The Beginners of a Nation

VII

Rise of the patriot party in the Virginia Company. Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's homecoming with hands full of the spoil of both colony and colonists, were severe blows to the hope of profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial motives fell to a second place. The company began to pass more and more out of the control of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman Johnson, and the corrupt clique of predatory merchants, as well as out of the reach of voracious noblemen like Warwick. More and more it passed into the hands of the great liberal statesmen whose leader was the incorruptible Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of rare gifts and knowledge and of great resoluteness. These men had suffered some disappointment, no doubt, in their struggle for parliamentary freedom in England. They might have succeeded better had their antagonist been a strong king, but against the pusillanimity, the vanity, the vacillation, and the pedantic dogmatism of James little permanent headway could be made. Without relinquishing the conflict in the House of Commons, they took it up in the Quarter Courts of the Virginia Company. In this new field they found themselves afresh confronted by the obstinacy of the king, who was stirred up to oppose them by the discarded governor, Sir Thomas Smyth, and his friends, by Warwick, and by all the partisans of high prerogative and all the advocates of the Spanish match. Woodnoth's Short Collection, p. 6. "Bedchamber men" and others about the king's person were engaged to work upon the king to come to the rescue of Sir Thomas Smyth's "honor." Peckard's Ferrar, 113. The Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who had spies in the Virginia Company, took pains to feed James's discontent. He told the king that it was time for him to look into the Virginia courts, which were held in the great hall of the house of the Ferrar family. Too many of the king's nobility and gentry resorted thither, in order to be in company with the popular Lord Southampton and the dangerous Sandys. They were deep politicians, and they entertained designs beyond a tobacco plantation. Their leaders, he said, were "subtle men of high courage who regarded neither his master nor their own."

Sir Edwin Sandys. Sandys, as assistant to Sir Thomas Smyth and virtual governor, had already succeeded in establishing in Virginia a constitutional state with a representative government. Royal Hist. MS. Comm. viii, II, 45. He was furthering plans for the foundation of the little separatist state of New Plymouth, and his enemies set agoing tales that he had dark designs of removing with the Pilgrims to America, in order to found a democratic state there. In 1619 Sir Thomas Smyth tendered his resignation, and the company, to his surprise, it would appear, accepted it, and chose Sandys to his place. When, in 1620, his first year of government drew to a close, Sir Edwin Sandys erected an elegant ballot-box in the midst of the hall of the Ferrars, that the brilliant assemblage of noblemen, knights, gentlemen, and merchants might by a secret vote exercise the right of choice without any constraint. The king's interference. Just as the assemblage was about to begin voting, two clerks of the signet were announced with a message from the king forbidding the company to choose Sandys. 1620. "Choose the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," was one form in which the king expressed his aversion. Southampton, braving the king's displeasure, allowed himself to be elected, with Sandys for deputy. In June, 1621, both Southampton and Sandys were imprisoned. A land of freedom. This attracted attention to Virginia as a "refuge from a more oppressive government in England." In three months' time twenty-five ships set sail for the colony, which gained an impetus from the king's opposition that put it beyond the danger of destruction by the calamities of the next two years. Even before the massacre and pestilence of 1622 and 1623, Southampton was assured by friends at court that it would come to "push of pike," and that the company would be overthrown. ³⁴ The charter of the company was vacated in 1624, but free government had so taken root in the colony that it could never afterward be quite extirpated. A new English state with a popular government had been founded of deliberate purpose by a group of English statesmen, at the head of which, and easily first, was Sir Edwin Sandys, whose great service to the people and nation that were to come has been almost forgotten.

VIII

Religious propagandism. We shall not have taken a just account of Virginia colonization if we do not reckon religious motives among the many forces that carried that wavering enterprise to success. From the excitement about American exploration and colonization the English church caught its first missionary impulse. The Indian captives brought from America at various times gave to Englishmen the novel sight of men and women from beyond the bounds of Christendom; people who had never been baptized, and had never learned to wear English garments, "naked slaves of the devil," as one of the early Virginia clergymen described them. To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the deliverance of the savages from devil-worship and semi-nudity, there was added the natural wish for ecclesiastical extension. The separation of England from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow to the aspiration for an unattainable catholicity cherished in one form or another by Christian ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not possible that the great men who were leaders of the English church in the reigns of Elizabeth and James should be content with the narrow limits of "the little English paddock," while Spanish conquerors and missionary priests were winning for the Roman communion a new and vast dominion in America. ³⁵ English ecclesiastics felt keenly the reproach made against them by the Roman Catholics that they were not "converters of infidels."

Zeal of the clergy. Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican missionaries was Robert Hunt, the first minister in Virginia, a light shining in a dark place indeed. He bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted patience rarely equaled in the history of martyrdom the accumulating miseries of Jamestown, until he also perished in the general mortality. His nobleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries of the early leaders. The most active and influential writers in favor of colonization were clergymen such as Hakluyt, Symonds, Purchas, and Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the footsteps of Hunt, risked life itself in the Virginia colony, while devout laymen spent their money in its behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colonization that, by a curious perversity of outcome, resulted in founding a nation of dissenters.

IX

The Ferrars. In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant, the courts or meetings of the Virginia Company were held for years. The two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicholas, served in turn as deputy governors of the Virginia Company. This pious Ferrar family, as it became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing Virginia something of the air of a project for propagating the gospel. Nicholas, the father, gave money for the education of infidels in Virginia. A school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, and rewards were given to those colonists who would educate Indian children in their families. After the younger Nicholas, who was a man of remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a romantic enthusiasm, became deputy in 1622, the production of silk and wine and iron and the educating of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. A college was proposed, for which an endowment of thirteen hundred pounds was collected, and to which a valuable library was bequeathed by a settler. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity of all this, and complained of those in charge that "they spent Michaelmas rent in mid-summer moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir Francis Wyatt, wished that "little Mr. Ferrar were in Virginia, where he might add to his zeal a knowledge of the country."

The horrible massacre of March, 1622, made the Indian question something other than the Ferrars saw it. All schemes for educating the savages were obliterated in a day. The only thought after this was how to put the savages to death, old and young, men and women, more often by foul means than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they did not surpass, the treachery of the Indians. With the dissolution of the company by quo warranto proceedings in 1624 the government of the colony passed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had no more to do with Virginia.

X

Later History of the Ferrars. The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the younger, though without direct relation to colonization, throws light on the age of colony beginnings. Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for his mother, now a widow, the manor lordship of Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, and took the entire Ferrar family, including his brother and his sister with eighteen children, into religious retirement. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic community gave alms to the poor, illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, and worshiped in its little chapel with genuflections and other observances that procured for it the nickname of the "Protestant Nunnery," and brought down upon it the pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who had taken deacon's orders, was the real head of the community. He prepared at Little Gidding what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron of the four gospels. By means of relays of worshipers the Ferrars kept their devotions always in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted antiphonally during each twenty-four hours. Those whose turn it was to keep vigil were wont to leave a candle at the door of Nicholas and to wish him good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at which hour he was accustomed to rise and begin the exercises of the day. The strength of this belated mediæval saint gave way under a discipline so austere, and he died in 1637. Peckard's Life of N. Ferrar. Arminian Nunnery 1641. Little Gidding, with its "fair grove and sweet walks letticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated a few years later by the counter-zeal of the Puritans, who showed an especial indignation against the organ, which they broke into pieces to light fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, App. to Pref., cix. Behold an epitome of the first half of the seventeenth century – its idealism in affairs, and its war to the death of opposing ideals in religion!

Advent of Puritanism. In the very years during which the Ferrars were most active on behalf of Virginia the earliest Puritan movement toward America set in. The attenuated mediævalism of the Ferrars did not lack a certain refined beauty, but it was hardly suited to the rough work of hewing a road along which civilization might march into a savage wilderness. The Puritans, with their robust contempt for æsthetic considerations – making firewood of organs with delight, and feasting without scruple on the sheep of those whom they esteemed idolaters – were much the fitter to be champions against the American Canaanites.

BOOK II.
THE PURITAN MIGRATION

CHAPTER THE FIRST.
RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM

I

Love of display in Elizabeth's time. Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth. The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses. Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. ³⁶ High sheriffs and other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends to lend state to their office. Machyn's Diary, 324, note. Edward VI set out upon a progress in 1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon. She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

The age of the drama. A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.

Display in dress. Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. Peckard's Life of Ferrar. It was thus that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, passim. Men of the lowest ranks, desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display in people of lower rank. ³⁷ Even the severe Puritan moralists did not object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty rank.

II

Observance of ceremonies. Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American history. Compare supra, p. 41. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the "starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor, delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates. There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen, and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of showy red cloaks. Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green velvet. De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church, and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again aboard the ship where he dwelt.

Formality at Plymouth. Even at a later date in the rather hungry little Pilgrim colony at Plymouth almost as much ceremony was observed, though the people were extreme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on Sunday morning the men came to Captain Standish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing a musket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three abreast, led by a sergeant. In the rear walked the governor, in a long robe. On his right was Elder Brewster, wearing a cloak. De Rasieres's letter, 2d N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii, 352. On the governor's left was Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak and side arms, and carried a small cane as a sort of baton of authority perhaps. Thus "they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."

Puritanism an outgrowth of the time. It was only in an age such as this that resistance to the celebration of rites and the observance of forms could be made a capital article of faith by the Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of a surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on certain occasions, was a matter for scruple and violent debate, for the grave consideration of the lawgiver and magistrate, and for severe penalties.

III

Origin of the Puritan movement. Fuller's Ch. Hist., book v, sec. iv, 27, 28. In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI there were those who objected to "the vestments," and one may even find what were afterward called Puritan opinions condemned among current errors in the twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII; but Puritanism – as a party protest against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship – had its origin in the persecution of Queen Mary's time. 1536. The English Protestants who fled from that fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cities of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva were the places to which these English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and Strasburg became cities of refuge for many of those who were to become leaders of the Anglican or Conservative party, while others who tended to what were afterward called Puritan views went sooner or later to Geneva, where Calvin was the dominant influence.

A. D. 1553. In the cities in which they found safety the exiles organized English churches. The English exiles. More remarkable religious communities were never gathered into single congregations. Five bishops and five deans of the English Church, and more than fifty eminent doctors of divinity, with younger men who were destined to play a leading part in the future, were comprised in these little churches. Such communities soon became centers of animated discussion and debate.

Outbreak of dissension. During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity; but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John Knox – the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish reformation.

Character of the debates at Frankfort. This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence – the little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude. Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the United States.

The rise of the two great parties. In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, resulting now in the exiling from the city of one beaten minority and now in the departure of another, and in the driving away of one leading disputant after another, there appeared at length the features of the two great parties of English Protestantism face to face for the first time. One of these parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the Protestant conscience could be made to bear, insisted upon the superior authority of the clergy, and sought to disturb as little as possible the ancient order of the English church. On the other hand, in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort contentions, the tendency of the ultra wing of the Protestants to the notion of a local and independent church and to a democratic church government was already apparent. ³⁸ Even the peculiarity of two ministers presiding over one church, which was cherished later in New England, appeared among the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this time.

A purified ritual. While attempting to mediate between the parties at Frankfort, Calvin expressed his preference for a ritual of greater purity than that established by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. Extreme Protestants rallied round this ideal of a liturgy purified of human tradition. It was some years later, after the Frankfort church had been dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, that this party came to be known by the name of Puritan – that is, a party not so much bent on purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant worship from mediæval forms. ³⁹

Return of the exilies, 1558. After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth the English Protestants returned to their own country. The two great parties that were to divide the English church had already begun to crystallize. Those who had settled at Strasburg and Zurich came back hoping to re-establish the Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the Prayer Book of Edward VI. Those who returned from Basel and Geneva had caught the spirit of the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the reformation to a more logical extreme; while the Frankfort church, or what remained of it, had been storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of congregational independence in church government.

Results. The petty squabbles of the English exiles, transplanted to England, grew into bitter feuds and brought forth persecutions and political struggles. The settlement of New England, the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, the growth of non-conformity, the modification of the English Constitution and of all English life, were germinally present in the differences between the exiles at Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Horne at Frankfort-on-the-Main about gowns and litanies and the authority of the priest. It is not often that a great historical movement can be traced through a single rill to its rise at the fountain head.