in the sand. On one side stood the English
king and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Opposing them stood two similar
yet unique groups of religious zealots: the Pilgrims and the Puritans, the second of which
being the major topic of this paper. The latter group, the Puritans, was the larger and
more powerful of the two and represented a respectable and well-educated professional
1
All words in italics are mine.
2
Dissident groups other than the Puritans including, but not limited to the Pilgrims, Lollards, Quakers,
General Baptists, Particular Baptists, Presbyterians, Levellers, Socinians, Fifth Monarchists, and Diggers.
See, John Morrill, “The Puritan Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds. J Coffey
and P.C.H. Lim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 67, 68, 71, 77-79, 83.
3
Who was also James VI of Scotland; See, Alan R. MacDonald, “James VI and I, the Church of Scotland,
and British Ecclesiastical Convergence,” The Historical Journal Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 2005): 885.

10. 2
and commercial class. The smaller, the Pilgrims, wasn’t as well funded, and was less
successful in the corporeal world than its more powerful brothers and sisters. Though not
nearly as much a threat to king and church, to the plain eye the Pilgrims were the more
detached of these two non-conformist groups. Unlike the Puritans, the Pilgrims had
absolutely no desire to institute reform in the Church of England. Both groups believed
the Church of England required substantial reform to make it consistent with the severe
orthodox Calvinist belief system that they both shared. That the Church of England
differed in some ways from its predecessor, the Roman Catholic Church, as far as the
Puritans and Pilgrims were concerned, it was never actually a reformed church of any
kind. Each group proposed differing solutions to this intolerable situation. The Puritans,
historically referred to as the more reasonable and “moderate” of the two groups, were
willing to wait patiently in an attempt to “fix” their nation’s broken church at a measured
and reasonable pace. The Pilgrims—more pronounced in their condemnation—believed
that such change was utterly impossible. For the Pilgrims the English Church was too far
gone; that is to say, too Roman Catholic, too “papist.” In their more radical view, these
“non-conformist” separatist Pilgrims regarded the Anglican Church as beyond
redemption, lost to them and forever lost to God.4
The Pilgrims’ utter disgust with the state church led them on September 6, 1620,
to set sail from Southampton, England headed for North America to forge a new life of
religious freedom for themselves. They arrived on November 9th. Against enormous
odds and with great difficulty—sickness, death, and an abundance of trial and
heartache—they founded the Plymouth Plantation.5
On their dangerous journey they
4
Bruce C. Daniels, New England Nation, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31-34.
5
Ibid. 33.

11. 3
carried with them the Geneva Bible.6
The Geneva Bible was the book by which all
Pilgrims’ earthly activity was to be judged; all comfort, guidance, custom, etiquette,
criminal infractions and sentencing laws, as well as ethical questions were unequivocally
to be found in this Bible.7
This was the essential and critical characteristic of all groups
that considered themselves part of the Reformed Church. The Bible and all contained
therein was the literal Word of God. Was not inerrancy of the Bible the alpha and omega
of the entire Protestant Reformation?
By contrast, the Puritans accepted as their own the English King James Version of
the Bible.8
While also non-conformist, the Puritans’ official position regarding the
Anglican Church was that with much work and the help of God it could be refashioned to
set it in line with their own reformed beliefs. At least this was their official position.
Though non-conformist as were the Pilgrims, the Puritans claimed they were non-
separatists.
Though this claim is firmly ensconced in the American myth, I do not agree that
the Puritans were non-separatist. If anything, the Puritans who set sail from Southampton
to North America in 1630 were even more radical than their Pilgrim brothers and sisters.
The reasons for my position will be clearly stated in the body of the text.
6
The Geneva Bible was the foundational book brought to the New World by the Pilgrim Separatists in
1620. “The Geneva Bible was first published in 1560 . . . in 1576, a revised form of the Geneva Bible was
produced . . . The edition used by the Pilgrims was the 1599 edition which was prepared for publication by
Laurence Tomson and Francis Junius.” See, Bruce M. Metzger, “Book Notes,” Theology Today, Vol. 46.
No. 4 (Jan., 1990): 463, quoted in The 1599 Geneva Bible, ed. Peter A. Lillback (White Hall, WV: Tolle
Lege Press, 2006), vii.
7
This raises the all important question of which particular Bible was to be examined to find the correct
answers to urgent questions that needed to be asked. The Pilgrims 1599 Geneva Bible was merely one of
many possibilities; the non-Separatists Puritans used the King James Version, which was authorized for use
in the Anglican Church. Even at this time, there were so many different versions, asking which version was
the “proper” one to use seems an exercise in futility . . . and absurdity. Yet it still remains a question of
vital importance to ask—and answer. Of course, there can be no correct answer, which makes the use of
any Bible as the “end-all,” and “be-all” Bible problematic.
8
King James I commissioned the translation of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which is commonly
known as the King James Version [or KJV] in 1604. It was published in 1611. See, Adam Nicolson, God’s
Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), xi.

12. 4
In essence, however, their stated strategic tactic was to act as tutor to both king
and church, to instruct them regarding divine perfection and in how to correctly order
their lives—in accordance with God’s instructions—as found specifically in their own
Holy Bible, the King James Version. Due to the fact that they were not having a
measureable deal of success accomplishing this goal, they shifted gears and began
planning a new tactic, though theirs took something of a circuitous path.
Their new plan was to leave the land of their birth and travel west three-thousand
nautical miles across a brutal Atlantic Ocean so they might build, in their new North
American wilderness home, a pure and godly community the likes of which had never
before been seen in England. The Puritan leadership knew, if given the opportunity—and
legal authority from the king, in the form of a bona fide charter—that they could surely
produce a mighty city and reveal to the lost sheep mired within the confines of the
Anglican Church just how a godly church must be gathered. When the Puritans’ heaven
on earth was fully completed, the king and his counselors would see God’s true light and
thereby make appropriate changes to the corrupt and deeply troubled liturgical
mechanism and ecclesiastical structure of the Church of England, creating at last a church
truly worthy of God, and to His standards.
This grand plan, as I will argue in this paper, was doomed to failure from its
inception. In making this argument, I will focus particularly on the area of criminal
jurisprudence to reveal that the Puritans’ stated goals and their manner of reaching these
goals were entirely inconsistent with their spoken position as to the use of the Bible. It
was for the reasons I will later reveal in this paper, that they fell far short of their desired
theological goals, and, in turn, that meant failure in their righteous mission not only as to
teaching the king and his church but also in their new home colony. Of necessity, this

13. 5
failure, whether admitted by them or not, had to raise fundamental questions as to the
validity of the entire reformed theological foundation. Herein lay the fundamental flaw in
the Puritans’ declared theology.9
Simply put, the Bible, no matter what version we are
referring to—the Geneva Bible of the Pilgrims or the King James Version of the
Puritans—allegedly contained the final Word of God. If it had, the Puritans would have
used it when composing their legal codes. They did not. Either the Bible is the Word of
God or it is not. The core and life of reformed Christianity relies entirely upon the former
being true.
This is the single issue in Reformed Theology that is absolutely non-negotiable.
By the very nature of the Puritans’ having to negotiate in the corporeal world both their
desires and circumstances, they were thoroughly unable to reach, or even come close to,
the godly example to which they say they aspired. I will explore the manner in which
colonial criminal law came to be and how their court system was conducted and in so
doing I will reveal precisely why their grand North America experiment became
“undone.”
Though the main thrust of the Pilgrims’ agenda was religious freedom, the
Puritans had their eyes set on a much grander mission in which reformed theology
played, if not a minor role, then certainly a lesser one than initially contended. By
necessity and circumstance, the Puritan leadership had to keep their intentions and
ultimate goals far from transparent to the general body of Puritan émigrés. Theirs was not
merely a journey to find a safe place in which to worship freely but most specifically to
establish a national homeland to call their own.
9
Please note, this is not an attack, merely an observation.

14. 6
John Winthrop, an educated Puritan leader who at one time served as an English
Justice of the Peace, is perhaps the pivotal character in development of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. In 1630 Winthrop, while sailing across the Atlantic to North America in the
Arbella, preached a sermon, now legend, entitled A Model of Christian Charity in which
he announced to his fellow passengers that they were charged by God with the mission of
building a shining “city upon a hill” so as to reveal to the unenlightened masses, both in
England and around the world, just how to build a perfect and godly community—relying
solely upon God’s Word alone. Somehow from its faraway vantage point—over three
thousand miles away—Old England would see the light, and accordingly, change its evil
ways. That is, they would truly reform themselves and their church to be in accordance
with the Puritans’ severe Calvinist manner of worship and theology.
Though A Model of Christian Charity has always been historically presented as
merely a sermon, albeit a crucial one, in truth it was actually a pristine “Declaration of
Intent” regarding the Puritans’ new settlement, or more precisely, their “Declaration of
Independence.” This was the raison d’être of the voyage, their full independence, not the
establishment of a new Anglican colony.10
The Puritans’ driving force was the
establishment of a new nation, English in origin and custom, but absolutely reformed in
its religious beliefs. Though they would for the time being maintain their English subject
10
Unlike the Virginia Colony which was founded in 1607 and was essentially an economic mission for the
Crown and was populated in great part by single men, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like the Plymouth
Plantation before it was represented, not by men alone, but by families, the building block of a civilized and
godly life. The Virginia settlers were essentially unmarried men of whom many were indentured servants.
Soon after arriving in North America they settled in a location which was later to be named Jamestown.
Most of the male settlers died there. Clearly, the primary purpose of the Puritan and the Virginia
settlements was entirely different. If the king of England had merely desired an English “presence” in
North America, he would have been satisfied with this single Anglican Establishment in Virginia, but he
desired more; he wanted and got from the Puritans a genuine living, growing, and learning community,
much more than an all-male Virginia settlement could provide. The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth
Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689, ed. Warren M. Billings, (Published for the
Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, VA by The University of North Carolina
Press: Chapel Hill, NC, 1975) 5, 10, 17, 107.

15. 7
status, their true intent was to forever sever their ties to the oppressive English monarchy
from which they had now safely escaped. By whatever name one wishes to call this new
entity, be it “colony,” “state,” or “territory,” it was intended ab initio to be a new nation.
Religious freedom alone could never afford them the political independence they sought;
for that, absolute political freedom was required. The proof is found in the way they, as a
“colony” acted—and re-acted—toward England, its monarch, and the English Church
and its officials during the entire lifetime of the Puritan Nation’s independence.
The reason all subversive moves they made had to be couched in absolute terms
of religious freedom was because the English monarch had to “know” that “his” new
colony would not be a threat to his sovereignty, which, of course, was exactly what it
was. In turn, the English King also got something out of this unspoken bargain. Charles I
needed English “subjects” on North American soil because it benefitted him politically,
militarily, and strategically. That is, the Puritans’ English presence served the function of
putting the French and the Dutch governments on notice that North America was
unconditionally to be the exclusive property of the English monarch. Clearly, it was a
quid pro quo of sorts. The English king had achieved a significant goal which he could
not have been terribly unhappy about, while the Puritans, whom he was glad to be rid of,
were in actuality doing the work his soldiers would have had to do, had the Puritans not
been present in North America to work the land, raise a civilized English community, and
defend the land if necessary. For both the King and Puritan leadership, this must have
seemed like a “win-win” situation. To be sure, a deal made with their respective devils,
but a workable deal nonetheless.
It was only after the 1660 Restoration when Charles II, son of the murdered king,
Charles I, ascended the throne that actions were taken to force the Puritan Nation to its

16. 8
knees and back into the fold of the English nation. For nearly fifty years, however, the
Bay Colony lived and breathed as an independent nation, perhaps not from within their
own community but certainly from without.11
In ultimate terms, the establishment of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 marked the de facto end of English proprietary rights
in Massachusetts. Though it took over a century for this game of political brinksmanship
to play out, there is no question that the initial disconnect between England and North
America occurred in 1630. For a moment in time the Puritans had acquired their freedom
but then lost it. In kind, in time the English King eventually won back his Crown territory
in North America but in turn—following General Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown in
1781—lost it, this time forever.
This thesis is comprised of four major areas of inquiry through which I intend to
prove my assertions. Chapter 1 addresses the issue of why a fairly small percentage of
English Puritans, some of the knighted class and some of the professional and
entrepreneurial classes—all of them highly educated—along with a respectable number of
common men, women, and children, left their home island to suffer the indignities of a
three-thousand nautical mile journey across the Atlantic to an inhospitable new world,
and, upon their arrival, to continue suffering the physical and emotional hardships of
beginning their lives ab initio.12
I will also examine the issue of why a good number of
Puritan settlers decided to leave the newly established Massachusetts Bay Colony to return
to Old England—some almost immediately after arriving—some years later. In my
opinion, this fairly constant back-and-forth movement of the original Bay settlers was a
11
By this I mean that “within” the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the basic rule was incredibly tight control
over the lives of the community’s people; from “without” means, from England’s position, they had
become overwhelmingly independent, and maintained that status for fifty years. However one chooses to
view the situation, the Puritan Colony had successfully become its own nation.
12
Latin for “from the first act,” or “from the start.” The Law Dictionary, Black’s Law Dictionary, Free
Online Legal Dictionary <a href="http://thelawdictionary.org/ab-initio/" title="AB INITIO">AB
INITIO</a>.

17. 9
major cause of the eventual downfall of the Puritan Nation. This constant back flow of
settlers to England accounted for a constant stream of “negative” information aboutthe
settlement that would eventually find its way to the king’s representatives and explains the
reasons for their intense wrath toward the Bay Colony. This back-and-forth movement
across the ocean contributes further to our understanding of the actual, original reasons for
the Puritans’ initial departure from England because in truth they did not have to leave Old
England. And of course, the key question remains: If the Puritans did not have to leave
England, why exactly did they? This question is fully addressed in Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 seeks to answer the major question of if, why, and how the Puritan
leadership used the Holy Bible as the final Word as to the prescribed crimes and
punishments recognized and used in the new colony. These matters were of utmost
importance if the colony was to maintain itself as a godly and civilized state. In this
chapter, I explain why the “official” notion that the Puritans left England merely to form
their much-touted “city upon a hill” is utterly preposterous. If such were the case, their
legal system would have consisted entirely of crimes, laws, sanctions, and punishments
thoroughly consistent with and taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Was this
not the reason they gave for leaving Old England in the first place? It was the story they
sold to the king and to the Puritan common-man. An examination of the original
literature, however, reveals that this, indeed, was not the case. Whether one refers to it as
a lie, a mistake, or “mis-speak,” it all amounts to the same thing: the stated reason for
emigrating from England was clearly an intentional fabrication that ensured a “clean get-
away” from England to pursue an end that was not a religious one.
Of utmost importance to my presentation is the question of whether the orthodox
Calvinists of the Bay Colony, who were allegedly wholly reliant upon the Holy Word of

18. 10
God as found in the Bible, even had the authority to so rely. By this I mean one of the
major issues that begs to be addressed, one that within the Puritan community was
supposed to be sacrosanct, was whether these mortal men could actually rely at all upon
what was written on the pages of the Bible. Does the Bible accurately reflect the actual
Word of God? If the Bible is the literal Word of God, then the Puritans did possess that
authority, and the right to use portions of the Old Testament to create their criminal code.
If they could rely upon the Word written in the Bible as being God’s own—and they did
not rely upon it to create their criminal codes—then they would have been in direct
violation of biblical law. If the latter is true, then how could Calvin’s Reformed
Theology—which thoroughly relies upon this premise—in any way truly posture as
God’s instruction manual for Man and how he is to live the godly life? Simply put, they
couldn’t; and if they could not, then was not the entire New England Puritan colony
guilty of committing the most serious of capital crimes, heresy?
If, as many contend, the biblical text is not the literal Word of God but a work of
Man alone, then the Puritan leadership, of necessity, never had the authority in the first
instance to excise portions of the Bible and place them in their criminal code(s). In that
case, ignoring the biblical text was spiritually irrelevant. Whether we can take the Bible
as the literal Word of God is at the crux of the entire Puritan legal and religious dilemma,
and, like it or not, this issue must be addressed directly and answered directly. Taking for
granted that the Bible is God’s literal Word clearly seems to me to be a fundamental flaw
in Calvinist theology—in light of how the Puritans used the Bible in the early seventeenth
century. It led to a foul precedent that, of necessity, produced catastrophic results in their
decision-making. Clearly, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s General Court did not follow
the so-called Bible’s “literal” Word of God. One simply cannot have it both ways. Either

19. 11
the Bible is the literal Word of God, or it is not. The implications for reformed theology
and its history, not to mention believers’ salvation, are dire. In Chapter 3, I will examine
in depth the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua as a representative section of the Bible
which beyond all doubt can in no way be considered the Word of God or even its dim
reflection.
Unable or unwilling to positively rely upon their Bible’s directives regarding
modern crime and punishment, the Puritans endeavored to develop a hybrid system of
criminal law and procedure to handle these critical issues. Not only did the Puritan
General Court substantially ignore thousands of years of biblical law, they also, to a very
high degree, produced legislation inconsistent with the laws of the king’s English
common law, the law practiced throughout England and its colonies. Bay Colony law
was an innovative combination of the King’s common law, English Justice of the Peace
Law, English custom, North American ingenuity and necessity, as well as a great deal of
common sense. Puritan punishments followed this hybrid system. If the Puritans were
supposed to be building this so-called “city upon a hill” to reveal to the world how to
correctly erect a godly society on earth based upon Holy Scripture, then of necessity,
there should have been strict adherence to ancient biblical law. Failing to do so, again of
necessity, says something negative not only about the Puritans themselves, but also the
reformed theology by which they allegedly lived. In truth, from the moment they set foot
on Massachusetts soil, the Puritans were in direct violation of their own biblical code
which comprised laws upon which their entire society, both civil and religious, was to
have lived and thrived, and by ignoring the bulk of English common law, they were in
direct violation of the charter that gave birth to their colony.

20. 12
My explanation as to why the Puritan leadership acted as they did may be found
in Chapters 2 and 3 of this work. Without taking an unconditional stand on this most key
issue of the entire Puritan experience, the theological and legal can never be satisfactorily
explained. The thoroughly unanswerable biblical inerrancy problem “checkmates” the
whole of what the Puritan leadership claimed they were trying to accomplish in New
England, and this, in turn, must alter their true intention regarding their stated theological
position regarding the English King and his State Church. Quite simply, no matter which
way we turn theologically, the Bay’s reformed Calvinists must lose. Under the most
reasonable of conditions, which I do not discount or affirm, and even with the best of
reasons, not employing biblical law in its entirety to identify and punish all criminal
activity within the colony still results in the unthinkable and unacceptable: a thoroughly
or partially eviscerated Holy Bible. How and why did the Bay ministerial class never
seem to voice strong objection to the civil authorities ignoring the relevant passages of
the Bible? How the ministry allowed piecemeal evisceration of the Book to which they
had dedicated their heart and soul baffles me.
The answer to this most important of religious questions, of course, says
everything about the true intentions of the Puritan leadership. Under such conditions, we
can rightly ask if John Winthrop and the other Bay leaders13
were actually true believers
in the “Word.” Clearly, Winthrop and Company sought reform, but not quite in the way
they asserted. Not stupid or foolish men, Winthrop and his colleagues had to have known
of the Old Testament’s shortcomings before they set foot on the deck of the Arbella.
Regardless of the angle from which we view this scene, it is eminently clear that John
13
Including but not limited to: John Winthrop, Esq., Sir Richard Saltonstall, Knight, Mr. Charles Fines, Mr.
Thomas Dudley, Mr. William Coddington, Mr. William Pynchon, Mr. William Vassall, Mr. John Revell,
and Mr. Jon Waterbury. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol. LXXV, (Boston:
The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1921), 236; The Winthrop Fleet of 1630, ed.
Charles Edward Banks (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1961).

21. 13
Winthrop and friends were anything but honest with the larger Puritan community.
Overwhelming evidence reveals that the overriding concern of Winthrop and the civil
Puritan leadership was to form their own independent nation, pure and simple. Religious
freedom, regardless of its importance to so many Puritan settlers, was not the sine qua
non for leaving Old England in 1630.
But the Old Testament was only part of the legal/biblical jigsaw puzzle that
became the Puritans’ judicial system. A markedly different and critical element of their
legal system appeared which acted as a counterweight to both Old Testament law and
newer seventeenth century legislation that was produced to “fill” the biblical “gaps” left
by the absence of relevant laws which could not be found in the Old Testament simply
because such laws were never addressed in the Bible—or where it was decided by the
powers that be that Old Testament passages simply did not rise to the “sophistication” of
modern seventeenth century jurisprudence. This unique aspect of law was found, not in
the Old Testament, but the New. Fully examined in Chapter 4 this newer element became
the glue that made the Puritans’ justice system work as no system of courts and justice
had ever worked before, far outshining even that of Old England. Its name is equity,14
and
14
There is an important point to be made here as the terms chancery court and equity court are easily and
often confused. In the United States they can be extremely confusing, as many American judges and
lawyers are unaware of this court’s origin. In England, equitable jurisdiction was handled by chancery
courts; later, in the United States these courts were, though not always, called equity courts. Whether called
a court of chancery or equity, this was a court administered by a chancellor, administering equity and
proceeding according to the forms and principles of equity. In England, prior to the judicature acts, the
style of the court possessing the largest equitable powers and jurisdiction was the “high court of chancery.”
In parts of the United States, the title “chancery court” is applied to a court possessing general equity
powers, distinct from the common law courts. Parmeter v. Bourne, 8 Wash. 45, 35 Pac. 5SO. The terms
“equity” and “chancery,” “court of equity” and “court of chancery,” are constantly used synonymously in
the United States. It is presumed that this custom arises from the circumstance that the equity jurisdiction
which is exercised by the courts of the various states is assimilated to that possessed by the English
chancery courts. Indeed, in some of the states, by statute, they are considered identical, so far as
conformable to our institutions. Black’s Law Dictionary Free Online Legal Dictionary 2nd
. Ed. <a
href="http://thelawdictionary.org/court-of-chancery/" title="COURT OF CHANCERY">COURT OF
CHANCERY</a>; A court which has jurisdiction in equity, which administers justice and decides
controversies in accordance with the rules, principles, and precedents of equity, and which follows the
forms and procedure of chancery; as distinguished from a court having the jurisdiction, rules, principles,
and practice of the common law. Thomas v. Phillips, 4 Smedes & AL t-Miss. 423. Black’s Law Dictionary

22. 14
it is that sublime aspect of jurisprudence which concerns itself with absolutely nothing
having to do with the king’s common law, but seeks instead to answer only one very
simple question: what is fair? Equity was its own world and proceeded by its own rules.
In the king’s courts, common law was everything. In a chancery court, where equity was
dispensed, the king’s law stood for nothing. Equity’s origin and ultimate significance,
both religious and civil, and why it was such a “game-changer” for the Puritans judicial
system, is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
The reason the fairness aspect of equity is important to my thesis is not merely
because of its goal and mission—and its prized place in the history of Anglo-American
jurisprudence—but because of the place chancery’s equitable maxims were first found:
the New Testament. It was there that they were first presented to the masses in the Words
of Jesus Christ. Equity in a very real sense is the “love” of which Jesus Christ speaks. He
employs the language of forgiveness, fairness, and of humanity,15
and it balances law. In
its broadest sense, its jurisdiction is mercy and for the Puritan Nation it was precisely
what colonial magistrates needed to “do” justice.
The concept of equity became perhaps the most important tool in a Bay
magistrate’s legal arsenal when deciding a case, especially punishment. The sticking
point, as will be explored in detail in Chapter 4, was this: equity could only be exercised
by a magistrate if, as was originally envisioned by Governor Winthrop, a sitting
magistrate possessed broad discretion16
to use it. The issue of “broad discretion” was not
Free Online Legal Dictionary, 2nd
. Ed. <a href="http://thelawdictionary.org/court-of-equity/"
title="COURT OF EQUITY">COURT OF EQUITY</a>. A chancellor presides over a chancery court, as
he is standing in for the king’s own chancellor; the keeper of the king’s conscience; a judge presides over a
common law court. In this thesis, I will use the term chancery court, the original English term, as the court
which oversees equitable jurisdiction.
15
It is the opinion of this writer that the concepts of equity and mercy may be suitably and fully expressed
by the word ἀγάπη.
16
The issue of broad arbitrary discretion, so reviled by the “common” Puritan settler will be discussed in
Chapter 4 as well.

23. 15
a minor one. Hanging in the balance was not merely the very nature and quality of justice
in the Bay Colony, but it also had everything to do with the legal system that was passed
down to our Founding Fathers some two hundred years later.
My final conclusion regarding the Puritan criminal justice system is that, despite
abject and popular derision in which they have been held, and continue to be held, the
Puritans developed a legal system which was uncommonly positive, progressive,
proactive, and forward-thinking. For its time it was the most innovative legal system in
the world. Their courts knew forgiveness and remission when English courts did not.
They cared for fairness and equity when the king’s courts did not—as is evidenced by the
rate at which English law courts sentenced relatively benign offenders to be hanged,
including very young children. May we conclude that the Puritans developed a more
civilized, more humane system of justice? The answer is an unequivocal “yes.” By
today’s standards it may be found wanting, but when compared to the Old English
judicial system, or for that matter most of today’s “civilized” systems, there can be no
room for doubt; the Puritans were light years ahead of their time. Sadly for us all, in
1684, Charles II—by legal process conducted in an English courtroom—revoked the
Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Charter. By 1692, the time of the Salem Witch Trials, the
humane legal system that the Bay Colonists had developed—in fact created—under the
bold leadership of Governor John Winthrop was no more. This thesis is the story of how
all the above-mentioned and inextricably intertwined people and issues came together in
1630 in a place called Massachusetts Bay to produce an independent Puritan Nation
through which was produced the most advanced criminal justice system known to
humankind.

24. 16
CHAPTER 1
The Impossible Dream:
Reasons for the Great Migration of 1630–1640
In this chapter I will examine the reasons why the Puritans left England, and why
such a good number of them or their descendants, who were born in New England,
returned to Old England. I also address what I believe to be the real, though not overtly
stated, intention of the Puritan leadership regarding their ultimate goal in establishing the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.
J.P. Morgan, a Puritan of later time, once said, “A man always has two reasons for
doing anything—a good reason, and the real reason.”1
This observation is particularly apt
when applied to the Puritans and the purpose of their voyage to North America in 1630.
Understanding their bona fide reasons, both stated and unstated, as to why they left
England is key to understanding the “how and why” of the type of society which was
established there. Attempting to highlight one single reason as the reason is, as Francis J.
Bremer writes, “foolish.”2
The traditional view, and the one fundamental to the
development of the Puritan Myth, which later morphed into the American Myth, is that
they emigrated due to religious oppression3
at the hands of Charles I and his Anglican
Archbishop, William Laud. That view is further buttressed by their most urgent stated
purpose, which was that they were elected by God to reform—by example—the English
Church. Add to this the relentless corruption the Puritans understood to be at the heart of
1
Ranker, “Best of J.P. Morgan’s Quotes.” http://www.ranker.com/list/a-list-of-famous-j-p-morgan-
quotes/reference.
2
Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, (Lebanon, NH: University of New England Press), 41.
3
Nellis M. Crouse, “Causes of the Great Migration, 1630–1640,” The New England Quarterly, Vol 5, No.
1 (Jan., 1932): 3.

25. 17
the practices of the Church of England, and it seems that the Puritans had their “reason”
wrapped up into a nice tight bundle. The reality, though, was much more complex.
By 1630, the fifth year of Charles Is’ reign, it was clear to the Puritans that their
world-view of reform was increasingly incompatible with the developing nationalism of
the Anglican Church. “Non-separatist” Puritans indicted the government for failure to
advance reform at home or to champion Protestantism abroad.”4
The Anglicans had their
country; now it was time for the Puritans to have theirs. “This strong belief in their
mission [to reform the Church of England] heightened their distress throughout the land,
particularly in predominantly Puritan East Anglia, formerly home to a once thriving
textile and cloth industry. At one time it was also home to a rich farming region, one of
the more prosperous in the kingdom. Located there as well, was Cambridge University,
the ecclesiastical training ground for scores of contemporary, as well as future Puritan
ministers.5
The Puritans believed, so the story goes, that in a new faraway land the
Puritan clergy, their professional classes, and the “rank-and-file” would be able to
practice their severe Calvinist religion in the manner in which they had been taught:
through the literal Word of God as found in the Holy Bible.6
In fact, it was this religious
factor that gave birth to the Grand Myth of Puritan exceptionalism “initially by John
Winthrop and other leading members of the future colony’s ruling class, both civil and
4
Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Branford to Edwards (Lebanon, NH:
University Press of New England), 42-43. Such as the English monarch’s sorely needed financial assistance
which was conspicuously absent when the time came to support the Protestant side in the Thirty Years’
War.
5
The college dedicated to this task was Emmanuel College, Cambridge where many of the Puritans’
educated ministerial and entrepreneurial classes studied. To this day, Emmanuel College maintains very
strong ties with the first Puritan college founded in the United States, Harvard College, which was founded
in 1636.
6
This issue of the literal Word in the Bible will be a major point discussed later in this paper, especially as
to what “literal-ness” precisely means. To date, I have not read a satisfactory explanation to the vexing
question of just exactly whose literal Word of God we are talking about. That is, of which Bible are we
speaking; whose is the most literal, or the least. Clearly, this is a question without an answer.

26. 18
ministerial; later by early first generation Bay chroniclers such as Edward Johnson.”7
Johnson ostensibly encapsulated the view of many first generation Bay settlers when he
wrote that he and his colleagues were leaving the Old Country “to escape the evils
generated by ‘the multitude of irreligious, lascivious and popish affected persons . . .
throughout the land.’ ”8
Sound reasoning, indeed, at least to a certain point—for letting
go of England—but Johnson’s point does not go far enough. For the Puritan leadership
this was never the entire truth; but to an extraordinarily large degree it was the only truth
he and others were willing to put into writing. For Nathaniel Morton it was much the
same: [the new colony was] part of a “divine plan to preserve the Gospel and proper
forms of worship.”9
According to both men, God had specifically mandated the Puritans
to “create a new Heaven, and a new Earth in new churches, and [to build] a new
Common-wealth together.”10
Truly, this is testimony to the vitality and strength of the
Puritan people that the myth they created, with the assistance of scholars and laypersons
both then and since, has remained fresh, “believable,” and unquestioned for centuries; in
turn, it was adopted and became the founding myth of our own nation.
It was not until the early part of the twentieth century that one scholar set forth the
proposition that the Puritan emigration was not the result of religious persecution per se
but quite simply to “better their condition.”11
Many young men, aged twenty-one to
7
David Grayson Allen, “The Matrix of Motivation,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep.
1986): 408. See, James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press,
1921).
8
Edward Johnson Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–165: 23, 25, quoted in “Migrants and Motives:
Religion and the Settlement of New England, 1630-1640,” Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 1985): 341.
9
Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial (originally published in 1669; facsimile ed., Boston: Club of
Odd Volumes, 1903), 83.
10
See, N.C.P. Tyack, “Migration from East Anglia to New England before 1660” (Ph.D. diss., University of
London, 1951), cited in David Grayson Allen: 408.
11
James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), 121-122.

27. 19
thirty, sailed to New England “by hopes of employment or freeholdership.”12
The
Puritans were human beings with the concerns we all share; they did not live in a
vacuum. The “economic” motive to leave one’s home has always been a valid excuse for
emigrants the world over. The Puritans were no different. There were other valid reasons
as well, the most powerful of which, and the most crucial in my opinion, was the political
one, with its desire to “break away [not only] from both traditional religious [but also the
corrupt] nonreligious institutional cultures.”13
Add to this the on/off spread of deadly
plague,14
then throw in some very personal social considerations such as love,
relationship, and family as well as the presence among the Puritan party of some
voyagers with no particular interest at all in religion, who left with the sole intent of
escaping the harsh reality of the king’s too often brutal criminal justice system. All these
elements combined give us a fuller, “rounder,” more well balanced truth as to the most
important reasons for leaving England. Powerful external reasons existed as well, not
least of which was that the European continent was aflame in the most apocalyptic event
in early modern history: the Thirty Years’ War, which was still raging on the continent,
and in which, at the time, the Protestant side was faring poorly.15
Cleary, all these were
excellent reasons for quitting England, though the Puritan community was never
required, forced or compelled to do so.
12
Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “Migrants and Motives, 367. “This group included essential personnel:
shoemakers, carpenters, butchers, tanners, hempdressers, weavers, cutlers, physicians, fullers, tailors,
mercers, and skinners.”
13
Allen, 408, quoting, Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village. (Middletown, CT, 1970).
14
For a discussion of the “multiple cause” viewpoints, See, N.C.P. Tyack, “Migration from East Anglia to
New England before 1660” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1951); T.H. Breen and Stephen Foster,
“Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd
ser., 30 (1973): 189-220.; David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies
and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom in Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 163-204; “Plague in London,” The British Medical
Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3764 (London: The British Medical Society, Feb., 25, 1933): 326. “It is well known
that the great epidemic of plague in London in the reign of Charles II was only the culminating episode of a
series of outbreaks during preceding epidemics.” 326.
15
Bremer, 37.

28. 20
To be fair to Professor Virginia DeJohn Anderson, despite her conclusion that
only religious persecution carried enough weight to convince the Puritans to leave, she
does mention the “economic distress in England in the early seventeenth century . . . and
its relation to the Great Migration [and that] [t]here were years of agricultural and
industrial depression; and farmers and weavers were [indeed] conspicuous passengers on
the transatlantic voyages.”16
Nellis Crouse, too, points out that in the years leading up to
the Great Migration, unemployment in East Anglia was rampant,17
and that there was a
shortage of grain, and [r]iots were not uncommon.18
“ . . . Contemporary records clearly
reveal the economic situation in southeastern England during the early part of the decade
[of the seventeenth century was] . . . conducive to emigration,”19
particularly for cloth-
makers and textile workers whose businesses were on the verge of destruction. The
opportune time for Puritan flight from England was at the tail end of the culmination of
[this] long period of gradual [economic] decline.20
This is supported by John White, who
lived and observed first-hand the situation on the ground. In his Planter’s Plea, he writes
“England’s ability to send out the colonists was due to her ‘overflowing multitudes’ who,
because of the interruption of trade, were living in idleness of trade or taking up callings,
other than their own, to everybody’s embarrassment.”21
Even John Winthrop, in a writing
ascribed to him, admits that economic motive played a part in the migration. “A surplus
of population,” he said, “had lessened the value of human beings.”22
The Reverend John
16
Anderson, 368, 370; Crouse, 8.
17
Crouse, 9.
18
Crouse, 11.
19
Whether their “emigration” resulted in a move within England or across the ocean says much about the
intent of the Puritan leadership as well as the degree of repression Puritan communities were suffering at a
particular time; indeed, there were English Puritans who moved only a county or two away but remained in
England.
20
Crouse, 14.
21
Crouse, 26, quoting John White Planter’s Plea (1630), http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_plea.php>
Retrieved September, 6, 2014.

29. 21
Eliot later recorded from North America that “many have come to New England because
of their inability to find employment at home.”23
Yet, while there is no doubt that
religious freedom was an impelling motive for his departure, he [Winthrop] complains in
a letter to his son Henry of being “so far in debt that he was ashamed to borrow
anymore.”24
Employment was, indeed, an issue but only one. This, too, obscures the
genuine complexity of the reasoning behind the Puritans’ emigration.
Clearly, a case may be made for all the sundry motives listed above, however, the
most reasonable moderate conclusion remains that put forth by T.H. Breen and Stephen
Foster who suggest that “the traditional either/or dichotomy—either religion or
economics—was essentially meaningless because to ‘separate the historically inseparable’
was an impossible goal.”25
“A number of factors intersected to form a “matrix of
motivation,”26
all of them equally legitimate. For even if there was one single
overwhelmingly predominant motive for the Puritan emigration, there is still no way to
prove it; to do so would require disproving all other motives, great and small; an
impossible task. Absolutists who insist on only one reason must always be wrong. And, of
course, if we grasp at the “single cause” straw we must still satisfactorily answer one other
question as well: “[H]ow does one account for the many [Puritan] non-conformists . . .
who never left England?”27
Indeed, the great mass of English Puritans did not leave.28
They stayed, worked, worshiped, and eventually fought with Oliver Cromwell’s New
22
Crouse, 26; See Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards
(Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England), 45.
23
Crouse, 27, quoting John Eliot, “The grounds of settling a plantation in new England, 1629” 1
Proceedings, Mass. Hist. Soc., VIII, 418.
24
Crouse, 27, quoting Winthrop Papers, (Boston 1931), 139.
25
T.H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts
Immigration,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 30 (1973): 201, 203, quoted in David Grayson
Allen, “The Matrix of Motive,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep.1986): 409.
26
Allen, 409.
27
Allen, 415.
28
Bremer, 44.

30. 22
Model Army during the English Civil War. Even such Puritan troublemakers as Isaac
Pitcher, Thomas Taylor, and Robert Peck of Hingham, Norfolk who were set upon
relentlessly by the Anglican authorities—and excommunicated—did not leave England.29
Were they cowards? Hardly, if anything, the opposite is true. The reason the vast majority
of English Puritans stayed was because, regardless of whether or not they may have
wanted to leave, they did not have to leave; that is, they were never forced out by
circumstance or edict. While it is true that non-conformist, non-separatist Puritans had to
“accommodate” to the demands of Charles and Laud,30
they were allowed to remain in
England. Emigration was the individual’s decision alone, not the king’s and he could have
expelled them had he desired to.31
Of the Puritan men who would lead their people to a new land governance,
qualifications consisted of being intelligent, well-educated, successful men of the
business or professional classes and politically adept; some legal training and experience
would also be essential. Though there was a dearth of professionally trained lawyers and
judges in the new colony, some men, particularly John Winthrop and a later arrival,
Nathaniel Ward, possessed such experience. With a few members of the knighted class
such as Sir Richard Saltonstall, there were, indeed, some very qualified Puritan leaders
who had a good deal of experience in church, county, and court governance.32
A number
29
Allen, 415.
30
Later in Chapter 1, I will address the issue of the New-England Puritans who subsequently left to return
to Old England.
31
There was precedent in England for expelling an entire religious group. In 1290, King Edward I expelled
the Jews from England. In the year 1182, France expelled her Jews. See Sholom A. Singer, “The Expulsion
of the Jews from England in 1290,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 55, No. 2, (Oct. 1964), 135.
32
Unlike their Puritan brothers and sisters, the Pilgrims, though strong in spirit and work ethic, were the
lesser in sheer numbers and fell far below the Puritans in terms of higher education and professional
experience. Of the two groups, clearly, the Puritans were the more formidable of the two. As one scholar
has written, “[H]istorians would assign to [the Pilgrims] a moral but minor role in the larger drama of
Puritanism in which the Pilgrims were character players but not stars. See, Peter G. Gomes, “Pilgrims and
Puritans: ‘Heroes’ and ‘Villains’ in the Creation of the American Past,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 95 (1983), 1.

31. 23
were familiar with age-old local customs as well as ancient practices that existed in their
home communities throughout England.33
Upon arriving in North America, the Puritans
already possessed a fixed and stable model for good government based largely—though
not entirely—upon biblical law, the common law, justice of the peace law, local custom,
and necessity; the very things required to survive and prosper in a new and oftentimes
unwelcoming new land. As to those Puritans who remained in Old England, the key to
living and worshipping in peace was essentially this: do it quietly. The king and his
church could tolerate the Puritans if they practiced their religion without protest,
advertising, or fanfare. Charles had more than his share of political problems to deal with
at the time.34
In England, it was only when Charles sensed political rebellion at the boiling
point—a political issue, not a religious one—that he grew agitated and concerned enough
to move to silence the Puritans altogether. Leaning heavily toward Roman Catholicism,
though he tolerated them to a large degree, Charles I had a distinct distaste for the Puritan
non-conformists. He made life more difficult for them by refusing to compromise on
anything and Archbishop Laud35
was tasked to be his pit bull. Whether radical or
moderate no longer mattered; the Puritans now had to toe the Anglican line. “[I]t was
33
Anderson, 359, 361.
34
On March 27, 1625, Charles I married Roman Catholic Princess Henrietta Maria of France. Charles was
enmeshed in foreign wars to which he was obligated to send to Holland men and equipment in what turned
out to be a vain attempt to recover the Palatinate in Germany; later in 1625, he sent an expedition to Cadiz,
which failed, and subsequently returned to England; in 1626, England and France went to war [England
and Spain were already at war]; in1627, an expedition, commanded by the king’s favorite, the Duke of
Buckingham, to the Isle of Rhe resulted in the loss of half his men and failed miserably in his assigned
mission; Buckingham was assassinated by John Felton on August 23, 1628; the Thirty Years’ War of which
so many Puritans were consumed was something Charles steered clear of; he sent no men or funds in
support of the Protestant cause on the continent. This is merely a sample of the non-Puritan political issues
with which the king had to deal. Charles was losing all over the world, and the problem of the Puritans
clearly seemed to him not his highest priority. See, Thomas Cogswell, “John Felton, Popular Political
Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Jun.
2006): 357; C.H. Firth, “The Reign of Charles I,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Third Series,
Vol. 6 (1912), 19, 20, 22-25, 26.
35
Crouse, “Causes of the Great Migration,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1932): 15.

32. 24
[Laud’s] desire . . . to restore uniformity of doctrine and ritual, to revive a spirit of
reverence for the sacred buildings in which services were held, and to rescue the Faith
from the contaminating influences of [the Puritan] heresy.”36
The silent agreement
between moderate Puritans, the Crown, and the Anglican Church was no more. Like the
rest of Charles’s subjects, the Puritans, still being “members” of the Church of England,
had to conform to the ways of the established English church. They had to obey the
following rules: The Book of Common Prayer [had to] be used with no variation or
omission to its contents; the clergy [had to] wear the stipulated vestments. In church, all
people were required to stand for the Anglican creed and the Gospels, and had to bow at
the name of Jesus.37
Though anathema to them, the Puritans had to accept Anglican
church furnishings and ornaments that, to them, recalled a Catholic practice; worse still
was Laud’s unconditional instruction that all “parishes were to follow the style of
cathedrals and place the communion table against the east wall of the chancel, ‘alter-
wise,’ surround it with railings, and to give communion to the laity who knelt at the
rails.”38
Laud also led the suppression of the Feoffees for Impropriations 39
and there was
an ever-growing supervision of [Puritan] church lectureships. Still worse, at the presumed
insistence of the Roman Catholic Spanish Ambassador, Sir Walter Raleigh was
36
Crouse, 17.
37
K. Fincham, 56; See, Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards
(Lebanon, N.H.: University of New England Press, 1976, 1995), 29.
38
Bremer, 56
39
The “purpose of the feoffees was twofold: first, to get into their [the Puritan leadership’s] possession
impropriations, that is, benefices owned by laymen; with the income from these properties financial aid was
provided to the pulpits for the benefit of active Calvinist clergymen.” Ethyn W. Kirby, “The Lay Feoffees:
A Study in Militant Puritanism,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar. 1942): 1; See also,
Isabel M. Calder, “A Seventeenth Century Attempt to Purify the Anglican Church,” The American
Historical Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Jul., 1948): 761, “In the year that Charles I ascended to the throne of
England twelve Londoners—four clergymen, four lawyers, and four merchants—probably representing a
much larger group of Puritans in and about London, associated themselves as feoffees or trustees to raise
money with which to purchase impropriation, and lands and appurtenances for the maintenance and relief
of godly, faithful, and painful (painstaking) ministers of the word of God.”

33. 25
executed.40
Needless to say there was an unacceptable growing presence of Roman
Catholicism surrounding the king’s wife, a very French and very Catholic Queen,
Henrietta Maria.41
The Feoffees for Impropriations was critical to maintain income through religious
work for Puritan ministers, but Laud saw to it that this method of support for Puritan
ministers was thwarted. As a result, an ever-increasing number of godly Puritan preachers
were deprived of their livelihoods. Of continuing concern was the “failure of the
[English] government to provide sufficient support to the Protestant forces [fighting] in
Germany and the Netherlands during the Thirty Years’ War.” In addition, Archbishop
Laud also forced an end to any Puritan group support for the Protestant side in that very
bloody war,42
an odd state position since the Church of England was a Protestant church.
Clearly, the Puritans had good reason to conclude it wasn’t. The hatred of the Roman
Catholic presence at court cannot be underestimated. “These developments seemed to
signal an abandonment of the nation’s mission [to support the Protestant cause against the
Roman Catholic army of Spain] and to threaten [invite] divine judgment.”43
All these
non-negotiable restrictions were a red flag to adherents of orthodox Calvinism. Charles I
40
William S. Powell, “John Pory on the Death of Sir Walter Raleigh,” The William and Mary Quarterly,
Third Series, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Oct. 1952): 533-534. Powell goes so far as to claim that “Raleigh’s trial and
condemnation [was] one of the most astonishing ‘frame-ups’ in English judicial history,” and that “under
the prodding of Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador to England,
King James I issued a proclamation against [Raleigh’s] ‘scandalous and enormous outrages.’ ” Raleigh was
hanged on October 29, 1618.
41
The former Princess Henrietta Maria of France, (1609–1669), queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
and the Queen consort of Charles I, was born at the Louvre Palace in Paris on 16/26 November 1609, the
youngest daughter of Henri IV, king of France and Navarre (1553–1610), and his second wife, Maria de
Medici Marie de Medici; (1573–1642), daughter of Francesco I, grand duke of Tuscany, and his wife,
Archduchess Johanna of Austria. She wed Charles I in May, 1625. “It was unprecedented for a Catholic
princess to be sent in marriage to a protestant court.” Naturally, this only made matters between Charles
and his Puritan subjects even more strained, nor did it help in his relationships with other non-Catholics in
England. Caroline M. Hibbard, ‘Henrietta Maria (1609–1669).’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Jan 2008 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12947,
Retrieved November 2, 2014.
42
Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (Lebanon, N.H.:
University Press of New England), 37.
43
Bremer, 43.

34. 26
also gave Laud carte blanche to weed out the more troublesome Puritans. There was no
love lost between Charles and the Puritans. When informed that one non-conformist
Puritan minister had fled to Holland, Charles was said to have remarked, “Let him goe;
wee ar well ridd of him.”44
This I believe was very much the king’s sentiment when the
Puritans made their final decision to flee England for North America. Even as non-
separatists, and still technically members of the Anglican Church, the Puritans were
losing their grip in their own world. The reformed minded “moderate” Puritans came to
understand there was little they could do to change this ever worsening and alienating
situation. The inevitability of their dire circumstances could no longer be denied. With
the loss of the Feoffees even their ministers could no longer make a meager living,45
an
intolerable situation. Compromise from either the Crown or the Puritans was no longer a
possibility. Many Puritan pastors lost their licenses to preach, and the option considered
so frequently—flight—found itself very much on the table. [In fact, it had never left.]
Some Puritans returned to Holland until Charles I pressured the Dutch government to
disallow this; English merchant companies were also muscled to crack down on Puritan
use of their transport ships to Holland.46
To the English King’s satisfaction, Holland and
the owners of the English merchant vessels complied. Still, the Netherlands was
Protestant “friendly,” and though it was becoming more difficult to get there safely, a
safe haven there was never completely out of the question though John Winthrop and
company had already concluded that building their own nation, separate and apart from
England, was the way to proceed.
44
Crouse, 20.
45
Bremer, 38.
46
Bremer, 38.

35. 27
By way of explanation we need to briefly examine how the Church of England
came to be. In 1521, evidently a bit prematurely, Pope Leo X bestowed upon Henry VIII
the title of Fidei defenser, “Defender of the Faith.” In so doing, the pope created an
ecclesiastical position that, second only to his own, was the highest such rank in England.
In 1530 a break occurred over the issue of Henry’s requested annulment of his marriage
to Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s request was refused by Pope Clement VII, a close friend
of Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor. On May 23, 1533, five
months after he married Anne Boleyn, Henry had his archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas
Cranmer, annul his marriage to Catherine. Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy
repudiating all papal jurisdiction in England and made the king head of the English
church.47
Excommunicated by the pope, Henry proceeded to lay waste to Roman Catholic
monasteries throughout his kingdom and in so doing enlarged the wealth of his own
treasury enormously. He remained king and formed his own church, merging both titles,
Fidei defenser of the Church of England and king into one person, and that person was
the king. As a result, Henry became both the de jure and the de facto head of the state’s
church;48
in his eyes, the king now wore two hats in the shape of one. As a result,
anything having to do with the Church of England, including reforming it, was the
immediate, and sole business of the king. As both king and Defender of the (Anglican)
Faith, each and every act committed against, or suggestion to alter the Church of England
was an attack also upon him, the king. As head of the Church of England his position was
even higher than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom, of course, he handpicked.
47
Catherine of Aragon, Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/99689/Catherine-of-Aragon. Retrieved November 2, 2014.
48
The title was conferred to Henry by the pope in recognition of Henry’s book Assertio Septem
Sacramentorum (Defense of the Seven Sacraments), which defended the sacramental nature of marriage,
and the supremacy of the pope. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/155661/defender-of-the-faith>
Retrieved October 6, 2014.

36. 28
“Change” to the church without the monarch’s prior authorization was, therefore,
considered not only an ecclesiastical misstep [heresy], but also a political act against the
king. We have come to know this as treason. Attempts to “reform” the Church of
England were tantamount to “reforming” the Crown, and, as such, was seen, quite
literally, as an attempt to overthrow the monarchy. The king would be within his legal
and hereditary rights to see this as rebellion against the crown, and to act accordingly.
Separating the Church of England from Charles I (i.e., rebellion) was a political act,
never a religious one, and Charles I was more than comfortable under these
circumstances.
The king, through his Archbishop, set the rules for dissenting groups, with whom
he was growing increasingly impatient:
1) Don’t call yourselves “separatists,”
2) Do your worshiping in private,
3) Do not engage in any public relations campaigns,
4) Do not defame the king or his church,
5) Declare openly that you are still members of the Church of England
[non-separatist].49
The key is this: For Charles I in 1630, the religious was the political. Through his
Archbishop, the king broke it down simply for the Puritans: Decide which is most
important to you: to worship quietly, with no chance of ever reforming my church, or risk
life and limb to “reform” it—which you know will never happen.
By this time, however, the Puritan leadership no longer seriously entertained this
question, having already made plans for their voyage across the Atlantic, and this is
where the religious motivation argument fits in so neatly—as a convenient political
expedient for the Puritan leadership. To ensure they had an adequate number of workers
49
David R. Como, “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London,” The Historical Journal, Vol.
46, No. 2 (Jun., 2003): 271, 280-282, 287-289.

37. 29
and families to successfully gain a foothold on North American soil, the Puritan
leadership used religious persecution as the tie that binds, to explain to its common
people the need for an en masse exodus across the sea. Why? Because religion was the
single factor that held all Puritans together—as equals—before God—regardless of each
individual’s particular station on this earth. Every other aspect of Puritan life was, like the
rest of England at the time, thoroughly and unalterably “class determined.” Wealth,
family, social station, profession: these separated individual Puritans from one another,
but not so religion. Religion was the common denominator that could and was used by
the Puritan leadership to bring its people to the single conclusion that would become the
engine for the massive emigration of 1630–1640. That conclusion quite simply was this:
The Puritans, all of them, or as many as could be gathered had to leave Old England and
forge a new colony [meaning: nation] where they might all worship freely. This is the
entire shining “city upon a hill” myth. With the religious reason firmly in place every
Puritan—those who emigrated as well as those who did not—now had “skin” in the
game. And religious “freedom” was an easy sell to those who were suffering privations
due to religious restrictions, a bad economy, and the taunts of their fellow Englishmen
that created an atmosphere that was no longer terribly hospitable to them—though not yet
deadly. Winthrop’s troupe was shrewd and they played their hand nicely. In emigrating
they pulled the rug out from under both monarch and archbishop. Along with John
Winthrop, Sir Richard Saltonstall, the Revs. John White, John Davenport, Thomas
Shepard, and John Cotton,50
and the other notables in the Puritan leadership went to
North America with all the sad souls who were just trying to make new and better lives
for themselves and their families.
50
Aaron B. Seidman, “Church and State in the Early Years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” The New
England Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Jun., 1945): 212-213, 215.

38. 30
For those who insist on believing that religion alone was the weightiest factor in
the Puritans’ departure, one should keep in mind that so much of what has “come down to
us, in the way of documentation, was written by clergymen, those who were most
immediately affected by the government’s ecclesiastical restrictions and sanctions—and
most likely to write about it. They were the ones who would naturally emphasize the
spiritual side of things, and were inclined to regard [religious persecution] as [their] only
impelling motive powerful enough to persuade, not only . . . themselves, but . . . their
followers.”51
Inordinately, these individuals would be members of the reformed clergy.
Unquestionably for those ministers, persecution was the most powerful irritant moving
them to action. It was certainly the factor for many ministers and for devout laypeople but
for most emigrants it was no more powerful a reason than the lure of economic success,52
or a new life, with or without religion; building their own independent nation is a reason
so often ignored in favor of all other reasons. Further, in support of my claim we must ask
when the Great Migration ended. The answer: when Charles I was safely off the throne
and dead, and the Lord Protector, Puritan Oliver Cromwell, had taken power, “ . . . and,
subsequently, with the election of the Puritan Long Parliament.”53
That is to say, when
power, politics, and religion were firmly set together on the winning Puritan side, in a
“godly” way, consistent with the proposed Puritan political agenda of an earlier time.
Professor Anderson’s position supporting religious motivation makes some sense,
as do all the other reasons given, but it does not make sufficient sense to derail the claim
that the reason(s) for the Puritan emigration was a multifold affair—with the desire for an
independent Puritan state as the leading cause. Regarding the economic genesis of the
51
Crouse, 35.
52
Bremer, 39.
53
Crouse, 36.

39. 31
great move, Anderson concludes that “Massachusetts would have been a poor choice for
emigrant weavers compelled by economic diversity to leave their homeland . . . [T]he
Netherlands, where a well-developed textile industry already existed would have been the
much better choice.”54
I would thoroughly agree with Professor Anderson if economic
necessity was the primary cause for their departure, but it was not. It is good to remember
that the overwhelming majority of Puritans remained in England and worked and
worshipped there even under less than ideal conditions, or even oppressive restrictions.
Again, I assert: the Bay Puritans did not have to go to America for religious reasons or,
for that matter, economic reasons, and that is why most of them never left England.
Though life was difficult, many Puritan ministers stayed the course in England
because their congregations, who also stayed, needed them, and many clergymen
“successfully” maintained their preaching and writing even when it did lead to legal
trouble for them. “[D]elaying tactics [were] adopted during “visitations” [by Anglican
authorities]; gestures [were made] toward conformity [which were] intended to meet the
demands of [Anglican] diocesan officials, without giving any value to ceremonial
practices in themselves; devoted observation of saints’ days was “played-through,” not
because they were laudable in themselves but because they provided opportunities to
preach beyond the single service on the Sabbath . . . [Perhaps] Laudianism lacked the
time, and the opportunity to remove the complex connections that sustained the presence
of voluntary religion within cities, towns and provinces . . . It is not unreasonable to
suspect that the Anglicans may also have lacked the will-power to entirely crush the
Puritan hard-liners. Regardless of what the king and his Archbishop thought, the Puritan
clergy had a firm toehold in England as the later events of 1642–1649 proved. What tends
54
Anderson, 372.

40. 32
to be less appreciated is that any tradition, or consensus requires maintenance; in this
[task], the [the Puritans’] godly community was much more a success than a failure.”55
Might I add, in the final analysis, the Puritans were much more successful in thwarting
the king’s intentions than the other way around.
Laud’s main objective throughout this period was to preserve the integrity of the
Church of England, and to prevent the growth of a religious institution that would in
effect amount to a “state within a state,”56
a very significant way of phrasing it. The
Puritan émigré position, however, had nothing to do with creating another civil state—in
England. They stated that they merely wanted to purge the state church of its papist
remnants. This may have been true at an earlier time but since it was clear that their pleas
and admonitions consistently fell on deaf ears it was inevitable that what at one time may
have seemed like a crazy and unwise choice later turned into what must have seemed to
them the only reasonable alternative. Conformity or non-conformity was the deal-breaker
and, at this particular moment in history, the Puritans knew their war against the Anglican
Church was one they could not win.
It was the rot of their politically untenable position regarding their rights in all its
permutations from which the Puritans were truly running. The need to break away, set up
their own government and be free men57
was now too great. They detested Charles’s
tyranny;58
what they actually wanted was a tyranny of their own. Whether or not Charles I
was the sine qua non of the Great Migration is a question that cannot be answered with
55
Bremer 62.
56
Crouse, 19.
57
This freedom, of which I speak had all to do with the Puritans themselves, outsiders need not apply; not
infrequently, when “outsiders” appeared in the Bay Colony, many times out of ten they were put on a ship
sailing back to England.
58
If Charles I was not the prime motivating factor leading to the Puritans emigration from Old England, he
certainly was a significant factor.

41. 33
any degree of certainty; that he was a major irritant to the Puritan leadership there can be
no doubt.
I submit that those Puritans who left England were those who were not at all
interested in truly reforming the Church of England or the nature of the monarchy. As
educated men they knew that both of these “possibilities” was a thorough waste of time
and energy. Pursuing these ends could only result in misery, punishment, and perhaps
death. It was the Puritans who remained in England who most desired church reform as
well as reform of the monarchy; for that, however, they would have to wait until
England’s Civil War of 1642–1649. For the Puritan émigré, reform was a dead letter; for
those Puritans remaining in England it was Cause Number One. It fell upon those who
chose to stay to bear the burden of changing England, once and for all, and that is the
direction in which their energies were directed. Quite simply, the Puritans who remained
in England were the only ones who put their lives on the line to fight for, and force
reform; the New England Puritans did not, and from a distance of three thousand nautical
miles, could not have been able to do it 59
even had they wanted to.
Pursuing their desired goal of leaving England revealed the shrewd business
acumen of these future Bay Colonist Puritans. They were working and executing their
well-laid plan long before they set foot on the deck of the Arbella and the other ships of
the 1630 Puritan armada. On August 26, 1629, John Winthrop and Company signed the
Cambridge Agreement wherein they pledged themselves to emigrate to New England by
the following year provided the General Court approved transfer of the company’s
government and the charter itself to the colony. Three days later this condition was
approved.60
Taking possession of the charter and carrying it with them to New England
59
There were exceptions which will be discussed later in this chapter.
60
Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (Lebanon: N.H.:
University Press of New England), p. 41; See, Full text of The Cambridge Agreement, August 26, 1629.

42. 34
was one of the great strategic non-violent coups in early modern history. Getting the
charter as far away from London as possible was critical to the Puritans’ fundamental
success in building their own nation in the New World. By so doing they had become
both the de facto and de jure owners of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.61
With their
valuable charter literally in hand, the stage was set for the Puritans to become masters of
their own destiny. With the charter firmly ensconced in Massachusetts, the Puritan
leadership was free to establish their own nation as they saw fit and without interference
from London. This newfound freedom was most important in the areas of politics and
law. Religious freedom fell under the umbrella of political freedom. Regarding the
religious aspect, they could have their own houses of worship and live their lives based
solely upon [settled] scriptural forms [doctrine].”62
At least, this was their overt agenda;
but their covert agenda, their real mission, had never changed. Though called
“moderates,” as opposed to their poor cousins, the Pilgrim Separatists, the Puritans were
anything but moderate, and, to my mind, were far more radical than the Pilgrims ever
were; and they negotiated the world with a cunning and a shrewdness to match their true
intent. Better educated and funded, and with a higher degree of political savvy, the Bay
Colonists were truly the perfect candidates to lead the way in splitting from the English
<www.winthropsociety.com/doc_cambr.php > Of utmost importance is that within the document itself is
the stipulation that “the whole government, together with the patent for the said plantation” shall go with
them to the new settlement. “In effect, they [the company’s leadership] resolved to establish full
independence of their plantation from any authority in England . . . Their foresight in taking the charter
with them to the new settlement proved crucial when in 1635, King Charles and Archbishop Laud sought to
revoke and destroy it. Their efforts were thereby delayed until Parliamentary victories made the
Massachusetts Bay Commonwealth secure in its right.” By far, the Massachusetts Bay Charter IS the most
important document in the entire Puritan saga, bar none.
61
If one is willing to entertain it, the comparison and similarities between the Puritans and their taking
physical possession of their charter is very much in the nature of Henry VIII taking possession of his new
church from the pope. In both instances both actions, Puritans/charter, and Henry/the English Church which
were originally separate and apart from one another eventually came together as one. In this respect the
law/equity synthesis of which we will speak later can also be seen as a “like” comparison. Perhaps, it is a
bit of a stretch but the similarities in their nature are striking, if not historically, then in a literary fashion.
62
Bremer, 43.

43. 35
monarchy and forming their own nation; to pull off this ecclesiastical/political game, they
had to be.
Like all great myths, the Puritan one is based partly upon truth, and partly upon
terminological inexactitudes such as lies, misrepresentations, mistakes, omissions, half-
truths, false starts, self-serving tales, and scholarly misinterpretations. Whether any part
of the myth is true or not and in whatever proportions one wishes to assign such reasons
for the historical events of 1630, like all such myths, this one has long outlived the people
who created it. Regardless of the tale told by the Puritan leadership and passed down
through the centuries to an audience willing to accept it, the so-called shining “city upon
a hill,”63
was never intended to be merely a safe haven for religious freedom but was
intended to be a new nation in which religious freedom was only part of their plan; an
important part, but only a part. Whether one chooses to call it a “bibliocracy,”64
a
theocracy, or a civil state with strong Calvinist leanings, what these people yearned for
most was a clean break, in its entirety, from England’s non-Calvinist tyranny. To them
Calvinist tyranny was acceptable, Anglican tyranny was not. This is precisely what the
Bay Puritans fully achieved for nearly half a century. In their mission, the massive
distance of three thousand nautical miles separating the Bay Colony from Mother
England was essential in achieving their covert goal. With the greatest respect to Perry
Miller, his position that John Winthrop and his Puritan brethren intended to reform the
63
The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, ed. Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 82-92. Regarding “a City upon a Hill.” see specifically the bottom of
page 91.
64
A “bibliocracy” is a political system based in its entirety on the contents of Holy Scripture found in the
Bible. “Weber identifies and characterizes Puritan theocracy as bibliocracy as defined ‘in the sense of
taking the life of the first generation of Christians as a model’ or simply the ‘Biblical way of life,’
particularly ‘a life modeled directly on that of the Apostles.” In a sense, this is also an implicit definition of
fundamentalism, specifically evangelicalism or Biblicism in Puritanism, which confirms the
fundamentalist-theocratic link or synthesis.” Milan Zafirovsky, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of
Authoritarianism: Puritanism, Democracy, and Society, (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2007),
126.

44. 36
king’s England and the rest of Christendom65
by their “shining” example falls flat, not
only because his truth is inconsistent with the overwhelming evidence of what really
prompted these people as individuals or as a group to move, but also because of the way
they conducted themselves upon arriving in New England. Every act they committed
themselves to was anathema to the king and his church. The proof can be seen in how
Charles II treated the colony after his 1660 Restoration to the throne and ultimately in
view of his revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Charter in 1684.
The Puritan leadership’s logic was pristine: to secure religious freedom would
secure only that; to secure political autonomy would secure freedom in every respect,
including religious freedom. Why ensure only one freedom when one can ensure total
freedom? The mass migration based upon a single explanation, whether it be religious or
economic is simply too limiting to convince me that over 20,000 individuals risked their
lives and the lives of their families to make such a life-changing and life-threatening
voyage. Besides, giving a purely religious explanation to such an en masse exodus has a
somewhat “cultish” feel to it that does not seem to be supported by the historical record.
The Puritans could be obedient and law-abiding but I have never read nor heard anything
about them that would allow one to reasonably conclude that these intelligent, thinking
people could ever be mistaken for a cult, or a cult-like group. Nor were the Puritans a
“romantic” people; to a man, to a woman they were unmistakably pragmatic and far too
engaged in their primary goal to veer off course.
65
Perry Miller, The Seventeenth Century Mind (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1939), 470-471, “The doctrinal positions won by Luther and Calvin had to be reinforced by the more
concrete program of polity, and New England had been reserved in the divine strategy to furnish
Protestantism with a model for the final offensive of the campaign.”; Perry Miller, Errand Into The
Wilderness, (Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1956), Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “The
Puritans’ ‘Errand In the Wilderness” Reconsidered,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Jun.
1986): 231-233, 251.

45. 37
There remains one revealing matter that demands examination because it is
probably the finest exemplar of Puritan leadership’s true political intentions as they
prepared to leave England. Failure to act and do in certain ways also speaks volumes
about what was actually percolating in the minds of John Winthrop and the other top
echelon leaders; a reasonable answer to this troubling issue, I believe, makes all the
difference in the world in terms of understanding the Puritans’ “Grand Experiment.” The
problem is this: the entire “city upon a hill” motive—that is, the “religious” motive—is
based upon extraordinarily faulty logic or more pointedly, no logic at all. For the Puritans
to worship freely as they believed God had intended them to do required that they be
away from a dangerous and unwelcoming place. To them this meant putting the greatest
possible distance between their new home and the king of England, safely away from any
Anglican-Roman Catholic influence. In his A Model of Christian Charity, Winthrop
called upon the community to work together in obedience to the one true God; and it is in
this writing where the phrase “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” first appears. If the
Puritans were truly to build what could be the so-called model of a “city upon a hill” for
all the world to see, however, then logic demands that to do this successfully, to correct
England’s foul ways as well as teaching the rest of the world just how to live the godly
life, there must be a nation(s)—[England], Continental Europe, the world—that is present
to see this ideal model “city upon a hill” in action. The flaw in Winthrop’s reasoning and
subsequent action was that they chose to build their “city upon a hill” in a desolate
though beautiful cultural wasteland literally thousands of miles away from where the
people who needed to see and learn by its example could so learn. Unless the rest of the
English population was able to view this shining example of the “city,” what hope was
there of reforming the Church of England? How could the Anglicans possibly know

46. 38
about the magnificent godly society the Puritans had created just for them to view unless
they were present to see it? The answer is, they couldn’t. So, if this “city upon a hill” was
truly Winthrop’s teaching plan of choice, he missed his target by three thousand miles
and must have been very disappointed, as he had clearly failed in his mission. I believe
the better explanation is that he had a clandestine motive not communicated to the rank-
and-file of his community but only to other members of the ministerial and civil
leadership who were privy to this plan—and consented to it—before the ships left
Southampton in 1630. If they had not been so informed, why would they have left
England?
The only reasonable alternative plan for building the Puritans’ “city upon a hill”
in a way that might have acted as an authentic model of a godly community is if the
Puritans had remained in England and built their community somewhere in that island-
nation. Some will say the danger would have been too great. Not necessarily. Let us not
forget that despite William Laud’s rules and regulations controlling non-conformist
religious behavior in English society, particularly the dismantling of the Feoffees for
Impropriations, the Puritans still maintained a strong support system of wealthy friends, a
good number of whom still held powerful positions in government. That system was still
functioning and unconditionally dedicated to aiding the Puritan cause in England.
Further, the Puritans were by no means the only non-conformist group present in England
who ran contra the king and his church.66
Even assuming the Puritan leadership could not
stay in England proper for fear of reprisal, imprisonment, or death, might they not have
moved to another location not in, but closer, to England rather than North America,
66
Scottish Presbyterians, Levellers, True Levellers [who later came to be known as Diggers], Fifth
Monarchists, Grindletonions, Muggletonions, Ranters, Quakers, and Baptists, both General and Particular
as well as Recusant Roman Catholics. Ex Libris, http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/index.html
Retrieved November 2, 2014.

47. 39
perhaps somewhere on the Continent? The Netherlands was still a prime location to
construct the Puritan “city upon a hill,” or one of the Scandinavian countries or
Switzerland or Germany. True, Charles I and Spain were pressuring the Dutch to
“squeeze” the Puritans, but with their savvy certainly somewhere more convenient than
New England could have been arranged.
In any event, moving to a refuge closer to England makes more sense than
traveling light years away—if building that “city upon a hill” was to be their teaching tool
to accomplish their alleged primary mission to reform the Anglican Church. Let us not
forget the Puritans were known for their exquisite practicality as well as for their devout
piety; the possibility of an alternative location could not have escaped them. Without an
audience in attendance to see precisely how a godly society worked, no one whom the
Puritans claimed needed to learn, could. This is not to say that Winthrop’s entire address
aboard the Arbella was fraudulent, but to some his stated goal was clearly and
intentionally deceptive. Distance instruction in the seventeenth century was not the way
one makes a lesson understood, not in 1630 and not in 2015. One teaches by example, by
showing; people learn by seeing and doing. The Puritan leadership chose a method that
made their much-touted “city upon a hill” concept thoroughly unworkable, indeed,
impossible as a teaching tool, thereby defeating their entire purported reason for leaving
England in the first place. Only those Puritans who traveled the ocean to get to North
America [of whom the majority certainly needed no convincing] and perhaps the Native
American population were present to see this dream-come-true “plan” in action. In any
event, from Bay Colony records, even as to the Puritan settlers who were physically
present, the attempt to build a godly society fell far short of their ideal, so if that was their
driving goal, they clearly failed in most respects. What the Puritan leadership actually

48. 40
intended to do and, in fact, did accomplish, however, was to forge a new nation, which is
exactly what they did. Calling it a “colony” assuaged the English King regardless of what
the settlement was actually supposed to be or how primitive its accoutrements. That is
why they risked all to make the voyage to North America and in this regard they were
successful.

49. 41
εκπατρισµός: The Issue of Remigration
To further support my position regarding the core reason for Puritan migration to
the New World in 1630, it is important to understand why many of these first generation
voyagers eventually returned to England before, during, and after the Civil War there. To
provide further proof that the reason for the initial migration to North America had less to
do with religious persecution than is normally acknowledged and more with political
autonomy, we need to briefly examine this phenomenon as well.
Most Bay settlers who returned to England did not fare well in the eyes of the
remaining New England settlers. John Winthrop, as an example, deemed them “weak-
hearted men.” Surprisingly, one man who fled New England in 1639, Nathaniel Eaton,
the first master of Harvard College, left behind an assortment of angry creditors, clearly
leaving the colony for thoroughly economic reasons. Eaton and his kind were
“considered traitors.”67
Andrew Delbanco points out that the Massachusetts Bay
leadership wanted them [those who returned to England] looked upon as “nothing more
than a rash of personal aberrations or discouragement.”68
As much that has been handed
down to us from that period, this, too, is not the entire truth. The “leavers” had good
cause for returning to England: A fair number of them returned to fight in the Civil War
of 1642–1649,69
but an even greater number returned after Cromwell’s victory to reap the
67
Delbanco, “Looking Homeward, Going Home: The Lure of England for the Founders of New England,”
The New England Quarterly Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep., 1986): 360-361.
68
Deblanco, 361.
69
C.H. Firth and Godfrey Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1940): I, 179-180; II, 564, 566, quoted in William L. Sachse, “The Migration of New Englanders to
England, 1640-1660,” The American Historical Review Vol. 53, No. 2 (Jan., 1948): 258. Included among
those going back to England was the notorious figure Thomas Lechford, the first professional lawyer in
Massachusetts. Lechford arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638. He was a bit of a character. “[He
had] attended an Inn of Chancery, Clement’s Inn, the training ground for the “lower branch” of the English
legal profession such as attorneys, solicitors, and clerks of various kinds.” It seems the friction between
colony officials, and Lechford was constant. Lechford vociferously disagreed with the way the legal system
in the Bay Colony was developing. “I fear it is not a little degree of pride and dangerous improvidence to